How to Turn Catering into a High-Profit, Repeat Revenue Machine
Catering is one of the most overlooked profit centers in your restaurant.
But most operators are running it with emails, calls, and chaos.
That’s why orders get missed, details fall through the cracks, and customers don’t come back.
In this episode, I talk with Elias Hage from Rally Catering about how the right system can turn catering into a streamlined, repeatable revenue machine.
Why Catering Matters
Done right, catering can:
Drive higher ticket averages
Bring in repeat corporate business
Generate revenue outside your dining room
But it only works if you have systems.
The Biggest Mistake
Too many operators:
Offer the full menu
Say yes to everything
Manage orders manually
That leads to stress, mistakes, and lost business.
The 3 Essentials
1. Simple Menu - Stick to items that travel well and are easy to execute.
2. Clear Rules - Set minimums, lead times, and cutoffs to protect your operation.
3. Easy Online Ordering - If customers can’t click, order, and confirm…you’re losing sales.
The Real Opportunity: Repeat Orders
Catering isn’t about one order. It’s about turning one client into dozens of orders.
With the right system, you can:
Track customers
Make reordering effortless
Deliver consistency every time
That’s how you build predictable revenue.
Bottom Line
If your catering is disorganized or hard to order…You’re losing business.
Fix the system, and you unlock a powerful new profit stream.
Want to turn catering into a true revenue engine? Don’t miss this episode.
Take Action
Get a free demo: https://rallycatering.com/rockstars
Connect with our Guest:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliasbhage/
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I am a huge believer in additional profit centers for your restaurant or hospitality operation. You can't have too many profit centers and what's one of the best ones? Catering. Whether you have an existing catering program now, or you want to start a catering program. My guest today is Elias and he is with.
Rally catering, and we're talking about a digital catering service, something that will be turnkey for your business. It's all about capturing all the catering orders, keeping everything organized and everything right at your fingertips so that you don't miss the fine details that lose you catering business.
Okay. All about systems and this is a system, so listen on, you're not gonna wanna miss this. This is a very, very powerful platform and I'm really excited to learn about it. And you will be too on with the episode.
This is really, really cool. Now you've got an amazing platform and we're gonna dive into all that, but beforehand, you got your finger on the pulse of what's happening in the [00:01:00] dining scene.
What are guests seeking today in these crazy times, and what are their expectations and how do we stay relevant as an operator?
it's a good question 'cause times have absolutely changed. And if you wanna go back even just a few years, but you could go back half a decade, a decade, but what we're seeing guests wanting. And, I mean, I'll lean a little harder into the, the catering space, but there is a distinguished difference between what guests want for a sit down restaurant versus for a catering experience.
But in general there's a certain level of reliability and service. And when I say service, I'm not just talking about the relationship and whatnot, but I'm actually talking about the quality of how things are delivered, how guests end up feeling. And that's something that is kind of elevated 'cause guests today.
They have choice, whether they're doing a restaurant, takeout, a dine-in, or a cater, they have choices with catering. It's, it's a little bit different because typically with catering, you are ordering for a large group of people and you're, [00:02:00] what you're looking for kind of shifts from, Hey, I want more choice.
And more fusion and more interesting things that I can kind of mold and modify to my liking to, Hey, I need something that people are gonna love, that there's 30, a hundred, 200 people relying on me to make this order. They're gonna love it, but, and no one's gonna get in trouble 'cause of their. You know, meal preferences, it's reliable, it's on time, it's gonna be the right quantity.
And that's, that's kind of the shift that, so that's what we're seeing.
Good to know. So catering excellent additional profit center for restaurant. I did catering in multiple concepts that I had, and it was a real benefit to our business. Now, what if a restaurant. Has not yet started a catering program. What's your best advice to start and just start with the basics before we get into any technology, like there's a system behind this. What would
Yeah.
Your best advice is there?
Yeah, that's you know, what, you, you kind of said something that's really important. Yes. You know, technology is kind of the backbone of what we do, but technology is, at the end of [00:03:00] the day, the tool behind the operation behind the system. So the question you asked is, is bang on. So what I would say for restaurant getting into it or, or doing it, but doing it not at scale yet is to start simple.
'cause a lot of operators we see overcomplicated so. You already have a kitchen, you have a team, and possibly a handful of orders that that you do per week. So the barrier isn't truly like, can we cook? Can we make the food for groups? It's, can we take orders without creating the chaos? So really there's three things that, that we see are, are key at the beginning.
