Wedding Business Solutions

Roy Porter - The 9 Wastes & The Hidden Event

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

Share episode

Roy and I did this as a webinar recently for VenueX AI, and it went so well that I thought all of my listeners should hear it. Enjoy!

Behind every seamless celebration is a mountain of unseen planning, coordination, and human potential. Are you over-processing without realizing it? Are you tapping into the hidden talents of your team, or letting valuable skills slip by? In this episode, we dig into the “nine wastes” that sneak into your workflow, practical ways to streamline processes, and the power of small improvements—plus a story about discovering amazing talent in the most unexpected place. What could one small tweak in your operation change for your team—and your clients?

Listen to this new episode for actionable ideas on cutting waste, empowering your staff, and making every event smoother from the inside out.

Bio:

Roy Porter, Activities Director at Engage Works, is one of the most respected voices in catering and special event operations.

Roy is a nationally recognized expert in hospitality strategy and the recipient of the Michael Roman Lifetime Achievement Award. With more than 3,600 weddings and landmark events to his credit — including the Emmys, Oscars, Grammys, Governors Ball, U.S. Open, and multiple Super Bowls — Roy has seen just about everything that can happen behind the scenes of an event.

Roy brings a people-first, execution-focused mindset to hospitality, and today we’re diving into what most event professionals miss — and how to fix it before it shows up in overtime, stress, or disappointed clients.

Roy's Page https://www.facebook.com/roy.porter.750

Catering community https://www.facebook.com/groups/223554818526099

ICA https://www.facebook.com/internationalcaterers

Instagram   https://www.instagram.com/tablewizard1/ 

If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com 

View t

Have you ever wondered... "What would Alan say or do about this?" - well, now you can ask my AI Alter-Ego "Ask Alan Anything" the things you'd ask the real Alan, any time of the day or night. And as a listener of this podcast, you'll save 50%, so starting at only $10 per month you can "Ask Alan Anything"!

Go to www.WhatWouldAlanSay.com and use the 50% off coupon code - podcast - to start asking Alan anything today.

I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

Should we kick off?

Let's do it.

Let's do it. All right, guys. Hi, everyone. My name is Abed Al Samna. I'm the founder and CEO of venuex AI. Thank you so much for being here today. Very excited about today's conversation between Alan and Roy and they're going to walk us through with the behind the scenes workflow that really shapes how an event is sold, set up, executed and effectively wrapped up. And the goal for today is for you guys to take away some best practices and some tips to apply to your real, your, your businesses in real time.

Hope you guys enjoy. And Alan, I'll pass it back to you.

Thank you, thank you. And thank you, Roy. I've been trying to get, get something going with Roy for, for a long time here now.

Yeah, thanks.

Go ahead.

No, I was gonna say we've talked about getting together some time on doing a podcast and I, I'm really excited to be here today with you and to talk about this.

And before you got on, I was saying that this is kind of the tech issues we were having is kind of the whole point of what we're going to talk about, which is all the stuff that happens to make something happen.

Yeah, right.

So I think it was karma that we had some tech issues here. So my name is Alan Berg. For those of you that don't know me, I'm a speaker expert on the business of weddings and events. I used to be vice president of sales at the Knot publisher, author of 13 books and I mentioned my podcast, the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. Roy, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself?

So I'm Roy Porter. I'm, I'm a catering expert. I'm a ronin in that I've been in the business for I guess like 20 some odd years. I've done everything from server to manager to bar manager. And my area of expertise is what I call lean catering, which is to develop people so that they can add value and eliminate waste, have a better guest and hospitality experience. And I work all over the country. I just was in Salt Lake City for an event for 5,000, and Thursday I did an event, Thanksgiving in Long Beach, 800 people. So that's my area.

I've been on the cater source and special event education and production team since 2010. And in 2021, I was awarded a Michael Roman Lifetime Achievement Award, which is sort of like an Emmy in catering, so.

Absolutely. So. So, Roy, when you say you did an event, you're not a. You're not the caterer, right?

No, I'm not a caterer. I'm. I work with caters. They. They call me and say, hey, come and give us a hand. Whether it's, you know, something intimate and very complex or it's something large. When I was in Salt Lake city, it was 5,000 people and they all needed to be fed in like two and a half hours. And the other day it was for.

I can't tell you the client because of what they're. The nature of their business and what they're doing. But it was a call on Monday afternoon, say, hey, we got this short notice. Can you come on Thursday at 8 in the morning and help us serve 800 people? You know, look after it, make sure and so on. I'm not cooking. A lot of people can cook a lot better than I can. But when it gets down to how do we make that happen so that it's enjoyable for the staff and productive and not a lot of waste, like too much food or, you know, the wasted steps, the chaos, the cat herding, I like to keep that down to a minimum.

So who's hiring you then? Is it the caterer? Is it the.

I usually get hired by caterers, but I also get hired by hotels, venues that are wedding venues, clubs that are doing a special event, you know, like country clubs, golf clubs. I've done a lot of work at Riviera. I've done a lot of work at the San Vicente Mongolo. It's a pretty bougie place up in la. I get hired by planners to come and work with the cater. Sometimes I'm not. We call adult supervision or another set of eyes that can coach, you know, and give some direction and help with the planning and the flow of things and the organization.

I mean, I noticed a post you did just the other day, and it was. I looked quickly and it looked like a rider truck or it was the back of a box truck open. But what you said there was, this is the way if you're caterers, if you're going to have a truck. This is what you need. And you pointed out the three levels of side rails and you pointed out the straps and don't use the, the, the, the ratchets. Right. That there was a light inside and a light outside. And this is the kind of detail that makes the difference between making it easy and flow and getting.

Get your job done. And the opposite, which is the stuff flows over, flies over in the truck when you're driving, you get pull up and there's no light there. And you can't see that. But that's the stuff that, because of your experience and because of your expertise, because those are two different things, right?

