Amy Maxwell - Ticketing

Amy: 0:00

This is Amy Maxwell and you're listening to One Hour To Doors.

Jon: 0:09

This is One Hour Two Doors, a podcast about the business and soul of the festivals and events industry. I am your host, Jon Stone. Every episode of One Hour To Doors explores the people, issues, insights and trends impacting the enterprise of bringing people and communities together in common cause. Our guest today is Amy Maxwell. Amy is the founder and president of Ticket Tomato, an online ticketing company that also provides promotion, box office management and get this real customer service. Based in Portland, Oregon, ticket Tomato has steadily grown to serve events throughout the Pacific Northwest. During a time when other independent ticketing firms have been struggling Within the events industry, amy and her team have earned a reputation as the antidote for the challenges often associated with the giant corporate ticketing agencies. Welcome to the show, amy.

Amy: 1:10

Thank you for having me.

Jon: 1:12

My pleasure. I know you're in Portland. Are you originally from the Portland area?

Amy: 1:16

I'm originally from Vancouver, Washington, so I'm a Washington girl at heart and went to school in Bellingham and, you know, loved the Pacific Northwest West Coast and after college transplanted to Portland. So growing up I spent a lot of time in Portland because that was where a lot of events and fun things were happening. So I'm kind of, I'd say, dual.

Jon: 1:45

Dual citizenship.

Amy: 1:46

Yeah, dual citizenship, residency, something like that, yeah.

Jon: 1:51

I only know you through the Ticket Tomato context, but what was your career background prior to Ticket Tomato?

Amy: 1:58

This actually plays into how Ticket Tomato got started. Very early on was an event coordinator and worked at Nordstrom and did the corporate thing and, you know, loved my job and everything but had always had a passion to be in music, entertainment, movies, you know, all of that fun stuff. I always kind of gravitated towards it and I met my ex-husband, who is a musician through my work at Nordstrom and I quickly left to work with him to help him build a music production company and so I integrated into the industry through music and took my event background and my degree in PR and marketing and used it to become a manager, road manager, producer, you know. So I got to kind of mesh my love for arts and entertainment, music and nonprofits and all of that type of stuff in the music world and so I did that for in the music world and so I did that for 18 years total. And yeah, and Ticket Tomato actually was born out of the fact that in around 2007, I was producing quite a few events and partnering with vineyards and other venues, clubs and different things, and the outlets that were available were very few and far between and expensive. So you know, using Ticketmaster was expensive and so not all of our clients could use that entity.

Amy: 3:38

And the dot-com thing had happened. And you know, the two of us were talking and I said, you know, I think there's something to this there. I think the dot com bubble was just ahead of its time and so we decided together and really with his urging to, hey, why don't we explore this and let's build something for our production company website, and I was like okay, and so we started doing that. And as soon as we started doing that and it was crazy because it was at a time when nobody really knew about programmers and like that environment and I remember the first group that we went to was the sterile office with all these guys on with headphones on and they're at their computers, you know, doing their thing. And I was like, wow, this is like being in a studio with musicians and engineers, but just a whole other industry. And it's interesting because the programmers have very similar characteristics to musicians they're quirky, they're unpredictable, they're emotional, they work odd hours, I mean. So I fit in great because I worked with musicians all the time. So I just kind of transitioned that and we started building the platform and then a lot of our friends started coming to us saying hey, we heard you're doing this, can we use it? And so at about that time I said you know, we should turn this into a standalone DBA of our production company, because other people want to use it. If it's just on our website, then other people can't use it. And so that's what we did.

Amy: 5:20

And we had a name in the beginning that I really didn't care for. It was Tickets Oregon, because I'm like it's the internet, like it can go way beyond Oregon, and I felt like it was branding us too close. And so at the same time, there's a band called Pink Martini and they are they were, you know, still are Thomas is a friend of mine and their business manager came to us and said hey, we were, you know, still are, thomas is a friend of mine and their business manager came to us and said hey, we heard what you're doing, you know, can we use it? And so then we got this idea of well, why don't we brand it to whatever project you're using, you guys can use it on your website, It'll be our engine, it'll work through all of our stuff. And they thought that that was great. So they were releasing Hang On, little Tomato. And so we built this platform and the skin and everything for it and they were all excited about it. And then they started to approach venues and entities about using it and got shut down real quick because the other larger entity was, you know, a company that was doing a lot of their shows and it wasn't going to fly, and so we shelved the skins and that whole platform and we're like, well, maybe we'll do something with it A little bit later.

Amy: 6:40

I was talking to the marketing firm that did all of our designs and graphics and everything, and I was sharing with them about how I really was struggling with the name and I just felt like we needed to change it. And they said, well, you know, we still have that Ticket, tomato scan and platform. What if we pull that out, do a little quick focus group and see if it flies? And so we did. We did this really kind of informal focus group and it was funny because everybody, when they heard the name, they giggled and when they said what it reminded them of was summer concerts, festivals, picnics, family fun, outdoor, and I'm like that's what we're all about. And so we basically took it and that's how the name changed and we kind of went from there and it stuck.

Amy: 7:27

And it's fascinating because I was in a new area this last weekend and we were sharing with people hey, this is going to show up on your credit card statement as Ticket Tomato. And as soon as you say that, all these people, they would just giggle and they'd be like, oh my God, that's so funny. Thanks for telling me. I'm never going to forget that because it has it's this quirky name that makes sense, but it kind of doesn't. So that's how it was born. In 2016, my ex-husband and I parted ways and he has the music production company and I have the ticketing company, so it became its own standalone business in 2016. And so I've been able to, you know, kind of move forward with it and kind of build it in a direction that I hadn't been able to before, because it was part of a conglomerate of things that we were doing.

Jon: 8:25

That's a great story. I mean, with the benefit of hindsight, we can look back on that. In my opinion, you did everything right and the timing was right too 2007,. The timing was just perfect. If you would have tried that idea five years earlier, probably wouldn't have worked. If you would have tried it five years later might have missed the boat.

Amy: 8:47

But you got that started at exactly the right time.

Jon: 8:52

Say more. You said focus group. Say more about how did you run the focus group. Did you hire a firm or did you just do it yourself?

Amy: 8:59

We did it ourselves with the marketing firm that we worked with and, like I said, it was informal and we just kind of got some people together and threw some questions out. And some of them were friends and some of them were colleagues of theirs. It wasn't anything really serious because at that time it was like, well, let's just throw it against the wall like spaghetti and see if it sticks, and that was kind of how we did it with all of it, like building it and everything. A lot of it came from my background as the event producer, the person that would execute stuff on the ground, the person that would execute stuff on the ground. That is one thing that has always been a big factor with us is that we really like to take into consideration the whole aspect of what ticketing is. As you mentioned about us is that we provide box office management stuff on site, and that is such an important role in executing an event. It's an important revenue stream and all these different things, and so we've really built it based off of the things that I've needed and then now, years later, we're doing things that our clients need.

Amy: 10:21

So people will come to me and they'll say, hey, can you guys do this and I'm like well, tell me a little more why you need that and they'll, you know, share with me what their perspective is. I'll take a look at it and I'm like you know what? This is great. A lot of people could use this. Let's build it.

