Full service restaurants make money across three channels: dine-in, takeout/delivery, and private events. While there have long been industry leaders in the first two categories, there is not a clear winner in the event venue space. Enter Perfect Venue, a CRM tool and marketplace specifically designed for restaurants to manage their private events spaces and off-site catering businesses. The startup boasts over 1k locations across North America and has surpassed well over a million events over the past four years. HNGRY recently sat down with Founder & CEO Luke Hutchison to discuss the massive opportunity to streamline this revenue. 

“Private events are still a technology black hole,” said Hutchison. “I think private events are where delivery was ten years ago despite the fact that it’s 20-40% of full service restaurants’ sales.”

Hutchison attended West Point and served for five years in the US Army as an Infantry Officer, and was also responsible for planning social events for his unit. After spending hours combing the internet, driving to venues, and playing phone tag, he came up with the idea of an events marketplace and hacked together a simple proof-of-concept. That consisted of Google Forms and AdWords aimed at matching venues and people looking to book them. Hutchison quickly realized that simply connecting supply and demand was not sufficient– he would first have to bring the supply online to effectively capture demand. Or in his words, it was like “trying to build Kayak.com as if hotels didn’t digitize their inventory.”

After raising a seed round and hiring his first engineer just before the pandemic, Hutchison got to work building out a full-fledged CRM for restaurants to manage the entire event booking funnel from capturing leads and managing availability to sending proposals and invoices. Without such a system, it becomes incredibly difficult for venue staff to track everything across multiple tools. About 75% of Perfect Venue’s customers were previously using spreadsheets and Word documents, with the rest paying anywhere from $4k-$6k per year on a CRM like Tripleseat. By streamlining this entire funnel, Perfect Venue partners like Gott’s Roadside and Barcelona Wine Bar are seeing anywhere from a 24-60% increase in private events revenue. Others like Rubirosa in NYC have gone from three private events per week to 2-3 per day. While Perfect Venue mostly skews towards restaurant spaces, it also boasts breweries, wineries, food trucks, caterers, and traditional event venues.

In a world where response time generally dictates the winner, Perfect Venue allows for one-click booking on the demand side as well as text message notifications and a mobile app to quickly build proposals on the supply side. It also uses AI to learn managers’ style of communication, pulling in availability from venues’ internal calendars to suggest auto-responses to inquiries. Hutchison says that ~10k AI-generated messages are approved by operators each month, which he hopes grows even further. The feature is also especially helpful for staff where English is their second language. 

Now that the 12-person team has built what it feels is a robust events management CRM, it is beginning to focus more on its vision of becoming the go-to private events booking marketplace with the pitch: “Never email a venue for availability again.” The platform automatically lists Perfect Venue’s existing customers while also allowing new venues to sign up to the marketplace for free with a limited set of functionality. Such venues pay a 1.9% processing fee on top of its existing merchant payment costs. The site unabashedly took inspiration from Airbnb’s design, allowing filtering by categories like restaurant, bar, catering, space rental, activity, patio, and private dining. Its top market is currently San Francisco with 700 venues and it sees roughly a 50/50 split between corporate and social events platform-wide. Hutchison says that he has recently seen a spike in demand from AI startups like Anthropic and OpenAI looking to host offsites. The Perfect Venue team has also been experimenting with paid Google SEM to further drive leads looking for nearby birthday party spaces or private dining rooms towards its marketplace.

Each listing allows venues to showcase their off-site catering menus and/or private events spaces ranging from full buyouts to sectioned off spaces like patios or private dining rooms. Venues have the ability to accept Express Bookings that allow customers to select specific menu items or venue packages without any back-and-forth; venues then have 24 hours to accept or decline. Beyond the marketplace, venues are generating direct leads both online and offline from sources like in-store QR codes and website lead capture forms, as well as reactivation campaigns through Perfect Venue’s Mailchimp integration. Custom-priced Premium plans allow for UTM tracking and Google Tag Manager to track attribution to specific campaigns. Basic annual plans cost $79 per month per location and Professional plans run $159 per month per location.

The breadth of supply on the Perfect Venue platform is quite diverse, especially in a city like Los Angeles that is choc-ful of push carts, food trucks, and pop-ups. Wood-fired pizza caterer Olive Wood Pizza, shaved ice cart Happy Ice, and Kogi BBQ food truck are just a sampling of the mobile catering options available through the marketplace. The trend of leveraging AI to optimize and grow small businesses is further evidenced by the recent launch of Cactus, an “AI Copilot” for private chefs who are highly time-constrained and, as a result, perhaps less tech savvy. While Perfect Venue isn’t an online catering platform in the way that FamilyMeal, ezCater, or Lunchbox is through their integrations with white label delivery providers, it is instead better suited towards more custom, off-site catering requests that require proposals. 

In today’s lower-margin omnichannel world, operators must find creative ways to drive new, incremental profitable sources of revenue while continuing to deliver on their core hospitality business. On and off-site events feel like a major opportunity that is seldom talked about. Occasionally, I’ll come across a PDR (private dining room) on Tock or perhaps my favorite, The Hoagie Room at Pizzeria Beddia on Resy. But most restaurants still seem to be under-marketing such unique offerings while also relying on outdated inquiry methods like phone calls or email. Now that Perfect Venue’s CRM is humming, I’m excited to see how operators repurpose their spaces to drive more dollars per foot and market new experiences to their biggest fans. From cooking classes to private wine cellar dinners, the possibilities are endless.

That begs the question– what’s your Perfect Venue?