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Food & Housing Nonprofit icon Catering Business Plan

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Bright Future Youth and Family Services

Execution

Marketing & Sales

Marketing Plan

Catering For Kids strives to be the premier provider of healthy, homemade catered corporate lunches for nonprofit organizations.

The marketing strategy attempts to successfully communicate the unique value the program offers to customers. This strategy builds on the focus of high-quality lunches for catered meetings to the benefits that at-risk youth student workers gain from involvement in the program. The marketing strategy will continue to identify the needs of the corporate market and to communicate with this audience in the most effective and positive manner possible.

Ongoing efforts continually attempt to understand how Catering For Kids can maintain the quality and integrity of the program within the finite financial resources of customers and the costs of supplies and labor. This challenge is increasing. As costs continue to increase in a number of areas, the demands and expectations of the customers do as well. Catering For Kids will constantly work to better our service through improvement and changes in its structure and implementation. Quality and efficiency are just two goals of these changes. The business manager, culinary arts instructor and Chambers School director play key roles in ensuring that the Catering For Kids continues to grow and succeed.

The growth strategy is based on continued attention to the quality of the customer’s experience in conjunction with identifying opportunities to expand the student participation in the program. Future changes in key areas, such as the facilities used for food preparation as our customer base grows will present considerable challenges for all aspects of the program.

Sales Plan

Catering For Kids is committed to balancing its operating budget and operating on a solid financial foundation. These efforts are based on a mixture of revenues from catering events, fundraising, partnerships with local businesses and charitable gifting. Just as revenues are tracked, internal expenses will be closely monitored.

Catering For Kids is intentionally emphasizing the need to reduce reliance on donation-based revenues and looks toward revenues from catering customers to support the program. Indeed, our goal is to become self-sustaining, involving our students in the process of maintaining a profitable and competitive entrepreneurial venture that benefits our community. This is a considerable challenge, due to the number of local catering competitors, the small size of the program and the unpredictable costs in areas such as food.

 Fundraising Programs

  1. First year revenues assume that internal Bright Future customers will begin using Catering For Kids in October for all catered board, committee and counseling meetings. A sales increase is anticipated in December when Catering For Kids may be used to cater company Christmas parties.
  2. Per person pricing of $6.50 is assumed and is an average number. This number may be revised up or down to reflect costs of goods and competitor’s prices.
  3. Anticipated donations are based on past donations received from grant-making foundations for similar Bright Future school-to-work programs. However, as it is a goal of this program to become self-sustaining, these funds taper off over the first year as Catering For Kids becomes more financially stable.

 

Operations

Locations & Facilities

Catering For Kids will be located inside the Chambers School and Career Center at 1390 Keasey Boulevard in Eugene, Oregon. The school facility includes a commercial kitchen that is licensed by the Oregon Department of Human Services to serve the public. Currently, the kitchen is used by the culinary arts program to prepare and serve breakfast and lunch for students during each school year.

 

Technology

So far, only three Eugene caterers offer online ordering, which means that the primary methods of ordering catered lunches in Eugene/Springfield is still by phone or fax. Catering For Kids will offer fax/phone ordering with either trained students or staff taking orders with a minimum two days in advance of delivery. During this first year, Catering For Kids will primarily serve Bright Future internal customers only and online ordering will be unnecessary. However, in the long term as more customers become used to ordering lunch online, Catering For Kids may update its website to receive online orders.

During year two, Catering For Kids will have a website that includes its complete menu and contact information. We will include this website address on as many printed materials as possible. For example, our thank-you notes, which will be included in every boxed lunch, will have our website address printed on them. The administrative offices of Bright Future currently updates and maintains the organization’s websites and we anticipate that this department will also handle the design and creation of the Catering For Kids website.

Milestones & Metrics

Milestones Table

Milestone Due Date
Business Plan
July 05, 2016
Commercial Kitchen Certification
Aug 08, 2016
Overhaul Culinary arts Schedule
Aug 24, 2016
Hire part-time business manager
Sept 12, 2016
Buy Food Supplies
Sept 26, 2016
Buy Equipment
Oct 06, 2016
Create entrepreneurial curriculum
Nov 07, 2016

Key Metrics

Our key metrics are: 

  • Linked in business to business lead generation 
  • # of facebook page views 
  • # of twitter tweets and retweets 
  • Blog – share and get consultants to write expert artices 
  • Fundraising events – a little old school but donors expect this 
  • Facebook videos 
  • Videos and articles that take advantage of crowdfunding