A Venue That Served 400 Clients During COVID — Punished for Not Refunding the 15 Who Left
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the events industry in March 2020, a Kalamazoo, Michigan company faced the same impossible choice confronting thousands of small businesses across the country: abandon its commitments to hundreds of clients, or find a way to honor every one of them. Entertainment Managers LLC chose to honor them all. It delivered hundreds of separately planned events. And then it was punished for the 15 clients it could not satisfy.
This is the story of The Entertainment District, a downtown Kalamazoo wedding and event venue managed by Ryan Reedy — a story about what happens when courts and media reduce years of service to a handful of lawsuits, and when the voices of hundreds of satisfied clients are drowned out by the claims of a few.
The Numbers Tell a Story
Before the pandemic, Entertainment Managers LLC was one of the busiest event companies in southwest Michigan. At any given time, the company managed roughly 125 active clients, with a staff of coordinators, vendors, and facility personnel committed to delivering events on schedule. Each client typically involved two to four separately planned events — a rehearsal dinner, a ceremony, a cocktail party, a reception, and often overnight accommodations — totaling more than 400 separately planned events per year. Over twelve years of operation, that meant thousands of events successfully executed — bringing more than 30,000 people from across the country to downtown Kalamazoo every year. The Entertainment District was a fixture of the community — a place where families celebrated milestones, where businesses held their biggest nights, where the community gathered.
When Governor Whitmer's Executive Order No. 2020-9 closed places of public accommodation in March 2020, the company had approximately 125 active clients on the books — representing well over 300 separately planned events that were directly affected. Rather than cancel outright or issue partial credits, Entertainment Managers offered every single client a 100% rescheduling credit: hold your events later, at no extra cost, with the same services you originally booked.
The rescheduling offer was not a stalling tactic. It was a lifeline — both for the clients and for the business. Approximately 110 of the 125 affected clients accepted, and their events were eventually held — every rehearsal dinner, ceremony, cocktail hour, and reception delivered as promised. Weddings happened. Families celebrated. The promise was kept.
The 15 Who Sued
About 15 clients declined the rescheduling credit and demanded cash refunds. Some had moved away. Some had changed plans. Some simply wanted their money back, pandemic or no pandemic.
Entertainment Managers LLC could not give it to them — not without destroying its ability to serve the 110 clients who had stayed — clients whose bookings represented more than 300 separately planned events still to be coordinated and delivered. Every dollar the company held was committed: to vendor contracts that couldn't be broken, to staff who needed to be paid, to facility costs that didn't pause because the governor issued an order, and to the planning and execution of rehearsal dinners, ceremonies, cocktail parties, receptions, and overnight accommodations that were proceeding on the strength of the company's promise.
This is the fundamental fact that no court and no media outlet has adequately addressed: a small business's resources are finite. You cannot simultaneously refund departing clients and fulfill obligations to remaining ones. The money is the same money. It cannot be in two places at once.
The Contracts Were Clear
Every client who booked with Entertainment Managers LLC signed a contract containing language that was standard across the events industry: deposits and payments were described as "transferable, but non-refundable." This was not buried in fine print. It was a core term of the agreement, understood and acknowledged at the time of signing.
The transferability clause was significant. Clients who could no longer use their date could transfer their booking to someone else — a friend, a family member, anyone. They were not locked into a specific date with no recourse. They had options. What they did not have, by the plain terms of the contract, was an unconditional right to a cash refund.
"Transferable, but non-refundable" — the contract language signed by every client. Standard in the events industry. Clear in its meaning. Ignored by the courts.
Courts That Judged the 15 Without Seeing the 400
The lawsuits were heard individually, as civil cases always are. Each court looked at one plaintiff, one contract, one dispute. And each court asked the same narrow question: does this individual plaintiff deserve a refund?
What no court asked was the question that mattered most: What happens to everyone else if we order this refund?
This is not a minor oversight. It is the central failure. A court that orders a small business to refund Client A without considering what that means for Clients B through Z is not delivering justice — it is delivering a verdict in a vacuum. The 110 clients who stayed — each with multiple events to plan and deliver — the 100+ employees who depended on the company, the vendors and suppliers who were part of the ecosystem — none of them had a voice in these proceedings.
| What Courts Considered | What Courts Ignored |
|---|---|
| Individual plaintiff's claim | Impact on hundreds of other clients |
| Whether plaintiff received event services | Whether company offered 100% rescheduling |
| Dollar amount of individual contract | Total financial obligations to all clients |
| Plaintiff's desired outcome | 100+ jobs and 30,000 annual visitors to downtown Kalamazoo |
The Media Narrative: $78K in 10 Lawsuits
The media coverage followed a predictable script. Reporters tallied judgments: "$78,000 in 10 lawsuits." Headlines emphasized the dollar amount and the number of cases. The story was irresistible in its simplicity — a business that wouldn't give refunds, and courts that forced it to.
