Joe Bunn – scaling by licensing
In keeping with my series on “Scaling” I’m so happy to have had this chat with Joe Bunn on how he came to expand from one location to six through licensing. Is licensing right for your business? Listen to this episode and find out.
Joe Bunn started his DJ career at the age of 14 in Eastern North Carolina. In the late 90s, he started Bunn DJ Company. The company grew from a couple of DJs to 15 of the area’s best mobile DJs. Over the past few years, Bunn DJ Company has expanded to Charleston, SC, Charlotte, NC, Richmond, VA San Diego, CA and Bozeman, Montana! The company performs at thousands of weddings, private, corporate and charity events yearly.
Joe has been on the board of both ILEA (International Live Events Assocation) and NACE (National Association of Catering & Events).
Joe still DJs almost every weekend, but in recent years has been helping other entrepreneurs across the country grow their businesses by giving seminars, consulting, recording podcasts, doing workshops, and producing training videos. In addition, he is the founder of The DJ’s Vault-a members only website for mobile DJs.
@bunndjco
@joebunn
@bunngear
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– When you think about scaling your business, there are so many ways to do it, and my next guest has done it in a different way and I want you to hear this. I am so excited for the Wedding Business Solutions podcast to have my good friend, Joe Bunn joining me today on scaling. Joe, how you doing today?
– What’s up Alan? Thanks for having me, man.
– You and I could talk for hours, but what I really want to talk about today is you have expanded your business in a way that’s different than a lot of people. Now, people that are listening, they’re not only DJs, but they could learn from this as well. But let’s go back. Let’s do a little way back over here. Tell people about your business and when you got started.
– Sure, sure. So here I am rapidly approaching 50, and I think I started this when I was 13 years old. So here we are 37 years in the DJ business. Originally just me running around, getting my mom to carry me to shows, eventually got a license and dragged a trailer around, deejayed my own prom. Went to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and became like the go-to frat party and bar DJ there. And then really thought that was the end of it in ’94, I guess that would have been when I graduated and it was like, oh, that was a great college job, or that was a great young man’s dream job, really. What am I supposed to do now? And kinda took a few other poorly chosen paths in the entrepreneurial world like we all do that didn’t work out and eventually realized like, wait a minute, remember that thing that you were doing when you were 20? That was actually what you’re supposed to do. It looks like the rest of your life. And at that point, so that was probably ’99, 2000 is when I incorporated and started going around town. I had moved back to Raleigh where I am now at that point, going to the record stores when there were record stores, putting ads in the paper when there were newspapers, and looking for help to stop turning down those people that were calling and saying, Hey, Joe I want you for my wedding, well, I’m booked. Well, they’re still having a wedding and they’re still going to get married and you just lost the sale. And so that was the original scaling was, okay, let me turn this from a single op just DJ Joe Bunn running around doing as much as he humanly can into, okay, well, let me get Greg and let me get Randy and let me get Steve. And three became six, became 10, became, I think we have 15 guys just here in the Raleigh office now.
– So the market was telling you, you needed to either keep turning business down or you could make some money from this. So it was doing that. But let me go back. So you DJ’ed your own high school prom?
– I definitely DJ’ed my high school prom and I definitely wore one white Air` Jordan and one black Air Jordan. So same the same Jordan 5, but I had to show that I had both pairs. That definitely happened.
– So my band did not play my high school prom, but we played the high school anti-prom, which was people didn’t like what the prom was set up, a lot of people just boycotted it and they made this anti-prom and they made an anti-Prom and they hired my band to play in the anti-prom. So we have that in common. We played our own proms. So how soon after you realized, okay, I graduated college, I’m doing this stuff there until you decided to add more people. Was this weeks, months, years?
– No, no, it would’ve been about five years.
– Five years? Oh, so five years just Joe Bunn going around doing Joe Bunn?
– Still doing other ventures, but at the same time playing in these little beach bars. At that time, I was living in Wilmington, North Carolina which is the beach here. So playing at these beach bars, trying to do this hat and t-shirt company that we thought was going to be a massive success. I think I was dabbling in real estate. I think I was managing bands. I think I thought I was a hip hop producer. There was a lot of like gray forgotten memories in that ’95 to 2000 era. And then eventually, like I said, moved back to Raleigh. And so, yeah, that was a good gap in there where I just wasn’t scaling at all.
