By: Angela Petro, Founder & CEO
My work family is proof that there is a silver lining in the worst of situations.
Catering and Event Venues have to be on the top 10 list of companies that are struggling right now. Followed by independent restaurants and cafes. And this is what I have spent my adult life building. At least that’s what I thought I was doing before March of 2020. I could write a long list of things I respect and admire about the team I work with and that list grew exponentially during the past months.
But let me tell you about today… one snapshot of how you know with certainty that our company culture is unbreakable, that our values are more than words on a webpage, that PEOPLE make the business and not the other way around, and that as a leader in an organization my number one measurable is how many people show up when it counts.
We have been fortunate to have a client who shows appreciation to their team by supporting local hospitality companies… one thousand meals, divided into three meal times and three locations. Pre-March this was just another day in catering but today we have 37% of our staff. This means a fraction of the culinary, cleanup, and operations folks we had at the beginning of the year.
So preparing scratch made food, baking 1,000 chocolate chip cookies, printing and sticking labels to containers, washing the dishes, packing the meals at just the right time so they are delivered hot and delicious, driving three vans in three different directions at three times… way harder than it used to be.
To stay true to what makes us unique… uncommon reliability, our bakers had to start in the middle of the night and not just the earliest hours of the morning. Thank you to our Kittie’s Cakes Bakery Team! Our Sales and Marketing team printed and set up a sticker station, “Mount Stickmore”, with a pile of to go boxes so tall that I couldn’t see who was on the other side.
Our Culinary team worked in shifts to get everything prepped on time over the past few days with crazy early start times and people here hours later than normal.
Our Operations team was driving vans, unpacking boxes, filling in where needed and doing it all with a smile even though they’ve been here since way before sunrise.
And less than an hour ago there were a dozen people from Sales, Culinary, Operations, HR, our manager from our restaurant, Sweet Carrot, our training manager… all masked up, giving each other space and honoring our purpose… to bring people together through whole hearted hospitality.
So the silver lining is that with 63% fewer people I am 100% certain that what has been built here isn’t a hospitality company.
It’s a family of people who believe that what they do is valuable to our community and that doing it together makes it worth showing up.
Even at 4 am.
