How Patrick Morlando and Enjoy Your Party are Revolutionizing the Food Service Staffing Industry

Enjoy Your Party’s director of franchise operations explains where the brand is headed as demand for staffing services continues to climb.

No one knows the food service industry like Patrick Morlando. His entire career has been focused on rising through the ranks in the increasingly in demand segment, from his first job scooping ice cream at just 16 years old to his most recent job as the Sales Operations Manager for a leading coffee company. And now, that extensive experience is what’s helping to fuel the success of the emerging franchise concept Enjoy Your Party.

As Enjoy Your Party’s director of franchise operations, Morlando brings a strong appreciation for providing quality service to the table. He decided to become a part of the brand’s leadership team to support its ongoing expansion efforts. Realizing that customers have a choice on where they purchase their products and often make their decisions based on the service that they receive. Enjoy Your Party was the perfect opportunity for Morlando to dive right in.

To say that Enjoy Your Party has been thriving since Morlando signed on board would be an understatement—with over 450 employees and a reach that extends across five states, the brand is already experiencing growth. And with the implementation of its franchising opportunity, Enjoy Your Party is expected to continue building on its strong momentum in the months and years ahead.

To learn more about the Enjoy Your Party brand, 1851 Franchise sat down with Morlando to see what’s next.

What does a typical day look like for you? What roles and responsibilities do you oversee when it comes to Enjoy Your Party and its business ownership opportunity?
Each day in the Enjoy Your Party office is incredibly interesting. Since we have many different subdivisions of staffing, from private events to contracted corporate events, my typical day starts with a morning briefing with our scheduling team to discuss current and future events. However, on a daily basis I am speaking to potentially new customers, boosting our current customer business, internal administration and working hard to get the word out there that food service staffing is the most critical part of any event. No matter how good the food is or how beautiful a venue is, The staff will ultimately make or break an event.

In your opinion, what makes Enjoy Your party so unique within its segment?
It’s simple: recruitment & selection, training, employee uniforms and setting high expectations for our team of 463 employees. There are many staffing agencies out there—they’re not hard to find online. However, when you look at what else they do besides food service staffing, they don’t compare to Enjoy Your Party. Some companies only hire models, while others staff events through an app where people can register to work events online without have any qualifications or being pre-screened. Our employees, on the other hand, are only placed on assignment after they’ve had a complete and comprehensive background check that’s e-verified. Every Enjoy Your Party employee also has to attend our interactive training program, pass a competency test and complete all necessary paperwork to be entered into our payroll system. When a catering partner trusts us to place fully trained and qualified staff on an event that carries the weight of their brand name, they’re sharing the responsibility of their brand and vision with us. Matching an event personality with staff personality ensures that success. Enjoy Your Party is unique because we pay attention to those details, ultimately creating a cohesive presence at any event. We don’t place individuals on events for our bottom line—we place them for our partners’ bottom line.

What makes a great leader and executive team?
I always follow three simple rules. First, trust your team. Second, empower your team. Third, always have an open discussion before implementation. If these three rules are ignored in any organization, it is impossible for both your team and organization to grow internally and externally.

What does the ideal Enjoy Your Party franchisee look like?
I’d ideally like to partner with people who have a background in the food service industry, including food service directors, maître d’s and event planners. The reason for that is the fact that they already have knowledge on how an event should be executed, from proper staffing levels to correct serving styles and table set ups. We can then train them on the ins and outs of the Enjoy Your Party brand and how we go to market. But having those basic fundamentals is critical to the success of our franchisees.

While we understand that those qualifications are specific, we didn’t spend over 20 years building and growing our brand to open franchises just for the sake of it. We’re looking to partner with individuals who can grow a business within this industry that’s in immediate need of qualified food service workers. To put it into perspective, the food service industry employs more than two million temp workers each week nationwide, generating over $3 billion in revenue. Trained and qualified temporary food service staffing is then the next segment in food service that’s going to take off.

What’s next for Enjoy Your Party in the months and years ahead?
Enjoy Your Party’s franchise ownership opportunity will follow the same business model that has made us successful over the past two decades. We’re aiming for systematic growth—we’re not in the market to flood the country with hundreds of Enjoy Your Party locations. Instead, our goal is to open up one new location every fiscal quarter. The reason for that is our franchisee on boarding process is very in-depth and interactive. We want to be able to provide our owners with extensive support so that they can make the most of our system. If we were rapidly turning over new locations that would not be possible.

With that growth on the horizon, there’s no doubt that it’s an exciting time to be a part of the Enjoy Your Party brand. We’ve never had a down year in sales—even when the economy gets tough, temporary staffing services rise. That’s proven in our numbers. In 2016, for example, Enjoy Your Party staffed over 90,000 hours of labor with sales over $2.2 million. And so far this year, we’re on pace to surpass 2016 by seven percent. We’re eager to continue building on that momentum, which is why if you’re seeking the right business ownership opportunity, you should reach out to us at Enjoy Your Party!