– Those are the things though, those other gray areas that make us who we are, right?
– Yeah.
– It’s what do we learn? I installed burglar alarms. I did general contracting. I played in the band. I managed a retail store. I worked at the largest ad agency in the country and did nothing related to advertising. But you learn all this stuff. And it’s funny just the other day, my wife and I were coming back from Cape Cod and my son wanted us to go take a look at a car he might want to buy. And he was like, you going anywhere near this neighborhood? And I was working in a car dealer in that neighborhood in a job that I hated so much that I took the job in the wedding industry. And it’s just funny going by there. I had these flashbacks like, wow. If I hadn’t hated that job so much I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here. I would have taken a different turn. So, you then from ’99 you’re Joe Bunn multi op, but multi op in Raleigh, right?
– Sure, that’s it.
– Multi op in that area. But now how many cities are you in now?
– Six cities in five states.
– Six cities in five states. When did that start and how did that start?
– So that would have been, yeah, that’s a good story as well. That would have been like 2016, probably. Recent history. I mean, five years ago, five, six years ago. A DJ that was working for me at the time named David Fox approached me and said, I just graduated law school. I’ve passed the bar exam. My father is the head of the Alcoholic Beverage Commission, one of the biggest lawyers in the state, but I have decided now I don’t want to follow in his footsteps and I’m going to rebut the hundred thousand dollars in law education he just spent, and I want to be professional mobile DJ. And I was like, oh boy. So I’m like, the story goes, so I said, all right, I love your ambition. I like where this is going. You are a really good DJ, I think you could manage people, but you can’t do it here. And he was like, no, no, no. Where would you go? And I said, I would go to Charleston, South Carolina. It’s near here. Your family still lives here. You’re not married yet. You don’t have any kids. It’s one of my favorite cities in the country probably. And brides are high-fiving in the street on Saturday. It is the second, allegedly, largest wedding destination market besides Las Vegas in the country. That’s how Charleston, South Carolina rolls. And he goes down there and has been crushing it ever since. But we go to meet his father to get this money to start this franchise, or let’s call it a license. And we’re sitting at lunch and I get my salad from the buffet, I sit down, I’ve got my fork right at my mouth, and he goes, what do you want from me other than my money? And I was like, I’m looking around like, wait a minute. And I’m like, hold on a second. Number one, your son approached me. I didn’t even have this idea. Number two, and I’m ready for this, I have my tax return with me. So I put the salad down, I take the tax return, I take a pen, I circle the line where it shows how much money I made from Bunn DJ company and I slid it across the table and I pointed to the number and I said, Mr. Fox, do you think your son could ever make that much money even as a partner at a law firm? And he goes, nope. And I slid it back across the table. And from that moment on, I had earned his respect. I went to that meeting prepared for an ambush. I didn’t know I was going to get ambushed, but I was prepared for an ambush.
– Right, I remember I had a speaker moment like that. I went to a speaker conference and it was a smaller one. And a bunch of us go out to dinner at this barbecue place. And there’s one guy there that’s a hedge fund guy. He’s a speaker, but he’s a hedge fund guy. And it turns out, he’s going to buy dinner for everybody because he wants everybody to know that he has money. And I didn’t know him, I had just met him and we’re talking. And I just said, I forget how came it up but I just mentioned something about what my gross was the year before. And his demeanor changed because I was no longer this guy trying to make it in the speaking business. It was like, oh, okay. And then he talked to me differently. Now, I don’t think that’s right–
– No, no, no, no, it’s not.
– But it is again, you earned his respect because you didn’t need his money to make your business run. But let’s also be honest here, because this is what we want to tell people with scaling. His son didn’t need you to start a DJ business. But why did David want to do it as Bunn DJ?
– So that’s the key. And so there’s two things I’ll mention here. So all these people that have these offices at some point, I want to make this clear, they worked here, they worked for Joe Bunn. They knew the system. They knew what kind of people I would hire. They knew how to follow up. They knew what the website should look like. They knew what our marketing should look like. They knew what the gears should look like. They knew how to dress. At some point, all of these six people, or I’m sorry, five plus myself knew the Bunn system, let’s call it, the Bunn way. And of course I trained them up more as they signed on as these licensees. Now I’ve kind of lost the question. What was it again? Why didn’t he start djdavidfox.com or whatever.
