The event was a rousing success, pulling in our best day's take by orders of magnitude. And I attribute this success to several measures.
- Z and Emille are excellent people. They took care of most of our event preparation for us, including cooking the most amazing pork you can imagine. Z's pork might be better than his cigars. Might.
- We reached a pretty critical saturation of event advertisement between my last-minute email reminder, facebook notifications, in-person reminders, and general word of mouth. The place was packed, almost to our fire code occupancy. It was awesome.
- Cordoba and Morales doesn't make shitty cigars. Not a one of them is less than excellent. Their original lineup, the Front Nine, 19th Hole, and Family Reserve are all outstanding unique boutique blends, and if you haven't smoked them you're a bad person and you should feel bad. All joking aside, do yourself (and their growing business) a favor and try one immediately. They are crazy-talk good for the price.
- Their special edition Clave Cubana is also stupid-good. "Ephram," you say. "Two points about cigars? You're a mad-man!" Well, yes, it's true, their cigars are so good, they merit two points.
- We're small, and we're okay with that. One of our major competitors was hosting an event the same night as us with Drew Estate, and as you might imagine, it was wildly popular. I didn't even have to check to know that. Why do I know that? It's fucking Drew Estate. They're popular as hell right now for good reason, they've worked incredibly hard on a new series of blends that are coming out really great. Good for them, they're giant, and we're small, and again... We like it that way.
That's it, I think. So, yeah... if you were here with us, you done good, kid. If not, you should be ashamed.
In all seriousness, though, these events are going to be the lifeblood of this thing I'm managing, for better or worse. I'd love to have one every month, but I fear that might over saturate people with cigars and tire them out on us, so I'm going to settle for six a year - every other month - unless I receive indication that we need more than that.
So, in the spirit of my missing Friday update, and given that I've told you everything that worked really well, so far... here's what crashed and burned.
Our email updates went out late. Our provider, GoDaddy, only allows us 250 SMTP relays per day. If you don't understand what that means, never fear. It essentially means we can only send 250 messages per day. Our address list is over 700 names, so I had to spread these emails out over three days to fully saturate our email list. Unfortunately I only found out I had to do this three days before the event, so the final emails went out the day of the event. Obviously less than ideal.
In this email I advertised some things that none of us knew would not be happening. I'd been told about raffles and free drinks that never materialized. I should not have said anything about them, but at least no one grumbled at the lack of free shirts and cold beer. C'est la vie.
Finally, I advertised something else that I should not have. One of my regulars asked me to include information about a card tournament, explaining that he had already discussed it with my boss, the owner. As it turned out, he was lying. While I cannot stress that the card game going on was entirely legal tournament style play, my boss did not want that information included in the mailer because he was worried about perception drawing scrutiny while we're trying to make money here. As we all know, even when doing nothing wrong, legal complications can surround a small business and really drive it into the ground.
So that's it, with the mail situation sorted, I'll just have the owner sign off on a draft before mailing out about the next event, and we'll be all set.
S/BOTL, please have a happy holiday and remember the reason for the season - Enjoying great smokes with your friends and family while they're in town! Just kidding, but no really, smoke 'em while you got 'em.
-Ephram Rafael Nadaner
Current Smoke: Cordoba Hand-Rolled (from the above event, extremely good for being rolled three days ago!)
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