How many extra drinks does a pub need to sell to cover a £250 band?

[41Hz]

Just wondering how many extra drinks a pub has to sell hiring a typical band at £250?

 

As a very rough finger in the air, I reckon the pubs make around £2/drink - obviously there is rent/bar staff/heating/electric etc. but these are fixed costs that they’d pay if the pub was half empty. 
 

So maybe around 125 extra drinks to cover the cost of the band? Does that sound right?

[Newfoundfreedom]

Pubs pay bands? 😳

[Happy Jack]

4 minutes ago, 41Hz said:

Just wondering how many extra drinks a pub has to sell hiring a typical band at £250?

 

Something that @Silvia Bluejay and I have pondered many times over the years.

 

In our experience, it's very rarely as 'straight line' as that. For example, where the pub is owned and/or managed by a brewery or PubCo, there will routinely be an annual subsidy in place to encourage entertainment and to market the pub to the local community.

 

10 years ago a mid-sized Fullers pub could expect to receive a subsidy of £15,000 p.a. from head office. Broadly speaking, that's £300 per week that the landlord/manager could allocate as they wished in order to attract punters. At the Fullers pubs that I played at the time, this translated into one band per week getting £250 and the other £50 being used to run a Quiz Night or a Poker Night or a Karaoke session.

 

Reverting to your original question, this all meant that the pub didn't actually 'need' to sell a single drink in order to cover the cost of the band. The assumption was that the band would bring in extra revenue for the pub, which would show up in their sales figures. Obviously a pub that took the subsidy but then routinely turned in lousy sales figures would soon lose the subsidy.

 

The other aspect to this system is that it made it easy for dishonest landlords (and yes, unbelievably some such folk really do exist) to simply pocket some or all of the band fee. This is essentially what led initially to pubs demanding invoices from bands, and then to 'direct payment' sytems whereby the band gets paid by head office and not by the pub.

 

[TimR]

My local landlord claims he only makes about 80p on a pint. Most of his money goes to the brewery. So I suspect the idea of a budget paid directly from the brewery is more likely. 

 

He resists putting any entertainment on whatsoever. He makes all his profit from food sales.

[jazzmanb]

That's our usual rate and i often do the numbers .The allowance in pub chains budgets  does happen but i've also spoke to pub managers who say if i dont get bands on that night  it can be empty,so it can sometimes be a break even situation to keep the pub in peoples minds as a place to be .

[Happy Jack]

20 minutes ago, TimR said:

My local landlord claims he only makes about 80p on a pint.

 

Trouble is, it all depends how the pub is operated and how the figures are presented.

 

There are so many different business models for running a pub (owned, managed, tied house, free house, etc.) and so many different ways to remunerate the person in charge (owner, tenant, landlord, employee, etc.) that the results from selling a pint for a fiver can produce pretty much any answer you like.

 

If the guy running a tied house is forced to pay £4 for a pint that will sell for £5, then he's making a gross profit of £1 out of which he has to pay his overheads. Boom! There's your 80p.

 

But then he doesn't need to share his profits with the PubCo and can keep whatever he makes.

 

One thing seems sure ... you're never going to get a straight, honest answer!

 

 

[Steve Browning]

Dredging the darker recesses of my memory. I seem to recall the average mark up of a pint at about 80%. So £2.40 on a £5.40 pint (to keep the numbers easy). From that there are the various overheads etc.

 

As Jack has stated, there are different models, and the profit will differ for each. A tied house will give the worst result.

Edited November 15, 2021 by Steve Browning

[TimR]

12 minutes ago, Happy Jack said:

There are so many different business models for running a pub

 

I don't see how it can be calculated per pint. Only how it averages out over the month. I was the only person in last night. 2 bar staff for a few hours £10 worth of beer sold in that hour. 

[Happy Jack]

4 minutes ago, TimR said:

 

I don't see how it can be calculated per pint.

 

Oh come on Tim, it was you who introduced the notion of "makes about 80p on a pint".

 

If you don't see how it can be calculated on a per pint basis, perhaps you should have told your Landlord friend to stop talking out of his derriere.

 

So anyway ... is this the 5-minute argument or the full half-hour?

 

 

[lownote]

2 hours ago, Newfoundfreedom said:

Pubs pay bands? 😳

We get a steady stream of pub work at between 2 and 3 hundred a throw. It's a well run band with good sales technique and have been doing it since the 60s. I'm very much the wide eyed noob at all this commercialisation.  But I've never been able to work out how it pays the pub.  We don't bring in that much extra footfall.   

