NY Launch Pod: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod, the New York Press Club, award-winning podcast highlighting the most interesting new startups, businesses and openings in the New York City area. I’m your host and New York attorney Hal Coopersmith, and in this episode, we are speaking about night events. Our Guest Marco Shalma saw an opportunity and wanted to turn something he considered as a hobby into something he can do full-time and wants to be a trend setter in this industry. Here is Marco Shalma:
Marco Shalma: So I don’t know if you remember
the drive-in in the Yankee stadium? So that was the first drive-in in the world
and it was like the end of April. The world is sitting home for a month and a
half right now. It’s gray, it’s dark, it’s New York winter, people are
depressed. The world’s just shutting down one by one. And then at the end of
April, we came out on a Friday evening and we said like, we’re gonna do the
first drive-in experience outside in the parking lot in the Yankee Stadium.
That caught fire like insane.
NY Launch Pod: Listen to the episode to find out how Marco and his team are working towards being number one and how they plan on growing their business. But before we go to the episode, we have a sponsor RezCue, New York State’s premier residential rental compliance platform for landlords. Rental laws in New York City are difficult to manage and, Rezcue helps you follow the law. If you are a landlord who wants to keep up with inflation, you need Rezcue. For example, you may not be able to increase your rent by the amount you thought you could, Rezcue helps solve that problem and a whole lot more. Go to Rezcueme.com and enter in some simple information and Rezcue will take care of the rest. That’s Rezcueme.com, and with that let’s go to the interview.
NY Launch Pod: So how did you get into night events?
NY Launch Pod: I was going to say, we’re gonna have some listeners in Brooklyn who are, who aren’t very happy with what you’re saying.
Marco Shalma: I got to be honest, I used to say like, I only go to Brooklyn for like, weddings and funerals. And then, the community in Brooklyn ask us repeatedly to bring what we do to Brooklyn. And when we brought it over there and, we got accepted, so well it was just incredible. We had a short season. We just had the season finale like last week, and it was just incredible. So I can’t, I can’t talk bad about Brooklyn, Brooklyn, showed us love.
NY Launch Pod: So we’re just going back to the start. You’re in, in the Bronx, living in the Bronx, you’re thinking there’s not enough diversity of food. How can I Marco get the food that I want? And you decided to start an event. Is that how it worked?
Marco Shalma: Well, next you grind.
NY Launch Pod: You grind.
Marco Shalma: We were humble from the beginning to understand that what happened, it was a combination of a lot of things. Like wildlife want to take the credit of saying like, “Oh, my marketing is on point.” We knew that it was the right time, the right moment. Social media exploding, hashtag food porn was exploding. The ground was really ready for everybody to kind of understand and have that. In that sense, we were lucky, but we knew that the luck is not gonna last for a long time. So we had to kind of build a foundation to make sure that, that luck is not like a one time, one trick pony. For the next two and a half years or three years we just grinded. We explored different paths, we tried different things. We really kind of like experimented with different ways of running the business or understanding what this business is as a business in the beginning, because it was a hobby, right? Like I have my own business, she had her own business. This started as a hobby and then started growing and getting bigger. And then about three years later, we were ready to make the next move to go to like the after night market that opened in Holland. And only after we felt like we graduated from the college, like, actually we got the master degree from like doing the Bronx Night market, we felt like we ready. And I’m so grateful that we waited that long because by the time we came to Harlem, it was just like a machine. We knew exactly what we were doing up to the point when people start saying I keep hearing you came out of nowhere and you just know what to do. People didn’t realize you have to put like three and a half, four years before that before you get to a place and to know what you do.
NY Launch Pod: It’s interesting because you mentioned you had to experiment, you had to learn some things. What are some of the things you needed to experiment and learn and what were some of those challenges?
