INTRO
LATHAM
Welcome to Artful Conversations, a podcast about arts and cultural management. I’m Annetta Latham.
INGRAM
And I'm Katrina Ingram. We interview leaders who help shape the world of arts and culture, sharing their stories, insights, and observations.
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INGRAM
I'm here today with Terry Wickham, festival producer for the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. Welcome Terry.
WICKHAM
It's great to be here.
INGRAM
Terry, you've been with the festival for close to three decades. For many people, you are the living embodiment of the event. How did you come to be in this role?
WICKHAM
Well, I turned it down the first time. I was in living in Calgary, and Holger Peterson had phoned me, he was the artistic director. I thought, “well that's really nice, but I'm living in Calgary, and you know I have a business,” and then I got thinking about it. A few months later the job was still open, So then I applied to take the job on one condition, that I live in Calgary. Which I found out, a year later, it was a five-to-four vote. Then after two years, I combined the role of artistic director and general manager so I do both, but I turned that down as well. So I've been fairly consistent. And then it came back, because they hired someone and they didn't take it. So in a way, it seems like it was meant to be, because I did everything not to do it.
But as far as experience is concerned, I took a Master's degree in Economics and Administration, which is supposed to be the science of management, at Trinity College in Dublin, and then I worked at the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts as a programmer there for the first two years it was open. Things were different in those days, we were able to do 50-60 shows a year. Live Nation didn't exist, so it was more open. But that gave me good experience, because we did everything from Emmylou Harris and John Prine to the Peking Acrobats and the Moscow State Symphony. It gave me a very broad range of what sells. But what really attracted me to Edmonton is, I came here in ‘86 and ‘88 as a guest and saw how friendly it was, saw how strong the spirit was. Being from Dublin, folk music is all around you. It was kind of natural that way. I've never looked for another job since.
INGRAM
It sounds like it was meant to be. Our focus today is on events management for Arts and Cultural Organizations, and we'd love to hear about your planning process for the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. Can you tell us a bit about when it starts? What are the major milestones you need to hit in order to deliver the festival each August?
WICKHAM
There’s an overarching management principle that I've brought in since I joined, and I call it “continuous improvement.” So, every year should be better than the last. That doesn't always work out, but it usually does. Sometimes you get better by a little bit, and sometimes like in 1993 when we founded Stage 3, 4, 5 and 6, and expanded the whole site it improves a lot. It improved a lot when we added a Thursday night.
But a year-to-year basis, the first thing we do is, obviously, tie everything up after the festival. Our planning starts in September. The first thing I do is take a holiday for a month, and then we come back. Programming is obviously important, but we'll have a staff debrief of what went well, what didn't. This year, of course, we had a lot to look at, because we had an evacuation on Thursday night because of weather. So, safety has become number one. Last year we found that lineups were the big thing we wanted to face. People getting in on a Thursday night, people lining up for the beer tent, people lining, lining, lining up, all the time. I get to skip the lineups, as do most volunteers, as do all the staff, so you have to put yourselves in the mind of the patron.
Obviously, there's budgeting for it. We've been very fortunate that in 29 years, we've had 28 surpluses and a breakeven year in 1993, which is pretty unusual in the arts, but it's pretty tight. If we make 5%, we're happy. Because we've been selling out every year, we keep doing it the same way, so we spend everything. Sometimes it's moving hotels, we moved from Kingsway down to the Westin, and that was a $40,000-$50,000 decision, but I knew instinctively it was a good decision. A better hotel, you're closer to downtown, you're closer to the site, and there are bars around where people can go for a drink.
There’s government relations, and I've had a problem with all three governments in funding since I joined. I finally fixed the provincial funding about two years ago under the Conservatives, but the NDP carried it on, so it's not a party affiliation, it's more like this is what should happen. We feel we're certainly underfunded on the federal level, always have been. We had a big fight there for a lot of years, and I'm hoping to get that fixed. The city is making moves to understand that an international festival of this reputation is not being funded.
When you have 2,700 volunteers, there's always things to take care of. There’s communication issues, this week for instance I'll meet with the hospitality crew, because we're having some some problems in there. However, we're known as one of the most hospitable festivals. So it's not broken, it just needs to be improved a little bit. It's all of those kinds of things.
Obviously, the programming is the most important thing. There’s two ways to break down the programming, we'll get into that later. But essentially, who you're going to bring back from the first 39 years, who are you going to bring back. There's about half or maybe 40%. Then, who is new, and that's thousands of artists.
But we're very loose at the festival, people keep their own schedules. Sometimes I'm there at 10:00, 11:00, and I'm the only one in. Sometimes there are six people in it. They have their jobs, I don't manage the people, I manage the organization. They manage themselves.
INGRAM
That's a great approach. There's a number of things I want to dig into that you mentioned. Let's start with the evacuation, because I think it's a great example of what happens when you've made all of these great plans, and then something hits you out of left field, and how do you deal with that kind of a situation?
WICKHAM
Well, we had a great plan actually, we had an evacuation plan, because we've had to do it before. Not the whole night, but we evacuated half an hour earlier, and we tuned it up. Everything was great. Everything fell into place, except they forgot to do one thing, they forgot to contact myself and the communications person. So other than contacting the person who had to make the decision to evacuate and the person who had to communicate that decision, we did everything right. I had 30 seconds to make that call, because a weather system had hit us and another one was a 50/50 chance to come along. It was a pretty easy decision to make, because as I looked out at the hill, I saw one of the large video screens flopped over and I saw another two waving at me. I went, “wow, that's not right.” So, that was an easy decision to make. It went very smoothly. We're going to tune it up again next year, but essentially we had a really good safety check.
If you think back to Big Valley, or other festivals, wind and rain is the most dangerous thing. Rain hurts you financially and gets you wet, but winds can kill you. Lightning can too, but lightning is very rare. But wind, so many things there can fly and hit you, or fall down. Our real focus now is on evacuation, and really on safety, because if I had been convinced that we could withstand an 80-90 km/hr wind, I might not have evacuated. But when I saw the video screens, I lost confidence. We have to build that confidence back up again in the site. It was a very cheap safety check, it cost us about $125,000, but compared to an injury or death, that's very small potatoes.
