IVW21: ICW Rob Wilmshurst, CEO of SEE Tickets at The Boileroom

so [Music] [Applause] [Music] we're all getting rained on [Music] hey [Music] hey [Music] for me today i'm getting rained on but i know who to call on you always make my days golden but when this sun shines through your face [Music] hey [Music] hey [Music] oh when the sun shines through oh when the sun shines your face [Music] hey [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hey evening friends and fellow music fans thank you for joining us tonight on our second ivw in conversation with um tonight it's my pleasure to welcome our guest um ceo of one of the biggest ticketing companies in the world that's it i like drum roll please um rob wilm test thank you thanks for having me yeah welcome to the boardroom welcome to guildford yeah welcome to guildford too yeah fantastic thank you um yeah you haven't been here before actually i haven't been here no we've only met once yeah we met at um when we won the spirit of the scene award i knew it was a war i couldn't remember what it was but i know you're about to sign with someone the next day yeah and i had a few drinks so i thought i'll chance my arm yeah and here we are so i think yeah two years later good client thank you so i'm going to turn the clock back to nottingham let's go to nottingham it's early 90s are you wearing some pretty cool shell suit not attractive no i i'd long hair and torn up converse nice various punk rock t-shirts or whatever i've been into at the time uh there's a record shop way ahead records yeah um and a chat called david brett yeah i'll cut a long story short here my dad said to me never get a job line in bed with long hair and i was uh i was studying computing at what was then called trent polly university now sounds bad and um i was doing a placement year i didn't take things particularly seriously because i was going to be a rock star it didn't matter i was in bed unemployed because i lost my job and a guy walked in he said jonah come and help out for two two weeks cash in hand at the record shop and i thought nothing else to do so i went in the guy dave after a week he you know i worked hard because that's what i do and he came downstairs with some notes he said is is the money's a bit more for you for working so hard yeah i thought a little thing went off in my head and i thought well he's a decent guy it's all right here looking around everyone's cool um so i stayed and because i was doing computing to get a long long story very short you know dave was into computers and he sort of and well i'm cutting a long story very short after a while you just thought you know why don't you have a go writing us some software so we'd be more efficient you know right and was that was that for selling records at that point we were selling tickets to people it was it was tickets i'll tell you you know we're going to talk about you know we've got an hour here so we're going to stick 30 years into an hour really probing questions but i darted around because obviously dave was a fantastic guy he's a fantastic guy he gave me free reign really and it was strange because i'd sort of after a while i'd had enough and i thought you know maybe i should go get what i thought was a proper job and he said don't go he said have six months learn what you can about software development and write something that helps so first off i started with ticketing then i messed up with epos systems for record shops and stuff like that um but after yeah sorry and i don't know i was going to say at that time i guess when people wanted to go to a show they would line up outside they used the venue when we started well they were selling tickets when i started but it was over the counter it was 50p you know five pound ticket 50p yeah and so if they were local gigs leicester you know leicester de montfort hall or or rock city or whatever it might have been a lot of local things narrowboat or whatever it might be in knots at the time and so you know customers used to chance their arms stand outside the record shop we'll select a disc which is a fantastic record shop in nottingham at the time as well or rock city and we start books of tickets there's no inter connectivity there's no systems there's a book of tickets you sold out and you know some guy i'd run down and give you some more um so that was interesting and then computers came along and it was a little bit more efficient but yeah it was it was very much cash and then credit cards came in and after when you started taking credit cards you realized that if you actually put a phone number on an ad people would phone it the phone would ring you pick it up you write the order on an envelope you wrote the card number into the card charging machine it's called a pdq machine and then you put that envelope over there and then someone put the tickets in it and lick a stamp and off it would go yeah and that's where that started wow yeah good fun yeah i bet it sounds it so so you start selling uh tickets to local shows um fast forward to like 1996 uh oasis worth yeah and you shift a quarter of a million tickets inside a day and you take 60 000 fans to a show and a fleet of 1200 coaches yeah that was that's all most of that was true i was going to say did you just have to lick a lot of stamps on that i think i don't know what the limited limitations are of whatever but you know when we got that how did that yeah how did that come about well look we i think between 91 and sort of 95 we developed the business and started focusing more on tickets and the software became more and more efficient and we started to extend ourselves past the local area an oasis or the promoters buying oasis or whatever the managing ignition management uh we're very much about the band and we were very much about servicing the promoter and the band it wasn't about us and it's still not about us you know and they wanted a free phone phone number that had to be answered oasis hotline and all the rest of it and there was another ticketing company let's say they're american let's pretend they were called ticketmaster and they didn't have the same say ethics the right word but the same standpoint as us so we got the majority of the tickets and yeah what number did you say 250 000 tickets in a day yeah yeah a quarter of a million tickets inside a day give it give or take a month you know um the store yeah the headline was that but i don't i don't mind telling the truth now because this is a long time ago this is 25 years ago and we had some computers of course we did but the computer's power back in the mid-90s was relatively slow so we had backup of bits of paper and all the rest of it so yeah i mean but you wouldn't believe i mean it was insane we crashed we used to crash the local phone exchanges bt used to hate us uh diamond cable at the time used to hate us and you know the cable provider at the time we had to phone up every time we had it on sale we had to phone up and say look this is going to happen and i used to do something called call gapping which they used to push the demand back through the exchanges all the way through the country yeah so you could be calling from say guildford you would get as far as the guilford exchange in a guilford exchange and say no i'm not letting this call go any further you get an exchange uh a gauge tone um so yeah i went to that show i went to i went to i had to have no choice yeah i