Speaker 1- Spent $100 in Facebook ads and got $10,000 in bookings. -
Speaker 2Yes. - That's amazing. It's an infinite money glitch. - Yeah. Our highest month has been 22.5. - Wow. - And then on average, we're right at like 16. - Do you have employees? - No, just my wife and I. - Really? You still have a job? - Yeah. - No way. - I have three churches right now. - Really? - That are every Sunday. -
Speaker 1Holy cow. That covers your rent. -
Speaker 2Exactly. They had goat hanging from the ceiling and they were taking torches and cooking pieces of the goat. -
Speaker 1If someone really wanted to start this business on a budget, what's the least it would take? - You could do it for under 3,000. - So my guest today rented out an empty church in a strip mall parking lot, spent a little money cleaning it up, not as much as you might think, and today, just a year later, makes $16,000 a month, part-time, no employees, doing this on the weekend, renting it out to birthday parties, anniversaries, et cetera. Here's what I didn't expect: he spent $100 on Facebook ads that got him $10,000 worth of bookings in one day. He has three customers that pay him every single month that cover all of his rent, and they never even throw a party. And then he has a QR code on the wall that turns every party into four more parties. It's a viral referral marketing loop. Oh, and one night, he came back to check in on a party and found a goat hanging from the ceiling. If you have a wife that loves to host, she's gonna love this. What first gave you the idea to start?
Speaker 2A venue? So my wife and I would do lots of events. And for our kids, we have a six and four-year-old, and so we would do big birthday parties, and they do a fall party each year, which has grown really big, where have some kind of large activity where it's decorating pumpkins or decorating hay, something large, and hayrides and that kind of stuff. And you would rent out other venues? We would actually, we have a good-sized house and yard, so we would do all that in our yard. But we would rent, and then for our second child, I said, "You know what, we should do somewhere else." So I started looking for venues to have a baby shower. And my wife was with me, and I went to a bunch and just was not satisfied. We ended up choosing one, and during that conversation, and towards the tail end of COVID, we said, "You know what, we should do this." 'Cause we also heard about people saying they couldn't book restaurants and other stuff, but you could book venues that had laxer laws, I guess, at that point, if you just brought your family to a venue. So we said, "We should look into that." And so we spent about three years just kind of, you know, playing with the idea and looking for venues, looking for a place that would work for us. And we were really close to signing leases on like four venues until we found the one that we wanted. And we're at now, so we, so yeah, it was just, we thought we could do, and then after hosting her baby shower- - At that venue? - At that venue, and the price I paid just for the venue- - What'd you pay? - I think I paid like 2,200 bucks. - Okay. - And I still had to come in and decorate with friends. That was- - For like an afternoon? - Yeah, it was a Sunday from like 11 to 6:00 PM, and we probably weren't even there till six. And so it was a brunch. So I hired a chef and they did like the omelet stations, and, and all the other stuff. And hired, not only hired the chefs, but also hired the, hired the team to come decorate with myself. So on top of the 2,200, I probably spent another two to, probably two to $3,000 on everything else. And we were like, wow, we, that we could have, we could, and we could have done a better job, we thought. And no slight to them, but it wasn't, it wasn't a huge venue. - What type of venue? - It was in a strip mall. And it was probably about 1,200 square feet. - Just like a- - It was like a narrow- - Like a retail. - Like a retail, yeah, like a retail space. And it was pretty narrow. And I think we hosted 60 people. And then we said, you know what? We could do this for the price I paid. I was like, we could definitely do this. -
Speaker 1I mean, I used to rent 1,200 square foot retail spaces for my iPhone repair store. And you're looking at like two to four grand a month. - Yeah. - So you're thinking, wow, they just made their whole payment in one afternoon. -
Speaker 2Exactly. - Hmm. - Exactly, from, yeah, from just our booking. - Yeah. - And so we started looking around and the one thing that did say, make one of the things that made me say we can do this. Then we just intentionally started shopping venues, taking a tour, sitting with them. And I would go into all these places and they would say, all right, what date do we want? And I'd say, you know, I want October 10th. They said, come on back to the office. And they dust off their- - Yeah. - Desk and they have the large- - Old school. - File calendars. - Yeah. - And she's like going through and said, okay, yep. I got you on the 12th. We have that available. I'm gonna write, I'm gonna take my yellow highlighter. - Yeah. - And when you book it, I'll come back with my red highlighter. - Most low tech ever. - Yeah. And so I said to my wife, you know, I've been a technical PM for a lot and I've got an interest in technology anyway. I was like, this could be so much easier than they make it. And why is no one doing it? This way. - Yeah. - And so that really got the gears turning and then we found a place. - Okay. - Essentially. - What types of places did you start shopping for? - Retail, stand alone. What I tell people now, if anybody's interested, you know, don't fall in love with the property. You gotta see what, you can have the most beautiful property that has horrible parking. - Parking, so it's all about parking. - Yeah. - It's all about parking. 'Cause there's some spaces that were in downtown Atlanta that were beautiful. And we were wondering why the rent was so cheap, but it's because that it may be two, 3,000 square feet, good size, but you can't park there. - Yeah. - Or you have to direct people to a parking deck that's $25. - Yeah. -
Speaker 1So parking. - And sometimes they're not even walkable areas either. -
Speaker 2Yeah. - If it's a walkable area, then you don't really need parking. - Yeah. And a lot of them weren't. - Yeah. - So that, and speaking to landlords, a lot of landlords did not want, a lot of them didn't want event venues. -
Speaker 1Maybe because of the parking or just the liability,
Speaker 2a bunch of people. - The liability, people, that was, I was surprised. It was so many spaces that we liked that they came back and said, well, sorry, you wanna do, 'cause they'd asked for your business plan or what you're gonna do. And they would say, sorry, we, nice to meet you, but we can't do event space in here. - Wow. - So, you know, we continued to shop and we eventually found one, it was in a retail plaza, it was a church. - Oh, interesting. - And so. - Standalone? - No, not standalone. - I guess in a retail. - Yeah. - Okay. - And it was a church and. - How many square feet? - 3000. - Okay. And they were moving? - Yeah, so what happened is they, they were building a convenience store across the street and in same owners as the thing. And so as the plaza and in Georgia, there's some laws that you can't have a daycare or a church within 500 yards of somewhere that sells liquor. And because the convenience store is, you know, $12,000 a month rental property, they told the church like, hey, your lease is ending. So. - The owner had to choose. - Yeah, owner had to choose. - Yeah. - And he chose to, chose the convenience store. So we just happened to be peeking in the window and someone from church was inside working, came out and said, hey, would you like to take a look around? And she literally gave us a tour. We told her what we were doing. She's like, oh, I'm gonna put in a word for you to the owner. She's like, unfortunately we have to go, but we've found a new, we've found a new venue. So, so we're good. And that ended up being- - How many square feet? -
Speaker 13000. - 3000. And it's perfect 'cause it's basically already an event venue, but it's not. It's different types of events. -
Speaker 2Different types of events. So it still took a lot of work. They had carpet inside, things that weren't suitable for weekly events. -
Speaker 1What city was this in? -
Speaker 2Stone Mountain, Georgia. -
Speaker 1Oh, I know where that, where the big Stone Mountain. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I used to go there every summer. - Okay, yeah, yeah. - On the way up to wrestling camp. -
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah. So yeah, right in Stone Mountain. So right, you know, close, eight miles from the city, still, you know, still great location. -
Speaker 1Okay, so 3000 square feet. Give me, give me an idea of what types of businesses were at that intersection. Like what type, what part of town is this? -