Marco Shalma: Well, the first thing is don’t listen to anybody, trust your guts. I honestly can’t say it enough because you’re still fresh, you don’t know what it is. And everybody wants to put the 2 cents in, but nobody wants to put the money in to cover up the 2 cents. It’s your money, it’s your neck. You are responsible for everything. You try to please everybody. But at the end of the day, whatever mistake you isolated, you made a mistake. You’re sitting there and, all the lights are on you and you’re naked and you don’t know what you’re doing with yourself. So I learned, and what we learned along this way is just like eventually say like, Hey, you know what? We have to go with our guts. We have to have a plan. We have to go with our guts. We have to do what we feel is right. I think that’s the biggest lesson that we learned. I think maybe another thing was to really take care of your staff. Our staff, well a lot of people, a lot of business owners will tell you like, it’s like a family. It is a family for us. We are taking everybody to Columbia at the end of the season, on our dime as a vacation, 20 people we’re going to Colombia, we’re gonna spend like a week at a beach. I don’t care about that money, stuff like that, take care of your people. That’s, the most important part.
NY Launch Pod: You needed to trust your gut and you were learning what’s kind of a mistake that you made people want to know. You’re, you’re painting it like, I trust my gut, I’m taking care of my people. But there must have been challenges along the way. What were some of those challenges?
Marco Shalma: There’s a lot of challenges. You know, uh, we made mistake, critical mistake from like involving ourselves with the wrong people or trusting people too much. It all, and the bottom line, it all ended up like either losing money or losing networks of connections that leads to losing money. When we work with sponsors, right? In the beginning, we didn’t even know how to work with sponsors. So like, we messed up, and some people did not come back because we didn’t know how to follow up on the sponsorship or whatnot. When we did some business deals to extend certain times or to do any popups, and we didn’t know how to calculate that thing, right? So we kept losing money, because everybody came back to us and says like about everybody wants you to do a collab, not collaboration. For me, collaboration is a dirty word at this point, because usually what it means is like somebody that wants to come and enjoy what we have without offering something to the table, bringing something to the table from their side. So it’s not really a collab, it’s more like a hustle, you on us. That kept happening because we wanted to appease people, we wanted to make sure that we are, everybody knew that we are a good player in the neighborhood. We like, we can’t wait to support the community. So people came and then at one point we started saying no. I think like the biggest lesson, the third biggest lesson that we learned is like, just say no for like 90% of the things, you make that 10%, that remaining 10% so much more valuable.
NY Launch Pod: So what are the economics of these night markets? How do they work? How are you making money? How do you incentivize it for the vendors?
Marco Shalma: Well, the business model is pretty simple, right? You bring vendors and those vendors pay you a rental fee, right? Then you have the stuff that you sell, right? So you have the bar or you have merchandise or different kind of elements. Sometimes it’s a ticketed event, you know, not those night markets, because those night markets gonna be remain free forever. But those also lead to other opportunities, which then you have ticketed events and then you have the sponsorship, right? So the sponsorship is like different brands that want to kind of have some visibility, whether it’s digital visibility or onsite presence, and they pay like a nice price for those, right? So that’s kind of like how the business model works from that aspect. Usually, like the way that we do it is like the vendors fee covers the expenses and whatever you make from the sponsorship, that’s your net profit. There are some other elements. For instance, we right now focusing on adding a non-for-profit arm because there’s a lot of like grants and fees either from the city states, other organization that want to give two non-for-profits, like some support and then we want to be part of that. And then that goes towards programming that we reinvest in the community predominantly in full sustainability and disparity like education of like plant-based eating and so on and so forth. So, that’s another, source and I, didn’t realize, but I, I’m only learning right now in the past year how much money there is in coming on from the government, whether it’s like SBA or the mayor’s office or the council members or all of that. So there’s a lot of money over there that can be used to like good things. So yeah, that’s another stream.
NY Launch Pod: Well, you talked about how the ground was ripe for when you were launching and getting your business together, how it was able to grow, but certainly there must have been an obstacle, covid right? Past couple years people couldn’t really get together. The space for vendors couldn’t really work. Restaurants were struggling, city was struggling. I’m back, I went to a night market, I see there’s different energy, but can you talk about the challenges, during covid and your business and, and your vendors?
