Episode #17 - Adapting Your Business Model with Sean Healy
Episode Transcript
Meredith Matics: Welcome to Business Reflections with your host Meredith Matics, and we are here to reflect on the business topics that are affecting you today and how you can better run your business. I'm really excited to have Sean Healy the founder of Sean Healy Presents. So Sean, tell me more about your career path and what led you to getting involved in the music industry.
Sean Healy: For sure. And, and thank you for having me. My path comes via Arizona and theater and acting.
I was a childhood actor. I went to Arizona State on a, on a scholarship for a BFA in theater and acting. And I graduated in 1990 and I came out to Los Angeles to pound the pavement. And, I gave it a good six or seven years. And I found myself as part of a theater company producing spoken word shows at a warehouse space at my theater.
And that's sort of how I got into booking. And through that theater, I would find all sorts of bizarre acts and poets and dancers and spoken word and performance artists and musicians. Through my theater, I started taking those shows to nightclubs and bars and taking nights at clubs and, and producing these shows.
That's sort of how I earned my booking chops. As the acting stuff was starting to peter out and I was getting into my later twenties. I realized, you know, that the acting thing probably wasn't gonna happen. So I started booking shows at bars and subsequently at that time I built basically central casting for local bands.
They could send me a demo tape and they could have access to all the venues in Hollywood.
Meredith Matics: Wow, that must've been really exciting for a lot of small bands that are trying to get their name out there.
Sean Healy: It really was because, excuse me, you know, as an actor, you mail out your headshot. I mean, this is going back, 20 plus years, but you used to mail out your headshot and hope that a casting director or an agent opened it up.
So I felt as a struggling actor that I could help musicians. If they mailed me one tape, they could have access to everything I had access to.
Meredith Matics: Wow. What inspired you from taking that from just doing it on the side to doing it as your own company?
Sean Healy: Well, believe it or not, as I mentioned that, the acting stuff, I was really tired of doing odd jobs and food delivery and catering and data entry and wondering where my next paycheck was coming. I was doing still acting and dabbling in the booking and one night I booked a show with a friend of mine who was on an MTV game show. It had just aired and we charged $5 at the door and he packed out this club. Essentially, I made my rent money in one night on $5 bills.
Meredith Matics: Bet your landlord loved that one.
Sean Healy: Yeah, so I remember I went into the bathroom at the venue and I had this wad of $5 bills and I counted it and I was like, Oh my God, I made my rent in one night. I used to have to save up for four weeks. So that's when the light switch sort of clicked is when I, the first time I made like real money.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. What were the steps to make it in your own company? Just out of curiosity, did you start out just as a sole prop and doing it, or did you jump right into, like...?
Sean Healy: I really, really started it out of the bedroom of my apartment on LaBrea and Sunset. And I had big calendars on the wall and I had an old, old school thermal fax machine.
I just started making myself available to local bands. I would go to all the different venue owners and I would say, Hey, can I do a night? I got all these bands that bring people and that's what they wanted to hear. I subsequently was a fulfillment house for bands. I just started being really nice and accessible to bands because I wasn't in a band. I was a fellow struggling artist. I felt as though I could give back by helping bands get shows.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. 2020, in the great pandemic, must've been really an interesting time for your company to have to pivot and change.
Sean Healy: Yeah. So, you know what I just told you about all the early steps and once I concentrated on this business, it really, really grew and I worked 24/7 and I got offices and employees.
Where we're at now is, you know, we still book local bands where we can, but we, we subsequently became one of the largest independent promoters in the country. We do Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Brooklyn, New York, Chicago, you know, we're, we're all over the country.
We're essentially a mini version of Live Nation and a mini version of AEG. We're used to doing a lot of volume of events usually, in 2019 we did 300 events. Once COVID hit, you can imagine there's no events, everything's canceled. All the clubs are canceled. All the tours came down on. We call it D-day was like March 13th or 14th.
Meredith Matics: Yeah.
Sean Healy: We obviously have not been able to do live shows. And our last live concert, I believe we had shows March 13th. We had one in San Francisco and we had one in Portland then everything came off the boards. What we've done instead of just sitting back and waiting for help is, we immediately started pivoting into online marketing for bands, promotion for bands and merchandise.