Speaker 2So it's a town that, it's Stone Lake, but now it's, we may be actually, annexed into a little town called Pine Lake. - Okay. - So the Pine Lake post office is next door, Pine Lake police department. Across the street is the actual Pine Lake. Can't see it from our venue, but there's a lake. It's not a huge lake, but you know, it's a lake. So there's people that live on Pine Lake. So we had, we had those people. There was a family dollar, I believe, next door. - Okay. - And the venue that we went into, or the plaza, was pretty much empty when we took it. - Oh, that's, which is usually not a good sign. -
Speaker 1No. - Lots of parking. - Lots of parking, 170 spots, I believe. - Wow. There's going to be less parking once there are more tenants. -
Speaker 2Yes. So we had to, we had to submit a, a business plan and give a full detail to the owners of the building. And they said, wow, this is really good. And so we signed the lease, but lo and behold to us, they started targeting other event places or event venues. 'Cause they thought that was a good thing to bring into their wait but plaza you had already signed the lease we had signed the lease nothing was in our lease i said you could not have another event venue was that a regret yes so um at one point in time we've been there since uh 2024 okay at one point in time at the end of 2024 there was five venues and what yeah in the same shopping the same shopping center so they had moved in four others besides us and none of them
Speaker 1had non-competes in their lease
Speaker 2no that's crazy
Speaker 1that not one of them was like not one
Speaker 2hey yeah and so it was weird we would see people moving in hey what do you what are you guys doing and we had one occasion where they're like we don't want to tell you and we realized because they were felt they were in competition with us but there's no one there now it's just us so we've outlasted all of them what month in 2024 did you launch uh so we
Speaker 1signed our lease
Speaker 2in um like august okay so two years
Speaker 1ago yeah and
Speaker 2then when were you open november of 2025 wow it took that long took that long so you have to pay rent that whole time we we we we had about six months free rent okay so we negotiated a pretty good deal um we went into it thinking um that we could do the reconstruction a little bit faster than we did and that's our that's our biggest regret and we're not going to do it again we're not going to do it again we're not going to do it again um being cheap well not even cheap just what we could afford i did most of it myself yeah so nights and weekends i still was working a regular nine to five so nights and weekends i'd be in there changing ceilings we put up a new entry wall we changed the bathrooms do you have skills in this or have i couldn't follow you i could follow yeah i could follow a good direction
Speaker 1so youtube university let me be clear so like you've been open less than a year right yes we'll get to your numbers in a minute but the only thing you were working on is we launched a new like doing events. Seems like they make a lot of money. Seems like they're old school and we can be, we can have better technology. That's kind of what you're working with. You still don't kind of know. You're kind of hoping, praying if we build this, they will come. Is that right? That is. And
Speaker 2when we started putting very little marketing, but a little bit of marketing out there just to see and test. And so we, our official grand opening was November of 2025, but we did some events. We maybe did 10 events that prior year. And we learned from each of those. And some of those weren't even profitable. Like we gave somebody a full wedding and reception for $3,500. Yeah. And I still see them posting the pictures saying the most amazing wedding ever. And we, and so we learned from that, that helped us gear our pricing structure to what it is now. How did you have
Speaker 110 events before
Speaker 2you were done? Um, because it just, it wasn't perfect. But it was suitable. Like once we had new tile floors in, once the bathrooms were done, once the walls were painted, we made, we didn't have an entry wall. Um, but it was good enough. Yeah. And, and we would shop and we would shop it to people saying we didn't shop it enough, but we shopped it a little bit. We said, Hey, we're come take a tour. We're not a hundred percent, but this is what you get. And this is why you're getting such a great price. So we did, we did about 10 of those events and we were probably, we could have probably did 50 of those events, but we were scared to take them. And both of us are slight perfectionist. And, you know, eventually once we got to November, like, look, we, we have to do, we can't, we're losing rip the bandaid off. Yeah. We're losing so much money because we're paying rent in this empty building. Essentially. What was your rent? Uh, about 3,000, 3,000 a month.
Speaker 1Okay. Which is not bad. I mean, no, no. 10 bucks a foot. Yeah. Yeah. Um, now where did you find these 10 customers?
Speaker 2Uh, Instagram essentially posting organic, just posting organically. And they came to us, no paid marketing or paid media.
Speaker 1Is this on a new Instagram page for the venue or your page or your new for the, for the venue? Okay. Yeah. Do you guys have experience with Instagram? Like organic content? Just my own, but I started
Speaker 2converting people over to the new page
Speaker 1as well. Okay. So you start a brand new Instagram page. Yeah. You're just doing like vertical videos. Like here's our venue. Or are we doing like building public? Like watch me build this event.
Speaker 2And you, uh, a little bit of both. So what I learned from my studio 10 years ago that we were the best kept secret and no one knew about us because I didn't want to share it until I thought it was perfect.
Speaker 1And it's, that's out of like insecurity fear, right? Which is not a big insecurity decisions
Speaker 2from, no, it's horrible. And even though we did a better job, we didn't do the best job, but it was a lot of, and I started realizing videos of us pulling up carpet or my kids in there with paintbrushes outperformed all the other still outperform other stuff that we do today where we pay people to do stuff. So, yeah. So we realized that, you know, we're building, this is like, we started with us, the key signing and, and it was also none of our friends knew. I don't think in our parents knew we had been kind of working on this and secrets that everybody found out at the same time. Well, you know, we, you guys acquired a space. So then, but they knew us as always throwing parties, but they're like, oh, that's great. So, um, so those, those organic things is what helped. So we'd have people. And then we didn't have, we didn't have pricing. I think when the first person reached out to us, they're like, Hey, so how much is it?
Speaker 1Yeah, exactly. I'm surprised you
Speaker 2reached out. So, so, you know, we should have doubled down on that and we should have said, look, we'll rent you to unfinished. Venue. Yeah. And that would have paid for in hindsight, that would have paid for, and we could have moved faster.
Speaker 1Yeah. But you know, is it safe to say that you posting about the venue in this neighborhood kind of grew the market? Like there were people that were gonna have events anyway, but they were probably gonna do it at a friend's house or something. And when they saw your posts, it kind of pushed them over the edge. Yeah. You know what? Maybe we should just get a place. Is that accurate? I think so. Grow the market by posting.
Speaker 2Yeah. Cause one thing, even with paid. Promotion I've said, look, we should be superstars in our own neighborhood. There's there. So with there's 7,000 single family homes within three miles of our venue. So like all of our paid needs, everybody they need to, my goal is when I'm pumping gas, people say, Hey, Justin, do you, do you own the, do you own the hall? And that's what we really target in because a lot of people still come to us like, Hey, I never knew you were here. We get that every day. And so then even when the signage changed outside the big eight foot neon sign above the eight foot long above our, above our sign and the windows all have say the hall in the windows now, and we're, we're pressing to help pressing now to get our landlord to paint the actual brick. If we can get that, I think that would really change of the whole building of the whole facade. And so, but that presence there, especially in a building where nobody's doing anything. So now those other venues are gone. All of them, all those other venues are gone.
Speaker 1You plus four or you plus five us plus four. So it was five in like the first three months. Yep. So he just went hard. I'm assuming he's recollecting a conversation you must've had. We're like, man, this place is perfect for a venue.
Speaker 2And yeah. Ooh, is it now? Is that kind of what happened? I believe that's definitely what happened, but you know, it wasn't it for whatever reason that didn't bother me. Like I still said, we're going to run our own race. And I thought that, and also I would talk to those venues and they would be like, yeah, I don't do Facebook. Like that's not gonna it's word of mouth.
