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A great booking form will not only help you get more gigs, but it will also increase the value of your average event. A bad booking form, on the other hand, is probably losing you money!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: this transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate
Hey, party animals, it’s Mitch here from Party Business Growth Solutions, and I’m super pumped today to be going through this training with you today. We’re going to be talking about looking at and figuring out what to do about it if your party packages are just too complicated. So we’re going to look at what the impact of that is to your business, how it affects your clients and ultimately how it affects your bottom line. All right, I’m going to share some of my story with you as well as we go through this. So we’re going to keep this really quick and efficient for you. We’re gonna get right to the meat of everything here, but I want to start by just sharing a little bit about what my experience was like when I first started.
So I was naive enough to think that running my party business would be easy and straightforward. Like that green arrow you see in the screen. But and at first, to be honest, it kind of was, and I was misled into thinking that that was actually the case because when I started and I had relatively few bookings, it was pretty simple to manage at all, even if I was making things a little bit more complicated than it needed to be for both myself, my staff and my clients. So I’m not exactly sure when it changed, but at some point it changed and it felt like it was both gradual and like, totally out of nowhere the exact same times. I don’t know if you can relate to that, but even worse was that as the years went on, I didn’t really learn my lesson. I kept convincing myself of this same thing. And so it usually sounded something like this. I would be like, Yeah, we could do that too. It’ll only add a little bit of extra work, but it will make the clients much happier. So it’s no big deal. And then I’d go on and do the thing and create all the extra work for myself and my team and make things way more complicated. And then I would start promoting that. I do that thing too. And then before I knew it, I had this huge list of things that I’d be talking about any time somebody asked me what I did and what I offered. And so these types of changes came through or these these types of incidents came when people would ask for things that weren’t really something I offered. And so I started offering tons of customizations.
I was letting my clients call all the shots, and they were basically in charge of everything of how I ran my business. But each of these missteps had a massive ripple effect on the rest of my business and meant more gear and meant more training and more storage space required. It meant basically everything, and the effect was exponential every time I made a little change like that. And I was dealing with problem after problem because nothing was predictable or routine for me.
So I don’t know if you could relate to that, but I want to just sort of look through why my business was so complicated, OK? So there are a few things. Number one, I didn’t have systems in place, so I wasn’t thinking in terms of systems and I didn’t put them in place. And as a result, every time I went to do something, I was making it up as I went along. The next thing was that my booking process was manually driven and it was very time consuming. So every little step I took, I had to handle it manually and not cause bigger issues for me. And this is all ties into my my party packages. I kept doing things a certain way because I kept telling myself that, you know, my clients are used to it and I can’t change now. I’m too far into this thing. I was offering way too many customizations and I offered way too many options, OK, which made it actually difficult for me and for my clients. We’ll talk more about that soon.
So let’s look at, you know, it’s a very simple question. If we have two extremes here, which do you think would be better? Would it be better to sell 100 units of just one thing in one product or service? Sell it 100 times? Or would it be better to sell 100 different things one time each? Right? Give me a second to ponder that one, right? Pretty obvious, right? Most of us, we’re going to be thinking selling 100 units of the one thing would be a better scenario, right? Seems obvious. And the benefits to selling one thing is obviously it’s going to be on multiple levels, right? We’re going to see benefits in terms of our operations. It’s going be a smoother business to run because if you’re just doing the same thing over and over and over again, you become amazing at running that thing and becomes a fine oiled machine, right? It becomes easier for staff training. Now I have just this one thing I got to teach people. They could do it. I can get. I can become a master at teaching it to them, and they can become a master at doing it in a really short amount of time.
But the one that’s counterintuitive is that third one we’ve listed there, which is marketing a lot of times. People think that when it comes to sales and marketing, that more is more right. If I can offer more options, obviously sell more things right. That is the, you know, conventional wisdom seems to skew our thinking in that direction. But the truth is it just it simply is not the case. First of all, to get top dollar for what your market will bear, whatever category you’re in, whether you’re a character entertainer, you’re a magician, you are a face painter, you’re a balloon twisters or some other type of children’s entertainer or party provider, whatever category you’re in. You have to. Be seen as a specialist and an expert at what you do. And the more that you, the more that you offer, the less specialized you appear to be. And then all of a sudden you become seen as a jack of all trades. And now other people start thinking in terms of price as opposed to value, which we don’t want.
OK. Also, when you have more, you clutter the decision making process and people are very easily overwhelmed by decisions very easily over when there’s this thing called decision fatigue. And the busier someone is and the more decisions they have to make, the harder it becomes to make decisions. And so if you’re presenting people with too many options, then all of a sudden you’re making their job to just book you harder than it should be. All right. So when people give you a narrow focus, it’s much easier for you to get excited. And similarly, if you give your clients a narrow focus and it gets makes it much easier for them to just visualize the options and get excited about the one that is speaking to them most.
