Providing the catering for more than 1,000 events annually, Gingers is one of Hong Kong’s most successful private catering firms with a remit that includes everything from cocktail-party canapés to multi-course dinners.
Coming from a family where both parents were good cooks meant founder Liz Seaton quickly developed a passion for cooking, and by the age of 16, the Scot had decided to become a chef. She started working in a hotel in Edinburgh that dealt with events for up to 1,000 people before moving on to institutional catering providing food to banking boardrooms and private clients on yachts around the Caribbean. She later moved to Hong Kong, where she found work as a private chef for a law firm doing corporate lunches.
“In the evenings, I had my own little business doing cocktail parties – buffets and so on – and then I just found that I was working too hard,” she says. Confident there was a market for her services, Seaton went full-time on her own – and even though she was no longer juggling two jobs, it was tough. “I worked a minimum of 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for the first six months.”
One of the biggest challenges in those early days was teaching the cooks her recipes as she developed the dishes alongside them. “I didn’t have time to write anything down – it was a case of, ‘I’ll make this mixture and then you roll them.’ It was really quite a scramble … there just weren’t enough hours in the day.”
Nevertheless, her vision for the future kept her going. “I knew that if it wasn’t just me, but Gingers, then I could eventually step back and be the face of the company and not have to get my sleeves rolled up and cater events for 500 people. And that’s what I managed to do after about ten years in business.” she says.
Making the switch from chef to business owner was another challenge Seaton had to overcome. Undeterred, she bought a book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting Your Own Business, then went online and downloaded a business plan. “That was good, because it made me think about what I wanted.” She also had a friend who had studied hotel management, who gave her a grounding in basic management skills. “She worked with me for about eight years and encouraged me to do things like bringing in a weekly schedule. When she left, I realised how much she had taught me. I wouldn’t be the manager I am today if it weren’t for her.”
While the entrepreneur doesn’t have any formal business education, her chef’s training remains useful. “I can go up to my chefs and ask ‘What’s that?’ There are a lot of caterers out there who aren’t chef-trained so they can’t check whether the food is okay.”
In an industry where most businesses fold within their first two years, Seaton has had to find her edge. “I always think of every event as being my own party, even though nowadays I don’t deal with every booking. And as competition came into the market, I built up the business by keeping consistent, focused and having great people around me.”
Over the years, it has not just been a case of competition increasing; clients are more demanding too. “Everything’s a lot more last minute – we’ll get a call asking, ‘can you do a cocktail for 100 tonight?’ Then we did a sit-down meal at Sky 100 [at the ICC] recently and there were 35 special dietary requirements. We might not find out about all these different dietary requirements until the day before.”
Now that the business is established, Seaton says she can be selective about what work to take on. “We don’t do every job that comes in – like a lunchbox for 3,000 people at HK$200 per head, for example. But we’ll do events like the 30th anniversary of the Chinese International School because the people who attended that were our target market.”
Seaton explains that if she were to set up Gingers today, she’d have to do a lot more marketing as a result of far greater competition in the private catering market. “Some are really going all out to market themselves and will even do food delivery to get more business. We were quite lucky because I already had a reputation so we didn’t need to do much advertising, and we still don’t. We had a client call up who was at a cocktail party of ours two years ago. She took a napkin, kept it in a file and finally got round to calling.”
As Gingers celebrates 15 years in the F&B industry, Seaton feels she deserves a pat on the back – and there are plenty of satisfied customers willing to do just that. “One client we had from the Australian Consulate-General was hotel-trained and quite challenging to work with. She wrote me an email recently saying, ‘you deserve all the kudos for all your hard work and dedication’. I’ve been getting great messages from people like that and it feels fantastic. And I still have that same client that I was doing corporate lunches for 15 years ago.”
This article appeared in the Classified Post print edition as Plate expectations.
