my Buff Butlers
My Buff Butlers currently provides Buff Butlers for hen parties, birthday parties, ladies nights, corporate events and various other occasions across the UK.
We have been running for over 3 years and the company has grown* over the last year due to the expanding popularity of ‘Buff Butlers’ as an alternative to strippers for hen party entertainment.
*Source: unaudited management accounts
The fast growth has also been aided by upgrading our website, with very good SEO, ranking us in the top 2 or 3 on Google for the most relevant search terms.
With the money we are hoping to raise, we will be expanding the scope of our services from just providing Buff Butlers to the following:
Own branded hen party props and merchandise for sale via our website.
Hen party goody bags containing our branded merchandise for a certain price per person for every booking we take.
Both a cocktail making masterclass and a lone cocktail making service.
Female equivalent for stag parties and male dominated events.
The business is about generating as many enquiries as possible, converting those enquiries into actual bookings, then increasing the add-ons for every booking to increase the profit per booking.
We believe offering hen party merchandise would aid with generating more enquiries as it would allow us to be found on more search terms on Google. Furthermore, as we would sell through other platforms, people searching for these items, that would usually be women organising hen parties, would be ‘introduced’ to our company. The sale of these items combined into a ‘goody bag’ we believe would directly increase profits.
We also believe that cocktail making classes would increase the profit we can make per booking and also generate more bookings. This is because people would search directly for the service and find our website. .
We believe expanding into the male equivalent should in theory double the market we can aim for, as for every hen party for women, there is a stag party for men. The service is not as popular for men currently, but is on the increase. However, we believe with a good, targeted advertising campaign and website, we would be able to generate bookings for this service.
In summary, we believe widening our services offered allows us to gain exposure to more potential customers and then up-sell to the people that enquire and decide to book with us. We think we can do this very successfully from our current platform and experience in the industry.
My Buff Butlers has been running for over 3 years and has for the last 4-5 months generated a profit* every month.
*Source: unaudited management accounts
We have recently been taking anything from between 10 to 20 bookings per week and occasionally doing over 20. As of writing our previous week of deposits for bookings alone has been £1200.
We have also been working on the expansion of the business to offer the new services. We have been contacting factories in China that manufacture the hen party merchandise and spoke to them about costs and branding.
We have had our success noted in local newspapers, see link:
http://www.nottinghampost.com/Hen-party-busines….
We have successfully taken a number of cocktail making bookings also, so we have established the format of these bookings and the cost of ingredients and equipment.
Finally, we have built up our database of females that currently attend bookings for stag parties.
We intend to use the money to grow the business in a number of ways, they include:
The design process for setting up our range of branded merchandise along with the initial stock.
Expanding the website to include online payments for deposits along with our own automated booking system. Develop the site into an eCommerce shop for our own merchandise, where we can bundle this in with our bookings.
Create a monthly newsletter to send out to our list of previous customers and email signups.
Take professional videos and photos of butlers at our cocktail making classes to be used on the website.
Increase our advertising budget on Google, Bing and Facebook, which would directly increase the number of bookings.
Attend wedding fairs and other similar events where there would be a high concentration of potential customers.