Yeah.

You, you notice those things. And to me, that's why people would bring you on. So you call, we call this the hidden event because it's all of this stuff. And everybody listening here who's a venue or a caterer knows this. All the work that goes in before a guest arrives.

Yeah.

And done well, everything falls into place. And you said 5,000 people got served within how much time?

In less than three hours, right, right.

5,000 people in less than three hours.

Yeah.

That's again, that's a lot of coordination there. So tell us, tell me and tell everybody how did, how did you end up there? Like, how did you end up here being the guy that people call on because they're having 5,000 people? Like, well, how did that happen?

I, you know, when I was in college, I went to among a couple of jobs. I ended up working at a hotel and I ended up in the banquet department. And so I had to. I was working for these wonderful Greek people, and I was like 17, and I had to learn how to carry, you know, banquet trays, those large ovals, and carry eight salads. And if you didn't, you didn't keep a job after a week. So I learned that skill. And then one day I was walking by one of the bars and a bartender, this at a wedding. And the bartender said, hey kid, go in the back and get me a case of dry white wine.

And so I went back to dry storage. I'm in about 15 minutes. And the chef comes in and he says, young man, what are you doing in here? And I said, the bartender asked for a case of dry white wine. And he starts laughing and he says, come with me. And he pulls out keys and we go to a lock cabinet. He goes, this is where the dry white wine is. It's in the liquor cabinet. So anyways, I took the case and the bartender gave me Like, I don't know, four or five dollars.

I thought, wow, just for delivery. This is cool. I mean, nice to know you're 17, you know, trying to struggle through.

Every dollar counts. Every dollar counts.

And so years later, I used to hire caters. I was in a direct marketing agency. We did some promotional NPR work and I would hire caters to do product launches and, you know, board of directors meetings and things of that nature. And then I ran into a rough financial spell. And the caterers are calling me and they're saying, hey, why aren't you hiring us? And I said, well, rough spellings. Or the one of them says, well, we know you, you can run a party. If you're really desperate, then come and work. And I did.

I went over, I filled out an application and they, they put me to work. And my idea was, is that I could rebuild my, my, my business and I could do events at night and on weekends. And it worked out for a while, except then they kept asking me to work more and more and more. And then after about nine months, they said, we want you to join the management team. And I kind of struggled with that and go like, gee, this is kind of fun. You know, it's different. And okay, let's try. And so I did.

And among my responsibilities as a director of operations, and this was at 24 carats, which is a pretty sizable company in Orange county, they set the bar. And my charge was to reduce the cat herding and the chaos and put SOPs, standard operating procedures and training and make it a safer environment. And I like to have fun. And they said, okay, make it a fun environment and get the staff trained. And suddenly we went from doing a little over a million a year. When I left, we were getting over 16 million. Yeah, we had over 500 on staff just in the front of the house. Staff, which was servers, bartenders, event leads and captains.

We were doing drop off and deliveries for breakfast, lunch and dinners and snacks, and we were running, you know, weddings and bar mitzvahs and you name it, if there was a reason to have food, you were there. And along the way I had to develop and learn. I made a lot of mistakes. People hated me at times and for good reason. And we learned to start doing some of these things like how do you hold all the stuff in the truck going back to the slide on the E track in there? Because I would arrive at a site and things would be damaged. And that's what we call a defect. That's one of the nine wastes. Well, how do we fix that? And I saw this thing, and I didn't know what it was, and somebody said, well, that's called E Track.

And so I started looking into it, and I found a distributor and found somebody to install it. And we bought the. The ratchet straps. And the problem with the ratchet straps is people were ratcheting down so much, they destroyed things, you know.

Right.

So there was a lot of trial and error. And. And, you know, I would looked to see what other caterers were doing, and I got some good ideas. And then I got involved with cater source. I would go to the cater source and the special event conference. I would go to restaurant shows. Then I started going to trucking shows and contractor shows to look for ideas to extract and bring into catering. So if you're a caterer or running a venue, you're sometimes a general contractor, and sometimes you're an electrician, and sometimes you're a structural engineer.

And so I would bring those things into the catering, and that's kind of like how it flowed along. I left 24 carrots, and then I started working for other caterers. And then I worked on staffing agencies. They would call, and the nice thing about that was I got to see how other caters work, having worked with, I don't know, well over 100 caters, and I was working on staff, and then they would say, hey, can you help me with this? Or help me with that? And that. It kind of grew from there. So now I spend most of my time doing that. But, you know, someone call, hey, can you help us with an event? And if I'm available and it looks interesting and we agree on Pocketbook, then right off we go.

So, yeah, I was just talking to a aspiring speaker, and I told her someone asked me I was a guest on a podcast. I said, why do you do what you do? I said, that's a good question. I said, it fulfills two things. It brings you value, and it brings me joy.

Yeah.

And if it does both of those, I will gladly cash the check. Yeah, Right. If it doesn't do both, I don't want the check. Right. It's got to do both of those things.

So. So a couple of lessons there. One is some of the best ideas come from outside your industry.

Exactly.

And keep your eyes open and say, wait, I could adapt that for this. I'm doing that all the time, and I hope everybody listening is doing that.

So you talked about the nine. What it. The nine.

The nine wastes.

Nine wastes. Okay. So efficiency but efficiency, not at the sake of quality experience and all those things. Right? So what are these nine wastes? So one of them you just talked about was not breaking stuff.

So the nine wastes are extracted from Toyota in their production. Okay. And people say, well, what does car manufacturing have to do with running a party, you know, running an event, everything. Because there are these things that take place, whether you're building a car or cabinets that get carried over. And the. The epiphany for me was. Was, you know, and I was frustrated along the way trying to figure out things. And some of the things I would.

