How to price a professional firework display, from the company's side

Plenty of pages tell a client what a firework display costs. Far fewer tell the company how to arrive at the number. Most operators start with the product, add a markup, and hope the rest fits inside it. That is how money goes missing, one show at a time.

This is written for the person who owns the diary and signs the quotes. It is not about what to charge. It is about knowing what a show costs you before you decide.

Start with what the show costs, not what the client will pay

A display price has to cover a stack of costs that have nothing to do with the fireworks. Write them down for one real show and the list is longer than most quotes assume.

Product at landed cost

Not list price. Not the number on the supplier's sheet. The landed cost is what you actually paid for the case, plus carriage, plus any duty and handling if you import, divided by the units in the case.

That number moves. The cake you fire in November was bought at last season's price, or this season's, or half of each. If your system snapshots the unit cost at the moment stock comes in, you know which. If it does not, you are guessing, and the guess is usually optimistic.

Duds and damaged stock are product cost too. A case that arrives crushed and gets written off has to be paid for by the shows that follow.

Crew fees

Per person, per show, by role. Include the show manager. Include travel time if you pay it. Include yourself, at a real rate, even if you are not drawing it yet. A show that only works because the owner fires it for free is not a profitable show. It is a hobby with a van.

Transport

Fuel, wear, hire if you need it. Load limits can turn one van into two, and two vans is two drivers. A venue three hours away is six hours of driving before anyone unloads a rack, and it is the same crew rate on the motorway as it is on site.

Setup and derig time

Hours on site, times people. A wedding that fires at ten means a derig at midnight and a drive home after that. Some venues want a litter pick the next morning. Some want the racks gone before the marquee company arrives at seven. Time that is not on the quote is still on the payslip.

Consumables

Fuse, igniters, tape, cable ties, sand, mortar tubes that split, racks that finally give up. Each is small per show and real per season. The simplest approach is a fixed fuse-and-igniters allowance on every job, so the consumables do not hide inside the product line and quietly eat the margin.

Insurance allocation

Your annual premium is a fixed cost. Divide it by the number of shows you expect to confirm, or weight it by show value, and put that share on every quote. A quiet year means the share per show goes up, which is exactly when you least want to hear it.

Magazine and overhead recovery

Magazine rent or upkeep, licence fees, training renewals, vehicle upkeep, software, accountancy, the phone that rings in February when nothing is happening. These are recovered across confirmed shows, not enquiries. If you confirm thirty shows, each carries a thirtieth. If you confirm twenty, each carries a twentieth. Overhead recovery is the part of the price most operators feel but never write down.

Deposit and payment terms

Terms are part of the price. You buy product months before the show and get paid after it. A non-refundable deposit that at least covers the product ordered for that job protects you from a cancellation in October leaving you with a shelf of cakes you bought for it. The balance should be in before you leave the yard. Cancellation terms should be written down and agreed alongside the price, not discovered when it goes wrong.

The margin conversation

Once the stack is written down, margin becomes a decision rather than a hope.

Talk about margin on the whole job, not on the product. A show where the product cost is doubled looks healthy until crew, travel and a midnight derig are added and the gross margin turns out to be a third of what it looked like. Then take off overhead and see what is actually left.

Set a floor. Decide the lowest margin you will accept on a show, and hold to it, or at least know when you are breaking it and why. Some shows are worth doing for the diary: a venue that will bring five more, a client who books every year. Know which ones those are. A company that does every show for the diary has a full diary and no money.

Round numbers are fine on the quote. They are not fine in the workings.

Why pricing off the list price alone loses money

Take two shows with exactly the same product. One is five minutes from the magazine on a Saturday afternoon in September with two crew. The other is three hours away on a Friday night in November with four crew, two vans and a derig in the dark.

Product markup gives them the same price. Everything else about them is different.

Pricing off the product also bends the design in the wrong direction. It rewards cheap, loud, high-count product because that is where the markup looks biggest, and it penalises the expensive, well-timed item that a good show actually needs. The design should be built to the show, and the price should be built to the cost. Product markup does neither.

Seasonal pricing

The week of the fifth is not the same market as the rest of the year and should not be priced as one.

In November, crew are scarce, every van is out, and every client wants the same three evenings. Costs go up, availability goes down, and the price should reflect both. If you are turning away shows on the fifth at the same price you charge in March, the price is wrong.

