Welcome to episode 98 of the Bandhive podcast.

It is time for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. My name is James Cross and I'm here with Matt Hoos of Alive in Barcelona. How are you doing today, Matt? You know, James, I am doing absolutely fantastic and it's all, it's all because of you. Thank you. Why is that? Well, because because of you is a song by 98 degrees and we're on episode 98 took the pun right out of my mouth. Oh, Oh yes, Now we have sound effects. Mind you, this is all created by real instruments, not by some monkey in a cage.

I'm just kidding. James is actually trapped in his basement. So it is kind of like a monkey in his cage. So or a man in a box, Alison chains. We need a whole bunch of different sound effects machines. So that way we can have our own uh I mean I could just start making sound effects. I don't know how they would come out in the recording. We need the guy from Police Academy. My mind immediately goes to, I think it's an episode of futurama where there's the sound effects 5000 and he's a cop but he has no arms so he can't actually like do anything to put.

So he just gets in the car and makes cop noises. That's amazing. Oh well I'm glad that you're having a good day because of me. That's great to hear. Even if it's just a bad song fun because I would do the same thing. How's everything on the east side today? Today is the greatest uh I can't wait for tomorrow. I'm having a great day so far. It's not Halloween yet, but this episode comes out on October 12. So by that time maybe there's some smashing pumpkins to be done.

We got the 123 punch. All right, we'd like to dedicate this episode to Billy Corgan. Not that any of us have any relation or correspondence with Billy Corgan, but for some reason he happens to listen to a podcast about D. I. Y. Musicians. This one goes to you, billy. Yeah and no offense, Billy Corgan. We also have more hair. If you are listening to this, you're just gonna have to roll with the punches like randy Newman says that's a throwback 1988 Five years before I was born. Just keep rolling.

Rolling, Rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling. Okay, now that we've wasted three minutes of the podcast on just more and more puns. Just bad puns to punishment. Oh yes, I love it. I think it's time that we introduce the topic for the day, punishment that we need to sound effect. That says that pun pun punishment Three months in a row hat trick. £3. A cheap trick. I think we have reached the allotted amount of puns that we budgeted for this episode and that was a lot. Now we're over budget.

We are legitimately over budget on the puns. Hey, that's funny. You know what's bad about being over budget, literally everything, it's impossible for you to run a business if you're over budget. And after all of our absolutely horrible dad ponds, we are segueing into today's episode, which is all about budgeting for your first tour, some of the dues and do knots about budgeting and really some of like the blatant like, oh my gosh, this definitely should not have happened those moments. We're going to isolate a couple of those and we're actually kind of going to use one band as a small case study because these guys actually made a bunch of headlines all across the country because they were able to do some pretty impressive things and all of those impressive things was overshadowed by the fact that they just like literally shot themselves directly in the foot.

So today's episode is going to be about budgeting for your first tour James. Why don't you kick us off? Why don't you tell us a little story? Yeah, Well, first I want to say, I know I put in the outline budgeting for your first tour, but maybe a better way to approach it would be your first tour budget because it's quite possible that there's listeners here who have toured before without a budget, and might have come up with some fruity ideas, like, the band we're going to talk about, I'm so sorry, we're laughing because the band we're going to talk about is a band called pompom Use, and that's the same band their singer, Jack Conte, started Patreon, so no shade to him because he is clearly a great businessman, But their 2014 tour, they lost $11,000 on a tour where they earned over 130,000.

I just want to point out for most D. I. Y artists, if you're doing, you know, like, your first van tour, even your first handful of tours, you are going to lose money, but you're not going to be bringing in 100 30,000 either. Like, you're probably gonna bring in A few 1000 spend, like, 5 to 10,000 if you're losing 11,000 on a tour that earned you over 130, you're definitely screwing something up. So, don't be, like, compliments. That's really all I can say. There's an entire article about this, and that's it for today's episode.

Yeah, that's it. Don't be pompous most. So, if you go to the show notes at band, I've got rocks slash 98 we will link to the article that Jack from pompoms wrote about their tour and how he lost all this money. It's a great look into the tour budget, but Mad and I looked at it the other day and we're like, they over spent so much on so many things, They spent, what was it like 22,000 on hotels in 28 days. It was a 28 day tour. I think it was 17,000 on on food and hotels.