I kind of figured out and stumbled on. And then I was building displays and somebody said, oh, there's this company up in Bellevue, Washington, called FastCap, and they make all the special stuff for woodworking tools. And we were making, you know, like trays for tray passing, and they looked like pigs and chicken or fish, and they had a theme or a logo of a company. And so I go to their website thinking I'm going to find some new screwdrivers or router bits or something. And I discovered a whole thing called Lean by, you know, Paul Akers, who runs the company. And in there they talked about these things to look at, and you could identify them and say, wait a second, defects. And then you discover that there is an acronym called downtime. And like downtime, what that means when it translates to, help you remember, is like, D is for defects.

So, you know, merchandise shows up. If it shows up broken at the event, then it's defect. It might be defective, and you can fix it with some masking tape or super glue or gorilla tape or whatever. But how can we avoid that from happening? Sometimes food shows up and it's damaged, things are dirty, chafing dishes are dirty. These are, you know, defective things. So what do you look for is you look for defects, things that are defective. And then how do we prevent that from happening in the future?

The next one is over processing. You know, the days years ago, I remember, we'd say, well, we always take an extra 5 or 10% along on an event.

You can't do that anymore. You can't take 10. And I even caution people not even to be taking five. I mean, five is the limit. You need to, you know, you think about you're buying extra food, you have to have an extra trailer or, you know, extra storage space and shelving and all the labor to pick it up and then process it. And then what do we do at the end of the event with it? We might Donate it to a shelter, it gets thrown in the trash, the staff takes it home. That was event. One day, they had 10 extra rib eyes, and the staff was taking them home.

You know, it's like five, six hundred bucks, you know, so waiting. Waiting is one of the nine ways, and that is. We're waiting for clients to decide on the color of the linen or the fold of the napkin. We are waiting for somebody to interpret the beo. We're waiting for the rental company to show up. We're waiting for the caterer to show up. We're waiting for the lighting guy, the dj, the people that are putting in whatever. We're waiting for the security guards.

We're waiting for the fire inspector to approve the building and the setup that we've made. So, you know, and that can be very expensive because nobody can do anything until.

Right.

That happens, you know.

Or there was my son's wedding where they were waiting for the glassware, which didn't arrive. And we were serving the special whiskey blend we made out of plastic cups.

Yeah.

Because the glassware didn't come.

The in the. In the acronym. The next one is called N, which means non utilized talent. And what that refers to is you have people on your staff who have skills, and you may not be using those skills. I was doing some work with a cater, and their. Their website needed help. Their menus were atrocious. The grammar, the misspellings, the lack of punctuation.

And I said to him one day, I said, listen, I used to work as a copywriter, so print everything out and put it in the. This area that it was like in the lunchroom. And I said, later on, I'll look at it. And I was out working with the guys in the warehouse, and we were talking about some stuff. And I came in and I looked at the papers, and they were all marked up, professional proofreading marks through everything. And I said, who did this? And they're like, oh, somebody's in trouble. And I said, no, no, no, no. I said, who? We need to find out who this person is.

Do they work here? They go, yeah, it's Kevin in the warehouse. And I said, we got to go find Kevin. So back to the warehouse. We go, go, Kevin, did. Did you do this? And he goes, yeah. I was really, you know, like. Like he was going to get in trouble. And I said, this is great.

I go, you know how to do this? And you're working sometimes as a dishwasher and helping load trucks and so on. He goes, yeah. And I said, how do you know to do this? He goes, well, my parents taught journalism and English at Princeton. And he said, so this was always a topic of discussion. And I said, kevin, come into the office. And here was this person who had this. This talent to. And I said, you're going to help us fix the website.

Not all the graphical stuff. You're going to fix all the grammar. And so. And, you know, oftentimes there's. I was doing some work with a cater down in Florida, and this woman comes up to me and she says, you know, Mr. Roy, you sound like my old boss. And I said, where did you work? And she says, oh, I worked at Ford Motor Company in Venezuela. I said, great.

I said, what brought you to America? And then. And why aren't you working at a car company? And she said, well, there was the cartels and the gangs. And she said, my family's here in Tampa. And she goes, but, you know, I know about this lean stuff. I said, really? I said, well, why aren't we putting it to you? She said, well, I only been here a couple weeks. And so, you know, her name is Ice because her Spanish name is too difficult to pronounce. And so we said, ice, let's go to work. And she became the employee of the year.

She's now moved up. She's. She's one of their captains and their leads, you know, so there's that talent.

You know, and this is, again, as any employer, if you look at someone as their job, you could be missing this. Yeah. When I. When I was vice president at the Knot, there was a receptionist in Omaha, and I had an opening in customer service, and I thought she'd be good for this position, and I wanted to promote her. And the COO said, she's a receptionist. I said, no, I get that, but I think she can do this job. I've talked to her. I know her.

And she wouldn't let me do it. And then it took, like, two or three more openings until she finally relented. Well, that person was there for about 14 years and left as a vice president.

Yeah.

Okay. Again, you look at someone as the job. I got hired for a job second, third job out of college that I had no business on my resume getting. But the person hired me, not my resume. And it taught me that you hire people, not their resume. And a resume is what someone has already given you a chance to do. It's not what you're capable of. And these are great examples, what you said there, of people that were capable of more, but nobody ever gave them the opportunity.

And you just leaving those papers out there, Kevin could have just walked by them. But Kevin took the opportunity. And this woman could have said nothing to you. Right, but. And I would always say to a new employee, listen, before you tell us how you can do it better, just do it our way. And then you can say, hey, you know what? I think there's another way to do this. And maybe it's better, maybe not. And some people have heard my podcast.

My son was working for JPMorgan Chase, and long story short, he had to run a report every quarter that went to Jamie Dimon, the CEO, and it took three weeks to run this report. Biggest bank in the world that taken three weeks. And he thinks maybe there's another way. And he figures out another way, runs it by his boss, who could have said, no, just do it our way. But she didn't. And she was probably all of 25 or 26 and she said, show me. Anyway, they ended up doing it his way in six hours instead of three weeks. Yeah, right, because they, they said, show me.

