Interview with Alan Shaw

Christian Napier interviews Alan Shaw in this episode. Alan has worked on major sporting events for over 4 decades in 17 countries across 6 continents including 12 Olympic Games. He shares stories and lessons learned including funny moments, teamwork challenges, mentor influences, and advice for those interested in entering the event industry. Key topics include the genesis of workforce planning, innovative data capture, and the core team planning model.

What is Event Masters?

Behind the scenes stories, experiences and lessons shared by the world's leading event experts. Hosted by Christian Napier.

Here is the transcript with the speaker labels and extra spaces removed:

This is Event Masters. Behind the scenes stories, experiences and lessons shared by the world's leading event experts, hosted by Christian Napier.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Event Masters. In today's episode, we have someone who I have admired and respected for more than two decades, known him since my first days getting involved in this crazy event business.

The one and only Alan Shaw. Alan, how are you?

Just fine, thank you, Christian.

Thanks for having me on.

Well, I'm so glad to have you and grateful that you're able to carve out the time before we get into your bio and everything. Where are you joining us from?

Currently in Lake Placid, New York, where I've been for about a year and a half now. My wife and I relocated up here when things got a little busy for the World University Games that took place last January. So I'm still here and still there in Lake Placid.

Well, that's fantastic. Maybe we'll hear some stories about the University Games that just recently concluded in a little bit. But before that, I just want to give folks who might be watching or listening a little taste of Alan Shaw here.

So, Alan, you've been working in this space for more than four decades, and in 17 countries across six continents. Twelve Olympic Games, six World University Games, two FIFA World Cups, two Pan American Games, two Olympic Bids, two special Olympic World Games, Asian Games, Commonwealth Games and ahost of other major sporting and special events. Holy cow.

That is a massive resume, Alan.

Yeah, it's been remarkable. I had no idea when I started out that I'd be sitting here all these years later with that behind me. But it's been a great ride. And one thing I can say the whole time is that I don't think I've ever been bored. It's been plenty to keep me going.

Well, that's one of the reasons that I love this event space so much, is it's never boring. It can be highly stressful, it can be chaotic, but it's never boring. You have worked well gosh on all different sides of this fence. From the organizer side, the event owner side, the bid committee side, the corporate side, the broadcast side, the federation side. But most of your career has actually been spent working with organizing committees and for the past 27 years, you have been the president of Epic, which If I recall correctly, stands for it's an acronym, right? Event planning and integration concepts.

That's what I started out using. I haven't used that for years because it's a little wordy, but yes, that's how it started.

That's a consultancy based here, headquartered in the US. And you specialize in providing consulting for event strategic planning and operational integration. And you have really focused heavily on efficiency and cost reduction. And since you formed Epic in 1996, you've helped more than 40 clients. So you've been very busy. But you started before, well, before you founded Epic, and you talked about this a little bit at the beginning, so I want to dive into this start.

According to your bio, you started back in LA In 1984. So how did you get involved in the LA Games? And what was it that motivated you to pursue this kind of career? A career in events before LA even.

And I know that this isn't on my resume, but I don't count these years. I'll jump to L In a minute. But I really started in junior high school, so more than five decades ago. I suppose that is I was always attracted to doing the film festivals and Sadie Hawkins dances. When I got into high school, we had the proms and we had a state student council convention that I was interested in helping out on. So I really got involved in events, even back in junior high and high school.

And then when I got to college I went to the University of Kansas, and I found out that they had a student union activities organization, and I volunteered to help out on that. And I handled hospitality for the first couple of years, and then I became the director of that. And all the way back in this is the 70s, most of our events were concerts and large scale concerts. We had Beach Boys, Doobie Brothers, heart, ZZ Top, Foreigner. This is bringing us back many years ago, but we had some major concerts.

And that's really where I'd say I got really interested in events and thinking about this as a career.

So then I moved to LA after college, and I knew that the Olympics were coming up in 1984.

So around 1982, I started sending my resume off to the organizing committee and never got a single word, never got anything back. But I kept sending letters and I never heard anything. And finally, a little less than a year before the Games, I was in aconversation with a friend, and he says, I have a colleague over at ABC News and Sports. She might be interested in getting some help during the Games. One thing led to another, and I ended up getting a job with ABC News and Sports, so didn't work for the organizing committee, but that got me my first taste in the Olympics, and it also taught me to be very persistent. Still never heard back from the organizing committee, but started my job with ABC News and Sports, and that led to a position with the sports marketing company in Los Angeles, where I worked for three and a half years, which led to the US Olympic Festival 91, which was also in Los Angeles, and that led to the World Cup 94, where I worked for about a year and a half, and then that led to Atlanta 96. So when I got the opportunity with Atlanta 1996, the Olympic Games, I was very eager to jump at that. And my wife and I and first child moved down to Atlanta in 1995 late 94, which then spiraled into this whole 27 organizing committees over the last 27 years. 27 in 27. And then, like you mentioned, 40 clients.

So that's really the whole story there.