INGRAM
Right. It sounds like you knew your core value of safety, and even though you had a limited amount of time to make that decision, you had a good plan in place and you were able to make that call. I do want to talk about budget, because that's obviously something that we think a lot about as event planners, and I believe you have about a $4.5million budget for the festival. Can you explain to us just roughly how that's allocated? How does that break down?
WICKHAM
If we go through the revenue side, which is the first thing I look at, more than half our revenue is our box office at just over $2.5million. And then from the box office, good things flow. Obviously if you have a big crowd, then you'll probably sell lots of beer. That's about $400,000 maybe $450,000. Government funding is about $500,000. So now we're up to $3.5million. Then there's a lot of ancillary things, whether it's concessions, we sell CDs, we sell lots of stuff. There's little bits and pieces. But but the major part is we're really box office-driven, which comes from spending money on the artists, on the expense side.
Again the main expense would be on talent, that’d be about $1.5million. Staff would be about $800,000. Production is expensive, and then there's a cost of everything you sell. If you're selling beer, you have to buy the beer. If you're selling the artists’ CDs, then most of the money goes to them. It all breaks down. We're also very public, so if anybody wants our budget – no one's ever requested it – but we will just e-mail it out to people, because we're a not-for-profit. I believe in complete transparency, which is very good when I'm dealing with the governments, because they can't match us on that. I'll just say, “well okay, I'm just going to tell everybody what you're doing, and you can come and check anything you want with us, because you'll find we're pretty clean.”
INGRAM
That's great. We might email you about that, just in the spirit of sharing with our students, because sometimes other organizations aren't as transparent, So it's hard to know how to budget. I want to talk a bit about the the team, the staff, and the many volunteers that help you to produce this festival. Can you tell us a bit about staff roles that you have in place, and how you decide what's a staff role versus what's a volunteer role?
WICKHAM
That can change over time, what’s staff, what’s paid. We can get into that if you’d like. As far as our Board, I answer to the Board of Directors. We're a very democratic organization. There are 2,700 volunteers organized into about 40 different crews, and a volunteer of two-years’ experience can become a member. We have about 300 people, it tends to be a bit older people who want to spend time at meetings. They elect the board, nine people who have three-year terms. So three people rotate every year. But people can stay on, there's no term limits, so some people will fill in 15 years on the board. They’re a policy board. That's very clear. We're lucky to be able to afford to have a staff, so we can take care of that on a staff level. I'm the producer, I didn't like the term artistic director, because I don't really direct anybody. It's not like a theatre. I describe my job as, “I get to plan a party and I get to pick the music.”
The staff levels… I'm producer, so that's artistic director/general manager. I know a lot of other arts organizations have two. So they have that argument, typically the general manager has to go and find the money and the artistic director goes and spends it. Or overspends. I just have that conversation, kind of with myself. I have a six-month, seven-month assistant, and that person has another three- or four-month assistant for those kinds of duties. There's an administrator who would fill in a lot of the functions, some of the functions anyway, of what a general manager would do, but mostly takes care of the accounting, box office, grants, all the paperwork. Very handy for me. We have a volunteer department that has three people in it. One full-time, one for four months, and one for about two or three months. We have a production department, they put together the whole thing, and the administrator has an assistant too for nine months of the year. We have six pretty well full-time people, and we have about another four that would be six to eight months, and then we have a lot of people in for two or three months, or a month. In production, they would bring in some students. It's a 10-month job on production, that production manager is now working on Flying Canoe as well, so they do two festivals. That's mostly how the staff has broken down.
On the box office side, the administration looks after that. We hire students. We try and identify students early, so that they can be with us for two or three years. Now that we're more respected than we were 30 years ago, people are actually finding that coming into our box office can lead to a career in the arts. There's many examples of that, including our current administrator. As far as staff is concerned, we always look inside first if we're looking for someone. But in 27 years as general manager, we've only had two changes of the six people. And unfortunately both of those were due to cancer, or we'd have had no changes in 27 years. I know that's very unusual, but so is the Folk Festival
INGRAM
It speaks to you having a very stable organization. I was trying to keep up on the map, was it about 20-25 people or so on staff would you say, or 30?
WICKHAM
I’d have to count how many stable geniuses we have. We have six full time. We’ve got 15 or 18, but some of those are honorariums for $3,000-$4,000, or so. In paid positions, there'd be about nine people that could say they make a living or have their living from Folk Festival.
INGRAM
And contrast that with the 2,700 volunteers that you mentioned, and I know you mentioned having a volunteer staff. Can you talk a bit more about these volunteers? Because this is quite literally an army of volunteers, some of whom have been with the organization for a very long time. How do you organize so many people, and make everything run efficiently?
WICKHAM
I don't know. I walk up on a Thursday, and I go “here it goes.” Delegation’s my middle name. It's the management principle that I like the best, that you can actually get other people to do the work. You retain the authority, and the responsibility. Responsibility’s a hard one. When something goes wrong, as they say, the buck stops here. How do we retain them, how do we hold onto volunteers, well first of all, people say we treat our volunteers very well. I'd like to turn that around and go, our volunteers treat each other well, because they're in charge. I work for the volunteers, who are in control of the festival as it runs. I make a lot of the decisions, but if people aren't happy then it's the volunteers that will say “we're not happy with you.” It is the largest temporary workforce in Edmonton. It's unusual that we all come together for four days, or a week, or whatever that is.
So obviously, you're going to have some communication problems. That's why it goes back to what we were saying at the start, continuous improvement. What do we need to improve, what do we need to look at? I encourage ideas coming from the bottom up, and a lot of them do. And from the audience, we will say to the audience, “what's wrong with the festival?” And they'll tell us. What's surprising with us for people is, we did a survey, asked them what all the problems were, and then the next year what I heard was “well, we told them what the problems were, but they fixed it.” They were surprised that we actually acted on it, because a lot of organizations, I think, try and find out what's wrong and then they just keep going their merry way. We're very customer-volunteer experience-driven. It's really important, because that’s your repeat customers. It saves us a lot on marketing. We just had a survey from the city, they interviewed and said that 96 percent of our audience plan to return this year, it was an economic impact study. That's 24 out of 25 people. That's pretty good. I'm kind of wondering why the other 4 percent aren’t coming back, but that's amazing.
