The Toolkit

Tools for building the future

The Toolkit with Gerard Mitchell, Co-Founder of Victor Media Group

Top Takeaways

  • Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most valuable marketing strategies.
  • Know your target market and gain an edge over other market competitors.
  • Be dynamic and forward-looking.
  • Having a good market analysis will save you from big difficulties.
  • Adapt to the constant changes in market trends.
  • Technology helps you improve your business and increases the efficiency of the system.

Guest Profile

Gerard Mitchell is the co-founder of Victor Media Group, which is a content creation, distribution, and marketing company that curates news and information focusing on the human side of the business. Aside from being an experienced entertainment and technology industry executive and serial entrepreneur, he is also a strategic business development advisor of Lyte in the areas of marketing, product development, and business operations. Having a strong business development professional with a Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) Focused on Leadership in Business Administration, Management, and International Business. He is skilled in the strategic development of entrepreneurial ventures; he is also a concert promoter and Lives music venue owner with a demonstrated history of building successful businesses from the ground up.

Background:

Co-founder at Victor Media Group – May 2020 – Present

Founder of Concerted Consultants – Jan 2018 – Present

Senior Advisor of Lyte – Apr. 2016 – Present

Co-owner of Foundation Presents – Jan. 2003 – Feb. 2018

Co-owner of The Social – Sep 2003 – Jan 2018

Co-owner of 64 North, Aero Rooftop Bar, The Patio – Sep. 2014 – Dec. 2017

Co-owner of Beacham – Jan. 2011 – Dec. 2017

Co-owner of Eight Dimension Entertainment – July 1998 – Jan 2010

Episode Highlights

  • Early Forms of Promotions

Putting a bunch of flyers all over the campus.

He went to just flyers literally and a little bit of college radio as he was doing street promotions for his own club nights (there was no technology).

“It was literally word of mouth, flyering, making sure you were in all the shops, making sure all the shop owners knew what you were doing so they would spread the word, getting guestlist.”

Starting your guest list is a form of influencer in a sense.

  • Expansion and Growth

As a club night promoter, he became a concert promoter, then venue owner of just one single venue, and then promoted in multiple different-sized venues around Orlando. Then he continued to acquire other venues as well. This happened in the span of 15 years.

“The market really drove us to get bigger in order to survive.”

Having the University of Central Florida in Orlando with 60,000 students, this became their target market for their live events.

“There was a big pie, and everyone’s trying to get a slice, and you are trying to get a good amount of market share as much as you could.”

There was independent music, a lot of underground music, anything that wasn’t really in the mainstream, that was coming to them to get promoted.

There was no genre that was off-limits.

  • The Team

In 2000, they were only 3 on the team. He, his business partner, and one production guy. As they expand, they hire numerous staff.

Because it was a continual business, some nights, they would not only do one show but two shows, or they do two shows in two different venues.

But when they had multiple events, they had large acts, they had multiple things going on at one time, it took the experience of the owners to make it more seamless.

  • Marketing Strategy and Themes

For The Social, since it is live music, they bring the best national or international touring artists and put on the best shows possible.

As music trends started to change and people consumed music differently, they were always trying to have an edge in knowing what’s the next hot thing.

They develop an artist who they think is going to go somewhere. So they’ll do an early show with this artist and hope that they’re able to come back and sell out later on.

They were marketing on the college radio, which was how they got the audience.

  • Technology Disruption

The advancement of technology has innovated business and made things easier and possible.

Podcasts are the future of radio advertising.

“Now Spotify tells you this is where you’re getting the listeners, so you can dial into that.”

Business nowadays is becoming data-driven.

“You have to fundamentally understand the music business and the entertainment business in order to disrupt it.”

  • Service Excellence

They are trying to deliver a consistent service to the artist as much as possible.

“We learned that if we, being the small guy, did everything exactly the way the artists wanted, they would remember that, because when they moved up the scale to the bigger companies, it was more cookie cutter, they wouldn’t get the specific tea that they wanted.”

Their mission is to set perfect service for the artist and then helped them have a better show.

About the Host:

Justin Fortier lives in Brooklyn, NY, and works for a consulting company serving industrial companies.