took my look i took my little brother to that show you didn't go on our buses did you i didn't no i didn't i dropped i drove them forward but i think i think it was forty thousand on the saturday and twenty thousand on the sunday and now the funny story here could we look we were i'm making jokes right there's nothing funny about it at the time and we you know we took everything seriously but the 40 000 coaches on this saturday we they all have their unique numbers right yeah they come into the park at nebworth and we park them up you know we've got the hi-vis vests and the sort of lightsaber type of things and all this rubbish you see airports we park them up and we create a massive map coach 47 bradford coach 21 southampton yeah but the coach drivers thought sod this i want to get out of here early start moving don't they so of course we're all there i have a few beers what's your bunny thing right this is easy we'll go back a few portal cabins some flood lighting and some pa systems and all the rest we'll get them home don't worry about it we go back and we look at our map i think it doesn't look like this anymore oh man you never see anything like it uh you know the the yeah of course we get back before the band finishes and there was like uh like an avenue a tree line avenue memory serves me right here yeah lights go up click and click the click and you see this like a zombie film right they'll come in towards you of course they've all had a few yeah and there comes and they're like they look for the bus and they're all singing where's the boss yeah and then of course they come to the portal cabin honestly it was it was like yeah they're dead yeah dead whatever and how did you get out of that yeah customers are resourceful clients you know a lot of people found their way back and of course we were blocking the exit anyway we weren't going to let coaches go with five people on when he should have had fifty so of course we coordinate ourselves but there were a few cases where i say a few let's say a few hundred or maybe if not a few thousand they say right and we say where do you want to go and they say bradford and go well that's manchester do you want to get on there all right so look it was surrender so we have situations like i was funnily enough i was talking to that my colleague who runs a business called gigantic mark mark gasson a very good friend of mine he went for a walk down by the river in nottingham she lives in nottingham as well yeah and we were laughing about this the other the other the other last friday and he says you remember me in a hotel room and the bus was the phone was going at three in the morning and it was like glasgow council and police saying all these buses you blocked up glasgow city center all these all these oasis fans wanted to want to get the bus to be blocked up the city center honestly it was it was like you know we wouldn't do anything like that again now yeah um but we didn't we did glastonbury in 2008 i think we took 20 000 people or whatever and that was interesting yeah um but a lot were resourceful and uh imaginative business and if a client challenges us to do something we'll have a go yeah so yeah your head offices are in nottingham yeah so why is that why did you guys stay in nottingham is it because that's where you wanted to be did you feel a lot of people i think with businesses think that you have to be in in you know london or you know was it was it because the record shop was there and that's where you said where we started that's where we started look there's an economic reason to be in nottingham there's a little there's a few reasons yeah of course going to london or wherever it might have made some sense but economically i don't think i look back and i think i used to use this as as as sort of sales pitch at the time look you know nottingham's a small city there's little competitive employment if we've gone to london with some of the great people we have in the business at the time and and now we could have lost them to competitors nautical was a relatively cheap city to live in it's a university town so we had you two universities the polly in the uni or the two units as they are now and so we could attract decent and let's say skinned talent from those institutions to work with on a part-time basis and then depending on their aptitude or their willingness to stay or whatever could you know could career them through the business so i think it would became it was an accident you know it was dave's hometown um but the more the longer were there the more it made sense office space was cheap talent was cheap i tell it i mean when i say talent i mean staff um and and you know what we'd find is people sort of grew up in nottingham became attached not and never left the business because there was nowhere else in nottingham really to go yeah and that's not where we were holding them captive wasn't any stockholm syndrome type thing but you know it was it was it was something we sort of cultivated over time and it made sense it was very easy to defend that type of question and economically we could we could run a business slightly cheaper than the other guys and therefore when deals came down to pounds and pence yeah we had the equation in our favor to to to leverage those those those uh those conditions and i think actually if anything now you you can have a business and be anywhere in the world we've found over the last year and i do think that when i open the curtains and the more i think it's drizzling again lisbon sounds nice yeah yeah let's let's not portugal no we'll stay they will stay there i mean we have some fantastic people and that's where we are and that's where we'll stay but yeah it sometimes seems a little bit bizarre when i'm at home outside nottingham and the guy from la phone's up for a chat you know it's like okay yeah so we're you saying the guy from la so we're talking about uh something that started out selling tickets for shows local to nottingham you now have offices in la where else let me let me go let's go let's go let's go from west let's go from west to east let's say uh los angeles yep or nashville a little little thing you know uh then i think we land in we land in nottingham really don't we then we go london yep and then we can go let's go north to amsterdam then groningen yeah we do some stuff in copenhagen with universal music it's not really an office but we've got activity there then we can drop down too we will just go to paris it's a good place to be then marseille yeah which is where the french business started then we can go lisbon and we did have an office in madrid but was also working from home in in um in spain at the moment and berlin and place in berlin there's some great places yeah i think that's i think i've ticked all the boxes oh hang on now we have zurich as well we've acquired a business in switzerland serves zurich so yeah amazing so i don't i can't i think i always say 10 i know if that was 10. but i think that's about right yeah so what does your day-to-day look like so i mean i guess from pre-covert or in covid i suppose pre-coded you know like you said you went from from uh you know putting tickets in envelopes to then developing software to then managing director as a lucky person really i don't think in a more professional environment someone like me would have found this position let's be let's be realistic here but and as i said