NC PANDEMIC PROFILE: Joe Bunn
(c) 2021 Kate Pope Photography
JOE BUNN (Bunn DJ Company, Crate Hackers, The DJs Vault)
Owner and DJ
I’m Joe Bunn, owner and DJ at Bunn DJ Company. There are five other Bunn DJ Co. across the United States: Richmond, VA, Charlotte, NC, Charleston, SC, San Diego, CA and Bozeman, MT.
Tell me how you first felt the impact of COVID-19 in your businesses? The bad part of being me in this past year is everything I do is DJ-related. It’s not like I had a mask-selling business or any of that going on. And, again, I’m well aware that everybody felt the effects of the past year other than – there were definitely some businesses that thrived. Your Amazons, Peletons and construction seemed to move on. But I sell DJ booths to DJs and that’s an expensive product; I sell DJ training and courses to DJs, and then I book weddings and private events to people and every one of those things is basically devastated by the past last year.
I think a year ago, almost exactly, is when we started getting these phone calls that we knew the year was a wash. 1 became 20, 20 became 60, we rescheduled 350 events or canceled them altogether, and that’s not even including the people that never even called. Randy, my right-hand man, really was dealing with a lot of that whereas I was just trying to keep this push alive with this membership community, The DJs Vault, and be a positive beacon, almost. We’ve got to keep pushing if we could just make it out the other side. Was I gravely wrong – just like the rest of the world was - about when it would be over? Here we are a year later and it’s still not over. There are multiple podcasts that I’ve recorded again about DJ-ing early April 2020 saying we’ll be good by July, enjoy these few months off with your family. Now, here we are a year later, still hoping for the world to reset.
Quantify the work for me. You said 350 events. Is that a normal year for you guys? Yeah, 400 plus. But the majority either canceled or pushed to 2021. That’s just Raleigh. Everybody had the same issues. They don’t do the volume that we do but you can easily say it was in the 1,000s of events. Thousands.
All our DJs are subs. Subcontractors. 15-16. And the other offices have anywhere from 3-8, smaller, smaller operations. All the owners in the other cities worked for me – other than my sister – they all worked here. “Hey, I want to be an owner. I want to do what you do – just somewhere else.” That’s how they got started. They all, at some point, DJ’d for me and then wanted to own their own office. A lot of the DJs I have just want to work. They want the leads, they want to meet with them, they want to close. They want to go out on a Saturday, rock a wedding, get paid on Monday and keep it going. They don’t have the time or the entrepreneurial spirit to own a DJ company, and that’s good for a DJ company owner. Those are the soldiers I want, the loyalists. I’ve lost dozens of DJs along the way, that went their own way – not just during COVID – over 20 some years. The ones that have that entrepreneurial drive and spirit are the ones that now own Bunn DJ Company of whatever town.
None of your licensees had to close their offices because of COVID, correct? Correct. Nobody went out of business. I’ve told any DJ – if you made it this far, then you’re homestretch now. If people shutdown – which they did – I know tons of DJs across the country, world that were just like ‘I’m done’. Especially older guys. They were done. Businesses may have been struggling already. I know a lot of DJs that have taken on other jobs. I know a lot of DJs – I don’t know if they’ve permanently changed careers – but there’s a lot more relators on the street now. A lot of DJs went back to realty school, got their license. It all depended on where they were – which state. Florida acted like it never happened. New Mexico? They can’t have a backyard barbecue, still. To this day with more than 10 people. Whoever the Governor is there – I have friends they have literally not played a show a party nothing since March of 2020 – a year. Zero dollars income. Nothing. It’s so divided. It’s such a mess. Go one state down. I went to South Carolina last week. They were showing me videos from parties they did all during Christmas, 350-400 people, massive, no masks. What’s going on?
You still had a few events that you worked during 2020. How did you feel about working those events? I felt great. I just wanted to be out there. I wanted to see people. I wanted to see people having fun. It didn’t matter if there were 25 people, they went off! People were so tired of being indoors or locked inside or no entertainment that they were just ready to party. As disappointed as some of these couples probably were, going from 150, which is our average guest count, to 25 people. Once that night hit, and they got married and the music started, they forgot all that. We did some live streaming things, especially ceremony part. But it was to me I wasn’t afraid to be out there. I was just ready to work and people were ready to get out there and party.
