by Mathieu Benoit » Thu Jun 12, 2008 3:14 pm
I dug up this old thread while reading back through the archives today.
Roachie and I have held down a steady house gig for a few years now. We do an weekly open mic. In this time I'd had the chance to really get to see the progression of the establishment over time.
What Larry describes is the problem. I'm good enough with numbers to know that to take care of your overhead and still make enough profit to put food on the table, a club owner has to be making a LOT of sales. It's not enough that people are coming in the bar, they have to be drinking. They have to show up early and get poured into a cab at the end of it. A major trend that people see around these parts is kids going out after getting drunk at their pre-party, and maybe getting one drink when they're out, they're showing up between 12 and 1 and the bar barely sees 10 bucks out of their pocket including cover charge.
On Sunday nights at our open mic, there is no cover. So unless people are coming in AND drinking, we really don't have a job, and it's not because we don't have a great rapport with the club owner, because we do. It's because if he can't make ends meet because we're nto drawing in enough revenue then, it's just business.
Fortunately, we attract drinkers. At first there was a handful of people there every week, but the band was getting paid peanuts too. Then I joined and by that time time the client base was reasonable, so we asked for a raise to compensate, and the owner complied happily. Then a lto of time went by, and we were able to see a consistent rise in patrons, and we knew the bar was now having one of their best nights on average. So we asked for another raise, the club owner took some time to run the numbers and make sure that the new numbers supported the request comfortably. When he realized it did, again he was glad to agree to our request.
My point in this is that we've cultivated a crowd, one that spends money on booze, and we keep them coming back every week, and there are new regulars coming in all the time. but we do our best to cultivate and nurture this crowd. We demonstrate to them that we have value.
That's it... bands around here that get paid well have demonstrated consistent value. I truly believe that on average if people always felt that you'd give them value in your performance, they'll keep coming back.
Now there are many other things that we could do to improve in this department, like changing up our set lists and such, but so far we are doign well, mostly because when we are on that stage, we mean it. We could also try to intice people to come out a bit earlier. We may not be the best players around, but we'll give you everything we got.
It seems to be working. but we are very mindful of the bar's situation, we always want to make profits for the bar. That's the only way we're ever going to make the money we want to make around here.