Speaker 1They Justin, was it mostly like existing venue businesses moving there? Or was it people like you starting from scratch?
Speaker 2People like me starting from scratch.
Speaker 1That's crazy. There would be that much, that many people starting an event menu.
Speaker 2And now the one of the women had a dance studio. And so she would have dance studio during the day. And then people would rent her blank studio at night for events. So she moved to our spaces. She had an existing dance business. And she moved to a bigger space thinking she could do more events. But it just wasn't actually with her. Unfortunately, she didn't do the right paperwork, you know, didn't have her occupancy and that stuff. And she was had actually had a large party in there one night and police shut her down. They say, you know, you're violating fire code and all that stuff. So, you know, and that was, that was an other thing too, that took us a long time too, is it took six months just to get our fire code inspection. And so and get our occupancy. How could you have avoided that? I don't know if we could have. I will say after three months of waiting, even I tried to at least be in their office one to two times a week. And that was difficult my schedule. I wouldn't win every day if I could have. And finally, they just got tired of me. Yeah, city or DeKalb County was like, Okay, let's help this guy out. And it was some miscommunication. We were told we didn't need a didn't need an entertainment license because we weren't serving food and people were actually renting from us. And then but it really did require entertainment license. So I took good notes. I wasn't trying to get anybody in trouble. I was able to direct them to who told me didn't and that person actually admitted to Oh, you know, I was that was my second day on the job. I didn't know he didn't need this. But that one not needing that sent us back four months, because then the clock restarts 12 grand on everything. Yeah. So it was very expensive. But I started going down there and saying, Hey, can I speak to the Commissioner started bringing muffins. And I just to the point where like, one of the commissioners like, Hey, let me just drive over there with you now and see if i can get some money because i was like i'll just it's like you guys are costing me thousands of dollars a month so yeah i i need to you need to know my name yeah and eventually that got it through and i have a good relationship with him now so when it's time now when we renew each year it goes pretty fast yeah but um yeah that that was
Speaker 1the biggest thing how did all those competitors survive like do they have to break their lease or sure they broke
Speaker 2their lease to leave because yeah they had to because we're all in three to five-year leases and they had to break it to leave but they also a lot of them i i know for a fact didn't weren't doing the right paperwork stuff um which to me was always vital um and i don't think they expected some of the other expenses that come along with it yeah and they just i don't think they were good operators they just they none of them they were all stuck on word of mouth none of them um and they didn't do the there there was one that's was next door to us now that's actually a gym which is good i like having a gym there but um they were almost 4 000 square feet and so but they they put in bright red industrial carpet oh they had you know like the old school church padded chairs that you have and the church tables it looked like a church yeah when you went in there and i and then i didn't think that was no business and and so the owner had a thing he's like it's great you guys can all work together because if somebody's busy they send business the other way and i was like it doesn't doesn't work that way don't even talk to me yeah so but i would go into them and then eventually they started coming to us and like wow your places looks nothing like ours and the other ones they just paint the walls they did nothing cement floor you know they just paint the walls and we had you know we're big on tech so we have screens on the outside of the building screens inside we have a 10 by 16 led wall in the main hall so they would come to us and realize we weren't running the same race
Speaker 1yeah either okay so you said from the time you signed the lease the time you opened you could have had up to 50 customers events if you wanted that's all from just organic that was all from organic did you have anything like going viral or was it just
Speaker 2the right people view viewing your content i think it was the right people you know and engagement we tried to engage you know engagement the right people um the right engagement and we did a few like who's like like uh no we did a few like community events okay where we would like at my daughter's private school we we got like three parents we just sat out there a booth and handed out flyers said hey if you don't know we have a we have an event venue where right down the street and it was a lot of that and people just didn't just didn't know we existed yeah there'd be a little community like um some of the farmers markets would have days where if you weren't selling produce you could come pitch your other idea so do that i would go to the south the cab or the cab uh chamber of commerce their business meetings that they'd have on tuesday where it was just networking and everybody's like oh didn't know you were here and we had really great prices at that point so we got a lot of interest just just from that and then once we hit november and did said look we're not done we still wanted a wall and some other things but we said we got to go so we did a full scale then we ramped up the paid social and then we were we were doing tours six days a week wow from
Speaker 1paid ads on paid ads yeah
Speaker 2facebook and instagram yeah facebook and instagram what were your ads like what did they look like at first they were just stagnant pick pictures of a post because we were running specials like our we have a gold package that comes with a lot of decor that package is now i think we sell it for 2800 which is still a great deal for one day for yeah six hour block okay we were doing that for a thousand bucks okay and i think i booked like 10 of them in a day whoa because it was such a great price it's still profitable still profitable still we
Speaker 1need the cash so it worked so 10 grand in a day in bookings going to take five to ten days for all of us to be used but how much an ad spend would it cost to get 10 like that that was that was less
Speaker 2than a hundred dollars in ad spend
Speaker 1yeah so spent a hundred dollars in facebook ads and got ten thousand dollars in bookings yes that's wild yeah were you like geo fencing the ads to only show to people in that area we and what
Speaker 2we found we did wrong is we were actually all of atlanta we were doing 22 miles out of us to catch atlanta sandy springs marietta we were attempting because you're
Speaker 1like atlanta's right there yeah why
Speaker 2not but since you've learned now we've learned just focus on you know our our zip our meet five five to seven miles five to seven that's the
Speaker 1sweet spot yeah that's the sweet spot okay do you live in stone mountain i do so you're like a local you know yeah i live about my my i'm four
Speaker 2minutes away from the event okay okay how much did it cost you to build it out say it was it was an ad in the twenty thousand dollar range that's it yeah twenty to like almost thirty thousand i'm
Speaker 1sure i thought you're gonna say a hundred at least no like thirty three thousand square feet tell me what all you did so you painted it painted it new floors ripped out the old floor put floors are the
Speaker 2most expensive thing tile yeah lbt okay like luxury vinyl title okay yeah um we redid the stage there was a stage there so we had carpet on it ripped that off put i wish we would have like malalite or one of those staging things but we went with a dark wood with real real wood stage it looks nice but i think i would do something different in the future redid the bathrooms tile in all the bathrooms um the led screen uh security cameras and cameras cameras security system uh created a prep kitchen we can't cook on premise but we have commercial warmers that you can use uh commercial warmers uh added sinks to that prep area and like stainless steel countertops
Speaker 1that kind of thing if you did if you were able to cook on premise do you think you'd make more money
Speaker 2or is it not i don't know but my the difference in insurance you play when fire hazard fire yeah because it's like a restaurant at that point i don't think for the difference i'd pay in insurance i don't think it would value
Speaker 1juice isn't worth this yeah okay
Speaker 2yeah um but we do get asked that a lot um but we tell people if you know most caterers just bring their hot trays anyway right and we have the commercial um warmers stick them in keeps them to temperature warmer that you needed and then we i built a big chafing cart buffet that lights from below oh cool and so um people drop their trays in there and those are also i built the dj booth i built the chafing table i built the bar those videos were great you know come with me as i go to home depot and build build a yeah build a dj those were great organic videos all of those i don't want to say viral but all those did very well yeah on building stuff for the space if you were
Speaker 1to list out like the top five types of events you have what would be number one through five one one would be
Speaker 2birthday parties okay what what age we do a lot of that 50 through 70 really yeah okay and i think that's just because of our area too it seems to be we get older clientele um and i and i'm happy to have that because um they have money yeah they have money and i don't know if i really want to do too many 21 year old birthday parties either um just for the liability yeah just for the liability and stuff so but yeah we do a lot of like that 50 to 70 seems to be the sweet and they're doing like 50 year birthday parties 60 year 50 55 okay and with some of our now mail um our direct mail marketing we're able to pull birthdays so because it has the driver's license information we pull it so i target ddm yeah your direct mail yeah okay and i and so now i target three months out to that milestone birthday so if you turn in 55 in january i'm gonna start hitting you now so i can touch you three times before your birthday do you have
Speaker 1any numbers on what the return on investment is on the direct mail on that strategy on that strategy
Speaker 2not yet i just
Speaker 1started doing but it
Speaker 2works but i we've been getting people to come in so it works
Speaker 130 50 cents per postcard yeah yeah it's
Speaker 2like 50 and you know exactly who
Speaker 1you're sending it to exactly okay and it's
Speaker 2just the thing is you have to touch them though three times that's where it
Speaker 1starts getting a little people send one and they check a box and they're like why didn't i get results it doesn't work