Well, one thing that I'm really keen to learn about, Alan, is how you got involved in the area of workforce planning, which is actually an area that you invented. It's a functional area that kind of sprang out of the work that you did, because when you work for events, I mean, you can do all kinds of things. You can do accreditation, you can do transport, you can do security, whatever it is. Right?

So as you got working in the events, how did you find yourself focused particularly, like, with World Cup, Atlanta, Salt Lake, which is where I met you, where you were working very heavily on this workforce planning, which also had that element of being very efficient with costs and budgets.

So the genesis of that is of workforce planning. I didn't invent workforce planning. I mean, it's been around forever, but within the major event space, within major events, to my knowledge, it didn't exist.

And I started out my career, if you will, my real career, working mostly in venue operations. So I was an area venue manager. I had nine sports and six venues that I was responsible for, for the US Olympic Festival.

And about halfway through my job, my time there, I went to my boss. One day and I said, look, I'm talking to these functional areas, and many of them are saying they're doing the same thing. The marketing team says they're putting up atent to do hospitality at this venue, and so does the hospitality team. They're doing the same thing. So there seems to be a lot of overlaps. And he said, all right, go sort that out. And I was like, Well, I got a lot to do, but okay.

So I took two weeks and I went around to all the functional areas, and I got them to agree on their roles, who's doing what, and put together an organizational chart and said, you're doing that? And said here.

And it got accepted. And I went back to my day job, and I kept doing venue management stuff.

So then after those games ended, there's a woman who was in a senior position, Jan Pouchikov, who I've worked with a few times over the years. She came to me and she said. I'm over at the World Cup now. We were having lunch one day. I'm over at the World Cup 94. We need somebody to do what you were doing back at the Olympic Festival. And I said, oh, venue management. She said, no, remember how you sorted out the roles and the orchestra and all this?

And I said, yeah.

She says, we need that here. So she got me an interview with a woman in HR, which happened to be the same head of HR, that was the head of HR for the 1984 Olympic Games that never responded to my letters.

And so we joked about that. She hired me. She said, I don't know what you're going to do because I don't really understand this whole thing. I said, Well, I kind of am putting it all together. So that's the genesis of it. And then I took workforce planning on and created a number of different principles and ideas and ways to go about it, job descriptions, staff types to try to sort out roles and how many people were needed.

And I could go on, but I'll stop there. That's the genesis of the whole functional area.

Wow. Well, one of the things that I think the story about the 1984, the person in 84 actually being the same person that was delivering 94, I think that's, wow, that is crazy. But one of the things that I'm curious about, Alan, is you have worked in so many different organizations. We went through it here on the bio - 27 organizing committees. You've had a lot of different clients, you've had different levels of involvement with those, whether it's just being a consultant or actually being really embedded in part of the operation. And so you've got to see and experience how organizations work and what makes them work and what makes them not work so well. And so I'm curious, from your perspective, the vast experience that you've had, what are some stories or experiences you can share with us where teamwork was really effective, the leadership was really effective, or in some cases, without naming names, maybe there were some struggles that you had to deal with in those areas

Yeah, I feel like I have many stories, but I think there's a couple that stand out. One is at World Cup 94.

So to segue back to what I was talking about a minute ago.

During the World Cup 94, there's an event called the Final Draw where the teams that have qualified for World Cup are matched up in different pools to play against each other in the first round.

This event took place for 94 in late 93 in Las Vegas. And I had been trying really hard to get the senior team at World Cup to understand the functional area of logistics and how important that was, and there was not a great understanding of it.

And I was asked, even though I was looking after workforce planning, I was asked to head up logistics for the Final Draw in Vegas. And I said, oh, please, you know, I've got so much to do. This is going to take a lot.

So anyway, I ended up doing it. And through that experience, I was able to model what logistics was. It was what materials do we need, who's going to set them up, who's going to procure them, who's going to store them, how are they going to get delivered, and so forth.

So I was able to demonstrate how important that function was for the games. For the World Cup. And that to me was after that happened, one of the senior people came back to me and said, okay, point made. Got it. We need that.

And I think that was a moment in my career when it comes to teamwork and leadership, where demonstrating something firsthand was a good way to get something done.

The second thing that occurs to me is for Naples 2019, which is a World University games several years ago, just being able to model a way forward. When there was a significant amount of confusion and uncertainty about whether the event would even take place. There was an opportunity for me to step forward and with a team of people that I had put together part of the Epic team and we modeled how it could be done. And that's another example. I suppose those are the two that strike me off the top.

I know this might be like choosing your kids here, but as you look back over this substantial career, what are you most proud of?

Again, I don't think there's any one thing that I could point to and maybe something will rise the top as I say all this, but I think there's a strong correlation between the biggest challenges that I faced and the achievements I'm most proud of. I guess that stands to reason. My involvement in the Rio 2016 and London 2012 data capture projects and London 2012 also was a much broader experience. But specifically those two experiences which were very short time frame, lot to do in a short time.

Naples 2019 was one of my biggest challenges that I worked on and a proud achievement.