Now, in fact, there was actually a famous study out of Columbia University that studied exactly this situation. Now this study was done back in 2000, so, you know, 20 plus years ago. But the message is still highly relevant to what we’re talking about today. So let me walk you through what that what that study was. So in this study, the the the researchers set up a table outside of an upscale grocery store in California, and they used the products from a like a gourmet jam company. All right. So they did this in consecutive Saturdays, and they they made sure to have all the appropriate controls in place now. On the one day, they showed up with six different jam flavors. Ignore the neon colors. I’ve gone with my slide here. They weren’t radioactive jams, but they went with six different jam flavors that they had a sample table set up. People could come by sample the jams if they like it there at the grocery store. If they liked one, they could go ahead and buy it. And on the other Saturday, they did the exact same thing, but this company had such a large variety of flavors to offer. But on the other side, today they do the exact same thing, but this time with 24 different flavors. So the same table, same location, same grocery store on the one day six flavors. On the other day, 24 flavors were available for sampling free samples. So during the periods when they did this, they kept a close. You know, they carefully monitored how many people stopped at the table to sample, and then they monitored how many of those people made purchases of those jams. Well, the first interesting fact that came to light was that when they when they monitored how many people came to visit their tables when they had 24 flavors on offer that drew in a larger crowd. In fact, 60 percent of the people who walked past it would stop and visit the table to take a sample, whereas when they only had the six flavors, it didn’t engage as many people, but 40 percent of the people walking by would stop to take a free sample. So so far, right, what we’re seeing here is that this is leaning in favor of having more. However, this next step is where it gets interesting. OK? Of the customers that came in sampled the flavor flavors, they monitored how many of them actually purchased one of the jams that were on display? Well, in the case where there were only six flavors to sample from 30 percent of those who sampled it actually made a purchase. Whereas when there were 24 flavors, three percent of those who came in sampled the jams made a purchase. So when you run the numbers on this and let’s just assume they’re only 100 people are exactly 100 people in both cases when you run the numbers on this. In the case where there was in the case there were, there were six flavors. They made 2012 six sales out of 100, whereas when there were 24 flavors, they made less than two sales out of 100 people that came in and stopped by this booth. So let me ask you, which of these jam companies would you want to own right? If you own this jam company, which display are you setting up or are you sending up the only six flavors? Are you setting up this the display with 24 flavors? All right, pretty obvious what we’re going to go with, right?
So why are you doing things the hard way?
Well, I can’t speak for you, but I can tell you, based on my experience, I thought and I reflected on the reasons why I might have been doing things the more difficult way that, as we could see, it often leads to worse results in terms of our bottom line. And here were some of the reasons I came up with. Number one, I was afraid of losing money. So I thought if I took an offer off the table, that was a segment of my revenue stream that I was just going to lose and it was going to be able to replace that. I was afraid of upsetting clients. People were used to me offering certain things, and I was afraid that if I made that change that people are going to get upset and go see my competitors. I was afraid that what I was offering wasn’t good enough, and I needed to keep stacking more and more and more on top of it in order to entice people over to me. I was not system oriented. I wasn’t thinking in terms of how to run the best possible business I was thinking about each in. Joel Klein, how to just get them to commit to buying. And that was hurting my business. It was hurting my personal life because my my job of running this business was way more complicated and it was hurting my bottom line. OK. And as a result, my clients weren’t as happy as they were when actually ultimately made changes. So we’ve talked about, you know, why we need to go simple and the impact it can have on your business. But now let’s figure out what steps you need to take in order to get you and your business there, OK?
So the first thing I want you to do is to evaluate. I want you to evaluate your business and the way you’re going to do this is you are going to get a blank sheet of paper or you can do this on a whiteboard and then split it into four columns. As you can see, I’ve done here our first column, you’re just going to write at the very top. You can write package packages and services and then you’re going to list off all the different service areas you have and all the different packages. Every single one of them lists them all off down here, OK? Then in your other three columns, you have, you are great at it. This is, are you as a business great at delivering that package and service? The next one is clients want it. Do your clients even want that thing? Or is it just one person one day who suggested it to you and you’re like, Oh, then we’ll do it right? Do people as a general rule, do people want it? And then finally, this is one that is often overlooked is can you run it efficiently? And if you can’t run it efficiently, that might be OK if you could charge a big premium for it. So is it efficient or a big premium? That’s what that third column is, and what you’re going to do is you’re going to really sit down and really be critical about all the different packages and services you have on offer and evaluate how you are doing in each of these areas. And so you’re going to put a check or next for each one. So, you know, in this particular service, we’re great at it. Our clients want it and we can do it efficiently. Now that’s your sweet spot, right? But there might be other things that are a little bit more gray, and you’re not 100 percent sure that each one of them is a check. And you really have to figure out and decide which ones of these are going to be killers to your business.