But I mean like the it was four hotel rooms per night because there were six band members to crew. So you have eight members, so two people to a hotel room each night. I don't know those of you who are good at basic math, but 28 days four hotel rooms do a little bit of math and let me know if that's enough money to make a down payment on a vehicle large enough for you to own instead of throwing money at the hotel industry, Hint it absolutely is as a matter of fact they spent more on hotels for that 28 day tour than we purchased our tour van for and the racks needed to build the bunks and the upgrades that we needed like and our trailer, I mean we paid like $1,500 for our trailer, $8,000 for our van.

And so we spent 9500. We spent almost half of what they spent just on hotels and we have a vehicle. It's a diesel that will literally last us to a million miles if we take care of it. It's an asset. Exactly. There are certain decisions that you have to make in the music industry, that some of them, you know, we've talked about like investment costs, being opportunity costs and you know, we've talked about startup costs, we talked about how sometimes you have to pay money to make money fish with fish, but you also have to be mindful of all of the systems that you're sitting in place because if you basically set up a system that hemorrhages money and then you move on to the next part of your business, you still have a boat that has a hole in the side.

Getting the water out is going to be physically impossible when there's a giant hole in the side of your boat. So it's important to focus on the factors that go into planning a tour and really the more your head is in this game, the more effective of a tour manager you're going to be. So basically, we want to start with a budget, okay, your budget is going to be determined a lot of these expenses, you can figure out ahead of time. You have your guarantees from venues.

Hopefully these people have advanced shows ahead of time, some of the time, depending on the size of the venue or depending on the size of the promoter, They will even send you money ahead of time as a form of deposits, $130,000. That's a big range. You know, even if you're 10% off, which these guys were, that's $13,000. And so like there's not a ton of wiggle room when it comes to like making mistakes. I mean, especially once you're out there on the road, you've been out there for three weeks and you're just like, man, all I want is to like go out to eat and not see something that is related to music.

I just want to go sit at a restaurant. Okay, well that's an expense driving. There is an expense, like finding place to parking if you're inside of a major city, that's an expense. If you're in a major city and there's toll roads and you don't have your specific little avoid tools icon swept. That's an expense. All of these things. I mean, they add up just like, we talk about building small systems that slowly but surely turn into this massive snowball effect debt does the same exact thing.

And it does it even easier, there is far less friction between you spending money than there is. But you know, with you saving money, it's really easy for you to just throw money away. It's really easy when you're 28 days tired and you're like, dude, I just want to shower, I will literally go and pay $100 to rent a hotel room just for us to shower and I have been on tours like that before at the very end of the tour my drummer or my guitarist or one guy in my group is like, I just want to like have a little bit of peace and it's like totally, we stayed 28 days in our bus and then we get to the end and we rent an Airbnb, we've definitely had situations like that and the more tired you get and the more things that have come up, the more time has passed, you are a little bit more prone to like shelling out a little bit of that money.

So it's very important to set a budget essentially the limit yourself, but it will allow you to not lose money the way bamboo moose did. So for you to have a tour where you make over $100,000. That is awesome. That is incredible. The best parts about this story should be isolated and studied. The worst part about this story should also be isolated and studied. So that way, you know exactly what to do and exactly what not to do. Starting with your tour budget step one is knowing how much money you have, this is gonna be contingent upon.

Like how long your tour is going to be a 30 day tour is going to have different expenses than a 15 day tour. How do you determine those number of expenses? Well, you have mileage. Always a good idea to round up with mileage. If I'm going from Denver to Salt Lake City and that's, you know, a few 100 miles, let's say it's 300 miles. It's more than that, but let's say it's 300 miles, I'm gonna budget 350 let's say that the price of gas in Denver and Salt Lake City is $3.60. I'm gonna budget 3 75 per gallon.

So that way, when I get to the end of this stint, my budget says that I have X amount of dollars and when I get to the end of that, even if I spend 100% of that budget, I have made money in the margins because I over budgeted gas wise, I over budgeted mileage wise. This is a simple practice that leaves you in the black by the end of tour and at the end when you're like when it's a little bit harder for you to keep your figures straight or when you're just so exhausted that you don't want to sit down and do another day of math even though the most important course of action is to be diligent and do that.

You also need to understand that like real life happens. You're human. There have been times when I've been out in 100° weather on warped tour and I got to the end of the block. Here's the money I paid. So like we all get lazy. It's important, remember. Yeah, absolutely. And I think just to make absolutely clear what you're saying here matt, it doesn't just apply to fuel, what you're saying about you wanna budget a little extra. I see a lot of artists who, if they do a budget budget for the best case scenario because they want the numbers to look good when they pitch the budget to their band mates.