But events even back in 92, there was a trade show that I worked on in Moscow where I only had 43 days to put together a 32 page corporate brochure, a trade show booth, a huge trade show booth, get everything made and a video showing the corporate objectives of this company. I was working with US Olympic Festival where we had no paid staff below us. I was the area venue manager, but I had venue managers and sport managers and a couple of thousand volunteers for those sports. Very proud of that. But I think launching Epic in 1997. And still being in business somehow almost 27 years later is an achievement that I'm proud of.

So many things come to mind.

Lake Placid, this event that I'm still here in Lake Placid, the event here. Which I've worked on for the past Four years, since 2019. First chance to implement this planning model that I've been working on and professing over the last decade or so. First chance to implement it from scratch. I implemented the model in Naples and in Chengdu for the World University games. But Lake Placid was really the first time, end to end, that this model was put in place. I'm very proud of that effort.

There's also one that well, you would wnow because you were there with me. Salt Lake 2002, just playing a small role in the success of that event. Not just the Olympics, but also the Paralympics. There's a lot of pride behind that. And one of the ones that I think no one knows about is the Museum of Islamic Art. I mean, that was one that kind of fell under the radar after three years of delays. I was asked to come in and help out to make sure this launch happened in the year of 2008. And I met with the Emir's wife and Sheikham Mosa and one of the Emir's daughters, Sheikh Mayasa, and promised them that with my support, we would get this launched in the year 2008. And we did a lot of struggles to get that going.

And then the last thing and I'll stop, I'm going to run out of things to say here in a minute anyway. Talk about all the events, but the innovations, workforce planning, the data capture program, the core team model that I've been working on. These innovations I'm particularly proud of because I think in some small way, at least through this work and these ideas the event industry will make progress, will be more efficient, will be less costly, less risky.

That's a long answer. Sorry about that.

But I'm proud of all those things.

Well, would you be all right if we dove into a few of them? Because in the event space, everybody's familiar with things like accreditation or accommodation or transport. I mean, this resonates with people or even things like logistics. Maybe they don't have deep expertise, but they kind of understand what that is. But when you say something like data capture, it's like, what is that? Right? So I had the great honor, very fortunate experience to work with you on that for the Rio 2016 Games. But maybe you can explain to people what that was and why it was such a challenge, because, as you said, it was a very short time period. And then ultimately, what were the outcomes of doing that?

So you can imagine going through many, many events and trying to plan and wondering what happened last time. Every one of these events is pretty much a startup, these organizing committees, and without having data from past Games, there's a tremendous amount of guesswork. So I experienced that firsthand Games after Games, event after event. And finally in I think it was 2007, I was in a bar in Vancouver and happened to run into a couple of people from the IOC and had a conversation about I said something about, well, I think the Games could be played better, or something kind of broad. And it's like, well, how? And we got into a conversation led to another conversation, another conversation. It led to me going down to Rio. Flying down to Rio. I was working on a project there in 2010. I got on a plane.

I went down there. I met with some of the senior people, and I explained how valuable it would be if in London there was someone capturing actual usage data. Not what the organizing committee said they planned, but what was actually used. And I used an example there. I said, from several games I've worked on Olympic Games. There's a client group, and I won't name them to call them out, but there's a client group which always asks or receives hundreds of parking spaces. And every games I've been to, I noticed that those parking spaces were never used or rarely used at a peak time, at a low time. I'd ask people to check for me, the spaces are just sitting there.

So I said, Wouldn't it be nice to be able to go to that client group for your games and say, how about instead of those hundreds of parking spaces, that we just provide you with what you need, what you actually use, and be able to present to anyway? It all resonated with these people, like, yes, we have to do this. We have to do this.

And I said, well, can I give you a proposal to help you on this? They said, no, we shouldn't be doing this. We shouldn't be paying for this. The IOC should be paying for it.

And I said, okay, I understand your point. It's valid. So I took it to the IOC. I got a meeting with some of the same people that I had talked to in 2007. And after about 55 minutes of my 1 hour presentation, the senior person in the room said, we have to do this. And that was a real turning point. So to answer your question, that was the genesis of it. There was a pilot project put together in London with about a dozen people going out to venues and capturing actual usage data.

How many people were actually sitting there, how many parking spaces were actually used how many media were actually using, the media workroom at peak times and the MPC and a number of other we had about 25 different data sets.

That led to some very interesting findings which were presented to the IOC in early 2013, which then led to a project in Rio. First in Sochi, there was a small project. It was done a little bit differently. Then there was a project in Rio where they said, all right, no more pilots. Let's do this full on. And we had 33 data capture, support people. Yourself, who was there, who had put together this great app that allowed people to easily enter the actual usage data in this app, put it all together, compile it, and be able to provide reports. And the outcome of all that to finish with your question, the outcome of all that was findings that showed that there was a lot of underuse.

So an organizing committee in Rio might have planned 200 seats for a client group and at peak times 50 of them were used and most times 20 of them were used or something like that. It wasn't always the case. Sometimes it was capacity, but frequently it was not. So this information contextualized, because I know the context is very important and if it was raining that day that might have had an impact. If the venue was far away from the spectators, that might have had an impact.