How to Connect with Justin Fortier

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Transcript

Justin Fortier: Thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Toolkit. I’m Justin Fortier, the host. Today I had on Gerard Mitchell, who’s an operator that has promoted events, ran nightclubs, set up engineering teams and now he’s an investor. I want to have Gerard on because he’s put on over 10,000 events, ran five nightclubs, and has also been a part of a technology startup that basically allows people to resell tickets in an official partnered way. He set up their engineering teams abroad. So, a lot of different experiences progression from promoter to owner to technical advisor and investor. We’ve had a lot of guests related to music on The Toolkit so far, it’s something I’m super interested in. I put on events, I did a bunch of them in college and I think they can be a really fun way to spend time with friends. They can be transcendent experiences in some cases. So we’ve had on Rob McDaniels, who runs the music download site for DJs Beatport. I just interviewed Josh Gruss. I don’t know if that episode’s out yet but I look for that, he runs Roundhill Music, a private equity firm that invests in music royalties of things like Elvis or ACDC. We’ve had on CID, who is a Grammy-winning producer, he DJs all around the world. I’m trying to get on a manager, and basically understand A to Z, how money’s made, what leads to success, and where the opportunities are. In full transparency, I’m using The Toolkit to explore things. I find it interesting to find ways to help me in my current job, to also see where I could start a company of my own. So that’s the journey I’m on. Thanks for coming with me. And now please enjoy this episode of The Toolkit with Gerard Mitchell.

Justin Fortier: I read somewhere that you helped produce 10,000 live music events. And that number seemed so high and really impressive. And so, when you got started, that means you had to get started producing live music events a while ago. And now, I think the first thing most promoters do is probably set up an Instagram page or something like that, and start going. What was the first tool you used to start promoting and attracting people to come to events?

Gerard Mitchell: I started in college in the late 80s, early 90s. And so it was literally flyers and the college radio station, and that was it. There was no technology. It was literally on campus, you put out a bunch of flyers. And then once I graduated, we went to just flyers literally and a little bit of college radio as I was doing street promotions for my own club nights, but there was no technology. It was literally word of mouth, flyering, making sure you were in all the shops, making sure all the shop owners knew what you were doing so they would spread the word, getting guestlist, that was it.

Justin Fortier: Getting a guestlist from another promoter or something like that? How was it?

Gerard Mitchell: No, starting your own guest list so that you knew you had x number of people who were gonna show up. And so you were telling them, “Hey look, I’ll put you on the guest list plus a couple of people.” So I know they’re going to show up, they’re going to spread the word. Hopefully, a few other people spread the word too or actually going to pay but everyone else is. You start your guest list, it was a form of influencer in a sense. That was how you did it. And then you just really flyered relentlessly over time. Definitely it was not eco-friendly at all.

Justin Fortier: Yeah. So you had some friends in the print shop that would produce a couple 100. When you started, you ran six venues at one point in Orlando. When did that start and how did you transition to that, from promoting and then you continued promoting the whole time?

Gerard Mitchell: So the progression was club night promoter, then concert promoter, then venue owner of just one single venue and then promoting in multiple different sized venues around the city. And then going to acquiring another venue that was actually right next door to the initial venue. This is over a period of 15 years. So it’s a very slow, methodical process of moving step by step. And a lot of it was just the market. The market really drove us to get bigger in order to survive.

Justin Fortier: Got it. And this was in Orlando and Orlando was growing. I think, at one point, it was one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. Is that why the growth? Was the cities growing? And there’s going to be larger players? Or was it just that you needed a way to balance out revenue? Or why do you need to grow?

Gerard Mitchell: I think a little bit of both, Orlando has been a young city for a long time. So you had the University of Central Florida, which has 60,000 students. So a lot of collegiate students who wanted to go to live events. Then you had a lot of competitors that came into the market, whether it be individual independent promoters, or at a certain time in the sort of early 2000s, Live Nation slash House of Blues came into the market. And so you had to always look at those market factors. There was a big pie and everyone’s trying to get a slice and you are trying to get a good amount of market share as much as you could.

Justin Fortier: And when you’re expanding in those early days, are you focusing on people with the same interests? Or that risk kind of burning out your list of people will only go to an event every other week? And so you’re trying to say, “Okay, I’ve got rock this night? I’ve got something else.” You’re growing multiple lists at the same time? or is the expansion usually, “We’re trying to own one, loosely connected set of musical interests.” or how does that work?

Gerard Mitchell: It was all the independent music, a lot of underground music, anything that wasn’t really in the mainstream, was coming to us as promoters. And we were trying to grab as much of that as possible. And then also expanding the market. So a lot of artists we would have, especially in the mid 2000s, we would get artists who they would only play Orlando. So they would come in, it was a cul de sac of Florida. So they would come from Atlanta, they come to Orlando, and then they go to New Orleans. You’ll need to swoop in, we’d be the only Florida date. And so then all of a sudden, we could get people to come from Tampa, to come from South Florida. And that sort of expanded our market beyond just Orlando even though the show was in Orlando. And, but that didn’t require us to do everything. There was no genre that was off limits.

