The catering enquiries were already there. Nobody had built a way to actually answer them.
A busy specialty cafe with a high-margin catering side. Being run from the owner's personal phone after midnight.
The co-owners opened this specialty cafe in Nobby Beach in 2021. Specialty single-origin coffee, in-house pastry, all-day brunch. The kind of place locals defend with surprising loyalty. Five years in, the cafe trades hard from open to 2pm daily and has eight staff.
The hidden growth engine wasn't the cafe floor. It was catering. Corporate breakfasts, event coffee carts, birthday platters. Higher per-order margin, fewer staff hours, repeat clients. The problem: every enquiry came through Instagram or Facebook DM, and every quote took the co-owner opening her personal phone after close to type out details.
When we walked the funnel with them, the picture was stark. They had roughly 30 catering enquiries per month surfacing in the DMs. She was replying to maybe half. Of those, the conversion to a confirmed booking was 38%. Not because the offer was wrong, but because by the time her quote landed, the event had already been booked elsewhere.
Three structural reasons catering enquiries were dying before they became bookings.
Build the catering page that should have existed for five years. Have it quote itself.
We didn't try to replace the owner as the relationship-holder. We built the structure that let her relationship-build on bookings rather than wasting capacity on quoting basics. Standard orders auto-quoted instantly; only custom enquiries reached her phone.
The six months before we started and the six months after the new flow went live.
Six months after the new catering flow went live.
From the owner.
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