How Event Planners Attract Big Talent

You are an avid, home-based event planner and you think you are ready to take your business to the next level and really start making the big money! Great, here is the event that could make you more money in one night (with a few months of work) than most people will make in a lifetime! Welcome to live talent and production entertainment. What could be better than watching a great comedian on television? How about seeing them live at an arena near to your hometown!?! This is what your new mission is to make happen.

Live entertainment in the most expensive and also the most lucrative money making program in the event planner line of shows. If you can pull this event off, you have just made yourself a career that will prove to be a lifetime of wealth for part time work. To use as an example, I will be showing you how I am trying to bring entertainer Larry the Cable Guy to the WVU Arena this coming year.

The first step to bringing live entertainment is to find a suitable place to host your desired act. For our entertainer, the most suitable place in our area in the West Virginia University Arena in Morgantown, WV. This enclosed 15,000 seat arena has the perfect setup to accommodate both Larry's show requirements and the maximum seating available to sell tickets for without wasting space. Another good advantage to this building is that the show will go on regardless of the weather outside (we get a lot of snow and rain throughout most of the year here). We called the arena and told their management office about our plans for the use of their building and they told us that the upfront rental cost of the building for one night is $15,000.

The next step is to contact the talent management group that Larry works with. Every talent act has a talent management coordinator that is in charge of booking shows for their clients so that all he has to do is show up and performs without worrying about all the legal aspects of the business. When I started talking to the management office, I was told that Larry's minimum cost for one show is $300,000. For event planners looking to make profit for themselves, they also take 15% of gross ticket sales in addition to the $300,000 up front payment prior to the show. The balance of the ticket sales goes to the event planner (don't forget from that remaining amount you must also pay for the arena, $15,000).

The final step prior to the show is to sell tickets. You can of course go around and try to sell the tickets yourself. However the best way to sellout arenas for big name talent like this is to have TicketMaster sell them for you. Typically you can name the price for your tickets, however TicketMaster also charges a fee per ticket sold for their own profits. Believe me, it's very worth letting them sell for you even with their extra charges on the tickets, just be sure to price your tickets accordingly. In our example, we have found out that the talent and the arena will cost $315,000 up front plus 15% of gross ticket sales. Considering the upfront cost alone each seat will cost $21 per seat. With a 6 month lead time to sell tickets, we will assume a sellout crowd for the show. If we sell tickets for an average of $35 per seat, we will walk away after the show with a net profit of $131,000!!! Not bad for a little work. Imagine if you got to the point that you could put together a few of these kinds of shows each year!?!