Finished the business plan! 8 pages of objectives, marketing, and a pile of financials. I was amazed how good it felt to get that completed. I may or may not have imbibed in adult beverages upon it’s completion this past Saturday. We did some more tweaking of the financial numbers. The scary part with those is that it’s not a no-brainer to go ahead, but also there are no big red flags saying we should stop. Our goal is to be a very artist friendly venue. A big part of this objective is that a large portion of the ticketing/cover charges will be going back to the artist. The remainder will cover our sound tech. What it means for us, is we have to make our money from the bar and our food.

I sent a copy of our plan into the city. We found out there are some programs the city has to help promote the arts here in St. Paul. I called them up and they indicated interest in trying to help us. That was very encouraging! As we sit on the fence, if we were able to get some sort of sizeable help from the city, that would most likely push us over the edge to get this thing going.

A sizeable chunk of our plan was marketing. Thinking of ideas and things to promote the business. What do we want the website to look like? What social media platforms will we use? What physical marketing can we do here in St. Paul? It really is just our first pass of ideas. We will have to be quick on our feet and creative in getting the word out. I have spent time looking at other music venues around the country for examples.

We are working with the management team for the space. We have not signed anything yet. That will be the true decision day. The previous tenant left a whole pile of equipment including an awesome piano. We are negotiating a price for all existing equipment. This would help us tremendously in both good price, and not having to haul it all in. We still will need to purchase some items, but around 60% of what we need is already there. We are hoping to see an asking price for the equipment in a few days. This will be a fun hurdle!

This coming week will be work on internal processes and paperwork. I am going to try to visualize what a typical week could look like, then document our thoughts. We both agree that it will important to have strong business processes to aid us (and future staff) in getting stuff done. It’s going to be interesting for sure! Until next time…

–J