Can I Make Money As A Pirate?

What a question- can I make money as a pirate? I doubt that many of the Golden Age of Piracy pirates uttered that but I could be wrong. For myself, living in the 21st Century that is a good business question that I asked myself, and got asked, when I was considering what to do at the Bristol Renaissance Faire (BRF). I had visited the faire and figured that with all the people (patrons) they attracted that operating something that featured pirates, a display about pirates or a shop, ought to make some money as a small, side line business.

So how do you know if you are going to make money at this, or anything. I had worked in different established businesses while in college. These had been Mom and Pop sort of stores, many flower shops- yes from flowers to pirates. I did it back then for the extra college money I needed and it turned out that I got a good hands-on education on small business management, of sorts. But I still did not have what I needed to know. How much could I bring in? In one hour, one day, a weekend and for the entire run of 19 days that BRF is open.

From my museum work, what I do for a living everyday for the past 20 years, I have learned how to conduct surveys. Not the type that we all hate of a person jumping at you and asking questions. I learned the sneaky type. The one where you just watch and record what people are doing. So I took some time and got a small notebook, a bottle of water and found a spot to sit so I could watch people.

One method is demographics. Who is walking by you? This is still a visual survey. Just divide your page into sections such as "babies-toddlers", "Grade School", "Middle School", "High School", (you can lump teenagers as a group under "teens") Young Adult (college age) "30-40 year olds", "Empty Nester's" (that is 50 to 60) and "Seniors." Do the slash mark method //// sort of thing as people walk by you. Mark the age level that best matches what you think that persons age is. I would write my start and stop time at the top of the page. I generally did this for one hour blocks. Once in the morning, afternoon and towards the end of the day. What this gave me was a slice of what type of age group BRF was drawing in and what my potential patron would be. I remember that they got a wide age span. It was interesting to see how many strollers got pushed into the Faire grounds- plenty of young families visiting when I did back in the early 2000s. I set up watching by the main gate and I only marked patrons coming in, not going back out.

If you want to duplicate this you had better collector current data as times have changed.

You can do this visual survey of ages for general admission, stake out a shop and see who is buying, stake out another attraction or whatever your interest is. Going by age groups is good as different groups spend more than other groups and the interest in learning or doing something differs between ages as well.

Male and Female. You can collect visual data on how many men or women enter the grounds or who is buying what. Race data can be collected the same way too although I did not as race was not a factor for my business.

I also did a simple timed survey of a particular attraction to see how many people entered, how long they stayed and the like. So once again I parked my self at a distance, had my small notebook out and timed how long a person entered the building and then when they left. This gave me a indication of what an average visit time might be. If you have a building, or ship, and you have only some much floor space you need to determine how many people you can actually move through the structure. Also I wanted to know what another place did in terms of business. This would give me a benchmark to go with. Very simple to do. Just sit and count people that enter for one hour. Do it a few hours and you will get a ratio of people who go through in a day.

I also recorded what was being sold and for how much. What is a soda, a beer, admission to the Haunted Dungeon, turkey leg, t-shirt, pony ride and so on sold for at BRF? This would give me an idea for a base price for my business.

All of this gave me some real world numbers to base what I might expect to make with a pirate attraction at BRF. By the way BRF managers did not want to tell me what data they collected as they had to spend plenty to hire survey firms to collect it all. I can understand that. But from what I did it cost very little, mostly my time, and anyone can do this for themselves as well. This was good to do and if you are considering a business like this you really ought to hire it done or do it your self, BEFORE you invest any time and money in the project.

Thanks for reading.