I started hosting pub trivia nights in 2015, using out of the box content. It was enjoyable, and over the years, I slowly started to make my on content that I felt was more relevant to my generation. in 2017, I'd started to host trivia full time as my primary source of income. but hosting 2-3 weekly trivia nights, and then 2-3 bigger events per month were enough to keep myself afloat, but I wanted more. I'd started to book gigs with bars in other cities, and would either travel there myself or would look into hiring a local host.

In late 2017, I was asked to team up with one of my competitors because the bar I was in was 'my bar' but she was more confident with the material (which was directed heavily towards women). The event was very successful, and lead us to work collaborate more, and finally we merged companies in January of 2018.

The 2 of us joining together made us the big player in our city, rather than 4 smaller companies, we were 1 bigger company with 2 smaller ones. We each had our strengths that we naturally fell into and complimented each other nicely when pushing forward. It ended up working out well because we each wanted to succeed on our own, but also didn't want to screw up the opportunity we had with someone who was mostly a stranger.

At the end of the day, the Trivia we'd been creating was the same as any digital or information service we could create. We can sell the same content 10,20,30 times over, but can only sell it to different people.

in 2018, we grew to hosting over 200 events, in 16 different bars, across Canada. This lead to over $250,000 in sales.

Here are the steps we are taking to triple our profits in 2019.

1) Get More Bars.

Quite simply, the more cities/bars we work with the more money we make. changing 16 bars to 30 bars will help us to double our sales of tickets to our events. most of the new bars we acquired in 2018 were done in Q2/Q3, and a few were in Q4. starting the year with these bars lets us hit the ground running, and getting more places will get us more sales. Plain and simple, Business 101.

Our target goal for 2019 is 365 ticketed events, a little less than double, but we hope to have more people at each event by streamlining what has worked and ditching what hasnt.

2) Selling Tickets Ourselves

Have you guys and gals used eventbrite? Its a great company. The eventbrite fees total about $1.30 per person. Granted some of that does go to processing fees and such, but our customers have paid over $25,000 to eventbrite in 2018 and really didn't get all that much from the company.

We've been building our own ticketing site to handle our transactions, and to incorporate a lot of the things that eventbrite doesn't do for us. This will ultimately save us time as we are able to automate tasks more easily, but also let us recoup that money that is currently going to a company that refuses to answer a single email we've sent them in the last year.

The other benefit of a ticketing site is that we can approach other trivia companies in saturated markets and offer a better service to them than the current ticket sites they're using. We might not be able to break into their market, but we can still make a small profit from their customers.

3) Selling more to our customers

I noticed something interesting when hosting a few of the trivia events. For each topic we do trivia on, we'll see the same 10-15 team names multiple times across the country. We have to get backup team names to be able to make sure that every team has a unique name, because there are so many teams wanting the same name. I also noticed an average of 2 teams per event (usually around 8-12 people in total) were wearing custom made shirts for their teams. These people went out of the way to get shirts made for this one event.

This prompted me to make a list of our top event themes across the country, and then look at the 10-15 most common team names for each event. From there, I've hired out t-shirt designers to come up with designs that we will offer out through Teespring (an on demand printing platform) that teams can order to wear. Luckily, there is enough variety in shirts that we likely wont see too many duplicates, and even if we do, its all in good fun.

Though we can make a decent profit off of the shirts, we're hoping that it moreso helps us with targeting those customers that are willing to spend more money. Building a profile of a customer that spends $150 rather than $10 should let us know who to target in the future.

4) Targeting Customers

We've previously been targeting customers by the theme of the event. People that like the show/movie/topic that we run trivia nights for are simply just people that 'like' it on facebook. Through the year we've been collecting emails from customers that enter into our door prize draws and have been making a database of people that come to our events and we can now directly target them on facebook. Using other data, like who is actually buying the tickets, we can create audiences of people that look like our customers. Audiences of people that have shown up to our events (but may not have been the person to purchase tickets) and even audiences of people that buy the most tickets (those that purchase 5-6 tickets at a time rather than 1-2). Targeting these groups we should be able to lessen our ad spend and take our customer acquisition cost from $1 to less $0.50 per customer.

5) Social Media

Our social media has been ok. not great, but can definitely be better. We tried a social media expert for 5 months, but the cost wasn't worth the results. We plan on organizing our social media more, and generating things that are interactive. We are a trivia company, so small 5-10 questions quizzes will be easy and engaging.

Getting away from JUST facebook and using Instagram and Twitter more will help us to expand our reach.

We will do A/B testing and focus on what works and what doesn't. Find out where our customers are coming from, and increasing efforts in those places.

6) Outsourcing and Automating

In October we hired a VA that does a lot of our customer service. She's great and currently works 4 hours per day, 5 days per week. We'll be growing her role into other areas, and increasing her time as we book more cities and more events. Tasks that I spent 10 hours a week doing, are now covered by her, and dozens of common customer issues are getting dealt with in a timely manner.

We'll also be using more tools to be scheduling and automating the tasks that we do frequently. We sat down and looked at where our time is being spent. Since my partner and I have goals of how much we want our time to be worth, we look at each task as a cost of $ in our time, and figure out how much it would cost to automate it, or have someone else do it. If my time is worth $40/hour, then paying someone $10/hour to do the same tasks is well worth it to let me focus on the $40 /hour tasks.

Everything listed above is what we will be focusing on to get more customers and make more money, but it's something that everyone can do. Even if you're successful, stop and look at your business and you'll likely see ways that you can make more money, trim fat, or get more time for yourself. There is almost always a solution to your problems, you just have to identify what the problem is, and choose what to do about it.