Most promoters think the hard part of expanding to a new city is the venue. It's not. The hard part is that nobody there knows your name yet. In your home market you've got history. People show up because they trust you. In a new city you're starting at zero, and the crowd has no reason to care. I learned this packing 5,000 people into San Francisco City Hall on Halloween, and dozens of times before that on smaller rooms. None of it happened because I had a great flyer. ....It happened because I knew the right people in the room before I ever threw the party. So here's the real question when you walk into a new market. Do you have contacts there? Not followers. Contacts. The movers and shakers, the people who already pull a crowd, the ones plugged into the social scene every single weekend. Because the fastest way into a new city is not to compete with what's already working. It's to collaborate with it, then build something nobody there has seen yet. Before you read on, do this. Write down the top three things you genuinely do well as an organizer. Now write down the top three things that scare you about a brand new market. Be honest. That list is your map. Now let me talk about a move most people miss. When you've got real pull, you don't have to fill a new room alone. You bring in the other promoters. I would take on a big event myself, carry the risk, produce the whole thing, then pull in the strongest organizers in the city, each one with their own crowd. Suddenly the room is bigger than anything I could have built by myself, and everybody wins. But you only get there by building something those promoters actually want to be part of. You study what they're doing, you find the gap nobody's filling, and you create the event they wish they had thought of first. That's how you go from outsider to the name everyone wants to work with. Here's the part almost nobody does, and it's the part that separates a flop from a packed house. Before you commit a dollar to a new city, do your homework with the actual partygoers.

Well, here's an interesting scenario:...it actually happened to one of my clients who is in College... What do you do when your upcoming party, a few days away, is looking to BOMB....meaning, you don't have many presold tix and you are starting to FREAK OUT????? ... you are freaking out as you have a Bar Guarantee and a Rental Fee that needs to be Covered, before you DIG a BIG HOLE for yourself and actually LOSE MONEY... Party.... is days away..... tickets aren't where they need to be. Here is exactly what to do.... no fluff, no theory. This is what works in the last 48–72 hours. 1. GET ON THE PHONE.....RIGHT NOW!!!!... not tomorrow... NOWWWW Text messages and reminders are fine, but they will not save you. You need to physically call your 15-20-50 most connected people, not message them.... ....CALL them tonight and say: "Hey, are you coming Friday? I need a little help packing it. Can you grab five or six people and roll in together?" .....That's it. ....Keep it real, keep it personal. Then do the same with your co-promoters and DJs. Everyone on your team calls their top 20+50 relationships tonight and asks each person to bring three friends. That's organic group energy and it costs you nothing. 2. TARGET PEOPLE STILL IN THE CITY Who is in town and looking for something to do Friday night? Call or text your top three college contacts right now and say: "Are you staying in town for summer session? Want to come to an Awesome Theme party and bring friends?" ...Summer school students are a captive audience with no plans. That's a low-hanging fruit most promoters completely miss....And WHO doesn't want to go to a GREAT PARTY! 3. RUN A GROUP TICKET DEAL Send this via email and DMs immediately: Buy 5, get 1 free. Buy 10, get 3 free. Groups sell tickets inside their own circles. One person becomes your "street team" the moment they buy five tickets and need to fill seats. 4. DO A TAG-TO-WIN ON INSTAGRAM AND SNAPCHAT Post tonight: "Tag 3 friends — we'll pick 5 winners for free entry and a VIP spot." Every tag is free reach into a friend's feed. That's the friends-of-friends spread, but digital. It costs you a handful of comps and puts your party in front of hundreds of locals who never saw your ads. Two days is plenty for this to run.

One Log Won't Start a Fire. Neither Will You.....! Here's a question worth sitting with before you do anything else. Why do you actually want to throw parties? Is it the money? Is it to meet more people, more women, grow your network? Is it the status of being the person in the room who made it all happen? Or is it something deeper that you haven't fully put into words yet? I'll tell you mine. I didn't start because I wanted to be famous or get rich. I started because I didn't want to feel alone. Growing up in team sports, soccer, handball, even dog training of all things, I learned that being part of something bigger than yourself changes you. A team of two is still a team. So I started gathering people. And once I saw what happened when you put the right people in a room together, I couldn't stop. But here's the thing nobody tells you when you're standing at the starting line, full of energy and ideas and excitement. DO NOT DO IT ALONE! I'm not just saying that because it's hard work. I'm saying it because of something I learned the old-fashioned way, from a fireplace. At home we heat our entire house with a wood-burning oven. And I can tell you from experience, you can spend all night trying to light one single log. It's frustrating. It barely catches. You're working twice as hard for half the result. But you put a second log criss-cross on top of the first one, create that little vacuum between them, and suddenly the fire comes to life on its own. Something happens in that space between two logs that one log alone could never produce. That's what a great partnership does. It creates energy neither of you could access alone. One person brings the crowd, the other brings the logistics. One person is the face, the other runs the back end. One person pumps up the room, the other makes sure the room is set up right before anyone walks in. I've watched this principle play out for over 22 years. The people who tried to go solo? They burned out fast or never got started.

If you are already the one organizing nights out, rallying the group, and making sure the event actually happens, what is stopping you from getting paid for it?

Let me ask you something straight..... You're the one who texts the group and actually makes it happen. You're the one who picks the spot, convinces the reluctant ones, handles the drama about who's driving, and then shows up early to make sure the whole thing doesn't fall apart before it starts. And by the end of the night, everyone's hugging you and saying "we have to do this again. That's you. Every time!!!! So here's what I need to know: why are you still doing it for free? I'm not being harsh. I'm asking because I've watched this exact person, the natural connector, the group energizer, the one everyone counts on to make the night actually happen, walk past one of the most obvious business opportunities I've ever seen. Not because they're not capable. Because nobody ever told them what they're already doing is worth real money. Let me tell you about Finn. Finn just sold out his event before the night even began. Before the doors opened, before the first drink was poured, before a single person walked in, it was already a success. People had already paid. They were already in. Now here's what you need to understand about Finn. He didn't invent some new model. He didn't discover a secret nobody knew about. He just stopped doing for free what he'd always been doing anyway, and he used a system to turn it into a business. That's it. That's the whole thing. Back to my question. What is actually stopping you? Because I've had this conversation hundreds of times, and the answers are almost always the same. "I don't know where to start." "What if nobody shows up?" "How do I even charge for this?" " My friends will think it's weird." These are real concerns. I'm not dismissing them. But here's what they are not: they are not reasons why you can't do this. They are just things you don't know yet. And things you don't know yet are fixable. Here's what I know for certain after 22 years of building events from the ground up. The skill of getting people excited, making them feel like they have to be there, creating an experience they'll talk about for years, that skill is not something you learn in a classroom.