So contextualizing the data is very important but then the next organizers have something that they can look at and make decisions using that data without as much guesswork.

Again, sorry about the long answer, but that's the project in summation.

All right, well don't worry about long answers because all of that I think, was super important to share. Not only have you done this with the IOC, but you've done this with FISU as well.

And that takes me to my next question, which is something that you talked about a little while ago, which is the implementation of this thing called the core team model. So I'd like to know how you came up with this model and how that evolved and really culminated in this recent project that you completed earlier this year, which was the late Placid 2023 FISU Winter Universiade.

Sure. So this other innovation that I've been working on since really 2007. Again, after all this time with these organizing committees that I'd spent, I felt like we were recreating the wheel, partly because of the lack of data, but also because the model of producing the event didn't seem as efficient as it could be.

So I started whiteboarding a lot of ideas and I still have the whiteboard sitting in my office in Atlanta from 2007. I haven't erased it, it's still there because it reminds me of the genesis of all this. Anyway, the efficiency of the current planning model I felt could be improved and it certainly was working. It was getting games done. The model was working but seemed like there was a lot of waste, a lot of complexity, a lot more risk and so on.

So I worked on it for a while. I also wrote down a lot of my thoughts and I shared them with people in the industry and said here's a concept, what do you think? And I got feedback from I don't know, I never added it up but let's say seven, eight, nine people that helped me improve the ideas. I kept working on it.

So then in 2014 I was speaking at a conference in Paris at a sports summit and I ran into the director of the Summer Games for FISU. The World University Games. And I was telling him about it. And he said I think we could use that at some point. So I kind of laid the groundwork there. Well, a year later, Brasilia was supposed to host in brazil was supposed to host the 2019 World University Games. And they backed out after they had said, we're in, we're out. So FISU now is looking for a replacement and it took them over a year and they came up with Naples, Italy in 2016. But with less than three years to go, FISU said, this is going to be very difficult. We need some help.

And the director of the Summer Games said, would you bid? We're putting out a tender for some company to help the Naples team produce the games. Would you bid? And I said, sure. So we won the bid. I hired two people, both who spoke Italian because I didn't. And the three of us put together this core team model, which I've named it because it really is about a small group of people starting out and doing a lot of work that would typically be done by a lot more people. The model has changed.

And just to sum it up very quickly, you can imagine in any business or any organizing committee, it starts out with a person sitting at the top. And they hire person below them and they might hire some directors and they might hire some heads of and they build out this organizational structure. Well, this model says, well, wait a minute, we need that structure at some point, but we don't need it early on. And if you're bringing in people with experience that understand what's needed, call it the end game, what's needed at the end of the day, that small team, that core team can do a lot of this planning from a much more integrated perspective than the larger team can. And so that's really the whole model.

But how to do that? What's part of this model, what components fit into that model was what I worked on for many years and am still working on.

But we put together that integrated and I won't go too much into it, but it was everything from the organizational structure of the organizing committee what venues and sports and where are they located and what's the elevation and a lot of details about the venues and sports. It's about a venue concept of operations. Which a lot of times is not produced until maybe a year or two into the planning. It's about materials, staffing, even office space as part of one of these components. And the main operations center, people say, well, main operations center, that's something way down the road. That's games time.

But if you understand what you're going to do at games time and you can work backwards from that, that's very important.

So all that said, what I believe is with this core team model, the learning curve is less steep. The learning curve for most organizing companies is very steep. But with this core team, I believe the learning curve is less steep and it allows for a much more integrated organizing committee.

So that is the summation. And just the last thing I'll add to that is that I've had this chance first in Naples because of the situation there with less than three years to go to implement that model, which ended up working, I think, quite well. That led to an opportunity in Chengdu China for the 21 World University Games, which got postponed to 23 this year. They just took place I just got back from China, actually, a couple of weeks ago, three, four weeks ago.

And then that led to the opportunity of Lake Placid, which again, was the first end to end use of the core team model. And again, I think even though we had lots of challenges in Lake Placid for various reasons, I think the model worked well. And one of the senior people there was actually quoted in a publication saying that they thought that this model saved the organizing committee at least a year of time and planning. We could argue whether it was less than a year or more.

I think it could have even been more.

But that, I hope, answered your question.

It does. One other dimension that I want to emphasize on that, though, as well is not only is it saving a lot of time, but it's saving money. Because generally speaking, what's happened is, okay, the organizing committee forms and they start hiring this executive team. And you think to yourself, well, if I'm a VP of something I need people to manage. I mean, I can't do this work myself. So what do they do?

They go hire directors. And the director is like, Well, I lead this. I have nothing to lead. I can't deliver this myself. So they hire more people.

So it ends up ballooning quite quickly compared to this core team model where you bring in a very small team of experts to come in and do this early work, not on your own but in collaboration with the executives not only saves time, but can save a significant amount of money, I think, for organizing committees.

