Every gig gets a walk-away number
Before the season opens, every kind of booking should have a number below which the answer is no. A festival's percentage deal, a flat-fee lunch pitch and a wedding quote all resolve to the same arithmetic: expected sales, minus food, minus crew hours including prep and travel, minus fuel and fees, equals contribution, divided by the hours the day consumed. Contribution per truck-hour is the comparator, because a loud festival that grosses triple a quiet office lunch can still earn less once the commission, the extra crew and two days of prep are counted.
The per-event books our accounting side keeps are the raw material; the CFO work is turning last season's records into this season's rules. Percentage deals get converted into expected dollars using your own history at similar events, never the organizer's attendance projection, and a minimum guarantee gets asked for whenever that history says to.
The calendar is the scarcest asset
One truck, one short Ontario season, only so many prime Saturdays: every booking you accept is priced by the one it displaces. We treat the calendar as a portfolio with three layers — weekday lunch service that covers the fixed costs, festivals that carry the big grosses and the weather risk, and private catering, which usually earns the most per hour and books the furthest ahead. The mix is a decision, and it should be made in February with rules for what a July Saturday must clear, not gig by gig in the inbox.
Cancellation terms belong in the same conversation, because a rained-out date with no deposit is a loss you accepted in advance. Deposits sized to the prep you will have committed by each calendar date turn weather from a catastrophe into a priced risk.
Catering quotes built up, not guessed down
Catering is the most profitable thing the business sells and the easiest to underprice, because the visible hours at the event are a fraction of the real ones. We price every contract from a build-up:
| Quote line | What it has to cover |
|---|---|
| Food and packaging | The menu costed per guest at current ingredient prices, with an overage allowance |
| Labour, all of it | Commissary prep, loading, travel both ways, service and teardown, at real wages plus payroll costs |
| The truck | Fuel plus a per-event charge for the insurance, maintenance and payments that run whether it moves or not |
| Commissary hours | Kitchen time booked specifically for this event's prep |
| Winter recovery and margin | Each summer event's share of the off-season fixed costs, then profit on top |
A floor price and a minimum guest count protect the quote; a payment schedule that keeps the client's money ahead of your committed costs — deposit at booking, balance before purchase day — protects everything else. And the full catering price, mandatory service charge included, carries 13% HST, a line worth building into the quote template once and never improvising again.
A winter plan funded in July
The truck stops earning in late fall; the costs do not. Commissary or storage rent, insurance, loan payments and licence renewals run all winter, and the CRA's calendar does not pause either: HST remittances and tax instalments keep landing in months with no window revenue. So the winter plan is a number — months of fixed costs, plus the instalments due before spring, plus the cost of opening again — and it is funded by transfers made in the strong months, not by whatever happens to be left in November.
Owner pay is the other half of smoothing. A level monthly draw set from the season's forecast beats living well in August and borrowing in February, and it keeps the winter forecast honest. Off-season revenue such as holiday catering and indoor markets gets judged by the same walk-away arithmetic as a July festival; some of it is worth doing, and some of it just burns the break.
Second truck, or a better kitchen
When bookings start getting turned away, the reflex is a second truck, and the numbers often disagree. Truck two duplicates the entire fixed stack — financing, insurance, permits, maintenance and a crew you must trust out of sight — and it inherits the bookings you currently decline, which are usually weaker than the ones truck one keeps. Growing the commissary side instead, with a bigger or dedicated kitchen, expands catering capacity at lower fixed cost, needs no new vending permits, and adds revenue that books months ahead.
The decision comes out of your own records: a log of declined bookings and what they were worth, truck one's utilization through the peak, and the direction of the catering pipeline. When the answer is the truck, the lender package matters, and a business plan prepared by a CPA who spent years on the banking side of the table gets read differently. Either way, this is the standing agenda of a monthly Fractional CFO engagement, sized for owner-run food businesses across Mississauga and the GTA and quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
