John Pleasants insists he's not a techie. On the face of it, you'd think the 37-year-old president and CEO of a technology-dependent company like Ticketmaster has to be kidding. Ticketmaster, after all, handled about 3 percent of its sales online in 1998 and that number leaped to 40 percent last year, with Pleasants directing the operation.
"No, really, I don't consider myself a technologically oriented person," Pleasants said. "Honestly, what I bring to the company — my background is in sales and marketing — is simply leading people and managing people, whether it's financially, operationally or technologically."
Not that Pleasants isn't fascinated by Web magic.
In fact, his classic education (political science at Yale, then an M.B.A. from Harvard) easily could have kept him on the sales and marketing track. Pleasants always was comfortable in those roles, first as a plant manager for Hygiene Industries — a textile manufacturer — and then as a brand manager for PepsiCo's Frito-Lay division.
But in the mid-1990s, Pleasants read Bill Gates' book, "The Road Ahead," and realized that he was hooked.
"And to be honest, I was so far removed from the tech world at that time, I wasn't even using e-mail," Pleasants said. "I read that book, though, and when I looked around, I just realized that this thing was going to transform the way people did business."
So Pleasants started looking for a way into the technological universe, and came across a friend with a start-up Internet business called Citysearch.
"There were about 20 or 30 guys in this little room, creating city property guides," he said, "but to me, I thought the whole thing was fantastic. I knew I wanted to do something in that kind of context.
"Basically, what I did was take a 50 percent pay cut for the privilege of standing around without even a desk of my own. I remember we had someone coming in and, literally, I had two days to put together a training program when I barely knew what I was doing."
That was in 1996, and eventually a series of acquisitions created Ticketmaster Online-Citysearch Inc. Ticketmaster is now the parent organization of these separate online entities.
Pleasants, meanwhile, had become president of the ticketing and transactions division at Ticketmaster Online-Citysearch Inc. and was responsible for the launch of several e-commerce initiatives, including the integration of hotel, restaurant and other online reservation capacities.
Ultimately, Ticketmaster grew into a giant ticketing and access company — $675 million in revenue in 2001, with projections of $775 million for the current fiscal year — and went public in December 2000.
As president and CEO, Pleasants runs the domestic and international operations of the company's three main businesses: Ticketmaster, Citysearch and Match.com, an online dating service.
"John Pleasants is very sharp, an innovator who will always keep pace with what his market needs," said Rich Krezwick, president of FleetCenter, while announcing that the Boston Bruins would begin the practice of demand-price ticketing earlier this year. "Whatever we need to keep improving and customizing our ticket service, John and Ticketmaster will already be there."
Although Pleasants steadfastly refuses to be classified as any kind of technological wizard despite Ticketmaster's various new online functions, he will take credit for one piece of the puzzle.
"I'm definitely a Johnny-come-lately in the technology industry," he said. "What I did do, though, was see what was going on and do something about it. In fact, I blew up my whole life to that point and took action — which obviously has turned out to be a great decision."
Pleasants said he's still aggressive and trying to see well down the road in his capacity as CEO of a rapidly growing company, but says he's been forced to add something else to his game.
"I've become more disciplined," he said. "I can look back now and see that I wasn't methodical enough to handle performance-driven operations."
