Been in the photo booth industry for nearly 10 years and generate $400k annually (set to do over half a mil by 2024) in the wedding and events space. I don’t feel like I am the expert by any means in business or entrepreneurship, but I’ve built a couple successful companies on a small scale, and have an MBA, so maybe I can contribute to your success. AMA!
Employees are hourly, obviously I have my own costs with payroll, social security Medicare etc, but hourly starts at $20 an hour and goes up over time / experience. Our average 3-hour event, employees will work (including travel which they are paid for along with mileage reimbursement) 7-13 hours. Just depends on where the event takes place. We bake in lots of time for early arrival, traffic, troubleshooting etc even though it’s mostly never needed.
The secondary employee used to go along with the first, but now we’ve replaced them with a contractor who just shows up as a brand ambassador and works for the set hours of the event to assist guests. This way we can spread out our key players and reduce cost per event, without coming to limit it to a single attendant. So our labor costs are probably quite high in the industry in general, Even though our hourly rates are not anything crazy, merely because we want to provide the best and account for every possible thing that could go wrong in order to deliver perfection. But I’d rather invest in good labor because the people are core to the business.