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Assuming you expect to attract 1000 people and charge these prices, the calculator will decide your gross income from admission fees for budgeting purposes as follows:

If, on the other hand, you had charged everyone entering the farm $7.50, the total income from 1,000 admissions would = $7,500. In this way the calculator uses demographics to show the impact of your pricing on revenue. You can easily go back and try different prices and see the impact on income.

The theory behind children up to age four being free is they may be too small to take advantage of many of the activities. Depending on the activities offered some farms only give free admission to children up to age two.

The thinking behind discounts for large families is to make it economically attractive for larger families to come. If the farm has a separate charge for several special activities or sells food, those families may well purchase some of these items for everyone in the family, which will improve the farm’s overall gross sales. Also, the impact on your bottom line is small. Statistics Canada reports that in 2006 about 62 per cent of Canadian families have children.

Within that group, 17 per cent of those families have three or more children.

Something else to consider is that the larger family might not have come if they had to pay separate admission for everyone. They might have found another family activity to do and you would have lost all of the four paid admissions in the family price. Some farms offer $1/person discounts to families over a certain size (e.g. fve people). Others offer discounts for coupons the customers have printed off of the farm’s website. There are lots of ways to determine price. We just want you to see how one system of discounting can impact your gross income.

Some larger companies have social committees that sell tickets to local attractions. They may even subsidize their cost. This means someone else is also promoting your corn maze. It’s a good idea to print posters promoting your farm and give them to the company with the tickets. You would

give them 200 tickets and they would return to you unsold tickets and the money for the tickets sold. Usually you would give them the tickets at a discount (e.g.15 per cent off). If the ticket buyers choose not to come to the farm, you still get the income from those sales.

Other products that can be sold on site to help increase your average sale per customer include: jams, honey, cider, maple syrup, pickles, unpopped popcorn (still on the cob, or shelled popcorn), and produce such as squash, pumpkins, or potatoes that you can keep from one week to the next without a loss in quality, etc.

There are maze design websites and companies. Some companies just sell a plan with instructions, while others offer a full package where they do the design, cut it out and help with the marketing and promotion. They may