Paint and Sip Nights for RSL Clubs | Paint Juicy
The biggest room in the building, and the quietest
Walk into the auditorium on a Wednesday afternoon and count the chairs. Two hundred of them, stacked along the back wall under lighting the club spent real money on. There is a stage, a dance floor, and a bar shutter that has not been up since the last wake. It is the largest thing the club owns after the land, and for most of the year it holds nothing but air.
At the same time the members book is getting shorter at one end and not longer at the other. The people who built this place are not being replaced at the rate they are leaving. The forty and fifty year olds in the streets around you have driven past the sign a thousand times and never had one reason to walk in.
So the room gets talked about at committee. Somebody says activate the space. Somebody else says advertise the hire rate. The flyer goes in the newsletter, the phone does not ring, and next quarter the same three ideas come back around.
Here is a fourth idea, and it does not cost the club a cent to try.
What we are actually proposing
Paint Juicy runs mobile paint and sip nights across Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory. We have no studio. Every night happens in somebody else's room, which is why we are careful with them.
The club is not charged a fee, a commission or a hire rate. The club pays nothing. We are paid by the guests through ticket sales, $59 AUD a head for a public session, and that is the whole reason there is nothing for you to pay.
You supply two things. The room, and the bar. We supply the ticket sales, the marketing and advertising, the customer service, the host artist, the PA, every art material, the complete setup and the complete pack down. Your staff do nothing different on the night. They pour drinks the way they would on any other shift.
A typical session brings 40 to 80 guests and needs roughly 60cm of table per painter, which an auditorium set for two hundred swallows without noticing. Guests arrive early evening, the session runs about three hours, and the room is clear and back to normal shortly after the finish. There are no travel fees anywhere in our service regions.
Guests buy their drinks at your bar. That is your revenue, and it is the entire point of the arrangement.
An empty function room is not free. It is just quiet.
Most venue conversations skip this part, and it matters most to a club with a big room and a thin calendar. A function room is not a spare cupboard. It is a capital asset with a running cost, and that cost does not pause when the lights are off.
What the room bills you on a night nobody books it
Your insurance is written against the whole building, including the dark part of it. Rates are charged on the footprint, and the auditorium is a big slice of it. Cleaning, pest treatment, fire compliance, air conditioning servicing and electrical testing are all priced against the room existing, not against the room being used.
Then there is everything inside it. Tables, stacking chairs, staging, AV and carpet depreciate on a calendar, not on a usage counter. A chair stacked for a year is a year closer to replacement and has earned nothing toward it. A loan on the extension, or a sinking fund the committee tops up, is money going out on a room that pays nothing back.
The number nobody at committee ever calculates
Take the annual cost of holding that room and divide it by the number of nights it earns something. That is your true cost per used night, and in a club with a handful of function bookings a year it is an alarming figure. Each of those few nights carries the whole year.
Now add nights. Nothing about the building changes. The insurance does not rise because the room is busy. You have not spent anything, built anything or hired anyone. You have only changed the denominator, and the cost per used night falls every time you do it. That is the argument on this page, and it is arithmetic, not salesmanship.
Why the hire rate is the wrong lever
When a room underperforms, the two instincts are to lift the hire fee so the few bookings count for more, or to drop it to attract others. One shrinks demand that is already scarce. The other teaches the district to expect your auditorium cheap, and that is hard to walk back.
There is a third option that leaves your rate untouched. Put something into the room on a night it was empty anyway, at no cost to the club, that brings its own crowd and sends that crowd to your bar. Your published rate stays where it is for the people who pay it.
What the room earns instead
Not hire income. Bar income, from 40 to 80 people across about three hours, most of whom order something before they have found their seat. Painting is thirsty work. Between layers, while the paint dries, people drift back to the bar on their own.
There is a second return that never shows on the till roll. Your auditorium spends the night lit, full and loud, in the hands of dozens of people from your postcode who had never been inside it. A room with people in it advertises itself. A dark room advertises nothing.