Edited November 15, 2021 by lownote

[Steve Browning]

12 minutes ago, TimR said:

 

I don't see how it can be calculated per pint. Only how it averages out over the month. I was the only person in last night. 2 bar staff for a few hours £10 worth of beer sold in that hour. 

An involved process but not impossible. As a VAT man I used to do it all the time in pubs.

[Newfoundfreedom]

31 minutes ago, Steve Browning said:

Dredging the darker recesses of my memory. I seem to recall the average mark up of a pint at about 80%. So £2.40 on a £5.40 pint (to keep the numbers easy). From that there are the various overheads etc.

 

As Jack has stated, there are different models, and the profit will differ for each. A tied house will give the worst result.

 

Good lord!

 

It's that seriously what a pint costs in the UK these days? 

 

I can have two whole nights out for that! 😳

[41Hz]

I read somewhere a keg of beer works out at around £1.50 a pint so they should be making £2+ a pint. Also soft drinks must only cost them a few pence so bigger profits on that. Likewise a litre of JD is £20 and you’ll get 22 singles at £3.50 a go, so works out less than £1 a shot. Though having said that I think in some cases the breweries force them to buy from them at slightly inflated prices.

[Steve Browning]

Generally about 30 measures in a 75cl bottle (30 x 25ml). Again, if memory serves.

 

Newfoundland - I was keeping numbers simple. At 80% markup the full cost = 180%. A £4.50 pint = £2 gross profit.

[acidbass]

Pubs make much more money on spirits and mixers, so really all it takes is a few regular drinkers and maybe 15-20 drinking punters there for the gig for the pub to break even or make a profit.

[Steve Browning]

When you're looking at cost per pint you have to factor in an amount for ullages (the bit left at the bottom of the barrel) and that lost when cleaning out the pipes (bore of the pipe x length of the pipe). As I said earlier, it's complicated to do correctly.

[41Hz]

2 minutes ago, Steve Browning said:

Generally about 30 measures in a 75cl bottle (30 x 25ml). Again, if memory serves.

 

Ah yeah, think I’d googled a US shot at 44ml, 30x 25ml shots would equal about 50p a shot assuming they paid £15 for a 75cl bottle

[Steve Browning]

If I still had access to my copy of S8-17 (the old HMC&E industry notes on various businesses, including pubs) I could give you chapter and verse on calculating weighted mark-ups on pubs. It's a long time ago now.

 

Pretty much all I can remember with certainty is that a hairdressing salon should derive income at 9 times the cost of the various shampoos etc.

[EssentialTension]

It seems it's maybe not a straightforward calculation anyway but also ...

 

We filled a pub and there was lots of dancing and boozing yet when we got paid and we asked for another gig the landlord said ...

 

'No. I don't like you.'

Edited November 15, 2021 by EssentialTension

[Steve Browning]

I guess that beats "I haven't got my diary with me, I'll call you". Credit for being honest, blind but honest.

[yorks5stringer]

Years ago we used to play at a pub that paid a reasonable £200 per band. A few months after  when wewent back the landlord was no longer there but a new person was in place. We got £300 and when I remarked upon the increase was told  the Brewery subsidised entertainment to the tune of £300 per week but the previous landlord had skimmed £100 of the allowance for himself!

[TimR]

1 hour ago, Happy Jack said:

 

Oh come on Tim, it was you who introduced the notion of "makes about 80p on a pint".

 

If you don't see how it can be calculated on a per pint basis, perhaps you should have told your Landlord friend to stop talking out of his derriere.

 

So anyway ... is this the 5-minute argument or the full half-hour?

 

 

 

 

Thought it was a discussion? It was my landlord friend who said about 80p a pint. The concept of per drink was the OP with £2/drink.

 

If you don't want to discuss things why come here? 

[41Hz]

17 minutes ago, TimR said:

 

 

Thought it was a discussion? It was my landlord friend who said about 80p a pint. The concept of per drink was the OP with £2/drink.

 

If you don't want to discuss things why come here? 

Could the landlord be referring to the profit per pint after all the fixed costs, wages, rent etc. in the context I’m interested in we can ignore the fixed costs.

[Downunderwonder]

I think on average you have to sell 3x the cost of the band to cover the band and the extra staff costs. Keep the place pumping for an extra hour and you know you're good value.

[Nail Soup]

Not sure if it’s a common practice, and does not directly answer the OP, but it’s related so I’ll mention it anyway.

We played a gig at a local pub where the band got a flat fee regardless of takings plus a percentage of takings over a certain amount. I can’t remember the numbers though. I do remember that we got the flat fee only!