Not Being a Cookie Cutter Company

Trying to Scale and Staying Cool

One of the most challenging aspects of trying to develop a cool brand in the arts is to stay hip, relevant, and unique.  It is diametrically opposed to the concept of scale, efficiency, and consistency.    As a business trying to grow and scale in the music industry, we are trying to have both--our creative cake and eat it too.   How do we grow a live music venue to a chain of 100 cool clubs?  All the same name and size; yet, each feeling local and unique.

Our industry is not suitable for a “cookie cutter” approach to expanding a chain of live music venues--the “nuances” will never be consistent.  Every municipality that has live music has a plethora of various codes and rules that requires navigation.   Every neighborhood has groups and organizations that require individualized lobbying for liquor license compliance.  Every market has a million differences that require both IQ and EQ to understand.   Hard Rock and House of Blues got the closest to commoditizing and creating McDonalds-like chains, but lost their souls as they started duplicating.  Live music venues with souls are all about nuances, staying cool, hip, and relevant to the service of fans.  If it was easy, more people would be doing it.   If you could ChatGPT the plan and then 3-D laser print-em, PT Barnum would have had 100 clubs and circuses.

What we are trying to do is bring to this creative industry the Food and Beverage discipline that successful chain hospitality companies have achieved and overlay into the more challenging live music space.   Thus, our intensive obsession with service, kitchen & bar protocols, beverage KPI’s, and training of service.  Every manager hired goes thru training which includes being given a copy of “Setting the Table”--Danny Meyer’s treatise on “enlightened hospitality.”  We quote from the book consistently.   Our staff are all given wine training and the ability to attend shows at their leisure.  Thus, parts of our model are well-suited for chain-like development.  The back of house systems all being centralized to give us as much consistency and professionalism; while at the same time, supporting a creative staff, culture seeking customers, and world-class performers gracing our stages.   Companies like Starbucks certainly get many parts of this right—a diverse and hip team, a strong work culture,  good textural design in their ubiquitous stores, and clearly MikeyD-like consistency to its franchises.  But they don’t put on shows.   Perhaps Howard Shultz was just too smart to add that element to the coffee house setting he had in his business plan. We all knew he thought about it and tried selling CD’s next to the non-fat decaf Lattes.

Because we have in our brand DNA a “wine” theme, we immediately raise the bar on the perception of the type of live music establishment the customer is coming to.  While, our back-of-house is moving to cookie cutter, our front-of-house needs individuality and creativity.  We have similar kitchen equipment, menus, and recipe protocols, nationalization of our beverage program, HR, management, and marketing systems and training that can be rolled out and duplicated, but our venues and people are not replicated.   A single POS and accounting system allowing for accurate measurement and individual department accountability, but every check is a snowflake .  A single and national ticketing and membership program that is beyond our competition in the customer interface, but personalized service.   This is all to be invisible to the customer—behind the scenes being architected into a system to achieve scale.

But what is seen and felt by the artists and the public on both the surface and in our personality has to be creativity, the customization of our service, the uniqueness of our spaces, and the individualization of our teams.   The visual is the physical beauty of our spaces, the shared branding using certain textures, materials, and design set-up, yet each building is individual, creative, and requires non-cookie cutter attention to build.  We love taking challenging old buildings requiring adaptive reuse of the existing materials, the patina fading of brick, the authenticity of wooden beams, columns, and historic vibes in the old walls.  Sandblasted old concrete and wood just can’t be bought at Home Depot.   This is the opposite of the hundreds of exactly the same replicated Olive Garden or Wallgreens where you know every shiny isle by heart.  They certainly cost less to build, the materials pop into place faster, can get cleaned easier, cheaper and every single table is the same.  They are the perfect definition of cookie cutter--but where is the soul.  No individuality, all efficiency.   And done right, they can make a lot of money, of that there is no doubt.   But it does not work in the arts. 

We want an artist and public to walk in and be wowed.  While some elements overlap between City Winery locations, each has its own character—a sense of homeyness, but creative.   And when an artist walks in, is greeted and brought backstage before sound check, before their yummy meal, they feel like they are being treated as royalty.  This indulging of the senses was the focus of my book with the subtitle “scaling intimacy in a digital world” as I am obsessed and focused on how to achieve scale, yet make sure the nuances of the customer journey does not get stale.  We started to get there 2019, got disrupted, and are back on track to get there in 2023.  It requires both left and right brain, a hardworking disciplined team from both the music world and the F&B world, to get to the profit goals. 

While we know the “profits are in the popcorn”,  our thesis focuses on the cool music or entertainment that is putting the “butts in the seats.”   I guess we actually aspire to have our physical spaces and the experience of the customer feel more like a piece of art than commercialized product.   While we certainly are working to be profitable and deliver a strong return to our investors, as have a have commitment to philanthropy, sustainability, and revitalizing communities; I also strongly believe that the long-term health of our concept is keeping an integrity to the individual nuances of a location, of the building, of the community, and respecting the intimacy as we scale.   We need to deliver the special magic every night, offering a cool and intimate experience, but to thousands of people nightly in different locations around the globe.

This is the plan at least.