The Banquet Budget June 16, 2006 Revision
Notes: Anything with a question mark needs to be firmed up. Anything that has “good“ next to it is (apparently) solid.
Estimated Expenses: Program Disc Jockey (KSLY guy) Casino Activity (??? Name???) Entertainment (Harry) Child Care (Bill Kellogg) Printed Program (Kelly Deftereos) Printed Tickets (Davis and Elam) Prizes (South Valley Sect.) Meal Food Wine on Tables (Mothers; no corkage) 120 X 12 = Venue Madonna Inn Decorations Stage and Stairs (Gotcha Covered) Curtain and Dance floor (Classic Party Rental) Total Expenses Estimated Income: Regional Donation Sale of Tickets 600 X50.00 Sale of Tables 50 tables X $20 CATA Membership Waiver $10 per member Total Revenue Net to the San Joaquin Region $2500 good $30,000 good $ 1000 good $ 1800 ?? $35,300 ($ 2,033)
$ 600 good $ 1925 good $ 2300 good $ 250 good $ 275 good $ 50 good $ 1000 good $26158 good $ 1440 good Inclusive above $ 0 ? $ 575 good $ 2600 good $37,333
Final notes on the Banquet:
Planning: We met in July or August last year to establish committee chairs. We had a program chair, a decorations chair, a prize chair, a reservations chair and the general chair (who was the regional president). The regional officers all sat on the committee as well and were support for the little stuff that came up. Your treasurer needs to a pretty bright person, not that there are any teachers out there who aren’t, but it’s a job and a half for them. The general chair (me) handled the venue, bar and the rental stuff. The program handled the entertainment and DJ, sound, spotlight, etc. The reservations did all that stuff, but you need to expand that to include ticket takers that night. The others are self- explanatory. By the time we had our fall regional meeting, we had the theme, venue, program and chairs in place. I established an email list of helpers to keep everybody in the loop. You could use your supervisor to forward stuff out if you wish, but that was going to be laborious for us. We met as a committee on the Saturday of state finals in May to measure the building and double check our plans. It was set up for a prom that night. This is when we discovered how far that curtain crap could go and the layout for our tables, bar and stage. We also figured out we couldn’t use the mezzanine for childcare and we couldn’t use a semi trailer for a stage and that we really didn’t need tooling hanging from the ceiling. It was enlightening. I don’t recommend waiting until May to do this. Ticket Sales: We went with 600. It was the largest event in the facility to this point. I believe the North Coast sold 650 the year before at the ranch and the Madonna considers 650 their maximum meal capacity now and I know you can sell 650 after this year. Seven days prior to the event when I turned in our final meal count, we had sold only 430 tickets. Karrie at CATA works very well on this task and is very patient. The tickets also need to be a marker for the wait staff and meal choice. Stress that. Timeline: We opened the doors at 5:15 and started at 6:00, which cut the pre-social short, but we thought it would be better to get the deal done and start the party earlier. I think it worked. The salad and desserts were preset and the salad was not good (as I suspected it would). Alexis told me a week prior that they would not place them too early (as I told her not to), and that did not work….at all. Hell, let the folks dress their own salads. I told her to be ready to serve at 6:05 and they did not serve a plate until 6:25. I guess she didn’t think I could do the intro on time. I did. People were out of their seats at 8:45.
The program: The meal was placed by 7:00. Elvis did 40 minutes and the official program was about 50 minutes. We let the casino go until 11:00 and we did prizes at 11:20 and I was out the door, done and cleaned, at 11:48. We got lucky with the Elvis thing and the casino activity. People liked it. Elvis was $2k and the casino was about the same for 100 gaming spaces. They can do more seats for more money, and she had good things to say about our crowd. Bill Davis at Golden West has her contact information. I only know that her name is Linda. The bottom line is that for a $50 ticket price, you will have plenty of money to put together a DJ and some entertainment. Watch your budget, but don’t freak out. I think we will end up taking about a $2,000 (max) dent in our regional budget. That is the cost of either Elvis, the Casino, or the cost of the dance floor and drape.
The meal: I think the meal was OK. Some folks thought it rocked and it most certainly was not bad. We wanted to give folks a choice in the meal and the Madonna had not set a banquet menu when we booked this deal, resulting in our rib eyes turning into fillets; with an increase in cost of $450 ($1 per plate) (450 beef and 150 fish). They are working on building a kitchen up on the hill in the building to improve service. If you wanted to only offer one meal selection that would be a no brainer. And if you went cheap, (turkey, halibut, salmon and chicken are all $22), you could actually reduce the ticket cost. (!) Or not. The cost between the filet ($29) and the fish ($22), over 650 tickets is $4,550. That’s a lot of cash. The bottom line on the menu choice is that teachers do a crappy job of pre purchasing the tickets and the Madonna needs actual meal counts seven days out. And that puts you in a tough spot. Perhaps tell people that they only have a choice if they buy a ticket before June 5. Which is actually what really happened this year. And we sure heard about it. I got comments from a person who was allergic to iodine (found in salmon), one guy allergic to all fish, and one lady who could not eat at all and wanted a free ticket. The bottom line was that they all paid for a ticket and we made no special orders. It sounds harsh, but you just can’t do that stuff. Mothers Tavern ran the bar and was very good to work with. They sold us the table wine at $12 per bottle when the corkage fee from Madonna was $13 if we brought in donated stuff. Even I can do the math on that. And they did not charge for their bar tenders or booze, other than what they charged for the drinks…..which was not cheap but it was a good solution. I believe they are “the approved bar concessionaire” for the venue, so you may not have a choice with that. Facility and Decorations: It’s freaking huge. Which is good.