And well, first of all, you know, I'm proud of him that he spoke up. I'm proud of his boss that she didn't shoot it down. I'm proud that they brought it up to the next level and now they do it his way. And look at all the time they're saving, right? Six weeks instead. Six hours instead of three weeks.

Okay, so defect over, processing, waiting non utilized talent T Transportation. Okay, there's the truck.

Transportation is the, you know, the walking and the moving, the, you know, loading what we call Cambros or food transport boxes, the sheet pan racks, getting the right size wheels on them so they can traverse the cracks and go up and down the gates of the lift, you know, the trucks, the trays. You know, you can buy a round tray for clearing a table and it's 8 inches in diameter and you can get them that are 16 and 18 inches in diameter. The transportation of getting things to and from an event. You know, do we use a van? Do we use a box truck? If we have a box truck, does it have a lift gate? Are we going to hand carry everything in and out? So this is something to look at and ask, can we come up with a better way? And if you ask, have the, should we say like crowdsourcing and the engagement of the employees, you're going to start hearing Things, oh, we saw something another company or hey, have you ever tried this? Things that are totally out of the box and with some trial and error you go like, hey, that works. And then that's, that's when you give that high five. And then here's what I really love is when you're, when you're doing this is I start seeing people trying to one up each other with a better idea. I got a better idea. Okay, that's great.

Let's hear it. And sometimes they do and sometimes not. So.

So one thing I did again when I was at the Knot is on the first day of every month, everybody's calendar had a thing that popped up and it said, ideas come first. It was on the first of the month and it was their chance to tell me something that they had an idea or their customer had mentioned to them. Something that they thought we should do differently or that we're not doing now. And some of them were simple. Change the wording on the website. We don't call our area this, we call it this. Some of them are really easy, some of them more complex. And, you know, people were skeptical.

You know, are you really listening? So that the next company meeting we had, I would put up on the board, I put up on slides, all right, Roy said this done. Kevin said this done. Lucy said this done. And the people like, wow, you're actually listening now. Everybody got an answer from me whether we could do it or not. You got an answer. You got acknowledged. And sometimes people didn't understand scaling.

And this is something you understand, right? You go from an intimate event for seven people, but it's high end crazy, to 5,000 people in Utah. And you understand scaling, right? A lot of my people didn't understand because they didn't have to. I said, you know what? That works in Columbus, Ohio. If you can think of how that could work across the country, then we can roll this out. I like the idea, but I'm not sure how we could scale that. So keep working on that right now they got acknowledged and if we couldn't do it, I would explain why we couldn't. But please come back. And once your people feel empowered, that's where that one upping comes.

So once your people feel empowered and acknowledged there are no bad ideas, maybe we've already thought of it, maybe we've already tried it, maybe it doesn't work. I'm waiting for a Kickstarter piece of luggage now with really big wheels because we've all been to the airport and it's Crack, crack, crack. And these supposedly you can roll up the stairs, right. With these huge wheels. And I am very much looking forward to this, this piece of luggage.

It's just, I think you're in for a better experience there.

Yeah, yeah. We're just waiting on the production because of tariffs, but we're not going to talk about that because that's not the tea.

Inventory is the next item, right. Too much, not enough. Wrong color, wrong size, too many places. I go in and this is an easy thing to address because you go in and then you kind of look and then you kind of judge and say, well, how are, you know, I was at a place recently and I got up in the pallet racks and look and there's a hundred thousand paper plates and there's 100,000 forks, there's 100,000 knives and 100,000 9 ounce cups, 100,000 12 ounce cups. I'm like, you know, you're telling me you don't have the money to do something. It's all sitting here. And so when we got done, we set $14,000 of inventory back to the supplier and just ordered what we, you know, we established some pars, we got the numbers down, we introduced some other elements but, and then there was, you know, I went into one place and it was, there was 16 cases of beer recently that we pulled out of the walk in that were expired. Some were like 2 years old, you know, so inventory, look at inventory.

Too much, not enough, you know, and.

Where can you, if you have two different things that are not that different, can you go with one? Would one suffice? Yeah, right. Why do we have to have that? One of my catering client, actually a few of my catering clients, I, I taught them to stop asking the client what vegetable they wanted on the plate. Right. It's seasonal. Right. It's a, it's, it's a fresh green salad. What's in it? They're not going to ask you. It's a fresh green salad.

And if on Friday, Saturday and Sunday you could be doing the same salad, Ordering is better, inventory is better, prepping is better, all these things are better. Instead of asking, which of these 12 salads would you like us to do on Friday night and then on Saturday and then on Sunday and their inventory and your ordering is just ridiculous at that point.

Yeah. Steve Jobs said that part of our job is, is to tell people what to get. And good planners, we, you know, and that's, we're drawing it. Hey, this is seasonal, you know, Right. Strawberries is, I Mean, you can get them. They come from Chile right now, Argentina, but in March they taste better. And same thing in April. So.

Right, right. Motion.

Next one motion. Motion is that, you know, the, you're packing stuff and how far do you have to reach? Get the bubble wrap or the tape or to get a box or a container. The, you know, the movement to get things staged to go out to a vehicle. And then the same thing is when things all come back, the motion of setting up. We all have to set up dining rooms or dining areas. And one of the things that I've introduced is we get a utility cart, but it's only 18 inches wide. And that way it can fit in between the tables. And we can put the glass racks, we can put the flatware on it.

So we're not walking back and forth to a table or to a storeroom. We go through the room, set up the table, move to the next table, next table, and then we're not walking back and forth all the time. And that's an example of motion. And that's an easy fix. Put a trash bag on the cart, boom, and off you go.

Yeah. I used to use hand trucks to move my supplies into conferences. And then one day a friend had to help me out, and he opens his trunk and pulls out this beach wagon, this foldable beach wagon, big wheels on it, and this big cloth thing. And all of our stuff went in instead of stacked up on a hand truck. And I'm like, that is so much easier. And that's what we use now. We use a beach wagon. It's crazy.