Did you have to make any adjustments to your regular business practices in response to COVID-19? Yeah, we definitely did. Me and Randy were the main people out there. Randy more than anyone. He was masked up the entire time. I think he was even making announcements. I wasn’t as good with it as I probably should have been. He even has a plexiglass shield on his DJ booth. Hand sanitizer on the booth. Trying to take requests from further away. A lot of DJs I know went to text requesting. There was an app that came out. They’d put a card on the table and if you have a request for the DJ then you could text it in. We did the mic condoms. We were trying to swap those out between people speaking – we’re still using those. Those were the main things that we really did to try to be safe about it.
What was the right thing to do? There was an irresponsible vibe to it, but those people were determined to get married, they were going to have a party and we were contracted to do it, so we’re gonna do it. I did reach out to my DJs and say, ‘look, if you’re booked at a party during this and you don’t want to do it – let me know. I’ll replace you and tell the couple that it’s somebody else.’ Some of the guys said took me up on that – they didn’t feel comfortable; wife had health issues, they had health issues; they didn’t want to be out there. If you didn’t want to be out there, then you didn’t have to be out there. Some of our guys have said they’re not comfortable until fall of 2021, so Randy’ll put them on the bench until then. It’s up to you; you don’t have to go out there and work.
The beauty of the model at Bunn DJ Company is that all the DJs have other jobs: plumber, software salesman, realtor, etc. And I think most of them kept their job-jobs. Are they going to feel it for a year? Losing all that additional income? Their Disney money. Kid’s college fund money. Yeah, they lost that. But nobody is like, ‘I’m not coming back.’
Then, the government, PPP stuff started coming in. But we don’t have employees and my overhead was so low, it wasn’t much. We have an application in again.
Talk to me about Crate Hackers and The DJs Vault. The DJs Vault started February 2019, again nobody’d ever heard of Coronavirus. Nobody could’ve imagined this unless you’d watched that movie Contagion. I just started this started this membership community for DJs to be able to learn. Basically, $30/month to be a member. Kinda blew up to 1,300 members. But last year was a fight. We’d lose 5 people a day, then we’d maybe get back 2, lose 2, get back 5. Every day, it was like lose, but gain. Run some ads, do a launch, get some more [members], but [membership] still hovers around that 1,300 number.
But this DJ approached me with this idea for music organization and how to help with that, which is a main problem for most DJs. We’d surveyed DJs and they couldn’t keep up with the music - didn’t have the time - and so he had this idea for this Crate Hackers thing and it just kinda blew up. That was May of 2020 and doesn’t that seem like the dumbest time to launch something for DJs? But, hey, you want to have your shit together by the time things get poppin’ again? This is the product. It started off as pdfs and now we have an app. I used it the other day and recorded myself downloading this app which scans your library and matches it up to the playlist that we created in Crate Hackers. Do you have this song already? Oh, this 90s hip-hop list, you’re missing this, this and this. Click, click, click. Now I’ve got the whole list. Boom. Right into my library. I did a 5-minute video and in five minutes, I’d added a whole 90s hip-hop list to my Serato (which is what we DJ from). From download to completion. Crazy.
If you had launched Crate Hackers outside of the pandemic do you think it would’ve had the same foothold? That’s a good question. In this particular case maybe the timing just happened to be perfect. Even right now, we use this open/close process. We close [membership sales] tonight at midnight, and today, sale, sale, sale. We had a HUGE launch over the last week. I mean massive. We did a 3-day challenge, music organization challenge, Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday of last week, had a big dance party online on Twitch, and that was the opening night. Then, tonight, a week later, we’re closing it. All day today, all the graphics will be ‘tonight, we’re closing;’ Facebook ads ‘we’re closing,’ and we will shut [registration] down. So, again, you get that rush of people needing to get in. It’ll be 3-4 months [before we reopen registration] and you’re locked out until then. It’s a push when you open to get everyone you can back in.
