The Interconnected Web of the Events Industry

If you are in the Events Industry, you already know what you are going through and probably don’t have the time to read this. But for those who are not, and find that you have 5 minutes, please read on …

With the forced shutdowns, the events industry is scrambling to ‘transplant’ booked events that fall under the timeline of the mandatory shutdown.

Our company has already transplanted 4 late March events and all 12 April events. The 1st several events in May have also been affected, as they fall near the end of the projected 8-week prohibition of gatherings of no more than 50 people. Most of these events are Weddings.

Obviously, this a huge blow to all the couples who have been planning for this special day for months or years. And many of them will have smaller events, with the schedules of every guest invited impacted by the date change. Many will have to find a new Photographer, Videographer, Musician, DJ, Florist and/or Baker, as these Service Professionals may not be available on the new date that is selected. Rehearsal dinners, airline tickets and hotel stays are all jumbled up.

All of these vendors are caught up in this situation.

From our Facilities & Catering perspective, we are essentially ‘dark’ for 8 weeks, starting with what would have been our next event on March 19.

We, like other events producers, are working feverishly to plug these stalled events into new dates, further down the calendar, starting in July. From a business standpoint, this is good business. From a financial standpoint, it’s not.

For every March/April/May event that we pickup, dust off and plug into July 2020 through March 2021, while we’ve preserved the original booking by moving the client’s event to a new date, we’ve also lost the revenue opportunity of a new client booking one of these later dates.

To dig a level deeper, we are coming off the ‘doldrums’ … January & February ... when we are busy seeing & booking new clients for future events, but hosting very few events, which always impacts cashflow.

March/April events are considered “Pre-Season” … they are discount months … with lower rental pricing, lower menu pricing and lower guest minimums. For these soon-to-be ‘transplants’, we are welcoming them to select new dates that sit squarely in “Prime Season” … with higher rentals, menus & minimums. In all good conscience, we are not charging a re-booking fee, nor are we forcing these clients to pay the higher pricing, rather, we are preserving almost all aspects of their original agreement.

If these prime dates were open for new clients, there’s a least the possibility of us booking that date with that new client, at the seasonally-appropriate higher pricing.

Change the industry, and it plays out like this …

• Imagine if you owned a Beach House.
• You have @ 15+ weeks’ worth of rentals in the Off-Season, say January, February and March.
• Then, all those weeks … overnight … were no longer rentable, due to whatever the reason: flood, hurricane, disease, etc.
• But you decided that you would allow these guests to select another week of their choosing in June, July, August … your Prime Season … when all rates are significantly higher
• ... remember, these were discounted rentals, now playing out in prime-time.
• So you’ve lost twice … on the cashflow that’s dried up for 3 months and missing out on collecting higher rental rates for summer dates, which are now full of your off-season transplants.
• Again … good business, but financially unsustainable.

Switching back to the Events Industry, we haven’t even touched on the long list of people and supply chains that are affected by a significant closure:

? Culinary Team

? Wait Staff

? Bar Staff

? Sales Office

? Cleaning Crew

? Suppliers

? Purveyors

? Warehouses

? Local Farms, Watermen, Fruit Orchards, Cheesemongers

The Events Industry will recover, but it will take considerable time, with many hardships along the way.