Okay, what's E?

E is extra processing. And extra processing is a little bit like overproduction. But as an example, the flatware, you know, the rental company shows up at the venue or the. Wherever the space is. And what do they normally do? They dump everything in the parking lot or in the middle of the dance floor. And so now somebody has to go through and sort it and then move the plates to the kitchen and move the flatware off the dance floor because they want to put a special bogo on there. And then it gets, you know, moved three, four times because the tables have to come in and the chairs have to be moved. And a simple solution to that, without going into great details, that when you place your order with the rental company, you say drop, for example, bar one.

And you say, how many old fashioned, how many wine glasses specifically? And if they come in racks, you know, the ware, washing racks, you say drop two racks, which is might be 36 or 75 glasses. Whatever the numbers are, they kind of vary a little bit around the country. You say that the 10 inch plates go in the kitchen. They don't go on the dance floor. Or if you have a buffet, they get put at the buffet. So this, this saves on the labor and it eliminates that Easter egg hunt of going on, you know, for all that extra stuff, you know, moving things around. So. Right.

But also extra processing just in the menu itself. I had a client of mine, I was at a caterer in Chicago, and she had just hired a new chef. Great chef, but he came from restaurant and he has this dish and she makes it for her and she says, this is great, but it needed seven touches. She said, I need you to make this with four touches. He said, won't be the same dish. She goes, yeah, I know, and you'll know, but the guests won't know. Right. You were going to make a delicious dish that's plated beautifully.

But I only. I can't touch it more than four times. Right. Because again, you've imagined that 5,000 people. Imagine the difference between touching something four times and touching it seven times. Crazy. So just in the thinking, you know. Yeah, restaurant, sure.

You're making one of those. Great. Okay. You touched it seven times. Yeah.

I believe that if you're doing a plating line, it should run like a Formula one or a NASCAR pit crew.

Yeah.

And we'll oftentimes put a camera on it and video it and then track the time to actually do things and then sit down afterwards or the next day and say, look at all the motion. Look at this, look at that. You know, how do we avoid the drips? Cater one day says, I come up with a new. A faster way to plate. And I said, okay, tell me about it. And he said, we took the three components and we put it into a stack like a Napoleon. And I said, explain. He goes, all the potatoes are on the bottom.

And he said, then the second item is. There was some vegetables. I think it was spinach. And he said, the third item is this filet mignon that goes up on top. And this was stacked into the insert pans. And he said, we just take the spatula and lift and put the whole thing on the plate at once, not three touches. And I go, that's brilliant. Now, we were short staff and we had 13 year olds working the plating line to put this down.

And our deal with them was because the guest count just kept increasing. It was a fundraiser for Children's Hospital and we were like we don't have enough people. And this kid came in and he said, do you want to buy a candy bar for the band? And I said, how many kids are in the band and how many of them are outside? And he said, well, like there's like 20 of us. We're going to go through the neighborhood. I said, here's the deal. We'll give you $500 and buy the, the candy bars if you'll come in. We wash their hands, show them what to do. And we played it at record time and got food out.

They got the 500. I think we gave them 750 and took all the candy bars on top of that. So, you know, that worked out. So.

Yeah. And to them it's like a game, right?

Gamification is. So is such an applicable in this. And whether it's, you know, it's like we play Tetris, loading and unloading the truck to, you know, making a game out of other aspects, you know, and sometimes we'll add to that vibe by playing like dance music or electronica, you know, like, okay, so let's spice it up.

So, so you just described when I, when I bag my groceries, it's always Tetris. You know, how, how, how few bags can I use it?

All right, so I got to call you out here because you said nine wastes and I only count eight in downtime.

Yeah, because there's one more, and this is a recent one, okay, called communication. So we say downtime plus C and communication falls into the categories of there's not enough. And then what's the direct opposite? Too much. So not enough is might be information lacking on a website. This is one of the things I always put all of your policies, all of your terms, all of your conditions for insurance, get that up on your website. Delivery times, get that up on the website. We recently used AI to go through emails of a sales rep and looking for the word on certificates of insurance. 3,000 times in 12 months.

And each one probably took 2, 3 minutes to answer. And so now all that information is on the website. These certificates of insurance are required if you're going to work at the venue. You will not be allowed to step on site on the venue unless they are filed. And there is a security guard who, when you show up, DJ lighting everybody, your name's on the list. Come on in. Nope, we don't have your certificate of insurance. Yeah, right.

So you know, that, that seems like a small thing, but 3,000. What's 3,000 minutes? How many hours Is that right?

Right, but so it, but it's everybody's everybody business. So I saw a speaker friend of mine years ago who had a page with his bio and his headshot and stuff like that. And I was like, you know what, I get asked for that all the time, right? I rarely ever get asked for my coi.

Yeah.

Although I have it, I rarely ever get asked for it. And my insurance agent has a page I can go to. I click on a link, I go there, enter the information, it spits out the coi. So it's. I don't, it's saving him time because I don't have to ask him for them every time. But I have this page on my site now that's got my speaking intro, a short bio, a long bio, headshots, logos, social handles, room setup, AV needs.

Right?

All these things. And when somebody says, hey Alan, can I get. I say, absolutely. Go to alanberg.info I give them the link. If there's something you need that's not there, let me know. They never come back to me because everything is there, saving me time, saving them time. And yet somebody the other day sent me a form that they wanted me to print out, fill out by hand, sign, scan, send back to them. And I'm thinking, what year, like what year, what year are we in here? You know, and people say, well, you know, it's going to take me time to make that happen, you know, to make that form that way.