Justin Fortier: Interesting. Being close to a common stop on the tour is interesting. I lived in San Diego for two years. And I thought they definitely had a big advantage being a large city, but also close to LAs. So I’d commonly see lots of underground and even main acts. They would get an LA night and then you’d see the San Diego Friday before the San Diego Saturday after that’s… So as you’re growing, what is the team look like as you’re putting on all these events? I saw on your bio, you said you eventually left promotion and club owning, (no not promotion, club owning) in search of quieter nights, which that makes sense. So what what was the team like behind that? And was that something that you were having people turn over all the time or over those 15 years? Were you able to build a group of people that was able to make it a little bit less chaotic as you’re trying to put on whatever 10 events every weekend or way more, I’m not sure what that number comes out to be.

Gerard Mitchell: So in 2000, I had a business partner. And it was he and I and one production guy. And we were promoting different shows and the production guy was basically our stage manager production guy. And we would hire out all the sound production. But we would hire in a company. That ended up very quickly going from doing that in 2000 where there’s three of us to owning The Social by 2003 and then you have a staff of 40. By 2011 owning The Social, The Beacham and having a staff of a hundred. And then by 2014, owning The Social, The Beacham and three other bar nightclub venues and having a staff of 175. So a very logical progression. And you always still felt like you didn’t have enough staff. Because it was a continual business, some nights you would not only do one show, you would do two shows or you would do two shows in two different venues, so you’d have two early shows, two late shows, flipping the room. The amount of labor it took to do that was pretty intense. But it was fun and until it was like, “Wow, this is difficult.” You get to a certain point, you’re like, “Okay, I’m up every night until 4am.” And that starts to take a toll.

Justin Fortier: Yeah. So with you being up, is that because there’s not enough in the margin in the business to be able to have a good manager to essentially give you that night off for any of these venues? Or is that just because those people are really hard to come by and are out trying to run their own venue as well?

“We want people to safely have the best night of their life.” – Gerard Mitchell

Gerard Mitchell: We had those people, we had really good production people, we had really good managers. But it was still, it’s not an exact science. So you have a lot of internal experience over time, and myself and some of my partners were operators. And so we knew that to get the most out of the business you had to operate it. And the owners had to operate the business as much as possible. Got to a point where some of the smaller events and the nights where there weren’t double shows, yeah it definitely didn’t have to be there. But when you had multiple events, you had large acts, you had multiple things going on at one time, it took the experience of the owners to make it more seamless. And plus the owners were ultimately responsible for everything going on. So we wanted people to, I use to always say, “We want people to safely have the best night of their life.” And then that’s a really hard thing to come by. We want you to have the exact best experience possible, safely. And those two things sometimes don’t go together. And so you have to be on top of it, all the time.

Justin Fortier: Yeah, so when people were going to the Social, or the Beacham, I’m sure they have lots of options in Orlando, what was your main marketing tool? Or what was the experience you were trying to provide? And was it different at those places when you expanded or you’re mostly trying to say, “We have a formula that works, let’s try to do this the same type of hospitality in both places.”

Gerard Mitchell: So for The Social was specifically live music, so it was just, “Let’s bring the best national, international touring artist and put on the best shows possible”, and that was the draw. For The Beacham, it was the live entertainment aspect, but then The Beacham was always a nightclub as well. And so the shows would go early, and then it would have huge nightclubs afterwards. And so there were two different draws. And you needed that in order to sustain what would became a much larger business, the touring business. As you go to shows, sometimes the great shows come all in the same week, and then there’s nothing for a couple of months. And then sometimes it’s just super sporadic. It just depends on when the artists are touring. And so once you got into a larger venue, you needed something that would anchor that venue and that were the larger club nights that The Beacham would do. And that would anchor that. When you’re in a smaller venue like The Social, you would just do 30 to 40 shows a month, and said there were definitely many multiple show nights. And that’s what anchored that venue was just the volume of show. But once you got to a larger venue, you needed something else. The club nights became the anchor tenant of the venue. And then you would do the larger shows as they came around. And the larger you get in the shows, the more competitive it is. So that added to the difficulty.

Justin Fortier: And when you’re doing these club nights, would you have recurring themes that you would put on so people would get used to saying, “On the last Thursday of the month, we have this disco night or something like that.” Or what allowed you to continually make it interesting for people to come on these club nights?

Gerard Mitchell: Specifically at The Beacham, I have partners who had done hip hop club nights for years, so that they did two hip hop nights Friday and Saturday. And then they did a Latin night on Sundays. And these were just huge nights that were always consistently happening in Orlando. And we partnered with them to bring in the live music aspect that was always going to be understood to be earlier on those nights or off nights during the week because people don’t go to large club nights on a Tuesday. And there was a very good and symbiotic relationship with that.