before this interview is about maybe yeah we make a lot of mistakes i made a lot of mistakes but we were in entrepreneurial business and we made money and we kind of got away with things and all the rest of it i'm very proud of what we've done but to your point about what the business what the business is about today it's not it's not about me obviously i'm here representing the business and giving you some personal anecdotes and whatnot but it's more about it's about team development now is is is really the thing i'm interested in and this is again about learning from my mistakes or telling my kid to learn from my mistakes don't make your own it was delegation was a huge problem when i was when i was younger yeah uh stress was a huge problem um trusting people was a huge problem yeah and overextending or over-promising was a huge problem you know all those things i think with the framework around us and supportive shareholders we've had as a business as you know i think they've seen more good of me than bad and i think i've made more good decisions and bad ones but i think to that point looking back and not trying to repeat those mistakes is more about it to me it's about developing the staff and trusting the staff and certainly as we if we go from pre-covid to you know where we are today and you know touch some wood yeah there you go like death we get past this there's some fantastic talent or characters in the business that sort of popped up above the parapet that i may not have spotted or we may not have spotted in a more normal day today come in the office sit in your box do your job go home tick boxes all that type of you know this was a is for everyone it's a surrender situation and everyone has to mock in but you know some people may be mucking in a slightly different way or more energetic way or more imaginative way to solving a problem so for me it's this has been a real eye-opener and i was saying to a colleague a finance director cfo lady called lyan who's been with the business 25 years like this week or something that you know i think personally i've become better at managing people yeah um because we've had no choice and i think i wish i'd learned this like 30 years ago what i've learned you know is to trust people because they're not all idiots and if you'd have asked me 30 years ago i'd have been more idiots yeah so i think oh i know someone's going to complain hello the boiler room uh yes uh hang on just a second hang on um yeah yeah i can definitely ask him oh dear okay question is um oh hang on a minute yeah no yeah i have a big drink for us okay yep ben from gosming wants to know okay uh do you have any rock and roll moments from meeting bands backstage uh no that's a really fast answer i've met a few people but nothing rock and roll i think um look we're a business that we don't look i think it would be fairly easy if we were that sort of outgoing set of people to force away into a situation to have fun that's not our job we're here to do a professional job yeah we love what we do you know with fans generally of what it is we sell and you know we discussed before this thing you know our portfolio of of clients is diversified away from music or we've extended from music music is very much a big part of the business but no sadly not i don't have any rock and roll stories i wish i did but i don't they're probably sorry ben i've got nothing interesting to tell you at all so there you are i wanted to touch on um when i was doing a bit of research um that c really uh were sort of pioneers looking at you weren't you weren't afraid at the changing sort of landscape of how people were purchasing gig tickets not not really he wasn't afraid of anything really yeah because it was always like we're always happy to be still going because we always felt like the little guys but i think in in in our um industry you know i remember when when uh music you know went streaming yeah you know people like spotify no it's never gonna you know people are never gonna stream music and pay a subscription fee that's mad that won't happen um and so i guess my question to you is kind of one how do you uh diversify constantly diversify and now looking at how live streaming yeah we're looking at another model altogether aren't we now we're saying well actually tickets live streaming do you think c will have to diversify kind of again do you feel that before you'll do that or do you think other companies are there and prepared to do it and you don't need to anymore oh no no no no we never think we don't need to do anything i think we're always i'm saying this to me chairman actually the other day a guy called simon in paris great guy and i said i think you know personally and i think the business has in its head always been looking over its shoulder or looking at the competition you know i think sometimes sometimes i i'm i'm i'm i'm baffled by some of the numbers the business behind the business i think wow really we did that um but we don't take it for granted so yeah we're very have a very keen eye on what's going on in the marketplace from a competitive angle but also from a technological angle i think you know as i said before i studied computing so i got a rough idea how all that sort of stuff clicks together i don't really fully understand all of it today of course not but i know enough and i remember when the internet came along and first off it was a bit of a novelty and i remember a particular promoter he did he'd done a deal with a guy who created a website and he's basically it's like this is how it will get up this is how it works someone will order a ticket off this website and you get an email and then you type it into your computer and i'm like that stuff sounds like a load of crap to me and then we started looking and thought well there's something else that's a funny story this is and then we started looking into the internet what it meant and we started to build some rudimentary extension to our ticketing platform so you could sell online any easter egg stuff this is true everything i'm saying today just for emphasis is good this is this i'm just this is the first time i've remembered this for a very long time right i used to have an office on the top floor of this in the building in nottingham and on the on the on the desk on the corner by the window was the computer and that was the internet computer and every time we sold a ticket through this it went ping right then we did a spy skills right when was that well i can't remember is it 1998 97 i don't know 98. no it's definitely 98 98 and it was it was a saturday morning something we came in oh what a mess and then we realized there's something in this internet thing so we put a bit of money behind it and i think and this i think this does play to your point a little bit we had to ask ourselves what we wanted to be and i think it started the dot-com boom it was all about if you had if put com after your name you're worth a fortune right yeah but our business if you go back to that oasis point i made about the oasis telephone number being answered as the oasis hotline we thought well hang on a minute if you build websites for clients so make it easy for a client to launch a website yeah right don't say just put our website on your ad because we're up against ticketmaster we didn't have the brand right yep so i remember going to a few clients to say look we'll build you your website what