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Here we describe the evolution from own disco businesses and what our plans for the future are going to be for The Ultimate Disco Company.

Daren’s Profile

I started in a very unconventional and very non DJ like way? I was working 3 nights a week delivering Chinese food taking home about £150 week, Steve on the other hand at the time was working once perhaps twice a week and bringing home on average £240 per night. I though hang on a minute Steve is earning at least twice what I’m earning for less work?

So thought long and hard about doing the same, however I have to mention at this point I have always have a love for music just never really considered earning money from it. Having be brought up in a pub most of my life I was always up to date with music and different genre, so thinking that this DJ lark would be a piece of cake, how wrong I was.

So one Xmas in 2005 I decided to perhaps give it a go and went out with Steve to a couple of gigs, I got the bug straight away, no money from Steve but got the bug. I immediately set about seeing the most advantage way I could get started and as my wife was an avid ebayer at that time suggested I gave them a go. 3 weeks later I have a FULL set up for the bargain price of £750. I now become Full Throttle disco.

Now the hard work really started, where do I get my clients from? Where do I advertise? How much should I spend? All these question Steve helped to answer, with a few ideas of my own, and for those looking to do that same perhaps some of the following ideas might help? Anyway the 1^st thing Steve introduced me to was the agents he did some work for, then suggested the obvious publications like yellow pages etc. I took this on board and set about trying to find as many free directory entry’s I could find and made some investment in hard copy advertising, however none of these method really worked that well? I have found the very best way to get any business is work of mouth. This obviously takes time and patience, however if you can do this it will surly progress your business.

To illustrate this best and with a dash of pure luck my neighbour at the time says to me “my best friend runs a management events company I’ll give her your number” great I say not expecting much, however no sooner have I said this than the lady is on the phone asking me questions about set up and gig done etc, thinking fast on my feet and using my sales experience I blag it a bit, mention a couple of the things I’ve done and in a flash she asks me to cover the xmas 06 parties at the Madejski stadium Yes home of the reading football club, I can’t believe my luck in my 1^st year of starting up. In that 1^st year I eventually do 25 gig’s not bad for a 1^st year, so set about a plan to grow for the 2^nd year. I do some networking and increase my advertising and set about getting myself a website, this proves to be the catalyst for more of my own business as they do some free local optimisation for me and people start calling and I start quoting and getting more and more work. It’s at this point I tick over as things are going well. Then the recession hits and although the disco work doesn’t suffer my day job does, and I realise that the disco work is keeping me a float, so again set about how to increase business, it’s at this point I have my 2^nd piece of fortune and another event management company calls me and asks me to cover a job for them, however it turns out I have actually done work for them before but via a 3^rd party whom pasted on my details as again and as all DJ’s will understand you live and die by your reputation to produce good set’s.

The event management company are very pleased with the work I’ve done and ask me to cover another couple of functions for them. After these functions are covered they feel they have seen enough and ask me if I would be happy to cover all the disco work that comes in, of course I say yes in a heart beat and they are now giving me in excess of 30 functions per year. This has now allowed me to bring other local DJ’s and friends in to the fold and cover the work I can’t do, and in turn they too are doing a good job and the feedback has been great, again proving about a DJ’s reputation.

I’m perhaps one of those lucky DJ’s (Touch wood) who to date hasn’t had one of those gig’s where everything goes wrong or the power goes off, however I have had one punch up Yes just the one, and in the most unlikely of places a 5 star spa resort, a bride refusing to speak with the groom, the groom saying nothing to do with me, and to top that the brides mother passes out cold and an ambulance is called. So in an attempt to defuse things work my way through about 20 people, drag the bride out and tell her and get the groom and tell him. That thankfully broke up the tension, the brides mother recovers and they kind of finish off the night, not dancing I might add but talking and thanking me for my help. 

So in conclusion from my experience the best way to start or want to push forward your mobile disco is always be early to your functions, be courteous and polite to all members, dress smart for every function, I always wear Black Tie, and always give the bride and groom what they want from the evening not what you want. At the end of the night I always make the effort to ask how their evening was and always say goodbye. 

The last thing to do is always be investing in new and better equipment. I have found that investing in better more expensive equipment will serve you well in the long run, rather than in more equipment at a cheaper price, spend what you can put by on quality rather than quantity, I took me over 3 years to realise that and only in this year have I started to invest in higher quality product and already seeing the benefits.

 Now over to the brother in law and the details of his show.

Steve’s Profile

Being an avid reader of Promobile, I am always interested in surveying the disco profiles submitted by fellow DJs about their individual companies. After seeing Eddie’s appeal for volunteers in his editorial, I was happy to team up with my brother in law in an article about our different discos and our plans for the future.

