The Young and The Old

Galley: The kitchen in a ship or aircraft. (also galley proof) A printer's proof in the form of long single-column strips, not in sheets or pages. [ORIGIN: galley from French galée denoting an oblong tray for holding setup type.]

The two primary purposes of this blog is number one introduce the similarities of the old ways with respect to the new ways to offer a younger generation an older perspective that is still relevant to what they deal with in the modern world.  The second purpose of this blog is to begin building a curiosity and an interest in the methods we plan to use to make it all quite interesting.

Much debate has been heard of late about taxes and whether they should be raised to help pay for the cost of an irresponsible federal government. In the next paragraph I want to illustrate to young and old alike, a much easier picture to visualize then what the mainstream media or the government would have you to see.

For 25 years I ran a general contracting business. Sometimes the contracts were huge and I required more employees. Sometimes the contracts were small and I could get by with only a few. One thing any contractor, large or small, must consider is how to pay his labor cost. In contracting it is very common to maintain about a 30% labor cost. In other words if the contract is worth $1000.00 you can expect the labor to run some where in the ballpark of $300.00.

Regardless of what the taxes I have to pay are, I must stay true to that 30% labor cost. If my taxes increase by 5% that means I must either charge my customer 5% more, which may cause me to lose my competitive edge, or hire 5% less labor.  

The logical extension of a tax increase of any kind is that I will not be the only one having to pay it. Therefore it stands to reason that I can look at a 5% increase in my material cost, my transportation and various other expenses. So as you see that 5% tax hike has now added up to a 15% to 20 % increase in my costs. In order to stay in business I have to recoup that cost using various strategies, one of them and probably the first of which would be to reduce my labor cost.

You hear a lot in the media about corporate taxes. Let me make it very clear as a business owner, increases in our taxes must be passed on to the customer in order for a successful business formula to continue to work. Regardless of what you hear, or any news outlet may tell you, or any economic adviser may scream from the mountaintops, corporations do not pay taxes. The customers of that company or corporation pay the additional expense.

Having covered that brief material, let us move on to where CactusGrass Productions is heading. One of the many ideas and business plans I intend to implement is a concert series called “The Young and the Old”. The idea of this series is to bring families together in the arena of entertainment. While I cannot go into specifics at this time for strategic reasons, I can say that the primary mission statement is to provide an entertaining environment for the 40-year-old man or woman and his or her 15 year old son or daughter. Believe it or not that is not a completely new idea. As a matter of fact it is an idea that has been in practice for centuries. Here is another very old idea, which works very well with even the youngest of audiences, keeping that experience as inexpensive as possible.

There in lies the combination of taxes verses labor and any industry out there, including entertainment. In general contracting we are given three options when it comes to getting each project complete. We can either hire a core group of hourly wage earners and complete the project in house or we can hire sub-contractors and farm all the work out at a predetermined rate or we can use any combination thereof; the latter generally being the best option. As external expenses increase (i.e...taxes and workers insurance) it is likely that any contractor or promoter will begin to trim the in-house labor expenses before any other expenses will be cut or the price to the customer begins to increase.

So there you have it. An old fashioned approach to a new kind of business and a very tangible illustration of how old ideas can work effectively in an increasingly younger marketplace. As young business operators become more familiar with the impact that some political issues have on their own business, they generally take a different stance on such issues as they may have had before. 


A 20% increase on a $50 concert ticket is an additional $10. With a family of four that increases the cost of the event $40. That can and often does keep a venue from selling out. 


Regardless of which business we may be in, seemingly benign political issues can have a detrimental effect on our ability to make a profit and hire the help we may desperately need. I chose to go to Entertainment Business School not because I want to work for someone else but because I want to run my own promotion company. However if the shoe were on the other foot I would hope that the business owner would have the available funds to hire me.


Finally as a concert goer, there have been times where that additional $10 has prevented form going to a concert I had hoped to attend.