The first is to pick a menu, but not the full menu. And that's one of the mistakes that we see is. Hey, here's, you know, a hundred items you could order from, but instead focus to eight to 12 catering. Items that are, that are friendly, they travel well, they can scale easily, and they represent you best.
Right? You don't wanna sacrifice that. The second thing is setting the rules. Now, this is a, it often gets dismissed, but [00:04:00] your minimums, your lead times, delivery radius cutoff times, it's easy earlier on to be like, Hey, I'll do anything for anybody, and all of that. But these actually protect the operation.
Because without them, the order becomes a negotiation every single time and you end up saying yes to stuff that actually hurts the operation. The third is to make it orderable, which means be able to put that out there on your website and give people a very clear path. To place that order. That's not, Hey, call us within this, this two hour window during the day.
But that's, Hey, if you wanna order catering, this is the path and it needs to be very easy, publicly known and obvious.
You know, that's a really good point. My, my first thought going back is not every restaurant's, kitchen and staffing is up to certain challenges, especially when it's a busy Saturday, say, but then someone goes and they order something online that's. Like what is the balance so that you don't mess up in-house dining service while you got your team putting [00:05:00] together a catering order?
Right? That's a real challenge. Or it can be.
Oh, it absolutely can be. And this is where the rules play a big part. Because if you are an operation that that can't handle the intersection of a catering order that's coming in last minute on top of a, you know, a busy rush time, then you need to set the rules to say, Hey, I need to get my orders at least 48 hours in advance.
And that's okay. You could kind of. Adjust that as you go. But once you have advanced notice on your catering orders, you can start to manage a lot better. So when you get those in advance, then you can organize your kitchen and your operation to get those prepped and get those out the door. In between the busy times that you know, your kitchen's gonna be jammed for their lunch rush or whatnot.
Do you recommend that someone, a business perhaps starts by just preparing orders for pickup, like in large pans or whatever it is, versus, okay, now. I gotta go delivered or I gotta cook it on site. Like that's a whole nother animal. And [00:06:00] you know, people are doing things differently, but that overly complicated?
If you put a catering program together and then suddenly people want you to be at a certain place at a certain time with so much food to feed so many people, but you're still trying to run your restaurant, there's a balance there too.
Oh, for 100% Roger. And the the scalability. So one of the, the key things that that restaurants that want to get into catering. Can trip up on earlier on when they're like, Hey, I want to get into catering, but I'm gonna use my existing operation. Is they don't consider the scalability factor, but it's a mistake to, to let that be a blocker for catering.
So you don't wanna say, Hey, I don't want to touch this 'cause I can't scale at it as I am. So having a plan for saying, Hey, I'm gonna go and dip my feet into this, but do it properly. Hit those foundational components, be able, I can, I have the capacity to do. Five catering orders per week and these are the criteria.
So I'm gonna build that into my [00:07:00] offering and if that is something that I see that works, that I, that goes well, then here's my plan to expand to scale. I'm gonna actually have a team, I'm gonna need to have, you know, people that are gonna go do the delivery or do the onsite set up and I'm gonna need to buy some more equipment.
'cause you're absolutely right. When you're setting things up on site, you're gonna need. Different things. You're gonna actually have to, to even modify potentially the food that you're gonna deliver and the type of menu that you're gonna offer.
For typical investment upfront. I mean, if. You can even throw that out there because again, based on the size of the operation, it's all gonna vary. But I mean, you need chafing pans and you need, you know, holding ovens and you need, you know, things to keep the product warm and you need things to help it travel to a location or whatever it is.
Right. Is there a certain budget that you might recommend somebody start with?
You know what, if I answered that question, it's gonna vary so much. So you're, the listeners are gonna say, someone's gonna say that's [00:08:00] totally not right and 'cause some people can do it minimally depending, like if you're, if you're a Mexican or, or, or you know, barbecue, there's certain types of cuisines that kind of can travel a bit better and, and or if you're offering is actually prepackaged a prepackaged offering, then you're gonna have a different type of setup than something that you gotta go set up on site and you could both of those still.
Can create catering margins and count as good catering business. But they come with totally different budgets.
I'm sure that that's true and I, I should have anticipated that answer. But the bottom
Yeah.
if you do things correctly, it is a profitable thing to do and it is an addition to your existing business.
