We celebrated our first year in business on January 17…can you believe it?!?

As we look forward to Year #2, we’ve been reflecting on our journey and having a lot of conversation about our future on Burnet Ave. We’ve been in a constant state of tweaking and adapting our business, so we thought we’d share a little recap of where we’ve been and where we’re going (we think?) in 2020. 

 

What Worked

Ticketed Shows

With a few exceptions, our ticketed performances are going extraordinarily well, and we managed to completely sell out a nice string of shows in the fall of 2019, as well as Mike Powell and Sean Rowe this year. This was a bit of a surprise…we thought the more expensive ticketed option would be a tough sell in Syracuse, but that hasn’t been the case at all. We’ve got a bunch of terrific shows lined up over the next few months and sales are brisk for ALL of them… whoooo-hooooooooooo!

VIP Patron Program

Our VIP Patron program is a smashing success! We launched it a few months ago because we had so many of our loyal supporters asking how they could help us. For $100 a year, our VIPs get a $10 gift card, 5 passes good for free $5 cover charges for local shows, advance notice for ticketed events, the ability to reserve seats for any event, early entry to our popular Tacos & Blancos event, $1 off every drink every time they visit us, free fountain soda plus an extra $10 loaded onto their card in their birthday month. 

The VIP program is one of those rare ideas that worked out exactly as I had hoped. Obviously, the influx of cash was a lifesaver for our fledgling business, but aside from that, most of our patrons visit us more often than they did before they signed up. They have become more invested in our success. At this writing, we have over 50 people signed up, which far exceeds my expectations. 

Tacos & Blancos

Jimmy and I used to love going to see Los Blancos during their long-running weekly residency in Armory Square for Sunday brunch. Like hundreds of other Central New Yorkers, we missed the fun and relaxed Sunday hang with killer music, yummy food, and lots of adult beverages. It doesn’t get any better than people dancing in the aisles in the middle of the day. 

Before we even opened our doors, we talked about trying to put something together on Sundays with the band, but our lack of kitchen space always stopped the conversation in its tracks. Since we can’t cook anything at the bar, we figured a Sunday brunch event was out of the question. 

Eventually,  I decided to rethink “brunch” and go in another direction. 

I love throwing parties at my house, and my go-to menu is a build your own taco bar. Almost everything can be made ahead of time and there isn’t any real cooking – it’s all done in Crock-pots, which we can totally manage, even with our limited space. I’ve done this menu for 100+ people at least a dozen times at my house, so why not give it a try? Plus – who doesn’t like tacos?

It ended up being a smash hit. We’ve had four so far, and the response has been amazing, so we just bumped it up to twice per month. We’re also exploring partnering with a taco truck to handle the growth of the event, especially as we look forward to warmer weather and the patio being open. 

 

Baked Goods

When we opened and were still operating as a coffee house, we had a selection of yummy homemade baked goods displayed at the end of the bar. We quickly discovered that we were selling more goodies at night with adult beverages than we were during the day with coffee.

Who doesn’t love a good cookie after you’ve had a few drinks?

So, while the coffee house component has been eliminated, sales are brisk on our delicious treats. 

 

Our Staff

None of this would have been possible without our hardworking, dedicated crew. 

It’s not easy being involved in a start-up business. Policies and procedures are subject to change (sometimes even from day to day) in a new business. Employees need to be flexible, able to roll with the punches and be willing to adapt as the business figures out what’s working and what’s not. It’s not easy and it takes a LONG time to get everything moving in the right direction. Our team works their asses off and we literally couldn’t do this without them. 

 

What Didn’t Work

Coffee House

When we opened in January we were a multi-roaster coffee house, open for early morning business. We had a gorgeous Italian espresso machine and a rotating selection of fabulous coffee beans. We thought that creating a funky and comfortable room and having great coffee that isn’t readily available everywhere in Syracuse would be a good reason for people to make The 443 their place to work, read or schedule meetings. 

We gave up the idea about 6 months in because despite our best efforts we couldn’t generate enough interest. The Rancillio Classe 10 was pulled out from behind the bar and it’s currently parked in my living room until we figure out if it’s worth bringing it back sometime down the road. 

We kept our Chemex pour-over set up until just a couple weeks ago when we moved it to make way for a second cash register. We noticed that our bartenders were spending a lot of time waiting to use our Square POS cash register on busy nights, so we decided to add a second register to keep things moving a little faster – and the pour-over station wasn’t being used much anyway.  

Lunch

We thought that offering lunch made sense since we were open for coffee in the morning. While we usually had a handful of people on any given day, our location (and likely our lack of a full kitchen) proved challenging for building up a lunch business. 

