Denver NACE Podcast
The Denver NACE Podcast is a show dedicated to the events industry in Denver, Colorado. Hosted by members of the Denver chapter of the National Association for Catering and Events (NACE), the podcast features interviews with a wide range of professionals in the industry, including bakery owners, wedding planners, venue owners, DJs, musicians, and photographers.
The aim of the show is to share the stories and lessons of these industry experts and help grow the Denver events industry by bringing the community together.
Whether you're in the wedding industry, corporate events industry, nonprofit events, or other social events, the Denver NACE Podcast is a valuable resource for anyone looking to learn more about the industry and the people behind it.
Denver NACE Podcast
6. Seasonal Savvy: Surviving the off-season
Unlock the secrets to a year-round booming business with Desiree Kelly, our chapter president at NACE, as she slices into the world of innovative income strategies for event professionals. Together, we whip up a conversation that's as rich as the frosting on her signature cakes, sharing the recipe for her birthday cake subscription service that has transformed the way we think about generating consistent revenue. Imagine musicians serenading subscribers with monthly performances or caterers dishing out delectable corporate lunches. It's all about stirring up the perfect mix of creativity and passion to keep your services in high demand, no matter the season.
With Desiree's expertise, we peel back the layers on affiliate marketing, revealing how a smart use of ClickFunnels and a sprinkle of social media know-how can sweeten your earnings. We discuss the importance of cultivating fruitful partnerships during quieter months, just like the collaborative success found in Des's cake subscriptions. Moreover, we serve up practical insights on financial management with tools like QuickBooks, highlight the need for a rockstar team, and offer a taste of how side hustles can keep your staff's skills sharp and your business thriving. Prepare to feast on a banquet of actionable advice that will leave you hungry for success all year round.
What's up? Event professionals. My name is Jared Judge, I am the host of the Denver NACE podcast and I'm excited for a very special episode where we are joined with our NACE chapter president, desiree Kelly, and we're going to have a brief panel discussion with Des and I about how to survive the off season. It's currently February 1st when we're recording this and it is certainly not wedding season. Here in Denver the weather is cold sometimes, sometimes it's hot. We all know how Denver winters can be. But moral of the story is our event professionals are not as busy as they are used to and some of them have asked how do we survive this time where income is a little uncertain? Yet the rent checks, the mortgage payments, the bills they're still coming in consistently and they got to get paid. So what do we do as event pros? So I'm going to turn this over to our president, des, so we can kick off this discussion.
Speaker 2:Right. So this is something that my staff has been like really struggling with, because you know they don't have a whole lot of hours, but they still have rent, they still have their car payments, they still have all these things and I'm trying my hardest. I'm like doing the newsletters, I'm doing the social media, I'm doing all the advertising and it's still the off season and I can't change that. So, just doing a little brainstorming about you know, how can I bring in multiple streams of income in our off season that are going to sustain us through this time? So, jared, do you have ideas? I have a couple.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, the first thing that I wanted to share was actually the idea that you mentioned. Is that okay if I kind of spill the beans on your? Okay, cool. So while we were chatting right before recording this, des actually mentioned that her company has a birthday cake subscription. You know from what I've gathered from the outside, des loves making cakes. That's why she got into this business. But when you know, february is not prime wedding cake season, you have this incredible subscription model throughout the year where you and your staff still get to make cakes and you deliver those on a monthly basis to businesses who are looking to celebrate their employees, make them feel valued and appreciated, without having to put the extra burden on, like a sunshine committee, to go to Costco or pick and save and get a cake every month, which I just thought was brilliant.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, absolutely. It's so low maintenance because all you do is you go on our website, you fill up an inquiry form, we'll call you, we'll get you set up for the right size of cake you have. The flavors are predetermined. We'll let you know what those are like Marches, Marble or whatever and then we just bring you one on whatever date as you pick, and so it's fantastic.
Speaker 1:You don't have to order it.
Speaker 2:You don't have to pay for it every month, it's a subscription, it just auto debits and we just show up with cake and they're like, yeah, it's cake day. So, that is fantastic. So in the off season, I mean, how would I would say, a musician do something like that? I mean, what kind of subscription would you do?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it's depending on each industry. You kind of have to think about what do you offer, what's the valuable thing that you do, and how can you make that relevant and valuable on a monthly basis? So for me, as a musician, you know, I think my performances are entertaining. People enjoy listening to my music. In fact, recently one of our, our friends down in Villa Parker, she commented on my Instagram saying, like I heard you play at the Rocky Mountain Bridal show and I am obsessed, which was awesome. And she asked me kind of like how could I support you? What are ways I could do that besides just having you play at Villa Parker? And I don't have a subscription model, but I absolutely could create one where I record a different song every single month, or like you mentioned.
Speaker 2:Yeah, to your email, or something.
