It is with great sadness that I am accepting defeat for ResellingDO for Beginners.
What goes into hosting a ResellingDO
There is a lot of time that goes into selecting venues, working agreements, finding awesome presenters, and don’t forget the catering. All of these aspects take great care and effort, so that we can put on quality events like ResellingDO3, and NapaDO. But the hardest part is the leap of faith one must take to sign a contract for $6,500 (or more) for an event, without having a single ticket sold. Setting that ticket price is also rather tough. Unfortunately, shutting down a brewery is not the cheapest endeavor. So I needed to factor in that I needed to spend at least $6,500 (not including tips for the staff), so I established that in order for the event to be break even, at the $149 we set the ticket price at, we needed at least 43 attendees.
As of 29 July when I finally called it, we had sold 8 tickets.
To put it differently, as of 29 July, when I had to make the decision on the contract (they do give us a brief window to pull out), I stood to lose around $5,000, hosting this event.
What happens to those 8 folks that bought tickets?
We have refunded those tickets already. I’ll try to go a little further for those 8 folks, because they were committed to attending, some making the purchase the first day tickets went on sale.
ResellingDO’s going forward
As for the future of ResellingDO. Putting on events takes a significant amount of time and to put on quality events such as my wife and I strive to do, they also cost a bunch. Further, we’ve never had sponsors because I’ve always wanted to ensure that we have the freedom of what we present. Going forward, I will still coordinate events but we will limit it to the Mile High Reselling Club (MHRC) primarily, which will help us properly gauge scale of interest, and essentially the scale of the event.
Wrapping Up
It was very hard for me personally to come to terms with the decision to cancel this ResellingDO. Going into it, I had thought this event was going to be the largest we’ve had, given the great interest we saw in a beginner level event. We chose to go back to a venue that has treated us well and that we had received great feedback on from past events. What this all leads me to believe, is that this type of an event may no longer be the best approach. I’m not quite sure what is the best approach, but I’ll keep trying things to see what works, because I really strongly believe that face to face networking and conversation is what builds this community the best.
