Events has always been a tough space for the staffers and workers. It is a very word of mouth and relationship based business. There hasn’t really been a solution to help event planners get staff at reasonable costs. Lots of calling, post jobs, going through resumes, etc.
Most of our events on Hefe have been pre-Covid-19 weddings. For the agents, they had been selling into wedding planners and venue locations. Many of the larger venues already had staff, but for a lot of the smaller venues like wineries, farms, etc getting event staff has been tough. Nothing is worse than being short handed with staff at an event. Even for the large venues, some events surge past staff capacity requiring additional help.
Selling into Event Planners and Venues
The folks that will be most successful will be the ones looking to monetize existing relationships. Those that are just starting out, the best route is going to a large bridal fair and just start talking to folks. It will take time and rapport to target the key individuals. Building strong trust relationships to the point where they switch from their old ways to this new way may take time. For others, it scratches and itch immediately. We only have one example we have heard of where Hefe is being sold into events space rather successfully.
One winery in the outskirts of Napa puts on weddings as a means to diversify income. As the owner said, making wine is a breakeven business for the smaller wineries in Napa and Sonoma. So events and weddings is a way to diversify and bring in more revenue. With that they are trying to pull more services in-house instead of depending on the undependable and rather expensive local vendors. The smaller winery is always battling to get help as the larger wineries sucked all the good local staff for their half million dollar corporate events. Not like this small venue was cheap either. The minimum booking fee for the location along was $15,000. For a typical event, it would run between $50,000-$200,000 when all was said and done. With so much money being spent, it is easy to see why the winery wanted to get a larger portion of the pie.
For you this could mean several hundred to over a thousand dollars per event in referral commissions as this venue alone could spend $10,000-$50,000 on staff for a given event. For this example, the agent was well connected into the restaurant community. Having worked at several restaurants from Calistoga to the City of Napa, all the way down to Vallejo. She knew how to get highly qualified workers. Most of her business was renting uniforms, so this was a natural extension of her business. While she could just staff the event herself and earn more per worker, per hour. It was a lot of work, liability, insurance, taxes, payroll, etc instead she just enrolled the winery into Hefe so she can just focus on her core business of delivering uniforms while getting a few extra bucks from the use of the uniform. The uniform business was much easier and simpler too. Something she like with three kids and a large household to manage. Managing a rolodex of hundreds of people and making sure they showed up. Not something she wants to take on.
This is only one case example of Hefe being used for events. We will have more example coming soon.