The Value of Choosing Your Events Wisely

For most mobile traders, the events season is absolutely critical. It is extremely important to achieve profitable trading during this season, and one of the most effective ways a trader can retain control of this narrative and give themselves the best chance of a lucrative season is by picking events carefully.

Caterers should always look to prioritise where their food will sell best, rather than just aiming to cater at the biggest events. A huge attendance doesn’t necessarily translate to a great business opportunity, but many can be naive to this. It goes without saying that at a major festival or event, there will be a huge number of people, but similarly there will be a lot of caterers for you to compete with, meaning you could actually struggle to sell as much as you maybe predicted.

Due to the nature of competition, the pitch fee for a bigger event is likely to be inflated on this premise, so you could be in a situation where you end up happy just to break even. This translates to a lot of work for not a lot of gain, and is exactly the kind of a situation you want to avoid. Think smarter about your season schedule – while everyone wants the glamour of catering at major festivals, the most important thing when running your business, is to be able to turn a profit.

There is a big case to be made, for turning your attention to catering smaller events, where the footfall may not be as gargantuan, but you will face minimal competition, have a much cheaper pitch fee and ultimately face much lesser risk, with potential to make a lot more.

The Association of Festival Organisers (AFO) is a membership group of like-minded festival and event managers who believe in learning and teaching, sharing and networking to continuously improve the festival scene. Created in 1987 with a small gathering of people working in the community festival business, AFO now has over 250 members who exchange ideas and support one another to help develop the sector.

That is 250 different opportunities and events that you can make good on. These are made up by a diverse range of events that are smaller in scale, often can be localised and curated in the interests of the community. Largely, these shows are passion projects as the people involved are often setting up events for their local area, so the priorities are more organic and there is less of a focus on the money side of things as is accustomed with major event organisers.

With a smaller show, as previously alluded to, any risk is minimised as the costs are massively reduced and in this sense, if you successfully manoeuvre a spot at an event well suited to your speciality, the event could be something of a goldmine as your profit margins are much wider.

In keeping with the nature of smaller and localised events, many of them may be free to enter, and often if a customer hasn’t had to pay just to enter, they may be more likely to spend while they’re there and seek to maximise their experience. Which you can facilitate and become an integral part of.

When considering events to apply to cater at, it is prudent to tally up how many people are expected, how much they’re estimated to spend and divide this by how many caterers are present. In this equation, AFO is always a good answer. Think about the demographic attendance of an event, does your offering suit that audience? Of course, not every single event will be right for you but with such a wide portfolio of events on the run, you are bound to find a good portion you can successfully navigate.

Furthermore, these events can be the perfect testing ground for you to try out business or culinary ideas and serve as great places to earn your stripes, setting you up well to deal with bigger crowds at bigger events later down the line, if you’re just starting out for example. They can be a great opportunity to get your food out there and build the brand, particularly if you can develop a positive working relationship with the organisers in question and can cater repeat events.

In order to do this, it is wise to show an interest in the actual event rather than looking at it as a weekend of work – after all, you are both working towards the same goal: providing a great, fun experience for those in attendance. As most AFO events are community run, you have a great chance to establish yourself within that community as a go-to trader that will add value to a multitude of events – so help them out with the promotion of the event.

Again, as these are community run, one huge advantage over meddling with major events is that you will be able to speak organically with another person at the other end of the phone, rather than the frustrations that can arise from dealing with a big corporation and the inherent mechanical, automated hoops you have to jump through.