Speaker 1:Give that to my email. Maybe even just do like you know. Each month one of our subscribers gets to request which song that I record for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, absolutely, that would be awesome. Yeah, and I mean I do five bucks a month for that and if you get, you know, 60 people doing that, that'd be a good car payment right there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I'm wondering, like, how would our lighting people? What would they create? Or, you know, or caterers, what would they create? Yeah, I mean our staff every month, you know like a monthly oh yeah, exactly, yeah, birthday birthday lunch.
Speaker 1:I know lots of course have those.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes. So you have cake on the second Tuesday and you have lunch on the fourth Tuesday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or the caterer provides the lunch, you provide the dessert.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, we can coordinate. So, absolutely, those are great. You just have to kind of get creative with what you do. And I love the you know how can I support you throughout the year idea? Because I mean, like I support Wikipedia, I give them two bucks a month, but you know they're a free service and you know how did they get income? And I use Wikipedia all the time, all the time, and so I just feel like, you know, 24 bucks a year is just fine. So yeah.
Speaker 2:And I don't want it to go away. I really don't, so that's why I do it.
Speaker 1:That's awesome and the true, like the value of what we're talking about here is that you still get to pursue your passion because that's kind of why we got into this business in the first place is that I love performing music at weddings and corporate events. You love making cakes and delighting people's taste buds and making their memories magical. We still get to do that in the off season, but this subscription model means that you have a guaranteed, steady income throughout the year.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, agreed, agreed, yeah, and that's the base level that you know is coming in, you know, and it's going to hit your bank account, all that stuff. So, absolutely so, okay. So another thing I was talking with Sarah, sean and Kristi Fernandez a few minutes ago and they were talking about possibly changing how you take your payments, because I started doing 25% down where a lot of my competitors I knew were doing 50% down. It was just lowering the barrier of entry for my clients. It's a smaller chunk right now when it gets in with me, which I thought was fantastic. Plus, it gives me more money when I actually have the expenses of the cakes to produce, so, like when I have to buy the goods and I have to pay the labor, that money is coming in a little later.
Speaker 2:The down part is usually they booked their cake in the off season. You know, somewhere between January and March is usually when I get those payments, and so we're not making a whole lot of weddings, wedding cakes, january through March, and so they were like either increase your deposit to 50%, like your competitors are doing, because I mean there's a reason why they're doing it, or possibly do monthly payments. So you know, then I have not only that payment in January, but I have a payment in February and in March and April, so that might be something I look into, but I don't know if my platform will do it, so that's a technology thing that I need to solve.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a great idea too. Back before I moved to Colorado and even before I moved to Wisconsin, I was a public school teacher and you could elect to either get paid 10 months or you could spread it out to 12 months, because you know teachers have summers off, just like their kids, and a lot of teachers chose to spread their payment out throughout the entire year for that steady cash flow during the off season of teaching. So I think that's a great idea.
Speaker 2:Right, that is a good idea, because then you don't have to go two months without paycheck.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:That's really good. That's really good. And then I was just kind of Googling different things and Alan Berg, who is coming in April, had a podcast about giving people value without charging for it, as like a blog or a podcast, because answering questions that are in your profession without charging for them. Because he was saying that if he had been a speaker at Wedding in Bands, somebody had stopped him in the hall and asked him a question, he would have answered that for free, even though he makes his money answering people's questions as a coach, as a web person, blah, blah, blah. Going on a podcast and answering a commonly asked question is really a good service to your industry. And then when they come across someone or, if they need it, yourself, your top of mind for who they want to pick or who they want to buy from. There's also like a psychological principle of reciprocity If you do a good turn for them, they do a good turn for you by giving you business. So that's a really good thing to invest some time in in your off season.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is awesome, and I love that methodology too because, as we mentioned before we started recording, it just elevates your perception in the industry that you are the expert in your field. So you become the go-to for all of these kinds of questions and it most likely will turn into more business for you.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. And the more generous you can be with information, the more it comes back to you. And you were saying you're involved with click funnels when you do affiliate marketing. Affiliate links.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. So affiliate marketing is another great way to make some passive income in the off season, because if you do what your last tip was and you provide information and knowledge and expertise, part of that advice is probably going to be recommending products or services to people. In my specific example, I help people out with their marketing and there are certain web platforms that I recommend versus others. The one that I recommend is click funnels, just because it makes it easier to do, like split testing and all these other optimizations. So when I'm helping somebody with their marketing, I recommend click funnels and I use my affiliate link and then when somebody buys click funnels, I get a percentage back from that sale.