That's not what you want to do because then you end up over budget, you budget for the worst case scenario, at least, you know, reasonably expected. Like you want to have an emergency fund and all that kind of stuff, but you're not going to budget for like three times what you need, but you still want that surplus. So your band mates at the end don't say, hey, why do we all owe like an extra $2000? Oh well I didn't calculate enough for gas or oh, I didn't calculate this.

No, you budget for the worst case scenario that can be reasonably expected matt. Like you were saying the length of the tour affects it. I think there's three main steps to figuring out the basics of your budget, which is how long the tour is going to be. I would say if you have never done a tour budget before, even if you've toured before, if you've never done a budget, Do a tour that's between 7 to 14 days and budget it and you will be amazed at the information you get from doing a budget for that specifically a few years ago, I think I've told this story on the show before, I did just a weekend tour with a friend's band And I did a budget for them.

And at the end of the tour I said, Hey, you guys made like $28 over the three or four shows. We played 3. 5 because one was acoustic, 3. 5 shows in five days and they're like, wait, we made money like, yeah, why are you so surprised? Why wouldn't you make money? Like we did well on merch, we didn't have high expenses because we were smart about it and we paid for our own food. If we paid for food out of the band budget, we would have lost money. But we said, no, we're going to be frugal, pay for our own food.

And they made $28 and they were amazed. So I said, Well, how much do you lose on tours? Typically we don't know if you don't know then maybe you actually made money on tours in the past and you just didn't realize it because you didn't keep a budget and you didn't track your income and your expenses. So I know how long it's going to be and actually track it, then you have to understand how many shows you're going to play because your costs on show days are going to be different than your costs on off days because off days you're going to have activities that you want to do.

You're gonna wanna, you know, go see the sights, go to a museum, go see nature. You know, whatever it is that you and your band mates are interested in. Maybe you want to go see a hockey game or a baseball game or whatever. This ties in directly to what you were saying that about calculating your mileage is, you need a rough estimate of which cities you want to or through. You're probably not going to end up playing those exact cities in that exact order that you write down in your initial routing, but you are going to have a rough total of the mileage to calculate.

We've touched on a few of these categories are ready, but these are the basic categories that I consider for any tour. The first one which is often overlooked is promotions. It has to be a realistic budget for the level you're at. But no matter what, even if you are like the baby ist of baby bands, this is your first tour. You just released like two songs ever and you're just dipping your toes in the water. $10 a day is the absolute minimum I would budget because you're going to want to print up flyers of some sort and mail them to the venue and say, Hey Please hang these up.

If none of the other artists are doing that and I would not rely on other artists to do that unless they say yes, I have done this not, I'm going to, but I have, it is done At least $10 a day to cover the postage and the printing of those flyers. If you can toss some money into ad campaigns, effective ad campaigns, that's good. If you don't know what you're doing with ads, don't start with that yet. We'll have another episode about that in the future. But for now focus on just absolutely plastering the local area around that show with posters in whatever way you can.

The next thing obviously is your vehicle. You need to get to shows. So aside from the gas, you know matt, you talked about buying a van. So if you own your van, there's going to be repaired costs, maybe you need an oil change before you can hit the road. Maybe you need a bench seat. Like like I did on one tour, we had to go buy a bench seat for the van. Maybe new tires, even for my sedan, I put new tires on my sedan, it's 500 bucks for van that's gonna cost more because the tires are bigger and stronger.

All of this has to be included in your budget. And then if you're getting a rental vehicle even more so because that's going to cost you a lot more per day, but you don't have to pay for it up front. Like the $8,000 you're saying for your van, Matt, a rental is going to cost you, you know, maybe like 150 a day for a van plus mileage. They sure to factor that in. Some rental companies charge you for mileage. Some don't is green van still around? If they're still around, it's a good company.

I like green bands. I've toured for like three weeks in a green van and it was nice but you know, find an option that works for you specifically. There are so many different rental companies. One thing I will say is a lot of rental companies will not let you tow a trailer. So if you need a trailer, make sure they allow that and that they're not gonna add a surcharge for the trailer. Then you know matt you already touched on fuel. But just to throw the calculation out there, if you want to determine how much fuel you're gonna need, you take your total estimated mileage and divide it by your MPG.