Sounds like a lot of DJs are taking this time to restructure, clean things up, organize. Do you anticipate that they’ll come out post-pandemic stronger? Gear. Business and Music. Yep. I think a lot of DJs will come out of this a lot better. Between all the content that I and other people have put out. We did this rocket sales challenge that was a 2-week challenge for about 40 DJs. First week was how to get leads. 2nd week was how to convert them to real sales. There are going to be a lot stronger DJs in terms of business sense, gear, their production, their setup and even what they’re playing. Even if all they did was watch people play online. All the DJs took over Twitch, which was a gaming channel pre-pandemic. We took it over. If you go on any given night, there will be 50 DJs from all over the world playing different kinds of music. You can tip them; you can chat. Twitch got taken over by the DJs. Twitch is where it’s at because everybody was pulled off Facebook and Instagram for copyright violations.
Would you say that playing on Twitch became an additional stream of income for some DJs? People that were consistent, regular, every week or every 3 days: we’re gonna be on Monday, Wednesday, Saturday at 9pm. Those people have definitely made money from it. Consistently streaming, fans show up, pay ‘em. They didn’t make what they would make DJ-ing in the real world but they made money, subsidized. Pivoting.
What has been the most challenging part of being in the events industry during the COVID-19 pandemic? Staying positive. Knowing that it was going to come back. I think that was the most challenging part.
Also, I felt really sorry for the people that had planned these events and had to move them. The worst was the people that just canceled their event. I was just like: are you sure? Have you really thought about this? I felt sorry for those people that really gave up. Pushing is one thing: ok, you’re moving to next year. I’m sure you wanted to get married this year, but next fall is going to be a different time. But the people that canceled, I can’t imagine just giving up.
If they canceled, they lost their deposit. But, even if they were canceling close to the event, I wasn’t trying to collect that balance. We never did a reschedule fee either for this year because I had so many DJs. We told people that they could apply the deposit to a future event, of course, because we didn’t want them to completely lose. We also had some people gift their deposit. Their question was: my friend’s getting married in 2021, can we gift this deposit to her? And, as much as I didn’t want to do it because that new client probably would have called us anyway, we did it. It didn’t happen a lot but it was probably 2 or 3 people that asked. I didn’t have the heart to say no, so we did some of that. There’s something to be said for customer service and good karma.
How has your work or business improved in the last year? (and, personal, too - if you’re willing to share.)
Having fewer in-person events gave me more space and room to do a little more on the education side of things and to impact other DJs.
For Bunn DJ Company there wasn’t a lot of positive. Business-wise: DJs Vault, Crate Hackers, helping other DJs was high, high-priority. It’s still really all I do. Randy runs the DJ company; I run that stuff.
The silver lining for me is always going to be the people who reach out and say that I helped them somehow. I got a message yesterday and the guy’s quote was something like, ‘I’ve learned more from The DJs Vault and Crate Hackers than I’ve learned in 35-years of being in this business. Thank you for sharing.’ And I get that once a day. That’s the thing that kept me going and kept me from flipping into the old Joe. The old Joe is all, ‘this is insane.’ The old Joe is furious, still. What is happening right now? I’m not a conspiracy theorist. COVID happened. I got COVID. It’s a real thing. But this is nuts. How did we mess this up so badly? Where did this go wrong – globally, wrong? I was angry. But I didn’t want to show that part.
I was like, ‘let’s be positive.’ I wanted to show people that [work] is going to come back. And it is. HARD. We book new shows every day, multiple a day. Deposit checks come in every day. People are still getting engaged; people are still getting married. It is very positive, but if you’re in the events industry, there’s no denying that you’re burnt for a year and half to two years. It’ll take that long to get back to where you were [pre-pandemic]. Especially when everybody had geared up for 2020 to be the biggest year ever. 2020 that numerology people were so hype on, it just didn’t pan out. No question – everybody – cake baker, wedding planner, DJ, didn’t matter – 2020 was going to be massive.
And, then, personally things have improved because - obviously, there’s been more family time. More going to the beach. More going out on the boat. More sunscreen and shirts. There was that silver lining, but even that, I had to send my younger son to private school. He didn’t need to be at home anymore. The older son here he’s missed half of ninth grade, all of 10th grade. At a certain point, even that became enough is enough. I’m not letting him start 11th grade here. Pick a school. He needs to go to prom, be around people, go to a football game.
What’s one thing you want the general public to know about the events industry?