We opened a store where we're selling, you know, t-shirts that we're making and we're doing other people's merchandise, that's SHPmarket.com. In the last four months we found that livestream concerts, ticketed livestream concerts are a pathway for the time being. We've been doing, we've done about 10 of them, where we literally rent out the venue, the Viper Room or the Troubadour.
We hire the band or the comedian and we bring in a camera crew and we shoot the shows. Most of them are live and we sell tickets to the pay-per-view livestream.
Meredith Matics: Let's back up a little bit. How was it pivoting and changing the structure of how you had done your shows before and now, you know, you're forced to just change everything. How was that as a business owner? How did you decide what to do?
Sean Healy: It's funny because the day that everything came down, basically I knew immediately that there would be eyes on us because we're independent promoters and we're not big companies that can withstand something like this.
I immediately told my staff, I had to lay off 75% of them. But I continue to pay their health insurance in full. That was something I vowed to do. So, you know, they're on unemployment or they're doing Instacart. But I really didn't miss a beat. The day that everything came down, we started coming up with ideas.
I insisted that even the ones that were laid off still gave their input. And I kept my vice president and him and I have been handling the general operations of the company but it was immediately like, Hey, we have to do something different. We can't stand back. There will be eyes on us. I think that was the biggest driving force is I knew that people would automatically be looking at us. Well, what's Sean going to do? He's a concert promoter. He's an independent. What's he going to do? I did not want to look like we were static.
Meredith Matics: Right, right. So you had no plan before this.
Sean Healy: The first step really was, I said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're turning 25 years old in 2021 so first thing I want to do is I want to archive the last 25 years. I want to have all the data, all the flyers, all the posters, all the images, I want to have all that categorized.
The second thing I want to do is I want to offer services to bands, to local bands, consultations, publicity packages, marketing packages. Those were steps that we took within days of the shutdown we started offering those things and then within a week of the shutdown, we had a retail store up online. We were creating t-shirts and, you know, letting everyone know that their purchases, all the money that we raise from the store goes to the furloughed employees health fund benefits.
We just never stopped. We never, never stopped.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. That's great. How has it been received by the public would you say?
Sean Healy: From what people have been telling me, they're like, Sean, you guys have really branded well during all of this and you've stayed active. That was something that was super important to me when everything went down is I was like, we're not going to fold. We're not going to just sit back and wait for stimulus and wait for help and woe is me. We're going to change the business model temporarily. We're going to, even if we're not making the same money, which believe me, we're not. Our revenues are down over 90%.
Meredith Matics: Yeah.
Sean Healy: But we're going to look like we're busy. By doing that, not just with content, but offering services, doing consultations, and offering product. Cause you know we're a a ticket selling business. We're not really tangible items. You buy a ticket to go to the Troubadour and you go see your favorite band and you go home.
We had to pivot into creating merchandise and tying that merchandise into live streams and the live streams, like I said, over the last, I'd say four months have been a pathway to still doing shows. So it's really the same. It's just there aren't crowds there.
Meredith Matics: How do you build that same crowd energy when you're presenting it in the live stream?
Sean Healy: At first, I was hesitant cause me personally, like I saw a couple of live streams, a couple of those music festivals and they were free and everyone watched that stuff in April on TV, on network TV. And I was like it's really cool, but are people going to pay for this? Because it seems like these live streams are free.
Our spin on it was, and this ties into what I mentioned earlier about the merchandise, is I was like, look, everyone's doing live streams, right? But we can tie in a commemorative t-shirt or a commemorative hoodie or a commemorative face mask to the event.
That's something people really aren't doing. They're doing their live streams and they're selling their t-shirts that they would sell in concert, but we are doing the merchandise that's pertinent to the event date. What we found was with the live stream , you can't just do any band.
It's a select group and we found the comedy really cool niche, variety and comedy works. And some of the younger artists , hip hop and R&B, that seems to work. You have to find the right thing. And you can't charge too much. You have to charge like really low prices.
The overhead is really more than what we would pay if we were doing a live show. In order to do it correctly, you have to have the right personnel that can shoot it right.
