Running a Show
Building customer-led events for House Hats Collective
For about a year in college, I ran the Gainesville branch of House Hats Collective, an events company and record label. Over five years, House Hats has booked artists including John Summit, Dom Dolla, Cloonee, Beltran, and Chasewest. If I'm being honest, it’s the only thing that really kept my 20-year-old self excited to stay at UF.
My title never captured the job, so I’ll describe it instead.
Part of the work was deciding what to build: which events, which artists, which venues, when to launch, and why people would care. The rest was making offers, finding agents, working with venues, selling tickets, managing artists, and settling the money at the end of the night.
Every event was a product launch. You shipped one night to a few thousand people, and you got one shot.
The central disagreement was simple: how should we build an event?
The company’s model was to spend as little as possible upfront, then rely on marketing to pull a crowd. I looked at events differently. I cared about two numbers: how many people came and how much they spent, both at the door and throughout the night. Everything else followed from those two numbers, so I started looking for what actually moved them.
The surprising part was how little the overall budget explained.
Our spending mix barely changed between shows. Artist fees usually made up the same share of the budget. Yet events with nearly identical cost structures produced completely different results. The only factor that consistently tracked the difference was the artist.
Simply, the most important aspect of putting together a show was deciding who people would come to see, and the hidden answer is uncovered by appealing to their sense of identity.
Telling executives they are wrong does not change anything, so instead, I laid out which artists people would actually pay to see, what we would give up by abandoning the old model, and what the new approach could make on a show-by-show basis. I presented the numbers on a call so they could reach the conclusion themselves rather than feel like it had been handed to them.
The work behind that recommendation took weeks. I ran hundreds of surveys, studied why competing events sold, and reviewed our own results. Everything came back to one question: what makes someone buy a ticket?
The answer became a simple framework:
Attendance = desire + cost utility − barriers
Desire captured how badly someone wanted to see the artist. Cost utility measured whether the experience felt worth the ticket price. Barriers included timing, location, competing plans, and anything else that made attending harder.
I kept returning to that framework because I was asking the company to take a different kind of risk.
It worked.
The event cleared a 40% profit on ticket sales alone, well above the 25% benchmark we considered strong. We sold more than 800 tickets and beat the forecast.
Part of the result came from planning a deeper run of shows and committing to it. But the real change had happened months earlier, when the company built an event backward from the customer instead of forward from the budget.
That approach eventually led to us gaining confidence to run larger events, defended by a forecasting model from more than 30 event P&Ls, and developing a plan that could scale from one branch to fifteen. Our planning horizon expanded from two months to two years.