Jeff Miller – Scaling up to 16 venues
Continuing my series on “Scaling” I was so happy to chat with Jeff Miller on how he came to scale his catering business from one to 16 venues. I’ve had the privilege of working with Jeff and his team and he’s carved out a great niche in and around the Philadelphia area. Listen to this episode for another angle on how to scale your business.
Jeffrey Miller is the chef-owner of Jeffrey Miller Catering, one of Philadelphia’s largest and most successful high-end catering companies.
Jeff started the business as a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 1979. His first venture was a brunch-in-bed offering for fellow students on Sunday mornings. While expanding the company on campus during the academic year, he took summers off to intern at a number of world-renowned restaurants. These include the now-closed Le Cote Basque in New York, as well as Bouley and Le Cirque, also in New York, as well as the Michelin three starred Moulin de Mougins in the French Riviera, and venerable Simpsons-on-the-Strand in London.
JAM Catering currently manages catering services as exclusive caterer at seventeen area venues and caters over 600 weddings a year for gross revenues of $13m. JAM employs 100 full time and 600 part-time staff.
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– When I think about scaling businesses, there are a few people that come right to mind. And my next guest is somebody you’re going to want to hear from. Welcome to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions Podcast. I’m Alan Berg with a very special guest and friend with me, Jeffrey Miller from Jeffrey Miller Catering in Philadelphia. Hey Jeff.
– How are you doing?
– I’m doing great. We are here at the Catersource Conference, which is very appropriate because I don’t think we met at Catersource, but you have, what is it? 16 venues now?
– 16 venues and counting.
– 16, and counting. So this is for my series that I’m calling scaling.
– Yeah.
– And it’s scaling businesses up and down. You obviously didn’t start with 16 venues.
– No, started with one.
– How long ago?
– 30 years ago.
– 30 years ago.
– Yeah.
– And how long did you have just one.
– Probably 10 years.
– Okay.
– Yeah.
– So 10 years just doing your thing. Did you get a second or did you get like a whole bunch then?
– Well, the funny thing was we got approached by the GM of Racquet Club of Philadelphia and he said to me, he says, “Jeff, you know, we’re thinking it’d be good to have some catering here and do some weddings.” I’m like, “Sure, I’d be interested.” So I spoke to him for a while. He says, “Well, I gotta talk to the board.” And I said, “Go get to talk to the board.” He comes back and says, “Well, I’m going to make sure the board is going to approve this natural. Who’s going to… What kind of people you can have. I’m like, “Okay, that’s fine.” So, five years later he comes back and says, “Well, Jeff, the board’s approved it.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s do it.”
– Five years later.
– Five years later. And I say, you know, you realized you lost about $8500000 that you could have had, but what can I say? It was just call, board’s call.
– The boards call. Better, late than never.
– Exactly that’s what I said.
– So this group, they had five venues.
– Yeah.
– What were they doing before?
– Well, they weren’t having any weddings. I mean, they had a beautiful ballroom and they used the club during the week, the members that have lunch in the dining room and then the weekends had set empty. And it’s actually, our model is kind of like an Airbnb. So we partner with different venues who often are non-profits and they have beautiful space, parking lots, bathrooms, but they don’t use the space on weekends usually. So that’s kind of how it worked.
– Got it, got it. So you don’t own any of those venues.
– Don’t own any of them.
– And what I do know about your venues cause we’ve worked together is you have some beautiful, I call them non-traditional spaces.
– Yeah.
– They’re all different. They’re all unique from the Mercer Museum to the Lake House, into the Arboretum. They’re just really, really cool. Is that what you look for when you’re looking to expand?
– Absolutely, yeah. I don’t really want to build a catering hall. – Okay.
– Cause you build the newest catering hall and five years later, it’s not so new, in 10 years later, it’s not really new at all, in 15 minutes later, it’s kinda outdated and 20 years later it’s like, ugh. And so then what do you have? Whereas if you get an old mansion, I mean, as it gets older, it gets more appealing because there’s less, less old properties.
