Staffing is the largest cost most venues carry, and a good share of it gets spent keeping the doors open while the customers are at work.
Picture your ideal customer. Somebody with money to spend and a reason to go out, which in practice means working people and students. Those people are occupied Monday to Friday between nine and five.
So why is anyone being paid to stand in your building during exactly those hours?
You are in an evenings and weekends business
There is an idea, especially among people opening their first business, that owning something means working a normal day and going home.
That is a real preference and it is incompatible with this industry. If you want nine to five, accounting firms exist and they are a fine business. Location-based entertainment earns when its customers are free, which means weeknights after work, weekends, and school holidays.
In the venues I have run and worked with, weekends alone accounted for 70 to 80% of revenue. Cutting into that to preserve a conventional schedule is not a lifestyle choice, it is closing during the only shift that pays.
Corporate bookings do not need daytime hours, they need an appointment
The best objection I get is corporate: team-building afternoons, staff outings, daytime group bookings. Those are real, and they are often the highest-value bookings a venue takes.
They are also never spontaneous. In everything I have worked on, corporate bookings were arranged weeks or months ahead. Nobody's office manager decides at 11am to bring forty people over at one.
So take them by appointment. Open the building for the booking, staff it for the booking, and stop paying for the other four empty weekday afternoons in case one shows up. Say so plainly on your website and on your Google listing: daytime available for group and corporate bookings by arrangement.
Closing on the busiest day of the week
The hours argument I lose most often is with owners who want to close Sundays for personal or religious reasons.
You are not Chick-fil-A. They can absorb it because of scale and because it became part of the brand decades ago. If your genuinely busy window is about forty hours a week and Sunday is ten of them, closing takes a quarter of your revenue out.
There is a solution that costs nothing. Hire somebody who does not share the belief and schedule them every Sunday. You keep your day and the business keeps the revenue. This is not a compromise on principle, it is what employing people is for.
Publish the hours, and publish them everywhere
The last part is unglamorous and it costs venues real bookings.
Once you have decided the hours, make sure they are identical on your website, your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page, and your booking system. Update all four for holidays, school breaks, and seasonal changes.
Wrong hours on a Google listing means somebody drives over and finds a locked door, and that is a one-star review about a business that did nothing else wrong. Keeping them accurate is part of local search work and it takes ten minutes a month.