Speaker 2it doesn't work yeah you can sell one how it works and so i think now what we're going to do too is we're starting to design our own um birthday cards in the hall and we're now we're going to send those for the three month out people yeah hey we're just catching early happy birthday yeah hope to see you at the hall and so we have began people like hey i got this i didn't know that you're i live in a neighborhood right behind you didn't know you were here and i passed by this every day i didn't know what the hall meant when i saw the sign so um so that that's
Speaker 1been a great strategy so what is a birthday worth to you get give me a breakdown of like an average birthday revenue and profit and then like a birthday with upsets and then like a birthday with upsells revenue and profit so our
Speaker 2average our average intake is about 1800 per party six hours six hours and i six uh we you know we're we're juggling between six and eight but i like six because when people say six is not enough time for me to come in and decorate i say well great that's why you need to step up to one of our packages where we can do the decor but when people do decorate usually they come in an hour before hour to two before the six hours yeah no no hour to two during the six hours so your party would be from six to midnight okay you'd come in from six to eight decorate your party starts at eight usually done by 11 to 12 to break down okay um and 1800 for something like yeah and many many moons ago i was a dj and most parties people really only party party for three to four hours yeah people say oh we need 10 hours like nobody's going that long yeah yeah dj don't even have music to last you that long so okay we find that six hours because that gives them four hours to just truly party yep and that seems like a lot of fun yeah i think that's a lot of fun i think that's a lot of fun i think that seems to be the sweet
Speaker 1spot what about a six-hour party with upsells what what does that
Speaker 2run so our basic packages are blank canvas which is just 1000 okay and so that's just tables and chairs in
Speaker 1addition to the
Speaker 21800 no i'm saying our average our average party is 1800 okay but our base price okay that's as cheap as it can that's as cheap as it can be okay and so uh what we find is upsells will be the screens so that's the biggest upsell if you get just a blank canvas people come in and they want the screens on because usually we're running something or running a slideshow and saying this is what your party could look like um they want linen um you know tablecloths napkins chargers tablescapes for the actual table balloons that kind of thing do
Speaker 1you store all that stuff on site or
Speaker 2unfortunately yeah okay i need to get some storage so it's also a lot of me bringing stuff from my house okay to there yeah so um and my wife does and i'm like oh my god i need to get some storage so i'm like oh my god i need to get some my wife was a interior designer at once upon a time so she does all of that so we try to move people towards the package so if you do a twenty eight hundred dollar package or four thousand dollar package you're going to get all that you just have to show up with your food yeah and we've really even been working with some of our caterers that are on preferred vendors let's just see how can we have food packages even because what we find the biggest thing people don't want to think about it they want to show up and and party yeah and we want them to we we want to we're selling convenience yeah yeah that that's we're not selling space we're selling convenience
Speaker 1and so do you find you get customers from people that come to events you know what i'm saying we do and i market to them it's like inbound like it's like a it's like a built-in viral marketing so one
Speaker 2thing we have discussed part of one of my favorite tools in the venue is we use a thing called instant spotlight from a small company called a start that started working on us two years ago right now we're the only company or venue in georgia with this but on our led wall we have a thing that we call instant spotlight with the hall so on the outside when you walk into our building there's 40 inch screens on each pillar when you walk in there's a qr code on those there's ones on the tables one in there and we tell your guests look your party starts outside let's scan the qr code so throughout the night every time they say happy birthday aunt sarah or they do a video or they take a selfie those pictures show up all throughout the building and people go crazy over that people love being able to take a selfie and it show up and then the party capturing that data yes so they have to you know of course their phone number email and so that all goes into my funnel system and then also if you did 40 pictures if you took 40 pictures throughout the night i'm assuming you had a good time and so that helps me market to those people and then also uh our google it's all automated so hey did you have a good good time we would love there when so we send everybody the um the the gallery at the end of the night so if they took 200 pictures everybody that took a picture is going to get all 200 and said hey it looks like you had a great time and on sarah's birthday um if you did we'd love for you to give the hall five stars they give five stars shows up on google if they give less than four i actually it comes back to me an email and i can address it but the biggest part is that's the largest funnel i have now so if your party has 120 people and 60 of them take photos that's now information i can use yeah as my lead you have you have any math on of those 60 people how many will book their own event so right now my latest numbers is about is about eight percent of those people have have booked
Speaker 1stuff no i think we could get it higher so if you have 120 people at an event half of them upload pictures eight percent of those will end up booking an event no way
Speaker 2that's what we've had so eight percent with that that's like an infinite money glitch like four people yeah from each thing so that's that's been great and i think we can even get that number higher with with
Speaker 1the um that's amazing yeah it's just it's
Speaker 2just it's an infinite money glitch yeah and and and we we've we've loved it and it's a value add um it is an upcharge to get that i was gonna ask so you're
Speaker 1charging them to get marketed to yeah
Speaker 2those up but if you get one of our packages we throw it in sure but if you just get the blank we upcharge you for the screen okay and and also the birthday girl or birthday person um we say hey what's your cash app and they or zelle or them or whatever they give it to us so as they upload pictures and you put in your permission to upload picture when you hit submit your picture is also a tab that says hey you want to tip the birthday girl yeah so if they tip the birthday girl ten dollars then across the screen it says aunt jessica just tipped sarah twenty dollars oh wow then it gets everybody else to say everybody else say oh well sarah tip twenty that is brilliant i gotta do thirty and and of course the the the uh the guest of honor loves that feature yeah but even if you weren't going to take a picture it still gets you to log into the system to try to tip the yeah the birthday person so you see
Speaker 1a correlation between the uh event attendee that uploads more pictures and the likelihood that they're going to book
Speaker 2their own yes i have seen that so the likely the person that uploaded 40 50 60 pictures they had they had the the good time and they liked seeing themselves on the screen they were clearly paying attention to oh or my picture because then you get pictures that aren't even from the event yeah people are posted baby pictures of aunt sarah and just uploading them because they had them on their phone and there's a correlation of that person had a better time than yeah the person that did zero pictures right how
Speaker 1expensive does a six-hour event get if you sell them everything you've got the for just the party with the
Speaker 2party the party the party the party the you're just showing up with food and what's your profit on like a four thousand dollar event versus a one thousand dollar event so on a one thousand it's essentially whatever my marketing went into to maybe get that person it would vary but essentially that's almost all profit because they're going to tell me where they want the tables and i'm there do you set up the tables yourself i do if they say we want four on each side we want a dance floor in the middle then i'll do that yeah how do they get in you just have like a key code i'm there i'm there so we're still working on that but i'm there for every event i like being there to touch in the beginning and then come back at the end because we have a checklist to say look can't do this can't burn candles can't do this i need you to sign this then i need to come back and assure that they no holes in the dry no holes in drywall no tvs ripped off the screen you know yeah all the weird things yeah that could happen what kind of stuff like that have you had the strangest thing we've had lately is and it was my fault we have the screens in our venue uh we have we just moved into another venue now which has smaller screens i left the remotes in the back and um during they didn't pay for anything so i showed them we have bluetooth speakers large speakers they said look we don't want dj we just want speakers and they said can we get youtube on the screens i said no you can't but that's why you have the speakers um we designed whatever image was on the screen anyways i'm sitting at home and i was like get a notification thank you for your youtube um music subscription so then i turn on the cameras and i did leave the remote i was my fault but they so ordered a year subscription of youtube music on you on me because my card is attached to the card is attached to the digital stuff in the back so selfish yeah that's like so we've had that that was only a couple of weeks ago so did you charge for it yeah i i went i was i didn't charge them everything because it was like 112 for the year google was kind enough to refund to explain what happened they took the charge off um we say no burning of anything open we had an event i left i came back hour into the event to make sure it's going good this was in early days and they had a they had a it was either a lamb or a goat hanging from the they were taking torches and cooking pieces of the goat it's like a cultural thing yeah it was a cultural thing and uh they on and i was like what are you guys doing you can't a
Speaker 1phrase no was it like skinned and gutted it was like it was ready to prepare to yeah it was ready to prepare to eat
Speaker 2skin and gutted they had all of our gut all the guts and just a regular one of our rolling trash cans with no bag in it oh and they they had all of our guts and just a regular one of our rolling trash cans with no bag in it knocked over the trash can on their way out the door on purpose no on accident but I had blood in my tile on the front. So that's the worst experience. Did they apologize?
