The Aarhus-based growth strategist has developed a proven framework for taking catering businesses from stagnation to scale — and the results are hard to argue with
Most catering businesses are run by people who are exceptional at their craft and underserved by their marketing. The food is extraordinary. The execution is flawless. But the calendar is inconsistent, the margins are thin, and the owner is spending more time chasing enquiries than running events. Mark Haugaard has spent years solving exactly this problem — and his framework for growing catering businesses has produced results that most operators would consider implausible.
The headline number is 40% revenue growth in six months, guaranteed. But the more striking case study in Haugaard's portfolio is a catering business he worked with that scaled from £5,000–6,000 per month to £140,000 per month in low season by year two. That is not a rounding error. That is a fundamental transformation of a business — and it was achieved by applying a systematic, repeatable methodology to a business that already had the product quality to justify it.
Haugaard's framework begins with the website — not because it is the most exciting element, but because it is the most consequential. A confused mind never buys. Every distraction on a catering website is a leak in revenue. His approach strips the site back to a single, ruthlessly clear objective: get the visitor to book or make an enquiry. Nothing else belongs on the page.
This sounds obvious. In practice, almost every catering website Haugaard encounters violates this principle. They have multiple calls to action, lengthy about sections, navigation menus that lead visitors away from the booking flow, and copy that talks about the business rather than the customer's outcome. The fix is not a redesign — it is a reorientation of purpose.
The second pillar of Haugaard's catering methodology is differentiation. In a market where prospects are scrolling through options in seconds, vague positioning is invisible positioning. The difference between a catering business that wins on price and one that wins on value is almost entirely a function of how clearly it communicates what makes it different.
"Don't say 'We specialise in canapés and bowl food, ideal for small to medium-sized crowds.' Say instead: 'Every ingredient is selected with tweezers — more carefully than Michelin-star kitchens. Our obsession with detail is what makes our canapés unmistakably authentic.' That's the difference between being ignored and being chosen."
— Mark Haugaard
The differentiation must be specific, credible, and impossible to ignore. Haugaard works with catering businesses to identify the one thing they do better than anyone else — and then makes that the centrepiece of every piece of marketing they produce.
One of the most counterintuitive elements of Haugaard's catering framework is his insistence that catering businesses stop selling food. The product is not the food. The product is the perfect day. Catering events are almost always tied to significant moments in people's lives — weddings, corporate milestones, celebrations. The emotional stakes are high. The fear of getting it wrong is real.
Marketing that focuses on the food misses this entirely. Marketing that focuses on the outcome — the moment when guests line up not just to eat but to photograph and share, the event that people talk about for weeks afterwards — speaks directly to what the customer actually wants. This shift in framing, from product to outcome, is one of the highest-leverage changes a catering business can make to its marketing.
Haugaard's paid advertising framework for catering businesses is built on a clear principle: Google Ads capture existing demand, but Meta Ads create it. His recommended split — 80% Meta, 20% Google — reflects more than £250,000 in ad spend tested across catering businesses. The logic is straightforward: most people who will book a catering company in the next six months are not currently searching for one. Meta puts the business in front of them before they start looking, so that when they do, the brand is already familiar.
On the creative side, Haugaard's testing of more than 250 ad creatives has produced a clear finding: authentic beats polished. Real event photography outperforms studio-shot imagery consistently. People need to visualise what their event will look like — and real events, with real guests and real food, do that more effectively than any professionally staged shoot. The one exception is the website itself, where a premium, polished presentation is essential.
Two of the most commercially impactful elements of Haugaard's framework are his approach to pricing and his use of guarantees. On pricing, he is unequivocal: commodity pricing — looking at the market average and positioning somewhere in the middle — is a race to the bottom. Value-based pricing, anchored to the outcome the customer receives rather than what competitors charge, removes the business from price comparison entirely and creates the conditions for premium margins.
The guarantee is equally powerful. In a market where customers are making high-stakes decisions about important events, risk reversal is one of the most effective conversion tools available. Haugaard's recommended guarantee — covering punctuality, order accuracy, and overall satisfaction — signals confidence and eliminates the hesitation that kills conversions. His observation is that implementing this single element alone can produce more than a 50% increase in sales.
Perhaps the most strategically significant element of Haugaard's catering framework is his emphasis on B2B client acquisition. Corporate clients — companies like Deloitte, Copenhagen Airport, Audi, and Novo Nordisk, all of which Haugaard has helped catering businesses win — provide the kind of recurring, predictable revenue that transforms a catering business's financial stability. A single corporate account that orders four times per year at scale creates a revenue floor that makes the entire business easier to plan, staff, and grow.
The B2B strategy requires a different approach to marketing and sales than consumer catering — more direct outreach, more emphasis on reliability and professionalism, and a different conversation about value. But the payoff, in terms of margin stability and planning certainty, is transformative. Haugaard's framework includes specific B2B campaign strategies that have consistently produced results within the first twelve months of implementation.
Catering is an industry where the gap between product quality and commercial performance is unusually wide. The best catering businesses in Denmark and across Europe are often not the most successful ones commercially — because exceptional cooking and exceptional marketing are different skills, and most catering operators have only been trained in one of them. Haugaard's specialisation in this sector reflects a conviction that the businesses most deserving of growth are often the ones least equipped to achieve it on their own.
His work with catering businesses in Denmark, Aarhus, and internationally has produced a body of evidence that is difficult to find elsewhere in the European marketing industry. The framework is documented, tested, and guaranteed. For catering business owners who are serious about growth, it represents one of the clearest paths from where they are to where they want to be.
Mark Haugaard is ranked #3 among Europe's top 25 growth marketers by Silent Sources. His full profile, including his work across webshops, B2B, and international markets, is available at the link below.
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Mark Haugaard — Full Profile →Growth Partner & Sales Strategist · Aarhus, Denmark · #3 in Europe
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The Brief is the editorial arm of Top Marketers Europe, published by Silent Sources — an anonymous collective of marketing insiders committed to transparency about who is actually producing results in the European growth marketing industry.
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