How many tickets before the event breaks even?
A one day conference with three income lines and a fixed cost that lands whatever happens. The model returns the margin as a range and, more usefully, a break even ticket count that moves every time a sponsor signs.
Words on this sheet
- Venue: The place an event is held. A venue line is what hiring it costs, usually a fixed amount whatever the turnout.
Operations Intermediate Monte Carlo Pro engine
After you install, this is the model to open.
Will the Event Make Money?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
This one runs on a Pro engine, and every free install includes five full-quality runs on your own numbers, shared across all five Pro engines rather than five for each. After that, Pro is $199/year.
The answer
- Median margin
- $17,363 the sheet's one-number answer said $23,808
- Chance of losing money
- 21% one event in five, losses the size of the wins
- Break-even tickets
- 703 on average, running 546 to 871 across trials
- One more sponsor
- 67 tickets off the break-even count per $9,500 signed
A one day conference: 850 tickets at $145, six sponsors at $9,500, and $28 a head over the bar, against $105,000 of venue and production, $34,000 of speakers, $19 a head of catering and $25,093 of marketing and platform fees. That is $23,808 of margin, which is a normal answer for a normal event and tells you almost nothing. Click Run with the ticket count, the sponsor count and the bar spend on ranges.
Margin averages about $16,700 with a median of about $17,200, a P5 of about negative $17,800 and a P95 of about $49,400, and the loses money flag comes back at about 0.21. 20 in 100 events lose money, and the losses are the same size as the wins. The line worth watching every week between now and the doors opening is the last one, the tickets needed to cover the fixed cost.
It averages about 703, but it runs from about 545 at the P5 to about 872 at the P95, and the reason it moves is sponsorship: contribution is $140.95 a ticket, so every sponsor who signs at $9,500 takes about 67 tickets off the number you have to sell. That is the sentence that reorders the run up. Selling one more sponsorship is worth two months of the ticket marketing you were about to buy.
The second run makes it concrete. Change the sponsor count to a discrete 6, 7, 8, 9 with probabilities 0.25, 0.35, 0.28 and 0.12, which is what a sponsorship pack sold properly in the spring looks like rather than one sold in a panic in September, and rerun: the margin rises to about $32,300, the break even falls from about 703 tickets to about 593, and the chance of losing money falls from 0.21 to 0.04.
The tornado ranks tickets first, sponsors second and bar spend a distant third, and the gap between the first two is smaller than anybody running an event expects. What the model cannot tell you: it has one ticket price, so it will not show you what happens when half the room comes in on a discount code, and it treats catering as a per head cost when most venues charge a guaranteed minimum, which puts a floor under the loss that this sheet does not have.
To make it yours, put your own venue and production quote in, your real average ticket price after every discount, and set the ticket range from your last event rather than from the target.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Will the Event Make Money:
| Tickets sold | 850 |
| Average ticket price after early bird and group rates ($) | 145 |
| Ticket income ($) | 123,250 |
| Sponsors signed (count) | 6 |
| Average sponsorship ($) | 9500 |
| Sponsorship income ($) | 57,000 |
| Bar and food spend per attendee ($) | 28 |
| Bar and food income ($) | 23,800 |
| Total income ($) | 204,050 |
| Venue hire, staging, AV and production ($) | 105000 |
| Speakers, travel and hospitality ($) | 34000 |
| Catering cost per attendee ($) | 19 |
| Catering cost ($) | 16,150 |
| Marketing and ticketing fees ($) | 25,092.5 |
plus 4 more rows on the sheet.
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- What on-time rate can you actually promise?Will We Hit the Delivery Promise?
- The higher price lost. Did it make more money?Two Prices, One Answer
- What should you reserve against a recall?What Would a Recall Cost?
- Book the same room again or take the bigger one?Should We Run It Again Next Year?
- Is a second supplier worth paying for?What If the Single Source Fails?
- Is your worst supplier really worse than the rest?Are These Three Suppliers Really Different?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Monte Carlo simulation.