– Right.
– Or if you get an Arboretum, you know, then I’m building new arboretums so that’s always appeal to me.
– Right, and again, your spaces are all different, all beautiful photo ops, okay. So you went from one to six?
– Yeah.
– And then…
– Well, no they’d won one.
– They had won one.
– Yeah, yeah, yeah.
– Okay.
– And then, you know, once we had a couple people started hearing about us, mostly in the non-profit world. So we got a call from the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks. That’s a mouthful.
– Yeah.
– And they had a property Anthony Wayne’s House, which is his “Mad” Anthony Wayne house’s home. So they had a tent property. So we approached them or they approached us that we heard you’re doing this at the Racquet club and all the, and so we spoke and we said, yeah, we’d love to work with you.
– And so people have been approaching you.
– Pretty much, maybe two-thirds approaching us at this point.
– Okay.
– I don’t think now we’re looking for places, they more or less find us.
– Finding you okay. So you’re at 16 and you said for now.
– For now.
– So, but again, you’re not actively seeking properties.
– I’m looking at properties when people approach us. So we probably look at, I don’t know, one or two a month, we get inquiries, I mean, some we don’t even look at, but we’re yeah, we’re looking.
– So let’s talk about the growth here, because I’ve talked to people about right sizing the business. We don’t know that 16 is the right size.
– Right.
– It could be 60, it could be 12, right?
– Yeah, sure.
– So as you went, you went from one to two.
– Yeah.
– When you went from one to two, did anything really change?
– Not really, I mean, the funny thing is you’re like, well, how big is too big? I mean, I remember 40 years ago when I first started, I was working out of my two bedroom apartment in West Philly and we were doing just work at Penn University, Pennsylvania so we did. And I spoke the chef to then, “We’ve got a call from the president and we have an event that night and the provost wants to do a dinner.” I’m like, that’s two in the same night. He says, “Well, Jeff, you know, you’d do one. I’ll do the other.” I’m like, “Well, I don’t… Sure why not?” So I did one, he did the other, I was like, it worked.
– Okay.
– And then I realized at that point, like, I don’t have to be at every party. I used to feel like I had to staff every party and I’d be up till midnight, the night before every wedding, I got to call the waiters to make sure they work. Otherwise they’re not going to come in. And then another guy says, “Jeff, I think I can do this.” Like, oh, I don’t know, like, all right, try it. And I haven’t staffed a party in 37 years. So I think, you know, it’s fun to build.
– Right.
– And it’s fun to create a venue from scratch and build it into something exciting. And that’s sort of the fun part in that. Sometimes it’s hard to let go, but that’s the only way you can grow is to say, you know what, I can do this pretty well. And maybe someone could do it 90%. Maybe we’ll do 110% better than me, but I can’t do it myself and I’m going to try to grow. And that’s the way the 16 is enough. It’s like, I don’t know. I mean, we had a lot of problems. We had two venues. We had a lot of problems with five. We have a lot of problems now and I’m sure if we can add 10 venues, we’ll have a lot of problems then too. So I can’t say what’s the right number. But if I find a property that’s interesting and cool, I would go after it.
– But you also have some economies of scale as you got even bigger because of some centralization, right?
– Yeah.
– Your accounting didn’t go 16 times up.
– Exactly, I mean, we’ve got a great CFO now we’ve got a great executive chef. We’ve got a great marketing director and they do marketing, whether it’s five or 10 or 15.
– Right.
– We just hired our first HR person, which I never thought we needed, now I’m like, how do we ever do without her?
– Exactly.
– Yeah.
– So in terms of the marketing, you market each property as itself not as Jeffrey Miller Catering.
– Yeah, cause I think we do a great job, but I think these are properties that are unique and gorgeous and beautiful and people want to have a wedding in Aldie mansion.
– Right.
– And if they find that there’s a cater, they’re comfortable with is good and they’ve got good reviews and they’re happy with and think the food’s great, then that’s a bonus. But I kind of feel like, you know, that they go for our venue.