Amy: 10:36

So I'll literally build something based off of a conversation that I've had with a client or maybe a need that they have to have, and that's another thing that makes us so different is that we have the ability to kind of be more flex and turn on a dime, whereas with a larger corporation that can't happen. Making something happen like that for a client would take a lot longer and it would be tougher, or maybe they wouldn't even consider doing it. So the best ideas we get are from our clients and actually being on the ground at events too, so we'll see things happen. And the people who work with me the crew on site or whatever always are communicating with me. My girls in the office are always taking notes and sharing things with me like, hey, what if we did this? And I want it to be really collaborative, because I don't want to be the smartest person in the room and I don't have all the answers.

Jon: 11:33

I was going to ask you who your original target market was or what your idea about that was, but it sounds to me like you're saying your original target market was yourself and what your needs were.

Amy: 11:47

Oh yeah, absolutely. But there's a but there. Music and music festivals and concerts and all that stuff because that's been such a huge part of my life, I tend to favor those events a little more. I tend to put myself out there for those events a little more. Just because that's my tribe Blues, jazz, r&b, soul, funk, americana, bluegrass, all of it I love it. I've been really really lucky to have some amazing creative people in my life over the years and so, yeah, I have a real soft spot for the music side of things and that's really what propelled us.

Amy: 12:31

We have done quite a few music festivals throughout the years. We've been working with Winthrop Rhythm and Blues Festival for 10 years and there's others. We actually just re-signed on with the Mount Hood Jazz Festival. They brought it back last year and you know they have a new music director out at the college and so they're kind of reinventing it as an education-based festival. And, yeah, and back in the day I was at the festival with the artists. I had different artists performing and I was on the board for a while when it was in kind of its heyday. So I tend to lean more towards music.

Jon: 13:14

I can imagine in the early years there were a lot of challenges just in competing with the ticketing giants in terms of getting access to clients and so forth. What other kind of hurdles did you experience particularly in the early years? Any technology hurdles or things like that?

Amy: 13:32

Oh yeah, I mean, there was stuff that just wasn't tried and true. Our first client was Waterfront Blues Festival. Oh really, yeah, Peter Damman and Clay Fuller gave us the opportunity and they had been using Tickets West and it wasn't working for them in the sense of the way that the platform at that time was set up, was it wasn't in real time. And, and this is the irony of it is that when I was on the board of the Mount Hood Jazz Festival, I was put in charge of ticketing because I was the only person that could read ticketing reports and I also knew how to set up the ingress, egress for the ticket booth and kind of it just came naturally to me.

Amy: 14:19

And so Peter came to me and he's he said, you know, we literally were building it. And he's like, can you have this ready by April? And I said, excuse me, and I'm like, why? And he's like we want to use it for Blues Fest. And I'm like, seriously, and we ticketed their specialty passes. That was the first thing, but it was our very first gig and I remember looking at him going can we do a baby gig? And he's like, oh no, there's no reason for that. And I'm like, are you serious? And so we did the event and we literally processed $150,000 in specialty passes.

Jon: 15:01

So, for the edification of the listeners, Portland Blues Festival is an urban outdoor festival that takes place in a park, and what that means is that all of your ticketing, your admission system, everything has to be built from scratch in a remote environment, and especially in this time. What was your first year with Blues Fest?

Amy: 15:23

2007.

Jon: 15:24

So 2007,? That from a technology, a connectivity perspective. That was a feat. It was that was not easy at that time to do something. So that's why I say I'm intrigued. That was a very bold move for you to say, yeah, we'll do that. I mean, you could have fallen down pretty hard.

Amy: 15:44

Oh, I was white knuckling it the whole entire time.

Jon: 15:48

And.

Amy: 15:49

I, I had our programmers on speed dial and it was. We were down at the waterfront park and overseeing everything and I'm like, oh, please, just work, please just work, Right, you know. And and then it was like problem solving. It was like beforehand okay, how are we going to scan all of these people in? How are we going to check them? And now there's wireless scanners and there's stuff that we do on iPhones and there's, you know, all of this technology that was not there.

Jon: 16:20

None of that existed when you were doing it. No, no.

Amy: 16:23

Yeah, it was like super scrappy, like where I was looking for the next best thing, and it was Patrick, my ex-husband and I, both together and he also in credit to him he's also very much a tech junkie with the recording and all that other stuff. So I remember our first scanners were these little palm pilots, you know. So they had the little stylus and everything and they worked great. But it was like and everybody's looking at them, they're like what are these? And like how do we use them? And like you have to train the volunteers. I mean, I look back on it now and I'm like how in the world did we make that happen? But it worked.

Amy: 17:04

And so we continued working, you know, with Blues Fest for a number of years and really that festival and Clay and Peter are what helped us build the company and a lot of the technology was based off of what we were doing for that festival. And then we started acquiring other festivals and, you know, meeting different people and stuff, and it just kind of had its evolution. But I really do credit Clay and Peter for us being what we are today and I really appreciated their mentorship and then also them believing in me and trusting myself and my ex-husband and the people that worked with us at the time, because that was a lot of responsibility to put off on us, and so there had to be a good amount of trust and collaboration and communication, and I really enjoyed partnering with them both over the years.

Jon: 18:02

Yeah, understood, I'm just. This little tidbit of background information here has just entirely changed my perception of you. Now I know that you are a big time risk taker and I think that's awesome. That's just badass. I can't. Having gone through the evolution of the ticketing world myself around that same time frame, I get it. It's like wow, that's badass.

Amy: 18:29

And it worked. Yeah, it did work.

Jon: 18:31

That's the icing on the cake is like it actually worked Wow.

Amy: 18:33

Yeah, and the other aspect of it too, which I'm really proud of, is that we have not infused venture capital into the company. You know, you look at some of these other companies and I've watched them come on the scene and they've had massive amounts of venture capital that has been infused in it and they all come and go.

Amy: 18:56

Yeah, and they. You know, and I've seen the rise and fall of you know different companies. You know brown paper tickets was right behind us, we were kind of in line at the same time. And you know different companies. You know brown paper tickets was right behind us, we were kind of in line at the same time and, you know, always friendly competition and of course they were based in Washington and stuff like that watched what they did and they had a huge fall during COVID and are barely hanging on and were bought by eventscom and there was some stuff that happened that you know was kind of devastating and yeah, so it's, it's, you know, kind of watching all of that happen.

Amy: 19:30

So part of the reason why I have not taken on the VC capital is because I've wanted to maintain the integrity of the company and to be able to do the things that are important. And, just like you said about us, that we actually have live people that answer the phones. And the thing that cracks me up is I don't know if you've noticed, but there are a lot of major companies now that are advertising that they have live people that answers the phones and, like during Superbowl, that they have live people that answers the phones and like during the Superbowl Discover card is one of them.

Amy: 20:13

That was their whole commercial and you know, and I just have maintained that the whole entire time, and whereas a lot of other companies have wanted to move towards live chats and bots and email and they'd pull away from that person to person contact, and I'm just like how can you do that in this, Because there's so much gray area in events and no platform can cover the gray area, and that's where the people are.

Jon: 20:37

Important is to kind of shift through all of that Exactly, but that's become such a difficult concept. It's such an old concept. The good news is, I think, it's becoming new again.

Amy: 20:47

Again yeah.

Jon: 20:48

Yeah, people are discovering. People are inventing live customer service, as if they've just invented fire or something like that.

Amy: 20:58

That's totally true.

Jon: 21:00

I volunteer with a nonprofit that works with young people 14 to 25 years old, and it always cracks me up. The younger people are expressing their frustration with can't get a return email or non-responsive text or whatever, and I'll say, would you ever try picking up the phone? And they're like what? No, why would I do that, but when I push them hard enough and they actually do, surprise, surprise, like magical things happen when you just pick up the phone and talk with somebody.

