What do you do if your the majority of your sales are day of?
Why, you extend that day as long as you can!
Long running shows see their advances decline over time. And with the number of tourists that come in to New York City on a weekly basis (especially during the summer months), it’s not uncommon for Broadway shows to see grosses increase by several hundreds of thousands of dollars during a playing week. It’s can be nail-nibbling time to say the least.
Imagine you’re the Producer of a small to mid-sized musical, and on a Monday you see that you only have $250k in ticket sales for the week. But as the week goes on, and since plenty of people buy day of, you’ve got $550 or more by the end of the week! You just went from losing a few hundred K to breaking even or putting a few bucks in the bank in a 6 day period.
Do this a few times, and you can find the rhythm, however, and you can start to make projections based on those weekly sales (again, depending on the time of year – the day of sales in September ain’t nuthin’ compared to the day of sales on December 27th.)
And now it’s your job to figure out how to maximize those same day sales. Outdoor advertising in Times Square, street teams, TKTS promoters, are all some of the tried and true methods of kicking up sales on the same day.
And they all work.
At Altar Boyz, we’ve been in the same day market for a couple of years now, and just recently we figured out another way to fill a few more seats.
Simply put, if people are buying tickets day of, then why not give them more hours of purchasing time!
One of our softer performances of the week was our Saturday afternoon at 2 PM. Guess why? Well, think about it . . . if people are buying day of, then a 2 PM performance just doesn’t give them as many hours to buy a ticket!
Because Altar Boyz is only 90 minutes, we were able to change our performance time to 4 PM and gain 2 hours of ticket selling time, and still have no conflict with our 8 PM show!
On Sunday nights, we took our 7 PM and changed it to 7:30, to give us another half hour of selling (especially at the TKTS booth which remains open until then).
The first week we did incorporate those changes, we put another 30 butts in the seats. Not an enormous amount, but long running shows are about the long haul, on over time, those 30 butts will add up to a butt-load.
Opening a show and keeping it going and going and going is a lot like making fresh squeezed orange juice. When you first squeeze that orange, a lot of juice comes out. After those first few squeezes, it gets harder and harder. But, as I’ve found out, if you keep squeezing, there’s always a little more juice.
It just depends how hard you want to squeeze. And how thirsty you are.
Podcasting
Ken created one of the first Broadway podcasts, recording over 250 episodes over 7 years. It features interviews with A-listers in the theater about how they “made it”, including 2 Pulitzer Prize Winners, 7 Academy Award Winners and 76 Tony Award winners. Notable guests include Pasek & Paul, Kenny Leon, Lynn Ahrens and more.
