BRAD MAYNE recently completed his first year as President & CEO of the Int'l Association of Venue Managers. Mayne, who ran multiple sports facilities before taking the job in July '16, talked to SportsBusiness Journal at this year’s IAVM VenueConnect conference in Nashville, which concludes today, to discuss his role with the trade group.
Q: Can you summarize your first 12 months on the job?
Mayne: It’s been a great experience transitioning from running venues for 30-plus years and getting into a not-for-profit NFP organization. You don’t have the resources that you have when you’re working for billionaires in major sports facilities. We have created some different initiatives. The biggest one is safety and security initiative and we’re really excited that Madam Secretary of DHS (ELAINE DUKE) (was) our keynote speaker on the first day of the conference. One of the other initiatives is energy management. As a venue manager, one of my top three expenses was electrical power and utilities. The challenge with utilities is the weather and the number of events that you have ... demand goes up and down. We’ve got a couple companies that we’re working with that will help us get through all that... putting a plan together to implement what saves you money.
Our membership has grown exponentially. Just a few years ago, we were around 3,000 members and at the end of our fiscal year in March, we’re at 5,300. We have about 2,000 members attend our events every year. We’ve restructured how we’re doing those events. We’ve always had the annual conference (and separate conferences) for arenas, convention centers, performing arts. We’ve now bundled all together ... so everyone who’s coming to our conference this week had to identify themselves as to which sector they were going to attend. Each one has their own sessions, yet we bring them all together for networking and major events and large social gatherings. I think the reason our attendance is 44% higher for the conference over last year is, No. 1, we’re in Nashville. Great city to go to. No. 2, is this restructured product. The other thing we did this year is take it from less than 50 sessions to more than 100 with the new format. That’s really resonated with our membership as well.
Q: Looking at the facilities space as a whole, there’s a lot of competition with other conferences. IAVM membership is up and conference attendance is up, but how do you maintain that momentum in terms of the future?
Mayne: In our executive committee meeting we had a discussion about competition. We’re about making the industry better. There’s a lot of people (discussing Oak View Group and its conferences), and that they are going to take away all of our arenas. What’s interesting is I did research and we had about 26 individuals from (OVG’s Arena Alliance) that attended the conference last year, and this year, we have 27 attending that are members of OVG. So, what we’re seeing there is we’re co-existing and I believe the reason that we are is that we’re all about professional development and giving our members resources on how to manage the building and what the trends are in the operational aspects. We’re not bringing in content.
Q: When you first took the job, last year you mentioned one of your goals is to get more teams involved in IAVM. How has that effort been going?
Mayne: We’re seeing a lot of folks that haven’t been as active in IAVM as they had in the past that are now coming back. What I’ve been able to do is on these different initiatives, we need volunteers, so instead of saying who can help and have the same people raise their hand, we’ve been strategic and gone out and asked specific venues and people to participate.We have (Lakers President) JEANIE BUSS presenting on women in leadership roles, we have MICAH DAY from the NBA, KIM STONE (from the Heat) and DONNA JULIAN (from the Hornets). MetLife Stadium is one of our pilots for the energy program.
The other thing with safety and security, we’re now seeing the leagues coming in. (IAVM Dir of Education) MARK HERRERA is doing live training and he’s been working with the Thunder, Cowboys, Mavs and Stars. Teams are reaching out to Mark because he has practical training with situational awareness and active shooter and risk assessments, and they’re seeing real value in that as opposed to "Hey, here’s something you guys should be doing." Now, what we’re doing is saying, "Here’s how you implement it and here’s where the resources are." Herrera is a former SWAT team guy who worked for DHS and trained pilots to carry weapons and to protect the cockpit.