do you mean well build your website give your website you go get the domain name and blah blah blah and if you take um a site like gigs and tours dot com big site huge um owned by sgm concerts huge yeah that was how that came about yeah and we still run that to that day so i think our right then it was a it was a you know perfect intersection between technology and and branding and custom demand and i think you know when i look at the the landscape now that every every you know we were doing white labels before they called white labels i remember saying someone's saying to me some about white label what's he mean i thought you meant 12-inch thing you know yeah um so i think we got it right on that day whether i answered your question or not i don't know but i think on that you know that particular point in time we it was a perfect junction is like which way are we going to go are we going to be a dot-com brand and try and be big and make loads of money by bullshitting or are we going to service the the clients or the customers or whatever and we've always held that ethic that and i said it you know to a prospect today which which we which we signed it's not about us it's not not about us at all it's about you the producer the investor the artist whatever the venue and it's about your customers we are just the conduit and we have to make sure your customer gets the best experience from us because we are extension of your organization so you own the data and blah blah blah it's really put a lot of stuff on the table um towards the end of the 90s that ordinarily i think our competitors might not have done uh but it stood us in good stead and i think those were the foundations of the business as they as they are today along with the you know the long-serving team that we still have in the business so i think i think we've retained that that that ethic if that if that's the right word there's certainly the attitude's still there you know well actually um looking talking about late uh late 90s as well i wanted to pick up that um you uh way ahead um were the sole agents for the diana museum yeah and we had a little chat before before we went live about firstly um uh what a challenge that that must have been i can imagine it would everyone was probably interested lots of people wanting to purchase tickets um okay there's there's a there's an interview where you um discuss that many callers were emotional believing that they were actually calling all swap and wanting to leave messages of condolence um and within i think it says within four days a hundred and forty thousand tickets have been sold out 152. that was crazy yeah tell me about sort of firstly how how how that came about and then sexually i came about i have to put jokes aside so of course we're talking about something that's you know emotional just to people but when it came about a chappie i won't use his name just in case i don't think i'm giving anything away but a guy came up as a representative from from diana's family estate or orthopedic northamptonshire and he said i'm so and so and i'm you know i've heard you can help us with so-and-so and blah blah it's like yeah and again it was before the internet and it was very much a custom job we want you to produce an invitation or a letter yeah you you take the booking and then you mail merge it and you send a letter with a family salon and all this type of stuff is very very personalized you know but at the time as i said it was pre-internet and this was a global thing so 24 hours a day you knew what time zone you were in by who was calling so you know you'd get you know you'd go around the world so you'd be up 24 hours a day in the japanese would be on the phone like two in the morning and we were reliant on because we never we did had no idea what this was going to do and it was he was turn the news on in the morning and be a reporter outside or thorpe in north america saying inside this building's 100 operators and all the rest of it i'm not watching the tv thinking no there's about 30 people in this office in nottingham but anyway yeah put that to one side but no it was it was a real challenge right now we'd sell something like that in an hour if that yeah but it took all week and and what was it like having people call up thinking that they were actually it was hard we had a representative from the estate embedded with us for duration cedia something nice lady and so look it was it was a high-profile thing yeah were we the right business at the time i don't know did we do a good job i think we did we did it for a few years before it sort you know okay helps me these things diminish um did we care yes we did um was it good for our business i think it was yeah um but yeah it was one of the big diversification things that landed in our lap it wasn't wasn't strategy at all but it did open the doors to other things coming from outside of music so the business started to change from that point but it was it was it was tough i mean it really was tough yeah you know you're there 24 hours a day sleeping on the floor thinking this is not going to start and of course you had other clients let me see this is an important point client's phone up saying none of our customers can get through if you don't sort this out you're only business and you have to take that stuff seriously and okay we might be making we weren't making over fist i've almost said that but it wasn't true it's a very cheap deal um and we think we can clear this you can't the right whole of the world you're phoning your office in nottingham yeah you can't make them go away there's nothing you can do you just have to weather the store but that's what we did um but yeah it was uh interesting time but uh and i wanted to pick up on you you said about diversifying um we're diversifying in the sense of not just selling uh tickets to musical you know music concerts and gigs um was there a point for you that you actually thought right we need to you know we need to look for different clients i know exactly when it was because you had a company called sfx came in who became clear channel yeah and then became live nation as we know it today and they bought overnight sort of 25 or 30 of our client list essentially by volume wow like now what we're going to do wow at that point it's just critical time because you think right this is not good this is not good it's not good and we started looking at consumer exhibitions and the first one we signed funny enough is the ideal home show which at the time was almost 100 years old so that was a household name yeah yeah again we i think we had the right story the right pricing and all the rest of it and then from that spun off a load of other activity of that type um but again you know we i'd like to give you a professional view on strategy and all the rest of it and five year and ten year plans but i won't lie to you i've got a five-minute plan some of the times no it's a slightly unprofessional thing for me to say but no i think sometimes we're a business where a business has to react to the conditions of the market yeah someone knocks on the doors and says i've got this do you want to do it you say yes or you say no you say no and that could be it you say yeah we're a business that tries to say yeah but as i said earlier we're not a business that says yes and worries about how we're going to do it we're a business that says yes in confidence and total uh conviction that we can provide that service to that customer on that client every time it goes yeah me too hello yes yep okay yep i can definitely ask him yep okay so we have uh emily from london who wants to know what made you stay with sea tickets for they put 22 years is that 30. 