I'm glad you mentioned that because I didn't really focus much on that. But I think not only does it reduce waste and it keeps things simpler, more well integrated, so the complexity is reduced and therefore the risk is reduced, I think. But that is one of, if not the main benefit of the core team model is I do believe it saves us a huge amount of money, not just in personnel, but because of the integration and because when somebody says, well, here's the venues and here are the requirements that we put into each of the rooms and the areas and spaces at the venues. When it's done from an integrated perspective, it's much easier to see just what economies of scale there can be. When you add a lot of people to the plans and everybody's looking at their one area media, or Olympic family or FISU family and so forth, they think they need things that they don't need. Because you can combine a good example that's printers, I always use this as an example because if you ask somebody at this venue and they say, well I need a printer to print stuff, I need a printer. And I know this is a little outdated because printers aren't used much anymore.

But every functional area might say they need a printer. So if somebody goes and captures the needs, they might come up with ten printers that are needed for that venue. But if you're doing it from an integrated perspective and somebody sees across the entire operation, they can say, well, you're located right next to this functional area. And you can share a printer, right?

And they said, oh, sure, no problem. We just need to be able to print. So all of a sudden, you see you need two printers instead of ten. Just one example. But when you go such a massive operation, especially a Summer Olympic Games, when you extrapolate that over multiple venues, multiple functions, multiple pieces of equipment, it's enormous. And the cost savings, not just in personnel, but equipment, vehicles uniforms, I mean, it goes on. In my opinion, these Summer Games are literally you can save hundreds of millions of dollars, not that much in the World University Games, because you're not spending the same scale, but in the World University Games, at least millions and maybe tens of millions. But in the Summer Olympic Games, tens of millions for sure, hundreds of millions, likely, even potentially more than a billion dollars, depending on what the budget is and what's been planned to the date that the core team starts. So, yes, money. It's huge.

Well, shoot. It sounds to me like your career has been a resounding success. Longevity proves that. But have there ever been any situations, Alan, where you stubbed your toe, so to speak, where you were asked to do something, it didn't work out? And if there are any stories you can share about things where you may have had a memorable failure that you were able to overcome?

Yeah, well, I stubbed my toe. Yes. Totally failed on things. Absolutely. Again, there's so many things that I could think, try to pick out a few lots of failures, things that I would consider to be failures. One of them goes all the way back. It was an initial early learning a concert we had at the University of Kansas, where we tried to do something different. We tried to attract a different type of artist, led to a lot of people from Kansas City driving to the campus and just parking wherever they wanted to. The famous Allen Field House, where the Jayhawks, Kansas Jayhawks play basketball was our venue. I think it might have been the last time the Allen Field House was used for a concert, but we had placed 400 chairs in four groups on the floor of the fieldhouse covered and we did not link the chairs together. This was back in the late seventies. I don't even know if it was possible to link the chairs but

as soon as the show started everybody in these seats got up and moved them towards the stage and the fire marshal stood there and said stop the concert. This is not going to happen.

We ended up working it out so we could continue. But that was one of my initial failings that we didn't realize that was important. Failing in Atlanta to get the scheduling software that I had for some reason volunteered to help out with because of my experience at World Cup. It was very unpopular. It was not part of the IBM suite of applications. We ended up having to take this matter into our own hands and hand deliver these freestanding non networked PCs to all the venues to enable the workforce managers and the venues to be able to be able to check people in, check volunteers in.

One of the things that occurs to me is I don't know why, but some of these things are created largely by my mistakes. Some of them have been created by other people's mistakes but it doesn't really matter.

I've always been, for some reason, attracted to trying to solve the problems. And I'm not trying to pat myself on the back.

But for some reason, when there's something that's not working, regardless how or why I think I get a lot of I'm interested in just helping fix it, because I think it's just a challenge that I want to jump into.

And it really never bothered me that some people might think I'm complicit with that problem. So I jump in. Mean a number of things come to mind.

In Torino the IOC was supposed to be dropped at a certain location so they wouldn't have to be rescreened. They were dropped at the wrong location. So they had to be rescreened. A lot of people were upset by that. I helped them figure out how to get in without having to rescreen them. In Atlanta 96, there's people that were there. Remember the parade, the opening ceremony parade was an absolute disaster if I can call it that.

The speed that the athletes were getting out of the stadium where they were staged into the opening ceremony stadium was really slow and there were lots of gaps.

TV had to cut away. I jumped in there and tried to help people fix it. People were looking at me like oh this must be your fault. No. Special Olympic World Games in 2015 in LA. The arrivals to the welcome center was another what I would consider to be disaster even to the point where the director of LA emergency management called out to help resolve this. And I ended up, for various reasons, being in a position where he had appointed me to fix the problem the following day. And I said, I think I have a solution. But he said, let's go with it.

Lots of failings out there. These events are just really hard to put on. And anybody that hasn't worked with an organizing or for an organizing committee, might have a hard time understanding why. But there's a lot of good reasons. There's a lot of failures out there, and I've certainly been the cause of many of them. Having learned from all those, obviously try not to do them again. I'll probably think of others when we continue to talk, but those are the ones that strike me right now.

