The lost art of communication: March 2010 morsel
Published: March 5, 2010
The step by step experience I have with banqueting managers across this country is pretty much the same everywhere. And, banquet managers: There is room for improvement. Time and time again, this is how things go:
- Menus are negotiated and designed with catering and chef.
- I put a lot of notes on my BEOs for banqueting and the kitchen.
- I arrive at the show site and go to pre-con.
- I sit in BEO review with banquet managers and the kitchen. Banquet managers take notes and ask the questions – we come to agreement on how the event will be executed. (Trust me when I tell you that I go through how I want things done in painstaking detail.)
It is right here that the information STOPS — it doesn’t get passed down any further. The banquet manager walks away from that meeting and fails to pass this crucial information down to the people actually doing the events.
The day of the event arrives. And this is where I go nuts, because the banquet captain, all nice and polite, invariably finds me and tells me that there are a lot of notes on the BEO and their manager told them to come see me to review. From the banquet captain’s point of view, they are doing so out of a passion for wanting to get this event right and a desire to hear my vision of it.
From my point of view, this is a huge problem, because I already explained my vision in great detail to the banquet manager.
Instead of having me repeat myself, I think it should be the banquet manager’s responsibility to review this information with their captains. Or, they should have the captain come to the pre-con, instead. Personally, I don’t care who attends as long as I don’t have to continually repeat information. Just two weeks ago, I was in Dallas. At the show-site the banquet manager came to BEO review WITHOUT his BEOs. How confident did I feel in working with him? I didn’t, and I had him removed from our group.
In closing out this morsel, I would like to politely ask banqueting managers to hear what I am saying and make a commitment, going forward, to pass this important information down to your banqueting captains.
This is my story, and I am sticking to it.
Thank you for reading my morsel.
Claire R. Gould is the owner of Rx for Catering, LLC, a 12-year-old culinary and logistics company that works all over the world negotiating and designing menus for meetings and events. Her company has done work for Coca-Cola, IBM, Honeywell and Embraer Executive Jets, among others. Gould teaches and writes about culinary and banquet trends and topics, and publishes a quarterly online newsletter "The Claire Diaries." Follow her on Twitter @Rx_for_Catering.
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