M&T Alumni Association of Metro NY · Speaker talk and dinner · The Penn Club of New York ·
A monthly speaker series that stopped costing me $664 a night
I host a speaker at the Penn Club of New York about once a month. Guest fees and dinner tabs I never got back were adding up to almost $8,000 a year. Now guests pay when they sign up.
The talk: Leading at the Edge: Brain Science, Big Change, and What Still Makes Us Human in the Age of AI, with Michael Platt, author of The Leader's Brain.
- Guests at the talk
- 8
- Collected that would have come out of my pocket
- $664
- Per year, hosting monthly
- ≈ $8,000
The problem
I host a speaker at the Penn Club of New York about once a month. As a member I can bring outside guests from the M&T Alumni Association of Metro NY, but there is a cap on guests and the club charges a fee for every one of them.
The guests come from an email blast the alumni office sends out, so most of them I have never met. The club bills me, and then it is on me to collect from people I do not know. That has always been a problem when I do this.
Then there is the dinner after the talk. No cap on alumni guests there, which is great, until the check comes. In the past I was left carrying the full tab for the guests. Nobody means to stick you with it. People just forget.
What changed
For this talk, guests signed up on Banyan and paid when they registered: the $33 club guest fee for the talk, and $50 to cover their dinner.
I also gave the club’s event coordinator access to the sign-ups. She could see how many guests were coming and what their names were, and let the doorman and security know who to let in.
The result
I collected every fee. Eight guests came. At $83 each, that is $664 I would otherwise have paid out of my own pocket, for one evening.
I host these every month. Twelve evenings with eight guests each is $7,968 a year that I was quietly absorbing.
“The price of connecting people just got cheaper for me, by $8,000 a year.”
What do unpaid guests cost you?
Plug in your own numbers, then use the adjusted fees to price your next event. The defaults are the evening described above.
- You cover, per event
- $664
- You cover, per year
- $7,968
- Left in your pocket with Banyan
- $7,468 a year
- Break-even
- Banyan pays for itself after 1 event.
Example prices only; Banyan’s published pricing may differ. Stripe’s rate is its standard US card rate and varies by card and country. If you don’t pass card fees on, they come out of what you collect.