And with Special Projects, that certainly helps. I think the hesitation you’re hearing in my voice is, what will Q1 look like? It’s always our weakest quarter and Q4 is always our strongest quarter. So it’s hard to gauge today because it’s a riddle that would only best be answered if we knew how the strikes will linger into Q1. Right now, before the strike settled, there were only three theatrical releases on a wide basis the entire month of January. Everybody was pushing out of it because they didn’t know if they’d have actors to promote. Now some of those movies are going to come back in, but it could be a ramp-up period in Q1 that I just don’t know the answer to, if we can be cash positive in Q1, but we would expect to be by Q2 and going forward.
Allen Klee: That’s great. So for your social influencing businesses that you combined, you’ve said in the past, that’s around 1/4 of your revenue, but then there’s opportunities to grow that very significantly you said as you add new verticals. How do you think about the timing of building out these new verticals?
William O’Dowd: That’s very near term, Allen. Just like we acquired Socialite and we announced it on this call last year, right, the Q3 earnings call date, November 14, I think it was also last year. And with the eye towards the merger, right, that we were going to combine New York and L.A. to create — we didn’t know the name of time, but the digital department. We handled that merger with the eye towards having the scale and size of a company to build these other verticals. That was a big factor in the merger. And so just like we’ve been working last few months towards the merger before, it came about. We feel very strongly about the work we’ve put in the last few weeks and months to have these other verticals and that we’d be announcing in the New Year for the digital department. And we’re particularly excited. We’re excited about them all. But obviously, sports represent such a huge area for us and growth area for digital department for sure.
Allen Klee: For Midnight Theater, how should we think about the impact of the Mastercard partnership?
William O’Dowd: Well, it’s certainly from a financial standpoint, it buffers the investment, right? I mean it’s a multiyear deal with increases every year. And we’re very pleased with the outcome. And then on an operational level, you’ve got a partner that both brings events to the space, brings awareness of their own events. I mean, brings awareness to the space and has a marketing engine behind it. So the theater is off to a strong start after the grand opening. Q4 is always good too because we’ll have the private events business with the holiday season. But it’s nice as you go into the slow business of Q1, so it kind of mirrors some of our companies in that way. When you have a partner like that, that can bring events during the data winter, it’s just very strong for our business.
And as I mentioned on the earnings call, I mean, these types of things may somewhat get taken for granted because of some of the blue-chip clients we have with our entertainment marketing companies. But in a venue like this and an investment like this, this is as far from normal. This is a 150-seat granted state-of-the-art variety theater in a beautiful $4.5 billion complex. But at the end of the day, everyone who — just think of your own hometown, if you’re from New York, think of all the entertainment venues of that size you’ve been to. Joe’s pub to 54% below to wherever you may be thinking of, right? Now I ask you to take five seconds and just think of which of those venues have a sponsor? If you can name one of the same size with any sponsor and that could be like Joe’s oil change, right?
And then you think about Mastercard and the deal done with the global CMO of Mastercard, I think it validates our venue. It validates its presence in New York City, and I think you can imagine that there’s excitement about what we’ll be doing in the future with that space and that brand.
Allen Klee: Is there kind of a goal for how many private events you would like to do a month?
William O’Dowd: Yes, we have a goal. In terms of full venue buyouts in a perfect world, you could do one a week and not disrupt your programming enough, right? And when I say full venue, that means a client is taking over both the theater and the restaurant. Now in terms of just either the lounge, buyout or private dining room buyout or even a restaurant buyout, you could do those, maybe you don’t want to do it more frequently than a couple of times a week for a restaurant buyout, but I think that 1 to 2x a week for the larger buyouts. In terms of the lounge or the happy hours of the private dining room, we can do that every day. And sometimes it feels like we do. And of course, you only do buyouts if the money you’re receiving is significantly above what you could just do if you operated it, right? So they’re lucrative for us, and we like to do as many as we can responsibly.