Positive Vibes emerged for an early 1990s collaboration with a fellow soul music addict, Mike Jarred. Our first gig occurred in the summer of 1992 when the music scene was beginning to emerge from all those raves that typified the era. We headed over to what was then Squire’s Sound ‘n’ Light in Guildford to hire an ‘interesting’ assortment of equipment that when assembled, resembled a disco rig for the Burpham Sainsburys Summer Party!! Sutton Green Village Hall finishing at 11 a.m. seemed pretty low-key but as far as I was concerned, I could have been Fatboy Slim playing to 5,000 in Privilege in Ibiza! The seeds of dj-ing were firmly established!

Mike and I continued this pattern; ‘doing the odd gig and hiring the equipment’ until we decided to have a ‘board meeting to initiate the company’s future!’ which is basically corporate speak for “ Hey Steve! Lets head down the local boozer and buy a disco rig and what shall we call it?” Before you know it, Positive Vibes was born with 4 speakers, a Vestax 2 channel mixer, an Anytronics A12 amp, Decks, CD Players, a Martin Magic Moon and a pair of light screens that were last seen on the Antiques Roadshow in 1965, but hey we have all been there in our origins haven’t we?

Next came the dilemma of marketing and ‘getting our name out there into the mainstream! True we weren’t Saatchi and Saatchi material but Mike had friends getting married and other sources potentially requiring a disco, so I recollect us pulling up outside the Park School in Woking, 1 frosty night in December to do their School Xmas Party for our debut gig. It went really well and it symbolised the start of things to come.

Then in 1996 Mike left the partnership to pursue his soul music ambitions. I think 2 years of YMCA, Shout and watching middle-aged people attempting to imitate Whigfield’s Saturday night persuaded him that this was not for him. We parted amicably and it underlined the need for me to network and explore new contacts within the industry and I thus discovered the Thames Valley Disc Jockey Association (T.V.D.J.A.) in the late 1990s that met over at Sonning near Reading. Presided over by Mike and Margaret Jordan, the association gave me new contacts and new expertise to develop the Vibes and of course, our current N.A.D.J. owes much to its origins from this Association. Many of you reading this will know that Mike and Margaret retired to Malta to pursue a discofree lifestyle, so all the best to them and my thanks for their support.

Now armed with these new contacts and knowledge, the bookings began to increase as I balanced the demands of a day job in Surrey Library Management with the ‘evening job’! On learning this combination of careers, people would look incredulous at the thought of a ‘DJ-ing Library Manager’, which seemed about as likely as Ian Paisley doing a sponsored silence, but they went together well being on a fixed timetable with the council.

Since then Positive Vibes has gone from strength to strength with new equipment purchased online or via retailers. I have great contacts for PLI, PATesting and my beautiful wife even designed a website for the company as a marketing tool for the company. She conceded that it does need some attention, but the arrival of Baby Rhys has possibly put that on the backburner for the moment.

My company does cater for every spectrum of function and aims to focus on what the customer wants from their booking. I cover weddings to birthday parties; school proms to Xmas Parties and I supply discos to 5 schools across Berkshire and Surrey as regular customers. There have certainly been some interesting experiences over the years! There was the time when the police turned up at a 21^st birthday gig I was doing following a complaint! Was one of the neighbours incensed by the inability to sleep above the noise? Had a partygoer peed into somewhere they shouldn’t? No the local inhabitants at Send Prison were not getting their beauty sleep thanks to the ‘carrying sound’ from the disco! So I played them ‘Jailhouse Rock’ as a dedi! Then there was the 1999 gig in a Wokingham pub with a Rocky Horror theme…which included the DJ!! Yes thanks a million guys for that one! So there I was in my then girlfriend’s negligee looking like a cross between Lily Savage and Vera Duckworth much to the dancefloor’s amusement! Between you, me and most of Promobile, I have never looked back since and what the wife doesn’t know about what goes on with her wardrobe on a Friday night won’t kill her!!

Like Sam outlined in his article in the last Promobile, my personal musical passion is dance music, essentially the late 1980s and 1990s. I do have a passion for 1970s disco but I have a huge taste in music from all decades and genres. This translates to carrying a huge range of CDs for every gig, but of course poses issues when that persistent punter keeps returning for that ‘track you know you have, but have no idea where it is!’ Yes time to investigate the ipod or laptop route!!

I love the buzz from the crowd when the gigs are going well as it does generate that spine tingling euphoria that you are generating it! Less appealing are the drunk punters that give you abuse and incoherent feedback through the night and collide with your deck stand. Even less appealing are the hours that challenge your role as a family man. Here I pay tribute to all partners of djs that support their other halves in their careers! It isn’t easy!

For all new djs I would echo the sentiments of other acts that have featured in this section. I still learn new tips and tricks of the trade after 15 years of dj-ing from fellow professionals, organisations and sources like this one. Everyone should aim to network, consult and seek support from all sources of the industry. Arrange their PLI and PATesting and of course I am biased being its Treasurer, but join the N.A.D.J. to benefit from the pool of expertise within its ranks.