Justin Fortier: Was there ever a time where you had to restart the magic in some way, like where you had something that was working for the club nights and then all of a sudden you had a month where people were not delivering in the same way. Were your usual flyers and other combination of drumming up interest, you had to find a new way to attract people or a new venue comes to town and all of a sudden you realize that your typical clientele have moved on, did you ever have to navigate something like that?

“Music and how people consume it started to change so much. You’re always trying to have an edge and figuring out what the next hot thing is.” – Gerard Mitchell

Gerard Mitchell: You certainly got to the point where you were always looking over your shoulder and ready. What is the next idea? How long is this trend going to last? And that was a big thing musically. And a music trends really changed throughout, especially throughout the early 2000s into the teens. Music trend started to change closer and closer because music started to change so much. And how people consume music started to change. The crowd started to look different. So you were always trying to have an edge and say, “Okay, what is that next hot thing?” And sometimes we would hear about artists and some of them go, “This artist is blowing up in this part of the country.” Or like, “We haven’t heard of it.” But is that going to be the next thing? And a lot of times, especially from the live music perspective, we just take a risk. We would be like, “Okay, we’re going to develop this artists, we think this artist is going to go somewhere.” So we’ll do this early show with this artist and hope that they’re able to come back and sell out later on. And that was a part of the process, you were just always forward looking, forward leaning. You had to be.

Justin Fortier: And so was there a full time or when would a booking manager come into the picture? You started with a three person team. I assume you were part of the booking manager at that point when you had a small team. But as it grew, is that something where that seems like a pretty important position, at least for The Social.

Gerard Mitchell: So at the time, I did mainly the marketing and production. And then my business partner at the time, did the bookings. And it was a two separations there. So just book it, and we’ll figure out how to promote it and we’ll figure out how to produce it. And so booking, it has always been a very full time, full time job. And so I shied away from that. I booked some stuff, but mainly I had a partner who did the booking and I would go in and just operate it, market it, and makes sure that the event went off without a hitch.

Justin Fortier: I think I know that the places like the Vegas casinos, I think they pay their acts quite a bit. And I imagine it seems hard. So, was there often a time where you able to use goodwill of booking artists early to have them come back at a reasonable rate? Or is that something where you usually see them basically say, “Sorry, this is my new rate. Now if you can’t sustain it, come back to your place.”

Gerard Mitchell: It was always a balancing act. The artist was very fan conscious. They are, the artists are very fan conscious so they don’t want the ticket price to be too high. But obviously, as they get bigger, the expenses go up. And so it was always, how can we make this a win for everyone? It always made sense for the price to go up on a ticket. If you came and you played for $10 and then you played for (inaudible) that made sense, 18-month difference. We just had to balance it, we had to look and say, “Okay, the market is willing to pay $15 now because the x unknown quantity versus when it was $10.” And people were like, “Oh, I’ll pay $10 for someone I don’t know.” But it was always a balancing act. Basically, we have a limited amount of seats so we could do it again in this venue, raise the price. But by the third time you come, we’re either going to have to raise the price which would probably be too much for the size venue. So we need to move to a larger venue. And so it’s always balancing, it’s a lot of market analysis. Basically, you’re just constantly trying to play with the numbers to get them to fit and to make sure that everyone is reasonably happy.

Justin Fortier: So in my head, I’m like, “Okay, yeah, that makes sense.” One thing I see now for a lot of venues is dynamic pricing, where they’ve got multiple tiers of tickets that are selling out. And there’s really easy ways to do that now. What was that like, how are people buying tickets when you started out? And how did you do the market analysis because I feel like there’s probably something to learn, that now everything’s so easy to do, that people might forget some of these basic skills that were necessary for you at the beginning. So that’s what I’m looking for.

Gerard Mitchell: Yeah, I don’t know if there was a basic skill as much as it was just constantly trying to crunch the numbers. You had less ticket prices, so you had an advanced ticket and you had a data show ticket and you’re always really trying to figure out your numbers on your advance ticket because you wanted to sell out before the day of show. And then with the advent of larger festivals, the festival started to put in the tiers. And then all the different pricing tiers became a big thing in EDM. So that was very generous specific as well, where we would have outside promoters come in and work with us. And we’re like, “Why do you have 10 ticket tiers, because normal band touring, it was your advanced ticket and your data show.” Now, it’s just totally common you have these early tickets, you have 10 different kinds of ticket tiers, it’s pretty crazy. But it was easier, especially in the 2000s, where we didn’t really have to think about that. We had two different types of ticket tiers, it was easy math, we’d look at, “Okay, we’re 75% sold, we’re 90% sold, we were five days out from the show, we’re going to sell out or 50% sold, and we’re two days from the show. I’m hoping to make it to 75%.” So it was very easy analysis as you went along. The ticket tiers have made the sales better, I think. But the analysis is more difficult.

