A kitchen, a floor, and a lot to coordinate
Bespoke catering has a hidden cost, and it is not in the kitchen. Every event is designed from scratch, which means every event has its own team, its own timings and its own set of details to get right.
Pull that together for one booking, and it is manageable. Pull it together for a full calendar, with chefs, front-of-house managers and service staff all needing the same information, and the coordination becomes the hardest part of the job.
For a while, that coordination ran on manual scheduling and word-of-mouth. It mostly worked. It also left room for the kind of small errors that only show up on the day, when there is no time to fix them.
Indulge Catering and Events, based on the Fonthill Estate in Wiltshire, has designed and delivered bespoke events since 2010, across the South West, London and Oxford. As the business grew, so did the team, and so did the number of moving parts behind every booking.
“Each event is unique and tailored precisely to our client's requirements and budget. With a dedicated team of over sixty talented chefs, front-of-house managers, and service and administrative staff, Indulge brings a wealth of experience to every event.”
Indulge Catering and Events Team
A recommendation they could trust
The turning point was not a sales pitch. It was a colleague. A member of the Indulge team had used Liveforce at another company and pointed to it as the tool that would fix the scheduling strain.
With the business growing quickly, and no clear way to judge one platform against another, a recommendation from someone who had already lived with the software carried real weight.
“Liveforce came highly recommended by one of our staff who already used it with another company. We were aware these types of software existed but didn't know how to choose, so this recommendation helped hugely.”
Indulge Catering and Events Team
Where every event now lives
Liveforce became the one place Indulge builds an event from. Scheduling, staffing, and the details that used to sit in scattered notes now share a single home, so the office is never rebuilding the same picture from memory.
It fit the budget, it covered what a growing caterer actually needed, and it gave the team somewhere reliable to look instead of somewhere to search.
Less chasing, more delivering
The change was quiet, and it showed up in the hours nobody used to count. Updates that once meant tracking people down now reach the whole team at once. Bookings that lived in someone’s head now sit in a shared calendar.
And the details that decide whether an event runs smoothly are in one place, ready before the vans leave rather than pieced together on arrival.
Before and after Liveforce
Before Liveforce
Staff schedules and event details tracked by hand
Updates chased down person by person
Event details scattered across notes and inboxes
Staff unsure exactly where an event was
The bigger the team grew, the harder scheduling got
After Liveforce
Every booking and shift in one calendar
Real-time notifications reaching the whole team
One place holding all staffing data
An event location finder pointing them to the site
One system built to handle sixty-plus staff
The difference
Less time lost to admin before each event
Everyone working from the same information
Nothing to hunt for mid-service
The right people in the right place, on time
Room to grow without the admin growing too
The features that keep events on track
Real-time notifications
A bespoke event changes fast. Notifications push updates to the whole team the moment they happen, so nobody is left chasing details or working from a plan that has already moved on.
At-a-glance calendar
Every booking in one view. Scheduling and staffing an event stopped being a hunt through notes, and became a single calendar the whole office plans from.
Event location finder
Indulge caters across the South West, London and Oxford. The location finder points each staff member to the right site, so a team spread across regions still arrives where the event actually is.
Helpdesk on hand
New systems raise questions. Indulge leaned on Liveforce’s helpdesk for quick, useful answers, which counted for a lot while a sixty-strong team was still finding its feet.
A Crew App the whole team can use
The staff side runs on the app. Team members who would not call themselves tech-minded still pick up their shifts, event details and updates without a fuss. That is what gets a whole team on a system, rather than half of it while the rest carry on as before.
Smoother events, and a team that finds it easy
The gains landed where Indulge feels them every week:
- Tighter communication, with the team updated in real time rather than chased down;
- Better organisation, with events and staffing in one calendar; and
- Staffing data that is easy to see, so nothing slips between the booking and the service.
The team took to it quickly, including the ones who would never call themselves tech-minded.
Several years on, Liveforce is where an Indulge event starts, from the first booking through to the last plate cleared.
Indulge still tailors every event down to the last detail. The difference now is that the operation behind the food is just as considered as the food itself.