Which by the way, you can outsource. There's somebody on Fiverr today that will make that thing for you. Actually There is a 13 year old today that will turn that into that for you. And again, I always start with first, make it easier for the customer. We have to make it easier for the customer to buy, right? Which makes it easier for us to sell and it might be a little harder for us sometimes, but if we make it easier for the customer, reduce the friction, we get more customers, right? Then how do we reduce that friction internally? Right? And this is a, you know, hosted by Abed with the Venue X AI, you know, and his software. The software, his AI agent, which I've helped him develop, answers the inquiries, right? Think about a time wasting, go back and forth with a customer, back and forth with a customer. What are you not doing when you're doing that? Right? So having something like this, which, the step before this was automation, right? So if you re, if you fill out my inquiry form, you're going to get a message back. That's automation.

If you respond, I'm going to respond to that. And I don't get a lot of volume, but a lot of the people that you work with and I work with get hundreds of inquiries a month. And what are you doing? You're just sitting there, just attached to your inbox. Right. To do stuff like that. So it's finding these things and is there technology or in your case, you know, is there efficiencies in saying, okay, what is this costing us? And maybe I have to spend a little time or a little money up front to make this not happen or to make this happen better or to save us time or to do things like that. I think that that's really where it is.

So of these things, what do you think are, what is the most common? And we have, we have a bunch of people listening here.

We'll have people listening to the recording. So knowing wedding and event venues, right. And these are probably not doing 5,000 person events, although some of them do, but you know, a lot of them don't. So the typical, you know, 50 to 300 or somewhere around there. Some, some bigger, some smaller. What, where would you start? If we look at those nine wastes, where would you look first?

Over processing.

Okay, so over processing, over ordering.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's these, you know, you get in the, you're talking about the inquiries and you, you look at how many touch points to, from when they, it's like a gestation period. They raise their hand and say I'm interested to. They sign the agreement and give you money or a credit card or send a bank transfer. Okay, so how do we shorten that up? And part of that is like all these emails. What's the context of these emails? And it's information that we could push out from a communication standpoint or you do the tour. Okay, great. Tours are great, but it's the follow up afterwards.

Right, right. And again that's, you know, that's where. So when I met a bed, they had a different product, a different product for venues. It was really nice product, but it's completely different. And then AI started to get big and he shifted to this. And it's really amazing because the biggest problem that I see, and I think, you know, we've talked about this, so at this point we have Secret shopped about 900 companies in the last two years, fill out their contact form, see what happens, track and see what happens. 16% never reply at all. Now I'm going to allow some of that to be technical issues.

You know, something broke, I had it happen to mine. But we reshopped early on. We reshopped, 15% hadn't responded. Reshopped. The 15%, give me a second chance. A third of them didn't reply a second time. Okay, Just talk about money going out the window. You got an inquiry through your website and nobody responded.

Okay, so that's bad, seriously bad. But then 52% send one response and never follow up. They just send one reply and never follow up. Now you and I and everybody listening to this live or on the recording has ghosting. Is ghosting somebody right now, right? I saw the email. You saw the email. Everybody here saw the email. And you're like, I don't have time for that right now.

Maybe it was too long, maybe too involved. So if you're like me, you flag it market on red and hope you'll get back to it again, right? But if that company pops up a day or two later at the top of my inbox and I'm still interested, I don't think they're aggressive. I'm like, thank you. I don't have to go look for that message anymore because it's 600 messages down in my inbox, right? So following up is our responsibility. And I think it's the place where people drop the ball the most. And some of them, I get it. I was talking to a client, I'm actually going to go to them for training soon. They get a thousand inquiries a quarter for their three venues and they're only trying to do 100 weddings a year per venue, which means they're getting 4,000 inquiries a year trying to convert 300 of them, right? How do you keep up with that? Right? And that's where again, technology can help you, whether it's automation or with the venue X AI where it's actually doing the responding and booking the tour for you, right? Which is the next level from automation.

Because automation is just going to respond until you respond, right? And where can we save time? And I was reading a book, the AI Driven Leader and it said, don't ask what can I do for me ask what can I help me do. And I think that's the same with any technology, you know, not what can this piece of equipment in the kitchen do for me? What can it help me do? Help me do more efficiently. Like I think of like the deli slicers. My brother in law's got a deli down in Florida if you want great pastrami, you know, just let me know when you go to the Fort Lauderdale Pompano. But you have, you know, these, the slicers that are automated, right. And they'll automatically. Used to be, you had to stand there. Now you don't have to stand there.

You have to set it up right. And then, you know, keep feeding it.

Right.

That's what. But it's just technology that can make what you already want to do better. And I think some of that is electronic in terms of software, in terms of CRMs, in terms of, you know, electronic BTO IS and electronic payments, electronic signatures. Think about that, right? Like I know when I started in the industry selling wedding advertising, it was four part carbonless forms, right? Press hard, press hard, Roy, because you got to get rid of that bottom one and then the knuckle buster to take your credit card, you know, to take your credit card. And now here, I just sent you a link. Boom, I got paid. There it is. There it is.

So much easier. Okay, so over processing first, what would you say is next?

I think communication. Yeah. And I'll give you an example. And you know, there's the physical layout of the space and, or the venue, inside, outside. And people need to know dimensions and capacities, you know, for the fire marshal, for insurance. Can we have, you know, people in. I gave a drawing one day to the mother of a bride and she started rearranging the tables and she added in tables. And I said, they won't fit in the room.

And she goes, I just drew them in. She had no concept of scale. And so what I mean is, for the venue, all of your dimensions, all of your layouts should be available as like CAD programs. Now is it going to cost you some money to hire and have somebody. I've done them physically. I walk around, get all the dimensions, my tape measures and lasers. Now there's a product called Matterport 350. Guy comes out, videos the entire room, all the dimensions, knows where the plugs and the lights are.

Okay, I have full video of everything and I have all the dimensions. And now you can drop that into any number of CAD programs for designing and know exactly, you know, if you have to pull a special permit with the fire department and that's it just, it's just data. And like now we don't have to have a discussion here. It's. It's all in. It's in 10 different file formats. Pick one, right.