– Right, and I actually spoke about this earlier today as like sell them, if you’re the venue, sell them on choosing you and then you’ll work on the menu. Then you work on the other things that… Don’t put the cart before the horse.
– Yeah, you know, we, we sell them the venue and then we are like, we do great work and we’ll do a tasting in three or four months. You’ll get a chance do your tasting, and then you can pick the menu out but–
– You do an individual or a group tastings?
– We do both.
– Okay. So each 16 venues, you have a person assigned to each one.
– Some venues are small enough that one person can handle two.
– Okay.
– And some venues are big enough that they require an assistant.
– Now you say small enough meaning volume.
– Volume, yeah. Like if a venue is doing 30 weddings, we can give that to a person’s already got 40.
– Does the venue determine what your volume is? Did they tell you, you can only do X number or is that you?
– Mostly supply and demand. I mean, how many people want to use that venue, and since our venues are niches, they’re not catering halls doing, you know, weddings every Friday and Saturdays they might only do 40 weddings a year, which is fine. Maybe just the Saturdays in May, June, September, October, and for the organization, most of these nonprofits, you know, they’re land trusts, they’re conservation groups. They’re happy to have an extra $100,000.
– Great, exactly. So your salespeople in each venue, they’re selling as if they are Aldie mansion they’re selling as if they are there, even though they work for you.
– Right.
– And then I guess they get whatever your arrangement is with them, the venue fees and all that kind of stuff there. So again, this scaling is what we’re talking about here. There are economies of scale when you get bigger, but they’re, you know, small problems can also become bigger problems.
– Yeah.
– Biggest problem is always people?
– Yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s interesting. When I was just starting out 40 years ago, I was at Penn and I was thinking, Aramark is based in Philadelphia. And I thought to myself, well, if I want to be here, I should try to talk to like a guy who knows a lot. So I said, I’m going to send a letter to William Fisherman who was the founder of Aramark. I don’t know what I was.. Why I was thinking he would talk to me, but he did, I mean, I was in alum and he was an alum as well and he was in Philly and I sent him a letter, explaining what I was doing. He said, sure. And he was gracious enough to see me. I spent like 20, 30 minutes with him. I said to him, I said, Mr. Fisherman what’s the key to your success. He looks at me. He says, Jeff. He says, I am the best paid HR director in the country. I’m like, really? How was that? He says, I just try to get the best people I can and pay them as much as I can afford to pay them and try to keep them happy. I was like, that’s it? He says, that’s it. I was like, ooh.
– There you go.
– And now I realize we’re still not quite as big as Aramark, but that isn’t the issue. I mean, I just got to get the best people I can and try to keep him happy.
– Right, and if they’re happy, people happy, money second.
– Yeah.
– Because my son found this out. He was in a job making really good money, but he really didn’t feel satisfaction.
– Yeah.
– And I’ve heard that this is a millennial thing, but I don’t think it’s a millennial thing. I think it’s a people thing.
– Yeah.
– You have to show up every day and it’s not like you’re getting paid every day. Here you go, here’s your money like in the old days, where you get paid at the end of the day. So you don’t really feel that the same way because it’s electronic deposited into an account–
– Yeah
– All that stuff. But you have to like the people you work with.
– Yeah.
– You have to like the job that you’re doing and it’s the connection to the results and my son and the job that he’s in now, he said, I know who I’m helping. He’s in banking. And before he’s like, you know, I know I’m helping my group, which helps the bank, which helps the stockholders.
– Yeah.
– Who am I really helping?
– Right.
– But now he’s like, you know what, I know who our customers are.
– Right.
– And every time someone refinances a student loan or whatever, he said, I feel that cause I refinanced my student loan, I’m saving money. And I can feel that. The great thing about weddings and events is you get to see.
– Yeah.
– You see the people having a great time, the reviews–
– Yeah.
