Experienced marquee erectors will be able to look at a garden and just see exactly how a marquee will fit and exactly what it would look like. Always keep in mind that your customers won’t be able to do this, giving them a few details and asking them to use their imagination is going to be a tough sell.

So what can you do?

Floorplans: supplying one or two suggested floorplans showing how everything is going to fit in to their marquee is going to be a big help. It will show that the numbers you’re talking about will fit in to their garden-often this comes as a surprise to someone who’s just marked the space out on their lawn. You can use our handy marquee planner for this – print it and cut it out or take a screenshot, crop it down and add it straight in to quotes etc.

Photographs: The best thing you can possibly do is have a photograph of exactly what your customer wants. This isn’t easy, especially when you’re starting out but if you have photographs in your portfolio of all the different jobs you’ve done then eventually you’ll have some clear favourites – expand on these ones in particular. You always want to have choice available but the best scenario for both you and your customer is for them to say ‘I want exactly that’. For us the most popular option was honeybeige carpet and ivory swags for weddings and blackout linings with black & white dance floors for 40th/18th birthday parties.

Look at a website like rightmove – when someone goes to view a house chances are they’ve seen pictures of it, they’ve seen a floorplan and they’re just going to see how it all comes together in a package. Make life easier for you and your customers by offering similar information.

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Many thanks to JF Marquees and Premier Party Tent (again) for helping us dismantle our Showmans Show marquees in record time (an hour & 30 minutes). The show itself seemed successful with most hirers having a positive outlook for 2012. Our new products on display seemed to go down very well including our new solid frame doors (only £400) and our simple gable pieces that give so much more flexibility to hirers. Thank you for everyone who came in to see us and especially those who mentioned they read this blog, I’ll try my best to keep helping as much as I can.

Thanks for reading

Spencer

Most readers will have heard of the Showmans Show, some will not – it’s the one show of the year to visit as a marquee hire company.  Every supplier you could possibly need will have a stand there including the wonderful DIY Marquees

We’re always in the same spot every year:

Register for free at The Showmans Directory. It’s on the 19th & 20th October at The Newbury Showground.

Everyone on our stand has had first hand experience of running a marquee hire company so we’d love to sit down with you and talk through any plans or ideas you may have.

As always I’m working on some new products that we hope to show there.

Thanks for reading

Spencer

So as many people know first hand The Showman’s Show was on last week:

Yes. That’s ice on the carpet. It was very very cold.

A few points from the show:

• Our 9m x 12m marquees should be available from Spring next year
• We have plenty of walkways in stock but linings are made to order at the moment so there might be a 5 day delay
• Our blackout/DIY starlight will be available for next summer, hopefully earlier.
• I’m very very sorry to the first few people who mentioned they read this blog, I’d forgotten about the free gift on the 1st morning until someone reminded me – mail me and I’ll send you some in the post.

As last year many thanks to Premier Party Tent for donating two of their staff to help take down our stand,  you are gentlemen and your assistance was very gratefully received.

Thanks for reading

Spencer

For those who aren’t aware we launched a forum for the marquee industry last week. It seems to be going very well with some very interesting ideas and healthy debates. A word of warning – I will unashamedly be using this for topics to discuss on here occasionally, if I see something I think would be useful to our customers then I’ll write about it on here.

We had an unusual thing recently, someone came in and bought a pagoda marquee (not that unusual), he then asked what time we were open on Monday to return it. He thought he was just hiring it! I felt bad. Obviously I offered him his money back if he didn’t want it (he actually seemed quite happy to be fair) but I also felt bad I’ve pinched a potential customer from a poor hirer out there. Still, our prices must be pretty reasonable for that to happen in the first place

Look at that, 9 days to go and I nearly managed to get to the end without mentioning The Showman’s Show next week! We’re still working on the samples so I can’t confirm what we’ll have there yet. Things that we won’t be showing but we are supplying next year are full height partitions so you can split a marquee internally (ideal for creating catering areas etc) as well as increasing our 4m wide range to include 4x6m and 4x12m as the 4x8m & 4x10m were so popular this year we could barely hold stock of them.

As always thanks for reading, please pop along to the forum and have a read.

Spencer.

It’s the end of the marquee season, your cash flow should be at a reasonable level and in a few weeks there’s The Showmans Show where all of us cunning marquee suppliers will dangle fantastic new products for you to buy ready for next season. Much as I’ll happily sell you any marquee you really need to do some planning before coming to the show.

Here’s what we used to do back in the days I was a visitor not an exhibitor:

• Calculate our costs for the next 6 months. Includes wages, tax bills, vehicle bills etc
• Calculate the likely income for the next 6 months (if it’s anywhere near the figure from the 1st step you’re doing very very well)
• Work out the minimum amount of equipment we’d need for the next season – including essential repairs/renewals etc
• Work out the equipment you’d ideally like to expand the business – things that customers have asked for or equipment that you’ve turned away business for. For example if you turned away 4 bookings for a 9x12m marquee last summer then if you can afford it it’s probably worth buying one for next year (in which case definately visit our stand, we should have something of interest for you!).

So in a nutshell we’d come to The Showmans Show knowing exactly what we wanted to look at and exactly how much we had to spend. I strongly recommend you doing the same otherwise you’ll get crafty salesmen (stand 269 ave E) convincing you to buy enough marquees to cover Wembley football pitch! We’re one of the few companies that could do that from stock too..

Thanks for reading

Spencer

Ok, so I may once or twice have mentioned the fact the showmans show’s on next month. We’re working hard on making sure there’s some new things of interest to you but some are going to be cutting it pretty fine -I’ll try and put them on here in good time before the show if I can.

I’d also like to reward you kind people who read my ramblings every week. I get a fair bit of email feedback but next month is often the only time I meet people in public, so I thought I should offer a free gift to anyone who mentions they read this blog.

I’m offering a 4 pack of pole straps. What are pole straps? I asked Jim from CCMarquees to review them for me just to make sure I wasn’t giving away something useless:

I have just packed away a 6m by 12 m marquee supplied by DIY Marquees and used adjustable tie straps to bind the poles together for storage. By locking the poles together with these strong but easy to use straps, the poles are not going to roll around when stored and are easier to carry. Thanks for introducing me to the product and I would recommend these straps as a great way to store and transport marquee poles. Regards Jim Costello Cc Marquees

So visit our stand (middle of Avenue E probably), mention the blog to get some useful free stuff (limited stock available blah blah)

Thanks for reading

Spencer

Update: We’re on Avenue E, stand number 269.