Speaker 1Not really. They're like, oh, we didn't know we could do this. I didn't know I could hang a goat from your ceiling and knock its guts everywhere and try to roast it.
Speaker 2Yeah. And so, yeah. So there's a couple of deposits we've had to keep, which is massive. People have spilled like lemonade, stuff like that, which is the worst. And then your floor is super sticky. So we've had to keep deposits, but like the goat stuff. And we realized, and now it's cultural because we do, the area we live in has a strong Ethiopian, Somalian, Hristen, just East African population. So now I've had to say, look, I know this is a thing. Because I've talked to other event venues and they've told me the same exact thing. And we were comparing pictures and they're like, oh, yeah, I had a guy hang a cow. And so I have to say, look, you can't do this. Sorry, I'm not trying. And, you know, I try to do it with baby gloves because, you know, not every. You've got to be respectful. And I don't want them to just assume that I think every Ethiopian family's got to hang a cow. Right. But we've had to add it to our contract.
Speaker 1That's a no-win situation for you. Yeah. If you say it, you could offend them. If you don't say it, you might hurt that goat.
Speaker 2So now I say it in the contract. And so please read over your contract. And if you haven't read over that and I see it, then I can come do it. Yeah. So that's the that's. And we found there's there's cultural things where some cultures are upset that you want them to take out the trash. Yeah. And stuff. And because we've had cultures where the women do all the cleaning and I've got there like wrap up in and there's all this trash. And it's the 80 year old grandma says, well, I can't lift the trash. I said, well, there's seven guys over there. They're like, well, they don't touch trash. So. So then it's things then I have to go say, hey, I don't want to keep your deposit, sir. But you've got 12 able able bodied men here. Yeah. I need you guys to take out the trash. Come on. Oh, my God. So they the women either can or don't want to say it. So I've learned from those things because that's that's a real relevant thing that happens at a lot of parties. Yeah. And I have to say, look, I know maybe cultural. You have the young ladies that are that are supposed to clean up. But I need one. Yeah. Oh, I got to keep your deposit.
Speaker 1How much is the deposit? Three fifty. For everyone. For everyone. So like with the goat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You kept the deposit. Yeah. And did they understand it? They did. You probably don't want to keep deposit. No, I don't. It leaves a bad taste.
Speaker 2Yeah, I don't. I don't at all.
Speaker 1I tried. Yes, I made three hundred fifty bucks.
Speaker 2I try to do everything to not. Yeah. Because then I'm losing, probably losing a customer. And we've found with our our especially we have a large Mexican population south of us. We have a large East African population. But I found my East African populations like. We we from one bridal shower we've done, we've booked like ten events from that same community. And and unfortunately, sometimes they call us last minute. We had one, two, third, two weekends ago. They call us on Wednesday nights and, hey, we need a full party on Friday. Hmm. We're like, OK, well, we'll make it work. Yeah. But they stick with us. And we and now even in my marketing, I have some marketing that solely is Somalian marketing interest. I have some marketing that's solely smart.
Speaker 1Uh, Ethiopian Facebook ads.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. And even, um, through flyers and things that we we hand out. But on Instagram ads. Yeah. Um, I find that with the East African communication, Facebook does way better than Instagram. OK. So maybe it's just more, you know, more, more eyeballs on Facebook than Instagram. Right. Um, Instagram does a lot better with our younger crowds, people selling, celebrating the twenty fifth, thirtieth and weddings. Weddings do great on Instagram.
Speaker 1OK, so your percentage profit is about the same on a four thousand versus one thousand dollar event because your cost is like the overhead, your power bill, your Internet, your utilities, three thousand dollar a month rent. You've already paid for all the tables up front. So you need to acquire the customer. Let's say it costs one hundred dollars. Yeah. What are your costs in a four thousand?
Speaker 2And so in the four thousand we offer step and repeat. So, you know, the large banners you ever see, like a premiere of a movie and a star. Celebrities are standing in front of like a large vinyl sign that has advertisement stuff. So we do step and repeats because sometimes they want their name or birthday girl, those things. So that that costs money. So you get that printed for them? Yeah, we get them printed for them. The design, you work with the printer. Uh huh. And unfortunately now I've kind of become a design guy because people don't know what they want. Yeah. Luckily, chat is able to handle a lot of that legwork for me, but their designs, they also get standees like standing cutouts. They want like six foot cardboard cutouts of themselves. Those are big up sales. Balloons, balloons are pricey on people don't think they are. But if you want true balloons like the balloons you see at events, they're not the dollar store. Wal-Mart balloons. We have a balloon vendor, so though, you know, balloons for an event can be two hundred dollars.
Speaker 1So your percentage profit is higher on the one thousand dollar event. Yes. Because they're just using table and chairs that you bought years ago. Yes. So four thousand, how much profit you make on a four thousand dollar event? About thirty two hundred. Wow. Better than I would have thought. Yeah. Okay. So seventy percent. Yeah. And then ninety-ish percent on a one thousand dollar event? About ninety-ish, yeah. And then ranges from ninety to seventy anywhere between one and four thousand?
Speaker 2Yeah. Okay. And we also now we're targeting weddings. Okay. So our wedding package is seven thousand. Wow. So we've done two of those. Okay. And we still feel like we're a great price for weddings. And that's six hours? Yeah. Now weddings all complete day because it's so much legwork goes into it, you can't. Yeah. Get the day. Are you trying to do two events a day? Like is that a full day? That's my goal. I try to. We don't do a lot of that. We try to. Okay. Now we have the weddings that was of course a whole day. And now we acquired the space next door to us. Oh. You rented it?
Speaker 1Last month, yes.