30 years i was way ahead before yeah what we know 20 21 aren't we thanks for the question 99 uh i don't know i have no idea glutton glutton for punishment no no i think uh i think obviously that's a personal question yeah um i think it's a challenge really and working with with friends and in an industry that i enjoy and there's been times i won't lie i thought forget this i think 2003 ish i thought i don't want to do this anymore and 2 000 12 13 i thought i've had enough you get those crises really yeah and it still does challenge you then you still find it a challenge yeah absolutely some days you wake up in the morning but that's you know it's not often and the older you get the more experience you get the more resilient you get but there are times you think is at it and you think well if it's it's pretty good yeah really and certainly in in these times yeah you know very very very happy to have the shareholders we've got in in vivendi they've been very supportive of the business so i think it's really it's you know when i have that yeah it's a good question what made me stay i think the challenge but also the times i thought that's probably enough for me it's probably the thinking stepping back and realizing the network of friends in in in clients or colleagues or shareholders or whatever and a little bit of you know that's what i do what else i'm gonna do i don't know no idea i often think that myself i think am i actually unemployable now because i've been working for myself for 15 years i've run my own my own company you kind of think about your unemployability you've probably got transferable skills but you do i'm not sure i think they're very much damaged now i i think you know when you get in your groove you do what you do and you stick to it and i look at some of our clients and i won't mention names but they stick to their guns and i they sometimes are an inspiration to me yeah because i think right you're you're you're doing and yeah i'd like to you know yeah i do get inspiration from certain quarters there's a handful of people i look at in life uh and dave's a good example the original founder i don't want to say too much about him because it's not it's not right for me to you know characterize him in any way but he's he was an inspiration there's been a few other people in my life that you know the current chairman has helped me a lot um you know certainly in 2012 or whatever it was he said don't go it would get better and it certainly got better yeah you know and there's other people i want to name check too many people because it'd be unfair because i'd probably miss people out um but i think it's a support of people this make you step back and think nah it's not it's not my crisis here this is there is no crisis this is this is good this is good so stick to it you know so i want to um uh touch upon um secondary ticketing and and how i guess back in the day where you were putting tickets in envelopes and ticket touts and yeah yeah old school yeah yeah that that going from something like that to really what the challenges that you face now as a ticketing company yeah so that's a good question yeah the oasis um conversation was a very interesting one earlier because because that does remind me of those days where you would do say take people on coaches to an event and the towns knew how that worked they knew coach drive would more than likely have a couple of tickets so customers didn't get them yeah it was a race between us and attempts to get to the coach driver with some official id to say we are from where ed will see tickets if you've got any spare tickets give them to us and we'll sort the customer out so towns have gotten kind of clever so towns you know i think towns to a degree serve some some some utility in certain sections not to us you know but they were a fabric of they were part of the fabric and you know if you're a customer and you wanted to get a gig rock up and the guy might sell you a ticket or he might not when it went industrial and the terminology change went from touting or scalping what you would call it suddenly became secondary yeah legit almost legitimizing it yeah i'm not a fan of it at all as adam that you know we want to call earlier yeah you know would say you know we've we've never been part of that i'm not gonna yeah i'm not gonna call out competitors that may or may not have engaged in this thing but it was never something we wanted to do and you know when we've got people like glastonbury you know on the books it's just doesn't make business sense it makes no sense from a con consumer perspective and then obviously all this stuff was going on and we launched something called fun to fun i mean i would have to give give credit to twickets for coming out with this ethical resell platform we thought well hang on we can do this as well um so no i've never never been a fan of of that the challenge at the moment i think is largely neutralized because artists promoters and everything else are coming up their own mechanics and yeah digital ticketing and non-transferable lists and the glass free example is a great one the photo ticket you can't get around that one and you sell it to your twin brother or sister and that's about it yeah um so we look we do our best but again though this is a very important point it's not our place we have a view and we have utilities and systems and all the rest of it to block it if the client wants us to do but we're not we're not policemen are you involved in that process say for something like glastonbury do you work with them to say right how do we how you know how do we work on this uh you know purchasing a a ticket for last week like you said i think you have to be consulted with them yeah yeah you have to upgrade your photo and then you say well actually you know well if you did this they someone might do that or that yeah you kind of no absolutely no they are a lot you know i won't say too much about them either because they know themselves yeah better than i do but they are a business or a family business that's built a phenomenal cultural uh institution if you can call it that and they know exactly what they want to know how it should be done yeah and we either do it or we don't do it yeah uh and of course yeah we have got conversations and very open conversations it's look you know we could fly around the world with glastonbury and we can open doors with that with that with that with that client we're very very proud to have them on the books but again it's it points to our resilience or adaptiveness or imagination um to how we deal with with clients and their customers so they hated ticketing and they're like they're sorry scalping or touting whatever you want to call it and they you know they had licensing problems and all the restaurants they just need that and the glass we did you know how hot these things are they could sell out in 25 minutes yeah they say those tickets would go for thousands of pounds yeah they would yeah right they would so it's absolutely absolutely essential that something was done about it and they came up with this well they had this technological