INGRAM
That's amazing. Just on that point about having a challenge and how you fixed it, or how you dealt with that, is there any particular story that you might be able to share with us that delves into something specific?
WICKHAM
Well, there was one time where I went down the wrong road with the Cloverdale community. I was getting really annoyed, because we give everybody in Cloverdale… it's about 550 Weekend Passes. Everybody that lives in Cloverdale south of 98 Avenue gets free tickets, and we were giving people tickets and saying “you can't sell them, you can't give them to other people, because that's going to hurt our box office.” But of course, they were. So then I started to get really mad about it, because it was hurting us, and it was wrong. Then I started to say, “well we'll give two per household.” We weren't trying to cut back the number, we just didn't want them selling it. And I was getting compared to Ralph Klein, and stuff like that. So I went, “well something is wrong here.” The idea was right. I went for a walk in the snow one night, going “I don't know what's going on here.” I like Cloverdale, we have good relationships. They're the ones who are cheating, how can I stop this? I went, “it's not the policy.” The policy was, if you live in Cloverdale, you get a free weekend pass. Even if you're a student that is studying in Lethbridge and comes home to their parents house for the summer, they're really residents so we gave them so the passes. It was the process. The policy was good, it was a process that was wrong.
And then we went, “okay, let's not give them the passes, because then they can’t sell them.” So we switched to bracelets, and said “come in two days before, the day before, and we'll give you your bracelet.” You can't tear the bracelet, well you can tear the bracelet off, but we can check that. Now the control was back in our hands. Instead of saying, “don't do this,” we just changed that whole thing. But it's funny, you know, someone said there was a story in the paper about it , and I couldn't find it. I said “I can't find it,” they said “well it's on the first page.” I didn't think of looking on the first page about folk festival tickets.
INGRAM
That's wonderful. That just speaks to taking more of an innovative approach, rather than taking a hard line and potentially destroying a relationship with the community. Really looking at it from a different perspective, and keeping everyone happy, making sure everyone's needs are met.
WICKHAM
I think it's very frustrating if, for instance, you lose your ticket and you wanted to go, especially in years when we were sold out, it's not even so much about the money as people wanting to go. So we tend to believe people. Canadians are overwhelmingly honest. You know, we let for instance seniors in for free. Well we used to let seniors in for free, now we charge $22 a day. It's pretty cheap. But for some people, that's an economic hardship. So we said, if it's an economic hardship just give me a call. No questions asked. We'll just leave the ticket there. First year, I had three calls. Second year, I had one. That call was one of the three people, because they recognized the voice. Since then, I haven't had a call. If that was in Ireland, you'd have 25-year-olds dressing up, and coming along with sticks, so it's easy to work that way.
I hate inflexibility, that drives me crazy. You can have a policy, but if you're inflexible about it… I always say to people, like if it's a security person, listen to the story first. For years, I didn't carry a cell phone. Technophobe for one thing, but I just want people to make their own decisions. If someone makes a mistake at the gate what happens. Oh, they let someone in for free they shouldn't have? No big deal, but they get to learn to make those decisions. Always listen to the story. If you have a policy, there's going to be exceptions to it. If you do something good for some people, they're going to tell ten of their friends. If you do something bad, they're probably going to tell 20 of their friends that the Folk Festival didn't treat us well. It's all about word-of-mouth, and being nice guys.
We're fortunate. Like, when I had to make that decision about the evacuation, I didn't have to worry about the long-term health of the Folk Festival, because we built up our surpluses over the year. It wasn't like, “I've got to make this decision now, and that's really going to hurt us, that could actually bring us down.” If you're in that decision, then you're kind of compromised. It was never a money decision. I can't help but make the calculation, I knew it was a $100,000-$150,000 decision, and a disappointment. But I also knew that it wasn't going to break us. So again, it gets a little easier that way.
INGRAM
It's great that you have that kind of culture, and that you're really living that culture at all levels. I want to talk a bit about logistics and regulatory issues. Maybe not the sexiest topics, but very important for arts management. I'm wondering about location, and wondering about being in Edmonton, and how that has shaped the Festival.
WICKHAM
The macro-view of Edmonton is, first of all, it still has and has had a lot of money over the last 20 or 30 years with oil. I was reminded of that when I went to Winnipeg and went “hey, this kind of looks dowdy compared to us.” You know, when you see all the new cars and the roads all fixed up. Also, I think there's a real culture of music-loving, and going out to support live shows in Alberta in general. In Edmonton, of course, we've had CKUA, CBC the University of Alberta, lots of really solid institutions that have helped support the Folk Festival, and were there for it, and have built up a music-loving audience. I drove a taxi in and around Calgary for a few years just to find out how to do the music business. I used to listen to CKUA, and Cam Hayden, and Holger Peterson and the blues, and different things. So I think there was a lot of underlying fundamentals that were very strong for the Folk Festival. Then we found our our site. Of course the first Folk Festival was held in Gold Bar Park way down east. What you need to know about it is that it's right beside chemical row and beside the sewage treatment plant. So depending on which way the wind blows, although it normally blows from the northwest, which is why the east side of towns are usually the poor sides, because the wind blows it to the east and down east.
And then the City moved us to Gallagher Park. Our producer at the time didn't think we could do a festival there, now we realize it's the perfect festival site for us. It was like “we shall not be moved.” We didn't want to be moved, but because of citizens around Gold Bar, we got moved. Sometimes you're just lucky, I mean that probably is the biggest stroke of luck that the Folk Festival had. Because at Gold Bar, we would have been restricted in our size. And then you get settled into a place and you don't want to move.
INGRAM
Right, and Gold Bar doesn't sound like the nicest place to be located. I did want to ask about Gallagher Park, or potentially the Cloverdale community that you're in. Can you talk about how that specific site has shaped the Festival?