Jon: 21:35

But there's such an aversion, and not even amongst young people, I mean amongst our society as a whole. We've grown to all but shun the idea of the telephone call.

Amy: 21:47

So here's an interesting little tidbit of information. During COVID, we were faced with a number of refunds and things that we had to do, like we were shifting and changing constantly, and after about three months, we kind of knew like, okay, this is not going to get over anytime soon and so we need to have a plan B. Well, the way that processing has been set up, and especially online, is that you have 180 days to do a refund to people, like where you go in and you push a button and it sends the refund and does everything automatically. Well, all of a sudden, we go to try to push the buttons and the buttons aren't being pushed, and we had to set up a virtual terminal. We had to physically call and email every single person for their refunds, and it took us a year and a half to do all of the refunds.

Amy: 22:51

Yeah, however, in the process, what that enabled us to do is to talk and reach out to the people and say to them hey, would you be interested in donating this back to such and such festival Because it's going to help them? You know, stay afloat. Or they're going to donate some money to the musicians who lost their gig, or you know whatever. So, like with Winthrop Rhythm and Blues Festival I believe it was $25,000 that we got returned to go to the festival because we physically spoke to the people on the phone and we could explain to them. You know what was happening, and so it was. It was fascinating. We had no other option but to call people and to do it because of the way that the processing was set up.

Jon: 23:40

I want to share with you my greatest ticketing story because I think, it'll lead to some more discussion on your end, and this revolves around the Bumbershoot Festival and this goes back through 2004. It was always been a gated ticketed event. But our tickets up through 2004, I believe, they didn't have a barcode or anything like that. It was just a regular old ticket serial number and that was it, and they were printed on security paper from a bonded ticketing house and whatnot. So they had. They were kind of you know, state of the art as far as a physical ticket goes at the time, but no barcode, simply because nobody had ever thought that to be important.

Jon: 24:25

And even if it were, bumbershoot takes place at a 110-acre campus and all the connectivity would have to be brought in on a temporary basis. I think we had five gates at the time and it just would have been. It would have cost a fortune and taken forever, so we didn't do it. But hey, you know, everything was the festival was successful anyway, so nobody thought about it. I had gone down in 2004 to visit Utah Arts Festival in Salt Lake City, which is a fantastic festival. If anybody ever gets the chance, you should go to Utah Arts Festival. But they were showing me and it was similar to Bumbershoot but it was a smaller scale. But that was the first time I remember seeing a barcode on a ticket and like a scan to enter an event kind of a thing.

Jon: 25:12

They've showed me that not only was the scanning really efficient as far as getting people in, but they got some meaningful data from those tickets. And I think the thing, as a production guy at the time, what really caught my attention was they could tell how many people were on grounds at any one time because the computers were tracking ins, minus, outs, so on and so forth. And for the Bumbershoot Festival, that was huge because it was on a big day, we'd get 50,000 people, and so crowd management, public safety, that was huge because it was on a big day, we'd get 50,000 people, and so crowd management, public safety, that was important. So all of a sudden I'm like, wow, through ticketing we can get this real-time or near real-time attendance data. That's cool. And so I talked the team into putting a barcode on the ticket.

Jon: 25:59

I think it was 2004, 2005 that we did that. And so first day of the festival, first year with the barcode tickets, and I'm standing out at one of the main gates, worried that this thing's not going to work, because we had to. It took us a week to string cable through trees and over buildings and it was just a completely patched together DIY kind of system, but it's like, crossed our fingers and this should work. Hopefully it won't rain and short everything out, and so the gates opened. At 11 o'clock, people started coming in and the system was working Big Palm Pilot things, just like you said.

Amy: 26:34

Yeah.

Jon: 26:36

And then there were all of a sudden there was a problem. There were all of a sudden there was a problem. There was like a series of tickets all of a sudden were rejecting like duplicate ticket or already entered or something like that. And so we were there, the team was there, the tech guys were there looking at us like eh, don't know, but yeah, come on in, come on in, just keep it going. And then the problem went away. So we figured, eh, it must be some kind of little glitch, it must be some kind of little glitch. And then about 15 minutes went by and all of a sudden here comes these strings of rejections again. That didn't make any sense, lasted for about five minutes and then everything went back to normal.

Jon: 27:12

And this kept happening like about every 15 minutes and we were all scratching our heads trying to figure out what exactly was going on here. And we were all scratching our heads trying to figure out what exactly was going on here and then I noticed that right across the street from the gate was a metro bus stop and we had at that time we had shuttle buses running from a park and ride coming to drop off outside that gate, and that's when I noticed that it was the people getting dropped off of the shuttles every 15 minutes. That's where the rejections were coming from. And so it's like, okay, this is really weird, but this is some kind of clue, let's look a little closer at this. And so the next bus would come and the people would get off and it's like reject, reject, reject.

Jon: 27:54

And we're looking at it like I say these were security tickets. I mean, clearly they were real tickets. We kept thinking there must be something wrong in the database or something like that. And then at one point we just asked somebody and we're like where did you get this ticket? Like what outlet did you get this ticket from? And they said we got it at the advance ticket sale booth at the park and ride at the mall. And that's when I was going to say the light bulb went off. But it was more like a horrific lightning strike because we didn't have an advanced ticket sale booth at the park and ride.

Amy: 28:31

Didn't exist, and so we kept asking people.

Jon: 28:34

It's like where'd you get this ticket? Oh, we got it at the advanced ticket sale booth at the park and ride. Very quickly we had a staff member go out with a Seattle police officer plainclothes, went up to the park and ride and, sure enough, there was a illegitimate counterfeit ticket booth. It had all the Bumper Festival branding on it, the staff were wearing festival shirts and they were half-priced tickets. So that was what they said buy here at the park and ride, save 50%. What?

Amy: 29:04

a bargain right. Why wouldn't you pick those up?

Jon: 29:08

And they were all fake. And that's when we noticed they all had the same barcode.

Jon: 29:12

Barcode so they had gotten a hold of one legitimate ticket and copied them.

Jon: 29:16

And the kicker was, what was really throwing us off still at that time was that it appeared to be the legitimate security stock.

Jon: 29:24

This is a separate issue, but we found out eventually through the investigation that our ticket stock was shipped via DHL. The printer was in Georgia or something like that. There was a crew, a DHL crew that was routinely breaking into and pulling out a brick of large ticket orders for large festivals, thinking that nobody would notice and we didn't notice. And so that's how they were doing this. They were legitimate, physically legitimate tickets. They just were fraudulent in terms of the barcode. And they had I think they had like 10,000 units or something there when the police arrested them and in that moment I realized I mean, it was easy to calculate how much money we had just lost that morning on the first day of show, but we have no idea how far back in time that was going and the loss to the festival over the years hypothetically could have been millions of dollars, millions of dollars, and we had no idea that was going on. And so switching to a barcoded ticket entry system not only revealed that, but it fixed that, it changed everything.

Amy: 30:40

Yeah, the impact is profound.

Amy: 30:43

You know the funny thing I heard about all of this. I heard about it through the grapevine and music and festivals and all of that stuff. I remember specifically hearing this very story and I was like no way that's, that's crazy, you know, and I was like no way that's crazy. But then at the time I was on boards for different festivals and things and it was an issue for everybody. I mean, it was that whole thing. And counterfeit tickets, I mean scalping has been going on forever, right Forever. And a day, right Forever in a day, and you know, somebody on the inside will pull some tickets and sell them to somebody on the outside and then they're out there selling them.