Correct.
a brand
Yeah. Yeah.
builder. And when people love your food and your cuisine and they know that they can not only come into your restaurant, eat it on site, but now they have a private party and here it is.
I want that cuisine for that, so Excellent, excellent.
right. But, but Roger, I, I want to give the, the listeners a, a little something if they wanna find the answer [00:09:00] to that question.
Yeah.
I'm gonna assume that a lot of listeners are, have some kind of an AI chatbot, and that's a great AI chatbot question and it's not gonna give you the exact answer, but I'm just throwing it out there.
It's a good question to say, Hey. You know, I want you to act like a a restaurant guru in catering, and tell me what is my upfront investment. Here's a bit of information on my setup, and then you'll get a ballpark. But I mean, it comes down, you gotta talk to real professionals if you wanna, if you want to go further than that, but that's just a little tip.
I think we're all doing a little bit of that. Some of us are doing
Yeah.
just going to chat and just typing something in and, and it's remarkable how technology is, you know, and AI especially is moving forward. You mentioned you, you started to talk about certain cuisines that travel best or, or best suited for catering.
Why don't we talk about some of those things? In your experience, what works the best?
I mean, a restaurant's not gonna go and change their entire cuisine to be able to do catering, but within their cuisine, like there's some cuisines that are naturally. [00:10:00] Good at traveling and packaging. Mexican, Italian Mediterranean and barbecue. Are are some of those that do naturally really well? So like grain bowls, tacos, burritos, you know, pasta, baked sandwiches.
Those are things that travel well and they hold. But I mean the more important point is the structure of how those cuisines are, are, are, are packaged and, and of the menu. So, I mean, I've seen sushi restaurants do really well, for example, because they build a clear. Boxed lunch program. And I've also seen sandwich shops struggle because they include all of their customizations for their sandwiches in their catering offering and be, and that just ends up hurting production rhythm.
'cause you can't really have a rhythm when you can do 25 different variations of one, you know, one food item.
Yeah, so simple is best and standardization is important. That's a good point to make as well.
Yeah.
talk about the details because there's so many details to running a restaurant. And then to [00:11:00] get the catering details right, like what are the important details to stay on top of? 'cause obviously you wanna keep your customers happy, you wanna keep 'em coming back for more.
You want great online reviews, but it's like you drop one of those details and it messes up the whole thing. Like
Yeah.
are those key, key points to keep in mind?
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There's there's a few. So I, you asked me earlier what's, what are consumers looking for? What is, what are, what do guests want and what's the state of kind of the industry? And I gave you kind of a restaur, but I gave you a bit of a catering answer. I did dive into catering, but the first detail, and this is really relevant for catering, is accuracy and speed on the first order.
Because if you nail the first order, the right items, the right quantities on time. You earn like almost like this figurative trust badge, and if you blow it, you almost never get a second chance. Because, you know, an, an admin or, or someone who placed that catering order won't usually call and complain if it's something that that is, oh, it made, they made a little mistake.
I'm just gonna order from someone else next time. And you'll just never know. So you lose that relationship. So that first order, accuracy and speed critical, and the [00:13:00] second builds on the second little piece that I wanna say builds onto that. Because if you give a frictionless, reorder pass. Then they'll find it a lot easier to come back.
And catering is a, is a game of reordering. If once you get repeat orders, your, your, your revenue from that catering relationship goes from, Hey, I got a, you know, a thousand dollars, $500 order to, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars of revenue a year. Right. Finding a one-time customer and turning them into a weekly, or monthly or quarterly account has massive, massive returns.
And it's, it's enabled by a good follow-up. So, I mean one of our, our, our models is a book deliver and then rebook. It's a, it's a, it's, it's our catering inquiry triangle, that's Reba component. It's. A very solid pillar of the model because the rebooking is what turns the one-time order into a a real revenue generator and margin creator.
Thanks for [00:14:00] bringing that up. You know, I've always believed in the lifetime value of a guest and. restaurants are always seeking new business, but it's so important to recognize how much one single guest who's a raving fan that comes back multiple times, either a week or a month, and what that means to the bottom line.
And if you create many of those, I mean, that's your core audience right there. And I'm really glad you brought that up 'cause that is so important. Let's talk about online ordering and how that has created opportunity for catering
Oh yes.
me.