Speaker 2How many square feet is that? That's only eleven, thirteen hundred. So you're forty-three hundred now? Square feet? Yes. Wow. And we may, and there's a space in between us, which is weird. Hmm. Because that tenant has left, so our goal is to acquire that. How many can you comfortably fit in forty-three hundred? So with tables and chairs, oh well, we only use one at a time. So with tables and chairs and our forty-three, or thirty, our three thousand square foot, we try to keep it to one-twenty. Okay. We can sometimes do one-fifty, but if you want one-fifty, that means you can't get a dance floor. Okay. It just depends on your event. So people that have a large, like a repass, like a memorial service. They're not dancing there, so you could do a lot more tables and seats. Yeah. But if it's a graduation or a birthday party, try to keep to one-twenty-ish because we can leave the middle open for your dance floor and still have adequate room. And we don't want to put ten people at a table, because one thing I track is when there's more people at our table, our reviews are not as good and people aren't having a good of a time. Interesting. Because they feel like they're squished. Squished. Yeah. So when you do eight at a table, that seems to be the sweet spot. Okay. So I
Speaker 1try to stay there. Okay. So we're talking like twenty-five square feet per person, give or take?
Speaker 2Yeah. Okay. Something like that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And so then in the new space, if you're doing tables and chairs, we try to keep it to sixty. Mm-hmm. But when we've done weddings, the beauty of now doing that is we could do a hundred, hundred and twenty, like theater style, just in the chairs and still aisle for the bride. So now we can have the ceremony there and move the reception next door to the bride. Okay. So we can have a bigger space. Because what we were doing is we had a couple of weddings in the smaller space and then we would tent the outdoor area, move everybody out, flip the room, move everybody outside for a cocktail hour, flip the room. Yeah. And bring them back in. And we were doing all that for like $3,500, which was killing us because then we had to hire staff. Right. And other things. So, but now with the new weddings, we haven't started marketing that yet. So I'm interested to see. We have people that have just knew us and asked us to do that. Yeah. But I think now once we've actually hired somebody too that just focuses on wedding marketing. Yeah. And I think that's going to really be a great uptick going into this year.
Speaker 1Are you on like Peerspace or The Knot, Zola? Are you listed?
Speaker 2We're on there. We're listed on there, but we don't pay them because. They want a lot. They want a lot. To me, it's not worth it. I could take those same bucks and do better on. Meta. Meta. Yeah. And now we've hired a wedding consultant. Fee was kind of pricey, but I'm already seeing the difference. Okay. And what that company does, and it's only a six month contract and they give the range to you. But yeah, that's going to be really good.
Speaker 1With the 1,300 square feet next store, is the hope to just do bigger events or two at once? Two at once.
Speaker 2That's the event. Right now. Double your capacity. We're in October. We're in October. I'm booked through January on Friday, Saturdays and Sundays in the big space. Okay. So I hate that I'm always turning away. You can't do anything. I can't do anything. You got to come up on prices or something. Yeah. So we're like, we got to move them to the new. Yeah. Now the new space, unfortunately, is not as small. So it's more intimate parties, but it looks different. It's completely marbles, marble walls, marble floors, big chandeliers. What used to be there? What was there? It was a woman that sold. Like a. Like, you know, like the, the Home Depot pallets, like, like. she talked about overstock yeah yeah she sold overstock in there marble huh yeah so but i redid i had to do all that yeah so it was
Speaker 1okay yeah i completely yeah i made it look nice so is it hard to film monday through
Speaker 2thursday i'm trying i'm trying so we've been doing a lot of trying to get corporate events people we have a guy in there now that does like mlm kind of something and so trying to get those and giving them a really reduced rate we've had some parties because our our blank canvas special monday through thursday is 450 and that's enticed a lot of people to come in so you know what maybe i should just have a thursday night party yeah instead especially if it's leading into a holiday or holiday weekend or something yeah so we get those so that that has been difficult and i'm trying to find the sweet spots a lot of i've been giving away networking events to like the uh chamber of congress and people like that say come have your network event i'll even throw in i'll even throw in a case of wine or something yeah too and and giving them that space to just to say this is what you can do on a thursday yeah um so we're trying to grow that okay so you do eight hour events
Speaker 1too then yes but most people choose six well we don't you
Speaker 2can do eight hours if you add on additional
Speaker 1hours that's like an upsell yeah it's up sale all are six how much extra to add two more hours 150 an hour so it'd be 300 yeah um all right what about i asked you earlier your top five events birthday's number one what's two through four oh
Speaker 2birthday's number one two uh baby showers okay three repasses and like like uh like you know a memorial like after a funeral where everybody goes wake it's like a wake okay but wakes normally before the funeral okay repasses normally after i don't think i've ever heard of a repass oh my life yeah maybe that's a south southern thing but yeah yeah so the repasses okay um three um three repasses and then like a memorial like after a funeral like after a funeral like after a funeral okay four would be anniversaries and five you know five's kind of a weird one the most calls i get from my marketing out of any other party which someone you want to guess is church space okay so church events huh can we host a revival or something like that they want to do it like every week or just so i have three i have three churches right now really that are every sunday holy cow so that that's i get more calls phone calls on churches than i get on any other thing wow and that's also made me led that maybe there's a business in it maybe there's a business into just having an open space only churches make it
Speaker 1look like a church make it yeah kind of generic what hours do they meet on
Speaker 2sunday and how much do you charge so i have a church that is from 8 30 to 12 okay i normally do three hours but i've given them a little bit extra time so eight thirty twelve then i have 12 thirty to three thirty okay so i have two essentially nine to twelves then i have one twelve to three or twelve thirty three i'm trying to fill it another one they get four
Speaker 1so you have two meeting at the same time yeah in the two different spaces and what do you charge
Speaker 2all three of them so we have two church prices one is 1000 and one is 1500 and i think all three of those are currently on the 1000 a month so wow oh a month a month they meet every but they that covers your rent exactly so the goal is to get more churches and we've offered them upgraded package where i'll bring in ptz cameras pan tilt zil cameras i'll train somebody show them how to one one stream live stream because more donations for them yes i show them like because i've been showing them look if you guys want to grow because we had one church in here that grew big enough to go get their own space yeah so now we've moved in the other three and so i advertise both packages and then there's like 1800 a month package we're all training somebody how to how to live stream yeah and one click youtube one click facebook because right now some of them do live screen with someone holding a phone and i showed them the difference of look you could do this this and it's maybe just not in their budget at the moment but look when you're ready to go in i'll move cameras in here i'll help you guys do it because but yeah i get more calls on churches and i turn away more churches because that you know you only got yeah you only got four slots so yeah um i'm surprised they they all need that much time yeah i'm surprised too i don't well i've seen a lot of them do like they'll bring food and they'll have lunch afterwards together they'll do stuff like that and the the largest congregation right now only has i think 40 people the other ones are 15 to 20 and they're growing yeah each week that's why i try to sell them on live streaming because live streaming will help you grow and marketing they need they need help with marketing but that's a whole different business i only got so many right hours but the wheels are turning there because i think literally you have a building that was a church or looks like a church um because the church is also pay sometimes a couple like 150 dollars to come in on wednesday and either they want to meet with some members or have a bible study and if you and and they really would like thursdays could be great yeah i try to sell them on wednesday sometimes they want thursday or friday and i have events i can't do that but that's why i think maybe there's something to this other business yeah it's just a church building church space interesting and then you have six church that rotates but they also have access to the week to meet up because the um the pastors of both have said i really just need an office for monday and sometimes i'll be like look i'm already working in here today if you you want to come in for two hours that's fine yeah but i really can't make a habit of that um but so that's why that's a whole other business i think to that too yeah because uh that that's literally i get more calls on that than any other any other thing and my ads on church space will outperform everything else really yeah the organic ads on church spaces just posting organically yeah about church space being open that outperforms everything else man man it makes me want to go rent
