Wade Armstrong

We Mean Business: Out Back Catering

Posted Tuesday October 28, 2008 in Entrepreneurship

This week’s We Mean Business follows the makeover of Out Back catering, a Southern California catering company that serves down-home food at parties. Out Back has been successful for two decades but has recently seen its bookings and revenue drop. With the founder’s daughter interested in taking a bigger role at the company, our heroes wade in to see what they can do to turn the business around.

The show circles around a while trying to find the problems, and discovers a few meaningful ones early on:

• The office is hard-to-find and, inside, the customer meeting area is cluttered and unprofessional
• The company is using outdated advertising methods
• The phone system is broken and hangs up on people

However, the parochial attitude of our hosts also comes out when they focus on things that appear to be problems but probably aren’t:

• The owner doesn’t know how many employees he has; probably this is because he has a long list of servers and prep cooks who he can call upon to work his events, but doesn’t have on payroll.
• The company runs on DOS-based computers, which may be “archaic” but I bet still works; any new equipment should be sold on the business benefits it brings, not because floppy disks are old and uncool.
• Tech guru Katie Linendoll — whose Google listing by the way reads “image2. image1. image5. image4. image3. copyright.” — has a tantrum because the employees aren’t paying enough attention to her and watch a turtle instead.

Their Solution

Designer Peter Gurski makes over the outside and inside of the office by painting the building a great red-and-white check, just like the tablecloths Out Back uses. He also makes the interior easier-to-clean and organizes it to be nice for the customers who come by to learn more and sign contracts. He even makes a new logo and Rancic brings by great new shirts that everyone can wear - although I’m sad that they called the company Outback catering, rather than Out Back, because it really is a different thing. (And who knows how Outback Steakhouse will feel about Outback Catering?)

Linendoll finally pulls her weight by setting up a great VoIP phone system with all the bells and whistles and laptops with 3G wireless cards that can help people working on the road get online from anywhere. The rest is a little more Dell and Intel shilling, but at least there’s real tech value this time.

Everything culminates in a grand re-opening picnic that seems to get new business.
h3. What I Would Recommend

As Rancic notes early on, Out Back just waits for customers to call - they don’t have much modern marketing. The only thing they run is a 15-year-old Yellow Pages ad, which probably worked great years ago when most people found caterers by looking in the Yellow Pages. Today, the equivalent is a search engine ad using a service like Google AdWords. In 15 seconds, Rancic could’ve mentioned this idea, and perhaps Linendoll could even have mentioned that the new Dell computers came with a copy of QuickBooks, which includes tools to help manage an AdWords account.

Another good marketing strategy for Out Back would be cold-calling area businesses to get corporate catering opportunities. Out Back should also be sending print or e-newsletters to its existing customer base to keep in touch - they could even run stories about good party ideas, to get their customers thinking about having an event. Out Back could even send reminders and coupons to its past customers for events like birthdays and holidays and try and get that business for this year too. It would’ve taken Rancic 20 seconds to talk about these ideas.

The founder’s daughter, who seems to want to be more involved, does a great job on the phone in this episode and also seems interested in doing new things. She’d be a great person to put on these jobs. Meanwhile, the founder does a great job face-to-face, talking about his company at an event. He should be getting out there, going to the larger events Out Back works and talking to new potential customers. Rancic already almost said this, he should just make it clear.

Finally, the company needs a new Web site. The old one doesn’t have good photography, has limited menus, and doesn’t let the user book an event or even fill out a form to get a call-back. It’s a pity Dell doesn’t sell small-business sites but perhaps a new partner like Yahoo, which also offers a store component, could pay for inclusion on the show and could provide adequate sites with e-commerce and, here, event booking. Linendoll likes to show off photos on big screens, she could easily show off a new site built with Yahoo’s tools.

Clearly, this company’s problem comes down to marketing and only marketing. Hopefully things will turn around for them! These new methods should help.

Harping on the Format Again

The disdain our team feels for the Outback owner and staff is palpable in this episode. In fact, it really made the first 5 minutes of the show difficult to watch. I wonder if part of the problem is that the show is a half hour, whereas competing shows are an hour long. While a Tabatha’s Salon Takeover or Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style has 20 minutes to create a crisis and tension, We Mean Business has only 5-7. Is this show overplaying its hand and showing too many negative moments, too quickly, in an attempt to create drama? Or are the stars really that snotty?