Meredith Matics: Yeah.
Sean Healy: But more importantly, you have to have the right personnel that that's fluent in this new speak with like stream keys and uploads and the internet, you know what I mean? It's a whole thing. They have to be able to know the platforms and to be able to know how to work with it. So that stuff we've learned. I look back in this past year and I've learned so much from changing our business model.
Meredith Matics: How do you think this change in your business model is going to affect your business in the future?
Sean Healy: Well, that's what I tell my staff so I believe the things that we've been building during COVID will carry over to when things return to normalcy, the merchandise and the live streams. I think people, in our world, there'll be some battles with the agents and they'll be like, well, you can't do the live concert and offer it on livestream because you're not sold out. But there aren't any rules on this yet, but I'm forecasting that if we have a sold-out show that we can make it available on a live stream for half the ticket price.
Meredith Matics: What about during the transitional time as things slowly open up, assuming that that's not going to be like, I mean, we shut down pretty fast, but I kind of assumed the going back is not going to be just one day we all are like, okay, we're cool now.
Sean Healy: It's a really good question. It's something that we actually talk about all the time and there are promoter alliances and venue alliances.
I'm in a lot of webinars where people are talking about that. As far as like what a traditional tour used to look like, that's going to be really tough because so many of the cities, at least for the rest of this year, are going to have so many different variables, so we don't know.
Meredith Matics: So, was there anything during this time that you wished you had done differently?
Sean Healy: Not really. Just as an individual and a human being, I grew my hair out. I learned how to cook. I'm a bachelor. I learned how to cut a cantaloupe. I learned how to make certain types of foods. I learned how to, you know, work with camera crews. I learned how to make t-shirts. I don't have any regrets. In fact, I'm really happy with what we've done. The revenue doesn't add up though, to the effort.
Meredith Matics: Do you think that you're going to balance that for your business's future?
Sean Healy: Well, we've been fortunate that we've gotten some relief. We did get our first round PPP. We did get an EIDL. We did get a city of LA grant and then we got a disaster grant too. Now that sounds like a lot, but if you add it all up, it was, you know, not as, not that much money.
Meredith Matics: You go through it fast.
Sean Healy: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we closed our office, so fortunately we were month-to-month at our office for years, and we never played that card with the landlord.
In fact, in February, we were trying to expand and take over another unit at our office. We were looking to go, I think we were paying 21 or 2,200. We were looking to go to 3,000 a month and we were prepared to sign a new lease on April 1st.
Meredith Matics: Oh my goodness.
Sean Healy: Obviously everything went South and we went back to them around May. And we were like we can't pay you full rent. We're not earning anything, you know? And they were like, well, you can pay half rent, but you're going to owe all this money. We're just like, look, can we just give you $500 a month to keep our stuff there? And if you show the place and someone wants to rent it, we'll get out. And they said, no.
Meredith Matics: Oh my gosh, I'm over here nodding like, Oh, that sounds like a fair deal.
Sean Healy: Right. We were like, look, you can rent it and they said, no. When they said that, I just went back and looked at the lease and I was like we'll give them 30 days, we're out of here.
Meredith Matics: Yeah.
Sean Healy: And that's how it happened. We've been working remote, but I have a big enough patio at my house where everyone comes over on Mondays and we do in-person six feet apart, spread out, masks.
Meredith Matics: It sounds like you've handled it really well. I mean, I know this has been a really challenging time for some businesses and some have not handled it well, and you sound like you've handled it quite well.
Do you have any recommendations or resources for small businesses that are having to pivot and change? I mean, at this point, if they haven't already, I know we're a little bit late in the game, but what, what do you think was the best resource for you to figure out what to do?
Sean Healy: I think you just gotta think differently. As a business operator, you have to know that, you know, you know, know your audience.
Meredith Matics: Right.
Sean Healy: Whatever that is. We knew our audience was consumers who went to concerts and we knew that our clients were artists. So what do consumers and artists like? Well, they like merchandise.
Everyone's going through concert withdrawal. This hearkens back to the live stream. So it's like, okay, gosh, I really want to go to a concert and see my favorite band or my favorite comedian.