Well, sometimes things happen in events that are difficult to predict. I remember back in Doha in the 2006 Asian games when there was a torrential rainstorm the night of the opening ceremony. And if I recall correctly, you were working in the main operations center and you were trying to source rain ponchos for people for this incredible storm that it was a once in a century rainstorm there in Doha.

Who could have predicted it?

Yeah, I don't know how I forgot that one. I don't know that that was so much a failure. That was a very strange situation where

the buses were over here and the stadium was over here, and just really right as soon as the cauldron was lit and I was in the main operations center and I was actually on a phone with the head of the ceremonies that was in the stadium saying when's the weather going to hit? And I was standing there next to the meteorologist trying to see where the cell was coming over.

We had a horse. It was actually the Emir's son was on a horse with the torch, was going to go up this ramp in the stadium and light the cauldron. Will he be able to? Is he going to slip when's the rain coming anyway?

So he gets the cauldron lit, the athletes start exiting, and the storm is pouring. Storm and of all places, you wouldn't think doha is going to be cold. But it was in the high 60s that night. This was in December, and with the rain and the athletes were freezing, all of a sudden, nobody had any ponchos. The problem was they couldn't get to the buses because there was a fence.

And the fence was going to open. The gate was going to open as soon as the VIPs had gone past this road, the VIPs stuck around a little longer. They were talking to each other, so the gate stayed closed.

The athletes were piling up against the fence, shaking the fence. Pretty soon the fence went down. Athletes were climbing over it, pushing the fence over, running to the buses. I mean, it was a very difficult scene.

But just remind me of one other thing real quick about Doha. Talk about challenges. Two days before the closing ceremony my boss in the main operations center, one of the senior Qatari officials there came to me and said, Alan, we have an issue. We have a situation.

What is it? Well, we have to move the final of the football, of the soccer competition from this stadium to this stadium. And I said, Why? He says, Because Qatar qualified for the final. And there's somebody in the Emir's, it was one of the princes said he wanted the match at his stadium, which is the Qatar Sports Complex, which only has 12,000 seats, but he wanted it moved from a venue that had 20,000 seats and was sold out. So I won't go into all the details.

I'll just say that it led to avery challenging next 48 hours trying to solve this challenge. Didn't get solved as well as I would have liked.

But those are the kind of things that happen in the event business, in the event industry. Like I said, rarely, maybe never a boring moment.

You've had opportunities, Alan, to work in a lot of different places. You've mentioned some of them here, Italy, not just in the States, but China. You mentioned Doha here. And I'm curious. You've gone into places all around the world and work and as someone who's done that myself. I've had my fair share of fish out of water moments. And so I'm curious if you've had any of those experiences where you've gone working in a new place in different languages, different cultures, different food and how you've dealt with that?

Yeah, again, I'm not going to be able to think of all of them, but there are a couple that do come to mind as you're talking. One of them is risk management. The concept of risk management. And that term means a lot of things in a lot of different cultures. And it's a concept that is adopted by senior team leaders because they hear the word risk and they think, oh yeah, we've got to manage our risk. We've got to make sure we do everything we can to reduce the risk. But in some cultures and I'll use Greece for the Athens Games, I'll use Beijing for the Games in 2008, their Olympic Games, and I'll use Italy for Torino as well as Naples 2019 World University Games, where the concept of risk management means very different things in those cultures.

In fact, in Greece, I felt like there really wasn't an established definition for it or an established product that was out there. There was a company I was working for to help them assess the risk and mitigate the risk. And they had people in their office. There as a service provider that were asking me what I would do, what I should do. I felt like a fish out of water in those cultures. When I was introducing the concept of risk management, risk assessment, mitigation. I think many of the people I was working with got to understand it. But I think it still didn't resonate so well in some cultures. One thing I did, and it's a little bit of fish out of water.

I have a tendency at times, and I think I'm showing it here, to go on. I mean, I get kind of passionate and I get kind of wordy at times. One thing I had to do, what I've had to do in all these cultures, whether it was China, Brazil, Qatar, Russia, anywhere I've been where the native. Language is not English, I've had to learn to speak in sentences. And I've realized that if I want the people I'm talking to to grasp what I'm trying to say, I have to slow things down. I have to really focus my words. And a lot of people who know me probably wouldn't believe that I can do this. But I've had to learn to speak in sentences, be much more concise and articulate when there's a language barrier.

So that's something that occurred to me. And there's one other thing when you talk about fish out of water. So this is back in Nagano. I was working for IBM on the Nagano games, helping IBM. They had 1500 people that were working for IBM as part of the games. So I was helping them get it organized with accreditation, accommodations, transportation, variety of things. One of the things I was asked to do was to help with the uniform distribution to the IBM team. They had their own uniforms.

And so I said, okay, well I put the plan together and I said What I need, I really need four people to help me with the distribution for these three days. And I'd like them to be the same people because I'll train them and then we'll distribute and then we'll be done.

So the IBM Japan office said, so you need four people? And I said yes. And they said well we have 21 people for you. And I said Well I just need four. And they said well we've got 21. And I said, can I pick four? They said no, you need to use all 21. And I said how should I do that? He said well some can work 2 hours, and then you bring another crew for 2 hours and another crew the next day.