Jon: 31:27

I mean that's one thing.

Amy: 31:30

But the way that this has all evolved and when you think about it, right with the paper tickets and over the years, and who knows how long they've been doing that advanced ticket sale booth I mean it's really interesting. Now the fascinating thing of this is how it's evolved into the industry itself. You know the secondary ticketing sites that are out there now and stuff is popping up all over the place. I mean the fascinating thing to me is ticketing companies are popping up all over the place. I mean just the other day I was meeting with a client and they're like hey, have you heard about this company? They contacted me and I'm like Nope, there's a new one there. I think there's this fascination with it and I think there's people that want to like get into the business and and create something and it's going to be better than everything else, and and they also want to stamp out the bad stuff that goes on, and and they find quite quickly that it's hard to do. There's so many things that I'm having to look at now for security whether it's the scalping.

Amy: 32:38

So we did a show with Alabama last summer. It was a reserve seating deal at the LB day amphitheater and you know we're every ticket has a section, a row, a seat, it's color coded, it's all these different things. And I had these people coming up to me and they're like I have these tickets, I bought it off of a resale site. And I looked at them and I'm kind of like these tickets. I bought it off of a resale site and I looked at them and I'm kind of like, because they the barcodes weren't scanning and everything I'm like, well, these don't look like our tickets, so that's a problem.

Amy: 33:10

And I looked at them closer and I said do you see that these have a section in a row but no seat number? And they go what? And I said, yeah, I mean, you look right here. It says section C, row, you know Y, but no number. And I said these are fake.

Amy: 33:30

And sure enough, we did a search and we had a handful of them come in and what we ended up doing was we ended up giving them comp tickets that weren't used. So we had, I think, maybe like 10 tickets total that this happened to, but these poor people paid triple the price. And I said please go and charge this back to your charge card and let them know what happened. And I said and then you need to go online and you need to report this, and you need to report this to the FBI and you need to do these certain things. I said, as long as you agree to do these things, we will just give you the tickets, because that's the way that we're going to kind of combat, you know, a lot of this fraudulent activity, but yeah, it's crazy the stuff that is constantly popping up.

Jon: 34:20

I still, to this day, have one of those 2004 counterfeit tickets. I keep it just as a reminder and the only clue. I've torn a corner off of it and even with this little red security threads that are woven into the fabric, it's perfectly legitimate. The only clue, the only visible clue, was on the backside. That year Starbucks was a sponsor and so on the back of the ticket it was a coupon for a free coffee beverage or something like that, and the printing for some reason, the printing on that backside of the Starbucks coupon was a little blurry. It wasn't as crisp as it should be. But who would look at that? Right, you're going to be looking at the front end of things as another clue as to how big of a business what we're talking about is organized crime.

Amy: 35:08

Oh, absolutely.

Jon: 35:09

This is not a bunch of kids screwing around with. No, this is big league. It's a global thing. And when we figured out the counterfeit thing and effectively shut that down at the gate, you know what happened next Ping flood attacks, or whatever they're called. I don't know if you've ever had that, but our servers were connected to the Internet. They do these ping flood attacks, a computer hacker trick, where they would basically flood our ticketing servers with bazillions of incoming things in an attempt to take our system down, knowing that if our system was down then we couldn't detect the counterfeit and we just let those people in anyway. And we had to deal with that for years, every day. I mean, we had to build up, as if the expense of the system wasn't enough already. We had to bulk up on our IT team and it was literally a real time, like war was being waged, trying to take our servers down to keep this fraud rolling. It was just incredible.

Amy: 36:20

So those are now called DDoS attacks and we just had one at the Oregon International Auto Show a couple of weeks ago and we had our first one a year, a little over a year ago. Up until that point, never had anything of that sort. So really lucky all things considered, and my team has always been really great with server security and all of that stuff, and so we always had the latest. But as stuff has progressed and as this has become more widespread, so it's not just happening in ticketing and entertainment and stuff like that it's happening to Nike, it's happening to Starbucks, it's you know, it's. It's kind of a warfare that people and some of it is you've got this bored younger person who's really good with technology and they decide to Ooh, I'm going to go try to take down Starbucks. So there's a little bit of that going on. But there's also the organized crime of it.

Amy: 37:27

So a year ago we had it and it was insane. It was the. I never had experienced anything like it before and we were scrambling and we got it shut down. But we realized that the parameters that we had, we needed to fix it, and so after that event we built a firewall, we instituted a DDoS attack system. So like if we saw something coming in we would flip certain switches and it would, you know, shut it down, like where people would have to say that they were human, like a checkbox and kind of like a captcha type thing.

Amy: 38:06

We moved our servers over to Amazon because there's more security, more stability and more depth in the sense of, you know, we can kind of, if we get hit with something, we can kind of shift and change more. It costs us money, but the bandwidth and everything is there at a greater space. And so we put all of these things into place and as soon as they came after us, you know, for the Oregon International Auto Show, we just instituted all of our pieces and of the puzzle, everything like went up like we saw it coming in and we were looking for it because we knew on certain events that like this could happen. And before we opened doors, you know, at nine o'clock, I get a call hey, we're under attack. And literally we were. Our servers were getting hit at over a thousand hits per second. We were, our servers were getting hit at over a thousand hits per second.

Jon: 39:03

Oh, yeah, yeah, usually, and they're going to do it right before doors, too, or right before your peak, whenever that is.

Amy: 39:08

Exactly, yeah. And so we just immediately and we just saw it like fall off. And all day through that day they kept trying to come back at us at different points and we were monitoring it up until you know late that night and then they finally gave up. But it's crazy what people will do out there, and people can hire people to do this to other people. I mean I'm like, how do you tell somebody, oh, I operate DDoS attacks? It's crazy to me because I just couldn't imagine doing that to somebody, but it's a very real thing.

Amy: 39:49

And so, with technology and stuff today and with AI coming out, I mean, I know, when we were at the WFEA, you know, before chat GPT came out, my team was showing me all of this stuff and I'm like I'm excited but I'm frightened because all the good stuff that they were showing me, they were also showing me some of the bad stuff that could happen, you know.

Amy: 40:11

So you've got to keep it all balanced and you have to keep ahead of it. And I remember hearing Bill Gates say something about how we need to keep this technology moving forward, because the good people are going to stay ahead of the bad people and ultimately we'll get things into place that will kind of keep it at bay. And it's really unfortunate that we, you know, have to do that. But there are reasons and you know, like you said, organized crime, where people were making lots of money off of these counterfeit tickets. And it's just unfortunate because the whole thing is is that legitimate people want to go to these events and they want to have a good time, and it can kind of get ruined or an organization like Bumper Shoot can get hurt, and so then it's hard for them to keep moving forward, to keep doing these things and keeping the event going. And that's the part that's really hard for me because it's affecting a lot of people out of selfishness.

Jon: 41:11

Yeah, and it's only going to keep getting worse because as ticket prices increase, there's just more and more money to be made and it's going to attract more and more players to try to steal a piece of that. Eventually, we got a handle on it, ironically, by switching to a smaller at the time upstart ticketing provider. We switched to Stranger Tickets in Seattle.

Amy: 41:36

Oh yeah.

Jon: 41:37

At the time Tim Keck's company, and they were just all in in trying to. I think at the time we were like their first major festival client, so they wanted to do well, you know.

