Catering Degrees
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Catering is a versatile career that can be made profitable in many venues. Event planners sometimes cross over and encompass this skill as well or vice versa. Catering colleges offer catering degrees that will help you begin your career in a short amount of time. Any school of catering that is worth it’s salt will teach you every aspect of the business from hiring staff to finding clients. How do you find a good catering school? This website will help you in your search for catering schools and then the choice is up to you.
Read this account of a recent recipient of Catering Magazine’s Caterer of the Year 2000 award.
Jack Milan loves change. He’s shifted careers from data processing consultant, to visionary restaurant owner, to successful caterer; he’s a self-taught chef who gives industry-recognized presentations on food and event design; and he’s stayed ahead of seismic shifts in the catering market, adapting his high-end catering services to a changing mix of social, wedding and corporate clients.
“I’m the type of person who doesn’t like to be stuck in a rut,” says Milan, owner of Different Tastes Catering, based in Boston. “With catering, the food is always evolving, the spaces are always changing and the themes change. I’m constantly stimulated by the challenge of catered events.”
Milan has provided stimulation to a host of others, too. He caters about 400 events a year, about 50 percent social and 50 percent corporate, including events for the prestigious Wang Theatre, where he has an exclusive (and almost unheard of) 10-year contract.
He regularly speaks at educational gatherings of the International Catering Association (ICA), where he is the second vice president of the organization’s national board), the National Association of Catering Executives and the International Special Events Society. He also is a member of all three groups, as well as a member of Leading Caterers of America, and the Massachusetts Restaurant Association.
Catering Magazine honors Milan this year as Caterer of the Year largely because of his foresight and ability to adapt to changing economic conditions.
Reaching success in the industry was a strange path. “I’m the eldest of seven boys,” Milan says. “I hate working for other people, and I’m used to being in charge. I knew in college that I’d have to do something on my own.”
He chose to study data processing at Loyola University in Chicago, as a “means to an end,” while he saved money to start a small business. Milan bolstered his business acumen by picking up a master’s of business administration.
The opportunity to build his own business came in 1975, when Milan and a friend opened up Stockpot, a soup and salad restaurant in Boston. Within six months, they expanded to a second location.
Milan sold his interest in the company five years later and began to work at Another Season Restaurant, opening its catering division. After expanding his cooking skills and cooking with the owner, Milan set up Different Tastes Catering when Another Season closed its catering division in 1982. Different Tastes positioned itself as a higher-end caterer, a move that was chosen by Milan to enhance the business’ longevity. “We have to focus,” he says. “If we don’t focus and do what we’re best at, we’ll lose everything.”
Different Tastes had a heavy (80 percent) corporate workload in its early days and on the nonprofit gala circuit, where Milan says he was able to “get the word out quickly” that he was a caterer that could handle upper-tier events. A decade later, he targeted the wedding market, and the social-wedding portion of the business grew to nearly 50 percent.
The increased wedding revenue became an important cushion for Milan, as the repercussions of 9/11 trimmed many corporate catering budgets.
Milan credits the growing wedding business success to a 1994 invitation to join the selective Boston Wedding Group, a network of respected wedding vendors in the New England area. Before leaving the group, he had become president and built its membership up to nearly 60 members.
“ I had 58 people advertising me, and we referred a lot of work to
each other,” he says.
Adapting to the changing corporate catering climate, Milan added a no-frills,
drop-off division, The Fast Repast, and consolidated his event planning expertise
into a separate events division, It’s All in the Details. The two divisions
have netted Milan approximately 20 percent more revenue, he says.
This year Different Tastes also benefited from being chosen to help cater
the Democratic National Convention in Boston, an honor that Milan asserts
will raise the bottom line by at least 25 percent.
In addition to networking and making presentations at industry conferences and meetings, Milan markets his business through attracting media interviews on catering-related topics and photo requests. He acknowledges that he places an emphasis on having high-quality food photography available for the media, especially close ups of creations like his salmon lollipops.
Milan says he exploits his vocational interest in photography by taking along a camera and catching a shot or two at most events. He also hires a professional photographer once or twice a year to create a fresh crop of photos to share with magazines and newspapers. “I have really good photos,” Milan says. “One editor will see some picture in another publication, and request it for his story. I always let them know, yes, here’s the picture, and that I’m available for an interview on the topic as well.”
With all this going on, Milan also finds time to teach. He advises students on how to be come a caterer. “I ask people to tell the class why they want to be a caterer,” he says. “Some of them will say their husbands thought they should, or they have a great recipe they want to make money on. I say to them, ‘If that’s all you have, leave, because it takes more than good cooking or a good recipe to succeed.’”
He also says, “The best way to succeed in this industry is to read the magazines and go to conferences. For me, it’s been a breakthrough. I’ve been in the business a long time, and I still learn from others. You stagnate if you don’t learn from others.”
Written by Liz Massey of http://www.cateringmagazine.com/.
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