And I said, well that's going to be not so efficient. So I didn't realize at the time this was a department that had been asked to help out and they had 21 people. And it would have been maybe a loss of face if I had only used four. So I needed to use 21. That was something where I felt like my cultural background, my experience, was very different than what I was finding.

So a little bit of a fish out of water there, and I ended up using 21 people and doing a lot of extra training that I didn't expect. But my desire for efficiency and their desire not to lose face sort of met and they won out on that one.

That's a great example. That reminds me of working in Delhi on the Commonwealth Games. The 2010 Commonwealth Games. And I remember going to the organizing committee and I saw a lot of different levels of management, a lot of people with a lot of different which to me sounded like very prominent job titles. And I remember asking myself, why do we have so many levels and why do we need so many titles?

But that's how it was done there, right? As opposed to in Salt Lake, 2002, the organization was much flatter and you had basically three guys with offices. Mitt Romney and Fraser Bullock and Ed Eynon were like the three guys that had offices, and the rest of us were sitting in cubicles. So it was very different structure there. And so when you were talking about your experience there in Nagano, it kind of reminded me of that experience there in Delhi.

So that's fantastic.

Well, this might sound like a serious conversation, but actually working at events is a lot of fun. You've talked about, well, it's high pressure and you got to solve problems and so on and so forth, and that's all very true, but it can be incredibly fun and a lot of funny, ridiculous things happen and you witness them as you work in your career and events. And so I'm curious if you've got any stories that when you think about them today, they just make you chuckle.

Yeah, again, quite a few, I think. One of them that strikes me and there's so many funny things, I mean I've had such a great time in this business over all these years, so many laughs, which really gets you through the challenges.

I started a project. Let's see, when did I yeah, so it was in 2002, right after Salt Lake. I was asked to come out to Athens to help out with some workforce planning organization and some work in the workforce area. So I got on a plane for my first trip out there and I arrived in Athens and my luggage was lost, so I went to the hotel without my luggage, and it was around 04:00, if I remember right, on a Sunday.

I was starting work the next Monday, the next day, and I asked at the front desk, where can I go to get a shirt and a tie and some pants? And they said everything's closed in Athens on Sunday. You won't find anything, nothing's open. And I said, there's got to be something. And they said, well, there's a market called Monasteraki, which know about a mile down the road here, they close at five, you might find something there. So I go down, I literally ran to Monasteraki and I found a store that had some shirts. I found a little kiosk outside that had a tie, that had ties, and I couldn't find any pants.

So I end up buying some stuff. And thinking, all right, I hope my luggage arrives. So I go to my first day of work in this culture where I'd never worked. I didn't know any of these people. Maybe I knew one guy. And I show up and I arrive. And I tell somebody this story while in the first morning I'm there and my luggage and bought the shirt at the tie. And the guy looks at me and he goes, I was wondering why you have a woman's shirt on?

And I was like, oh, come on. They didn't let me buy a woman's shirt. So I'd gone into the store and bought the one shirt I could find. And it was a woman shirt. So that was a really embarrassing.

This is funny now, but in Athens also alot of things in Athens that have go out one night with a bunch of people. We went to a club and we drank and danced. It was like two in the morning. It was down in the coastal area, the docks. And we come out, five of us pile into this car. We start to drive to leave on this road, and two guys step in front of our car. One of them has a handgun and says, stop. And we were thinking, we're being held up. And they come over around the side and we don't speak Greek and they don't speak much English.

Come to find out, they say that they're the police and they asked us to get out of the car. We had somebody who spoke a little bit Greek and they said, well, these guys say they're the police and they're searching for drugs and okay, well, we don't have any drugs, and let us go. And they start going into the car to search the car and they plant a little container containing I don't know what. And they say, oh, I see you have drugs. And we're, no, no, you put that.

So we it was very tense for a while. We talk about it now, we laugh. But that was something else that happened.

Karaoke in Chengdu comes to mind with some of the FISU team. One night hours of karaoke. Another thing comes to mind is in Sydney, my main interface there for the projects I worked on was the head of human resources, and he asked me to go out on Sydney harbor one day. He had a boat and went out with him and his friend. And on the way back, we were going to dock the boat and get out of the boat, and he asked me if I would dock the boat and it's this very nice sailboat.

He put the sail down and run engine power. I had never docked a boat in my life. And I thought, well, I've never done. No, you'll be fine, you can do it. And I felt like it was a bit of a test to see who I'm working with here, because it was the first visit down there that turned out to be pretty comical. Did not destroy the boat, but I don't know, I can think of probably. Did anybody get wet?

No, we didn't get wet. Going to a Qatari wedding was quite an experience. Just men. We did the sword dance, learned how to do a sword dance. I'm not sure that these are so comical. They're just things that pop into my head when I think about these cultures. And how much fun and enjoyable things that have happened to me over the years.