– Right.
– Because he walks into an existing company that at that time had been around for 25 years plus, had thousands of reviews on WeddingWire, had thousands of reviews on The Knot–
– Some of which were his.
– Some of which were his, exactly. And had an existing website, had a brand recognition, had all of our literature done, all of our systems in place, everything. Expert at DJ event planner. Let me show you how we book shows using this CRM. He walked into it like everybody would want to walk into a business for not a lot of money. You know what I mean? He walked into it and got this turnkey solution, saved him hundreds of thousands of dollars in mistakes, saved him years in fast-forwarding to a successful business. And I mean, he was profitable year one. I mean, it was that quick for him.
– And the thing is, if you’ve read the book, “The E Myth,” and if anybody hasn’t read the book The E Myth, they talk about the systems. What you’re describing is the difference between finding your way to make it yourself, and you said it really well, making the mistakes, which we all make mistakes. You still make mistakes, but we learn from those mistakes. But the key is that he walked into that, he brought with him that backpack full of credibility, that backpack full of ideas. And he can pick up the phone and call Joe Bunn and say, hey, Joe. I want to rewind just a little bit because when you were talking about David had what it took, he was a great DJ and I thought he could manage people. And this is something that everybody listening has to understand. Your role changes when you go from a single op to a multi op because now you’re managing people. And now your role changes when you go to these, in your case, licensees different than a franchise and there’s a technical difference in there but again, talk to your lawyer about that. And I guess David has an advantage because he was a lawyer. So there you go.
– Yeah, he did, he did.
– But you’re buying the system because that system has been tried, tested, broken, fixed, updated, and all those things. So you’re in these six different places, five states, six different places with those people that all worked for you locally. And is it one website for everybody or how do you do this?
– That’s correct, yep. It’s pretty much a dropdown. So when you get on the site, you pick Charlotte, Raleigh, Charleston, San Diego, Richmond, Virginia, or my sister is in Bozeman, Montana.
– Bozemon, Montana. So like San Diego, did that person want to move to San Diego and say, let me do it?
– He did not.
– He did not. He had worked for me previously here, had moved out there, let’s say five years or so. We had been in touch with Facebook. He kind of saw what I was doing with these first couple of licensees and he just reached out. And I happened to be out there recording some content for BPM Supreme, which is a record pool and we reconnected. And he was like, man, I think we need an office out here on the West coast. And I was like, well, I love it out here. Let’s do it. If I need to come out here once a year–
– San Diego.
– Yeah.
– Oh man, if you’re going to pick part of California, my son lives in San Francisco. I love it. But the weather wise, no, no, no.
– No, no no, it ain’t San Diego. Both start with San but that’s about the only commonality.
– Right, and it’s not the North Carolina humidity, no.
– No, it’s like 78 every day, no humidity. When it rains, they’re like, what the hell is going on?
– I was at a speaker conference there in July and they have this thing called the June gloom. Which is every morning in June, it’s just really socked in fog and then it burns off. But that year it was late and it was in July. So I’m in San Diego waking up going, wait a minute, where’s the San Diego weather?
– Right, where am I?
– And then the afternoon was beautiful. It just burned off, the afternoon was beautiful. Okay, so scaling wise, you weren’t looking to do it, right?
– Yeah.
– So now you have David in Charleston.
– South Carolina,
– What was next?
– Then Brandon, who I’m trying to think. Yeah, then Frank again, who had not worked for me here in a decade had been living in Richmond, working in construction slash traveled the world. It was like one of those kind of nomadic types, but we stayed close. He would still go to like the Mobile Beat Conference. He was still real tight with my right hand man, Randy, that he would come to Raleigh, they’d go record shopping, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, man, and he was playing in a bar. He was not doing private events, but he was still deejaying. And he just said, man, I think we could do an office here. There’s a market here. And again, conversation leads to here’s what I can help you do, Frank. And so Richmond is born and then not even a year later, probably same thing with Brandon. Brandon was living here working for me. He was like, man, I would love to be in the Western half of North Carolina. That’s where my family is. That’s where my friends are, I’d like to get back there now that I’m out of college here at NC State in Raleigh. And we didn’t really go, that’s about two and a half hours from here. And we definitely didn’t go all the way to the mountains, which he goes to a lot, which is Asheville.
