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Brief
Founded by Sally-Ann Bradley, Andrew Norrie and Damon Brown, Olive Catering Services is an independent contract catering company based in the Midlands. The company provides a wide variety of high quality, tailored contract catering to businesses, independent schools and further education colleges with a particular focus on fresh food. Olive Catering ranked 28th in the 2010 Sunday Times Fast Track 100 league table.
Olive Catering Services redeveloped its website three years ago and as entrepreneurs, the founders understood the impact that a successful website could have on the business: acting as an incredibly powerful marketing tool, delivering a steady stream of new business leads and filling the sales pipeline.
The company’s website was redeveloped to reflect their key messages and core values, while attracting potential clients. The site was also built to play a huge HR role and is crucial for Olive Catering in terms of employment. They have 513 team members, 90 per cent of which joined under TUPE legislation having worked for another contractor. The website Olive Catering Services put together gave them peace of mind that they are joining a successful, professional company which places a huge emphasis on training and developing its people.
The catering provider then began a working relationship with web hosting specialist Webfusion. Webfusion initially contacted Olive Catering Services to provide a catering contract for its head office in Stockley Park, Uxbridge. After establishing the partnership, Olive Catering recognised Webfusion’s expertise and promptly took the initiative to build on their success and maximise its online business performance.
Strategy
After embarking on an aggressive Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign, Olive Catering quickly established themselves in the top search engine rankings under the search term ‘contract caterers’.
With the success of the SEO campaign taking hold, there became a need for increased resource efficiency, business flexibility and continuity, while keeping data safe and reducing IT overheads. The company worked with Webfusion to identify the solution of a Virtual Private Server (VPS).
Webfusion, a specialist in its field, offers the best available specification on the market. Throughout their work with the catering company, Webfusion’s focus was to take the strain away from the business by providing them with a quick and easy way to create a professional and polished website, whilst enabling Olive Catering Services to concentrate on their core business processes.
Webfusion also set about providing a 24x7 reliable solution, without the worry of any downtime. Like most businesses, Olive Catering Services’ website is fundamental to their growth strategy so it is crucial that they don’t experience any outages, particularly as their website is the first port of call for potential customers and a key lead generation tool.
Execution
Webfusion executed a VPS solution that means Olive Catering Services now benefits from:
A website that runs 24/7/365, without disruption or downtime
- Reduced costs on maintaining the website
- A reliable website that can be used to support sales and lead generation
- Reassurance that interest from potential employees is retained
This year, Webfusion, was ranked 28th in the Sunday Times Deloitte Buyout Track 100 league table. Olive Catering Services felt it was particularly important to align themselves with a similarly successful company. Having both secured a position in the Sunday Times Fast Track, the catering company had further confidence in the solution Webfusion could provide.
Results
Since working with Webfusion, Olive Catering has benefited from a robust hosted website solution that provides maximum performance and increased resource efficiency.
The website was designed specifically to be simple and user-friendly, making it an enjoyable experience for visitors. The core of this experience is ensuring that Olive Catering Services’ website runs smoothly, without disruption. This means potential customers or team members are not disengaged and go elsewhere because they’ve had a frustrating experience. During the course of the catering company’s relationship with Webfusion, there have not been any concerns with service provision. There has been no downtime at all.
In fact, the service has been so good that Olive Catering Services hasn’t even needed to use Webfusion’s 24/7 support services, although they know they’re on hand around the clock, should the need ever arise.
The company has also found that an additional benefit of the Webfusion solution is that it takes care of the website infrastructure. Technology is such a pervasive part of business and by removing the internal infrastructure management has enabled the business to focus on what they do best - providing high quality catering services.
Working with Webfusion, Olive Catering Services has reaped the rewards of having an effective website. Looking to the future and the expansion strategy of the business, the team is considering the development of a customer feedback function and ecommerce service on its website. This will build on the interaction between the company and its customers to help develop relationships further using a variety of technology tools.
Meanwhile, Webfusion continues to benefit from fantastic food, served by friendly, polite people from a business with a sharp focus on efficiency. The perfect recipe for mutual business success.
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