Performer Pay Ranges

It’s another rainy morning here in Redding, Connecticut. I’m awaiting the arrival of Dan, my brother-in-law, who together with my sister Jeanne has been instrumental in building GigMasters' accounting system over the last few years. Dan is now working with me to build out the company's financial model which could be used to raise capital for future expansion. It’s a major undertaking, but Dan has really made it seem doable.

As I await his arrival on this rainy day, I’m thinking of all the "rainy day" projects that need to be tackled here at GigMasters. One of them that both Kevin and I have been really wanting to address for a while is limiting the high and low pay rates that performers can list on their press kits.

Here are some of the most drastic pay rates currently listed by some of our active performers:

$50 to $100,000 for a Hypnotist in Calgary, Alberta
$175 to $100,000 for a DJ in West Bend, Wisconsin
$200 to $100,000 for an Impersonator in Willowbrook, Illinois
$75 to $30,000 for a Santa Claus in Dayton, Ohio
$150 to $50,000 for a Elvis Impersonator in Boston, Massachusetts

In our opinion a performer’s high pay rate should be no more than 10 times their low pay rate. Why? Because its confusing to customers. They don’t know how to interpret this information. In fact, many times it can scare them off, and they might steer clear of this performer because of the performer’s high pay rate even if they likely would not be charged this much.

Therefore one of our rainy day projects is to put in a limit so that when a performer chooses a pay range, the high pay rate can be no more than 10 times the low pay range.

For example, if they choose $50 for a low rate, then the highest 'high' pay rate they would be able to choose would be $500. If they choose $175 as the low pay range, then the highest 'high' pay rate allowed would be $1750.

We realize that for some performers such a wide pay range might actually be valid. For example, you might have a 10 piece swing band that normally gets $10,000 for a full show, but that would be willing to send one or two of their performers for a charity even and charge only a few hundred dollars. We do acknowledge this, but we want the pay ranges to be the most common ones - not to encompass all possible extremes. The idea here is to not scare off the customer.

Now that being said, when a customer clicks on the performer’s pay range, it opens up a 'Quick Quote' window which shows an actual history of past bids. This will give the customer a true measure of pricing. But not all customers do this, so they may only see the $50 to $10,000 pay range and not go any further.

Yes, definitely a most important 'rainy day' project. Actually the forecast calls for rain the rest of the week. Hmm. Maybe no time like the present!