Speaker 1a church and then rent it out again yeah like there's a lot of churches for rent yeah or
Speaker 2for sale and a lot of we get bigger churches that have to plant in atlanta and they reach out to me and they need to kind of test the market yeah and i just some most i don't have the space yeah yeah
Speaker 1um okay so church is number five any other kind of random events that you have that would be like six through ten fashion shows we started doing
Speaker 2those we did a fashion show that was great i i know i'm friends with a really popular designer in atlanta and i asked her i was like hey i really want to do fashion shows i won't i'm not gonna charge you um post about on instagram yeah did did i built out runways i had some friends of mine that do professional lighting they came in look the copy on photos look amazing and videos look amazing doesn't even look like our venue when you have the lighting then we pipe and drape some of the other spaces off and professionally lit it and so since that i i'm i've done like three other fashion shows wow that was in may okay we've done three since then and i get that and i think i won in november too so wow those have been good and it's up it's up i think i did two packages i did a two thousand dollar package with just a runway and you do everything yourself and then i did a three thousand i'll bring the lighting everything else and so it's been a mixture of those two i mean
Speaker 1it's all about surface area like the more types of events you do the more you open up your market yeah and the it's a finite amount of space and time so the more eyeballs you have on your space the more you can charge yeah um do you have employees no it's just my wife and i really you still have a job yeah no way yeah all right so you've been open less than a year let's talk numbers since november when you opened what have your monthly revenue and profit numbers been so my lowest
Speaker 2month since november which i think was november we did 11 your first
Speaker 1month ever did was your worst month you did 11 000 revenue
Speaker 2yes 11 000 profit uh not so much on that month because you put it all back into the building sure and then our highest month has been 22 5 wow um and then on average i think i did the average a little while ago we were right at like 16 like 15 9 in profit uh
Speaker 1no or in revenue oh that's been oh geez okay revenue and what's your average profit on a 16 000 month uh would be about 8 000 wow yeah so 50 net profit margins yeah but if you have a 25 000 month like your margins just go up yeah because you're you your costs are fixed you have no employees which would be a variable cost your overhead is fixed your utilities are basically fixed right yeah so the only thing
Speaker 2that's gone up is our rent so now we're at 4500 rent true we're about to if we acquire that mill space that will take us to 5500 okay i'm off in rent um and so that but but the upside is now that we're marketing the other side literally just opened three weeks ago yeah so now we're marketing that like all those dates i turned away from the rest of this year if i can even get 30 of those into the new space um and at first we were going to charge less because it's a little bit smaller but we found what is nice it is and then the same amount of work has to go into decorating those things so we're going to keep actually keep the price point the same okay um but if i could fill those dates in there and have double capacity um we should easily be at races we should easily yeah we should be at 30 35 000 rents revenue. What does your insurance cost? like 24 2500 a year
Speaker 1it's not horrible nothing nothing yeah so i mean you pay your monthly rent in like one or two events yeah the goal is
Speaker 2i want to pay it with churches that's that's what i'm trying to do okay yeah yeah because they pay on the first and they're low maintenance i would imagine yeah they're pretty drinking and no the only only low only bad no it's not even a bad thing they're low maintenance but we have um because we have uh the church chairs and i don't have anywhere to store them so i'm bringing them from home or moving them from they can't use the normal chair no and they i don't think they even want to that that was upsell to them liking to have the nice padded church chairs in there and some of them have podiums that they store there one has a drums keyboard they store there so i'm touching touching those chairs three four times a week which is just a huge time so yeah to move those out so the the goal is to we had cleaners and they for whatever reason stopped so um that price point you know that that um charge came out for statement each month but that now that means i'm doing it so yeah so the goal is to get you know to get more cleaners and the cleaners were great because they come in saturday they clean they set the room up for sunday they bring all the chairs over set them up for sunday set up the podiums they go home and i'm there to let them in eight eight in the morning sunday which was great how much of your score footage are you using for storage oh man uh maybe 400 between the two spaces four and ten percent yeah give or take yeah ten about ten percent okay because a lot of
Speaker 1it's at home unfortunately too right yeah so are you're working 40 hours a week at your job yeah and you're doing this in the evenings and a lot of work on the weekends yeah you enjoy it oh i enjoy it yeah yeah you like being around people i mean you were a dj so
Speaker 2yeah i like the people i like i like the business stuff on it some of the stuff well we didn't discuss is like uh when we were going to the other places that are doing it old school way and like i like funnels i like you know it's all our yeah what's your tech stack yeah it's our tech stack so go high level um some hoot suite um meta and basic excel basic like microsoft stuff yeah google workspace or microsoft workspace um so a lot of go high levels are crm bringing people in then uh the instant instant spotlight i told you about before where they take the pictures because that's also a funnel system that talks to my go high level that ports all the names and info over the go high level um then puts everybody in our funnel for
Speaker 1our marketing there do you have any bearing on how much competition you have compared to any given event rental business anywhere like is it extra competitive in stone mountain or that you
Speaker 2know i don't know outside of our area it's it's right now in our there are two there are three other on our street on rock bridge road there's three others wow and so um but they're different though the one that there's one that's extremely nice beautiful place the woman that runs it she's been in the wedding industry for 40 years and she's great and her inside of her place i can't touch it it's just immaculate yeah but when we have you know she sent us stuff unfortunately she's had two or three occasions where she's double booked somebody and so she's called me like hey i double booked this person and their parties tomorrow can i yeah give them there i'll i'll do it that's great last week she had one they came over people were frantic our weddings i couldn't help them because i'm booked up now yeah so but i think unfortunately for her she's her weddings are beautiful some of the best in the state but her stuff is on a notebook she's right that's how she's double booking because she's writing down dates forgot to highlight yeah exactly so i think that's our advantage and even the other ones the one that's further down the woman's been in the business 20 years yeah they're they're great at what and they're both designers but decorators they're great at what they do but they both they don't do any they're doing no paid social one doesn't even have a website one has a one has a facebook page that has stuff that was posted last post was six years ago crazy so when i was going into the business i made a detailed list of everybody did they have facebook did they have websites and then i went took a tour and saw all the things we could do better yeah and we're killing them just on the fact that our socials there our presence there yeah and that we're trying not to make those mistakes and it's also it's a lot of work to write down we another thing we've had several tours because people said hey i booked a tour with them no one showed up um i called them they say oh i'm at the dentist i can be there two hours and so they come to us because you know it's all through either they book it or we book it's all through go high level yeah sends the reminders to everybody hey your tour is coming up tomorrow the tours come up in the hour it's on my phone yeah i can't we don't miss tours and we don't miss dates yeah it'd be crazy yeah because that's that's our business your
Speaker 1closure it on tours is probably stupid yeah
Speaker 2yeah it's because yeah you got to get by the time they get there i mean you probably close 70 80 percent of those i think we closed about 70 percent that's good yeah yeah about 70 the but we have i don't know what the issue is we only only about 60 about 50 or percent of the tour show yeah so and that that number has gone down it was much higher that's surprising that's surprising yeah so it sends the follow-ups now we've started thinking do we need a phone call follow-up right do we need to get a va or somebody the vi to to call and say hey just a reminder you took because they want to cancel that's great that's that's fine but that causes a that uh that's a time issue with us um because it's just the two of us that give tours so you know we have certain parts of the day blocked off because we're either picking up from school picking up kids and those things but we essentially give tours 10 a.m to 7 p.m Monday through Friday but we have issue with people so then we try to stack them when we can gotcha so if if try to have a bunch of them from three to five right in