Amy: 41:51

People are more tech savvy now and used to buying stuff online.

Amy: 41:56

And then, even during COVID, people's behaviors have changed since then, where they you kind of had to do the stuff online.

Amy: 42:05

There was going to events online and you know the streaming and all of that type of stuff, and so zoom how that blossomed after that, and so it's really interesting because that has really changed the platform.

Amy: 42:18

It's made things easier from a user perspective. More people are comfortable with all of this stuff, but on the back end you still have to do a lot of like what you were talking about, where you have to shift and change and build and protect and all this other stuff, because you never know when something's going to come at you, and especially a high profile event. You know a larger event that's well known and is out there. That's where you know people are like I want a piece of that or I want to go after that because it's so big, whereas with the smaller stuff you know they don't, which is why when you move to a smaller ticketing company it was better, it was better you have a ticketing company that can turn on a dime. You know you don't have to go through a whole chain of people and they're there and they're on site, you know which is?

Jon: 43:08

They're actually there with you. Here's another thing about. I remember about making the switch to a smaller, you know, local ticketing company. With that switch came the access to the data. With that switch came the access to the data. Now, when we were using the bigger corporate ticketing companies, they held on to that data with an iron fist. They'd give us access. Yeah, we'd get, like you know, standard ticket reports. You sold this many of this type of tickets, but that was about it, and it wasn't until I had the meeting with them and said folks, it's been great, but we're going to make a change and we're going with these local guys and they didn't like that. They didn't like that at all.

Amy: 43:50

And so they said tell you what.

Jon: 43:52

Stay with us and we'll you know, we'll drop our fees a little bit and it's like we're going to go with the local guys and it's kind of their last offer on the table. They handed over the full data set that they'd been collecting on my festival's tickets and I couldn't believe what I was looking at. It was like the complete story of who my customers are like in every way, shape and form that you can measure. That I was astonished. I had no idea. I had no idea the kinds of data they could collect and in the moment they were I mean, they were trying to persuade me.

Jon: 44:33

What they did was they really ticked me off? It's like I we could have used that data all along to make our festival healthier and happier and to improve our customer experience. So I I was like I couldn't even believe that they've been just holding on to that and not sharing. So that was, they were trying to save the deal. That was actually the straw that broke the camel's back right there. Yeah, no, it's just like screw you, you know. And then, through our partnership with the local people, all of a sudden, it's like, in a sense, suddenly we really understood who our customers were for the first time, or at least in a, to a level that we had never even imagined possible.

Amy: 45:21

Oh, you know, that's one of the amazing things with having access to so many different types of, you know, ticketing platforms and different things. Now, and it's actually one of the pieces that was very motivating in building. You know, ticket Tomato was having a real time dashboard where everything was in real time, like somebody would buy a ticket and it pops up and all of their information populates within the reports. There's a seat report, which you know has all the pieces of information, and then you could go in and we have a zip code report so you can look at your top 10 zip codes but then even all the other zip codes. So, you know, there are some festivals that we've done where, all of a sudden, I'm looking at a zip code report and I'm like hey, did you know how many people from Japan are coming to this event? You know, it's like we had no idea, we had a contingency from Japan and so all of that stuff is so powerful.

Amy: 46:21

I mean, it's powerful to help with grants, it's powerful to help with how you program the festival, what type of you know food and beverage stuff you have.

Jon: 46:32

I mean it's.

Amy: 46:34

It is really yeah. When you dig into the data you can get a lot of information. We understand about privacy so we're very protective of people's information. All of our clients have to sign off. They can't use that information like to personally solicit unless those people agree that they want to receive more information. We also do not sell a single piece. I mean I've had people approach me and ask to buy all of our database and data and I refuse.

Amy: 47:07

Refuse Because I appreciate the people who buy from us and I appreciate the clients that we have and I want to keep the information that everybody receives. It pertains to them. Everybody receives, it pertains to them. If they want to go to a PDX Jazz Festival show and we have a database for that and we market to them, I want them to get that. I don't want them to get something from a monster truck show. You know what I mean. That's something that we're really protective with, but we work in conjunction with our clients, whereas with a lot of larger corporations there's a lot of stuff that they hold on to and use it in different ways and do sell it, because it's a revenue stream.

Jon: 47:50

Yeah, now, in a lot of ways, the data is more valuable than the cost of the system in the first place. With the Bumbershoot example, once we finally got a hold of the complete data picture, it was fascinating because at that time I'm talking about the festival was like 30, 35 years old and there was all this literally multi-generational wisdom that had been passed down within our organization. Here's who our customers are. You know, our customers are primarily coming from these neighborhoods and these cities and just all these things. It was just like we've been doing this for decades. We know what we're talking about.

Jon: 48:30

But then when the actual data started coming in from ticketing stuff, it's like no, no, a lot of that was inaccurate, to be kind. After watching four or five or six years worth of data for the same event and granted, this is at a time of enormous growth and change in the Pacific Northwest region to begin with, but we would see we could literally watch year to year those numbers start to shift and change. Our audience was changing not on a year to year basis, but over three or four or five year period. Absolutely Not on a year-to-year basis, but over a three or four or five-year period, absolutely. Yeah, just the remorse of realizing all the opportunity lost in the past by not having that kind of information.

Amy: 49:16

And having access to it. You were working with an organization that was collecting it and it was there, but you didn't have the ability to have access to it. There, but you didn't have the ability to have access to it. And that's the part that I love is the collaboration. Whenever we go back and we do an event, with a reoccurring event with a client, we can collaborate on it and discuss it and talk about it, and we've got data to look at. We just did the Big Horn Show outdoor adventure show up in Spokane and they have not had in the past a real strong online presence and collaboration with a good ticketing outlet. Some of it they've done and built on their own through a Shopify thing and that didn't quite work. And it was fascinating because throughout the whole process, I kept talking and meeting with them and I said now here's how we can shift people to more online business. Here's what you can expect for next year. Here's what you can use these reports for. If you want to go after some LTAC grants, you know you you should use this report for this and this report for that.

Amy: 50:21

And even just during the time that we were up there, there was a lot of collaboration going on and what it created was the council that puts on this event because it's a big fundraiser for them. They're excited for next year because they feel like for the first time in a long time, that they can understand how to grow the event and how they can also tighten up things so that people aren't just walking in and taking advantage and getting in for free or they have a huge contingency of cash that they take and I'm like there's no reason that this should be occurring. You should have a more balanced approach with this and move more people to the online portion of it. I think they're going to see a tremendous amount of growth even so much so, like I was pointing out to them, I said with this data, you can look at how much more do you want to market to Idaho? Because they can pull people from Idaho to come to this event in Spokane. And they're like we've never really considered that and I'm like, yeah, why are you just working within this circumference? I said do some outreach and you'll probably find more people will travel and come spend the weekend in Spokane and, you know, do different things.

Amy: 51:40

And that's the stuff that excites me is when you know you kind of open up opportunity for people and and that's also part of who we are as a company we believe in collaboration and partnership. We want to have long-term partners. We want to grow with our events. We don't want to just have you be a number and, oh, we make money off of you and we sell these tickets. We, we actually want to help you do better. So our tagline is we're a ticket company that cares, because we really do care. We want you to be successful, because if the event's successful, then we're successful, so it's a win-win for everybody, which is kind of an odd thing in ticketing.

Amy: 52:21

I mean a ticket company that cares. Usually the ticket companies are the bad people.