solution which we argued wouldn't work in the mud we came up with a very simple thing to replicate it with you know with that with those guys and it's worked really really well it doesn't work for everything because it's a you know as you said you i think is you know the tone there was like you register a photo and you do this and you do that it's a bit of work yeah but yeah people are prepared to do it aren't they because they won't they want it the event well they're prepared to do it because it's the only way they can get tickets but it's fair right there's not like a free-for-all and then someone pays like 250 quid or whatever it might be they these days and five seconds later it's up on some secondary or touting site for two and a half grand and is that why like like you said fanta fan was launched in 2017 to enable people to resell tickets but uh face it was it was our position yeah it was it was like we never made any money out of it we won't make any money out of it but at the time you know people are trying to justify all this stuff um and there was i think it's a fanfare alliance and all sorts of stuff we thought we have to anchor ourselves to some point here and okay we'll always do what the client wants that overrides everything but we thought we need to make it put ourselves in a position here where are we going to be we were on that side so we put put this thing together and okay if you've got a ticket and you know you can sell it for two or three times yeah you can go and sell it right you do what you want or if you are like-minded you don't you want to put it back just to get a refund or resell it then you could use our exchange platform you know that's our position what a customer does and i'd be i'll say this personally if a customer buys a ticket and sells it make some money well so be it if that's what they want to do and there's a willing bella willing seller willing buyer that's commerce what else can you you know you can't otherwise where does that end i wanted to pick up on the point um you said about resilience yeah and as a um the leader of a company i guess uh and also as a as a company have there been times where you you've talked about personally having to dig deep but as a company as if you had to weather some storms of of changing uh you know changing tides where yeah i mean is there anything that's that sticks out in your mind like i don't know like you said when tickets went from physical to online or i don't think we've ever yeah when live came in and swooped up half of your clients and you decided to i don't think there's a collective a collective um what's the word insecurity i don't think that's happened there i've been crossroads you know we've been through a number of shareholders and all the rest of it yeah you know and it could be different opinions that come in yeah and you might think i don't like this but we don't like it and it's a case of i mean it's also client demands or whatever and you sli you have to be sensitive and diplomatic and sometimes you have to let things go and i think that's part of being resilient i mean the long-term thing is to keep the business going serve our customers and the clients and pay people's wages and all the rest of it that's that's business um i cannot think of a collective crisis where we've thought we're dead or in trouble but there are times when you think right this is going to cost a ton of money and there were times certainly at the advent of the internet and maybe we're a bit slow in places we didn't sometimes have the financial firepower to compete with say ticketmaster at the time you know sometimes our systems would creak and you just get it in the neck and you'd be five past nine and promote phone up they wouldn't be happy and they'd be told you'd sort this out otherwise you're gone you sort it out or you're gone so they're they're those crises we think right we've got to do something here but let's take it all to bits and put everything back together and get it right now i know we are we're exactly we have been for a long time we've been exactly where we want to be and i don't think we're missing a b anywhere but you know maybe a client or phone in a minute give me some tell me i'm wrong there yeah yeah no i think you know i don't think there's ever been a time we thought we're out of the game because i think we've you know we've again it goes to the people in the business they've been absolutely fantastic and sometimes they really really really do work hard to get things done there's no nine to five in our in our culture you know um so another question that's coming um via online is um does selling a particular type of ticket excite you more than other tickets for example that's a great question um uh chelsea julia chelsea julian yeah yeah yeah julia okay i like that uh okay all right chelsea is that first name i think so chelsea whatever yeah chelsea any any particular type of excitement yeah that's a really good question because i wish i had an answer that's why it's a good question yeah no idea i'm gonna think about that when i'm gonna ponder that yeah because i guess i mean the breadth of clients that you must have i mean you mentioned ideal home and then obviously you say glastonbury i mean what what is the if you've got something quite um random that you sold tickets for that doesn't fall into maybe that i will have an answer i'm trying to think like it's easy to point at glastonbury because there's a there's that excitement you get on that sunday morning you know when they're uncontended and you're looking at the numbers you know one minute it's five thousand it's fifty and it's thirty and it's just like by the time you finish your cup of coffee yeah you've sold out and you go back to bed and that that's exciting but but in the lead up you know everyone's like this because you never know is there a type of ticket yeah i mean what kind of events do you sell or have done in the past sold tickets for oh i wouldn't know where to start with that look we cover everything theater comedy sport music festivals yeah exhibitions i think i said that already we're getting into the trade registration piece for consumer trade exhibitions you know it's sort of industrial but why not it's something that is close to i think at the moment answer answered chelsea's question i think the stuff that excites me most is if we sell a ticket for a new segment that we weren't previously selling for the moment i mean giving away trade secrets i'm not i mean we're interested we like i like the exhibition space yeah i think it's a very very interesting space there's a lot of data collection a lot of data management a lot of analysis that can be done and i think we can add as a business a lot of value to that segment and we've done very very well over the last few years of signing a lot of this stuff up i think the immersive sector is interesting um you know i'm coming i'm saying this because it's sort of topical we signed some good clients over the last couple of weeks really uh in segments a few years ago we may not have been in so i think i think to to the question it's about selling something new but there again i still get a kick out you know we still get a kick out of you know selling stuff we've you know for for a client we've had for 20 odd years or whatever yeah you know and i like that you know because i do get i think we all do we get a thing out of you you think