Justin Fortier: I put on a couple of events in college and I’ve always found this dynamic, that so many of the sales would come in the last couple days. How do you deal with that as a promoter? I assume, that seems like the most, the thing that would give me gray hair, if I did this job.

Gerard Mitchell: For me, it was always genre specific. So there were certain genres where you knew as soon as you put it on sale, the tickets were going to go. And then certain other genres where you put it on sale and you didn’t even look at the ticket count until you got within 20 days of the show. You might put it on sale 45 days in advance and know that you’re gonna sell 2-3% of the tickets, those first 30 days and all the rest of them at the very end. And that was just a part of it. And look, and there were certain nights where you’re like, “Oh, it’s coming late, it’s coming late.” And then you’re like, “I’m at the door, and it’s not coming”, or there are other nights where you’re like, “I gotta sell 60% of these tickets at the door.” And this has been on sale for 45 days. And then they show up. I spent a lot of my time whether I was at the venue or at home doing other work, on text with high production manager going, “What’s the ticket count? Where are we at? How many people are walking up?” It was pretty crazy and it was nerve-racking. But you got to a certain sense of, “I understand the crazy, the crazy’s normal.” Shows are gonna walk up no matter what, because it’s the genre, it’s the crowd. And certain other shows they’re not, and if you don’t have those tickets sold going in, what is what you get, you’re not gonna sell it out. So it was over time you just gained the experience and understood very specifically how the market reacted to certain genres of music.

Justin Fortier: And being in a college town, how did you continuously win over new crops of people coming in? You had mentioned that you had some relationships with shops and trying to get fliers up in those places? Is there any sort of, I don’t know if it’s ritual as people are coming of age in your city to say, “Hey, these are places you want to come to?” Or is that not as much the market you’re going after?

“The tools that are available today, it’s phenomenal. You can do everything from your laptop; you can spin up and promote large events.” – Gerard Mitchell

Gerard Mitchell: I think that from the live music perspective, obviously a lot of times it was just the talent you were booking. And there were a lot of acts especially in the early mid 2000 that were getting a lot of play on college radio so the college students were hearing about them. We were marketing on the college radio and that was how we got the audience. So the talent drove the audience later on in the late 2000. It was started to be more marketing focused, where you actually had digital marketing where you could do social media marketing. I still remember that transition of I don’t have to print fliers as much. I have to sit in front of the computer. Now I have a marketing team that sits in front of the computer and they’re posting all the time and they’re reaching out to all these fans online. It was definitely a unique time. And now I look at it and I go the tools that are available today. I’ve been out of the promotion game for almost four years now. And the tools that are available today it’s phenomenal. You can do everything from your laptop, you can spin up and promote large events. And you don’t have to go anywhere. That was not the case. That was not the case. And not that really not that many years ago.

Justin Fortier: Yeah, I’m trying to think of now there’s so many things like playlists and Spotify and listening history that you could really target exactly who would listen to your song. And so probably way more specific about knowing who can sell out a show more than just going on to college radio. So you’ve been out of the promotion game for a bit, but you are an advisor at Lyte. And I saw that you helped set up their engineering offices, so Lyte’s a ticketing app that I’m familiar with, they were a reseller partner to a festival where basically the show sold out. And then fans who were no longer able to go were able to list and get a premium for their tickets. But it was basically a waitlist and then that’s circled out. How did you get involved with that? And did I describe it well? Or what piqued your interest to say, “Yeah, this is something I want to get involved with.”

Gerard Mitchell: It solved a problem for me as a promoter. The Social and The Beacham we’re client number two for Lyte after the Catalyst Club in San Jose. And we were introduced to them by one of the owners of the Catalyst Club. And for me, it solved the problem of constantly getting emails from customers saying, “Is the show sold out?” And I would say, “Yes.” “Can I get any more tickets?” And I would say, “No.” It was like the worst form of customer service. All I could do was continue to say yes and no to to the customers, there was no option. “I can’t go to the show, can I return my ticket?” “No, we don’t have a function for that.” And I remember talking to Ant Taylor for the first time, the CEO of Lyte, and he’s explaining this to me, and I’m like, “Oh, my goodness, that can be really helpful. Because all I do is say no to the customer, which is like the absolute worst customer experience possible.” And so that’s I got involved with it because this is so interesting, because it solves these very simple problems. And entertainment has not been disrupted by technology, it’s still really hasn’t been that disrupted by technology. But we’re talking, I got involved with Lyte in 2016, so not that long ago. We were still just receiving emails from customers that said, “I can’t go to the show because of whatever.” And all we could say was, “Okay, yeah, but you bought the ticket and it’s non refundable.” Yeah, Lyte has really helped to bring the business forward with all their different software products. And it’s good for me at the time, it was just like, “Okay, this solves this very specific problem for me as a promoter. I don’t have to tell the customer NO, all the time. It’s become someone else’s problem. Lyte will deal with this for me.” And that was really good. That was real there.