I know lunch is tricky in most locations, but without much neighborhood support and no walk-up traffic, we just couldn’t make it work. 

 

While creating a home for original live music always the main goal of The 443, we knew that relying on people consistently showing up for shows was super risky. We thought developing other components of the business would take some of the pressure off the evening events. We thought between the morning coffee business, lunch, meetings in the afternoon and happy hour we would have enough people coming in at different times and for different things to sustain the business.

The hardest part about building a new business (aside from being flat broke) is trying to figure out if something is truly a bad idea or if you need to just keep on keepin’ on…until it catches on.

It takes a LONG time for a new business to enter the public consciousness and then longer still to get people to break out of their habits and regular haunts. You really do need to have a couple of years (or more) of operating expenses to ride it out. Unfortunately, we ran through a lot more money than we had budgeted dealing with delays in the permits from the city and unexpected expenses related to the new requirements for grease traps. I suspect we could have eventually made the coffee house and possibly the lunch part of our business work if we could afford to pay someone to stand in a mostly empty cafe for a year while it developed…but, sadly we weren’t in that position. 

When we realized we couldn’t afford to pay our daytime bartender/barista any longer I became the daytime front of house person. In real life, that meant 18 hour days, mind-numbing exhaustion and every other part of the business suffering. After a few months, it became clear something had to give, so we dropped our day hours altogether. I still work all day, but in the mornings I’m at home on my computer booking bands, updating the website and creating marketing materials or shopping for supplies. 

It’s a little scary because only being open at night doesn’t give us a very big window of time to hit our numbers.  

 

The Jury is Still Out

 

Local Music 

While our ticketed shows are going fantastically well, local shows are another story…they are still very hit or miss. It’s not about talent or the quality of the performance – because, quite honestly, everyone we put on our stage is pretty spectacular…our roster of performers is carefully curated.

But even when the planets seem to be aligned, and it’s not too hot, too cold, too wet, too snowy, too humid, during a big downtown festival, too close to a holiday, or going up against some other really good show happening across town, we still might only get 15-20 people to show up. Or LITERALLY nobody. Shows that were a home run the first time we did them might only get a handful of attendees the second time around. It’s frustrating, and there is no rhyme or reason to it. 

I suspect part of the issue is the fact that we charge a cover for our local shows.

The only way we can offer local music on our stage is to charge a $5 cover to defray the artist’s guarantee and pay our sound tech. If we don’t charge a cover, we are just working to pay the band and it’s not sustainable. I guarantee any small bar that is paying their bands out of pocket is struggling with the same issues, and frankly, I don’t see the situation improving until everyone gets on the same page and puts value on live music again. 20-30 years ago you paid a cover to get into a bar even without live music and nobody batted an eye…why is it such an outlandish idea today? 

If you’re interested, I broke down the economics of it in a blog post a while back, you can read it HERE.

We’ve created a much-needed home for original acoustic music, and that’s a good thing for our little musical community. I hear a lot of bitching about our lack of a music scene in Syracuse, but the first step to fixing that is actively supporting the handful of venues around town who regularly offer original music. A creative, vibrant, and supportive scene doesn’t happen by itself. 

These days, I try to book as many touring artists for ticketed shows as I can and I’ve dialed back the number of local shows we do. We dropped 2 different monthly series we were running on Sundays because we couldn’t consistently get people to show up for them, and Wednesdays have become more of a wild card night. I have a few artists that work well on Wednesdays, but we’re leaving a lot of them open to try and develop regular bar business – which leads to our next issue. 

Just a Bar

We always envisioned having a couple of nights a week with nothing on our calendar, nights where people could meet for drinks and good conversation. We created a very unique, comfortable and groovy space, but interestingly, we have a hard time getting people to come in unless there is live music or another event happening. Our funky living room conversation areas don’t get much use on off nights.  

When we have a ticketed show we have to pull those living rooms apart to arrange everything in rows, which is a lot of work. The debate we’re having right now is whether to keep the living rooms at all since the ticketed shows are the only aspect of the business consistently working. If we end up focusing 100% on ticketed performances, realistically that area should be changed to rows of chairs and small cocktail tables…but we would lose a lot of the character and charm that we’re known for.

It’s a dilemma we don’t have a good answer for at the moment.  

We’ve been experimenting with a Book Club & Board Game night on Wednesdays when we don’t have live music. We offer an incentive package if you book your group with us on these nights, you can get the details HERE. They’ve been moderately successful, and I think it’s something we’ll continue to do. Because we can run them with a skeleton staff and we’re not paying a band and a sound tech, we really only need a few groups to book with us to make it work. 

