Places where people can gather are central to our social fabric, and the economics supporting traditional spaces are changing.

As the supply for third spaces (anywhere one regularly spends time outside of home and work) has tightened, the variety of ways in which people gather has also exploded. After years of uncertainty and relative isolation, we’ve seen a reimagining of purposeful events in the form of creative festivals, niche retreats, experiential dinners, mini-conferences, partnership celebrations, and more.

With 12 years and nearly 2,000 events under our belt, our team has put together the frameworks that allowed us to run a humming event venue for over a decade. The playbook is written to give you a strong head start to the core systems that will help you start your business or further optimize the one you already have, whether you’re a team of 1 or 20.

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Ours wasn’t always a raging success.

We had many “downs” in addition to the “ups.” The times when we struggled (you might assume we’re talking financially, but in addition, physically, relationally, and mentally) were the times we really had to put these frameworks into place. And they came into being slowly, with plenty of iteration. They even grew to leave room for adaptation to quickly changing markets, clients, and resources.

Our hope is that you’re always flush with cashflow and loving what you do. However, in preparation for when times get tougher, and as a preventative measure, these systems will be there for you, and provide a faster learning curve.

This playbook is not exactly an answer sheet. It certainly will provide guidance and save you significant trial-and-error, but it’s also meant to help you get into the mindset of creating systems needed to run an event space without it overrunning your personal life and health. The benefit is exponential in terms of time and energy saved to you, your team, and your business. Not to mention the pain avoided. Much of the playbook can be applied to any business, really - but these insights are custom-fitted to event spaces and venues, especially where food and drink can be made and served, since there aren’t many resources for these out there on the interwebs. Also, we’d like to see more gathering options for people (ahem, office conversions).

Cookhouse was the first of its kind in many respects. Though you could reserve a restaurant's private room with a pre-fixed food and drink menu and no options for personal touches, or rent a vacation home big enough to cook dinner with all your friends, there were no spaces with an open kitchen that anyone could rent to have a dinner party for around 30 people and direct all of the details themselves — details such as what to eat and drink, who would cook, and how the space would be decorated. With recent hardships experienced by small businesses and the service industry impacting the availability of hospitality services, we believe there is a need for more resources to support the creation and operation of these third spaces.

More about these starting blocks

Many of these systems were created after mistakes, miscommunications, or repeated painful situations. We’d like for others to benefit from our effortful work.

• There are systems we didn’t have until 2 years in that we couldn’t imagine not having after they became embedded in our operations.

• There are forms of products we offered only after 5 years that seemed obvious in hindsight and greatly increased repeat business, but were things we hardly imagined providing at the start. Don’t wait 5 years like we did.

None of these are requirements for opening an event venue. If you implement all of our systems right away for a brand new venue, your day-to-day operations may feel overly rigid (and it will feel like trudging through mud to get through them). Take what you can from the playbook according to what you need, and when you need it. You can always come back to it when you need guidance for new systems, improvements, iterations.

Who this is for

• You, if you have an event space, and are looking to upgrade the foundational systems to make it run more efficiently.

• You, if you want to open a rentable event space and are looking to make starting up less painful.

• You, if you are turning underutilized private space — offices, clubs, shared/common spaces, etc. — into a rentable venue for a wider public.

• You, if you want to turn time vacancies in restaurants, bars, cafes, or public spaces into additional revenue streams by offering events or private bookings.

Who this is not for

• People expecting a completely hands-off passive income source.

• People expecting complete checklists. Ours give you a speedy head start and a visual reference so you don’t have to build from scratch, but we also teach you how to create the systems and give you hints as to what’s needed in each and what can save you oodles of time in the long-run so that you can build upon our starter checklists.

What it’s meant to do

• Improve the quality of communications with clients, prospects, employees, and your extended team of contractors and partners.

• Take away needless back-and-forth so you can focus on necessary, gainful communication. We could all use a little less screentime.

• Introduce you to workflows proven to produce the best time and cost saving benefits.

• Prepare you for scenarios at various levels of risk that could compromise your business’s finances, reputation, or future, or the safety and morale of clients, guests, staff, extended team, or you.

• Provide guidance for you and your team so that you can be present in enjoying the most fulfilling parts of running an event space.