Big time. Oh yeah. Yeah. So I mean, catering is it's a space that's. Before online ordering, like the ability to place a catering order was almost invisible to today's modern buyers. And I'm gonna frame what that means. What I mean by that is. Today's demographics, you've got Gen Xs millennials and Gen Zs that make up about 80%, you know, 70 [00:15:00] to 80% of the workforce today.
And these are admins, office managers, you know, team leaders, project leaders and they're the ones actually placing the order and. Most of them, if not all of them today, are digital first. They don't like to call. And I listen, I know this from my own team, you know, and they're, some of them are probably li gonna listen to this and they're gonna but I'm calling them out on it if you like, if you say, Hey, did you pick up the phone to call that person about that thing?
They'll be like, no. I sent them, you know, a bunch of emails and didn't hear back. It's like, pick up the phone. It's, you know, here. But it, but it, they don't like it. They like to click, they like to have a way to order online, and if you don't exist to this buyer segment, no matter how good your food is, it's just never gonna get seen.
Right. I.
That has become the benchmark, like since the pandemic really created that online ordering thing, it was a must have. I can't imagine restaurant operating without it right now. with that comes certain challenges to coordination and [00:16:00] obviously professional photography, to put your food in the best light, to let people know what your offerings are, and having that whole seamless thing where when they want it ordered or when, when they want it ready, it's gotta be ready.
It's gotta be accurate. There's gotta be checks and balances and a team that you can really trust to put it together. What are some of the other things let's talk about starting with say, rally catering. Like talk us through the whole process. First, tell us what it is and then let's, let's talk about the steps of getting your program up and running with the platform.
Sure, I'll, I'll I'll dive into that. So, rally Catering. So we're a catering focused digital ordering platform. So we are built specifically for catering operations, not just generic. Restaurant ordering tool. And from a guest flow, it's pretty straightforward. So they come to your website, they find you on social, they see a catering button, or they scan a QR code and they get taken to a clean catering menu.
They answer a few questions about the order, so the date, the time, [00:17:00] the headcount, the delivery address, and then custom questions. That's one of the key things about catering. 'cause in catering there's some questions that every different operation will have a different variation of it, you know. Whether you want cutlery there, whether you want, you need setup, if there's a building with security, you wanna ask questions about that kind of stuff upfront.
So those are all there and the rules are built in. So this is another key, important part. Lead times, minimums, that kind of stuff, all built into the experience. So the goal here from the guest ordering is for them to be able to see the packages, the pricing upfront, make a decision. Before or without moving on to any other competitors and options.
'cause the reality is, and this is what I heard when we first started doing discovery on this, is when people place catering orders, they're typically sending inquiries to two to three caterers. And then they're gonna wait to see who gets back to them first and then start to make decisions there. But with rally allocating, there's no phone call needed, no email thread.
The order lands directly in the operator's back [00:18:00] office. Now from the operator side, the team that's that's, that's taken the intake can manage everything in one place. There's a visual dashboard with a calendar view. They could see the day's orders or the week's orders, or the months orders, and they can filter by, I mean, there's a whole bunch of different filters by date, pick up or delivery and review production requirements at a glance, accept orders, modify orders, all of that.
So another key piece here is modification with caterers. That can be done all the way up until the point of fulfillment. Usually for a typical online order, it's, Hey, this is my order, and if you wanna modify, there's maybe some flow there, but you might have to pick up the phone. With catering, the rate of modification is much higher.
So rally Catering is designed to be able to, to allow the guests to request modifications all the way up until the point of fulfillment and for the operator to make those modifications.
And you're getting sort of, okay, I got a busy restaurant and I'm humming and I'm short staffed today, and I got a couple of catering orders. Like someone [00:19:00] constantly monitors this or there's some kind of a push notification letting you know, Hey, there's been a last minute change here. How does that work?
Yeah, the last minute you asked, you asked a really good question, and so those little nuances are really important. So the modifications don't come in as, Hey, I guess it's just modified. Their order, and now you've got to appease the modification. It actually requires an approval at any point in time.
Good.
It requires the acceptance of the operator to say, Hey, we can accommodate this, or we can't accommodate it.
One of the key metrics that we measure in Rally Kaner is how many transactions, like how many back and forths does it take? To have a successful end to end. And how do we minimize that as much as possible so that all the information is available upfront. There's a minimal amount of back and forth.
