Running a Company: Professionalism
It's coming up on a year of my being the owner/artistic director of LeetShakes/Golden Duck Productions, and we're doing pretty well. We're steadily expanding into other venues besides our weekly Massanutten gig. In fact, tomorrow, we were supposed to do a Friday night performance at a newly revamped Italian restaurant in Harrisonburg. This was a special event, which the owner contacted me to do on March 8th. I called my group of performers and pieced together a cast. I've got several performers who are servers, several who work nights, and some who just like having their Fridays after a week of working. Today, at 5:10pm, the owner calls me to tell me that he hasn't had enough bookings to justify having us. I express hope that we'd still be able to appear tomorrow, and he says that in order to not lose money on the event, he would have to pay us half of our already discounted introductory rate. I tell him that, unfortunately, we would not be able to work for that, as I would not be able to pay my actors and pay the royalties on the performance itself. At that point, he says that he's sorry but he thinks he'll have to cancel. I tell him that we'd very much like to work with him in the future, and that we'll be switching to our new show soon, and that hopefully the beginning of a run would draw a group that he felt would work for him. We then disconnect amicably. As he called in the middle of my lunch/dinner, I finish my food, an hour goes by, and I then call my assembled cast and tell them that, unfortunately, our venue has had to cancel due to funding. Everyone is disappointed but understands, and I'm hoping that the people who might have given up shifts or rearranged their schedules, can reclaim something of their night. This concludes the amicable part of the evening. Two hours after that (three hours after he canceled) the owner calls back to say that he's rethought the situation and that he's worried that it might look bad for him to have to cancel the evening. I explain to him that I've already contacted my cast, that we were committed to the evening, but, upon his cancellation, I had to give the evening away so that people might be able to recapture their nights. At that point he asks me how that's already happened. I explain to him that my cast needs to be able to trust my booking calls and that I can't flip-flop on them. He changes tone to...well...charitably, since I'm not in his head, I'll just say that he definitely changed tone. I tried to tell him once again that I hope we'll get to work there, but he didn't seem that interested anymore. LS/GDP is a professional company, and I take pride in that. I worry about not taking the new venue (as I'm always interested in building business), but when he'd called back, we were less than 24 hours from the start time, and he'd canceled. Thoughts?
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
arkstangent) wrote,
anxiously disappointed