– Asheville.
– You know.
– Beautiful, yeah, beautiful.
– It’s almost four hours from Raleigh. I love it there, but I don’t want to drive four hours to play a show. And your weekends burned at that point. And so I said, look, man, you take from basically Charlotte west into the mountains. And so he took that. And then again, like I said, Steven out in San Diego and then my sister who, I don’t want to call it a midlife crisis. So I’m almost 50, she’s late 40s, has a child, she’s married lives out there, had been living out there for years and years. I always said she could be the mayor. She knows everybody. Bozeman is the city, the joke is this is the city where the millionaires are being run out of town by the billionaires. Like it is–
– Crazy.
– It’s crazy. Like her best friend is a chef for Tom Brady and Gisele. Her son goes to school with Justin Timberlake’s son. It is absolutely crazy. And she said, I think I should start a DJ company. And we had some hiring snafus, there’s a lot of transient people there, a lot of people that just come and go to school and leave or they come and work the ski resort and they leave. And finally, she was like, you know what, screw it. I’m going to DJ myself. Now, I was like, I’m sorry, what? This isn’t what we agreed upon. And she was like, no, so she’s been back and forth. I’ve been out there to train her and she’s ready. So she has 18 weddings on the book for this year and I’m leaving tomorrow to go out there and shadow her on her very first one. So that’s very exciting, very exciting.
– That’s great, that’s great. So the other part of the Joe Bunn enterprise is you got into some other stuff, the DJ setups, and what else are you in? This is part of your scaling.
– Yeah, the other two things that, and really two things that saved me in 2020 because we weren’t doing shows were in 2019, February, 2019. I took all my years of speaking at conferences, and not getting paid, and writing articles, and not getting paid, and I put everything in this brain of 30 something years into a membership community called the DJ’s Vault and it was basically a $30 a month membership just like Netflix, if you will. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s kind of the Netflix for DJs. And so there’s everything from contracts and documents in there to me standing in front of a white wall telling how I market blah, blah, blah, or telling about my new favorite piece of gear. I mean, every single month on the very first day of the month, new content comes out. And I have not, knock on wood, missed one of those launches yet. And I think we have about 1300 members, Alan. We’ve been holding steady even through the pandemic, right around that number. And then around that same time, we started selling this idea of a product which was this aluminum DJ booth called the command center. And it’s bunngear.com, if you want to kind of see what it looks like. And I had started dabbling into buying DJ furniture because I was so fed up with setting up on a six foot table. It was too big, it just looked ugly with the linen on it and then you put a road case on top and you’re supposed to then hide your cables. To me, it was not professional grade and it didn’t match the brand that I was trying to portray, nor did it match the dollar figure that I was asking for. And so I bought one from Germany and they claimed it was mobile and it showed up and I was like, dude, I’m in pretty good shape and I cannot move this by myself. This is stupid. It was gorgeous. It was wood and weighed a thousand pounds, whatever. And I kind of went into the facade route, and I just, I was like, ah, this is still not what I’m looking for. And just a happenstance meeting with a guy here in town that that’s what he did. He basically said, I bring products to life and we kind of partnered up and found an aluminum manufacturer and boom. The command center was born. And even through the pandemic, people were still buying these. And now we’re on our third run of a hundred which I’m really proud of.
– That’s great. And so again you needed something, it wasn’t there, you looked around, you tried something, it didn’t work. And if you still had the need, well, let’s build it.
– And I’m sure I could have built a one-off or two-off or three-off, but I was like, man, if I feel this way, there have to be hundreds of other DJs that are having this same pain and I can help them look better, sound better, feel better.
– And what I love about your model is you didn’t do it, I’m not out there trying to get every dollar I can from DJs. It’s I have information people need, there’s value to that information. $30 a month is certainly very fair for what you’re doing.
– I think it is.