'cause those are realities. And when you do it manually, the back and forth is your, your phone, your text, your yeah. Your emails and, and whatnot. And so [00:20:00] this is, these are, this is one of the key success metrics of actually how Rally catering works. We minimize that. We make sure that control is in the right hands at at all times.
That the operator does have the ability to manage and control and approve certain things. So modifications fits under that category, and they can actually turn it off. They can say, Hey, my rules are, I don't want modifications. And we have operators that do that. They say, Hey, you know,
It.
no modifications past this point.
There's actually a two cutoffs. There's a modifications cutoff, as well as an ordering cutoff. So you can't, you can say no more modifications within 24 hours of the fulfillment.
I wanna relate something important. So upselling, suggestive, selling, all these things like you know, there's certain digital ordering. QR code platforms out there. Like when I travel and I'm in an airport and you're in a hurry and that kind of thing, and you scan a QR code and the menu comes up and it actually makes suggestions and, and things that compliment what you order.
Is there any of that built in? Can you use AI or, or do anything to sort of upsell an [00:21:00] order? Once someone says, this is what I want, but then there's sort of a suggestion, is that possible too?
Oh yes, that is possible. In fact, it's recommended because
Yeah.
ca for catering orders, there's the, you know, the upsell is, is actually a quite a powerful feature for caterers. 'cause you think about. Especially in in corporate catering or, or even private events, catering, there's, it's very easy for the person making the catering order to forget, you know, the coffee with the breakfast, you know, we need, we need the coffee set up.
And so those are the, so there's some very key things. That gets suggested during the checkout process for rally catering, that when they're doing the checkout, it's like cookies, coffee, juices, drinks, you know, maybe there's side dishes or side platters. A famous, you know, the famous thing that, that establishment offers.
It can get presented depending on, you know, certain criteria. In during the checkout process and it actually does boost cart size. But at the same time, it kind of saves the [00:22:00] bacon of the guests making the order. 'cause those are things that they'll see and they'll say, oh, I'm glad I didn't forget that.
'cause it, we want it, we don't want that to turn into a modification after the fact.
You and I share a philosophy, I've always believed that technology should only enhance hospitality and not detract from it. And you're a re real believer in achieving mu meaningful human interactions. Like you somehow built this all into the catering platform, haven't you like, so that you feel like you're having a human experience.
And even though it is digital, not losing the hospitality piece. Is that right?
You've got it right on Roger. And you know, maybe if we had more time, I'd tell you some more war stories from back in the past of my earlier days getting into the industry. But you're exactly right, and I think you picked up on something I said earlier about technology being the tool, but that it is the tool, the relationship with the customer is about the food, the experience, and trust.
Less so about a phone tag or waiting for [00:23:00] emails or the manual reconfirming. Those aren't necessarily relationship moments. It's, there are potential friction points that might wear down goodwill. And when you remove those and you can actually focus on, on building the relationship. And if I could give a, like a short story, one of my friends, Amir he's one of the local restaurateurs here in, in, in my hometown, and.
He has one of the most service forward operations I know, but he uses technology for like, in every aspect of his business. It's not obvious when you go there because you're served by people, you talk to humans, you build relationships. But he's fully digital. He, he trained his staff to use the technology.
To take away some of the friction. And hey, if people wanna reorder, they can actually reorder whether they're doing a pickup or even at the table. He's got the full catering pickup at the table. He's got the full setup, but the servers are there to actually talk about the experience to make [00:24:00] sure guests are all right.
Well taken care of. He, he's actually involved in building the relationship, and he gets to focus more on the conversations with his guests. And actually converting the people that walk through the door into, you know, caterer, catering clients and, and pickup clients. And, and that's what he uses technology for.
And he's done a fin, phenomenal job. He's one of the, he's one of the best in town.
Oh, I applaud that. That is convenience for the guests. That's efficiency, but it's also that human touch at the same time. That's great.
Oh yeah.
It's doing everything right. That's, that's perfect. That's awesome. Let's talk about rally catering. And what would be the typical, say onboarding, like you got a new client, right?
Like one of my audience members hears this is interested, they get in touch. I know you got a, I believe you've got a free demo on the website. Let's say, what is the timeline to getting up to speed so that everything's like functioning perfectly? Is it typical?