Justin Fortier: When you went to help, I saw you set up their engineering offices in Eastern Europe. What skills from your operational managing did you bring over there? What were new things you had to learn? I guess what was that experience like?

Gerard Mitchell: So when I got out of the actual concert business at the end of 2017, I started going to San Francisco and actually working with the scale and operation of Lyte. And basically just providing some expertise from being inside the concert business. And simultaneously to that, I had gone back to school to get my MBA in 2016. And that was an eye on, it’s just getting some real theoretical knowledge to go with my practical skills so that I could ease myself out of the concert business. Basically, I was getting to an age where like I’d said, but didn’t want to stay up all night. And so all of these things happened at the same time being introduced to Lyte and going in and running their operations department for a while. And then combined with doing that, and trying to help them hire new engineers in America and the difficulties of that. And then having the head of engineering come and go, “Oh, I think there’s this European solution that we could potentially do.” “Yeah, okay.” All I’ve done all my life is start and scale businesses, I can help do that. And while I was in business school, I spent some time in Estonia, which was in the former Soviet Union. So I was like, I totally understand the Eastern European thing. Let’s just give it a go. And that was the skill sets.

Justin Fortier: Interesting. And now that you’ve seen the concert business, and then the software business, I’m sure they each have their own challenges. As a young person, I’m looking out at the world saying, “What do I want to put 10 years into?” And they’re definitely different ways to help out in the ecosystem. Let’s say if I wanted to be a concert promoter, I have an idea what that would entail. I’d be closer probably to the things that are like most exciting about the music business, but a little bit more chaotic. And something I could always just buy a ticket to somebody else’s event with my whatever money I earned from a software company. Now that you’ve seen these different types of businesses, what do you think about the the promotion business? And if you were young again, was that something you dive into again, now that you’ve got that?

“If you’re in entertainment, that intersection of entertainment and technology is where you want to be moving forward.” – Gerard Mitchell

Gerard Mitchell: I was adjacent to technology, and didn’t know it. The concert business, if I had to do all over again, I would have paid a little bit closer attention and dove deeper into the technology business, but I didn’t. There was this parallel business that was going on. And my initial exposure to it was through a company called Ticket Fly. They don’t exist anymore but they were a ticketing company. And they were one of the first sort of real digital focused ticketing companies. And The Social was one of their first 25 clients as the first client in the Southeast. And as a promoter, it was the first time that I had total control over my ticketing. Everything was within this technology interface. I remember working with them a lot and saying, “Hey, this is great, but could you add this feature?” And then they would do new features and they would come to me and go, “Can you test this feature?” And I’m like, “Ah, this feature is great, it just needs this one little thing.” And at the time, I wasn’t putting it together, that was all a part of product development and this whole technology space. But I loved it, it was a lot of fun and as a small promoter, as an independent promoter, for me it was all about trying to gain an edge. What edge can I gain over the larger competition? And so it was the ability to do all of your email marketing tied into, all of your ticket sellers tied into, all the data you’re receiving, all at the click of a button. And I was like, “God, this is amazing!” But at the time, I still didn’t understand exactly, this was I think Ticket Fly came about probably 2009 at the time. So wasn’t aware of the larger technology business and the whole world of startups. And I wish I was, and once I started to really understand it, I was like, “Oh, that’s where the future is coming.” It’s all these technology startups that are ultimately going to disrupt legacy businesses. And so for me, now it’s all about being a part of those types of businesses that are basically just going to disrupt all facets of entertainment no matter what. So my advice, I tell people this all the time, “Go into the technology space and into the part of it that’s adjacent to wherever you are today.” So if you’re in entertainment, that intersection of entertainment and technology is where you want to be moving forward. Any industry you’re in, you want to be at that intersection of that legacy, industry and technology. I think that everything’s moving that way.

Justin Fortier: Yeah, it’s really interesting to be able to have a best practice in a box somehow, where maybe one venue in California that you would had to talk to, or know the owner about how they did this little ticketing trick or something they do. And now a company can come to you and say, “Hey, yeah, we found out that it’s 10% easier to sell tickets if you do it like this, or if you do this tiered pricing or test out this thing, we can automatically run that for you and see if you can see if we can market that or you should be collecting your own email list or phone numbers. That’s an important part because even though our platform helps you mark it on Facebook and Instagram, the costs are probably going up there. So you need to have that.” Yeah, it’s definitely really interesting to think about taking those advancements and just helping distribute them across the entire country or world.