– And you guys get phenomenal reviews, actually four o’clock today, you guys won’t see that, but I’m presenting here and I’m pulling up some of your venues because I’m talking about show the results and you have some of your venues have tents, right outside, beautiful, clear top tents. And you want to show somebody, your tent don’t show me an empty tent.
– Don’t show an empty tent.
– Right, and on your website is… I pulled a couple of them, beautiful pictures and the people are in the tent and you’re not going, oh, there in a tent. You’re looking how much fun are they having?
– Exactly.
– And then I think it was Anthony Wayne, beautiful historic building. You want to show people the historic building don’t show me the empty room.
– Right, we’re not selling real estate.
– Right.
– Selling an experience.
– Right, and now look at this couple in this beautiful historic room.
– Yeah.
– And I get to see the fireplace and the details and all that kind of stuff there. So what advice would you give to people who are scaling? Some people who are listening have one location of whatever their business. They’re not all catering or venues. Some people already have multiple.
– Yeah.
– What did you know now that you didn’t know then?
– Well, I would say that you should only scale if you want to scale. I mean, there are people who are very process-oriented very much doing the same thing. They want to get things done to a science and there’s some very successful caters. Some of our colleagues, they have one in particular, they’ve got two venues. They love it, I don’t need more venues. I’m making great money, they’ve figured out how to run it like a science. And if that’s it like God bless them.
– Right.
– So you have to want to have a little of a restlessness and you have to want to grow. And you have to want to be excited by doing something new and creating something new. If you are, then I would say, go for it. I mean, you gotta find, if it’s a venue you gotta it’s all about location, location, location, location is part of it in terms of where it is and what it is but the catering a secondary, as you said, it’s the location. So you have to walk into a property and say, wow, if the couple walking, doesn’t say, wow, that’s going to be a problem.
– Right.
– You can put as much, you know, uplighting as you want, as much white furniture as you want. But at the end of the day, if they’re not going to say, wow, because of the property, then that’s a problem.
– And it’s actually before that, because if they don’t get wowed by your website, by your advertising–
– Yeah.
– And marketing, another thing I’m going to show this afternoon, I went to, it was either theKnot or Wedding Wire. I went to catering and just random market, pictures of food, pictures of food, pictures of food. And I’m like what are you selling?
– You’re not a supermarket.
– Right, what are you selling? Show me the experience. And then one of them is actually, it’s like a three wheeled, almost like a golf cart-y kind of thing. But it was turned into a mobile bar. But there’s nobody standing there getting a drink.
– Right, it could be equipment furniture.
– Right, I mean, you can see the… If you look in and it’s tough to even see at least the pictures, this big, right.
– They need Alan Berg to consult with them.
– Well, you know, I say this all the time. I mean, I was vice president of sales at The Knot and I tried to get across to people. The first impression is that thumbnail.
– Yeah.
– And then they look at the rest of the pictures there. You don’t need 80 pictures if you have 20 drop dead, gorgeous.
– I mean better to have five good ones than 20 mediocre ones.
– Absolutely, and when you talk about the venue, the photo ops, every venue either has, or can create photo opportunities. And if you don’t do that, then they can’t picture. It’s like staging a home. Why do you stage your home?
– Right.
– People know what a sofa looks like.
– Right.
– But show me where it would go. Show me where the chairs would be. Show me this kind of stuff. We sold the house and we had nice furniture, but we had taken it out and we had it staged. And my wife who should have been a decorator, she’s looking going, huh?
– That looks pretty good.
– You know, I never would have done it that way. But I mean, they did some, you know, things like they put glass, coffee tables, so it looked more roomy, right? They did some certain things like, oh, well we wouldn’t use the glass table cause we had kids, but it does show better, doesn’t it, right?
– Yeah.
– So you need to show them the possibilities of what it could be. But you know, interestingly, the other caterer, you said, that’s got two venues and they’re happy. Don’t scale your business because somebody else did.
– Exactly, you think you’re supposed to.