WICKHAM
Well, more to the point, we've shaped Gallagher Park to meet our needs. When I joined the festival, there was no stage 3, 4, 5 and 6, that area was parkland. We were having horrendous sound bleed, and everything was growing. We see ‘89 was my first year, ‘92 we had Emmylou Harris and Ry Cooder. We were getting there, we were starting to make some roads into the roots music business, and get a bigger crowd. It was during the ‘92 Festival, when I'd already been there three years. I walked into what's now Stage 3, because that's where the kitchen tent used to be. I went, “we're having terrible sound bleed. What am I going to do about that?” For some reason, I just looked up left, and there was Stage 3. I went, “well why don't we use that?” I went for a walk, and I saw Stage 4, which we got rid of because it wasn't very good. And then I saw Stage 5, and that was enough. I thought, “well there's the thing.” The next year we still had sound bleed problems, and I went for another walk, and I missed Stage 6 when I went for that walk the first time, because I thought I didn't need it. And then I found stage six, it holds 10,000 people. So now we have very little sound bleed problems, you'll always have some again. There's another thing that we're looking at, because I noticed it was bleed between 5 and 6 depending on who's playing, and it's a question of how you orient the speakers. Just turn them a little, or who you have playing against each other. That was the big change. We moved the Mainstage back. Stage 1 and 2 used to be beside each other, and the beer tent was at the bottom. Again, sound bleed.
Your site has to be designed around the stages, you put your stages in the most advantageous traffic flow, but mostly the best sound bleed place. You separate them, like the spokes of a wheel, and then you try and separate them as much as possible. So I put Stage 1 on the bottom, put the beer tent in the middle, and put Stage 2 up further, and then sound bleed went away. People said, “you can't do that, the beer tent is on a hill.” Then I said, “I don't care, it's where the stages go.” I had a friend who bought a jug of beer for $15, and then turned around to talk to his friend and it went sliding off the table. “There goes $15,” I said “well don't complain, you got a free ticket.”
INGRAM
It’s amazing what people will do for their beer. They'll go to that extra length to get their beer if you were able to address the sound issue, which sounds like a major consideration for a music festival. But also, it sounds like you were able to grow at the same time while you were addressing that.
WICKHAM
Yeah we were. For instance, our dearly departed production manager Dan Snyder phoned me and said “we made a mistake on the Mainstage, but don't worry, we'll take it down put it back up again.” That's two days’ work. I said, “well, let me cycle down and have a look.” I was a lot younger, so I went down to the top of the hill to look at it. He moved it six degrees one way by mistake, you know someone just got it wrong. I said, “leave it right there.” It's just perfect, because instead of looking straight up the hill it turned a little bit, and opened up a whole new area for visitors or people who were straining to see the Mainstage the year before. Now they could see it.
Sometimes there's happy accidents, like being moved to Gallagher Park, like that six degrees, and again it comes to that continuous improvement. We made a big change to the beer tent last year, and I went “you know, it works so well, I'm going to actually enhance that a little bit.” The back portion of Stage 1, the beer tent was going to take over half of Stage 1 for the public and half for the beer tent. So they’ll be able to sit right up towards the stage. We're not increasing the capacity, so it's going to relieve the congestion in the beer tent, which will not only enhance the viewing and listening for the beer tent audience, but it'll also give us more room to set up proper lines to go in and get the beer quicker. There's no point in lining if people were lining up for an hour to get in for the beer. We solved that, now it's five minutes. There's no point in replacing that and saying “well, I got in, now I have to wait an hour for the beer.” We actually put people in line in busy times on the weekend and say, “how long did it take you to get the beer?” They'll say eight minutes, three minutes, five minutes, seven minutes. No one was over ten minutes after… the first night was bad, even after a year of planning. That goes back to communication. 2,700 volunteers, trying to get everybody on board, but when people are actually faced with doing the job, they will find their own solutions, they'll find what's quickest, what's best. We're looking to enhance and improve those little things all the time, like a finely tuned instrument. We're trying to improve.
INGRAM
I love that, because it's a great example of your continuous improvement in action, sending people out to figure out how long exactly it takes to get that beer. If you have beer, you obviously have a relationship with the Alberta Liquor and Gaming Commission, and I'm sure there's other regulatory bodies that you need to abide by the rules with. Can you speak a bit about some of the regulatory bodies that you deal with in organizing the festival, and how you work with them to make sure everybody's happy?
WICKHAM
Well first of all, the City of Edmonton is very good. I'm going to give praise where it's due. They have people in place that help festivals. I mean there is something like 900 special events that happen in Edmonton, some are small, some are bigger. They go from the Triathlon to maybe a World Cup game, to the Folk Festival, to you know whatever else. So they organize a meeting and will have the police, fire, transit, health and safety. We deal with all those departments, and since we're doing mostly the same thing every year, we get to know them very well. Especially important is health regulations, so we don't poison anybody.
We had a serious salmonella outbreak for the first time in our history last year. We tracked it back. We didn't do anything wrong, in fact we did everything right. But you bring in say 20 or 30 concessionaires, if one person has the flu or is sick and is handling food, you can't really control that. They don't even know what actually happened. The food that the restaurant bought might have been contaminated, they can't really go back and track that. But they do track everything that we do. We had a clean bill of health, but it was unfortunate that it happened. We take everything seriously, because all it takes is one tent not secured. One speaker that could fall on someone's head. That's all very important. The City are good to work with, and we work all the way through with them. And that's what our staff does.
INGRAM
It's great that you have that kind of a partnership with the city. I want to shift a bit, and talk about the audience. You brought up the audience a little earlier, and I want to talk about great experiences when people go to events or festivals, or are looking for a great experience. What do you think makes for a great festival experience?
WICKHAM
Well first of all, you have to have a great lineup. It actually was a person at CKUA that said to me, it was my Forrest Gump moment. I was being interviewed, and they said, “how do you get a really good lineup?” I said, “you make sure every artist is really good.” It seems facetious, and it seems funny, but it's actually true. We turn down so many, that the ones we actually bring in, we thought about for a long time, we've listened to for a long time. That's the first thing, they're coming for the music, that's the exciting part. The management book I read that made most impact on me was In Search of Excellence. What they said is just search for excellence in every area. You might not always get there, but you try, so you aim for the stars. Maybe you hit the moon. So being over the moon is okay.
