From weddings to conferences, people need places to congregate to learn, celebrate and unite. Venue rental and event planning are exciting industries where you can meet lots of different people, and every day will be different.
If you are considering going into the venue rental business, here are some important factors you need to know.
1. The Venue
Maybe your family home is expensive to maintain and you want to use it to generate income.
Maybe you can lease the top floor of a skyscraper with a spectacular view.
Even a single room can be a great venue for certain occasions like important meetings or photoshoots if it is accessible, well decorated, and provides a special ambience.
The parameters of your space and the type of event you plan on hosting will determine what services and amenities you will need to provide.
2. Adaptability
To get the most out of your venue, you need to make it adaptable to several different kinds of uses. You may not be able to book weddings every weekend.
If you have a large space, look for ways to divide it up into smaller spaces for smaller events. You can use temporary walls and dividers to separate a large room into more intimate ones.
If you are renting out a residential kind of space like a house, utilize the outdoors well. You can incorporate your garden into the event, adding aisle seating for a wedding or tables for a banquet.
A large house like a Victorian mansion or Tudor castle will have a certain style all its own, but you can make it appealing to wider audiences with neutral colors and decor that allow each renter to imprint it with their own style.
By offering different setups for lighting, seating, and music, you can transform your venue for a wide variety of events.
3. Partnerships
Whether you are hosting a personal event or a corporate one, your guests are likely to expect catering, from coffee to full banquets. They may also want services as varied as flowers, DJs, valet parkers, and onsite technicians for presentations.
As a venue rental, it’s best to have a list of approved vendors that you can recommend to clients who seek to rent your place. These should be pre-approved businesses whom you have vetted thoroughly.
You should work out ahead of time how you will handle fees, insurance, and other logistics. You can save your clients the hassle of negotiating individually with each one, so they can pay you one overall price and you will make a profit.
You also need to trust these businesses to show up when you need them to, clean up when necessary, and hire trained staff. You want these partners to help you maintain your brand and reputation amongst clients, and deliver the services they promise.
Your ability to provide and manage all of the ancillary services necessary for a good event will help make your venue more desirable.
4. Technology
Every event will expect its venue to provide access to technology. You must at least be able to provide adequate electronic outlets and Wifi for whatever tech effects they anticipate using.
Corporate conferences or meetings may want screens to project presentations and video. They may need microphones for speakers and spotlights. They will want all of their attendees to be able to access the Internet easily.
If your venue is located in the country far away from reliable cell or internet access, you may want to look into reliable tech options like boosters or your own servers.
Personal events need tech, too; weddings and bar mitzvahs will also want sound systems and lighting.
You may also want to have staff available onsite to help run these technical systems and address any last-minute glitches or outages.
5. Hygiene
Even before COVID 19, it was always imperative for great venue rental companies to have established systems for making sure their facilities were spotless and germ-free.
If you are offering any kind of catering or food, your preparation and cooking facility must be up to code and pristine. You must have appropriate refrigeration available for any kind of perishable foods.
You need to have a certain number of bathrooms available depending on the occupancy limit.
Even if your event has outsourced the catering, you should make sure you are not liable for any lapses they may have in their cleaning and maintenance processes.
Nowadays, you may want to offer ways to hold socially distanced events. You can offer seating plans that keep people six feet apart, with shields and barriers as well.
You should definitely offer advanced cleaning services, in addition to options that let people Zoom into the event.
6. Staffing
Both customers and vendors may expect you to provide people to staff the event. Corporate event planners will expect you or someone from your staff to be on-site to address any issues that arise.
As part of your partnerships, you should include a company that can provide staffing for food service, clean up, technical management, and parking.
Depending on who may be attending the event, you may need security staff.
If your venue is luxurious, you will probably need round-the-clock security to protect it from intruders.
As your venue rental business grows, you will need your own staff for cleaning, administration, and marketing.
7. Sales Plan
The most important part of running a venue rental business, besides maintaining a perfect space to host events, is to book your calendar as much as possible. A beautiful space won’t make you money if people are not using it!
We have all heard about wedding venues that are booked up years in advance.
In order to engage that kind of interest, you will need a rigorous marketing and sales plan. You want to reach out to potential clients as many ways as possible, especially online.
As some clients may be booking a venue from far away, give them the opportunity to see what it will look like without having to visit in person. Offer a spectacular website with images that show the different uses of your space.
You can even incorporate event seating software into your website and marketing, so potential customers can see different ways of configuring the seating without leaving their desks.
Venue Rental Business: Give Them What They Want
To succeed in the venue rental business, you need to be able to deliver to your clients a peerless experience with minimum hassle on their part. Anticipate their needs, take care of every detail, and give them an experience to remember.
For more creative ideas on how to start a successful business, keep checking back here.
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