When working out a sales and marketing plan for your catering business start-up you first have to understand the market both in terms of the competition and what kinds of events local clients will require catering for. Before writing up your business plan you should look at how your future competitors are running their businesses and doing their marketing. By calling them up on the phone or even having a meeting with them you can get a fair idea about the marketing and sales methods that they are using.

Work out a sales process right from the point of first contact with the customer through to closing the deal and test various aspects of it until you find the most successful process. Try to relate to your customers by imagining yourself being in the same busy situation that they are in. When you meet with clients don’t forget to take along some samples of your food for them to try. When it has become clear that you have a new client, try to up sell them on more profitable menu items or additional services.

Test a variety of advertising methods, starting with the methods that other caterers in your city are using. It is also important to realize that a large part of your business will come through word of mouth referrals. How successful you are in getting referrals from your existing customers will depend on how good they perceived your catering services to be.

Successful caterers realize that while it is important to focus on the food side of the business it is even more important to focus on the marketing side to have a steady stream of prospective clients coming in all the time. By fine-tuning your marketing and sales for your catering business start-up you will be setting yourself up for a great deal of success.

There are many more reasons why many business start-ups are using Internet or online fax. Chief among then are the following:

1. Setting Up a business fax number is almost immediate and in most cases the set-up is free.

2. Monthly fax services on average are only around $10 a month, less if you shop around and find a good deal.

3. Online fax is completely scalable for your business or company, if you need extra fax numbers, you can get them immediately.

4. Online fax is completely mobile and available 24/7 anywhere you have Internet access, which makes your business more competitive.

5. Web or email faxing also ties your company into today’s business environment, it’s the modern way to fax!

Perhaps, another main reason many individuals and companies are turning to web or email faxing is because the whole actual “set-up” can be easily done. You choose an Internet fax service provider where you’re given a local or Toll-Free number which you send out to all your contacts. You are also given an online interface or site where you can check and send your faxes. Keep in mind, online faxing uses your computer and your email system to do all your faxing – your faxes are sent as email attachments, usually in TIFF or PDF formats. Getting your faxes is as easy as reading your email. Should you need a hard-copy of a certain fax, you can just print it out.

In addition, what seems so popular with many small business start-ups is the whole PBX system, where faxing is just one component. With these fully loaded systems all your faxing, phone calls, voice mail, receptionist calls… is farmed out to a virtual service which handles all your messages, faxes and phone calls. For the small business start-up, using such a virtual PBX (Private Branch Exchange) can be a real time and money saver since costs are significantly cheaper than going the traditional route.

This is a popular form of “cloud computing” which you hear so much about in business circles these days, but it is also one of the least expensive ways of setting up a new business, especially if funds and/or space is a problem. For the home business it can be a very beneficial and effective business model to follow and use. Actually, online fax may just be the ideal business service whose time has come. So are you or your company using it?