Jared Smith answered quickly when asked what he knows now that he wishes he had known a decade ago. He would have told himself to act more quickly on staffing matters rather than waiting to see whether his first instincts were correct.

“I’d have given myself that advice 24 months ago, never mind 10 years ago,” said Smith, who in his second year as president of Ticketmaster North America has overhauled much of the company’s top management. “These last 18 months I’ve gotten much more aggressive about upgrading the team, and some of the talent we’ve brought in is transformational.”

Ticketmaster shifted its strategy to become a more consumer-conscious e-commerce site that touted access to big data as one of its strengths five years ago. But Smith conceded he was slow to bring in the people who would help Ticketmaster make that switch. That changed last April, when he hired McKinsey & Co. consultant Amy Howe as chief strategist. Soon after, he promoted Jody Mulkey, former head of technology for shopping website operator Shopzilla, from executive vice president of platform engineering to chief technology officer. Earlier this year, Smith promoted Howe to COO. There was a raft of key hires at the senior vice president level as well, with all of those executives having strong digital, and often e-commerce, pedigrees.

“Once we got serious and the store started to get better and had more stuff on shelves, you started to need different personnel,” Smith said. “We’re doing digital marketing in a different way, customer relationship management and loyalty in a different way. These things were not intuitive at a company that has largely been an enterprise software business for 20 years.

“When you’re trying to attract talent, there’s a huge advantage we have with scale. When you work on something with us, it will be in the hands of 30 million people. Your grandmother has a Ticketmaster account. Your grandmother doesn’t use Uber.”

— Bill King