But if I can't, I'll spend $12 and watch it from my living room. And that's what seems to be working. We did a New Year's comedy show from the Mint in Los Angeles. That was just great. That seems to be working, but I would be lying to you if I wasn't fearful that some artists and agents, some people in the industry will start to shy away from the livestream because they see the light at the end of the tunnel, as far as bringing back live concerts.
They may not be as apt to do a live stream, but again, it's like no one has seen anybody in forever. Something's better than nothing.
Meredith Matics: I think you bring up a great point knowing your audience and knowing your direct consumer, which could be different for every business, but knowing what they want and need and how can you get them to that and you know, modify that.
Sean Healy: And just don't, you know, don't panic and the other thing we do with this is we've spent hours on the grants and the loans and the PPP stuff. But you got to file for all the grants, all the loans that make sense. You know, the city loan that I got, they converted it into a grant so now we don't have to pay it back.
Meredith Matics: Yeah.
Sean Healy: I would continue to look at all the resources that are still available, even though stuff will be coming back.
You should still continue to look for funding and still keep your brand and your business alive.
Meredith Matics: Well, Sean, it sounds like you've handled it really well with all things considered.
Sean Healy: That's the only way you can, you can't panic. You know what I mean? You just, you just can't panic. And if, if anything, I would say this to other business owners, because God forbid anything like this happens again.
Make sure your paperwork is straight. Make sure your tax returns are straight. Make sure your quarterlies are straight. Make sure you have all your permits, all your insurance, because if you don't, you won't get these loans, you won't get these grants, you know? I would make sure everything is in place.
Meredith Matics: Yes.
Sean Healy: And that's the one thing I'm happy we had, we had everything in place.
Meredith Matics: That has been a big thing. I've seen a lot of in my time, like people being like, Oh, I'll just get around and extend my tax extension to the longest possible time and then came this and they're like, well, I need this. And it's like, yeah, you haven't filed your taxes for 2018 yet so you've got nothing to show them.
Sean Healy: Yeah, exactly. That's what I would say is just keep your record straight. You never know. That's one thing I'm really glad that we did. We got some help, not enough to carry us for a year. But it was enough to carry us for a few months and we're earning, like I said, but the earns are, are not anywhere near what we were.
Meredith Matics: We like to ask two closing questions on this podcast to every business owner we interview. First question is what is one piece of advice that you have received that you want to share with another small business owner?
Sean Healy: Hm. I would just say don't panic.
Meredith Matics: Reiterate what I said earlier.
Sean Healy: Yeah. Don't panic. This is the time in our lifetime to be as creative as possible. And I think that, that's the one thing you're seeing with the human spirit, despite all the horrible things that have been going on. I think you're seeing us as a species being incredibly creative.
It's important to keep that creative edge with your business.
Meredith Matics: I think that's so true. I know a lot of people have been like, Oh, well, because of restrictions, I can't do what I've always done, but maybe we're not always supposed to do what we've always done.
Sean Healy: Exactly. This is sort of a checklist.
We're all supposed to be checked. Something greater than us is saying, Hey, take a look, you know.
Meredith Matics: Let's try something new. So Sean, where can our listeners find you on social media and learn more about your company?
Sean Healy: Absolutely. Well, our Twitter and our Instagram is @webookbands. Plural. We book bands, and our website is webookbands.com. The store where all these t-shirts we're making and hoodies and caps and all that. That's SHPmarket.com.
Meredith Matics: Just to go back to the beginning, you said you were a child actor, anything anyone seen you in that we should know about?
Sean Healy: The only thing you might - well, I wasn't a child, but I had about 10 seconds in the movie, the mask with Jim Carey.
Meredith Matics: Oh!
Sean Healy: And I did Days of Our Lives as an under five way back in the day. I did Unsolved Mysteries and, and a few other things.
Meredith Matics: Mysteries is my favorite.
Sean Healy: I mean every now and then I'll get a $2 check from that so that's good. But I have no regrets. I, I became a businessman and like I said that one night I made my rent in one night, the light clicked and the rest is history. And this is our 25th year! 2021 is our 25th year.
Meredith Matics: Thank you so much, Sean, for coming on.
Sean Healy: Thank you for having me.
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