7 Essential Elements For Hosting Events At Your Venue
There’s no take two when it comes to events. Here’s how to do it right and increase potential revenue for your venue.
A lot goes into creating successful events, and even more, goes into creating a successful events business. When done right this can generate extra revenue, fill quite days as well as diversify your offering and customer base. But in order to do it right, there are a few essential things you’ll need to consider.
Know Your Why And Who
The first step is to ask yourself two important questions that will ultimately shape every other decision you make within your business.
Why do you want to create an events business
Who is your target market
Of course, raising revenue is key but there are other things to think about too.
Are you looking to fill quieter times? Expand your clientele? Or perhaps your venue is perfectly set up for a certain style of event and you have underutilized space.
Who will be your key clients? If you’re in the CBD, for instance, corporate celebrations like EOFY dinners, team building masterclasses, Christmas parties would likely be your target. If your venue is large and by the water, it might be the perfect venue for weddings and engagements. Or maybe you have a really busy dinner trade but quite weekend lunches. So focusing on family celebrations like anniversaries, birthday, christenings and baby showers is a the best market to target.
A successful events business will incorporate all of this, but when starting out knowing what you want and what will come easy for your business is a great place to start.
Smart Food And Beverage Packages
While it’s really important to create menus that look good, taste good and best showcase your restaurant, there are also a few other things to take into consideration that will help elevate your event business and make your life a lot easier.
When it comes to the food it’s really important to work with your kitchen team to make sure that they create a menu that can be cooked and plated quickly for large numbers while still looking and tasting great. One of your signature dishes might be a show stopper but can you get 100 of these out quickly with an efficient team? If the dish takes too much time to prep, can’t be cooked in bulk and has too many finishes it’s not going to work. It is really important to balance the way the food looks and tastes with how long it takes to cook and how many chefs you’ll need to make it.
Tiered pricing is another important part of creating your packages. We suggest always having three beverage packages:
Standard
Premium
Deluxe
(Try and come up with more creative and enticing names).
You’ll find 9/10 times people will choose the middle option so from a psychological perspective it pays to have 3 options. The same goes for your food menus. Having your team create an incredible tasting menu for a high price point sets the bar for the rest of your menus. Give people options to maximise your chance of securing more bookings.
Finally, making sure that you create a few high-profit margin items that your team upsell and easily discount to encourage a customer to order. We recommend an Aperol Spritz or low-cost cocktail, a few select canapes and grazing tables.
Create Your Sales Assets
If you are serious about creating an events business at your venue you need to first create your sales assets. These will include a great functions pack to showcase your venue. Your functions package should include:
General, enticing info about your venue- what makes it so special?
Floorplans to show the different layout options
Minimum spends and costings
Food menus (including canapes and seated lunch/dinner menus)
Beverage menus, and packages
FAQ’s
Preferred supplier list (for elements you want to outsource i.e stylist, florist, photographer, AV provider)
Lots of beautiful images of the venue, food and beverages throughout to bring the pack to life
Establish Your Internal Processes
In addition to your sales assets you need to have your own internal assets ready including:
Terms and conditions
Booking system
Financial system for taking payments, tracking sales as well as targets and goals for your team
Workflow tool or checklist
Run sheet template
Develop A Strong Team
This may seem obvious and simple, but you would be surprised at how many people get this so wrong. As with any part of the hospitality industry, the staff are the most important representation of your business.
In most cases the first contact an event client will have with your business will be with your sales team, so you need to get this right. We recommend having a designated event person or team in place. Whether that means hiring an event and sales manager, promoting from within, or tasking a few of your upper management staff to work on events. You need people who are on the ball, understand the event offering and can sell it with confidence. You also want to make sure that your customers are only speaking to a few people and not a new person every time as this will give them confidence in the team in the lead up to the event.
Your Checklist For Pre, During And Post Event
When it comes to events organisation is key, you cannot have enough checklists and procedures in place.
Firstly, make sure your sales team have a checklist to confirm all the final details of the event before they hand this over and brief your team on the event day. You also need a checklist on the day for the restaurant, to make sure that everything is set up correctly and in place well before guests are due to arrive.
There are also a lot of things you need to cover during the event. From making sure that you have enough cold alcohol, to clean toilets, these are things that are easily missed and can make a huge difference in your clients experience on the night.
We would also recommend a post-event checklist, to include a debrief with your team. As you are building your business you need to be constantly checking back and improving your processes. What worked, what didn’t and of course making sure you touch base with your client, for their feedback and to thank them for choosing your business for their celebration. This is a huge one. Every single client is putting not only their hard-earned money but their trust in you and your venue. Do a good job and they’ll turn into repeat customers and referrals to other customers.
A Marketing Plan
Once you have everything in place to sell and host incredible events you need to market your offering.
A great website and a social media presence would be the first steps. Then look at your business and consider the best way to attract your target clients. This may be hosting a PA/EA famil where you invite potential clients to come and meet you and the team and experience the venue. It may be reaching out to local media or directories to have your space featured. It may include paying to be featured on external events and sales websites which will help generate leads. It may be all of this, but we recommend looking at all your options and generating a marketing plan for your first 6 months.