We look at everything, and it comes down to toilets, food, you know weather, or how we deal with the weather. The tents, our old tents used to have bars coming down so we replaced all our tents. It's just in every area. As I said, there's 40 to 45 crews. We look at every one of those crews, and see where we can improve. Again, putting yourself in the position of a ticket holder instead of sitting there. Looking at everything and saying, “okay, if I was coming along I would be…”
I waited half an hour to get into Roger Waters, and I went “this is ridiculous.” I turned to my wife, and said “geez, this is like trying to get into the Folk Festival” as a joke. But we fixed that, and how we fixed that is about every five or ten years getting in on Thursday night would blow up. And there's a very good reason for that, because you know, half our audience buys four-day passes. So we only bracelet them once on Thursday, then we don't bracelet them anymore. It took me years to convince our volunteer crew to not put six people on every night. On Thursday, you need 12, because you’ll only need four on Friday. That kind of thing. People just look at the numbers, and they divide. You have to think of it more deeply than that. You have to say, “well what actually happens, everybody gets banded on Thursday, and then on Friday you're just banding single ticket people.” It's just looking at those kinds of logistics, and working through it. There are 2,700 people thinking about it, plus lots of other people that will give us suggestions.
If you don't look at it as your festival, if you look at it as Edmonton's festival. I don't book by my own tastes, to an extent, but there's lots of stuff I bring in that I don't like. There's lots of stuff that I do like that I don't bring in, because I don't really figure it's folky enough, or whatever. It's not my festival, it's Edmonton's. We'll have more blues, we'll have more African music than maybe some other festivals. So every festival, they're all different, they're all built on the same model, all the Canadian folk festivals. But they all adapt to their city, they all adapt to their surroundings, they all evolve that way.
INGRAM
That was actually one of my questions, about how you choose to book. You mentioned a little bit earlier about inviting people back versus new people, and I want to talk a bit more about that, and also talk about this push that's happening in a lot of arts and cultural organizations to move toward the younger audience. How has that informed some of your booking decisions? Has that shaped the festival, can you speak a bit more to that?
WICKHAM
First of all, very simply, I look for the best. I don't make any apologies for that. A long time ago, I wanted Edmonton to be among the top folk festivals in the world. According to John Prine and Mary J. Carpenter, some of the Irish musicians, I've talked to, even someone like Lakou Mizik from Haiti, they'll say “this is the best treatment we've ever had.” As a folk festival, we don't compare ourselves to you know Bonnaroo or Coachella. They are different animals. But compared to other folk festivals, I wouldn't swap with Cambridge or Newport. I've studied their lineups, and their finances, and their physical setup. I like this one better than anything else.
As far as the younger audience, younger people are very easily satisfied, I have to say. They've been putting up with high housing prices, baby boomer music on the radio all the time. We bring in 60 to 65 artists. If you give younger people 10 or 15 artists that they recognize, and that they like, whether that's The Tallest Man on Earth, or whoever that is. They're very pleased with that. So about five or six years ago… you know, I tend to be loyal to a fault. I was pushed into a direction by someone very close to me to say, “we’ve got to be younger.” And I remember, we had some young board members come on and said, “we want to get younger people down to the festival, how do we do that?” And I said, “that's very simple, you book younger artists that younger people are interested in.” So we've had good success with that, whether it's Passenger, or John Butler. Some of those people are in their 20s, 30s and you know what you do, you try and find people that younger people will really like, but won't turn off older people. Same with the older musicians, you don't want them to turn off the younger crowd.
My daughter sat on a tarp with about ten other people, and they had a vote one time. This is when we had the Avett Brothers, and some other kind of younger bands, and they voted for their favorite Mainstage performance. And it was the Preservation Hall Jazz Band with Del McCoury. Well I wouldn't have bet on that. I think if people are open, and minds are open… and letting kids in for free from the time they are three, four, five, six or babies. Then half-price for teenagers, so they kind of get it. By the time they get into their 20s, they get folk music, at least down in Gallagher Park they do.
INGRAM
Very interesting, and it can be a challenging dynamic to manage and bring in a younger audience while not losing your core, but you've seemed to have really done a wonderful job of that. In fact, the Folk Festival sells out on a regular basis, and you've created this great reputation over the many years that you worked with the Festival. I'm wondering about what advice you might have for someone who's just starting out. It's a brand new festival, there really is no reputation yet. What is your advice to that person who's just starting out with a new festival?
WICKHAM
Well, the best advice I ever got for doing the Festival was after I got the job. I was driving back to Calgary with Laurie, who does a lot of the research for our programming and stuff, and I said “okay, this is not a concert, this is a public institution, there's more of a role here. How do I do this job?” She said, “you need to listen.” And I kind of listened to that idea, I said “yeah, yeah, I'll listen.” And I still remember, I looked over, and she said “no, you need to really listen.” And because I'm Irish, I can talk all the time, but listening is hard. Especially active listening. So I listen to the volunteers. I listen to the audience. I listen to whoever, I listen to the artists. I mean, who's going to know who the best artists in the world are, me, or someone who plays music? People who play music have a better feel for who's a really good banjo player, or a guitar player, all that kind of stuff.
So I think listening is the most important thing. Listening to your friends, you know, listening to the people who are trying to set it up. We're helping Bear Creek up in Grand Prairie to start. We listen to them, and just essentially… listening. I know that sounds flippant, but if you really think about it, we still listen. We do surveys. We did a survey that had 1,500 responses, and I read every one. I know from studying statistics that you can be outweighed, the last few you read can weigh more heavily than the first few. So I take notes all the way through, and go “there's a good idea, there's a good idea, don't like that one.”
