Opening a live music venue is an exciting and rewarding experience. But it doesn’t come without its challenges. After all, starting any business from the ground up requires patience, persistence, and planning. However, if you know where to start, the path to pursuing your dreams as a venue owner is a little more straightforward. That’s why we insist on checking out our guide for opening and running a music venue. We’re confident it’ll help you get some solid footing so that you can start showcasing incredible musical acts as soon as possible.
Form a Business Plan
Starting a business requires brainstorming, budgeting, and a killer game plan to get everything done. Establishing a music venue is no different. Start by figuring out your core values and how to represent them through your brand and the venue itself.
Next, commit your creative vision for the establishment to paper and start brainstorming how you might structure your business. After you get a baseline for the fundamental aspects of your venue, get more specific with your game plan by deciding on the following things:
- Your business structure and budget
- Short and long-term goals
- Jobs and responsibilities
- Product and service offerings
Market analysis and strategizing are also key in this stage of planning, as they will help you identify the best ways to attract customers. And when you’re ready, start drafting an executive summary that demonstrates the viability of your business through your budgeting, research, and planning.
Decide What Kind of Venue You Want To Run
Of course, you should already know the specific type of venue you’d like to open. And the first step here is finding a location that meets your needs without breaking your budget. But once you’ve secured a site, you’ll need to perfect the more nuanced details concerning the type of venue you’d like to run.
You also want to consider what sort of products and services you’ll offer to customers. For instance, what type of musical acts are you planning to showcase? Perhaps you want to provide a full bar but leave the cuisine to a fleet of food trucks outside your location. Maybe you’d like to sell venue merchandise and backstage pass memberships to customers who sign up.
However you choose to set stuff up, having a laser focus on what sort of venue you’re going to run is crucial to the success of your establishment. These details will help you book the right artists, provide the best products and services, and ultimately make your venue a hotspot for local music lovers. So it should come as no surprise that we had to add this tip to our guide for opening and running a music venue.
Get All the Proper Equipment and Paperwork
Of course, you can’t open any establishment without acquiring all the proper equipment and paperwork to make it happen. Depending on the needs of your venue, you’ll likely need to get some basic restaurant and bar supplies, like mixers, espresso machines, safety mats, and the like. You’ll also need appropriate seating if you plan on having a café area.
Perhaps most important of all, you’ll need the proper POS and inventory system for your business. After all, you need a way to ring up all those cocktails and venue merch. Once the equipment is taken care of, the next step is to make things legitimate by filling out all the required paperwork and obtaining the licenses you need to do business at your venue.