So for example, 400 miles divided by 40 MPG is 10 gallons and that's like your bare minimum and then you multiply that by, I recommend 10%. So by 1. 10 to get the surplus That you need. And that way you have a 10%, wiggle room in the fuel budget, You can do more if you want, I would not do less than 10. But if you want to do 2025% totally fine. Matt, you mentioned tolls. I always budget $10 a day, no matter where I am, I might be in a state that doesn't have any tolls, but I budget $10 anyway, just in case.

Maybe it's not tolls. Maybe you know, you have to pay for parking. Cool. We had $10 in the budget for tolls that now we can use for parking Meals if you can budget for meals, $20 per person per day, that's great. But that's also to be honest, the first thing you're gonna cut, if you can't make ends meet on tour, people pay for their own food. That is the easiest thing to cut. And if you're all band members that will work. If you have hired crew, you need to pay for their food because they're away from home.

That's an expense that you need to pay for. But if you can't afford meals, why are you paying for a crew? So crews not even on this list because this is just for your first D. I. Y. Tour. Next up his hotels, you have to see if this is important to you. You could be like pompeii mousse with some absolutely fruity ideas and spend thousands more than you need to on hotels. Or you could do what I've done many times, which is asking friends if I can crash on their couch or their floor.

Somewhat ironically, the first time I ever did was a bus tour. So I went from like the cushiest level of tours. Not that warped tour is cushy, but warped tour with the bus is definitely cushier than, you know, a van. And then after that I did D I. Y towards crashing on floors and was like, okay, like I definitely had it, nice the bus, but I was still able to do it. So if I can do it, having come from a bus tour, somebody who's never been on a bus tour can by all means crash on the floor just fine.

Or ultimately, you know, matt, you also mentioned Airbnb, maybe an Airbnb is the way to go if it's cheaper than a hotel and you can fit more people in there and you have a good location, it's worth it. But keep in mind all the extra fees that Airbnb is typically charge, so look out for that as well, and then just a miscellaneous category, everything else you need will fall under this. It's like a one off purchase. Like you get a pair of hand held radios. I'm a big fan of getting a set of like $40 radios from Walmart or wherever else.

I don't support Walmart, but that's like the tour stop when you're on the road somewhat. Unfortunately, getting a set of radio is stuff like that or you have to buy a table for your merch that goes under miscellaneous, which I would recommend always bring your own table because you never know if the venue is going to have one lighting that kind of stuff. Now missing from this budget, something else I want to point out is any instrument related expenses, larger acts. They are going to have strings, cables, instruments, all that as a business expense.

I'm not including that here because at the D. I. Y. Level, chances are your bass player, first of all, hasn't changed their strings in about a year and a half and 2nd of all these instruments when you were taking them on tour, they are still your personal instrument. They don't belong to the band. So I would not budget for that. I would say just make sure you have strings for yourself, pay that out of your own personal pocket once the band starts to gain traction and you have more funds in the band.

That's when you can start to pay for that type of expense from the band budget now matt, you might disagree with me there. I don't know, but I'm a big fan of being self reliant each individual of the band until the band can actually cover those costs rather than the band going into debt because members are buying supplies through the band's account. Yeah, I go back and forth because six and one half a dozen of the other. You're either using banned funds to pay tour expenses and then you as individuals.

Once you get back to your home, you're starting to work again. And then you're using labor wages to pay band expenses. So it's still the same thing. You either work to get your money what you then use for your personal stuff on tour or the band pays for your stuff on tour and then you work and use your personal money to pay bills. Maybe you go back to work and then you're paying off the merch bill and said, you know, because that allowed for you guys to while you're on the road go to cedar point or wherever.

I think it's going to be kind of different depending on who you are and what's important to you and really what your focus is of the band. I know for us, we really like the social aspect of playing music. And so like when we play a show, we want to hang out with everybody that came to the show as long as possible versus like some good buddies in defiance. They really like to play a show mingle for a little bit. But then they like to start the drive to the next city that night because they have a band ritual where they like to wake up in the city that they're playing and spend the day kind of exploring the city that they're at their god and they get coffee as a band and they do that in the new city. Now.

Obviously if they have to wake up and drive four hours it's a little bit harder for them to wake up and get coffee. So it's kind of kind of depend on what's important to you as a collective or even as individuals. I really like the list that you kind of threw out though, I'll just kind of want to highlight some of the importance is promotions. So we have played shows before where we paid to have a radio ad and then the person who booked the show sold the show to somebody else who sold the show to somebody else who did not realize that like no promotion was done for it.

