Catering is the quiet second business in every pizza shop
Office lunches, school events and team parties come in big tickets on weekdays, when the ovens are free. Most shops treat them as luck. They can be marketed like anything else.
For years the best order of my week was not a Friday night. It was a Wednesday lunch for an engineering firm two miles from the shop. Twenty two large pizzas, three trays of wings, salads, the lot. It came in by phone on Tuesday afternoon, it went out at half past eleven, and it was done before our lunch rush started.
We never marketed for it. The office manager had found us on her own. When she left that job, the order stopped, and it took me months to notice.
That is how most shops treat catering. It arrives, it is lovely, and nobody does anything to make it happen again.
Who orders big
Look at your order history for anything above a certain size, say five or more pizzas in one order on a weekday. You will find a handful of patterns. Offices. Schools and churches. Sports clubs. Hospitals and the night shift. Each one has a person who places the order, and that person is your real customer.
Write down who they are. The business, the person, how often they order and roughly when. If you have a few dozen of these, you have a catering business whether you meant to or not.
Look after the person who places the order
The office manager is doing a job. She needs the food to turn up on time, be what was ordered and be easy to pay for. If you make that easy, she will keep coming back, because changing suppliers is more work for her.
Small things help. A single contact at the shop. Invoices that make sense. A call the day before a big order to confirm. A note after the event asking if everything was right. None of this is marketing in the usual sense. It is all of it in practice.
Ask for the next one
After a big order, follow up. Not with a blanket promotion, but with a short message that knows what they ordered. "Thanks for having us at your Wednesday team lunch. If you want to make it monthly, we can hold the slot." Many office lunches are recurring events that nobody has set up as a standing order.
Go and find more
Once you know which kinds of places order from you, you can look for others nearby that look the same. Other offices in the same business park. Other schools in the district. Other teams in the same league. A short, specific offer, delivered to the person who does the ordering, will do far better than a general flyer.
Catering will not replace your evening trade. On the weekdays, though, it can be the difference between a quiet shop and a profitable one.