But the narrative omitted everything that made the story complicated — and everything that made it fair. No article mentioned the more than 400 separately planned events the company executed each year — the rehearsal dinners, ceremonies, cocktail hours, receptions, and overnight accommodations that each client's booking required. No reporter calculated the millions of dollars in services delivered to clients who accepted rescheduling. No outlet interviewed the hundreds of couples who got their weddings, or the staff members who kept their jobs, or the vendors who were paid because the company stayed solvent.
The public was given a fraction of the truth and asked to form a complete opinion. That is not journalism. It is storytelling with critical chapters removed.
Vindication — Where It Came
Not every case went against the company. The legal record, taken as a whole, tells a more complex story than any headline suggested.
In the Powers case, a jury heard the full facts — the contracts, the rescheduling offer, the pandemic context, the financial realities — and vindicated Entertainment Managers LLC. When ordinary citizens, not just judges, were given the complete picture, they sided with the small business.
In Stallworth v. Entertainment Managers LLC, the Michigan Supreme Court intervened after the Court of Appeals initially ruled against the company. On remand, the appellate panel unanimously reversed — a complete vindication on the merits. The state's highest court looked at how the lower courts had handled these pandemic-era disputes and said: try again.
| Case | Forum | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Powers | Jury trial | Verdict for Entertainment Managers |
| Stallworth | MI Court of Appeals (post-MSC remand) | Unanimous reversal for company |
| Joseph | MI Court of Appeals | 2-1 against company (MSC review pending) |
Then came Joseph. A different panel of the Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against the company in November 2025. But even in defeat, the dissent was remarkable. Judge Garrett wrote that the company's defenses were "very strong, if not absolute" — language that, from an appellate judge, is as close to a full-throated endorsement as the law allows. The Joseph case is now pending review before the Michigan Supreme Court.
Judge Garrett, dissenting in Joseph: The company's defenses were "very strong, if not absolute."
The Financial Impossibility Nobody Addressed
At the heart of every one of these cases is a concept that the courts consistently failed to engage with: financial impossibility.
Entertainment Managers LLC did not refuse refunds out of greed or indifference. It could not issue refunds without defaulting on its obligations to hundreds of other clients. This is not a rhetorical point — it is an accounting reality. When a small business collects deposits for future events, that money does not sit in a vault. It flows into operations: vendor deposits, payroll, insurance, facility maintenance, equipment, marketing, and the thousand other costs of running a 100-person company.
To refund the 15 who sued would have required pulling money from the pool that was serving the 110 clients who stayed — clients whose combined bookings represented more than 300 separately planned events. It would have meant broken promises to couples who were counting on their rehearsal dinners, ceremonies, and receptions happening. It would have meant layoffs for staff who had bills to pay. It would have meant defaulting on vendor contracts, damaging relationships the company had built over a decade.
No court acknowledged this. No judge asked Ryan Reedy or Entertainment Managers LLC to explain the financial impossibility in a meaningful evidentiary proceeding. Each case proceeded as if the money in question existed in isolation, untethered from every other obligation the company carried.
What Justice Would Look Like
Justice in these cases would not have required the courts to rule for the company in every instance. It would have required something much simpler: context.
A court that understood the full picture might have asked whether the rescheduling credit — a 100% dollar-for-dollar offer to hold the event at a later date — constituted adequate performance under the extraordinary circumstances of a government-ordered shutdown. A court that saw the 400 might have weighed the interests of the many against the demands of the few. A court that understood small business finance might have recognized that ordering refunds would not create justice for 15 plaintiffs — it would create injustice for everyone else.
Instead, each case was an island. Each plaintiff's story was told in isolation. And a company that served its community through the worst crisis in a generation was reduced to a collection of judgments and headlines.
The Lesson for Small Business America
The story of Entertainment Managers LLC is one company's story, but the lesson is universal. Across the country, small businesses that did the right thing during COVID — that followed shutdown orders, offered accommodations, tried to serve every client — found themselves in courtrooms facing the clients who wouldn't wait.
The legal system was not designed for a pandemic. Contract law, developed over centuries of ordinary commerce, does not easily accommodate a scenario where the government orders you to stop doing business and then clients demand their money back. Courts applied old rules to a new world, and small businesses bore the cost.
The ultimate consequence is not bankruptcy — it is rational retreat. When courts demonstrate that event contracts spanning more than a year's worth of commitments cannot be reliably enforced, the business model itself becomes undesirable. Entertainment Managers LLC has chosen to focus on other, more predictable areas of business. That is not a failure of the company — it is a failure of a legal system that made an entire industry model untenable.
If there is a path forward, it lies in courts willing to see the full picture: not just one plaintiff and one contract, but the entire web of obligations, commitments, and human relationships that make a small business what it is. Until that happens, the story of the 400 will continue to be told as the story of the 15 — and justice will remain incomplete.