The Nowsta Blog

This guest post comes to us from Matt Phelan, President and Co-Owner of Simply Fresh Events! This is Part One of a three-part series. 

Simply Fresh Events has been catering outdoor events in the Washington, DC area since 2015, but my background in the industry goes back much further than that -- more than 20 years, in fact. I’ve spent nearly my entire career figuring out how to get delicious, simple, and fresh meals to hundreds of people in far-flung parks, barns, quarries, and wherever else people want to gather. I’ve learned a ton, and when Nowsta approached me about sharing my expertise with the rest of the catering world, I jumped at the opportunity.

Over a three-part article series, I’m going to share with you some of my strategies for building an outdoor catering company, finding new customers, and making an outdoor event run smoothly. I’ll start with my background and a few things I’ve learned about what makes for a well-run catering company.

In today’s perks-heavy office environment, companies go to great lengths to retain top employees and build an enthusiastic office environment. Corporate dining is one of the most potent tools available. Although free or discounted office food has been around for decades, creative meal plans and catered meetings are becoming more and more common for white collar employees around the country. In a recent interview with the New York Times, one corporate food supplier explained, “You reduce turnover because you have happier employees. It’s how you stay competitive for a certain sector of companies.”

As corporate dining preferences shift and expand, caterers need more highly-trained food service staff who can adapt to a wider range of client preferences and even, in some cases, work directly with office managers to meet new demands.

So, what exactly are these new demands? We lay out seven below. You'll notice common threads like a focus on wellness and sustainability, but above all else, these corporate dining trends are about elevating the daily work experience for office employees. Let's dive in!

Matt and Ted Lee have the catering world abuzz with their new book Hotbox: Inside Catering, the Food World’s Riskiest Business. The two food writers went undercover, working as event chefs for two years to get the inside scoop on an industry that nearly everyone has interacted with but few truly understand. We got the chance to sit down with them and learn more about their journey into catering.

In his New York Times bestseller Life’s Little Instruction Book, H. Jackson Brown has a great quote for managers: “Don’t forget a person’s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated.”  

Meal and rest breaks are considered a standard perk at most workplaces, and yet they’re not actually mandated by federal law. At the federal level, employers are only required to compensate breaks lasting less than 20 minutes, should they choose to provide them (the one exception being nursing breaks for mothers, a minimum level of which are required by federal law -- we’ll cover this more later). It’s actually up to the states themselves to determine if and when employers have to make these breaks available to employees, which means the standards are different all over the country.

Work break laws can be broken down into four major categories based on the people and circumstances they cover:

• Breaks for minors
• Meal breaks
• Rest breaks
• Nursing breaks

While some states have no mandated work breaks, most of them call for employers to provide one or more of the breaks listed above.

Understanding your state’s rest and meal breaks help ensure that you’re fully compliant and properly measuring overtime. And if your business has employees across multiple states, you of course need to make sure you’re meeting each one’s unique standards at your different locations. Below, we’re going to talk about each type of meal and rest break law, explain what it means to your business, and lay out which states it applies to.

Hourly employees are often the face of your business. Baristas, servers, and other folks in customer-facing roles have to connect with people and exude your company values, so it’s imperative you find the right people for the job -- and since turnover is high for these positions, you need to be able to do it consistently.

In October 2018, job openings in the US reached over 7 million — outnumbering job seekers by nearly a million. Candidates have more power than ever when choosing which employers they’re going to work for. That’s one reason why more companies have started to treat recruits like customers, optimizing the application experience for candidates and making efforts to promote their company as an attractive place to work.

Job ads are the backbone of any such recruitment marketing strategy. They’re your opportunity to make a strong first impression on potential employees, set the tone for the interview process, and ultimately get more applicants through the door. With that in mind, here are our three tips for writing more effective job ads.

Allow me to introduce myself! My name is Lisa Ware and I'm the Director of Business Development & Special Projects at Catering by Michaels in Chicago. I've been in catering sales for ten years and prior to that, I taught Kindergarten at a private school for six years.

You might think that teaching Kindergarten and selling catering services are totally different careers -- and they are -- but the lessons I learned managing a classroom laid the foundation on which I've built both my personal brand and business in catering. Many people think sales takes a magic formula or specific personality type. But I truly believe that anyone who has a passion for their industry can become successful in sales. It just comes down to some fundamental basics that are often overlooked.

Long-awaited updates to federal overtime laws are finally here. On March 7, the Department of Labor (DOL) proposed new changes to the overtime threshold exemptions under the Federal Labor Standards Act. This proposal — which is now taking public comment — calls for a higher overtime exemption threshold than exists now, but a lower one than the DOL called for under the Obama Administration.

Creativity is so intrinsically linked to the special events industry that its true meaning has become lost in a sea of job titles, marketing verbiage, and company branding. As a diverse, powerful, well-connected industry, we’re all in agreement that creativity is a key part of what we do, but we often struggle to make it part of our companies’ daily operations.

It’s not enough to just say that we’re creative. How can you as a caterer ensure your company's default position is to always be innovating? The answer comes down to culture.

If you run a business or manage a significant number of staff, you know that your attention is being pulled in a million directions at once. Did we underschedule today? Should we be hiring more? Are we going over budget? There’s always something new to deal with.

But with so many problems to solve every day to keep the business running smoothly, it’s easy to forget about the frontline employees who make it all possible. If they’re not consistently learning, growing, and getting better at their jobs, then it’s nearly impossible for the customer experience to improve over time. Even worse, if your staff are disengaged and turning over at a high rate, you’re almost certain to provide a worse experience over time, since you constantly have new people starting from scratch with no understanding of what makes your business successful.

That’s the problem servant leadership looks to solve. Servant leadership is a management philosophy that reimagines the role of the boss as one who serves their team rather than leads them. Proponents argue that by focusing more on what they can do to make their team successful rather than vice versa, leaders can build a more cohesive, autonomous, motivated workforce, which will ultimately get better outcomes for the business.