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Hey everyone!
How was the first week of Substack as the home of the newsletter? Did it work better? Let me know!
So many great podcasts guests that I’ve had a chance to chat with the last two weeks: I had Mark Fowlie from AudienceView on earlier this week. This is a really great conversation because Mark was very open and honest about the good and the bad of leading a team through a pandemic.
Bonus: I added the episode with big time friend of the podcast, Oli Shawyer, to cover a specific topic: the sales funnel. This is like a class in how to build a sales funnel, what to measure, and how to set yourself up for success!
And, I’m prepping episodes with Brett Zalaski and me, Harold Hughes, Richard Howle, Zoe Scaman, and more in the next couple of weeks. I’m only slow to put them all out because the conversations have been so valuable to me that I don’t want to put too many out and one of them gets lost in your podcast feed.
BTW, I’m sure everyone everywhere in the world knows that there is an election in America in November. What you might not have known is that US voter participation trails most of the rest of the world with something like 25% of voting aged, eligible voters not even registered. So I’ve signed on to work with the folks at iVoted to help their efforts to get more people to vote, no matter who they are voting for. So do me a favor: check your voter registration and if there is an action you can take to support iVoted’s work whether it is time or money, please do. Voting, no matter what, is the price of democracy.
To the tickets!
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1. College football is closing up shop:
You know me, I want my Alabama football.
But it ain’t happening in 2020 despite the SEC trying to hold out as long as possible on making their decision.
This is has been the likely outcome for months now, but it is still a kick in the shins.
What is behind the delaying and the trying to hold out hope that the season would go off without much disruption or total disruption, money.
Maybe there will be college football in the spring?! That’s a bit of a challenging proposition. Maybe we will have college basketball?! Again, seeing how things are going, I can’t tell you for certain what will happen.
Here’s what I do recognize:
One, a lot of folks have lost their jobs in the past few weeks and will continue to lose their jobs until we can get the pandemic under control. If you or someone needs help, email me and I will see what our community here can do to help.
Two, if you have resources that you can share or jobs to be filled or anything of the sort, send stuff my way. I have a section in our Slack group for jobs and job seekers. And, I can share the information with the appropriate people in my network or more widely if you want.
Finally, as the top article says, this exposes a lot of the ills of college sports and we’ve seen a lot of the ills of the business of live entertainment exposed over the last few years.
Things will change on the other side of the pandemic and everyone is going to have to be a part of driving change in their organization. I’ve been on the phone with executives and leaders from around the world that are talking about the tough decisions they are having to make now and the tough changes that lie ahead.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that we will all get through this. We won’t necessarily be the same, but we will get through this. But if you need someone to talk to, bounce ideas off of, or just to listen…I’m here.
I also crack many jokes. I can’t promise they will be funny though.
These kinds of weeks stink and I am hopeful that we will get back to the weeks were I can talk about folks making money, selling out, and doing cool things again!
2. Sports business will change in some ways on the other side of the pandemic:
I like a good roundup of opinions and I’m going to do a few based on questions or ideas in the survey I’ve been pushing on you for the last few weeks. (It is still open!)
It is interesting to run through these ideas because the longer this goes on, the less likely it is that folks are just going to be able to put things back together the way they were before the pandemic.
Also, considering that there was likely billions of dollars in missed opportunities left on the table in America and other countries, why would you go back to the same way of doing business that was enabling you to wiff at so much money?
Let me tease this, in two upcoming podcasts with Zoe Scaman and Brett Zalaski, I talk about revenue opportunities, missed opportunities, and what the business is going to look like coming back.
All of the pieces here are pretty good and can give you something to think about.
From my vantage, here are three things I think will change after the pandemic is finished:
- You’re likely to see a lot of turnover in talent and skills up and down many organizations. The skill sets and tools needed to modernize some of the stale business practices likely lie outside of the industry.
- You will see the way that tickets are sold change. In the States, it is high time that modernization came to a lot of sales offices and in other markets a more marketing led sales effort would make a lot of sense.
- It is completely likely that you are going to see this process stagger, back and forth, because change isn’t easy and when there have been so many reasons to keep the status quo in place for so long…those folks don’t let go of the way things have always been done without a fight.