It does not need your good nights
This lands on the nights the room was doing nothing. A members function, a memorial booking, a wake or a hall hire takes precedence, always. We are not competing for your calendar. We are looking at the gaps in it.
Who brings what
The club supplies
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Paint Juicy supplies
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Who walks through your door on the night
Our audience is female, from 30 through to 90, with the biggest group between 35 and 65. They come in twos and fours and eights. Sisters, workmates, neighbours, a group of women who have been meaning to organise something since March.
That crowd suits an RSL better than almost anywhere else, for unglamorous reasons. Free parking close to the door. A flat entry with no stairs. Clean bathrooms that are easy to find. Tables and chairs already the right height to paint at. A proper bar with a proper range. Somewhere a woman in her sixties will happily meet a friend after dark, because the car park is well lit.
Most of them will be inside your club for the first time. What you do with that is your call. If the committee wants membership forms on the table by the door, nobody will stop you.
We are a members club. Can non-members even attend?
Fair question, and it is the first thing we sort out, before a date is even discussed.
The honest answer is that clubs handle this differently. Your constitution, your licence and your house rules are not something we would presume to interpret for you, and we are not offering a legal position on any of it. What we can say is that guests attending an event in a licensed club is ordinary, everyday business.
In general terms, here are the common paths. Some clubs have guests sign the visitors book at reception. Some sign them in as guests of the club for the evening, or of a member, with the event in the diary so the duty manager knows who is coming. Some issue a temporary or day membership at the desk. Some have rules about how far away a visitor must live, and some do not. Whichever applies to you is your process, not ours.
Our job is to make that process easy to run. We hand the guest list to reception in advance, in whatever format they want. We put your sign in requirement on the ticket page and repeat it in the reminder email, so guests arrive knowing to bring photo ID and see the desk first.
In practice it is a five minute item in the first conversation. Your secretary tells us how the club does it, we build the ticket page around that, and it never comes up again.
Real Guest
"Such a fabulous vibe and night out with friends! Looking forward to attending another of their events soon!"
Jenny Luck via Google Reviews
Questions club managers ask us
Can non-members attend an event in our function room?
Yes, and clubs handle it differently, so we follow your process rather than asking you to change it. Some sign guests into the visitors book at reception, some sign them in as guests of the club or of a member, and some issue a temporary membership at the desk. We give you the guest list in advance and put your sign in requirement on the ticket page.
Our auditorium is used for member meetings, wakes and commemorative events. Will this get in the way?
No. Those bookings come first, always. We look at the nights already sitting empty in your diary and work around everything else. If a date we have pencilled in is later needed by the club, we move it.
Do your guests have to follow our dress standards and house rules?
Of course. Your house rules apply to everyone in the building, and we tell guests what they are before they buy a ticket. Send us your dress standards and anything else you want stated, and it goes on the ticket page and into the confirmation email. Guests wear an apron, and our paint washes out.
What does the club actually pay?
Nothing. No venue fee, no commission, no hire charge, and no travel cost within Queensland, New South Wales or the Northern Territory. We are paid by the guests through ticket sales. The bar takings are yours.
What happens if the night does not sell well?
The risk sits with us, not the club. We carry the marketing and the ticketing, so a quiet night costs you nothing you were not already spending on an empty room. If numbers are short we will talk to you early about moving the date.
Put a date in the diary
If the room is sitting quiet and costing the club money to sit quiet, the next step is a short conversation about which night suits and how your sign in works. No hire agreement, no obligation.
Tell us about your club and your quiet nights, and we will show you what a session in your room looks like.
The full explanation of how a venue partnership works end to end walks through the whole arrangement, and the venue partnership directory points you to the right page for your room. Committees running more than one facility often read the notes for community clubs and for bowls clubs. The Queensland paint and sip calendar shows what we are already running near you.
We have painted with more than 42,000 guests, we hold 4.9 stars on Google, and we are recognised as a Best of Queensland Experience every year since 2022. Your room, our night, your bar.
Trent & James