Jon: 52:26

Yeah, so you and I understand the power of doing ticketing in a particular way. Do you think the average smaller mid-sized event promoter, does everybody understand that now, or is there still a learning curve going on?

Amy: 52:43

There's a really big learning curve going on. Where I see this the most is when a lot of mid-sized to smaller events hand over that to a volunteer and I'm like no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have one person that comes in and kind of manages for a short period of time, or you have nothing but volunteers operating this system and there's a learning curve and they don't know how to operate it. And again, even if you're a small to midsize, I mean, yeah, you've got your big festivals where the ROI on the ticket sales is big, but some of these smaller festivals or events, they're solely dependent on the ticket sales for most of their revenue. And you know, the rest of the revenue that they get from, like booth sales, like if it's a food and wine event or something you know goes to putting on the event itself and the actual fundraiser is the ticket. That's how they propel their nonprofit forward. It's such an overwhelming piece and it's a complex piece and it's it's a piece where I think because as producers there's so many other things that you're trying to work on if you can offload it on to somebody else, then they choose to do that, but they're not realizing that, even though these volunteers are very, they're doing it for the right reasons. They want to, you know, help the organization and all the other stuff. They just don't have the right tools with it.

Amy: 54:17

So, like one of the things that we're really good at doing is we'll take an organization and we'll say so. We know that you operate off a lot of volunteers. How about you just have one of us on site? We bring all the gear up, we train your volunteers and then we'd manage them so that we know that they're doing everything right and if there's questions about ingress, egress we can help them problem solve and stuff like that.

Amy: 54:41

A lot of chambers you know, I have an event that I'm going to tomorrow up in Kirkland and it's that very thing. I go up and I help manage the volunteers and train everybody and we've had a really great relationship with them and all of it's become more efficient and effective. And that's half the reason why we exist because it's easier for larger festivals and things to invest in a ticketing company and a platform and gear and all that stuff. But these smaller events where you have 1200 people, 1500 people or 500 people, they don't have that same ability and so it's about helping them build a foundation and have access to things that they normally couldn't. I mean, I can't tell you how many people still, to this day, smaller events do it by hand, or they do it solely at the door and I'm like no, no, no, no, that's not necessary, that's a lot of work. And people actually ask me that they're like oh well, our event's too small. And I said no, no event is too small. We do retreats that are like 20 people and we like it.

Jon: 55:59

You saw me just have a physical reaction to that last statement, me just have a physical reaction to that last statement. This is something that I learned through WFEA a long time ago, when I started presenting topics at conferences and seminars and such it seemed like pretty much any time it didn't really matter what I was talking about, but I'd share some experience that I had, and so many people in the room two-thirds of the people in the room would say, yeah, I hear what you're saying and that's all great, but that's not really relevant for us. You see, we're a smaller event or we're a rural event. It's not really.

Jon: 56:39

What you're talking about is big time, big city stuff, and that is such a fallacy and I always say it's like, if there's any truth to that, it's only truth in this moment, because every issue that the biggest events will ever face is eventually going to trickle down to the smallest event, whether you believe it or not. It may take 10 years before it trickles down to your small event, but it will trickle down. I've seen that prediction play out countless times and, if anything, I think that timeline is only speeding up as technology. The world's just getting faster and faster.

Jon: 57:24

But, there's still so much. It's hard for me to understand that mindset that, oh, we're too small to be worried about X, Y or Z.

Amy: 57:35

It is and it's something I see that as my kind of my duty to help educate, to put that myth aside for them and give them time. I mean I've had with through WFEA. I've had some really great roundtable discussions. You know, when I've hosted a roundtable at our conferences, I've talked to people and they'll say make comments like that. And I'm like no, no, no, Tell me what, what are you doing? How are you doing it? Why do you want to do it that way? And and let's talk about this and cause, I want to encourage them to do it.

Amy: 58:10

I think some of it is based out of fear, because it feels overwhelming, and they're like oh no, if I go down this rabbit hole, it's you know, it's going to complicate my life. So I think there's that. The other thing that I have really found out is that with a lot of these smaller to midsize events is it's a very small group of people that are putting it on and where the responsibility is on its shoulders. So you take a large festival like Bumper Shoot right. There's a team of people, there's an operations director, there's a CEO, there's a production coordinator, there's stage managers.

Jon: 58:47

You've got departments and such yeah exactly. And then you take like this small little festival, that is, you know, 15, a chamber, event, one or two people, that's it.

Amy: 59:00

Yeah, exactly yeah, that's exactly it. Plus, they're doing other things and so then I try to say, hey, we're here. You know, if you need us, we can plug into you and we can help you and we can be a resource. You know, one of the things that I also love about how we operate is so we do an event called Fashion Next here in Portland, which is a fashion event. That's like Fashion Week, and I know Seattle has some fashion events and stuff and again, it's a small group of people that put it on and they're doing a lot of different things.

Amy: 59:34

They have a really unique way of doing promo codes. They give all the models and all the boutiques that participate in the designers promo codes and they get, you know, kind of like a little kickback or credit if people use them. They have 125 promo codes that you have to enter physically, enter into the system. Now, in our system, you can go into the dashboard and you can sit there and do it.

Amy: 1:00:01

I said to them send them to us, we'll do them in between our phone calls and we'll we'll take care of it, because for you to sit there and have to enter in 125 promo codes, that's going to take a long time and um and so every year we do it, we'll, you know, kind of process it and that's a way for us to be a support system to these organizers that don't have the same ability as the larger festivals and teams, and so that's the kind of stuff that I'm wanting to kind of educate. So people who have these smaller events reach out and ask and or partner with somebody like us, where we have the ability to help alleviate some of your pain and you know your overall orchestration of the event, we can team up with you. I tell people all the time I'm like, if you're a 20 person event, we love you just as much as our 20,000 person event.

Jon: 1:01:01

On your Ticket Tomato website. You offer social media promotion and SEO support. How effective are you in that regard?

Amy: 1:01:09

Very effective. We feel the best way to promote ourselves is to promote our events and our clients. We do have some generalized advertising that we do, but we also will boost stuff. We'll boost posts and ads and things that we do on our site. We team up with our clients, like with Winthrop. We have a really great partnership and rollout where we follow their lead with the social media. So like when we launch tickets for them, we set up a plan where they launch their ticket sales at 9am in the morning. They immediately roll out their social, their e-blast and all of that, and then we follow it up later in the day. So about midday we start launching our social media and we launch our e-blast, and so it's kind of so like throughout the entire day. There's this rolling effect of people getting hit with the information. And we do that for twofold, because it keeps the message going out throughout the day, because it's a launch and there's early bird, you know tickets and all that stuff. But the other thing is is we don't want it all to hit people right at once, because it's too overwhelming and if they're getting you know from too many different sides, and so we craft it and then throughout the festival, we have meetings and we connect and they let us know what they're doing.

Amy: 1:02:37

With social Plus, we also have the ability in our system to track pixel codes and the G accounts with Google, and so we take that data and we kind of, you know, take a look at that and go okay, well, where are we at? What do we need to do more of? Again, it's that whole premise of the more successful our clients are, the more successful we are, the partnership of it. It's very beneficial in a multitude of ways. You know, we even developed a white label and we specifically did that so that we could have a stronger SEO and DNS outreach with a festival.