Yeah, there's, we do have a typical, it's, I mean, to go from, Hey, I need this, I want this for my business. [00:25:00] We, we've done a, a validation to, I'm up and running. It's, you know, one to two weeks. It can be as short as that if you're, if you've, if you're in, if you're bought in and you're ready to go we do offer the demo and typically the demo, we do it on a live video 'cause we like to understand.
The businesses that we talk to and their operation, we evaluate for fit as well. We ask the questions about, you know, what's their experience in catering? How many do they do? What's their you know, what's their marketing approach? How do they market themselves? What is on websites, socials? Do they use those?
'cause there's ways to leverage those. And those are some of the resources that we give away as part of our package. And as part of the packaging, we also do the full initial setup. So. We, you know, our, our goal is to de-risk it for people coming on board both financially and from an operational perspective, and set things up for them so that they, everything.
Is, you know, in real time, they can actually manage in the dashboard, but that initial lift can sometimes be intimidating. So we kind of take care of that. We look at the menu that they [00:26:00] already have or want for catering. We build that digitally. We set that up for them with their minimums and, and and lead times and all that, and, and get them off to the races.
So that's, that's our process in a nutshell.
You also have a recommended, say, social media strategy. Do you help with the marketing at all? That goes hand in hand with the platforms just to make sure that there's success right off the bat,
Yeah, we have a few marketing guides and tools that we use, and typically it, it really depends on who we're talking to, but for the most part, it's being able to leverage the website leverage the socials and provide the most direct way to get to the catering order. One of the things that we often see as tripping points is.
The catering button to do the thing is buried behind a few pages, somewhere on the website, in between a paragraph and an image. And so we kind of, we do analyze that and we give a bit of a, we, we kind of do a recommendation as part of our, our onboarding. But but we also [00:27:00] have best practice guides and whatnot.
On the marketing side, the because we're a first party platform at the end of the day, I mean, it's. There, there's no commission on the catering orders. It is their, it is the brand's catering operation and catering storefront. So we wanna make sure that in our process we're able to not just hand them the tools and the, the blueprint, but also get them set up so they can easily manage it for themselves.
And the word easily is very key. And that's part of what we've done with Rally is to make it intuitive and easy to use.
I also notice your website's offering a free downloadable guide to catering using ai. Can you tell us what we can learn from that and how it benefits someone's program?
Yeah, I mean, look, I'll say this upfront, Roger, at the end of the day, AI, very similar to technology, is gonna be an enabler for strong operations and better processes, but it's not [00:28:00] the whole point. And what I mean by that is the point is building a catering operation that can capture catering orders reliably, fulfill them cleanly, earn repeat business.
And what AI does, it actually just helps make, get you there faster and. And
Mm-hmm.
yeah. And, and give you coverage over some of the intimidating things. Like, how do I say this? What template, what you know, what responses do I build? Hey, what is the most appropriate catering friendly description for these menu items because it's gonna be different than your, your dine-in restaurant.
And those are some of the things that AI will help with. And that is those prompts on, how do you get that are all in that guide? They are the caterer's guide for. I need some AI prompts to tighten up my intake, audit, my menu validate my ideal customer profile and who I'm going up. How do I create repeat orders and what do I say to do that?
'cause I need to have a thank you message after each cater and invite them to to cater [00:29:00] for me again.
So the AI must also offer some sort of historical record of past client orders and that sort of thing, so you can somewhat personalize the next, you know, interaction or let's talk about that. I mean, that's really, really important to you get a new order and you wanna. See if they've been a past client, especially if you're not the only one doing this.
If you have other team members, is there a way to sort of recognize and encourage, you know, future business by giving that personal touch and, and seeing what they ordered in the past.
Yeah, so there is, and when you have it digitized, it is so much easier to see 'cause there's a report for that. You know, there's a place that you can go and say, Hey, this person ordered from us this many times. But better yet, I'll, I'll share a, a short story about 'cause we're talking about repeatability issue.
I like to, to share stories. 'cause these are just real things that have actually happened and, and they take the theory and, and give it some perspective. One of the caterers that [00:30:00] they're, they're using Rally Catering. Rachel, when I first met Rachel this was before she became one of our clients.
She was doing a handful of catering orders per week. And I just remember going and sitting down at, at, at her restaurant, 'cause she has a jazz restaurant and she does catering and. She couldn't get an hour conversation with me without getting interrupted by people messaging about the catering. At one point, she had to get up and actually grab a cart to the delivery person downstairs who was doing the catering delivery.