wow i remember doing that deal way back when and time flies that's that's the thing yes and that to the previous question about why if it's a personal question why i'm still there that's it as well it's a history thing and think well we remember doing this and signing that client and they're still with us today that's that's that's that's the best bit of this job i think and what would have you had clients that have been with you the full time that you've been pretty much yeah wow i'd like to say sjm yeah i'd like to name check simon run i think yeah because he was yeah it was one point i don't want to i will tell a story he didn't mind so long ago but he was this is when we were selling tickets pretty much in the you know out of above the record shop and one day he said i'm not going to send you any more tickets you're not selling them just before the internet yeah put a phone down we won't go into all the story because that would reveal too much really but i thought i'm in trouble here and i knew it was going to break for us and i sent him a letter a letter yeah signed it and i've got a feeling yes and it basically is you know i'm sure he won't phone me in a minute so you shouldn't said that but you said i can't afford to service you it's a waste time why am i going to pay someone to send you tickets and you send it back in and my proposition i will say i said look i'll pay the wages for that person to send them to us and then we'll send it back because trust me it'll come good yeah and it did come good and we went on to do the gigs and tours thing and we still have him as a client now and i'm very thankful for him to him because i always i always take sjm if we were a shopping center sgm if you some like in some ways there are harvey nix or uh john lewis or whatever you know yes they've got they've got the good stuff that people walk into the shopping centre yeah so to have them in our shopping center is means a lot um you know to the business and me personally in in in some way so look we don't take any of this for granted we have to fight every year to for new deals and all the rest of it and we cannot let our guard down or drop the ball because we will be dropped and that's the driver and that's another there's there's an answer to a question to you you know why two questions ago why are you still with the business that challenge yeah so would you um looking to the future talking about um adapting and you know live streaming especially with everything that's been in the news in the last couple of days with uh with prs and live streaming and covid uh planning a lot of venues like ours are now live streaming um do you see that as the future of where ticketing is going or do you think that the the new show is now a hybrid show and does that also apply to your other clients you know i'm going to give you the provocative possibly and content contentious answer i don't believe i think if streaming was all the things you say it would have been there before covid i think it's got a part to play of course it has um yeah but look look where we are right this is a fantastic venue you've got a bar you got probably a great crowd comes in here why do we go to live gigs why do we go live gigs you can't watch it on ipad you want to go meet your mate for a couple of drinks come in see you mates have some beers get kebab whatever it's that's what it live music's about isn't it it was when you were yep younger you're young anyway certainly was when i was in me you know late teens and early 20s or even earlier than that it was about the social thing streaming has a place of course it does we'll streaming it'll augment it but you know what i mean if you're a band and you can come to the uk and do five stadium shows or whatever arenas or a club tour whatever you can't do that every night on stream right you can't yeah it doesn't work you watch one and you're bored and i always worry about the amount of content already out there you know on youtube yeah it's live and you but it's not that it's not the same and that's that's that's me speaking not from a business perspective that's just me would i so yeah would you like would you would see would you see launching a your own platform to facilitate people's streaming there have been a lot of ticketing companies that have now jumped haven't they that have now been launching yeah absolutely no i i i was interested well we did look at it i tell you that the challenges and again this goes back to the question about prs and all the rest of it was the rights piece because you know some clients would say how do we do it yeah we're in a ticketing business but they see us as a technology business in some respects yeah i think i've absolutely no idea now you've rigged up all this stuff yourself you learned how to do i saw you on the news this morning yes you know what you're talking about i i have absolutely no idea and clients to say to us how do you do it then it would always boil down to what about the rights i think i have absolutely no idea you know which which which are the you know the the the the broadcast platform platforms have those those those collection mechanisms in place to pay off the the rights to societies and a lot of people are using youtube and they okay it look like it's gate kept but as soon as you're on youtube you are on youtube you can take that link and you can send it to 100 people therefore eliminating the commercial benefit to the artist that's how i read it today i think i thought i saw it as a minefield yeah i think we saw it as a mindful we had a few people in the business take a look at it uh and we decided it probably wasn't for us we're happy to sell us a stream ticket yeah we're happy to keep it but at the the you know the the broadcast the streaming the broadcast recording and all that sort of stuff it's not our forte and do you think with tickets because i suppose yes it is a digital ticket you sell so it's the physical ticket has become digital yeah do you think there's another incarnation to come of that you know do you think it will always be that i mean people obviously get tickets to their phones now so you just scan an app don't you don't even have an actual physical ticket do you think where do you think that could possibly go do you think one day we'll just have a thumbprint and it will just be yeah they'll be loaded onto a chip that's in our arm what's the most unique thing we've got about us we've got fingerprints we've got faces yeah we've got dna we're not gonna do that yeah um so you could see some sort of face recognition gatekeep thing but i think that's intrusive um a little bit um i think tiki master working on some audio type thing where you'd have you know your phone i think if i remember rightly yeah would sort of put out a subordinate sub some you know some uh human hearing or above human hearing spectrum frequency and that would be a ticket you know but yeah i'd read about that a year ago i think i might be right it might be wrong when i have to look it up i might made it up i don't think i made it up but i think it was something like that it could have been a dream about it but you know it's it has you know i think it was what 15 years ago people say mobile mobile mobile and it never really happened but now kovit has sort of accelerated that trend uh and it does work and you know i think when it was i'm getting technical now when it was so barcode readers were