Amy: 1:03:15

So, with Winthrop, we put them on our white label this year, and so that label is going to collectively collect all of the SEO information every year that we do it, whereas before, when we used to do it, it used to have its own address, so every year we'd have to start over and so, yeah, so there's just all these different things that we're trying to see how we can do better and be better and help our clients better and be better and help our clients and then, in turn, they come back to us in a collaborative realm and we come up with better ideas of how to do outreach and promote to people. But the promotion piece is really an important part of what we do. There's not a lot of other ticketing platforms out there that actually promote their clients.

Jon: 1:04:04

From a 30,000-foot perspective, what are Ticket Tomato customers actually buying?

Amy: 1:04:13

So it's interesting. So we have two ways of looking at it. We have our clients, which they're a customer of sorts, and then we have our ticket purchasers. So there's two different spaces there. Within those spaces, we want to do a lot of those things. So we want to be accessible, we want to solve problems, we want to be responsive to help them, you know, push out information, develop what it is they're wanting to do.

Amy: 1:04:44

So, from a client perspective, we just brought on a new client the last month or so, and it's a festival that's going to happen over four days and it's an experiential festival. So it has music, it has foods, it has costumes. It's kind of a Renaissance type festival, and so everybody dresses up and things, and the group that's organizing it was, you know, sending us stuff and I would take a look at their information and I would be like so how did you come up with your ticket pricing? Explain this to me. And so they explained it to me and I said, well, first off, we need to round it up or round it down so that it's zeroed out. We don't have a $23. 15 ticket, you know, because that's too hard for people to grasp. And okay, I get that, you want to fold in your taxes and the fees and all of that. I think that's great, but let's do this and then and then also, these are the amenities that you want to showcase. Okay, we've got way too much information on this page. It's too overwhelming. So those are the type of things where it becomes collaborative, and we have a lot of experience in doing this because we do it every day. We can say, hey, this is what another one of our clients have done, and we think that you should maybe think about adding this to your playbook.

Amy: 1:06:06

So we have a very hands-on approach in customer service aspect with our clients, but then also with the ticket purchaser. I mean, we have issues where, you know, an email service will change their settings for spam and so all of a sudden and we haven't quite caught up to it yet, so they're not getting their tickets right. So they can pick up the phone and call us and say, hey, I'm supposed to go to the McMinnville wine and food classic. I don't have my tickets. I don't know, or maybe I deleted them, I don't know, but they're not there. And so we're like no problem, we got you. Here's a link, there you go.

Amy: 1:06:45

And so the fact that people can call us and solve that problem in a short amount of time, you know, and nine times out of 10, they're calling right before the event, you know, because they haven't really thought about it until now, and and stuff, and so having access to us is important, so, and for us to service those people and to get them what it is they need, because ultimately, they need this in order to go and attend their events and to have a good time, and if they have a struggle with it, it's going to affect their overall experience.

Amy: 1:07:20

So when you read those things that are on our website, we really try to live up to that standard. When we do box office management and we're on site, we're the first people that they interact with. So if they have a bad reaction to what we're doing, they're going to go into that event and they're going to feel like they stubbed their toe. We need to be friendly and we need to try to solve their problems if they have an issue, so that they can go in and have a great time and then look back and go wow, that was amazing. You know, I want to go to that again.

Jon: 1:07:55

So if I were to summarize everything you just said, I would say that your clients and your customers, for that matter are buying high touch.

Amy: 1:08:05

Absolutely.

Jon: 1:08:06

Your ticket pricing anecdote reminded me of another important lesson learned through ticketing. You can learn a lot about an event just through ticketing, but I've worked with events nonprofits, you know and nonprofits are driven to keep the ticket price as low as possible for their customers. Sometimes they'll think about that to a fault, and I've been in so many meetings over the years where the argument is do we raise ticket prices this year, $1 or $2? These are like knockout drag down arguments that go on for days. One thing I've learned is that whenever you raise a ticket price, you're always going to get complaints, but the intensity of the complaints isn't any different between $1, $2, or $5.

Amy: 1:08:54

So if you have to raise your ticket price just raise it five bucks $5, yeah.

Jon: 1:08:58

Yeah, yeah, Rip the bandaid off, take the heat, because it's going to be the same heat as if you raised only raised at $1. So you might as well raise it five and get on with the show.

Amy: 1:09:09

No, that's absolutely true, and the people that complain are like it's a very small but mighty group of people and especially if you're a nonprofit, you know, the first way that we diffuse that is we tell them like, if we're on site, we're like, well, but we appreciate you coming and paying this ticket price because it's helping this organization or this is going to go to support this program, and then it kind of just corrects their perspective and they're like oh yeah, you know, and and so there's little ways that you can kind of, you know, shift that frustration that they might have. And I kind of get where they're coming from. Prices go up all the time and got food prices and gas prices and all of that type of stuff, and it vents kind of fold into that as well. It's all in how you approach it. The other thing that I also am adamant about with our clients is it's about education. So you want to communicate and market a certain way if you are raising the prices and you want to be transparent, because being non-transparent and smacking people in the face with either the ticket fees or different things is what upsets them.

Amy: 1:10:23

You know we had an interesting thing where we work with the Ellensburg music festival and people were really struggling with the ticketing fees and the taxes and this and that and everything. And they the group was talking to me about it and I said, hey, what about all in pricing? I go, let's just put it all in, let's roll it all in and let's just have one price, because they've made it very well known that they're frustrated with this. As soon as we went into all in pricing beautiful, hardly any complaints, you know. So we back out the ticketing fees, the taxes get backed out, and you know I'm like what do you want your bottom line to be? They're like, okay, we want the bottom line to be $65 or $70, one or the other.

Amy: 1:11:10

And I'm like, okay, well, let's do this for online and let's add all these pieces in and then it'll, if we, you know, put it up to like $75, we're hitting your $65 mark after the taxes and the processing. And us, yeah, it's been incredible how much easier it has been on site since we've done all in pricing. And I am going to predict something that I think the ticketing industry is going to have to move to all in pricing. I think it's going to become regulated and it's going to be pressed upon all ticketing companies to do that just because of everything that's happened as of late. And you know lawmakers are frustrated with that, you know so.

Jon: 1:12:01

From a political perspective. I'm surprised it hasn't already gone in that direction. I really am, so I think you're right.

Amy: 1:12:11

And the other thing that I would really like to see lawmakers kibosh is dynamic pricing, because dynamic pricing doesn't work in the ticketing world. You have such a huge surge at like the launch of an event or tickets going on sale. You know you have people waiting in queues, you have you know, and so it creates this false demand and then, like it drops and then it kind of has its thing and then it surges right before the event if the event's not sold out. It's not like a hotel where it has that dynamic pricing. That's more fluid.

Jon: 1:12:48

Event ticketing can be completely manipulated. Oh, absolutely Completely manipulated. So, absolutely Completely manipulated. So yeah, dynamic pricing is ridiculous. I would imagine you have to be working pretty intensely, probably seven days a week, a lot of the time. What is a typical day in the life of a ticketing CEO look like for you.

Amy: 1:13:09

So funny. You should mention seven days a week. The last few weeks of this month we've had, you know, events over like the Oregon International Auto Show, so working in the office during the week and then come Thursday on event site, working through the weekend, back in the office on Monday. Same thing with the Bighorn Outdoor Adventure Show up in Spokane. You know, wednesday through Sunday, back in the office on Monday, event seasons like that for me.

