Action station
The contracts are rolling in at Carlton Catering Partnership. The company has added to its first contract to feed the legal profession with a deal at Sheffield Law Courts. Business at Lawson House continues as normal, despite the building work going on there. The company has also survived another visit from the auditors to check the company's performance against the ISO9002 customer service accreditation it gained earlier this year.
When the phone rang at Stephen Prestwich's home at 7.30am on 9 October, it was the call that the Wilton centre manager had hoped he would never get: there was a full-blown emergency at the chemical complex.
Prestwich recalls the morning when a BASF warehouse containing plastic chips caught fire on ICI's sprawling Wilton chemical complex on Teesside, where Carlton Catering Partnership has the catering contract. At the height of the blaze, 30 fire engines battled to stop it spreading to other areas of the site.
The call to Prestwich was part of a well-rehearsed emergency procedure. For Carlton, this involves first alerting the senior management team of Maureen Whatley, North-east operations director, and Prestwich, and for them to alert other key members of staff.
The emergency procedure on site involves immediately sealing off the site to all but an emergency action team. Carlton Catering is part of that team, since those involved in any emergency are going to need food and drink.
Prestwich says it was a strange feeling driving on to the site, the only car on a road that would normally be packed with workers, and to see dense black smoke billowing around him.
The control headquarters directed Prestwich and his team to one of the kitchens where they set about producing sandwiches and hot food.
The drama came closer to them when the wind changed direction and they were instructed to relocate from the kitchen they were working in. The team had 15 minutes to move out.
"We loaded what we had done into one of our catering vans, went to a safer part of the site and just carried on," says Prestwich. The site was closed for a day, after which it more or less returned to routine.
Beyond the drama of the fire on Teesside, life goes on as normal for Carlton Catering. The refurbishment of Lawson House, the conference and training centre where it has a full facilities management contract, has entered stage two.
Four bedrooms have been converted into de luxe standard, and work will soon commence on a further block of a dozen, which should be complete early in the New Year.
Conference and private dining rooms have been fitted with an electronic paging system so staff can be alerted when something is needed.
The vacancy of night porter at Lawson House has now been filled. After having no success in finding applicants from existing Lawson House staff, someone from outside has been taken on. Everything about Lawson House is going smoothly, says Salisbury.
Diversification remains a key word for the team. As well as its standard contracts, Carlton Catering has the court houses business at Worcester and Sheffield, and has now won a contract at a Red Cross administrative centre in Knutsford.
It is not a big contract, says Dave Stanistreet, North-west operations director, "but it's one of those that is nice to have in the portfolio when going for new business and telling potential clients the range of existing business".
Another piece of new business is a contract for three business sites belonging to Crosfield Electronics. There are 450 customers at a Peterborough site, 600 at the Hemel Hempstead head office, and 40 at Crosfield's office in Milton Keynes.
This was won in a straight competitive tendering bid for all three sites, replacing the existing arrangement of one contractor for Hemel Hempstead and another for the other two sites.
The contract is for guaranteed performance, in which the client pays costs on an on-going basis, but Carlton has to stay within the tendered budgets.
As well as putting pressure on the contractor to forecast and manage the contract accurately, business development manager Colin Edge says they are also operating an open-book policy with the client on food costs.
Life as a contract caterer is nothing if not eventful. One of the occasional outside events Carlton Catering handled came when a Cheshire businessman asked Carlton Catering to provide a buffet for 50 to 80 Cheshire farmers at a local function. Two days before the event, the client rang to say response to the 2,000 random invitations was going better than expected and could he increase the catering to 120?
On the day of the event, the client telephoned, rather agitated, saying there might be up to 500.
Salisbury says there was only one kind of deal he could see working with such fluctuating numbers. "We told him we would do a cost-plus deal with a guarantee that we wouldn't run out of food."
It was battle stations at a nearby Carlton Catering kitchen and hundreds of sandwiches, pies, sausage, rolls, quiche and portions of chicken were delivered in time for the 7.30pm start.
At 7.20pm nobody had arrived and Carlton Catering thought it was facing a nightmare in the making. Then suddenly, an endless procession of headlights appeared and by 9pm, 600 hungry farmers hxcarrived. Carlton Catering kept its promise and the food did not run out, but the staff had a very light supper.
Next visit to Carlton Catering: 7 December
