Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Driggs
Hi Daniel, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
From Door-to-Door Sales to Brides and Grooms
I started my professional career in door-to-door sales, traveling across the U.S. and convincing people to eliminate pests. After my fourth summer (I attended school during the other eight months), a friend who owned a restaurant with a small catering arm called me. He asked if I could sell events for him, and I thought I could do it on the side while finishing my English degree (I originally wanted to become a lawyer). This was during the pandemic, and he offered me 10% of all sales. Although this might sound like a lot, his biggest year to date had been 100 events and $100,000 in sales. That meant I was being offered $10,000 for what turned out to be full-time work, and no one knew how long the pandemic would last.
Still, I saw the potential, and within a year, we serviced over 800 weddings and were on track to do the same the next year. After this initial influx of sales, my friend shifted his focus more towards the restaurant side of the business, leaving me in charge of not only the sales but also the operations and fulfillment of each event. I fell in love with all of it—the stress of creating the perfect weddings and events, the challenge of training and finding reliable workers (many of whom were high school students), and the process of transporting a restaurant to someone’s event and serving hundreds of people at once. It was a difficult yet rewarding problem to solve.
After two years of running that business, I decided to start my own catering company, Crisp Catering. Since then, we have handled over 2,000 events, most of which have been weddings here in Utah. We’ve developed a passion for large events, parties, and receptions by creating a fun, exciting, and entertaining way to serve.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
There have been a lot of challenges. Our clients(many being brides) demand perfection, many of our employees are teenagers, and our product is food—which can be incredibly finicky. Catering is not for the faint of heart. I’ve ruined weddings (though not many, thankfully!), had employees fail to show up for work, and lost a lot of money early on trying to figure out margins, costs, and how to run a profitable business.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Crisp specializes in wedding receptions and large corporate events, which means we typically don’t handle events with fewer than 100 people, sit-down meals, or traditional table service. Instead, our focus is on food and drink stations. Two amazing employees are behind each station, preparing your food right in front of your guests. Our drink stations offer millions of possible combinations, with entertaining servers mixing up any of your favorites. Our fries are cooked just five feet away, our paninis are pressed in front of you, and our donuts are made fresh as you watch. We offer a wide variety of options, each providing a unique experience that makes these events so much fun and is the difference between us and other catering companies.
Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
Understand money. Cash flow can be incredibly difficult but take a lot of mental energy while starting to understand your books, and understand how your going to grow. Do not have the mindset of, “if i build it they will come” have the mindset of, “I’m getting in front of my clients and Im going to learn through failure.”
You’ll never have the perfect product until you get feedback from your customers. Your product gets perfected much like everything else and that is by selling the product and then listening to feedback. We sold 200 events in 2021, 400 in 2022, and are on track for over 600 in year 3, if I were to cater any of these 600 events like I catered the 200 initial events I would expect all 600 to demand a refund. But as our company grew our events got better and better and our product continues to perfect itself. So what comes first the sell(chicken) or the event(egg), in my belief it is the sale and then comes the perfecting.
Pricing:
- Affordable
Contact Info:
- Website: https://catercrisp.com
- Instagram: crisp.catering
- Facebook: Crisp Catering