3. We can look to Australia to see the ups and downs of bringing back events with fans:
I had a chance to talk with a bunch of folks from Australia this week about how things are moving along as they find themselves struggling to contain a new outbreak of the coronavirus while also working to reopen their events and venues.
Like a lot of places, things are up and down.
The article at the top talks about the guidelines being shared around the industry to ensure safety for performers, fans, and staff.
As a practical manner, you are seeing the Australian Open plan to host 5 bubbles to allow players to come down safely and still have fans in attendance.
The bubbles work as the NBA, NWSL, and other leagues in the States have shown, but the bigger challenges lie in how to manage to bring fans into your buildings when the situation on the ground is changing rapidly. On Wednesday night, Dallas FC tried an experiment to bring fans to their MLS match.
In Australia, a number of venues have had the opportunity to sell tickets to their matches and events under restrictions where a cap, maybe 30,000 fans were allowed into the venue, and as cases dropped, the restrictions were lifted allowing more folks to have access to come to a game only to see their state or city have cases uptick and have stronger limits put in place.
Where this means we need to pay attention is what are the plans you have in place if you sell according to less restrictive guidelines and you have to pull back tickets from folks that bought seats?
Or, how do you communicate the changes?
How do you monitor these situations?
I bring all of this up because I think it bears a lot of attention to keep in mind that these things are likely not going to go in a straight line for any of us and watching how things are handled in Australia and New Zealand now, which are in their winter will help a lot of us if we can get things going in the fall and winter in the northern hemisphere.
4. MLS is back in their home cities and it is complicated:
Jeff Carlisle does a great job of putting together the many circumstances around the MLS return to play.
Like everything that is happening right now, it is complicated.
Which I’m fond of saying is typically the right answer and the most unsatisfying answer.
In my thinking, the idea of MLS returning and allowing fans back into their stadiums where available brings to mind two questions:
- Is it likely that they will draw significant attendance?
- Is it a good idea to do it where they are likely to be allowed?
In thinking through this, the answer in both cases is probably no.
If you look through the piece and think about the nature of what we have dealt with in trying to bring back sports, deal with a pandemic, and save folks jobs, it is a bit disheartening, to say the least.
Unfortunately, it seems that in the way that MLS is laying out its Options A, B, and C, they are looking at the magical thinking solution to finishing their season because there seems to be a lot of emphasis on having large scale gatherings in the fall, long trips being okay, and some resemblance of normal.
5. I’ll finish with a few that don’t have a theme but maybe some of them will make you laugh or roll your eyes at me, at the least:
- Tottenham’s Amazon Series will give me something to watch later this month. The Jose scene where he talks to the team about being tougher is edited in the trailer, but I’ve seen a rough cut. It is worth the view.
- I’ve got a lot of smart people that I can turn to for advice, Colin Lewis wrote up a column about lessons he has learned after getting laid off four or so times in his career. This is amazing because Colin is one of the best travel marketers I know and definitely he’s a great writer. This might be something to share with a colleague that finds themselves thinking about what they want to do or how to position themselves for the future.
- Guinness is now the official beer of the Notre Dame alumni association. Is that a good pairing or what?
- Check out my friends at the Warrington Wolves, they’ve done some really interesting things with rebates, getting their members to donate or leave their money with the club, and have tightened up their relationship with their community.
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What am I up to right now?
Tonight, at 5 PM EDT, I’ll be co-hosting a Happy Hour with my man, Ken Troupe. We’ve elevated Matt Wolff to announcement level inclusion as well. He’s below the title though, for those of you that have done stuff with Broadway or theatre.
As a teaser, I’m working with a small group of people to put together a mini-online conference sometime in the next couple of months with me curating content and bringing in folks from sports and theatre and concerts from around the globe! I told y’all to fill out the survey! I ask, you answer, and I deliver!
Check out my website at www.davewakeman.com. There are a lot of great things going on there.
Connect with me on the social media.
And, if you want to chat…just let me know. Send me an email at dave@davewakeman.com
Check out my friends:
Booking Protect: Sophie has been doing a great job on the Booking Protect Instagram feed lately. Give them a follow.
Go say hello to Einar, Martin, and the entire team at Activity Stream. They are behind the efforts of We Will Recover that brings folks from around the world together to share ideas, best practices, and other ways to get organizations in live events back to business.