AFTER breakfast we check our to-do lists…and finances. Not good.
It’s no great surprise, but we’re now at crisis point – we’d been banking (pardon the pun!) on the money from my show at Lindisfarne Festival, but that’s not gonna be paid for at least another week. Luckily I find a (very small) balance in an old bank account that I transfer, and we manage to scrape enough together to cover the ‘first of the month’ direct debits and standing orders. It gives us two or three days’ breathing space.
Thankfully we put some wheels in motion last week. Some, like the guitar I’ve put up for sale, (check it out here) are long shots and unlikely to help in the short term. Although we’re not thrilled at the prospect, we’ve put our spare room on AirBnB and I’ve offered to help in the local shop.
No interest in the AirBnB so far…but I nip to the shop to see if there’s anything going and get an immediate start! I’m shown the basics and even at that, find there’s a lot to learn and get my head round…but my first three-hour shift is interesting and enjoyable. I have some more to follow through the week 🙂
Back home I have lunch and do all the social media sharing round my latest eNewsletter…there’s also been some merch sold as a result of the eNewsletter.
We’ve distributed the posters for the Glasgow and Edinburgh shows in November…and we’ll do same for Perth. Hadn’t been sure what to do about Aberdeen as its a bit far to travel and get the posters out in person…I email a pal in Aberdeen who’s happy to do that for us, so parcel up the posters and flyers and get them in the mail.
A local pal who website I set up a few months ago needs some help setting up relevant emails and drops in early evening. Nice to catch up and sort it out for him.
Before dinner we sort all the USA tour receipts, attach each to an A4 sheet and put them in. date order.
Once we’ve had our chilli tacos I spend a few hours putting them all through my accounting spreadsheets and we finally get a snapshot of how the tour did financially. We pretty much broke even which is better than expected with the extra ten days, additional flight costs, car rental, fuel etc involved in launching the signature guitar. Ticket sales, fees and merch sales were all strong…but the expenses in pulling off the tour were considerable. Moral of the story – success doesn’t always mean profitable!
We can’t, of course, quantify the goodwill, visibility and potential positivity – leading, hopefully, to increased profitability in the longer run. Oh, and we had an amazing time too. No-one or nothing can take that away from us 🙂
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