Scaling back a little may help your bottom line.
In this ever growing difficult economy many companies, big and small are scaling back in order to protect their bottom line and their future.
Yesterday Starbucks announced that they will be closing several hundred of their coffee stores across America in order to not hurt the business. They claim that they will attempt to relocate their displaced employees in other Starbuck locations to keep the individuals employed. As you probably already have noticed, there is a Starbucks on every corner, in every mall and inside grocery stores. Their biggest problem is the over saturation of the Starbucks brand and the sudden drop in the economy. When a cup of coffee costs as much or more then a gallon of gas, something has to change.
Many of the major businesses in the last few months have also announced cut backs in personnel, products and hours in order to make it through the tough economy. One city announced that all local government employees will go to mandatory four day weeks in order to save on fuel as well as all the different utilities for the buildings.
How does this relate to the DJ industry?
The Multi-Op DJ services are getting hit hard. I know many Multi-ops who are cutting back on the number of DJs they have to send out on a single night. Since the numbers of bookings are dropping they have DJs who are not working every weekend as they once did.
Not having a steady income along with insurance costs, the state and federal paper work and all the other problems that come with employees not actively working is causing the owners to cut back on the number of employees available.
They may have at one time employed ten to fifteen or more DJs for a weekend night, but now have cut back to seven to ten employees. I know of one DJ company that had ten employees and over the last year has cut back to three DJs.
His company is a very good service with the best DJs and equipment available in his area. Because of the economy, fuel prices and the increasing numbers of people calling themselves “Entertainers” with those DJs working for pennies on the dollar, the numbers of bookings for him has dropped to where he could not afford to keep so many DJs on the payroll and continue working his business.
For a single operation DJ like myself who DJs as a full time business, it is also very difficult to book events when so many DJs who already were charging half as much as I, then began dropping their rates even more.
It’s very hard to convince a 20 year old Bride & Groom who have a tight budget because of the economy, to spend $1200 or more on their entertainment when so many DJs are quoting them $600 down to $200.
The smart thing for a multi-op DJ service to do right now is to let go of a few of the DJs according to the average number of bookings you have over the next six to twelve months.
If you are only averaging seven events on a Saturday evening and you have more then seven employees, then you should think about cutting back to only seven employees.
If you know of one or two nights where you need more then seven DJs, keep in close contact with those that you had to let go and have them help out on those nights as a “sub contractor”
(Read the local and federal laws of “Sub contracting” before doing so to make sure you qualify in this area)
If you don’t have someone to fill in on those occasional nights, check around with single operation DJs that you know and trust to see if they are available and willing to cover those events.
You need to take action now before it becomes too late and it hurts your business or can cause you to close your doors.
Jeff Richards: Party Time Productions