Bill Hansen shares one of his wildest wedding stories in an excerpt from his new book, Plating Up Profits: Miami’s Catering Icon Dishes Up Lessons for Business Success
As the founder of Bill Hansen Catering and CEO of Hansen Group, 55-year catering veteran Bill Hansen has seen it all when it comes to catered events. He shares his most memorable stories—and the business lessons learned from them—in Plating Up Profits: Miami’s Catering Icon Dishes Up Lessons for Business Success, co-written with CFE Editor-in-Chief Sara Perez Webber. Following is an excerpt from Plating Up Profits, which will be published on Feb. 20, 2025. To pre-order the e-book version, visit amazon.com.
I cut my off-premise catering teeth working at Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, a waterfront mansion on Miami’s Biscayne Bay overlooking Key Biscayne and a handful of homes called Stiltsville—which are literally built on stilts in the shallow offshore waters.
Catering at Vizcaya is not for the faint-hearted. Built in the early 1900s as the winter home of James Deering, cofounder of International Harvester, the lavish mansion’s kitchens are off-limits. You get three hours to build a kitchen some 100 yards from the water’s edge dining area—and set up all the tables, chairs, place settings, bars, and buffets on the terrace.
If dining inside, you only have one hour to set up before guests arrive.
So, the stress level was high as we prepped for a wedding at Vizcaya one Sunday afternoon in December 1992. The wealthy Middle Eastern bride—whose name I’ll remember until I go to my grave—was Fatima, and her wedding ceremony was scheduled to start at 6 p.m. At about 3:30, my team and I were busy kicking open table legs, draping chairs with custom covers, and setting tables, when I noticed a commotion around the bridal planning pioneer of those days, Lois Beinhorn.
Lois was the first planner I ever worked with. Today, anyone who plans their sister’s wedding claims to be a planner. But Lois was a true professional.
Curious, I approached Lois and asked what was going on.
“Bill, you’ll never believe it,” she said. “The bride was getting her final coifs at a downtown Miami hair salon, and when she went to get into her car parked on the street, she discovered a broken window. Her perfectly pressed Vera Wang gown was gone!”
Someone had stolen the bride’s dress just three hours before her walk down the aisle.
Even back then we had large, clunky mobile devices, and Lois’s phone was blowing up with frantic calls from our distressed bride. Where could she find a new dress at this late hour?
By this time on Sundays, the Miracle Mile boutiques in Coral Gables were closed, but Lois had a solution. She flipped through her Rolodex filled with home phone numbers for her vendors and quickly roused one of the bridal salon owners, who was resting at home. The owner raced 10 miles to her store to outfit the panicky bride with a new dress.
Fatima was a perfect size two, so few alterations were needed, but obviously she was going to be late to her own wedding.
Meanwhile, back at Vizcaya, guests were beginning to arrive—and the pressure was mounting. What should we do? What could we do?
My aim is to delight my guests, not distress them, so my team and I jumped into overdrive, opening the bars an hour earlier than planned.
I directed the kitchen to start passing hors d’oeuvres to the confused guests, who were wondering when the ceremony would start.
“Why are we eating and drinking now?” I heard a few ask.
As word of the stolen dress spread quickly among the guests, my team and I did our best to keep them happy—even though we weren’t scheduled to start serving until after the ceremony. One of my company’s mantras paid off that day—be ready for an event an hour early.
About an hour later, Fatima arrived in her beautiful new dress, and soon the ceremony began. The guests, fueled by pre-ceremony cocktails, were in great moods.
With the knot tied, we began dinner pretty much on time, with plenty of time left for toasting, cake-cutting, and—of course—dancing to the beat of a 10-piece band.
At evening’s end, Lois grabbed the cake top, the cake-cutting utensils, and the toasting goblets as the happy couple slipped into the back of an awaiting stretch limo to be whisked away to the Grand Bay Hotel some two miles away, where they would spend their wedding night before jetting off on their honeymoon.
Fast-forward to the next morning, when who should show up at my office but the bride’s brother, looking for lost-and-found items like jewelry, disposable cameras, and even a missing shoe or two.
We’re not responsible for lost items, but we retrieve whatever we can at the end of each event, particularly scouting the area for glassware that may have been left out of sight. For every missing item, the rental firm charges three times the original cost, so we search high and low for hidden items. And, yes, we find other things, too—some unmentionable.
I gave the bride’s brother what we found, and then asked, “Did they find the person who stole your sister’s wedding dress?”
“Yes, Bill, we did.” It was the groom’s former girlfriend.
I thought to myself, How mean can you be? Get over it, girl.
While I’ve never heard of this scenario happening to anyone else, it proves the adage: If it can go wrong, it will.
Not only do successful business teams—like mine and Lois’s—have to expect the unexpected, but we must also go above and beyond what’s expected to make sure our clients are happy. We weren’t responsible for the stolen wedding dress, but we made sure our clients were happy despite the near disaster. Lois took care of the bride while we took care of the waiting guests.
We all only have one chance to get it right.
