Staying cool in the kitchen

Martin Smith caters for events ranging from private dinners to the V8 supercars.

Food is only one ingredient in caterer's plan for growth

Managing five kitchens delivering cold beers and sizzling food to as many as 3000 punters at Pukekohe's V8 Supercars event would send most people's blood pressure through the roof.

Not Martin Smith, general manager of Collective Hospitality, the official caterer for the New Zealand leg of the Australasian motorsport juggernaut.

He says impeccable planning three months in advance ensures the stoves run as hot as the laps, without a meltdown.

"The one thing that we don't do is we don't stress and we don't panic," he says. "We take everything in our stride.

"We just make sure that when we make a decision we stick to it, and we have a lot of faith in the team and we have a lot of faith in our decisions and planning."

Appointing Smith, 37, to the top job at Collective three years ago signalled a shake-up in the business, which at that stage was under the umbrella of its parent, Orange Group.

Smith undertook a rebrand, launching Collective Hospitality in July 2013, but behind the scenes he was cooking up a new strategy and business plan.

Drawing on experience in event catering both here and in his native London, Smith could see opportunities to create a new style of catering business.

"I felt the marketplace didn't have as much confidence in private caterers as they used to and, I'll be honest, a lot of the well-established catering businesses in New Zealand hadn't moved forward with the times." The food was on point, he says, but the overall business and client relationship management was missing the mark.

Smith says the Collective business was built around delivering a hospitality event that ensures clients come away feeling they've experienced something different.

"Every event you do, it's a PR exercise; it's a marketing exercise," he says.

Our biggest form of growth has been from people attending our events.

Based on their experience, someone attending an awards dinner at Vector Arena -- Collective has the venue catering contract -- can end up booking Collective for a private dinner party or a function at one of the two Auckland venues the company runs -- The Wharf and Orakei Bay.

One of Smith's favourite events in the early days of Collective -- a three-day society wedding in Northland -- was booked by a past client.

Relationships count, and Smith says the company's hands-on approach, which involves clients dealing with a designated point of contact and sitting down directly with the firm's chefs to discuss menu options, makes for a great working bond.

Smith also saw an opportunity to smooth the peaks and troughs of the New Zealand catering cycle, in which most work is done over summer.

Catering in Britain, where he worked since his mid-teens for Searcys and then Party Ingredients, firms providing high-end catering for corporates, private clubs and state banquets, has two distinct seasons -- summer weddings and winter Christmas parties.

Moving to New Zealand with his Kiwi-born pastry chef wife and young family, he found there was one long season stretching from November to March "and then there was a terrible low throughout the rest of the year."

Winning a couple of corporate contracts for in-house catering provided a steady core of "bread and butter" work, he says, with event catering ranging from private homes through to spaces such as the Auckland Museum, plus large-scale events like the Vodafone Music Awards filling the diary.

We've made sure our offering across all of those three business silos is different and varied but we feel that we can deliver 1600 plates the same way we can offer 16.

Collective's 50 full-time staff, many based in its head office and kitchen in the basement of the Orakei Bay venue, and as many as 200 contract staff are riding the crest of a wave that has seen business in November up nearly 60 per cent on last year and December numbers close to 100 per cent higher than the same period in 2014.

"I think we've certainly picked up a larger market share, particularly in the last 12 to 18 months, which is fantastic to see.

"I think our model is different from our competitors in terms of innovation and how we operate with our client relationship management, but the market has picked up definitely and we've had a solid run all the way since April."

Smith will close the company kitchens on Christmas Eve, then throw open his own doors the following day when he will entertain 20 for a Christmas lunch featuring turkey barbecued on the Weber.

Then it's back into work to prep for parties and weddings between Christmas and New Year before the wedding season kicks really kicks off, with the first of the New Year weddings booked in for the first weekend in January.