– Right and you don’t… You could be one and you’re happy and that’s it. I am talking to people who are also scaling their businesses down and you know, sometimes you get big and, what is it? More money, more problems?
– Yeah.
– But so many people I’ve spoken to who’ve gotten bigger and get to a point and said, you know what? I got to here and I was making more money, making more money. And then I’m not making any more money. I’m not making any more money. I’m not making any more money. I’m doing more, I’m passing money from somebody to other people, but I’m not making any more money. And that’s what you have to worry. A client of mine owns a rental company is a rental company. And when I started working with him, I said, so what are we trying to achieve? They said, we want to be the biggest rental company in the city. I said, let’s work on being the most profitable. And if you also happen to be the biggest, great. And if not, not, and the funny thing is they ended up buying the biggest competitor. So they began the biggest one, but again, bigger problems, right?
– Yeah.
– And now the problem that a lot of people are having is staffing and staff. They’re so busy. So they are the biggest–
– They can’t handle the work.
– Right and they are raising their prices and they’re profitable but you know, you can’t handle the work. So right sizing your business is saying, what’s right for me. Not what’s right for somebody else and then that whole, you know, the grass is always greener. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes there, right?
– Right, right. No, it’s true.
– Yeah, so I’ve met your people, I’ve worked with your people, your people love working there, they’re great people to work with. I remember, you know, somebody, one of your chefs was like, oh, he’s, you know, he’s gluten free. And man, next time I was there, there was stuff. I didn’t have to say anything. Didn’t have to ask, it was there again, people listening.
– Yeah.
– People paying attention. What was that bacon bar we had at the one event…
– Bacon bar is popular, everyone loves bacon.
– So how did that start? Who came on with the idea of bacon bar?
– I don’t even know, I think I may have seen a leading caterers conference. Someone else had bacon. I’m like, that’s a pretty good idea who doesn’t love bacon. It’s different chocolate or whatever and people are…
– And it was like five different kinds of bacon. I’m like, oh yeah.
– Yeah.
– Oh yeah. We’re going for that. I mentioned to somebody one time. How about a French fry bar?
– Yeah.
– And I saw it somewhere. It was like waffle fries, string fries, steak fries, something like that. All the dippings, all the stuff like that. How easy is that?
– Well, I’ll tell you production French fries are pain in the a**
– Right they get cold.
– They get cold, they can’t get warm, getting them soggy if they’re in a chafer. So we’ve been doing French fries. I’m like, let’s not do French fries anymore. As this…
– You’d have to kind of be cooking them right there.
– You can, and now you’ve got hot oil with kids running around.
– Anyway, kids you wouldn’t want do that.
– You stop doing that too.
– All right, so there you go, we live and learn experiential there. So again, I think people can learn a lot from, you know, the concept of people came to you because you were doing a good job. Hey, could you do what you did for me? And don’t grow and then try to get the demand you grow because of the demand. And as I heard in many sessions over here, no is a very good word.
– Yeah.
– We’re not a good fit for that venue. We’re not a good fit for that over there and you have to be able to say that because you have to live the life. I remember being in Mexico one time and somebody is like, “Hey, if you don’t want to do the job, just give them a high price.” I said, no, if you don’t want to do the job, just don’t do it. Because you’re going to be kicking yourself. Why did I take this job? Why did I take the job? You cashed the check already, and I’m like, ah, now I got to do this over here. Don’t scale just because it’s sexy, scale because there’s a reason that you want to do that.
– Yeah.
– That’s what I think. All right, I will put into the show notes, links, what is your website if people wanted to see?
– Jamcater.com.
– J-A-M, like Mary caterer.
– Caterer, cater.
– Cater, jamcater. We’ll put it in the show notes.
– Caterer was taken.
– Yeah caterer was taken. So really jamcaterer was like, okay.
– Jam cater was available we took it.
– Jamcater.com, we’ll put it into the show notes. Jeffrey Miller, Jeff thank you so much for joining me. Thanks everybody for tuning in.
– Take care, see 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 [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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