How to Prove the Value of Events and Private Dining to Your Boss
There’s no doubt that having a private dining and events program at your restaurant, hotel, or unique venue will bring revenue to your location. But whether you’ve established one or not, you still need to prove the value of dedicating time and resources for private events to your manager, owner, and everyone else who reviews the financial reports every month.
That’s why we’ve created this list on the benefits of introducing events and private dining to your venue. Share this list with the people in charge to show them the value this program can bring to your business.
1. First, the numbers
Before you get into the details of your events program, it’s important to take a look at the industry as a whole. Events create more revenue than you may have initially thought. The events industry has created more than 5.9 million jobs in the United States. Plus, the events industry’s GDP is $115 billion. There’s money to be made with private dining and events. And if your venue isn’t jumping in, your competitors will.
Interested in what your piece of the private dining and events pie might be? Get a preview with our ROI calculator.
2. Events provide guaranteed bookings during busy seasons
Having a private dining and events business at your venue means that you are guaranteed to fill seats during certain times of the year, like December and January for holiday parties, springtime for high school and college graduation, and summer weekends for weddings.
Sure, there are Type A people who want to reproduce the perfect, Pinterest-worthy party at home. But there are a lot more hosts who are too busy or DIY-challenged and would rather turn to your expert team to execute the perfect event experience without spending all day in their kitchen and all night cleaning up.
Keep on top of your bookings using our features including the Tripleseat Advanced Reporting Portal, Business Intelligence dashboards, sales goals, reports, and more.
3. Events can bring in revenue on slow days
Business may slow down in the aftermath of the holiday season, or when everyone leaves the area for long summer weekends. But that doesn’t mean your venue has to be a ghost town. Event management tools like Tripleseat allow you to manage your calendar and pull sales reports to forecast a drop in bookings so that you can anticipate what’s ahead and prepare for it.
If your restaurant’s sales are down for the month, look to private dining to boost your business. Promote your events program (you could use some of our marketing partners to help spread the word) with email marketing or social media. Offer customers and prospects a special discount or deal for booking during those time periods. You could also promote booking certain types of events for your space — birthdays, bridal showers, reunions, networking parties, and other social events occur every month of the year. Remind your customers that you are the go-to location for all types of celebrations.
4. Events attract repeat customers and prospects
The clients who book events with you are your best source for new and repeat business. Your satisfied customers will turn to you to host their next event, and their attendees will keep you in mind for their future celebrations. If you work with corporate event planners, you can become one of their preferred vendors for their company events and departmental gatherings. Don’t forget — all of these people dine out for brunch, lunch, dinner, and drinks. They may end up becoming regulars in your main dining room as well.
Tripleseat helps you keep this loyalty going. Pull reports on your most booked contacts and contacts that booked for a certain time period that may want to hold the same event at the same time this year. Contact those important customers ahead of time and check to see if they would like to reschedule upcoming events. Or pull the email addresses of those lists and send them a segmented marketing email as a reminder to book again for event types or seasonal periods.
5. Running an events and private dining program is easier than you think
When you have the power of an event management tool like Tripleseat, you’ll have a system in place that allows you to increase sales and streamline the planning process. Tripleseat with SmartSuite is a complete web-based platform that will power any restaurant, hotel, or venue events team to increase group sales, manage and communicate easily with guests, keep track of every detail, plan every event seamlessly, and more.
