Why Catering Doesn’t Grow Most Restaurant Revenue

Why Catering Doesn't Grow Most Restaurant Revenue -- Catering sounds like easy extra revenue — more orders, bigger tickets, new customers. Beautiful, right? Except for many independent restaurants, catering doesn't create profitable growth. It creates more chaos with better packaging. And nothing will fool a restaurant owner faster than a big sale that looks profitable on the surface but quietly beats up the operation behind the scenes. This is why catering doesn’t grow most restaurant revenue. 🗓️ Book a Profit Identifier Call with Ryan: https://dsp.coach/book-a-call 📖 I wrote a book for restaurant owners and managers: https://amzn.to/2ZYlL7Y 🔔 Be sure to subscribe to this channel to get alerts when I post a new tip: http://bit.ly/2Yk484P 🎧 Take me on the go and listen to my podcast: https://dsp.coach/podcast ********************************** Welcome to my YouTube Channel. I am David Scott Peters, a restaurant coach and speaker who teaches restaurant operators how to cut costs and increase profits with my trademark Restaurant Prosperity Formula. Known as THE expert in the restaurant industry, I apply my no-BS style to teach and motivate restaurant owners to take control of their businesses and finally realize their full potential. Thousands of restaurants have used my formula to transform their businesses. To learn more about me and my coaching program, visit http://www.davidscottpeters.com. ********************************** To be clear, I'm not anti-catering. Catering can be a great revenue stream, but only when the restaurant has the systems, margin, staffing and production flow to support it. Without that foundation, catering doesn't grow the business. It just makes the chaos portable. And trust me, chaos in a chafing dish is still chaos. The real problem with chasing catering revenue Let me walk you through how this typically plays out. You add catering because it seems like a smart move. You already make food. People already love your food. Larger orders mean more money, so you take one catering order, then another, then another. Sales go up. But… the team gets busier. The kitchen gets tighter. The dining room gets disrupted. Prep gets thrown off. Managers are scrambling. And at the end of the month, you look at the numbers and think, "Why doesn't this feel like growth?" That's the frustrating reality of unsupported catering. More sales, more stress and no real improvement in profit. On paper, catering can look great. A single order might be $800, $1,500, $3,000 or more. Compared to regular tickets, that feels exciting and efficient. It feels like you found a shortcut to growth. But restaurants don't get paid in feelings. They get paid in profit, and profit asks better questions than revenue does. Revenue asks how much you sold. Profit asks what it cost you to sell it. Revenue asks whether the order was big. Profit asks whether you made money after accounting for food, labor, packaging, delivery, admin time, discounts, mistakes, remakes and the disruption to your regular service. That second set of questions is where the truth lives. The misdiagnosis so many restaurant owners make is thinking revenue equals growth. It doesn't. Revenue is money coming in, but growth means the business gets stronger. Growth means better margins, better systems, better leadership, more control and, ideally, more freedom for you. If catering increases sales but destroys your operation, burns out your team, confuses your food cost and pulls your managers away from the core business, that's not growth. That's a distraction with a receipt attached. Just because you can sell it doesn't mean you should This is where restaurant owners get seduced. The logic sounds reasonable: it's a $1,500 order. We'd be crazy not to take it. Maybe. Or maybe you'd be crazy to take it if you don't know the true margin, you haven't planned the labor, you haven't calculated packaging costs, you haven't built the production system, and you don't know what it does to your core service. A restaurant can sell all kinds of things that don't make operational sense. You can create popular menu items that are impossible to execute consistently. You can run discounts that drive traffic but destroy margins. You can say yes to every catering request and slowly teach your team that the business has no limits or boundaries. That's not growth. That's chasing catering revenue without a strategy. ********************************** Find more about how to run a restaurant business on my other platforms: 👍 Facebook:   / davidscottpetersbiz   📸 Instagram:   / davidscottpeters   📱 Twitter:   / restaurantxpert   🔔 Subscribe to YouTube: http://bit.ly/2Yk484P 🎧 Podcast page: https://dsp.coach/podcast