So here we are on tour, we roll up to this random place in Arizona and there's like five kids at the show. Now we felt terrible for the promoter because really it was like the venue owner that ended up the show ended up getting sold to and she was like super apologetic, but really it was that no promoters actually did their job, but we, a band from Washington State put out a radio ad and there was a kid who heard that radio ad and said, oh that's on my birthday.

And so he hit up two of his friends and he and his two friends came down to this show and we got there, we like we weren't even gonna play because there was nobody there. But then these like three kids showed up and then later, like another two kids showed up and he was like so pumped because it was his birthday and we wanted to have fun. We dedicated every song to him just to be funny and he thought it was cool. And then afterwards we hung out with those three kids for like quite a few hours.

We let him see like the van and stuff just there were experiences for him that he never been able to experience before and that was all because of us putting out a radio ad. So like, I personally believe that like we made the most progress towards converting him to a lifelong fan by way of our promotion. So don't underestimate the power of that your vehicle, if you like renting a vehicle is so expensive. If you actually just think about how much you're going to pay to rent a vehicle for a full tour and if you just lower your time preference a little bit, let's push this back a month, we can buy a vehicle.

If you're not actively looking at potential tour vehicles constantly, I would highly recommend that you do that because you like for us. It was literally a joke. My friend who is not in our band sent me a text message that was like a local dealership and he jokingly said, oh I found your new band van and after looking at us like that actually might be our new band van. So then I instantly texted jesse and I said, hey bro, check this out my body, just you know colleges sent this to me, what do you think?

And sure enough we looked at it and it was like, you know, we have to jump on this as quick as possible because this was like a turbo diesel with 80,000 miles on it for 8000 bucks. Then an engine that will run till a million miles and on top of that can pull it has an engine big enough to pull our trailer without being hindered. And it was just like all the things that we needed and it came up as a joke. So like keep your, you know, your vehicle to find your mind is great fuel, obvious meals, obvious, hotels obvious and easy to cut tolls.

I love what you said about $10 a day. You might not be crossing a toll road every day. However, the day that you cross the pennsylvania turnpike from end to end, If you have a trailer, you are going to pay $100, that is not an exaggeration at today's like current rates, it's like $47 for you to drive a vehicle with two axles from one end to the other. What happens when you throw a trailer, that's an additional axl, what happens when you have a tandem axle trailer, that's two additional axles.

So you have four axles on your vehicle, you cross that frickin road and it's 100 bucks For you to cross the George Washington Bridge into New York City. It is $50 James. You also didn't include parking on here. I'm assuming a lot of you are gonna be playing metropolitan areas. Anybody ever tried to park a van and trailer in San Francisco. I have, it's hell. And on top of that it costs a lot of money parking in Brooklyn overnight. And really it wasn't even overnight. The guy was just nice to us, parking in Brooklyn for four hours was $20 a space.

We had two spaces so we had to pay $40 for four hours of parking. The guy was nice to us and said don't worry about it a lot. It's not anywhere near full, we'll just leave it open. You guys can stay there all night. He was nice and so like these are things that they pop up man, Your emergency fund was a perfect addition to because like there might be something that you don't think about. We think about the oil changes, we think about the tyres popping, we think about something going wrong, battery issues, headlights, whatever what you don't think about is like, oh my my calipers are seized, I have to go get break, work done and maybe you thought about brake pads but you didn't think about the calipers.

So there's always some things to have in the back of your mind that it's just like, here's an emergency fund, here's 1000 bucks for us to say in the case of an emergency, we need this personally. I'm a firm believer that your fifth tire, your spare tire, you should have a full size rim and a full sized tire in your trailer. So that way if you pop a tire, you can put a real tire on there as a means to get it to your next location because having, you know trying to put a donut on a van and trailer is you're just gonna do more damage to your vehicle.

So the important thing is to kind of isolate all of these different expenses. And then once you have a system that works for you then you can like always start trimming off the excess. Then you can say I don't need hotels, I don't need this. My gas budget is over budgeted, my mileage is over budgeted, I have $1,000 in emergencies just in case We prepaid for five hotel rooms across the country in order to lock in a certain rate and we paid for that. So we know that we're gonna be staying in hotels.

These rooms, we brought along a propane grill and we cook every breakfast together. Now when I do this instead of us saying Oh this is $20 per person per day. Well now everybody just paid $1. 80 in order for you to all have breakfast. So now that $20 is actually gonna take you a lot further, then if maybe you have a venue, either catering or a venue buyout, that is also not going to contribute to that. So all of these are factors that can go into your macro budget that really allow you to make money in the margins, so keep those in your mind.

