Incense, April & Breakfast & Tico’s (Professional Project)

Yesterday Shoma, Luke & I walked into Bournemouth to meet with Mark at The Winchester to try and secure a date for the 2nd Dungeon Dancehall. We weren’t expecting anyone to be in the venue because we’ve learnt from prior experience the staff at The Winchester do what they want, when they want and how they want, and that’s why we love them. However as we walked up the hill towards the front door we knew the venue was open as we could gauge the smell of the venue that we have come to love, a mixture of burnt incense and that classic pub smell your not sure if you like or not.

“This is my church”

Mark greeted us and we began to talk dates. Originally we were going to go for a friday or a saturday as they would be more popular nights but unfortunately each friday and saturday night had been booked all through 2014 by resident nights. In the end we settled for 16th April which is a Wednesday, a slight setback, but considering the last event was on a tuesday night we are still hoping for a good turnout.

As well as dates, we asked Mark about equipment and how much it would cost to book out 2 CDJ’s and a central mixer. He said to come back to him on that because by the 1st March he is hoping to have his own equipment installed in the venue for good which would be cheaper than hiring from an external source.

The great thing is that Mark seems really enthusiastic about our night, he said he was really impressed with the last Dungeon Dancehall. It’s really great to be working with someone like Mark because although he runs a business it seems like he has a passion for the artistic side of events.

After this short but sweet catch up with Mark we carried on the post Winchester tradition of going for a breakfast at Tico’s.

DD 2k14 #nofilter

Whilst tucking into our food we talked more about our next live stream, which we are going to do tomorrow (30th Jan) and on that day we will release the new promo and the date of the event. We are not releasing the acts and set times yet.

 

Cheddar (Professional Project)

Yesterday Me, The Moth & Shoma talked about money.

This guy…

As well as charging entry on the door we plan to sell tickets in advance to our event with an added incentive of a free shot of foul liquor upon entry. At the moment we have decided to charge £3.00 for entry into our night. We are aiming for a minimum turnout of 70 on the night. Our budget is £200.00 so if we meet this head count we will end up with a profit of £10.00, not a lot at all, but a realistic figure instead of expecting to be sleeping on a bed of money at the end of the night. We’ve calculated this massive profit out of our budget expenses which include, equipment hire, paying for acts, promotion and dungeon alcohol.

 

As well as this we managed to contact Louise at The Winchester and have set up a meeting on Tuesday to try and secure a date for the event. We are hoping to get a Friday night as this will really help with the turn out on the night. We also need to talk about setting up a small bar to give away (or sell) our shots. Then is the matter of setting up on the night because the set up will be very different to the 1st event. One of the ways that it will differ is because of the equipment we will need to hire for our acts.

These are CDJ’s and are pretty damn sexy. They’re an industry standard for club DJ’s.

As I don’t have the cheddar to pay for this kit and have not used them before I will still be using my DDJ MIDI controller on the night. This means that we’ll have to find a way to have both units able to output at the same time which could be tricky.

We’ve also been talking about decorating the venue because we recently went to an event called Jungle Warriors which was held at The Winchester and the main room had been decorated really well which I thought really added to the overall atmosphere. However we also have to work the materials for decoration into our budget.

Nerds on the internet. (Professional Project)

Recently I have been trying to push a greater online presence for Dungeon Dancehall so that people are more aware of our night. I’ve been uploading content more frequently including pictures and free music for the people who have ‘liked’ the page.

We currently have a huge following of 69 people.

I am finding it very hard to engage with people through the page. It’s tricky because we don’t want to pay for Facebook to promote our page as it is expensive and will probably not reach the niche demographic that we hope to connect with.

Having said that I’ve found that we are getting more interactions from people recently after posting more content. We even got the don Phil Beards to comment on some pictures that we uploaded. Every ‘like’ that some content on the page gets opens it up to greater audiences (the friends of people who have liked the post).

I think it will be really useful to get a solid online following for our page but if we manage to get say 100 people it will hopefully make a difference to the turn out on the night.

I’m going to continue working on this and try and find similar groups or pages that will help us build a following.

It’s not worth being in the wallet if it’s not a 50 (Professional Project)

Ok so we have been given the brief for our newest unit which is called ‘Professional Project’. It sounds scary because I’m the least professional bombaclat around.

Me Shoma and Luke are following on from our previous unit and are going to host another event at The Winchester. From what we’ve understood from the brief this unit is more focused on the money side of things such as budgeting and learning how much to charge for your work. THIS IS DMP NOT BUSINESS STUDIES!

This is how I see myself as a business man.

As far as all this money stuff is involved I’m fairly inexperienced. I’ve never learned about tax, expenses and budgeting. On the tax side of things I know nothing, and I don’t know much about expenses right now. For budgeting I kind of get the idea and see that my knowledge of working to a budget is more based around common sense than real experience. For example don’t blow £100 on rings from Argos if you’re working to a £150 budget to set a club night up.

It’s more about covering things like travel costs, promotion costs, the hire of rooms and booking acts. As well as this I think that if you have a £200 budget for something you still want to spend as little under that budget as possible. Just because you have the cheddar to spend, you don’t have to use it all.

This is how you feel when you have a budget to work from.

Although it’s very tempting to blow your budget on one big bit of tech, I feel like you have to think like a fox. Route around through bins scavenging scraps and odds and ends as much as you can to conserve the little funds you have. So the first thing I thought about was trying to pull off as many scams and favours as possible. This might be trying to convince people to work for free or maybe giving them free drinks all night in exchange for an hour mix.

LIE, CHEAT & STEAL.

Although this sounds totally unethical, the brutal reality is that nearly all successful businesses make their money in unethical ways. This could be Nike producing they’re clothes in tiny Indonesian sweat shops, while employees are fighting for less than a minimum wage to feed they’re starving families. Or it could be Amazon running their money through offices in Jersey so that they pay no tax.

what ever you look into, business will try and do anything to avoid costs and taxes.

I’m not parring Nike or Amazon because I love them both. I just accept that they’re unethical practices bring a bit of joy to my materialistic lifestyle.

This guy should be an idol to everyone studying this unit in DMP.

So without getting arrested, we should try and conduct our business practices like this guy as much as possible, so using contacts we know, borrowing XLR cables instead of buying them, and if a set of Pioneer CDJ’s happen to fall off the back of a lorry then so be it. (Just kidding)