And then I was extracting kind of the pains. This is way earlier in the journey of the pains of what are some of the pains of catering, and she expressed that. There is so much opportunity and potential in repeat orders for caterers and understanding the customer and giving them that level of service where people are missing the point thinking technology is anti relationship building, but it is not anti relationship building.
If [00:31:00] you're building the relationship and giving a frictionless way to interact with you, people buy your standards and they buy from you. When you build that together in the package, it's so powerful. So in Rally Catering, she was actually one of the first to give that nugget to say, make sure you build repeatability.
And today she is doing this. Isn't that from that long ago? She's doing over 40 caterings a week. And it's 'cause she gave her catering clients. Here's the link, and in their account there's a reorder button that saves all of your preferences and your exact order from last time you go in the history.
So when you give people that one click reorder and say, if you need anything, I'm here. You can reach out and call me. But if you need to reorder for that quarterly board meeting, this is your easiest way to do it. I'll still pick up your, the phone, I'll still answer your call and if you have some feedback from me, I'm here.
But I want to give you this 'cause I appreciate your business and I want to make it easy for you. [00:32:00] And that's what's been just pump punching the orders up. 70%. 70% reorders. Exist, like 70% of the catering business is from Reorders.
Huge success story there. I'm glad you shared that. I mean, that's what's possible. And even more so, and it's all about the system and you can't do it without the systems. Let's
Yeah.
he eats. What can you tell us there?
Yeah. So you found Rally Eats somewhere on our, our our website. So Rally Eats is a first party digital ordering platform for pickup and on-premise ordering. So it's essentially built for operators who, who have catering through Rally catering, but also wanna run their own branded ordering channel for day of and onsite orders.
With it all within the same system. So they want the same dashboard, the same, you know, same tools that can also run their, their day-to-day, same day pickup. And that's something that's actually, we we're seeing more common, and especially in restaurant caters, is that they wanna have a day off or a quick order offering, or even an [00:33:00] on-premise.
You, you scan and you pick up here, but at the same time, they want to kind of bring it all in into one tool side by side with their catering offering, and then they offer a different menu for that and, and all that, right? So you want to create that a bit of a separation in terms of the rules of the experience.
So Rally Eats is designed for that on demand, or I want to pre-order, but I wanna pre-order in the short term ordering flow for the, the restaurant brand.
I think you got a tremendous platform. There's so much brain power and in this, you know, behind the scenes, in the trenches capabilities that you've created, and it seems like you thought of everything, like all the details are there. And you're really making it seamless and simple for someone to get into catering or to uplevel an existing catering operation.
So that is so great, Elias. Thanks for sharing that on our show.
No, I appreciate that, Roger. And and there's, you know, there's more coming. You say you think you thought of everything, but there is, there is more coming and it's it's because we're always getting feedback and we're always [00:34:00] evolving, but I would say for, for restaurants that are doing catering we mentioned this earlier, we do have a free workbook that's just for that, right?
It's the, it walks through the book deliver rebook framework for catering the full cycle from first order to, to managing the second one and getting that repeatability. And and I believe it will you be dropping a link to, to those, for the, to those in the show notes?
Well, we can talk about the URL right now. It's rallycatering.com/rockstars if you want more information and get the free demonstration, but we will also put that in the show notes of the episode for sure.
Awesome. Perfect. Love it. Love it.
Elias it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Keep doing what you're doing. You're offering a great service for the industry did catering, but I wish I had Rally catering back then.
fantastic job. Thank you.
Thanks, Roger. Thanks for having me.
That was the restaurant Rock Stars podcast. Thank you so much, audience for tuning in. We really appreciate you listening. Thanks to our sponsors this week, including Rally Catering and hope y'all [00:35:00] stay well. Stay tuned and I'll see you in the next show.
Catering is a powerful profit center for your restaurant. But are you still juggling catering orders through email, phone calls, and scattered messages? Guess what your customers notice, one missed detail, one wrong delivery, and suddenly a new or even repeat customers ordering from your competitor. Rally Catering puts all your orders in one place.
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Catering is an excellent added profit center for your restaurant, but it’s all in the details.
With Rally Catering, customers browse your packages and pricing to order instantly. Orders arrive complete and ready to approve, with kitchen-ready production sheets and packing forms. Grow your catering business without missing a beat and without the chaos!