If you're sitting in my position, and you encourage all the ideas, that's an awful lot easier than trying to come up with all the ideas yourself. Now you just have to sit there and go, “that's a good idea and that's a bad idea.” People are willing to give you all that feedback for free. So I would think for listening, you have to do an analysis of when I joined the Calgary Festival in 1995-1996 for about ten years, I had to look at where the problems were and break it all down. Funny enough, they'd lost money, they'd lost $100,000 and I found out their problem. I phoned the chair of the Board, and said “you probably didn't spend enough.” “What do you mean we didn't spend enough? We lost $100,000.” I said, “you didn't spend enough in the right area, which is talent.” Talent leads everything. Artists are what leads to the box office. When they lose money, they all look at “let's cut back the artistic budget.” That's the wrong decision. I'm trying to advise Vancouver at the moment, and saying “don't do that, and increase it.” So Calgary now had the support of the Edmonton Folk Festival. Calgary did. We doubled the artistic budget, and we turned it right around. We tripled the audience the first year I was there, and we got rid of the deficit and put a hundred grand in the bank. That was a big turnaround, and it was because we got Blue Rodeo, Jann Arden, we got some big names in there, and everybody came down, because it's a beautiful site down there too.
INGRAM
That makes a lot of sense, and I know that sometimes organizations can get into the cost-cutting spiral, and it's really hard to come out of that. It makes sense, though, it can feel counter-intuitive to double artistic budgets, taking quite a bit of a risk. You mentioned pricing strategies a few times through our conversation, and I know that you have various segments that are allowed to come to the festival for free, but the festival still makes money at the end of the day. Can you talk a bit about your pricing strategy overall?
WICKHAM
We're not-for-profit, so I'm not allowed to make a profit. But no one ever told me I couldn't make a surplus. Well, we want to be underpriced. That's our raison d'être, for one thing, we want music to be affordable. We don't have any VIP passes, the only VIP passes are ones we give away to people who are in the business, people who have helped us, whatever. But a lot of festivals, you go to Coachella and you can have a tent, and you can have a hot tub, and you'll get the better seating. I'm sick of rich people getting the best of everything. The best seats on a plane, the best healthcare, whatever, yeah, they have the money. That's the way the world works, but not at the Folk Festival. If you can afford $47.50 a day – with no service charges, and we do that on purpose – we sell half the tickets ourselves. Ticketmaster sells the other half, ours have no service charges. Even beer is $6. You know, Calgary’s at $7. I went to an Oilers game, it was $11 for a beer and no other beer was as big or as good as what we serve. I just think that's ripping people off. I think that builds long term loyalty.
I went in one time, and I didn't even know this, but I saw our t-shirts at the time – I think they’re $25 now – but they were $20, not $35 or $40 like at a concert. They were $20 or $25. But a kid's t-shirt, the baby t-shirts, the ones for the three-year-olds were $10. We don't make any money on that, we break even. I thought, that's really good. Someone puts that t-shirt on their kid, it looks cute, but there's our logo all the time. Your t-shirt should be made of good material. They should last. I still see people working in our back lanes, wearing our t-shirts. People get on airplanes with the t-shirts, and that's free advertising.
A lot of it is word of mouth, typical arts organization will spend 10-15% on marketing. We spend about 1% on marketing, and that's because of all the word of mouth, and the repeat business, we're having to adjust that a little bit now, doing a bit of Facebook advertising and all that. That figure might have gone to 2%, but it's still pretty low.
INGRAM
That sounds, again, like you're living your values, you're delivering quality at a fair price and you're not penalizing people, or trying to extract the most from the situation.
WICKHAM
Well there was one time, we sold out in eight minutes. We know that we could have charged $20-$30 more, and we could have put $300,000 in the bank. But that's just not what we're about. We're a not for profit. That's why we get $500,000 in government funding, letting kids in for free. When you say we let people in for free, we have about 25,000 people a day and about 11,000 of those every day are free. Children under 12, used to be seniors, Cloverdale residents, we give away tickets to social service agencies, about 2,000 tickets over the weekend. Lots of hangers-on, lots of people from other industries. You know, we're generous, we're able to be, and that's a good way to be. I think it comes back to you, too.
INGRAM
Absolutely. So what does the future hold for the Folk Festival, and for you, Terry Wickham?
WICKHAM
Well, I'm not looking for another job. I don't have a pension plan, so it's kind of fortunate that way, that I need to work there. And they like having me on, I'm 62 now. In fact, we have a board retreat this weekend at CKUA, just for a day. We'll address that. Who knows what the future holds, I mean this is a generation that has different interests. Newspapers have lasted for many generations. Maybe they'll be gone, maybe symphony orchestras will be gone, maybe folk festivals will be gone. But I do think that the organizations that are going to last are going to be the ones that listen, they're going to be the ones that have quality first and foremost, and that are trying to adapt. We do find already that there's less people buying four-day passes. They're more interested in one or two days now. Baby boomers are losing energy, four days is a lot. Younger people don't have four days off. A lot of them have two jobs. The kid who cuts my hair, I've known her since she was about a day old. She works on Thursday nights and Saturdays, so she buys tickets for Friday and Sunday. Used to be a four-day pass when she was a kid. But now she's working. So there’s demographic changes and shifts.
We hope to stay relevant. We may have to cut back. We may get into a cost cutting situation, but other festivals exist quite well on eight, nine, ten thousand ticket sales a day. We're selling 13,700. One of the things I look at is to say, “well, what happens if we aren’t the flavor of the month anymore?” There's a lot more competition in Edmonton, Rogers Place opened, Rexall used to do about 15 or 20 shows, they did 60 this year. The more people go to big shows at Rogers and pay $150, then they go, “you know, I could have gone to the whole Folk Festival for that, and brought my kids for free.” So I think the future's fairly bright, but you never know. We don't take it for granted. As I said, we still sell out. But we do about 75% of ticket sales the first day, and then it trickles in for the next two months, and then we get an upturn as the festival gets closer. And then maybe there's a good weather forecast, so I always say good weather forecast is worth $100,000 for us. If you looked in the newspaper, and they said it's going to rain all weekend, and this is Tuesday, you're not going to buy a ticket. You'll wait and see what the weather is. But if the weather forecast is solid, then you'll buy.
We'll keep adjusting, if we have to get smaller we will. We're not going to get any bigger. We've already shrunk by 5% on purpose because we oversold one year. What does the future hold, people are not going to move from Gallagher Park. There's no need to do that. We've done a lot of infrastructure. We're not heavy on infrastructure and capital costs, a building like this is great to build but in 20 or 30 years, you're going to have to put a lot more money into it, where does that come from? So I stayed away from buildings. If I'm going to do a concert, I can go to Myer Horowitz, McDougall, Jubilee, the Winspear, or the Arden. And frankly, we don't do any shows less than 1,000 or 1,700 anyway. So, I don't see it going into the venue route, because we're well-served with venues. We will just continue to hope that people will make it like Christmas comes around once a year. They've been going as kids, and they'll keep going.