And if that software is right, I think like triple seed or any of these, it should know you can't add two more tables. Yes, physically they will fit in this Space. But fire marshal won't let us. There's not enough space between them. You're going to be bumping into the person behind you when you're sitting in your chair. You know, all these things. And you and I have been in those rooms, the ones that you don't want the fire marshal showing up to with some of those.

So back to the communication, because a lot of things happen. You know, there's a, there's a great story about a Netma badge, which means nobody ever tells me anything. You don't want people running around, you know, because you hear by the water cooler during the family meal or lunch and like, yeah, nobody told me. Nobody tells me this, you know, and we want to avoid that.

So back to the communication. You know, the colors and the dates and the times and, you know, instead of handing out an entire BEO to somebody, to the staff, just give them a one sheet. The important things. What's happening, what time, where, what's the menu, and maybe, maybe some special points.

And now it's down. They can carry that in their pocket. They can refer to it. Give them a six page beo. It's way too much, you know, and then you expect them to print it. They go like, I don't have a printer at home. I'm not going to go to FedEx or Staples, you know, Right.

If you're, you're dealing with Gen Y and Gen Z, they do not have printers. I have two Gen Y sons and you know, I, I don't. If one of them has a printer, it's because I gave it to them. I don't think, I don't think they have one. But I also say this is for your clients because you, you know, you have 87 things in your terms and conditions. And then you wonder why they didn't know that they couldn't. X, because it was, you know, line 47, subpart B. And I say, you know what? As you get closer to the event, the big things, because we only remember, what do they say? 40% of what we hear, 60% of what we read, right? Those big things, send them a 1 sheet.

Here are 10 things you need to know, right? Tell your bridal party and your guests no outside alcohol. Right? That big one, the big one over there. Okay. There you go. This is the time that you can arrive. This is the time you have to be out. You're responsible for cleanup or we're taking care of cleanup or whatever it is just the biggies, you know, they don't need to know about force majeure at that point. They don't, but.

And then. But, you know, people wonder, you know. Yeah, but it's in the contract. Really? Really? You expect them to remember all of that? Well, have read all of that. First of all, you know, because we all approve the terms and conditions without reading the menu.

I say in situations like that, it's. It's hospitality, not hostility.

I like it. I like it.

All right, we have a few more minutes here. Does anybody have any questions? Three, please throw them into the q and A as we're chatting along here. But. But I love this, you know, just going down here, thinking about my mind. Every one of these things, my mind goes to someone or something that had happened. And I'm sure everybody listening here has that same thing of the defect, the break.

Listen, things are going to break, right? We're dealing with people, we're dealing with movement. Right. Things are going to break. Can you avoid that? Right. Can you avoid the glasses that are too tall to fit into the. Whatever, you know, can we standardize? Do we really need. At the fancy event, do you need seven different glasses? Yes. Do you really need that at every event? No.

Right. And if you're a. If you're an owner, file and you're like, but we can't serve red wine in the white wine glass. Who's coming? Right. If the people coming would know, absolutely. Have the other glasses. Right. You know, I'm a whiskey guy.

You're a whiskey guy. When I go to a bar and I see that they don't have Glencairn glasses, they only have rocks glasses, I say, excuse me, do you have a snifter? Do you have a brandy snifter? And if you don't, do you have a very small white wine glass, like in a para teeth glass? Could you put my whiskey in that? Right. Because I want to be able to smell it. I don't want it in this big, big rocks glass. I'll know the difference. Am I mad if they don't? No. No. Am I surprised when they have a Glen Cairn? You bet.

And some places, I'm going to tell you, some dive bars and they've showed. Shown up with my whiskey and a Glen Care. And I'm like, all right.

Yeah, all right.

I am. I am impressed. There you go. Nobody has questions.

To two last things.

Yeah, please.

I've talked about a lot here and it can seem overwhelming.

Yeah.

But don't look for those grand slam telephone pole heads. Look for the small incremental 1 2% improvements because, like, interest over a course of a year, it adds up. And, and it can add up significantly. If you, you know, have staff standing around while they're trying to unload the truck or unload the storage room, and you have 30 people standing around for 15 minutes, you. You've just blown a couple hundred bucks. And when you get tight with it, you can schedule them back so they don't have to come in two hours before.

Right.

So one shoot for the small things. And then the other thing is, is training. A lot of places I go this, everybody's got a different way of doing something. And then you'll hear, well, when I'm at Fred's Catering, we do it this way, like, and who's paying you today? You know, so I've started a partnership with a company and we're now starting to do front of the house training where, you know, they go like, well, it's expensive to have Roy come and spend the day with us in Miami. Like, well, now I can come on video. So here's a video and we're, we're breaking this down. It's not going to be out for a couple months. We're building the videos and something as elementary as how do you properly open a bottle of wine, how do you open a bottle of champagne or Prosecco or Cava? And these are little small vignettes.

And so we're going to be launching that soon. It's going to be called the Banquet Training Academy.

Love it.

And if they're interested in the. And knowing more about it, shoot me an email. It's a table wizard one, and I'll put you on the waiting list. Probably in March, maybe at Cater Source, we'll, you know, be saying, here's the videos that you can, you know, rent out, let your staff see it. And that helps on the guest experience. So, yeah, staff is confident, knows what to do and how to do these things. You know, opening a bottle of wine is the same in Miami, New York, Chicago, Louisiana and San Francisco. Maybe in Napa they're a little more bougier, but maybe it's the same.

And that allows them to be free and confident to have those better interactions with the guests. You know, at the end of the day, how the guests feel, that's what counts.