Amy: 1:13:39

So June through September, I pretty much work seven days a week and I try to fit in moments in between there for myself or my family or people important to me, and that's by choice. You know I have an amazing team that works in the office with me and I have to admit that and you might see this on our website that there's a lot of females that work for me and that's by design, because I want to expose women to tech and entertainment. Sometimes it's harder for women to get opportunities. I have struggled over the years and have very skinned up knees and elbows for kind of proving that I deserve a seat at the table. But because I have really good people and strong teams and stuff, I don't mind being on event site or, if I have to, like, pull away and, you know, do something and leave it in their discretion.

Amy: 1:14:40

I feel very comfortable with it, but I do and I do enjoy it. Like I tell people that I think us event people are a little bit gypsy-esque, where we create these short-term communities and you go and you live in the community and you're spending, like you know, 10 to 15 hours a day with these people and you become very close and then you break it down and you move on to the next one. You maybe see some people once or twice a year and it feels normal, and so you just kind of hop around and do these different things. So I don't mind that in my life I don't feel like I have to go to the office and have this really structured life kind of having the variation of stuff is exciting to me, so but it is physically taxing. I try to do things like exercise, eat good, get massages, chiropractic work so that I can keep going out and doing all of this stuff because it is physically demanding.

Jon: 1:15:43

Yeah, your description of temporary communities. That's very accurate. That's a great way of describing it. I mean, not only can I tolerate that, I thrive on that. I mean, that's what's a large part of what's kept me in the game all these years. It's like that's kind of the way I want to be, through having to bounce from community to community to community to community in wildly different communities. It's just giving me an exposure to cultures and ideas that most people just never get in their lives. I wouldn't go back and change it for anything.

Amy: 1:16:31

Oh, I wouldn't either, and I like you, I wouldn't either. I and I, like you, I thrive on it Meeting people, seeing events and how certain things are being done. Cultural events, I mean, it's the different foods that I've been exposed to, or artists, or whatever. I mean it's, yeah, it's, it's really incredible and it is very different and it is a, you know, different perspective.

Amy: 1:16:59

And you know, my big thing with anything that we do is we want to partner with good people. We want to partner with people that are putting on the events for the right reasons, maybe supporting nonprofits and that's a very big part of who I am and who our company is creating something that's like this temporary adventure for people and just really doing it for the right reasons. I mean, I have honestly fired some clients where I'm like I'm not going to, I'm not going to do this because it doesn't feel right and it's not my lane, and there's some questionable things going on or there's some dysfunctional sorts of management top-down management and I'm like, nope, not worth it. So something else will pop up and take its place.

Jon: 1:17:56

Where will Ticket Tomato be three years from now?

Amy: 1:18:00

Oh, I hope bigger. You know we've been rebuilding since COVID. I'm just grateful that we made it through COVID. I see it with more technology, I see it with bigger partnerships. I want to see it thriving. I want to do as a potential career. So it's fascinating.

Amy: 1:18:41

So I had a girl that worked for me when she was in high school and in college and she wanted to work for a sports team that was a professional sports team. Work for a sports team that was a professional sports team. And when she first started working with me she didn't like being on the radio and she'd be like I'm scared of it and I'm like, no, you just pull it up and you're like Amy, go for McKenzie, you know, and if I say "what's your 20, that means where's your location, and like and I'm teaching her all of this stuff. And she was literally terrified of the radio by the time she stopped working for me. She was just taking that radio and she'd be like Amy, go for McKenzie. And she was like all over and it was so awesome to see.

Amy: 1:19:23

Well, she went on and handled the ticketing for a professional soccer team on the East Coast. Yeah, so she was one of their directors of ticketing. And then she just was recruited to go to Oregon state university to be one of their management people in their ticketing platform and cause they've been kind of redoing stuff and things and I, you know, each time she'd reach out to me and she'd say, hey, I want to use you as a reference and I'm like I'm so proud because you know, here you are, you know, doing what your dream was to be in the sports arena, whether it's college or professional sports, and she's doing it and kind of based from what she learned with me, so yeah, so that's, I want to keep doing stuff like that.

Jon: 1:20:15

So you're talking about something that I'm very passionate about, and that is mentorship. But did you have the benefit of any mentors as you were trying to figure out the ticketing business, or did you just have to figure it out on your own?

Amy: 1:20:34

business, or did you just have to figure it out on your own? So I had one. There's a production company here, a promotion, a music production promoter double T promotions in Portland.

Amy: 1:20:42

Yeah, really well-known David Lichen and I worked with him on the music side of stuff and my ex-husband was on his record label and all of that type of stuff and so I had heard through him because he started Fast Ticks which was an actual direct competitor to Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster tried to take him out. He successfully sued Ticketmaster and won one and he when I first started you know kind of going in this direction, he'd take me out to coffee or lunch and he talked to me about it and he would share to me you know kind of his war stories and stuff like that. And then I think from afar you know has kind of watched me and I would take it, I mean, whatever I could garner from him or learn from him, both as a producer as well as the ticketing side of stuff. I was really grateful for that. But other than that not really a whole lot. The rest of it was kind of has been blazed by myself.

Jon: 1:21:45

I'm going to ask you some completely random questions. Okay, what is your favorite sound?

Amy: 1:21:56

Wow, that's a really good question. I think my favorite sound is a guitar.

Jon: 1:22:05

Say more about that.

Amy: 1:22:07

Well, there's nothing like an amazing guitar solo. I mean, oh my gosh, yeah, and in all different aspects. So I, you know, whether it's acoustic or it's electric, it's funk, it's R&B, it's rock, like I can appreciate any kind of guitar solo. I really, and it will stop me in my tracks. Like I, something like I could be at a festival and on the other end of the festival and I hear faintly a guitar solo and it's like amazing, it will stop me in my tracks.

Jon: 1:22:47

Guitar is capable of being an extremely expressive instrument in the hands of the right person, any genre, any style but in my experience it's one of the more expressive instruments. I imagine that might be what you're latching on to. You're walking into an ice cream shop and you're going to get an ice cream cone with two scoops. What are the two flavors?

Amy: 1:23:17

Chocolate and vanilla.

Jon: 1:23:20

Okay, well, you're pretty quick on the draw with that, why?

Amy: 1:23:25

I just love both of them and I have ever since I was a kid. And you can throw all of this, like you know lavender mint, whatever, whatever, and yeah, those are nice sometimes, but I, you can never, ever go wrong with that. Or even as a kid I used to love the swirl cones where it was both of the flavors you know together. Yeah, I mean it's and I think maybe it's nostalgia. You know, as a kid, you know, growing up, that yeah, just very I, I have always been very basic in my ice cream flavors.

Jon: 1:24:01

So in the chocolate and vanilla scenario, which scoop goes on top?

Amy: 1:24:07

Chocolate.

Jon: 1:24:08

Got it. I'm watching the clock. This might be the longest session I've actually done to date, which surprised me. The last 20 minutes I've been watching the clock and thinking like, well, why is that? And it's because there just kind of gloss over that with the chaos of everything else that we have to worry about in our lives. But there's just, there's a lot of, there's a lot of depth in the field.

Amy: 1:24:43

There really is.

Jon: 1:24:44

Amy, thank you for making the time for a conversation today. It's been fun.

Amy: 1:24:50

Yeah, it's been great, I've enjoyed it. Today it's been fun. Yeah, it's been great, I've enjoyed it, and I am just so I I'm going to have to tell people about that. You brought up the Bumber shoot story. I mean the fact that you shared the story that I, from afar, was witnessing just as I was getting into this business, is I mean it? It feels like everything's come full circle. It's a small town you know. All call, One Hour to Doors.