You Do Not Have a Lead Problem in October
David Selva · · 4 min read
Booking Analytics, Catering, Capacity Planning
Inquiries plotted against capacity by event date tell you something monthly revenue never will: which weeks you lost slowly.
You probably do not have a lead problem in October. You have a capacity problem that looks like a lead problem in February.
Catering demand is not flat and nobody who runs a catering business needs me to tell them that. What surprises people is how much of the year's decision-making gets made on gut when the booking data has been sitting there the whole time.
Revenue hides the shape of the year
Monthly revenue tells you what came in. It does not tell you what you turned away, when you turned it away, or what you could have taken if you had known three weeks earlier.
Booking data does. Not revenue by month — inquiries by requested event date, plotted against what you actually had crew and kitchen for. Those two lines are the whole picture, and most operations have never put them next to each other.
When you do, the useful thing is rarely the peak. Everyone knows December is full. The useful thing is the shoulder: the three weeks where inquiries were healthy and you had capacity and somehow booked at sixty percent, because nobody was watching closely enough to push.
Turning down work should be a decision, not an accident
Every catering business declines events. The question is whether you decline them on purpose.
Declined by accident looks like this: an inquiry comes in for a Saturday you are already heavy on, somebody replies two days later because the week is chaotic, and by then the client has booked elsewhere. You did not choose to pass on that job. You just lost it slowly.
Declined on purpose looks like this: you know by Tuesday that the Saturday in question is at capacity, so the reply goes out the same day and says so, and offers the Friday or the following weekend. About a third of the time the client is flexible on date. You cannot capture any of that if the answer arrives too late to be an offer.
The prerequisite for choosing is knowing your committed capacity for a given date without going to ask three people.
What to actually track
Keep it to things you can pull without a project:
- Inquiries by requested event date, not by the date the inquiry arrived
- Win rate by lead time — inquiries with six weeks of notice versus two, which almost always convert differently
- Declined or lost, with the reason separated into "we were full" and "we lost it"
That last split is the one that pays. "We were full" on a given weekend is a pricing signal — you were underpriced for that date. "We lost it" on a weekend with open capacity is a follow-up or a proposal problem. Same missing revenue, two completely opposite responses, and a single lost-jobs number cannot tell them apart.
Spend follows capacity, not the calendar
Here is where this stops being a reporting exercise.
Most catering operations advertise on a fixed rhythm, or worse, advertise hardest when things feel slow — which is usually a few weeks after the period they should have been filling. Lead time makes that backwards. If your average corporate booking comes in five weeks ahead, then advertising in a slow week is buying inquiries for a date five weeks out that may already be committed.
Once you can see inquiries against capacity by event date, spend has an obvious target: the dates that are open inside your booking window. That is a different question from "are we busy right now," and it is the one that actually moves the number.
The part I would not automate
The reply itself, at least not fully. A same-day response saying you are at capacity but have the Friday open is doing real work only if it sounds like a person who looked at the calendar.
Automate the alert — tell the coordinator by Tuesday that Saturday is committed. Automate the capacity view. Let a human write the sentence that offers the alternative date, because that sentence is where the third of clients who are flexible get saved or lost.
Worth an afternoon
Pull last year's inquiries, tag each one with the requested event date rather than the date it arrived, and put your crew capacity next to it. It is an afternoon in a spreadsheet before it is ever a system.
If the shoulder weeks come back looking as soft as they do for most operations, you have found next year's revenue without adding a single lead. If they come back full, then you genuinely do have a lead problem, and at least now you know which one you are solving.