lasers the course mobile phone wouldn't work but now it's images it's a camera and now it works and we use it we do a hell of a lot of digital ticketing and but there's also the challenges of you know mobile phones at the you know front of house and batches going dead and being families or whatever and he's got the phone where's the phone all this type of stuff i think ingress is an issue i think print at home was the bridge between the old promoter or venue printed tickets and yeah and mobile yeah print home still has as a place but you know if you're selling a ticket as a number of add-ons you know it's 15-20 pieces of paper it's unwieldy yeah i don't think there's a smart answer we get you know you've got wristbands but you need to post them or you collect them which means there's queuing you know it's horses for courses um it all depends on the conditions yeah and what the what the client's trying to achieve and you know that you know how how big is it you know the door to get people in i mean there's a lot of factors i think we try and touch all um but we are a business i'd be totally blunt on this that we'll look at ideas and if we like them we'll steal them you know we are like that we have to be everybody is so if we see a little business doing something we think is interesting we're going to nick the idea yeah so that sounds a horrible thing to say but that's that's that's that's the fact of life so but yeah it's it's we try and touch all those all those all those you know instruments um so i'm gonna add a couple of more questions we will be nearly we're nearly done okay um yeah i know great company um so second to last question what advice would you give to someone who is uh starting up their own business um now in this current climate you know you look back from your days like you said in the record store and working above it doing the tickets and going from there to uh taking the company to where it is now i mean that in itself is you know is a huge achievement and obviously you've mentioned there are times where uh it's been up and down personally for you and you talked about resilience but um you know is it has it always been that you've you've had that hunger for something and it just hasn't ever been stated yet or you know what what is it what's your driver and how would you necessarily distill that into knowledge for someone that maybe has an idea is innovative and has got something that they want to do whatever whatever it is um it's it's just going for 30 years in an industry that i think i think first off you've got you've got to enjoy what you do you got to be challenged by what you do why do people climb mountains someone else is insane why would you do that but people do um i think i can give you i can give you the stock answer which is easy you can read it any book i mean honesty integrity drive all that sort of rhubarb uh and you know i can look back and think there's been times where i've probably not been all the things personally i wanted to be all the business i think the thing is if i did think about this i did anticipate his questions about not just challenging yourself because that sounds a little bit stuck but i think just being open-minded to keep learning and learn from people doesn't matter if the you know if they're below you in some respects or juniors or employees or outside the business or a guy down the pub or or or or your chairman or a boss or a shower or whatever it might be listen to everyone use what is useful if you don't like it don't use it but keep it in mind because it might be useful and i've made you know there's times certainly as in everybody's life that i've not listened to people and i wish i had when i look back um i think that's probably stay open-minded stay light on your toes stay energetic and don't [ __ ] people i suppose if i'm allowed to swear yes you are all right i think that's probably yeah that's that's probably it i don't know if it's a recipe but it seems to work well thank you so much for sharing your stories with us today thank you and yeah thanks for being here and also for um being part of ivw as well oh it's a pleasure um you know it's i think it like i said it makes a big difference when um large companies decide to get involved with initiatives like ivw and support them in any way they can i think yeah i was seduced by by by sybil and i think what did it she invited me to the office in soho which as soon as i walked in i realized you fans yeah just one of them with due respect to sybil and it's not normal business yeah you strike me as the kind of person that likes uh to be able to make a decision on their toes you know they like to be able to say i like that and i'm just going to do that it's kind of yeah but it comes with experience yeah i was thinking about this question as well because and i say this i said this to the colleague not long ago you know years ago i'd ponder and i'd i'm an r and i'd i dot every you know dot every eye on crossover t and i just you know absolutely stringent on everything i did but now i think with experience you kind of know the answer yeah and sometimes that takes away the challenge and it can get boring because you've seen it before and therefore but now i think you know what i have but that maybe that guy below me hasn't or that lady gilbert but so basically impart that knowledge on them and then we can look at something else for a business of me now it's passing the knowledge down so we can go forwards into other areas and you know we question we asked me earlier about how many offices we've got and that those the offices are there because we've had the you know that sort of knowledge being pushed through the business has allowed people like me and my colleagues to be more adventurous and go into different territories and learn about new countries yeah because they're all different you know uk is completely different to france to portugal to spain they're all unique market situations technological um situations and uh you know i think that's it stay light on yourselves and be open-minded just keep going i think that's i think that's very very good advice actually um so yeah thank you for joining us today thank you thank you very much and thank you for watching wherever you may be um remember tomorrow we have we'll be like we'll be joined by uh mark richardson who's a drama from skunk nancy and also erica who is a an artist as well and has they those two have been doing some amazing things during um the pandemic so we're going to have a chat about those um but to play us out i think chocolates are going to get set up and yes it leaves me just to say thanks for the questions thank you rob as well pleasure thanks and i'll see you all tomorrow at the same time thank you thanks for having us this is another original song called days are gone [Music] take me back to where i was before it seems like that was but a sunlight sure i know those days old friends oh how they come and go off into the sunset i watch until the light grows low i know those days are gone but they're still on my mind i know those days are gone [Music] where i am now felt like an open road but now i'm here the reality is getting me low i know those days are gone but they're still on my mind i know those days are gone [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] take me back to where i was before seems like that was better [Music] [Applause] so [Music] you