Speaker 1case somebody doesn't show one big unlock for me is probably stupid simple to you is just the fact that most of these event rental places are just renting the space like yeah because I'm thinking like oh this is half a million dollars to get started here you gotta own a building no buy a building like mo you and most of your competitors are just renting a space just renting the space sometimes standalone usually in a retail
Speaker 2center yeah crazy and it's not I think our space looks beautiful inside but it's not it wasn't like a hundred thousand
Speaker 1dollar yeah what did you spend on like tables and chairs like you spent 30-ish grand on the build out yeah what about all the stuff that you have maybe five Facebook Marketplace
Speaker 2list that's your best friend Graham so when I find you know the regular Lifetime round tables or what yeah 120 120 dollars in Sam's or something I try to get them on Facebook Marketplace for 30 bucks so
Speaker 1a lot of those off-white plastic ones yep yep and then you have the six foot ones too yep we have
Speaker 2those originally we started with I found a guy selling cafeteria tables the old school ones that are on wheels that fold in half yeah they're around and those are a nightmare to move okay they weigh 200 pounds they're there so I bought them and I was able to flip them sold them for more than I bought them for on Marketplace then went and bought from somebody else that had was selling you know I bought somebody that was selling from there closing down their event venue yeah so yeah so just the tables the chairs are the most expensive chairs like that uh I don't have any like that I have the clear Safari chairs oh you have to look those up they're acrylic okay they look really nice they're clear they're a little bit delicate I've probably had 20 broken this last year okay but they're like 75 a chair okay so that they're expensive so you could easily spend 10 grand just on chairs but you've spent like five total on all of
Speaker 1your tables and chairs
Speaker 2yep and the most expensive thing was the initial hundred chairs I bought was like three thousand dollars okay and then what about TVs and all that that's included in there yeah TVs yeah that was not so expensive um I knew how to do some of myself it's an LED screen but we have 65 inches that are all at nine of them are all attached on a grid so it makes the one yeah the one screen that's cool um so that wasn't a horrible that wasn't horrible I I'm thinking the next year I may really upgrade to the full LED panel some of those you 10 11 grand ish for those but this works it does everything we need to do I bought a commercial grade NSP box which is what hooks all them together um to show individual pictures on one large picture and some of that I already knew how to do
Speaker 1yeah um so if someone really wanted to start this business on a budget what's the least it would
Speaker 2take I I think you could do it for under three thousand three I think you could I think you could what about getting
Speaker 1a door rent deposit
Speaker 2okay so maybe six thousand okay I would say find a rent we wanted six months we got four months of free rent okay but the free rent saved our lives because we were able to put all we were going to be paying into rent into into the space so I would say and we looked at many properties some of them said no absolutely no free rent and I knew we needed to build this I knew we couldn't do it. I have another friend in the business that started around the same time. He took a SBA loan for like 50 grand and was open seven days after he did his lease. And he had a build out too. How's he doing? He's doing great. Where's he at? He is in Virginia. Okay. And his prices are more than mine because there's no competition for him. He's killing it. There's no competition for them.
Speaker 1So you might be in a more competitive area. I think we are.
Speaker 2Yeah. I think we are.
Speaker 1And it sounds like it four in the same place, two down the street in Stone Mountain, Georgia of all places. So I think I'm thinking of DFW and I'm like, when was the last time I drove by an event venue? Certainly they're not in Strip. Really? Oh, because I drive by them every day. All over Metro Atlanta. Yeah. It's a business that I never think about. I don't have events. I don't do bridal showers. Yeah. My wife would be good at this because she loves hosting. I love decorating. That's my wife too. She's going to hear this and I know she's going to be like, hey babe, I heard that episode. She never listens to my podcast. So I know if she did, it means something.
Speaker 2Yeah. She's got, I, we make a good team, but my wife wants absolutely nothing to do with the tech stuff or the other stuff. She just wants to meet with the people and come up with great ideas. She loves, that's the best part of her day is sitting down and saying, look, you told me, like she has to fill out a questionnaire and says, look, you told me your favorite colors are yellow. And this and that, and you want this and you're having a baby. And then she shows them and then she'll text me and say, Hey, can you create something for the screens? Cause they're there. Yeah. So then we'll, you know, we try to, when we're bringing people in for tours, we kind of know what they're doing. So I'm already selling them. I'm already having, if I can, especially if I could find a picture of them online, I already got pictures of them on the screens and the other stuff. So it's an easy sell when they walk in the building, but my wife loves that part of saying, look, I can make, I can, and showing the proof, like, look, I can make this room look completely different. It's just open canvas. I can make it look however you want it to look or however your vision is.
Speaker 1Anything else that people should know before starting this business, like something that people need to know?
Speaker 2Yeah. Like don't fall in love with the building, fall in love with the, what the inside can do for you. You got to have parking. Has parking
Speaker 1ever been an issue
Speaker 2for you? Uh, not yet. Okay. So we, we, we have some other interesting things that are going on. We have the lake and we actually found, this year, the lake has worked with our landlord to, uh, to use the parking lot for their lake fest. Okay. So I've had to, I've been talking to him this week. It's like, look, I, this is wonderful. It's great. But I have 120 person wedding on that day. So we got to figure out who's going to use what. Okay. So we'll, that will be the true test next week to see if that is. Okay. But so far it's been great. No, no issue. Cause it's no one really there, but us. So, okay. So what you can do inside parking, what else? Um, you're, you're the company or not the company, your county bylaws. Can you have, can you have a T for that? You can use chat. You, yeah. Can you have event spaces? Some counties don't allow them or some counties say you can have them, but you have to get a liquor license. And most people don't know how very expensive a liquor license can be or how difficult it can be. So knowing those things, cause I'd hate to see anybody, um, like sign a lease and then cause landlord don't care, but you sign a lease and then go into the property and realize you can't build it out or do what you want.
Speaker 1What do you think about using like a buying or renting a big, nice home as an event space?
Speaker 2I think, I think there's something to that. We've, we've talked about that, especially as a big yard. The one thing we can't do that people see us online and see the pictures inside. They're like, Hey, how does the courtyard or how's the outside look? And I'm like, sorry, I don't parking lot. It's a parking lot. Yeah. I don't got one, but I think the house and, uh, especially his own for commercial and a big yard. I think that's great for weddings. Yeah. And then you can have onsite, you could have the Airbnb, you can have so many things. Oh yeah. If I were to do it again, or when I do it again, I think we'll lean more towards something like that. But I think a house is great. And also I think I see people doing like going to a local VFW and saying, Hey, can I either use your basement or use your hall for, you know, can I pre pay for two weekends? And then you try to sell those weekends to somebody else and test the concept. Without a long-term lease. Yeah. Brilliant. And then, but you got, the thing is like ours, everybody that walks in our door says, I did not think it was going to look like this when I walked in. And if you do that with the VFW or whatever you, that's what you have to sell on. People can't, they have to be transformed when they walk in and their pictures, their pictures have to look great on Instagram. Every, every place needs to be photographical in your building, your lounge, your bathrooms. And we spend a lot of money in the bathrooms and we see so many pictures. We spend a lot of money on Instagram in our bathroom because just, we have great lighting and those things. So that's, you know, selling point.
Speaker 1Where can people find you?
Speaker 2So they can find us at the hall ATL, um, all things social, the hall atl.com. Okay. Um, my wife and I get a lot of questions about this, so we kind of devise a little free ebook, um, that you can download straight from our Instagram and that's the hall ATL. Okay. And yeah, we're there and, and we take questions every day. I just want to help people. So anybody that wants to do. I just connected your last name hall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm sure that was intentional.
Speaker 1Very okay. Uh, Justin, this has been amazing, man. It's been awesome. Thank you. Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn. You're still driving. What have you, if you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business, it would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.
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