A June wedding runs the other way. The season is quieter, so overhead recovery per show is higher. But it is one show per crew per day, it fires late, the derig is at midnight, and the client expects finesse, not volume. The cost curve is different and the margin should be set for that show, not borrowed from bonfire night.

Musical displays and design time

A show fired to music costs more to make and the price should say so.

Design hours are real hours. Scripting to a track, building the cue list, addressing the modules, testing it: that is a day, sometimes several, before anything is loaded into a van. Then the show itself needs more modules, more igniters, more setup time on site, and a more experienced crew. And a musical show is much harder to build from whatever is on the shelf, so it tends to need product bought for the job rather than product you already hold.

Price the design time as a line, or fold it into the rate for musical work. Either is fine. Absorbing it and hoping is not.

The trap of quoting before checking stock

This one costs companies money quietly, every year.

You quote sixty of a particular cake at the price you paid for them two seasons ago. The client confirms. You go to the magazine and there are twelve. The rest have to be reordered at this year's price, with this year's carriage, and if the supplier is out you are substituting something dearer and redesigning around it. The margin you quoted never existed.

Check the shelf and the on-order book before the price leaves the office. If the design is built against live stock, with allocations showing what other shows have already claimed, the quote is built on what you actually have. PyroPortal links the design to stock for exactly this reason: the bill of materials shows the stock position as you build, and allocations show what is already committed to other shows.

What actually left the magazine

The show is fired. The client is happy. The question that decides next year's price is: what did it actually cost?

Not the bill of materials you designed. What was picked, what was fired, what came back, what was written off. The "we may as well put another one on the end" additions. The extra crew member who was needed on the day. The second van. The dud that had to be dealt with.

If stock is issued to the show as typed movements, each with a unit-cost snapshot, that answer exists without anyone having to reconstruct it from memory. PyroPortal's Financials tab on each display computes the margin from the design and the stock actually issued to the show, alongside the payments taken, and adds an estimated fuse-and-igniters line so the consumables are counted. The show-margins report then lays the season out side by side, so the shows that looked profitable and were not are visible before the same quote goes out again.

That is the loop: this year's actual cost is next year's quote. Companies that close it get more accurate every season. Companies that do not repeat the same guess.

A word on the public price guides

Many UK display companies publish price guides for their clients. Flashpoint Fireworks, for example, publishes a guide with standard displays from £800 and musical displays from £1,500 (their pricing guide is here). Guides like that are useful as a market check: they tell you roughly where clients expect the conversation to start.

They are not a pricing method. Another company's starting price is built on their magazine, their crew, their vans and their overheads. Yours is built on yours. Use the guides to sanity-check the quote after the cost stack has produced it, not to replace the stack.

See it on your own data

Put one of last season's shows into PyroPortal with the product that was actually picked and the crew that was actually paid, and see what the margin really was. The display record and its Financials tab are built for exactly that question, and Spark is free for up to ten confirmed displays a year.

Questions operators ask

What margin should a professional firework display make?

There is no single right number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing about your overheads. What matters is that the margin is calculated on the whole job, after crew, transport, time on site, consumables, insurance and overhead recovery, and not on the product alone. Decide a floor you will accept, and know when a show is below it.

Should I charge for design time on a musical display?

Yes. Scripting to music, building the cue list and testing it are real hours, and a musical show also needs more modules, more igniters and more time on site. Either price the design as its own line or build a higher rate for musical work. Absorbing it is the most common way pyromusical shows end up unprofitable.

How much deposit should I take?

Enough to cover the product you order for that show, as a minimum, and make it non-refundable. You are buying stock months before you are paid. A deposit that covers the product means a cancellation leaves you with stock you can use, not stock you have paid for and cannot sell.

Should I price the fireworks at cost or at list price?

Cost, and specifically landed cost: what you paid for the case plus carriage and any import costs, per unit, at the time it came in. List price is a number the supplier chose. The margin should be applied to the whole job on top of real costs, not hidden inside a product markup.

How do I price a show a long way from the magazine?

Cost the travel honestly. Driving hours are crew hours, and a long trip can mean a second van, an overnight stay or a next-day return. Put those on the stack before the margin, not as a surcharge after. Two shows with identical product can differ by hundreds of pounds in cost on distance alone.