Are you doing any basics on wine? Like, you know, knowing that dry white wine is not in the dry goods cabinet or, or. Yeah, yeah, or, or whiskey, you know, because for me, if I go to. I don't care if you have a Great selection. As long as you have a couple of good ones. And if I say, what type of bourbon do you have? And they say, well, we have bullet rye. I'm like, okay, well, you don't understand that rye is not bourbon. Right. And that's not a big deal.

Right. It's. I'm not asking you to know about the bourbon, where it was made or what the grains were, but you should know that just like, you know, you just said cava, prosecco, champagne. They're all sparkling wines, but they're not all champagne.

Exactly.

Right. So those basics. So if you want to do one on whiskey together, you want to do a video, I'd be happy to.

I'll take you up on that. That there's like five levels. And each of the five levels encompasses, you know, five skills, like trey passing. You know, people think, what can there be to be? Tray passing and Trey passing is not about passing the food. It's saying, there's the bar, there's the coat check. This is what time the valet leaves. There's the restroom. Let me take you over there.

You know, those type of things. And then. Yeah, as you go up, then it gets into more of the nuances, like. Yeah. What is the difference between bourbon, whiskey, rye, and scotch. Okay, but you're not going to get there if you don't know how to set a table.

Right.

And know how to open a bottle of wine and. Or.

And it also makes the staff more confident.

Okay, we have a couple of questions. One was Susie said she missed the. I. I was inventory. So give a quick. Again, Inventory. Is physical inventory not enough.

The wrong kind. Yeah, not enough. Yeah.

Yeah, not enough's bad. Too much is bad.

Tying up your money.

Right. So it's. It's the Goldilocks just right. That's what we're looking for.

And then, Melanie, we're a catering company doing 100% off site. What should be a hard must have in inventory. And that's a tough question because you need to know more about who our clients are and what type of event.

So much of how much it's having the right mix. And then the most powerful, profitable word in catering is a polite and firm no. Now here's the opposite. Clients can have anything they want so long as they're willing to pay for it. So recently, a client in Los Angeles said, we insist that everything be biodegradable. And we're insisting that the forks and the knives, the flatware, the utensils. Okay. Be made out of avocado seeds and we track down the supplier.

Okay. And I said to the client, I said, I don't. Because we had to buy like a thousand of everything. That's, that's how they do. Okay. We only need like 300 for the event. I think we're going to give these to the client when they're over, so they're not clogging. We don't have to occupy space.

Just give them to the client and that's what they get.

Yeah. So the client paid for the thousand.

Yeah. And they did. Yeah. Which is part of the waste, you know, is that we had to buy a thousand in order to serve 300.

Right. But, you know, the other thing is, the answer is yes, if they're willing to pay for it and don't apologize for the extra cost. Right. So we know that all budgets are made up. My friend Phil M. Jones, in his book exactly what to Say, said that every budget in the history of the world has been made up, which means every budget can be changed. And if the client comes, you know, you come in on budget and the client says, that's great. And then comes back to you and says, I want X.

Can you get it avocado seed, flat, where the answer is, sure, that's going to cost you this on top. If that's okay, let's do it. And if they say, we want, you know, Macallan 25 on the bar, and you say, how many bottles would you like? Yeah, don't sell with your wallet. Let them buy with their wallet. My cousin got married in LA and she didn't want any flowers that had to be flown in. They all had to be grown, that would come be local. And she had this beautiful bouquet that weighed a ton because it was full of succulents. And, and it was funny.

She, you know, first time bride. And she's little, she's little. She's probably maybe five foot tall. And I remember walking over to her and she goes, my arm is getting tired. I said, so switch hands. She goes, can I, you know, as a. She thought, if I start with my left hand, do I have to have every picture with me holding the bouquet with my left hand? I say, switch hands. It's okay there.

So. So, Roy, your email again. Say it, say it slowly.

Table wizard and the number one at Gmail.

At Gmail. Table Wizard. Number one at Gmail. And if you check my Facebook and LinkedIn profile today, you'll see that Gmail has settings with their AI now that they turned on by default where they can use your Stuff and scan through your emails to help change train its AI. So go to your security settings. You might want to turn that off Roy and everybody else again, you can check that. So tablewizard number one mail.com I bet there was a question about recording. So there will be.

Recording will be shared. The transcript will be shared.

Yes. So after, once we jump off today, I'm going to send over the recording to everyone and then I'll also throw in Roy, your email address and then if you just provide me with some the information about the banquet training academy, we can drop that in there.

Thank you. Great.

And I'm going to also, if it's okay with a bed and Roy, I'm also going to put this on the wedding business solutions podcast. Yeah. So we'll share this for everybody else. So if you happen to be listening and you're not a caterer, I hope you picked up some tips because this really applies to any business. There's, there's all of these nine defects, these nine waste, I should say that are in all of those things. Bed, thank you so much for sharing. Again, I talked a little bit about Venue X. I'm just so passionate about it, about how you can not talk about waste, not waste all this time sitting there in your email back and forth.

You can actually be doing something positive like doing a tour, like following up with a client, like you know, processing the things you need to do to make these events great instead of sitting, going back and forth. It's great. And it's the only two AIs that are trained to know the wedding industry. And my best practices are Venue XAI and my Ask Alan Anything bot. So thank you for, for, for hosting this for us. Roy, thank you for joining me.

Thank you for the invitation, I bet. Thank you.

Of course. Thank you guys so much. I'm going to send out the recording after the show. Alan, Roy, you guys are incredible. This has been amazing. I will always think about that Kevin story because I think one of the things that lots of folks who are running their own businesses are always thinking about is how do you motivate your staff to think outside of the box and kind of get themselves out of the, the siloed skill set that they, you know, they work through every single day. So I'm going to be pinging you post, post this, call Roy to get some more tips and best track best practices myself. But thank you everybody.

If you want to learn more about Venue Xai, visit us at www.venuexai.com and hope you guys. Enjoyed.

Thanks for coming.

Take care, guys.

Thank you.


I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2026 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com


Head Shot

Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

Host