Edmonton is still growing, so we only need 1-1.5% of Edmontonians to really like us. Or maybe 2-3% with single tickets, and then we're good. We’re going to be addressing that situation with the board this weekend, but you're trying to predict the future. Someone said that trying to predict the future based on the past is like trying to drive a car, while you're looking at the back window. What it holds for me personally, you know, I'm 62. My health is good. You know, honestly, kind of corny, but I think 69 is the new 65. People live longer. I think it's healthy to keep working. I think we can get this down to a half-time job, once we finish all the capital acquisition.
One thing that worked very well when we had the wind evacuation, was those big towers that we put up. A couple hundred thousand dollars, just there. And we bought a warehouse now, so we're buying all our own tents to keep inflation under control. We bought our own office, so we don’t have to pay rent. We've been pretty smart, I have to say, economically, with keeping our expenses down wherever we can. We spend like drunken sailors on talent, and hotels, and everything else, but the core of not spending money on rent and tent rentals and all of that. We’re generous, too. That's part of our philosophy. The Government of Alberta paid for half of those tents. Therefore, I feel it's incumbent on us to lend them to the Heart of the City, or the Children's Festival in St. Albert, or a mobile stage that we own, we give for free to Grand Prairie. They just pay the costs of getting it up there, and setting it up, so I certainly hope our spirit of sharing and generosity will last.
If people keep buying tickets we're going to be healthy. It's going to come down to that. If the younger generation coming along want to listen to folk music, or our definition of folk music, I think that's the key. I would say to any aspiring artistic directors out there, I talked to a lot of artistic directors and say “how are your tickets selling?” They go, “I don't know.” I go, “well, you should know, that's your job to know.” If you're buying something, then you have to know how it's going to sell. You can't just have that dichotomy, where people are departmental. You're all in this together, therefore it's in your own interest. If you book talent, you have to know the people are going to buy. So I spent a lot of time in the early years getting to see what Edmonton likes, looking at figures, looking at Ticketmaster figures, talking to journalists, seeing what they like, what they thought was good for the show.
For myself, I think I can get to 69. And then after that, maybe I sign one- or two-year contracts. The guy who runs Glastonbury, probably the biggest festival in the world, he worked until he was 75, and then passed it on. If I work until I'm 74, I'll have been there for the 10th anniversary and I'll be there for the 50th. It’s a bit of a joke, but I think I can travel a bit more. My kids are in B.C. I'll probably move to B.C. in a few years, and then because we've done all the capital acquisition that we like and everything's running, the show’s just running smoothly. So I could be in a situation where I can take less money on a contract, and then spread that around and encourage some younger people to come up, and say “hey, here's a full-time job,” and I'm going to keep clicking on this until I'm 72, 73, see how it goes. I still like it.
Some people say to me, “you're going to get run off the cliff by the younger people,” and I go “well okay, but because I've been doing this for 30 years, I probably know more about it at this point than anybody else.” I'm looking for talent out there, I'm looking for if there’s something that could replace me down the road. You don't have to be a genius to do it, but you do need the experience. My experience is, I did shows when I was driving a taxi. I lost money. If you lose a couple of grand on a show, you learned fairly quickly. You can have your Master's degree and put that in your back pocket, it doesn't matter. It all comes down to the decisions you make. I learned a lot by doing shows myself, so I'm looking for someone that has kind of an entrepreneurial spirit but wants to work in an organization and channel that. Because, I'm not an actual entrepreneur. I can come in and make an organization better or more entrepreneurial, but I'm not the kind of person who just wants to work at home at his desk. I'm a more social person. I like working with people, I like working on these kind of things. We don't know if it's going to be an unemployed person that's coming in to see me, or a professor from a university, or a government-elected official, they're all important and I like that.
I've been head-hunted for a couple of jobs that said, “oh, we're going to remove you from the day to day, you just have to essentially go talk to rich people to leave money for endowment funds,” which is the bottom of my pile. I said, “no, but you don't understand, I enjoy the day to day. I enjoy all those things.” So, we'll see, who knows. Health will play a part. But if I start to fail in faculties, and I've seen that, my dad lived to 94. I joke with people and say, “well I'm halfway through anyway.” People live longer, that's why the actuarial people are saying that we're not putting enough aside for retirement, or the government hasn't put enough aside. That's why they're trying to move the retirement age to 67, because in my own family, my mom lived until her mid-80s, probably could have lived longer. My dad, if he hadn't fallen in the last couple of years, would have lived longer. My mother-in-law is 88, and my father-in-law lived until 90 where the average lifespan might have been 74. That's probably going over 80 now and upwards, and I seem to have pretty healthy genes that way. So, touch wood, we'll see. But if I start to fail, if the show is not as tight or as popular or something, whatever that is, I’ll know before anybody else. Or else I've lost it already, and then someone else is going to have to kick me out.
INGRAM
Well, we've covered a lot of grounds, Terry, and I just wanted to ask you if there is anything else that you wanted to share that you think will benefit our audience, the future arts and cultural managers, especially those who want to preserve arts festivals or other major events.
WICKHAM
Be open, if you're in a situation like me, be generous. When I was growing up in the music business, people were very tight-lipped, and they didn't want to share the information, because they felt that was a threat to themselves. But the industry has evolved much more. When I was in my 20s and 30s, there wasn't an Arden Theatre. There wasn't a Winspear, there wasn't a Calgary Center for Performing Arts. There wasn't all those things, the Pollstar didn't exist. All the tools that are there now, the level of professionalism has increased so much.
You don't think about the presentation of music. Have a look at the Beatles at Shea Stadium if you want to know why the Beatles retired from live playing. John Lennon said it's a joke. The audience can't hear us. We can't hear ourselves. I think the Shea Stadium built a special system where the Beatles could hear themselves, and it was like a 100 watts. George Harrison talked about it, he thought it was 100 watts. So now you go to a show like U2 or Pink Floyd, or whatever, and you have a look at the sound systems. It's night and day, so there's always continuous improvement. Just immerse yourself in that. It's a really good industry to work in. I think it’s a small industry, but it's much bigger now. The amount of people who make a living in live music, Roger's Place didn't exist. Think of all the people working there.