Marco Shalma: Yeah, so I’m gonna say something that I’m always gonna slightly hesitant on saying is covid was the best thing that ever happened to us. We never intended on stopping, so covid happened. I remember like I came back from a trip on, I think it was like March 11 or something like that and we supposed to start the, the season in March 14. March 14 is where everything’s shut down. My team at this point, we were like six of us working remote since 2017. So we all work remote. It was easiest for us. The first thing we’d said, Okay, alright, let’s cancel all our events for this year. First of all, let’s just kind of give people the money back. Let’s cancel, let’s see what we can help. Second thing is like creating a directory to help those small businesses do some online sales or whatnot. So basically a lot of them did not have any, landing pages, even websites or whatnot. Recreating a directory that kind of showcase each of our vendors, almost 700 vendors, what they have, and then push that to customers all across the East coast so they can order from those venues directly, so keeping them in business. As soon as we are done with that the question was like, what are we gonna do next? We knew the ground is not ready for a night market yet, we’re gonna keep it in the back of our head that we launched the drive-in. So I don’t know if you remember like the driving in the Yankee stadium? So that was the first drive-in in the world and it was like the end of April. The world is sitting home for a month and a half right now. It’s gray, it’s dark, it’s New York winter, people are depressed. The world’s just shutting down one by one. And then at the end of April, we came out on a Friday evening and we said like, we’re gonna do the first drive-in experience outside in the parking lot in the Yankee Stadium. That caught fire like insane. I’m talking about 300. I was in 300 interviews from India and Philippines and you name it, I was there and we kind of felt like we gave literally the entire world, like a little bit of a smile and a little bit of a hope. You know what situation is, but we’re gonna be fine, right? And that kind of put us on the map right away and from that moment we started having conversation with SBS in the mayor’s office to basically sit down and have a conversation about what does it take to reopen New York and with the markets or with the activation. So I was on the board that helped kind of facilitate their, the open the street opening and the street the street closures and the, the sidewalk cafe affairs and all of that to kind of give them like some information. But when the time came, like around, like, I think it was like the end of August, we said, You know what, I can’t stay at home anymore. We got to do something. So we worked with the DOH and the DOT to kind of create a guideline and it was a tedious guideline of to open a night market, and it was like we had to do like an hour RSVP for like an hour space and we had to limit the amount of people and the limited amount of vendors, but it was insane because I was losing money on every event, but it didn’t really matter because we really wanted two things. One we wanted to support the community, and give love to the community. And two, we wanted to be the first one, because the bottom line is like, you want be the first one and, and be the one that everybody’s talking about. And what I say the pandemic did as good is like from being top 10, 15 companies in New York, end of the pandemic, we like top three companies in New York and what we do right now, we, the way that we grow, I think top number one by mid next year.
NY Launch Pod: So how did that Yankee Stadium thing come together? You know, and getting the, the parking lot and getting any access and working with the Yankees.
Marco Shalma: We actually didn’t work with the Yankees because, the parking lots are owned by a vendor, like a city vendor. It’s kind of funny because like at one point, Yankee Stadium, I think it was like CEO or chair or something like that called everybody that I know and I started getting phone calls from the borough president, some people from the mayor’s office, it’s like, how dare you and what are you doing? You’re trying to get like, this is what happened, right? This is how, sometimes the media’s messed up, right? Because the article came out and says like, in the parking lot outside Yankee Stadium, within three days, you remember the game phone we used to play when we were kids?
NY Launch Pod: Telephone,
Marco Shalma: Telephone,
NY Launch Pod: Yeah.
Marco Shalma: You know, within three days the media already talking about these guys who are doing driving inside Yankee Stadium and then the Yankee Stadium Yankees are doing a drive-in, and it just showed me within like a week how people just like copy pasted something without actually talking to anybody, understanding. And this is like the first time that I kind of realized, okay, the media is, not like that, we work with the media. I don’t want to say it’s, it’s, it’s total garbage, but it was like, it was
NY Launch Pod: This is pretty good media.
Marco Shalma: This is pretty good media, but it was kind of like, okay dude, we said in the parking lot outside Yankee Stadium. Now you saying Yankees are doing a drive-in inside and people are sending me sketches of what it’s gonna look like. And I’m like, okay, this is insane. You know, like rule number one in PR I’m not denying anything. I’m not in the war drawn, so they can say whatever they want. I’m still getting the publicity. So yeah, I made the Yankee organization a little bit bad, which is kind sad because I’m a big Yankee fan, you know, but, it’s all good.
