Why are dance floors so expensive?

Expensive is a relative term but ill be happy to explain what goes in to providing a fully working and clean dance floor for your event that ensures you get value for money when you hire a dance floor from us.
Firstly there is the initial investment that we make in the equipment. Our most popular size of dance floor is a 16′ x 16′ in white starlit. For a starlit dance floor this would cost around £9500+vat. If this was the only floor we had then we would need some spare panels should any of our main ones develop a fault. Lets be conservative and buy 2 spare panels at £260+vat each. We also need a spare power supply at £140+vat.
So just to buy in the dance floor it would be over £10,000.
But we also need other initial purchases such as a van to deliver it to your event. Event a small reliably van would cost around £5000.

Then there are the ongoing costs for not just running a dance floor hire business but costs associated with running any bussiness. Storage – a small container can cost £100 a month. A website with hosting (that you build yourself) can be £20 a month. Vehical running costs could be £75 a month for insurance, plus allowing £50 a month for general repairs. Consumables to clean and maintain the dance floor could be £50 a month. Breakdown cover can be £20 a month too. Equipment insurance and PLI would be around £25 a month.
So general business running costs are at about £340 a month

Advertising – without people knowing who you are you wont get any work. So you need to spend money at either wedding fairs or online ads. If you did 12 wedding fairs a year that is at least £1200. Add onto this the cost of attending with fuel and printed materials this could easily be £1500 a year in total.

Depending on your venue we would need to pay for fuel to get to and from your venue twice. Most of ours are within a 25 – 30 mile radius. Lets say that a van does 30mpg that would be 4 gallons of fuel per event. This currently equates to around £30 per event in fuel.

Then the final cost is our time – If the dance floor is ready to go it would take around 30 minutes to load it into the van. We would allow around 1 hour to drive to any local venue to give additional time should there be traffic / accidents on route. 9 out of 10 weddings (and yes i have logged this) run atleast 30 minutes behind. This is time we are just waiting at the venue. If you then allow an hour to setup and then 30 minutes to drive back. It would be a total of 2.5 hours to deliver a dance floor. Pick up is usually quicker as its not so imperative that we leave as much time for traffic, but we still sometimes have the overrun at the end of the night. So pickup and drop off at the unit would be around 2 hours. Meaning a total of 4.5 hours to deliver, setup and collect a dance floor.
Once the dance floor is back at the unit it can take anywhere from 2 – 6 hours to clean and check each panel depending on how dirty the dance floor has become. If we go in the middle and say 4 hours cleaning time. That is a total of 8.5 hours to load, delivery, install, collect and then clean a dance floor.
Even at minimum wage this would be over £100 per event for staffing costs. But no staff wants to work for minimum wage giving up weekends for a part time job. So we pay staff more than this. At £15 an hour it works out to £127.50 per event.

So as it stands so far we have spent £15000 buying in the equipment we need. Spend £340 a month on basic bills for the business and then around £167.50 per event to delivery the items.

So if we hired out our starlit dance floor twice a week with the above numbers at our current rate of £640. It would give an income of £66,560. Staffing to deliver this would be £17,420. £4080 would be general monthly bills and then take off £1500 a year for basic marketing. This would leave £43,580 a year.
Seems a lot right? Well yes it does, however. This figure doesn’t take into account the time i would be spending on marketing, attending the wedding fairs, answering client enquiries, doing accounts. So if i took a full time wage at just £15 an hour at 40 hours a week. That would be £31,200. Leaving £12,380 a year profit for the business.

So that £12,000 a year profit (pre tax) is based on the assumption that we could get 2 bookings a week for the entire year. Which just doesn’t happen. April through to September are the busy months for Weddings and then some more in December. So 7 of the 12 months you could potentially hit that target of 2 dance floors per week. That would be around 60 bookings in peak months if you had 2 bookings per week for the 7 busy months of they year.
Out of the 5 remaining months. January and November are very very quiet for Weddings. February and March along with October you could probably get a single booking a week but you may only get one a month in January and November.
Meaning total number of bookings for a year would be around 74 for a year giving a total income of £47,360. If we now remove the monthly costs of £4080 a year. Then subtract the advertising costs of £1500. Remove the costs to delivery and labour for each event which will come out to £12,395. That would leave £29,385. Not even enough to pay a basic salary at £15 an hour.
This also doesn’t take into account the initial £15,000 investment in the van and dance floor.
It doesn’t leave room for company growth, it doesn’t allow for holidays or to be out of action with sickness. This is also operating at the peak of what you can deliver in terms of available dates.

So in order to run a dance floor hire company to just about break even you need the following.

*£15,000 initial investment.
*Cashflow for 6 -12 months to establish the business and get bookings in.
*find a staff member willing to go out ad hoc at late nights at the weekend.
* be able to be a web developer, accountant, marketer, content creator and customer service person.
*be willing to take home a salary of less than £15 an hour.

So when people ask why are dance floor hires so expensive, show them this.