(I dealt with three different Madonna coordinators in a year. Keep your paper work in order so you can avoid confusion if Alexis leaves. She was a little frustrating to work with in the beginning, but she warmed up to us after she met us. Good Luck there.) The space above the stage seemed to go on forever. Could you tie something into the roof to frame in the stage more? If you backed the stage up to the back wall, you could just decorate the wall; but it is still just a vast amount of white wall that you are left looking at. The curtain stuff is 10’ high maximum; the wall is probably 20’. Go with a higher stage? We went low so we didn’t need a guardrail around it. We had a lady in the region that did all the centerpieces for no cost. She has lots of that stuff around, I guess. We did not go with the traditional freebie regional items placed on the tables as that would take away from the theme that we chose. A few plants go a long way toward greening up the place. We talked a lot about white lattice and columns to separate the spaces of the entry, auction, stage and gaming and ended up not going that way. Gotcha Covered and Taylor Rents were good to us. Classic Party Rental was ungodly expensive, but due to our timeline, we used them. You will need to find a spotlight; someone in your region has one. And you need to get it placed higher than we did. The side entrance thing threw most folks for a loop. The building appears to have a grand central entry and we didn’t use it by request of the Madonna. Better signage, ropes, decorations, or whatever were (and are) needed. We did not do a good job of this. And the reason you need folks to come in one door is….. Table Reservations: I think this is a great idea to keep people calm as they enter, and it prevents the long lines that we used to have at the Chumash Auditorium. There were (supposed) grumblings in the Central Region meeting on Monday about buying a table, but they figured out the voluntary nature of it eventually. We set 60 tables of ten chairs each. I think you need to set maybe 10 or 20 extra seats because of the way folks sit, even if you go up to 650 tickets. It would not change the meal count, but make the last 15 people much easier to seat. We sold 45 or 46 of the 60 tables for $20 bucks each. The price was discussed at length ranging from free to $40. If it were too cheap, folks would turn in bogus stuff and not take it seriously, and if it is too much, you get resentment. Alyssa Huie at Corcoran was our reservations chair and she did a great job, including printing the reservation tickets and drafting the floor plan into Auto Cad with our number of tables accurately depicted. Madonna has a copy of this. Contact her with your questions; she’s cool. And to get people seated in the right spot and to check tickets, you need a committee of about 10-15 people that night running them through like airport security (we didn’t do this). You need people who are not afraid to tell some idiot how it is going to be. That sounds bad, but it was the truth for us and that is how some moron took that table marker off of a table and tossed it in the women’s bathroom. If we had a couple of “heavy’s” on duty, they could have cleared that table and I would not have had to apologize to the lady who reserved it. The theft of that marker was a low point for me. I think stuff like that
should not happen. I would have punched a woman if I knew who did it; maybe my wife would have stopped me, but boy I was hot. Child Care: This needs to be revisited in a big way. What we have done in the past and what we did was pay Bill Kellogg to get some college kids (church group kids in the past) to watch the kids. It is $250. We had Rich Vandenack assigned to be the contact person, but I did most of the footwork prior to the event and Rich handled the day of event stuff with Dr. Kellogg. The Madonna suggested a separate tent to put on site with a heater in it, but I got poor reactions from that idea. They do have a 1,200 square foot mezzanine in the building that is thus far unfinished that someday could handle the childcare activity. We were originally told that we could use it and that was retracted the first week of May. Renting another room at the Madonna gets into fire marshal restrictions and renting a small banquet room at the Embassy Suites was $300 or more. You should check with Dr. Kellogg regarding the number of kids served in this area this year (I don’t know the number). I appreciate his willingness to do what he has done in the past, but for the amount of money that we are putting out, I think we can get the kids closer to the venue. Parents were not really comfortable leaving their kids across town in a classroom with folks they had never met and I do not blame them. We just did not have time to come up with a better solution. Overall: I’m not sure if I would run right out and sign up to do this next year, but I am certainly not afraid of it as I was a year ago. I was encouraged by the number of folks in my region who said that they would help and actually did. Recruit good chairs to work with you. I will answer questions if you need or perhaps this is the last that you wish to hear from me about this, and that’s fine as well. I just wish to see the event not be such an ordeal for the chairs in the future and for the event to run smoothly in a professional manner. Is that too much of an optimistic perspective? I think not. Good luck to you.
DC