On a Friday evening in summer, a Los Angeles catering company had a wedding to serve. Ten servers and two bartenders were booked for the first shift, and none of them showed up.
The company's scheduling manager, Libby, spent the next stretch of the evening phoning and texting through a roster of roughly 200 part-time workers, trying to find anyone who could get to the venue in time. She got enough people there, and in her words, "the party turned out okay." But she and the owner agreed that night it could not happen again.
This is the story of what they changed, and the numbers that followed.
The business behind the wedding
The company caters medium to high-end events in Los Angeles. At the time it had around 20 full-time staff, about 200 part-time workers, and roughly $4 million in annual revenue. In a typical week Libby scheduled about 15 parties, which added up to hundreds of individual shifts.
For a caterer, every event is also a sales pitch. Wedding guests become future clients, and a planner who sees a short-staffed bar is unlikely to recommend you again. Staffing reliability affects the next booking as much as the current one.
How bad the problem was
The wedding was the worst night, but it was not unusual. On the company's busiest days, Libby estimated that about half of scheduled workers either arrived late or did not show up at all. She described the job at the time as "spinning her wheels and grinding her teeth."
Scheduling ran on a mix of handwritten notes, Google Sheets, phone calls, texts, and Facebook messages. None of it was shared across the team, and nobody was tracking who was reliable. Libby kept most of that knowledge in her head and in notebooks, and scheduling took up her full 40-hour week.
What they changed
The company moved its scheduling into Roosted, and onboarding took less than a week. Three changes made most of the difference, and each of them is a habit any event business can copy, with or without software.
1. Inviting reliable people first
Libby started each event by inviting the specific workers she trusted most, then filling the remaining slots from the wider pool. Her best people got first pick of the shifts, which made them more likely to stay with the company.
2. Making workers confirm before every shift
Before each shift, every worker had to reply to a text or email confirming they were coming. If someone didn't confirm, Libby found out with time to spare and could book a replacement. According to the case study, this one change reduced no-shows and lateness straight away.
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3. Tracking attendance on every shift
The system recorded lateness, no-shows, and performance for each shift automatically. After about a month there was enough data to see clear patterns, and shifts started going more often to the people who turned up on time and less often to those who didn't.
This replaced Libby's memory with a record the whole team could see, which mattered when she wasn't the one making the call.
The results after 60 days
| Measure | Before | After 60 days |
|---|---|---|
| Late or no-show rate on busy days | About 50% | Under 5% |
| Attendance issues | Baseline | Down 90% |
| Libby's weekly scheduling time | Full 40-hour week | Under 10 hours |
| Staff turnover | Baseline | Lower (no figure reported) |
Freeing up 30 hours a week meant Libby could spend time on work that grows the business, like preparing for client tastings and following up after events, which used to get squeezed out by chasing people for shifts.
What other event businesses can take from this
You don't need to be running 15 parties a week for these lessons to apply. A small business hosting monthly workshops with a handful of helpers faces the same risk on a smaller scale, and one missing person at the registration desk shapes how guests remember the whole event.
A few practical steps from this caterer's experience:
- Ask for confirmation the day before. A short message asking people to reply "yes" gives you warning while there's still time to act. Set a cut-off, and line up a backup if someone hasn't replied by then.
- Write down who shows up. Even a basic spreadsheet column for "on time / late / no-show" builds a picture within a few weeks. Without it, scheduling decisions rely on whoever remembers best.
- Give your most reliable people first choice. They're the ones you want at your most important events, and offering them first pick helps keep them.
- Keep everything in one shared place. When details are split across texts, notes, and social media, one person becomes the single point of failure. If they're off sick, nobody else knows who's booked.
The catering company went from a 50% late-or-no-show rate on its busiest days to under 5% in two months. Most of that came from asking people to confirm and keeping a record of who turned up.
This story was shared by Roosted, workforce management software for caterers and event staffing businesses.
