An analysis of Patrick Properties events. By Laura and Sydney
Patrick properties Events owns 4 properties in downtown charleston. They are the William Aiken House, Lowndes Grove, the American Theater and Fish restaurant. Patrick properties coordinates events, such as weddings, corporate functions, private parties and other events that take place at these 4 venues.
The William Aiken House, The American Theatre, and Fish Restaurant are all located on King Street (right next to each other), while Lowndes Grove is located behind Hampton Park at St. Margaret St. and Sixth St. Most of the company’s business is generated from the wedding market, a niche market which they’ve learned to specialize in quite well. Many people travel across the country to have a historic Charleston wedding at one of these properties. According to Dr. Canberg (professor of Hospitality and Tourism Management at CofC), the average cost of a wedding in Charleston is $27,000. William Aiken House and Lowndes Grove are the second most expensive venues in downtown Charleston, after Drayton Hall, which costs $11,000 just to be able to make use of the space.
Caterease is a generic, “off-the-shelf” product that can be customized to meet specific customer requirements based on their business process model. Patrick Properties chose this system because of its succinctness and thus did not need it to be customized. The system unifies all of the different departments (sales, accounting, marketing, and event management) and contains information pertinent to each, although the way this information is used varies from department to department. To organize and execute an event, the critical information that an event manager needs is clients’ names, date of event, time of event, venue, number of guests and the catering plans (if applicable). Contrastingly, accounting would use the system to track payments: who has paid, who has yet to pay, etc. Also, labor costs are only supposed to account for 21% of the catering fees, accountants use the information in Caterease to ensure that labor costs do not exceed this percentage.
For the purposes of this project, Patrick Properties supplied us with 99 data entries from the Caterease system that gave information pertaining to the events planned from September to December of 2009. The variables given were those used most by the event managers: event date, client, property, total cost, number of guests, event time, type of event, date booked, and sales rep. We compiled this list in excel and used functions that we learned in this class to analyze the data.
The average cost of an event at Patrick Properties is $10,574.45. The average number of guests at an event is 103, resulting in an average price per guest of $102.46. Judging from our four-month data set, October is the most popular month for events at patrick properties with a total of 37 events during that month this year. The second most popular month was November, with 29 events. The least popular is December with only 9 events planned, which is probably due in part because of the holiday season.
After analysis, we concluded that the most popular property is the William Aiken House, but the most profitable property is Lowndes Grove. Because Lowndes Grove is a larger venue, it allows for a higher average number of guests resulting in a higher average cost per event. So, although there are fewer events planned at Lowndes Grove, the price per event is higher than at any of the other venues. As discussed in the previous slide, october is the most popular month for events at Patrick Properties. A manager would use this information to schedule additional temporary staff to be hired specifically for this influx of events during this period. Further analysis showed that Lowndes Grove makes up for 49% of total sales, William Aiken House makes up for 43%, and the American Theater, The River House at Lowndes Grove, and Off-premises events together account for only 8% of total sales. The following slide shows the breakdown of the percentage of sales per salesperson
After analyzing sales per salesperson, we found that Sarah Copeland accounted for the highest percentage of sales as well as the highest dollar amount of sales of the 6 salespeople listed in the data set. However, Charlotte McDowell had the highest average sale amount, and Ashley Gunnin made the most sales in terms of the number of sales (not dollar amount).
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