Speaker 2:Right, right, yeah, and I do that on my social media. Like if I've used a certain product that I purchased on Amazon, I will put an affiliate link in the post, because if somebody wants to go and buy that cake home or that board or those colors or that airbrush machine, then I have an affiliate marketing account and so I can use that money to purchase more things on Amazon. So helps Amazon too. Yeah, exactly, oh good.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That reminds me of another tip that we were talking about earlier, which was in the course of running a business or even being an employee for another business. You learn so many different skills that you never thought that you would have to learn. Like me, as a musician, I never thought I'd have to learn digital marketing, yet without it I wouldn't be able to get there and make a living, right, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you can then leverage those skills that you've learned and start to hire yourself out to other companies with these new skills like graphic design, web design, social media management and so forth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. I mean, who would have thought? Because 18 years ago when I opened the bakery, people were like you are really good at decorating cakes, you should open a bakery. And then here I am, I do taxes, I do my website. When the toilet breaks, I fix it. I actually don't get to do cake very much. I design a lot of cakes, but the actual production of them I leave that to my really skilled team. They're awesome. I mean, empower your team to do what they need to do and get out of their way, because they will do it so well.
Speaker 1:So that's awesome. I didn't know that you did your own taxes. You could totally hire yourself out as a bookkeeper for other companies too, Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, shoot me in the head. I don't wanna do that. No, I actually. I use QuickBooks, but I do manage my own books, so I'm like the bookkeeper. And then I do have Ann, who will do my taxes for me and she'll have my personal taxes and she's gonna be doing my dad's taxes. She doesn't know that, but she will be.
Speaker 1:Well, fantastic.
Speaker 2:She's fantastic. And then in the off season you know if you do have a whole lot of extra time and you don't want to do a commitment of you know, getting a second job.
Speaker 2:like a couple of my staff, we're talking about possibly doing Uber in the off season, because you know they're not in a position where the more they do like the owner, like the more you work on your website, the better it'll, the more return you will get. If you're an employee of a company or if you have staff that have extra time because they're not getting the hours in the actual business, they can do things like Uber or Lyft or, you know, grocery delivery, because it's not a terrible commitment. You sign in, you do it, you sign out, you're done. So it's not like getting a job and then leaving a job when we get busy again.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:Well, there's lots of Absolutely.
Speaker 1:There's lots of opportunities and I'm sure there are even businesses within our events industry where the off season is slightly different. You know there are some businesses that are corporate based, some are wedding based and those seasons don't necessarily coincide. So if you could partner with another one of those businesses and, you know, kind of trade yourself out during the off season, that also could be a way to help survive your off season.
Speaker 2:Right, and you know, I think here in Denver corporate is sort of like flipped, like wedding seasons high when corporates low, and then they they change, and so if you can get more corporate business, so like my, my case subscriptions you had a great idea a few minutes ago. We actually service Topgolf and Topgolf is, you know, part of an East community and everything, and so I was thinking, you know, I should really talk to those people, because they have a bunch of corporate companies that actually invest in their clients, because they do the parties at Topgolf. Those are the types of companies I probably want to target with my case subscriptions, and so instead of just throwing it out on social, instead of just putting it up on the website and just like praying, maybe I should be targeting those people and see if maybe there's a partnership that I could, you know, get with that.
Speaker 1:So yeah, that's right, and I even have to share an email for sure, and I jokingly offered to help out be your sales rep for that. But that could be a legitimate like example of a partnership during the off season, where I help you out during the off season and then if, when my, when my wedding season comes, then unfortunately I won't be able to make more sales for you, but you'll have the recurring income.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, and I know that there's a lot of florists that provide flowers on a monthly basis to companies, and so that might actually be a really good partnership as well. So just finding, like, what you do and where you want to go and what company is actually servicing that already, and then making some kind of strategic plans with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, awesome, exactly I love this, jared.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for kind of brainstorming through this with me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my pleasure, thank you. I think it's been wonderful ideas and I think one of the big things, to just kind of wrap it up, is to survive the off season. One of the biggest things is having a support network, right? Yes, having people around you where we can bounce ideas off of. They can help you out in a bind, and that's, to me, one of the big values of our, our NACE chapter here. Not to turn this into a pitch for Denver NACE, but I love NACE and there's so many people who are willing to help out if you just reach out to them.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I was listening to, I believe, Alayna Harris's podcast somewhere, big podcast Yankee, and she said you know, having a community is one of the 10 best things you can do for your energy level, for your, just your mental health and your state of mind. And having having people around you that have similar goals, similar energy levels, similar everything it makes you feel like safer and included and just happy and energized. So NACE has definitely done that for me. So thank you, NACE Nation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. Nace Nation. Well, this was a wonderful episode. It was great to chat with you, pres Des, and to our listeners. If you are not a NACE member yet, please come check us out. Come to our next meeting. Go to nasedenvercom. Our meetings are listed up there. Our next one, I believe, is February 13th. It's called Unleash your Potential. It is an empowerment panel at the Limelight Hotel in Denver so you can register there. You can come as a non-member, but once you come and experience our community, we are sure that you will want to become members for life. So that is at nasedenvercom and that's it for today's episode. So thanks for tuning into another episode of the Denver NACE podcast. Go crush it and hopefully you guys survive the off season. Bye, everybody.
Speaker 2:Bye-bye.