3 Business Lessons Learned From Throwing a Party ??

A few years back, a couple of friends and I decided to throw a New Year’s Eve party in Fort Wayne because there weren’t any GREAT parties… so we worked out a deal with a local, historic venue, and they gave us full control of the venue for the night.

If you attended the event, you know it was a success! It led to us throwing a party the next year, too, and having even more success that year. But I want to talk about 3 major lessons learned:

1)   STICK TO YOUR GUNS: We started the event with a ton of “I don’t think that will work” conversations with the building owners/managers. We definitely talked through it with them and I think they ended up stepping back just purely because they realized we were stubborn. When it failed they could say “I told you so!” but they wouldn’t be out any money either way….. spoiler alert: it was a HUGE success! They were wrong. We made more money in one night than we had ever made in one sitting in our lives. Which led us to be invited back for year 2. They HAD to have us host the event again year-over-year!

2)   BE REMARKABLE: part of the reason they tried to talk us off the ledge with some of our ideas was that our ideas were so different! They were “remarkable” in a way. We realized that if we threw the same, standard party that everyone was used to we would never make enough money to even cover the costs. We couldn't afford to be normal. We couldn't afford to be average. We couldn't afford to be expected. So we went big with it. It worked. People were craving a “different” party experience!

3)   SPEND MONEY ON MARKETING!!! I can’t stress it enough. We were told we should make our marketing budget $250-500 for the event. We made it $5,000 and we even went over that budget… Yet, we brought in more revenue in one night, for one event, than they had ever seen prior. We sold out quickly! We even had people calling the day before offering thousands of dollars just to get into the party last minute. I’m not joking. We went BIG and it worked.

Oh…and we spent all of that budget on social media. We didn’t put a penny into any other form of advertising. Just FYI....

I can’t promise you’ll always be successful with these 3 tips, but I can tell you that when you trust your gut and stick to your guns, go way outside the box and shoot for “remarkable”, and spend an appropriate amount of money on advertising, you can have extreme success!!!

Good luck!

Be remarkable or be ignored.