Which one of these things, you know, if you’re offering things that your clients don’t even want, that might just be hurting you in your business, OK? If you’re offering things that you’re not great at. Chances are it’s hurting your reputation and ultimately hurting your business. And if you’re offering things that you cannot do efficiently or charge enough money for them, that is definitely killing your business. And these are the ones that are easy to overlook because we we often don’t value our own time and our own efficiency at a high enough level. OK. So find your sweet spot and zero in on the things that you know you could be great at that your clients want you to do efficiently or charge an appropriate price for them, OK? And then next thing you’re going to do is now that you’ve sort of whittled your list of services down to just the ones that you know are going to be your core offerings. Now you’re going to map out your packages so you’re focused on doing fewer things really, really well. Awesome. You’ve figured out now that there’s this, you know, there’s this exponential growth pattern to the amount of work it to do every time you add a complex layer to it. And by eliminating it, you’re going to actually get the the inverse of that. You’re going to get the expert exponential benefit of getting rid of all those complexities and those headaches, right?
And now it’s time to map your packages out. And here are some rules I want for your packages. I want that ideally, you only present your clients with three packages per event type, so you might do you know, school assemblies, you might do birthday parties, you might do community festivals, you might do all these different types of areas of businesses that you provide your services to, and that’s fine. But for each one, let’s limit the choices to three really great choices that every time somebody is about to make a buying decision with, you only put three choices in front of them, and that will not overwhelm people. That will help people make better choices and choose you quicker because you’re not overwhelming them. The same could be said about any add ons or upsells. So don’t present them with a 10 or 12 different add ons and upsells. Give them three great options and let them choose the level that makes the most sense for them. OK, now of course, you know there are companies that character companies as an example. They may have 25, 50, 100 different characters, and they want to present their clients with options to choose the characters that they want. So obviously in that case, you’re not going to whittle it down to just three. But every time there’s a decision to be made about, you know, that has a financial implication to it. I want you to try to limit it to three options three really great options for them, OK, wherever possible. All right.
So, so those are a couple of rules of thumb that I want you to consider, and I want you to remember that there’s a massive ripple effect every time you add a layer of complexity. If you say, well, that’s just one extra option, but that now creates all these different iterations of one extra option across two or three different packages. And now all of a sudden, you need more gear, you need more staff, you need more storage space, you need more opportunities to train your people. Everything grows with every decision you add to this, so you want to keep it as simple as possible. Three options is your ideal scenario. OK, so you’ve you’ve evaluated your package. Just in services, you’ve knocked out your packages.
What’s next? OK. So after you’ve done all that work, the next thing you’re going to want to do is now you go and update your website with your with your more simplified packages. You can update your marketing materials. You could improve your booking processes is such an important piece that we’ll talk about another trainings, for sure down the road. But it is so critical that you have such a smooth booking process booking you should be the easiest thing anybody ever has to do with you, OK? And you should be putting energy into getting the right systems in place. If you’re not thinking of your business as a collection of systems that run smoothly, that aren’t just a series of random decisions you make on the spot, then you’re doing your business and yourself a disservice. I want you focused on getting your business running smoothly, and systems and the right tools and technologies is what you need to make that happen. OK. And then if you could do all this, just get ready for better results. That’s what we’re aiming for here.
So I’ve already run this training on a little bit longer than I was hoping to. So we’re going to start wrapping things up here. But I do want to say like, you’re stuck on any of this if you’re confused about where do you start with any of this? This is what myself and Adam. This is what we. This is our jam. This is what we do day in and day out and Party Business Growth Solutions. And our single mission is to help you grow your party business as quickly as possible. And we do this by providing trainings like this, by providing tools and resources, by providing the right software as you need to run your business as efficiently as possible. And so if you have questions about any of that kind of stuff, please reach out to us. But I do want to say, just because this is the training I did today, this doesn’t mean it’s the logical place for you to start your journey on improving your business. OK. So what we’ve done to help you focus on the right area for your business and to identify your greatest opportunities for improvement in your business is we created the Party Business Growth Quiz is a free quiz. You go to partybusinessgrowth.com/quiz. All right. And I will drop a link to that below this video partybusinessgrowth.com/quiz of what this quiz will do is it’ll run you through a series of really important questions things for you to be considering in your business. But as you go, it’ll be scoring your answers and it’ll ultimately identify for you what area of your business is your greatest opportunity for growth and improvement. And at the end of that, I’ll even offer you some training and tips on what to do in that area to push that forward, OK? So again, our mission is to help you grow as rapidly as possible and to get rapid results, you need to actually work on the right things first. And this quiz is the first step in helping you get there. OK, so go take that quiz partybusinessgrowth.com/quiz if you ever have any questions at all. Reach out to us. Connect with us. We’re here to help you. All right.
Party on!!
Kind words from other party business owners, just like you…