Gerard Mitchell: Yeah, and it’s simple thing is the functionality of doing tiered ticketing wasn’t even available. Even 10/12 years ago, it wasn’t available. Not to do it at a really base functional level, it didn’t exist. You couldn’t just go into a system and make seven/eight tiers of tickets. It was very hard, it was a very manual process. And then all of a sudden the technology advanced and you could do it. And so it innovated the business. But it’s still to me very hard to think about the things that were not available not too long ago in the business. It was still very much done by hand and I still think it to a certain degree, some of it still is, it is getting better. It is getting disrupted by technology, but there’s still a long way to go which is exciting. There are a lot of things that are going to change.

Justin Fortier: And your expertise came from operating hospitality. And now you’re focused on investing, advising, I know you have a podcast network, how do you think about what companies make sense to understand? Are you looking to just really broaden and invest in companies that are teaching you something new or something where you can provide value? How do you think about that?

Gerard Mitchell: I think about gaps in the industry or in things. Gaps that haven’t been filled by a certain technology. And a lot of it, I just look at my everyday life and go, that’s not here, it’s not there. This technology doesn’t exist yet. You’re still doing this by hand. I look at it in the music business, I look at, for instance, Music Publishing, everything is still done by hand. They don’t have smart contracts. So I was involved in a Juneteenth event that Juneteenth Unity Fest, and we had to clear a bunch of music. It was supposed to be in person but obviously, because of the pandemic, it was a virtual event. There was all this music that had to be cleared. It was all done by hand, it was all emails and phone calls, there was not this just protocol where you can go in and go, “Hey, I need to clear these 10 songs and check these boxes and this is what we’re willing to pay.” And then someone on the other side, check yes or no, and it’s done in an hour. It was a laborious task. And I was like, “Wow, it’s still this way, it’s still no one’s cracked the code.” And that’s just one example. But I see it all over entertainment. But then I see it but just in places in media, where media is still done the same way. I was in my car the other day, and I happen to accidentally turn on the radio and I go, “That’s still a thing? They’re still radio?” Because to me, it’s podcasts are the future. Podcasts are the most entertaining thing happening. There’s still advertisers who are advertising on the radio, I’m like, “Wow, this is crazy.” So I think there are a lot of legacy industries that are going to be disrupted. And every time I see an opportunity to invest in something new, I’m just like, “What is this disrupted?” And it’s very easy to see. Okay, five years from now, that’s not going to exist, and this is going to be the new thing. And yet through the concert business, I’ve been able to see that in real time and really live through, I used to hand out flyers, now, I’m advertising on Instagram. And when I first started advertising on Instagram, it was costing me less than a penny to get clicks. Because no one was doing it, it was still so new. So I’ve really seen how innovation has changed. And now you know how it is, you can’t go through an Instagram feed without seeing an ad on every third photos, an ad. So it’s really changed and everything’s changed like that. So you just look for the gaps. That’s all I can say, look for the gaps.

Justin Fortier: Yeah, that’s interesting. The one thing I was listening to an interview of REHAB, who’s a performing artist, but probably mainstage EDC, that type of person. And he was saying that he would always go to as an artist and promoting his personal brand, always try to hunt down the cutting edge platform as well, because that’s where you can get the cheapest and impressions and get the most lift. We’re talking about the, I think it’s called synchronization rights or the ability to have music licensed for either both a live event or put inside of marketing material. The last person actually just interviewed for this podcast, his name’s Josh Gruss, and he runs Round Hill Music, which is a private equity firm that buys up old music primarily publishing catalogs, not the music’s masters themselves. And they have an entire division, I think an office of 10 or so people in LA that I think their entire job is like basically answering the phone and somebody saying, “Hey, we want to play like this ACD song in our movie.” I wonder what the future you’re talking about smart contract with music. I think a lot of people are thinking about that. What would it be like to collaborate and do that creative work in a way with much lower friction where you could to say, “Yeah, well I want to use this. Let’s use it I meet the criteria.” I think that’s really exciting. But I’ve seen one called audience maybe, but I haven’t seen many projects in that space yet. And I wonder when you look at somebody trying to disrupt or see a gap, how do you think about these legacy interests that maybe or just ways of doing the thing, “Okay, these people won’t actually have a chance at making something new here.” I think music probably has quite a bit of that, you’ve got a couple really large players, that they’ve got large music catalogs. I’m actually drifting off here. And I’m almost answering my own question in my head.