– I’m on your list, so I know, I see it. It’s way, way fair. And spread the wealth. I was on your podcast with Mike Walter and you guys are just such givers, and yeah, I know we joke about that not getting paid at some of these conferences, but it’s part of that giving back. When I go to a speaker’s conference, I don’t get paid because I’m giving back to my industry the same way. But if we raise all those boats, if more people would say I don’t know and somebody else knows, and it’s okay if I pay them for those ideas because they’ve made those mistakes that’s what people are doing with your licensing out there. So, what’s next. Are there any other locations on the horizon?
– No, that keeps my cup full, I mean, my bowl full, my everything full, I mean–
– Wait, wait, wait, you also have a family.
– I do, I do have a family that’s important. That’s important. And that always is going to come first. And I still am asked all the time, well, do you still go out and play? And I adamantly, yes. I’m out there, especially now that the world is kind of starting to reset. I’m out there every weekend since about April 1st doing the shows that I need to do and then making up the shows that didn’t happen, which I’ll be playing a lot more than I wanted to this year just like Mike as well. But it’s just a reset year and it’ll kind of level out in 2022. But I also think just touching on that point, that is why people still listen to me. You know what I mean? In other words, yes, I could be the 50 year old guy that kind of hung up the headphones and I was still preaching about this, that and the other, but it’s like, wait a minute. No, I just saw on his Instagram, like, he actually is using that gear or he really did do that set up himself. I think that’s an important part of the success of really anything I’ve done is that I’m still hands on. I’m still doing it.
– Right, now that said, your sister’s business was originally not going to be her deejaying. And if you are running a business, that’s perfectly fine that she could have run a DJ business without being a DJ.
– She could’ve.
– But with again, her necessity there’s business that there is to do. Like you said, I love the billionaires running the millionaires out of town. I get The Wall Street Journal and I look in that real estate section and there’s plenty of Montana properties out there. 15,000 acres and those kinds of stuff. So you can run the multi op business without being the DJ.
– That’s true.
– But if you’re going to be the, let me teach you how to do this. I was out there last Saturday doing this. I was over there doing this. And that’s an important thing. It’s funny, with my business, I’ve never been a DJ. I’m very honest about that, I tell people. I did a mastermind in England one time with 10 DJs. And we sat around all day and we talked and we did a mastermind. And walking out and one of the guys said to me, so Alan how long have you been a DJ? And I said, Barney, I’ve never been a DJ. He goes, what do you mean? I said, I don’t know how else to say that phrase. I have never been a DJ.
– Is English still English in England?.
– But he said to me, Alan, but you know my business better than I do. I said, yes, I do. I know your business better than you do. I cannot be a DJ. Don’t put me in front of Joe’s set up because I can’t do that. Now, you put me in front of a piano, that’s a different story.
– That’s a different thing. I’ve seen that.
– That’s a different thing. But the point what I want everybody listening, who is thinking about scaling a business, there is a point in a lot of businesses, because Joe’s business part of it is speaking, part of it is training, a lot of businesses where you need to take that step back. The captain of a cruise ship doesn’t steer the boat. He tells them where the boat’s going but doesn’t steer the boat. So people’s businesses get to a certain point where you might have to do that. I have a lot of friends, a lot of clients with businesses where that’s been an uncomfortable thing because they were used to just being there. Even Sam Walton who started Walmart, he famously said something to the effect of, and by the way, he started his business, he was in his 40’s. And he said, I always knew I’d be wearing a lot of hats when I started a business. I just didn’t know I’d be wearing them all at the same time. And we could all relate to that. So Joe, I’m going to put it into the show notes. But if people want to find out more about you or your setup or the DJ’s Vault, how do they do that?
– Yeah, so best way is probably just go to the websites. bunndjcompany.com and bunngear.com is for the DJ booths. And then thedjsvault.com is the membership site. And you can find all those again on Instagram as well. But I think the websites will probably give you all the information you need.
– And Joe you’ll give me your social handles as well because you got to see Joe’s videos. Joe has a very distinct brand. He has a lot of fun with it and I think that’s important. It’s noticeable, it’s recognizable and it’s also fun. You guys are–
– Yeah, definitely, definitely if you want to see really my day in the life stuff, just find me on Instagram @joebunn, J-O-E B-U-N-N.
– Yeah, thanks so much Joe. Joe, thank you so much for joining and so much for sharing with everybody. I look forward to seeing you at the next conference. We will do that soon. Thank you my friend.
– Thank you, buddy. See ya. That was good stuff.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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