Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

This is a bigger question than you think.

There are many low or no cost methods to get your name out there. If you are going to do business catering, it's easy to pick up the phone and find the person handling those kind of things.

Architectural firms, realtors, lawyers often have "lunch & learns". The presenter does a non commerical presentation and brings in lunch for the attendees. When i'd go into an unknown area, I relied on their coordinator to tell me where to cater. Pizza and chips won't do it. And there is always someone with a special diet. The coordinator would always have a few menus or just one special caterer they preferred.

These firms often set aside one day a week for this, and the larger firms are booked months in advance. They're all going to be catered-- it might as well be you.

When I coach salespeople, I strive to get them to develop good daily marketing habits. We pick 8 or 10 activities that they can commit to for the month. Some are daily, like talk to x# of people a day. Some not, like 2 networking events a month. And we track the activity. And results. I meet with them weekly and we go over the successes, and failures. We brainstorm how the failures might have been successes. What doesn't work, we change. What does we keep. That's what your going to have to do.

Very inexpensive to have business cards and flyers made.

Go show your face at all the businesses in the area. They'll remember.

Michael

I would start with an identity and some business cards.

Chamber of Commerce and similar sites supporting local business like meetup.com etc.

If you are wearing ALL the hats in the company, put on your sales hat FIRST...

ALWAYS remember the axiom: "NOTHING happens until a sale is made."

If you're undercapitalized, the one thing you can't afford to do is wait for the business to come to you. You gotta' get out there and get it! When you get some cash flow going, you can pay some attention to the finer points. Right now, you gotta' SURVIVE!

On my priority list, I would put talking to some pharmaceutical reps toward the top. If you're brand new in catering, they can teach you a lot about what you're gonna' need to do in business catering. Explain your situation to one of them and ask them for help.

As you evidently have a cooking facility, I would also look into "Personal Chef" income as well... This can be lucrative if approached systematically and will conceivably help in promoting your catering as well.

Godspeed

You should get started with personal calls to businesses, in your chef uniform, with printed menus, ordering and payment instructions, and tiny samples you can leave for people to try.

And before you embark upon social networking, which I am sure is a good idea, remember what networking used to be about before the internet. Call all your buddies in small, medium and large companies, and find out who in their organisation orders meals and snacks for meetings and functions. Ask them to recommend you to that person, then follow up with a personal visit to that person with menus, samples, etc.

People are always willing to change their office caterer because they get tired with the same old menu items after a time. Lesson for you: Keep old favourite items on the menus, but add seasonal items for a short time, all the time. Then promote them (by phone - you can even do that when people call to order) to give people a reason to keep coming back.

Hope that helps.

ChrisB