Also you're a D. I. Y. Band, you are, you're crew James, you mentioned crew. Unfortunately guys, you get to be the people lugging your heavy stuff around, you get to be the people sitting up your merch table, you get to be the people forgetting your gear. So have your lists. These are places, you can cut things out. If you have a crew member, that's boujee and he needs to like sleep in a bed, then he does not need to be your crew member. He is trying to compete at a different level of the game.

He is priced out of your market, you are not purchasing his service, just like you are not going to the store and buying granite countertops for your kitchen because that is priced out of your market because that's not the market, you're in. These people are the same way. And so you have to look at price as this, identify where it's a piece of data, that's what prices, it's a, it's a metric for you to understand a quality that you can expect and b what market they are trying to compete in.

So these two aspects are like, super, super important. This is why it's your scary about hiring someone for free. We all intrinsically know that price is this piece of data for determining this. But if you're like, oh yeah, this guy is free, well then instantly everybody gets weary about it. Why is this free? Why is this car only $300? Because in your mind, you've already applied a certain value to something. And so like when I hear some of these figures from this tour, where it's like, oh yeah, like they literally paid each person on the road, made over $200 a day plus per diems plus catering and buyout plus they stayed in hotels.

I was like, no wonder you lost $11,000. No offense, but no wonder they're looking at like 6 to $800 per day per person. Yeah. You went on a 28 day tour and you spent $130,000. Anybody that can do basic math realizes that you are spending thousands of dollars per day. Now, granted I would encourage everybody to go and read that article and take what I'm saying in partnership with that article, because this also includes like promotion costs and all the costs of their merge and all the cost of their fuel. The cost of their crew.

The cost of a whole bunch of things that they kind of lumped together. And I would have loved to have actually dissected it a little bit more to really see where he's been allocating a bunch of his money. But at the end, the article is really is a good article because he talks about Viewing that $11,000 as an investment expense. There's definitely a time and place for that and maybe maybe they were at a time and place in their career where that leap needed to be taken because there is always a point in people's career where they have to kind of take that leap and say like I'm either going to fall out of the sky or I will soar on the wings of the people who love us.

And unfortunately, like it's a hard realization to make, not everybody flies. And that's also a good thing because it makes people realize that like, hey, you know, maybe I'm not supposed to be doing this, maybe I have a future in the music career, but, but it might not be as the lead singer of a band or it might not be as the touring guitarist for for Green Day. Well maybe you could have done that, but I'll tell you what, well you're day dreaming about doing all of these things.

There are other people out there, formulating and building systems and practicing and testing and the people that are making systems and practicing and testing those are the people that succeed. Testing is probably the most important thing that you can do for your business. If you don't test things then you don't grow. If you don't grow out then you stagnate. If you stagnate, congratulations, you have a business that will also stagnate. So your D. I. Y. Focused on your budget, break everything down budget macro and then hone the micro, find out the exact small figures.

Imagine getting to the end of the tour and saying, well guys at the end of this tour, we only made 500 bucks but due to the way that we budgeted, we made 500 bucks. I mean that's a good start and you get to the end of that sweet. But then if you if that's what your bottom line is, that's what your macro budget says. Then when you start to really dive in your micro budget, you say, oh we actually have there's another $500 in gas. Oh and on top of that this money that we budgeted for X. Y. Z. Expenditure, no tires popped.

We don't need a new tire. We did a 10,000 mile tour and we bought new tires last time. So now this next tour tires are not an expense. So now even parts of like your emergency fund instead of you having to recoup that next time and say oh I'm going on our next tour, we need another 1000 bucks. You're allowed to say oh hey we have the emergency fund left over from last time. So we're still good, Do yourself a favor in the margins because then even if you miss it's like the old adage shoot for the moon, if you miss you still end among the Stars.

And I'll tell you what as somebody who has done tours that have made massive amounts of money, would that have made minimal amounts of money and that have hemorrhaged money. One year of work tour, we had too many people out. I learned the hard way. I was testing the first year we went out with three people, the second year we went out with like seven and that was the year that I learned that having too many people ended up turning into high school and making things clicky and having people segregate themselves and move off into certain places.

