Business Angel / Entrepreneur wanted

[bathsheba]

I run a very exciting Caribbean catering company catering for weddings, parties and corporate events.

I am currently looking to expand either by finding my own venue to work with or to purchpase a venue.

The wedding market is quite lucrative and there are a lot of potentials. I have a very good template, the knowledge and experience to make this work.

 

[Psl]

What Carribean country are located in?

 

[Astaroth]

Assume they are in the UK and offering caribbean food rather than actually being in the caribbean

 

[maxh]

I run a very exciting Caribbean catering company catering for weddings, parties and corporate events.

I am currently looking to expand either by finding my own venue to work with or to purchpase a venue.

The wedding market is quite lucrative and there are a lot of potentials. I have a very good template, the knowledge and experience to make this work.

Get a van (like a keebab van) and call it the soul van. Then you have a Caribbean food dispensary that you can set up anywhere.

I was involved in a similar business before and you don't see any real profits until you have around 15-30 vans out there.

Maybe you should try to talk to Levi Roots, if you promised to serve his special blend of cuisine you could steal a lot of his marketing clout!

 

[bathsheba]

Thanks for the feedback but I started with a van and upgraded to what I do now which is much better. Levi roots..well he has done well with his barbecue spicy sauce but not really my thing. My business is sunshine catering so look it up and see what you think. It has a high ranking on google and is very easy to find. Thanks once again

 

[akhtarkasia]

I think, majority of the caterers business would be from recommendations. Serve good food, provide good service at good price and you have a good business. I am involved in the Asian Catering market and I must say margins are small but it is a big business. Offer other services to compliment catering, such as waiter service, link up with car / limo hire company etc. etc.. Offer something that your competitor can't and you have cracked your market.

 

[bathsheba]

It is and indeed that is where most of my business comes from but what I want is a fixed venue where I do not have to worry about travel and clients come to me, pay me to rent the venue, use my services and use my bar where I can make around £7-8 k per job.

 

Can you not team up with an existing venue?? You onbiously won't get the bar take, but there will be economies of scale.

you could waste a lot of valuable time & effort looking for Angel Capital...

 

[Archil]

Me too, I'm looking for a business angel for my project exposed here :

http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=170357

 

[Astaroth]

Owning a venue moves you into a very different space to being a caterer. The advantage you have at the moment is that you can naturally do small or large parties, if you have a 150 seater venue your suddenly more limited as whilst in theory you could have just 30 people in it, I am yet to see any single venue that can satisfactorally divide a space up and keep it looking good (and believe me, currently wedding venue hunting, we have seen lots!!!)

The one thing we have found, particularly on the wedding scene, is that a lot of venue have a specified list of providers that you must use. With my fiancée being from outside of the UK there have been none to date that have caterers on their list that do the correct cuisine and whilst some have said they can "learn" how to cook anything you obviously don't want that.

Depending on how "traditional" you are then I would be surprised if you wouldn't be better off getting closer to existing venues than trying to set up your own unless you'd consider a resturaunt etc