I think there's an awful lot of opportunity. Talk, listen to people, volunteer to try and get into organizations, all that kind of stuff. I know it's hard, it feels impossible, and it did for me at the start. I had some knocks along the way, and people always say, “find the job that you love.” And find what you love to do. Find a job doing it in the way you go. Yeah. And I kind of did that. But really, what the statistics are saying is that persistence is really important. You'll get knocked down along the way, you'll have setbacks. And I remember going to a meeting, where a guy was going to be my funder to do shows. He didn't show up. I'd built up a lot for this organization for this meeting. I phoned a friend of mine back home, and I said “I just can't get this going,” he said “you never know what happened,” and I went “okay.” Turns out, the guy who was supposed to meet me at 10:00 on a Saturday morning couldn't, before cell phones he couldn't reach me. A good friend of his, a son of one of his good friends, had committed suicide that morning. And that's why he wasn't there. Well how am I supposed to know that? So you know, you never know why. So that's kind of a dramatic thing, I'm thinking how he doesn't want to meet me, but he had another crisis with one of his friends.
Persistence, I know it's not a sexy word, but it really does work. If you get knocked down, you have to get back up, especially in this business, because a lot of people want to get into it. I look at what's going on now too, the other thing I'd say to people in coming in is do not put up. I always say this when I talk to students, don't put up with any abusive behavior. Sometimes you have to, I don't even mean abusive in terms of sexual abuse, I mean in terms of verbal abuse. This whole thing of always, “the artistic director’s had a tantrum.” That's just bad behavior. I don't care what he is, it's just bad behavior. There's no room for that in an organization, or any organization. If you find a boss is abusive, verbally, mentally, whatever, maybe you can't quit that day. But look for the exit. It tends to be men. I've heard that, “he's just temperamental,” or, you know. That's the other advice I'd give. You're not going to change that person. So either the culture changes in the organization very quickly, or you're looking for the door and finding somewhere else.
INGRAM
Great advice. I just want to say thank you so much for your time and for your wise counsel. It's been a real joy talking with you.
WICKHAM
Well thank you for having interest in the Folk Festival. My wife says, “you get to talk about two things, your two favorite things in the world.” “The Folk Festival and yourself.”
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INGRAM
It's Katrina and Annetta in studio. That was a fantastic interview with Terry Wickham, wasn't it.
LATHAM
Yeah, it was amazing.
INGRAM
Wow. What really resonated for me is Terry's management style. He's always looking for continued improvement. And it sounds like he's really infused that in the culture of the Folk Festival. I really thought that was an interesting take on his management style, and how he's embraced that culture.
LATHAM
Yeah, and it really shows in the way he manages to keep his staff. He said that only two of his staff had left over the last 30 years, which was pretty impressive, a lot of organizations really do have a high turnover and his doesn't. That’s a real reflection of him and his management style. The other thing that I really liked that he mentioned about his leadership style was, he lets people do the job. He doesn't micromanage anybody. He lets them do their job, he lets them account for the hours, and their time, and when they’re in the office, and my take on that was that’s a really empowering leadership model.
INGRAM
Absolutely, and you know it struck me that that extends out to the volunteers as well. That’s why they have such great volunteer engagement, and volunteers who've been with them for a very long time. When you look at even the ratio of staff to volunteers, there is no way they could do that festival with just staff. It’s so important that they have all of those volunteers working for them.
LATHAM
Absolutely. The volunteers are people who come back. They take time off work and travel back to volunteer in that festival again. It would be interesting to see how he moves that leadership on. As he said in the interview, he's looking for somebody else, saying who's out there, who could maybe take on that role. I thought that succession planning stuff that he was talking about was interesting, because for me it was about how does he step aside, and when he steps aside, what role does that take? Especially if he stays on part-time, that he mentioned he might do.
INGRAM
That's a really interesting point, I think that happens a lot in organizations where you have a really strong, charismatic leader. And how do you transfer that skill set in that culture to the next person? I think it's a really interesting challenge.
LATHAM
Yeah very much. And also, then, how does the next leader embrace all of the volunteers? Who are the people following, are they following the Folk Festival, or are they following Terry? I think it will be a definite challenge for the next person who takes that role on.
INGRAM
Absolutely, I totally agree. One other point I just want to touch on quickly, because it really struck me as something that we need to think about when we're managing big projects, is the site evacuation. And it got me thinking about the concept of risk management, and how you want to think about all the different risks that can impact your event. In this case, it was weather, and the reason that they were able to react so quickly is they had done that emergency preparedness well in advance, so they were able just to execute on it. I think it's really important to do that when you're doing a risk assessment.
LATHAM
Yeah very much so. It shows in what they did, because they were able to kick in immediately, and I think that was really important. The other thing I think it's really critical that we take note of, is the sustainability stuff that he talked about. In relation to, they buy their own equipment, and then lease it out to other people, so they're not only making their festival sustainable, they’re making other people's festivals sustainable. I think that was an impressive way to look at your assets as an organization, and how to use them across the community. Not only does the festival engage at it’s own time, but there's a level of community engagement they do with other festivals, which I think is unique.
INGRAM
It is a great business model, very smart on their part.
LATHAM
Yeah, very clever, and fantastic for the City of Edmonton.
INGRAM
Absolutely. That's why we're Festival City.
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This show was created by:
Executive Producer - Annetta Latham
Producer - Katrina Ingram
Technical Producer - Paul Johnston
Research Assistant - Rael Lockwood
Theme Music - Emily Darfur
Cover Art - Constanza Pacher
Latham, A. (Executive Producer). Regan-Ingram, K (Host). (2018, June 4). Artful Conversations [Season 1: Episode 10]. Terry Wickham. Podcast retrieved from https://www.artfulconversations.com/transcriptions/2019/1/4/ep-10-terry-wickham
Artful Conversations is a production of Annetta Latham in partnership with MacEwan University. All rights reserved.