And this caused people to not work as well. People had friends that they could hang out with instead of working towards building the brand. And so after we got about halfway through the tour, we ended up in massachusetts and I had this throbbing headache because I knew I knew in my mind something was wrong. I was always in charge of money and my budgets would always get us totally fine. We'd always end up the tour totally fine. But I knew something was off, the amount of money that was coming in and that was going out.

So instead of going to the band barbecue that night, I sat in the back of my bus and I crunched all the numbers for the tour so far. And I came to the realization that if we had sold every single piece of merchandise that we had, we would still end up losing money on the tour. And that was if we minimized all of our expenses. I mean this was literally the worst possible case scenario. So I turned to jesse, I said jesse, we need to drive everybody back home and the only chance that we have of recouping any of our losses is for you and me alone to come back out and we will finish the tour.

And so what we did is we, at the end of that night we let everybody have one less barbecue. Then we got into the car, this was in massachusetts, we drove from massachusetts to Spokane Washington. We slept that night, woke up in the morning, got in a car and drove back to ST paul Minnesota that is 5000 miles and we did it in five days. That is the longest stint of driving that I have ever done. I mean, I literally, it was absolutely horrendous. And then jesse and I worked and worked and worked and worked, we sold everything that we had at discount, we got to the very end of the tour and after budgeting The rest of the money that we had.

We, we came to the realization, it was like just under $500 is what we had lost on the entire tour, 500 bucks. And so we turned to our band members have said, Hey Guys, we've done everything we can to do this, we're going to let you be responsible for the 500 bucks. And our band members were like, thank you, here's 100 50 bucks each and that was taken care of. But that tour and from that day forward, I went on telling people, it's like, do not bring too many people on tour, do not do it.

And I had friends who have done incredible things that warped tour and I've had people who didn't believe me and they said I'm going to try and then they tried and then they learned the hard way to, I told him, I was like, look man, I'll tell you right now that even though you're making a lot of money, you're gonna have people leave the tour because it might seem awesome to you, but they're not making this awesome money. And so for them, it's a lot harder. And this guy looked at me and he's like, no, no, no, that's not the case.

Two days later his brother left the tour without him knowing that his brother had purchased a ticket and this was two days after I had that conversation because I told him, I was like, look dude, you're making a lot of money, you gotta take these guys to go do something nice, you got to take them to an amusement park, take him to movies, take him out to steak dinner, like you have to do something or they will leave. And he was like, no, no, no, I was like, you don't know what you're talking about.

And sure enough, I think it's two days later his brother left and then less than a week later, one other person on his crew left to and that was a very humbling experience for him because it was like, he kind of realized that he had budgeted wonderfully for one aspect of his business and he was making tons of money but he forgot to kind of budget emotionally for his guys and realized that like at certain points in the tour 28 days in when you've been in 100 degree weather every day.

It doesn't matter how much money you're making, how many sales you're making when you're not collecting that paycheck at the end of the day, you're like, I'm miserable, hot tired and I just want to buy a plane ticket and go home. I just want to sleep in my bed. I just want to shower. These are like normal base level human experiences that people want. Again, they're just like, I just want to sleep in my bed. Like that is not a lot for them to ask for. It's not a lot to ask for you to like say like, hey, instead of staying in a hotel room every night at the end of every week, we're going to treat ourselves to an Airbnb, we're gonna pay 250 bucks, We're all going to go and we'll have a room.

It doesn't have to come out of band budget. You can say like, all right, everybody chipped 30 bucks or if everybody chip 50 bucks and we can stay here if you're interested. And sometimes people do, and sometimes people don't and that's cool. But like, Those rotating budgets are really would help you. And honestly, those are the types of things that will help you minimize on your spending $130,000 on this tour. If I'm spending 100 and $30,000 on the tour, 50,000 of that is going into marketing. So that way, the return on investment is literally so good that every venue along the run is sold out.

These things are possible. And so be wary when you go to book a tour and you have to pay $100 plus $60 a day. I've gotten paid more than that for running merch at D. I. Y. Level tours, I shouldn't say D. I. Y. But like small bar tours. Exactly the point is is that all the figures that come are going to be contingent upon how the business runs. Kind of, like, when people say I deserve to make $30 an hour for working at Mcdonald's. Well, the price of burgers at Mcdonald's Only Cossacks amount of dollars, and the amount of burgers that they sell is only X amount of burgers.

