The airbed's an interesting place to start when looking at the price of LEL.
In 2013 each airbed cost me £6.22. I couldn't afford to buy enough for the event, so two volunteers spent much of the event deflating beds, shipping them between controls and reinflating them. In 2017 they only cost £4.50 and I've been able to buy enough to go around this time. There are in fact two airbeds per rider, but the cost per rider is £4.50. Plus, say 10p towards the pump that blows them up. £4.60. They need storing but happily we were loaned land onto which we put a storage container. That cost us about £1,500 to buy, have delivered and repaint. So altogether it works out at about £10 per rider for beds.
You've also got the volunteer who blows them up. Volunteers aren't cheap. The market for volunteers is surprisingly competitive, and as I discovered in 2013, spending a week of holiday doing manual labour for free is a tough sell. Other events treat their volunteers better. This time each volunteer costs LEL about £120 for food, clothing, travel expenses and small treats. That works out at around £40 per rider.
Riders eat a lot. The unexpected extra food bills in 2013 nearly caused us to lose money. The event is also too big to cater without professional help, which most schools expect anyway as a condition of letting their properties to us. The food budget is £3 per rider, per visit. The total catering cost, including staff to cook, serve and clean up, is £6 per rider, per visit, or £120 total.
Hiring the venues works out at around £40 per rider.
Already that's around £205 per rider.
I spend about £8k over the four years travelling to meetings and checking the route. Barriers are another £8k. That's another tenner per rider. And afterwards there's a long tail of expenses that go towards running a proper event to a professional standard.
At the moment we have a budgeted surplus of about 4%. Any seriously nasty shocks will cause us to run cap in hand to AUK. But AUK have seen the budget and they're happy with our approach to organising. I'm confident all will be well but I cannot predict the future and we could be surprised by something right up until the last day of the event.
LEL is good value insofar as the money you pay us goes entirely towards making the event happen. Whether or not the event is something that people want to take part is another matter. But you can be confident that LEL is the price it is, because that's how much stuff costs.