“You have to fundamentally understand the music business and the entertainment business to disrupt it. And I think a lot of people who’ve come at it from a technology standpoint, don’t fundamentally understand the legacy history of the business.” – Gerard Mitchell

Gerard Mitchell: I think it’s a good question and it takes you in a lot of different directions. So you have to fundamentally understand the music business and the entertainment business in order to disrupt it. And I think a lot of people who’ve come at it from a technology standpoint, don’t fundamentally understand the legacy history of the business. And so it makes it really difficult to disrupt the same players that are in the business today. We’re in the business 30, 40, even 50 years ago. So it’s all institutional knowledge. And in order to disrupt that, you really, you have to be at a scale like Spotify. You’re looking at on the contract and the music publishing side, you’re looking for a player that comes in at that scale. And so you have to have a huge amount of capital to come in at that scale and go, “I’m going to disrupt all of music publishing.” And it may take someone like a Spotify, right? Because they’re doing a part of that music publishing function within their accounting function. So it may take them to become the ones that say, “Okay, we already have all of this infrastructure. We’re going to parse out part of this infrastructure and make it a standard. We’re going to standardize what we do in our back room with accounting, and royalty, and standardize that into music publishing.” And that may be how it happens, because they’re the only ones who could, are big enough who could come in and go, “Okay, we’re going to do it this way now. We’re going to handle all the rights.” So it’s some big player saying, we built up enough intellectual capital to be able to really move this entire business. That’s the only way I see it going.

Justin Fortier: But that’s interesting. The Spotify part makes me think of Zillow as well, where at Spotify largest source of revenue is Universal Music Group already. So they built this tech company, but they really are now tied to that. Zillow had this idea where I think they wanted to do what they’re heading towards now, which is like, helping people just buy homes on the internet, and almost disintermediate. But then, in order to get revenue, they ended up saying, “Okay, actually, the people who will primarily use this and pay us are real estate agents, given the way the world works.” And so then they had real estate agents that kind of almost locked them into, “Wow, this is how we get money, we have to give up that source and maybe cause a fight.” And so I bet Spotify will be able to do that, that does make sense where currently they’re getting whatever, $9 billion a year from Universal Music Group. But I bet if they know the future, Spotify has done a lot of pivots. One last kind of question about when you’re getting in artists, or like working with the the players that are in an area, what was your pitch for artists to come play at your venue? I know, you typically have to work through maybe a tour manager for them or a booking manager, if they’ve got an agent. Money is always important paying the amount they want. But what else were you doing to say, “Hey, this is a good spot for you to spend one of your 50 weekends a year or something to come to our place because you only have so many options.” Were you trying to say, “We’ve got this rabid fan base, these people will help convert for you.” What was that pitch like to them?

Gerard Mitchell: It was the fan base, the fan base and ‘you haven’t been here.’ A lot of times, we were doing a lot of artists and saying, “Hey look, you’ve actually never been to Orlando and your fan base is here.” And then once they would come back and they would come back and they would come back, but the pitch was always the fan base is here. And talking about technology again. Now, the artist knows the fan base’s here. Yeah, seven, eight years ago, they didn’t have the technology, they didn’t know. Now Spotify tells you this is where you’re getting the listeners and so you can dial into that. But before it was like, “Okay, just, you know, trust me, the the college radio station is getting tons of requests for your music. It’s getting played here.” But it was all anecdotal. It wasn’t data driven. And that’s the beauty of what’s happened in the business recently is that things are data driven. And the booking agents know the data now, but these are still very new. These are, I’m talking five, six years or not that far into everyone in the concert ecosystem using the data. It’s still super new but yeah, back in the day, it was just, I gotta convince you that the fan base is here and hopefully you’ve got some type of data point, maybe you’ve got some fan club members who are from the area. But it was, it’s crazy to think about how anecdotal everything was. And I always joke about the cannon string era, because that’s what it felt like, there wasn’t, it was just like you were talking to someone on a cannon string, there was no technology. There was nothing gluing it together, even though mobile technology was happening. There was no technology within the entertainment business at all.

Justin Fortier: Yeah and anything you did for these artists that made them, besides just delivering a good crowd to them, that makes them want to come back or any sort of hospitality for them that you feel helped make your venue, one that people want it to be at both, from the artist side, and maybe even from the fan side.

Gerard Mitchell: I think it was trying to deliver a consistent product for the artist, even backstage, so saying, “Hey, the artist wants this. This is their writer, this is their catering, this is how they want everything.” And very early on, we learned that if we, being the small guy, did everything exactly the way they wanted, they would remember that because a lot of times when they moved up the scale to the bigger companies, it was more cookie cutter, they wouldn’t get the specific tea that the artist wanted. But we were willing to send our production catering people out to Whole Foods to get the exact stuff that they wanted, so that when they got to the green room, everything was perfect. And that was the product that we wanted to always deliver. It was to set perfect service for the artist and then that helped them have a better show.

Justin Fortier: Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time. This was fun, I learned a lot. Yeah, this is great. Thank you.

Gerard Mitchell: Alright, cool. Yeah, thank you. I hope I answered all your questions. We went in a lot of different directions.

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