NY Launch Pod: Okay, so you did that during covid, you supported vendors. Now what’s kind of the next chapter you talked about you’re number three. You wanna be number one. What’s your plan for growth? How are you gonna grow your own business?
Marco Shalma: Great question. Thanks, man. So this year we are five brands that we work with. Three night markets, one bizarre, one flea market and a bunch of pop-ups. I’ve been working for the last two weeks with my team to kind of plan out 2023, what it looks like. And we talking about like, at least double that in the amount of event in New York City. But then we are adding four massive festivals, and I’m talking festival like a single day annual celebration. There’s gonna be like the smear fest, which is like a Jewish food festival. Everybody knows like New York is one, is the biggest Jewish, city in the world. You take Montreal from above and stuff like that. So you, you talking about like 1.5 million people at least like in potential, we talking about Middle Eastern, I know I am Middle Eastern. I eat, I love Arab food and everything branded. And we working with some amazing people from Yonkers. We have a vegan exporter we working on. So, besides the regular event that we doubling, we bring in all these experiences as well, plus a few digital experiences. Cause like the digital campaigns, one of them is Uptown Octoberfest that we working with the Boston Beer Company to kind of create the biggest happy hour event in New York State which is gonna be like over 300 businesses from uptown New York, anything above 110 all the way to Dyckman celebrating Octoberfest together, there’s so much coming up right now. And besides that, we got a couple things in Atlanta, Austin, Texas, and then in East Bay, California.
NY Launch Pod: So one of the things that we can kind of get from talking to you is that you love New York, you love the food, the people, the businesses. Can you talk about what doing your business in New York means supporting New York businesses, kind of dealing with New Yorkers, both on the vendor side and customers, what that means to you and supporting New York?
Marco Shalma: You know, I grew up in Israel and then, in Tel Aviv, and then I grew up and then continued in South Africa, Johannesburg, and you always wanted to come to New York. I didn’t want to come to New York to be a filmmaker. I wanted to be a new Spike Lee/Woody Allen, when it was still cool to, to want to be Woody Allen, but I came over here and you’ve fall in love immediately. The speed is, is intoxicating. If you can deal with the speed that this city moves then this is heaven for you and for us, the, the idea of the hospitality, the idea of like, the food businesses, we see it. When I go to a place where I produce something in Atlanta or Austin, we see the dynamic, it’s so easy. It becomes so easy to do anything anywhere else. It’s, it’s like the saying, if you can do it here, you can do it everywhere. It’s literally that because you go through a lot of hoops over here in New York but it makes it all worth it at the end because there’s a certain love over here and, people really enjoy themselves. Like, you know, like everybody’s out all the time. You know, everybody got attitude. Everybody got something to say about everything. I don’t know, it sounds like I’m dissing it, but I’m actually kind of, this is my favorite thing about New York, just the attitude, the sheer attitude of just like, yo, that’s it. So I am very proud to be successful as I am and do it in New York, like if I’ve been in South Africa or been in Israel, I can do this thing like that but doing it in New York and remember why we do it, making so many people happy, people recognizing what we do and who we are right now and it’s in New York. That’s, that’s the biggest stage in the world.
NY Launch Pod: Well, that is a wonderful note to end things on. How do people find out more about you and your businesses?
Marco Shalma: Well, our business is simple’s, like MASC Hospitality Group. M a g.com mask, m a s c, we are everywhere, like in Instagram, TikTok, whatnot. Yeah, come check us out, all the events. There’s so many cool things happening. We have a team of like ninjas, monsters like really creating experiences that you can’t even imagine, woman’s ice rink, a Dykeman, full Tryon, we coming everywhere in 2023, and really just bringing like unique experiences that people can kind of enjoy and have a good time with.
NY Launch Pod: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can follow us on social media @nylaunchpod and visit nylaunchpod.com for transcripts of every episode. And if you’re a super fan of the New York Launch Pod, Marco, are you a super fan of the New York launch Pod?
Marco Shalma: Well, I am now.
NY Launch Pod: If you’re a super fan, if you’re an old super fan or a new super fan like Marco, please leave a review on Apple Podcast. It is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
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