That, and the fact that it is not necessary to own the gear at all. If you charge $500 and spend $300 to rent - then you simply show up with your laptop and go home with that $200 net in your pocket. Your net will be whatever margin you add to the cost of staging the event. This is essentially what a club DJ does. That $300 gear payment (lease or debt) belongs to the club (client-side) not the DJ.
Most DJs don't think about generating net income - they are consumers, focused on buying gear and music THEN go looking for some way to earn the money back. They also distract themselves with "price" as a function of expenses; which it is not. Price is a function of consumer demand, demographics, and liquidity. Fail to realize that and understand your effective price before you run up expenses - and your smarter competitor with lower costs will run circles around you.
Why spend thousands of dollars on gear up front only to use it at a handful of events? Gear that gets consistently used can also be leased so that the expense of it pro-rates in line with gigs as they come in. This means you start earning net income right away instead of trying to pay off a gear debt.
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You don't know that - her budget might have been $350 and she has already gotten the family/spouse to stretch for another $100.
Schools and colleges for example; often have purchase order limits - beyond that amount they can no longer use a discretionary funding process for the event. So, you have to know your customer, where the money comes from, and what their constraints are before you start making assumptions about how to price certain things. There are hard limits in the world so to target a certain kind of client and not understand where those limits are would be quite frustrating - but, you'd be blaming the wrong person for the situation.
