Comparing shows by total sales is misleading. A two-day festival will almost always out-earn a three-hour evening market, but that doesn't make it the better show. This short video explains the number FairKeep uses to compare them fairly: income per hour.
What Income Per Hour Is
Income per hour is what a show netted divided by the hours it was open. Net means after the booth fee and costs, not gross sales. Dividing by the hours puts long and short shows on the same footing.
What It Tells You
It tells you which shows to go back to and which to skip. A show with a big gross and a big booth fee can end up with a lower income per hour than a small local market. When you're deciding which applications to send next season, that's the comparison that matters.
- Shows near the top of the list are the ones to apply to again.
- Shows near the bottom are candidates to drop, unless something in your Event Diary explains a bad day.
To get the number, you need the show logged with its hours, booth fee, income and costs; the how to track a craft fair video covers that.
Try It Yourself
The step-by-step guide on the FairKeep site walks through income per hour screen by screen, so you can follow along at your own pace. FairKeep is free to start and doesn't ask for a credit card, so you can set up an account and try it with your own shows. If you haven't seen the app before, the two-minute tour of FairKeep covers the dashboard, events, applications, calendar, packing list, reports and integrations in one pass.
I recorded this video on a demo account for a made-up candle company, so the shows, names and numbers on screen are examples, not real data. For the bigger picture of what FairKeep does, see my FairKeep overview, and for the free calculators and tools that sit alongside it, the VendorTools hub.
More short how-tos on the VARØ Industries YouTube channel.