What One More Regular Is Worth

Everybody in this trade knows what a quiet night costs. It is visible, it is immediate, and it gets discussed the next morning.

⚠️ Almost nobody can say what one more regular is worth across a year — and that is the number that decides what you can sensibly pay to acquire one.

⚠️ What this page cannot tell you

⛔ What you may record about guests and about the people who work with you, how long you may keep it, who may see it, and what may be attached to anybody's pay are data protection and employment questions with specific answers where you are.

⛔ This page recommends no arrangement and takes no view on any. ⭕ Ask your adviser before adding a field, before showing figures, and before attaching anything to them.

⭕ What follows is the operational half: the arithmetic that turns "we should advertise more" into a number.

The three figures

⭕ What an average visit bills. How often a regular comes in a year. How long they stay a regular before they drift.

Multiply them and you have what one regular is worth. ⚠️ Every venue holds all three and almost none has put them in the same sentence, because the first lives in the till, the second in the book, and the third nowhere at all — drift is not an event, so it never gets recorded.

⇒ The calculation is on a page: free, no sign-up, and it asks nothing about you — the ad-budget ceiling calculator.

Why this trade gets it wrong in a specific direction

The spend is judged on the night

⛔ A promotion is called successful if the room was full. But a full room of people who never return and a half-full room of people who come back monthly are not comparable outcomes, and only the first one looks good the next morning.

⚠️ The judgement happens twelve hours after the spend and the result arrives over twelve months. That mismatch is why the wrong channels keep getting renewed.

The requested guest is counted as one guest

⭕ A guest who asks for somebody by name behaves differently from one who does not — they come more often, they stay longer as regulars, and they are far more expensive to replace.

⚠️ If your figures do not separate them, your average regular is an average of two populations that share nothing, and the number you get is worth less than either of the numbers it came from.

The channel that fills a quiet Tuesday is judged against a Saturday

⛔ Filling a night that would otherwise be half-empty is worth more per head than adding to a night that was going to be busy. Judged on headcount alone, the Tuesday channel always loses.

The ceiling

⭕ Once you know what a regular is worth, the ceiling is simple: what you can pay to acquire one and still be ahead.

Any channel that cannot produce regulars below that figure is a channel you stop paying — not because money is tight, but because the arithmetic says so.

⚠️ Venues that set this line usually cut one thing immediately and increase another, and the increase is the part that surprises them. ⛔ Without the line, spend only ever goes one direction, and it is not up.

The smallest version you can start with

⭕ One question at the door, recorded once: was somebody asked for by name. That single field separates the two populations, and everything above becomes calculable within a month.

Not a system. ⚠️ One field, filled in at the door rather than reconstructed the next afternoon — because a sentence somebody said at the door does not survive twelve hours in anybody's head.

Read next

• The Two Tuesdays
• Who Types The Request In
• The Request Fee Nobody Explained
• What a Regular Is Actually Worth