A Catering Enquiry Is Worth Thousands. Most Get Answered in Days.

Venue relationships and referrals are the strongest channel in catering and nothing here replaces them. What they are not is adjustable — you cannot decide in January that you need more June weddings, which leaves you with a calendar you can watch but not steer. Search work gives you something to turn up when the diary looks thin. There is also a quieter point: a planner who was referred to you will still look you up before calling, and if what they find is a site that does not say plainly what you cater, where you serve or what a typical event costs, some of those referrals stop there. So even for a business that never intends to advertise, getting the basics right protects the bookings you are already earning. We would usually start there before spending anything on ads.

We can improve the odds and measure the result, but nobody controls what an AI assistant says, and any agency promising placement is selling something it cannot deliver. These systems assemble answers from your website, your Google Business Profile, review platforms, venue and directory listings and local press, and what they say changes from week to week without notice. The work that helps is unglamorous: state your service styles, cuisines, event types, guest count range, service area and typical price band in plain text a machine can actually read, keep listings consistent, and earn the kind of local mentions those systems draw on. Then each month we run the questions a real planner would ask across several assistants and record whether you appear and who appears beside you. That gives you a trend line rather than a promise.

This is the right thing to worry about, and the answer is that the system is not there to have the relationship. Its job is the first sixty seconds: acknowledge the enquiry, confirm the date is one you could work, and collect the things you would ask anyway — headcount, venue, service style, whether they have a budget in mind. Then it hands a person a conversation that is already useful. What it will not do is quote a per-head price, promise availability you have not confirmed, or attempt the consultative part that actually sells a wedding. You set what it may say and what it must escalate. For corporate and drop-off work it can carry more of the conversation, because the buyer usually wants speed and a clear price rather than a tasting.

Often yes, because the value of a single booking is high enough to absorb a meaningful cost per lead, but only if it is aimed narrowly. Broad catering terms attract recipe searches, people looking for catering jobs, students researching the industry and price-shoppers with no event, and all of them look identical in a click report. So campaigns get split by event type — corporate, wedding, drop-off, large private — with tight match types, a serious negative list and geography drawn around where you will actually travel. Then the account is judged on cost per booked event rather than cost per enquiry, which means tracking has to be rebuilt and verified before we touch a bid. If the arithmetic does not work at your average event value, we would rather find that in month one.

It is a review with findings, not a sales presentation. We look at how you currently appear for the event searches that matter in your service area, what your Google Business Profile is missing, which terms competitors own that you do not, whether AI assistants name you when asked to suggest a caterer, and how any existing ad spend is structured and measured. Then we test your own enquiry path by sending a request the way a planner would, and timing the reply. That part is usually the most uncomfortable and the most valuable. You get the findings written plainly, ordered by what would move revenue soonest, including the fixes you can make yourself without hiring anyone at all. There is no charge, no obligation to work with us afterwards, and the findings are yours to hand to another agency if you prefer.