2000-2020
As the former President and co-founder of Ticket Alternative and Freshtix, I was a leader in the ticketing space for nearly 20 years before making a timely exit right before the start of covid.
After playing in and managing various bands, I leveraged my venue relationships to create a ticketing company that partnered with smaller indie live-music venues, the likes of which, the larger ticketing companies wouldn’t touch. With the mission of serving those who loved and those who created live events, I sold millions of tickets under the premise that if convenience fees were kept low and clients and ticket buyers were provided with the best customer support and customer experience in the business, venues would sell more tickets in advance than with other providers. And they did.
Over the years we added additional revenue streams; custom printed tickets, event wristbands, call center services and on-site operations staffing solutions for events across the country.
As our customer service became legendary, we began to offer solutions to other organizations and venues, not just our own ticketing clients. Instead of limiting ourselves to just one ticketing platform, our ticketing-system agnostic call center served clients like The Fox Theater, Atlanta Botanical Garden, the Honda Indy Grand Prix of Toronto, the Firestone Grand Prix in St. Pete, Infinite Energy Arena and our agents used AXS, Paciolan, Audienceview, Gateway Galaxy, Elevent and Freshtix ticketing systems.
After I realised that 99% of our venues used event wristbands, I entered the event wristband business and became one of the largest event wristband suppliers in the USA. We offered 24-hour turnaround custom ticket printing and at our height printed nearly half a million tickets a month. I oversaw the development of a custom web-to-print e-commerce platform and implemented several other e-commerce websites using CoreCommerce, BigCommerce, Spree Commerce and Shopify.
We had originally partnered with Paciolan as our software provider, white-labelling their software and reselling it as our own under the name Ticket Alternative. But after quickly realising their lack of product development, we set about developing our own ticketing software platform which became known as Freshtix. The first Freshtix client was the Atlanta Botanical Garden and we sold more than 450,000 tickets for their annual holiday event, Garden Lights, Holiday Nights. I hired our first CTO, hired the outsourced and eventually in-house development team and oversaw the entire creation of the platform. We successfully migrated 99% of our clients over to Freshtix and sold the remaining handful of others to Paciolan’s ticketing arm, TicketsWest.
Towards the end of 2019, I felt I had done everything I could at the company and decided to leave. The company brought in new investors and bought me out. I announced my departure in Billboard magazine in January 2020.
Pegasystems 2021-2023
After a 1-year sabbatical, I joined Pegasystems in February 2021 as a Principal Account Executive. A good friend of mine has been there for 15 years and had often suggested Pega as the software I should have used to build and future-proof Freshtix. During my time away, I became a certified Pega Business Architect. I understand the pain points leaders face with the digitization of processes, software development, technical debt, the challenge of hundreds of siloed applications & systems that don’t talk to one another and the importance of live data. In today’s world, data needs to be agile and delivered as and when it is needed in real-time. On the personalization side, Pega’s decisioning engine works to deliver meaningful, in-the-moment, hyper-personalized conversations in real-time and is able to re-decision in milliseconds ensuring every conversation is contextual. I work with complex, global organisations to crush business complexity, digitize work and connect all those disparate systems to orchestrate workflows and optimize processes to deliver outcomes and get work done.
I spent 17+ years as the founder of a company whose core belief was if the customer service experience was the best it could be, my customers would sell more tickets and for the fans, buying a ticket might not be the worst part of attending an event.
Fast forward to 2023 and to think I’m now influencing how complex global Organizations like think about and execute things like customer service and the customer experience has been extremely rewarding.
OutSystems 2023-present
In June 2023 I joined OutSystems. I knew I wanted to focus on low-code application development for the next stage of my career. OutSystems is a high-performance, low code application development platform that unites design, code and deployment in a single, future-proof, unified platform that radially simplifies the process of creating enterprise-grade, business critical software so organizations can spend more time innovating and less time maintaining. OutSystems has been named as a leader in the LCAP space by the analyst Gartner for the past 6+ years and we’re helping organizations like Mazda and Western Union develop applications faster, with smaller teams and reduce technical debt. I’ve joined a rocket ship and I look forward to delivering quantifiable value to organizations with a full stack IDE.
Get In Touch
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Personal Life
- Performing & writing. I play piano/keyboards in the band Britpop. (visit my Soundcloud page)
- Attending gigs and music festivals
- Listening to as much as I can (especially British bands)
- Avid tennis player and hiker
- Football/soccer fan (Man Utd, Atlanta Utd & Minnesota Utd)
- Travelling the world (I speak French, German and a little Spanish)
This is my kid’s favourite picture of me from the internet with Ed Sheeran 🙂
