Case study · 120-day engagement
A Denver caterer was running a 12-person kitchen on the back of wedding season. April-October was bedlam. November-March, the lights stayed on but barely. The owner had been told for 5 years to "build a corporate side." Nobody had told him how. The wedding side had a marketing playbook. The corporate side had nothing.
The challenge
The owner came in through a referral. He did not need a wedding-side fix — that was working. He needed something to keep the kitchen earning during slow months. The bot scored his website at 71 (good for wedding queries) but he had no inbound corporate-catering traffic at all.
We pulled his client list and ran the math:
B2B catering is a long-cycle motion: a corporate decision-maker (usually an office manager or executive assistant) needs 4-7 touches before they will trial a new caterer. None of his existing playbook supported that. We had to build a new one.
The plan
Built a single offer: a $0 lunch for 5-10 people delivered to your office. No commitment, no contract. The pitch: "If your team likes it, we will quote you on recurring lunch days. If not, we keep our food and your time." Built a /corporate-trial landing page. The owner ate the food cost on the first 80 trials. He closed on 22 of them inside 6 weeks. Average corporate account ticket: $1,400/mo.
Built a list of 1,200 Denver-area office managers and EAs at companies with 15-200 employees within 5 miles of his kitchen. Wrote a 4-message sequence for connection requests + first message + nudge + final. Owner sent 60 a week, personally. Connection rate hit 38%. Reply rate hit 19%. Trial requests came in week 3.
/corporate became the second front door of the website. Stripped of wedding photos. Hero: "Recurring office lunch + meetings. Denver downtown only. Trial for free." Below: 8 sample menus, dietary accommodations, a real-time scheduling widget showing which delivery windows were available next week, and the trial CTA. Conversion rate at 6.8%, way above the wedding side.
Once a corporate account signed, we built a simple Airtable + email automation that confirmed each weekly order, allowed substitutions 48 hours out, and surveyed each delivery for satisfaction. Churn dropped to almost zero — no corporate account who signed in months 1-3 had cancelled by month 4.
AI tools we used
We do not pretend the work happens by hand. Three of our internal tools are the reason this engagement moved as fast as it did. Each of them replaces what used to be days of human time.
Custom AI we built that grades every search term on commercial intent, urgency, and local match in under a second. Replaces a half-day human audit.
Takes one bad search term and proposes the related variants we should also negate before they show up. Found 87 negatives nobody had thought of.
Crawls the site and fires every conversion event in a sandbox so you can see what is actually being recorded vs what should be. Caught the duplicate form fire in 4 minutes.
The execution
| Week | What we shipped | What moved |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Lunch-trial offer designed, /corporate-trial landing page live | First trial request day 4 |
| Week 3 | LinkedIn outreach sequence live, 60 connections/week sent | 9 trial requests from LinkedIn in week 3-4 |
| Week 4 | /corporate microsite redesigned, 8 sample menus loaded | Direct organic traffic + Google Maps starts converting |
| Week 6 | 22 trials delivered, 9 converted to recurring accounts | Recurring revenue $11k → $24k/mo |
| Week 10 | Owner hires a part-time catering coordinator just for B2B | Trial throughput doubles |
| Week 14 | 17 active corporate accounts, retention 100% | Recurring revenue $48k/mo |
| Week 17 | Quarterly review | B2B side now outpacing wedding side in slow months |
The numbers
The 17 active corporate accounts at $1,400/mo average produce $23,800/mo in recurring revenue. Trial-to-recurring conversion stabilized at 41% by month 4 — meaning roughly 1 in 2.5 trials becomes a paying account.
The 120-day engagement at $799/mo cost $3,196. The new $48k/mo recurring revenue produces over $300k/year in new gross revenue. Off-season is no longer a problem. It is an opportunity.
I had been told for 5 years to "build a corporate side." Nobody told me how. Mark told me LinkedIn, free trial, and ditch the catering form. Within 6 weeks I had more recurring revenue than I had ever seen. I am keeping the kitchen warm year-round now.
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