Catering Business Growth: The $100,000 Club Log #2
When I wrote the first $100,000 Club log, our catering business was operating out of a temporary kitchen and preparing to move into our new location.
Now we're finally open.
And that changes things.
For the last several months, there was always an asterisk attached to our numbers. We were moving. We were dealing with construction. We were working out of someone else's kitchen. We had inspections, equipment problems and days when we literally couldn't operate normally.
Despite all of that, we did about $63,000 in July.
That's certainly not our $100,000 goal, but considering our doors weren't even open, I'll take it.
Now the excuses — legitimate as they may have been — start disappearing.
The Original $100,000 Catering Business Formula
When we started the $100,000 Club, we identified a few numbers that seemed to correlate with our strongest months:
40 deliveries per week
$10,000 in breakfast sales per month
$50,000 in Closed Won opportunities
$100,000 in monthly sales
I still like the first two.
I'm starting to question the third.
We've gotten much better at entering opportunities into our CRM. That's good. But it also means the opportunity number may have been telling us something different than we thought.
If the team simply gets better at documenting business that would have happened anyway, then increasing Closed Won opportunities doesn't necessarily mean we're creating $50,000 in new business.
And despite reaching that opportunity target at times, we still haven't had our $100,000 month.
So the question is changing.
It's not just:
How much opportunity did we close?
It's:
Where did the actual revenue come from?
Catering Business Growth: Follow the Money
This may be the biggest evolution in how we're running the $100,000 Club.
We're starting to look backward.
If it's August 2026, I want to know where the money came from in August 2025.
Then I want to look ahead at September 2025.
Where did the big orders come from?
Were they one-time events?
Were they recurring customers?
Have we heard from those customers again?
Are we waiting for them to remember us, or are we reaching out before they need us?
That's a much more useful conversation than staring at a sales target.
Protect Your Existing Catering Customers
This has also exposed one of our weaknesses.
We've done a poor job of protecting some of our largest existing accounts.
We spend a lot of energy thinking about new customers — and obviously we need them — but a customer who has already spent thousands of dollars with us is incredibly valuable.
They already know us.
We've already earned their trust.
The sales job isn't always finding somebody new.
Sometimes it's making sure the people who already love you don't quietly disappear.
Going forward, I want our $100,000 Club meetings to keep our largest recurring and historical customers visible.
Not because every one of them will order every month.
Because we should know who they are.
Why Recurring Customers Matter in a Catering Business
One thing from Log #1 hasn't changed at all.
Recurring customers may be our best long-term growth engine.
And since writing that first log, we got our first real example.
A new customer found us in May. She ordered again the following month. And then again the month after that.
Three consecutive months.
Even better, she spends roughly $1,000 each time she orders.
That's almost exactly the kind of customer we're trying to create.
She wasn't an old account we reactivated. She found us this year, tried us, liked what we did and came back. And then came back again.
One customer obviously doesn't prove the strategy. But it does show the math.
A $1,000 customer who orders once isn't bad.
A $1,000 customer who orders every month is potentially a $12,000-a-year relationship.
Find ten of those and suddenly the path to $100,000 months looks very different.
So our goal of creating 10 new recurring relationships by the end of the year remains.
But I'm adding something to that thinking:
Protect and expand the recurring relationships we already have.
New recurring customers build the base.
Existing recurring customers protect it.
We need both.
How Large Orders Drive Catering Business Growth
Another thing becoming increasingly clear is how important large orders are to our business.
Recently we executed the largest single order in our history: roughly 1,600 lunches.
Those kinds of orders change a month.
And they're one of the reasons revenue hasn't declined at the same rate as our delivery count.
We've become pretty good at executing large events.
So rather than fighting entirely against the decline in small, spontaneous office orders, part of our catering sales strategy is leaning harder into what we're already good at:
Large corporate events
Schools and universities
Healthcare
Tour groups
Training programs
Organizations that need hundreds of meals at a time
I still want more deliveries.
But ten $300 orders and one $3,000 order both equal $3,000.
There is more than one way to get to $100,000.
We're Open — Now the Real Catering Sales Work Begins
Maybe that's the biggest difference between Log #1 and Log #2.
We're finally operating from our own building again.
I'm spending more time inside the business.
I'm watching how orders come in, how the team handles them, where people spend their time, what gets delegated and what doesn't.
And I'm enjoying being back in it.
There's something different about sitting inside the business instead of sitting at home refreshing the sales numbers on my phone.
I feel like I can actually influence the outcome.
That doesn't mean we're suddenly going to hit $100,000 next month.
We haven't done it yet.
But the whole point of the $100,000 Club was never to pretend we had the answers.
It was to become better students of our own business.
Catering Business Metrics: What We Believe Right Now
So here's the updated hypothesis:
Delivery volume still matters.
Breakfast remains an important opportunity.
Closed Won opportunities are useful, but they may not be the leading indicator we thought they were.
Historical customer spending deserves much more attention.
Protecting large existing accounts is just as important as finding new ones.
Recurring customers create stability — and we now have our first new three-month recurring customer as evidence.
Large orders can compensate for some of the decline in smaller office catering.
We need to deliberately create demand rather than wait for the phone to ring.
And most importantly:
Revenue is the scoreboard. Everything else is an indicator.
We analyzed five years of catering data to understand declining deliveries, changing office trends, and why recurring accounts are key to rebuilding our path to $100,000 months.
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