''You don't do these things by venue capacity!''
So I ended up asked to prepare a quote with a friend for an event at the local sports arena. To be specific a boxing match. The venue is 158ft long and 106ft wide so not small, but at the same time not huge. Promoter is apparently one of the top two in the kick boxing field in the country. Venue capacity in this configuration is 2000 Pax and there are 12 VIP tables too, with each table paying nearly £1000 each to be there. Tickets sell for £20–40 depending on how close to the ring you want to be. So we're talking serious money coming in. Promoter expects to sell out based on the number of tickets sold two months before the show.
Promoter wants the following:
- Moving lights (to scan around the audience between rounds)
- Everyone to be able to hear announcements and music with a very loud audience
- A fancy entrance where contestants appear through a wall of smoke and light to enter the ring
- Additional lighting for a 8ft x 24ft stage for dancers
- Ring to be very well lit (TV standard as this is to be recorded and possibly broadcast)
- Everything flown for no obstructions by the ring and clear sightlines
Based on all this a lighting design was done, and the sound design was done including asking help from the people on the LAB because it was stretching what I'd done before. The price was submitted to the promoter this morning. £20,000 quote.
For that the promoter was getting:
- 12 Stacks of D&B C7 covering the majority of the audience (a system with small fills was going to cost more to put together)
- 12 Martin MAC700s on the ring for audience and ring use
- 8 Mac 250 Entour for the entrance and dancers
- 8 Mac 250 Wash for the Dancers and Entrance
- 72 Pars trained on the 600sq.ft ring.
- 2 Juliat Follow Spots with Ops
- Avo Pearl 2004 and ART 2000 Dimming
- Smoke Curtain
- Trussing for entrance with drapes
- Central lighting truss flown with 1 ton motors
- Distro from CAMS to the necessary
- 15 Crew setting up the venue from totally bare to rigged and back again in just under 24hrs.
Now we don't own any of the gear so it was coming from Stage Electrics (Lx), Kave Theatre (Sound) and Nobelex (Rigging)
£11200 Lights + Effects <== Weekly hire rate
£1850 Truss, Rigging and Motors including a rigging expert to ensure safety of flying having not done a rig that size before
£1800 Sound
£3000 Crew bill (15 Crew for 24 hours straight more or less)
£500 Insurance
£600 Trucking
Total: £18950
So we quoted £20,000 for about 10% profit, which doesn't seem too unreasonable right? (I dunno maybe 10% profit is unreasonable to expect… but I don't know enough to be sure).
The promoter was told the price, and promptly exploded. He was expecting to pay about £3000 for technical or £1.50 ($2.60) per head. Yes he was expecting to pay about the cost of the crew to get everything for the venue. His direct comment was as the title. Apparently ''you don't do these things by venue capacity!'' I see, so what should you do them by?
Now I know our quote included a profit margin of the companies supplying the equipment and our quote includes VAT because we aren't registered for VAT, but nor is the Promoter so that makes no difference. Is that quote unreasonable though for such an event where we'd be in at 3am following another show out then out the following 3am? People in the know I'd be curious to see what the answer is. I don't think it's high for what he was getting, but I could be wrong.
Christopher Hinds
28 Mar 2006 12:07
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Tags: Event Management Lighting Sound
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[Skip to the latest comment]Thorwald Stein
I think people generally underestimate the costs of sound and lighting. Do you have to pay the weekly hire rate if you're only gonna use it for 24 hours though? The crew bill indeed sounds fair (what's that, 8 quid an hour?). But yeah don't ask me – we always freak out with Rev when sound and light seems to take up half our budget!
28 Mar 2006, 13:56
Christopher Hinds
Yeah it's about £8/hr overall, with the designers/ops getting nearer 9 and box humpers getting slightly less. We were awaiting confirmation from Stage about whether we'd need to pay the weekly rate for hire, the difficulty being we were going to be asking for a lot of equipment at highly unsocial hours, which is why it wasn't likely to drop to the daily rate, and while £5.5k off would have helped it wouldn't have dropped it enough to take the show. I think people see what can be done with mega budgets and then expect to pull rabbits from hats on mini budgets which inevitably involve people losing money.
28 Mar 2006, 15:30
Ed
Your quote is very reasonable. Its a big job and spec'd about right. For a gig like this sound and lighting is utterly crucial – lets be honest, there isnt much else going on. The most important thing to remember is that this is an industry full of complete morons who are simply not prepared to listen. You will be lucky to get any money out of this bloke.
Also, most production companies wouldnt touch a job like this if they weren't making 30% for themselves. So he's even more off the mark. Remember the only reason he wants to do production for £3000 is to maximise his profit. Thank him for his time and walk out the door.
29 Mar 2006, 00:08
Dan
Perhaps he expected you to own the necessary gear as opposed to commercial hiring rates…
29 Mar 2006, 20:42
Christopher Hinds
Commercial hire rates or not that would have taken at most a couple of thousand off had the equipment been in inventory. A commercial job pays commercial rates. That's similar to charities that ask for things to be done at 'special rates' because they're a 'charidee', sorry but they want a commercial job done they have to pay the commercial price.
29 Mar 2006, 22:48
Dave
I tried to ping a trackback at you but your server returned a 404.
Here's my take on it at link
31 Mar 2006, 01:15
Christopher Hinds
Dave
Thanks for an exceptionally useful post, I've notified our blogs people about the trackback issue and will comment on the meat of your post on yours.
31 Mar 2006, 11:02
John Broadbent
Hi Chris
I pretty much agree with Dave's post. Did you have a rider for this gig?
If you need any advice with quoting in future drop me a line as I have recently been examining the whole process myself and I'd be happy to share what I have learned!
Regards
John
14 Apr 2006, 01:40
Christopher Hinds
Hey John,
Nope no rider, but the alarm bells should have rung when the promoter approached a DJ first off! Thanks for the offer of info, much appreciated. I'll drop you a line when the exam thing is done with. Hope things are going well at Surrey
14 Apr 2006, 10:39
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