 

Our Building

With as much money, sweat equity and love that we have invested in this room, it’s a tough space for what we are trying to do. We spend an extraordinary amount of time and labor trying to work around our limitations.

We don’t have nearly enough storage and we juggle a lot of furniture around for our ticketed shows, so we rent a 20′ storage container that sits behind our patio outside the building. We don’t have a green room or any private space to stash music cases, which is a problem for a business that is primarily a live music venue. Our bar is badly arranged due to some misinformation we got before we opened. We unexpectedly had to jam a hand sink in next to our 3-bay sink, which pushed our ice bin and drink station into the corner. That makes it very challenging for 2 bartenders to make drinks at the same time, and 3 bartenders are pretty much out of the question. We don’t have a prep area or dish room, so we have to tackle all the dishes behind the bar and rent time in a commissary kitchen for some of our prep work. 

We also sometimes have people trying to come in for drinks on nights we have a show, but they don’t want to see the show, or maybe we’re sold out. Our ideal space would have a small bar area apart from the stage to accommodate those people, plus it would cut down on noise from the bar during the performance. 

But – changing locations is often the kiss of death for bars and restaurants. Sometimes the charm of a place is in its quirkiness and challenges, and I suspect that’s the case for The 443 – so we’ll make changes where we can and do our best with what we’ve got. 

 

Losses…and gains

 

 

 

There are few things harder than launching a new business and surviving the first year. Entrepreneurship will test you and your relationships in ways you can’t even imagine. It’s hard to keep the faith when the people closest to you tell you to abandon your vision when your business isn’t a money-making success right out of the gate. It’s harder still when they take the passive-aggressive route and simply refuse to patronize your new venture.

Surviving takes grit, tenacity, sacrifice, and a strong stomach.

There were several points in 2019 when we came very close to closing our doors. We were low on faith, out of money and it all seemed hopeless. 

On the flip side – we have been humbled by the kindness so many people have shown to us. Casual acquaintances and even people who were strangers before we opened have gone out of their way to support what we’re doing. There are dozens of people who have made a point of coming in regularly, bringing new friends in, and spreading the word about The 443. I even had several people tell me, “I’m making it my mission to keep you in business”. 

At one of our ticketed shows last year we had an unexpectedly low turn out…for no good reason. The performer was spectacular and her work was probably better known than any other artist we’ve booked, and yet, I just wasn’t successful getting bodies in the door. One of our guests approached me and said, “This show is AMAZING and should have sold out. I want to help you with that”. He handed me a $100 bill and I promptly burst into tears. 

I’ve ugly-cried in my own bar more times than I care to admit. 

 

The summer season was absolutely brutal, and business didn’t rebound until October and November. But then December was so flat that we questioned whether we should even continue the fight. I dragged my feet booking for 2020 because I truly didn’t know if we would be able to keep the doors open that long, or if it was worth trying to keep something going that there was so little interest in. 

We were closed the week of New Year’s and when we came back we were bracing for a slow January. But somehow, we came back to a whole new business – there was a big uptick in sales, which is unusual in the hospitality business this time of year. We got some nice press around the holidays and I think we finally reached enough people where we can expect a decent crowd most nights.

It was a lovely and completely unexpected New Year’s surprise. 

We celebrated our one year anniversary on January 17, and we were thrilled to have a packed room of happy people with lots of big smiles and lots of warm hugs.

We have an ever-growing tribe of loyal friends who appreciate what we’re doing and they do everything they can to support us. We are truly grateful every single day. 

2020 GOALS

We need to extend the hours we’re doing business, so we’re discussing ways to develop our happy hour business and discourage guests from running out the door immediately after our shows. A full room for 3 hours a night during a show is awesome, but it isn’t enough to make The 443 a viable business. If we add a solid happy hour crowd and a bit of late-night business, we should be in better shape. We will likely be extending our closing time by an extra hour and adding a second happy hour after the performances. 

This will be our first full season with our groovy outdoor patio, so we’re hoping to utilize that area as much as possible. The summer season is terrible for hospitality, so we’re hoping that planning live music and fun events outside will help keep us afloat. We’d like to add an outdoor bar too. The governor’s proposal to extend the New York State Fair to 18 days is adding an extra level of difficulty to an already challenging season, so we’ve got to figure out how to we’re going to manage that new wrinkle. 

And finally, we’re on a mission to convince all of you who have been “trying to come in” for the past year and “hearing great things about us” to venture in our door and see what we’re all about. We’re doing some pretty cool things, and you just might find your new favorite hang out. 

 

See you soon!