And so in order for them to pay every employee that they would have to double the price of their burger, and if they double the price of their burger, then nobody's going to come to Mcdonald's. So it's an intricate balance. Everybody has to figure out the price and the market that they're working in. Unfortunately, metal makes less money than pop. That's just how it is. Metal makes less money than country. So if you're gonna play as a, as a studio musician, like if you're going to be a country basis, you might be able to make a little bit more money.

But the point is, it's those really humble budgets that end up getting you to the end of the tour and saying, oh, I made money, I'm still invigorated and I can go out and do this again when you end a tour and you've made money, you're like, yes, that feels awesome, how can I do it better when you end a tour and you're down money, you're like, how do I recoup, its demoralizing when you find the right way to not do something, it still hurts, it's not wrong, but it still hurts like learning, especially when life is the teacher is pretty brutal some of the times.

So it's important to keep your head up, keep your budget in the forefront of your mind, and if you are able to focus and trim the fat in areas that you don't need and really optimize the areas that can be optimized, you will get to the end of your tour, feeling invigorated, full of life, passionate about music and you will have created moments in time suspended for eternity for your fans and they will come back the next time that you come through town. If you do everything in your power to optimize the experience for them, you'll create true fans everywhere. Absolutely.

I think it's so important to have the big picture, that's what it really comes down to is when you have a budget, you have the big picture and you know what you can do and what you can't do or maybe what you shouldn't do. You could, but you shouldn't And Matt, I crunched the numbers for you for that pompous tour. They spent 148,000 or 147,000 per day. That comes out to $5,278. 64 on that. 28 days. The exact number spent was 147,802 over the 28 days with $135,983 in revenue And that just tells me either they didn't plan ahead and their expenses ballooned beyond what they expected or they didn't plan at all.

But either way, I don't imagine them planning to lose $11,000 on this tour. That would just be bad business again, I want to say Jack Conte, he found a Patreon and Patreon is doing great stuff for artists and creatives all around the world. So I don't think he's a bad businessman. I just think that he learned a lesson from this tour and that's why he is now focusing on Patreon instead of compliments. But I mean, who knows? Maybe he was already shifting his focus towards Patreon anyway, and he was like, yeah, this, this gives me an out, I lost money, I can quit now.

Or who knows? But they're still making music, don't get me wrong, they're still making music anyway. If you, as an artist, want to set up a budget for your tours, which if we haven't convinced you yet, I don't know what we can do. But every band should budget every single tour. We've just launched the band, I've tour sheet, which is a template for google sheets that you can get and budget your entire 15 day tour, there's going to be a 30 day version soon as well, but I'm starting with 15 days because again, like if this is the first tour, your budgeting, You don't want more than 15 days, like you want 7-14 days tops.

If you go to band, I've got rocks slash tour budget, you can pick that up. I definitely recommend it. And here's the catch. It is a one time payment compared to apps out there. There are tour management apps, but you are going to pay an arm and a leg every month. The leading up costs $65 a month. It's a good app, don't get me wrong, but $65 a month and it has way more features than any D. I. Y. Band needs. So if you want a simple, easy and automated system that I have built and I've been using it for the tours.

I've done, I've I've been using this sheet since 2012, 9 years now and I have been updating it every time I do a tour saying like, hey, this is what I've learned. This needs to be incorporated. Oh, if I do this, this will make it easier. So you might be wondering why should I pay for a google sheet template? Well, yeah, you could make your own, but you're not going to have the almost a decade of experience that went into that. So go over to band, I've got rocks slash tour budget and get that now.

So you are ready for your next tour since it's brand new. We have some introductory pricing on it, grab that before the price goes up. Bandhive dot rocks slash tour budget. Mhm. That does it for this episode of the Bandhive podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening. Like you do each and every week at least. That's what I hope and I really hope that this episode brings a new light to budgeting for your tours because it really is important. And it could be the difference between Making money on a tour that earns $136,000 or losing money on a tour that earned $136,000.

So please don't be like Pomplamoose. Don't waste all that money. Be smart. Put a budget in place. Like I said in the episode. Maybe they had a budget in place and they just went over on it. But something went wrong. They should not have spent that much money. So please put a budget in place. If you don't know where to get started, head on over to band, I've got rocks slash tour budget so you can get your copy of the template again. That is Bandhive dot rocks slash tour budget.

Tour budget being all one word. No spaces no dash is nothing like that. Thanks again for listening. I really appreciate it. We'll be back next Tuesday with another new episode at six a.m. Eastern time. Until then. I hope you have an awesome week. Stay safe and of course, as always, keep rocking.