Well, one question that I am particularly interested in, Alan, is the question of mentors. Because I found that in this business, it's really helpful if you have someone who is willing to take you under their wing, show you the ropes, so to speak, maybe impart some of their knowledge and wisdom at opportune times. And I'm curious, throughout your career, were there any individuals that served that role for you?

I don't know that it's so much of a mentorship role where somebody was saying, here's what I advise and here's what you should do. I've had a lot of advice over the years from people, I guess. Yeah, if I look at it that way, I really could consider those people mentors because they're people I looked up to and really took their advice to mean more than just a few words.

So, yeah, there's a lot of people. First one that comes to mind was the US Olympic Festival 91. My boss, who was the head of venues, a guy named Greg Bingham. It has always had a place in my heart, and I just think back. To how wonderful he was to work. For, and he led by example. One quick story about Greg. It was right before games time. We're sitting around, kind of one of. Our last meetings, about 20 of us. And there was this, if I remember right, it was the judo flooring had to go in before the table tennis flooring or we weren't going to have time to switch over from one sport to the other, something like that. But the flooring got stuck in Las Vegas and it wasn't going to be delivered until two days later, but we needed it the next morning. So he said, all right, we got a truck, right?

Yeah. Who's going with me? And some guy raised his hand and the two of them got in the truck, they drove to Vegas, they loaded the floor, they got back at seven in the morning. They drove through the night just to get the floor set up. Greg led by example, so I learned a lot from him. But there's been so many other people. I think of Fraser Bullock from the Salt Lake games. I consider him someone I've modeled a lot of, tried to model a lot of behaviors after and looked up to his advice. Also in Salt Lake, Steve Clark, who was the head of Human Resources.

I think of Warren Harper from Marsh, work with Warren for really ever since Atlanta on a number of projects, have a lot of respect. And he's also been someone that I've really looked up to in Doha. Abdullah al Najjar, one of my favorite people that I've ever worked for as well. Just a great guy with a lot of common sense and a lot of decisiveness.

Speaking of decisiveness, I'm also going to call out Ashley Walden, who I just worked with for four years on the World University Games here in Lake Placid. She was the chief operating officer. Really great temperament, very decisive, very fair. Somebody I like to model myself after.

I think of Doug Arnot. So Doug, who I know, you know, and many people in this business know Doug. We started off working together in 94 on 93, on the World Cup 94. And Doug has been responsible to bring me into a number of projects. I think six projects over the years. Have a lot of respect for Doug. A lot of things he's done and said are things that I believe in and we see eye to eye and a lot of things. Jill Davies down in Sydney, wonderful to work with. She's been another influence. Marla Messing has been a big influence on me. She worked at World Cup 94 and 99 Women's World Cup. Kathy Scanlon, I mentioned Jan Palchikov earlier. Eli Primrose Smith, who is head of The 91 Olympic Festival, went off to work for IBM. But there's so many people and yourself.

I think of you. We've worked together so many times. I have so much respect for you. And learned so much. And just the work relationship we have. I've learned a lot. Jing Zhao. Zhao Jing, if you're speaking Chinese, Jing is someone who she's the summer director for the World University Games.

Tremendous amount of respect. Young, super sharp, super good to work with, easy to work with. Jerry Anderson, who's no longer with us, is someone I remember. Petter Ronigan, who headed up the Lillehammer Games and I got to know in Salt Lake, along with Benta Malmo, very positive influence. Donna Providenti, Allison Melangton, that could go on. Anita DeFrantz. Anita is someone who I got to know many years ago. I don't know her well, but I follow what she does. I read about the things she does. We've had conversations over the year.s A lot of respect for her. I consider, just to kind of wrap it up, I consider all these people, the ones I mentioned and more, to be people who have had such a positive influence on me and what I've done over the years. It's hard to call them a mentor per se, but they've provided me with so much value, such good modeling that's helped me grow and learn how to work in this business.

So long winded answer again. But those are people that really stand out to me.

They're amazing people. Not including necessarily myself in that statement, but I feel the same way about you, Alan. I mean, I've learned so much about this event business from you, and it's been an honor and a privilege to be able to work with you on many different projects and appreciate you pulling me in to work on certain projects with clients.

And I've always enjoyed it and kind of taking that to another place and looking at how we pay it forward. There are people who are going to be listening to this, who are seasoned veterans, but there are also people who are just now getting into this space and might be wondering, are events for me? What advice would you share with those who might be looking to get into this space or they're just getting started working on events?

The first thing that occurs to me I guess this says something about how important it is, is to keep my mouth shut more over the years. Actually, back in 2022, I believe it was, right after the games in Salt Lake, I will name his name, but he said to me, you don't have to react to everything. And I thought, oh, okay, what's he trying to say there? And it's meant a lot of things to me over the years, and I haven't done a great job since 2002 improving that. But I think listening more, and people talk about that all the time, listening, being a little more measured in my response, in my responses, and think twice before throwing out an opinion. I've always had plenty of opinions on what I think should be done or not. So that advice I had back in 2002 is something I have taken on board, I've tried to improve on. And I think another piece of advice would be to take time to learn more about managing people and leading people. If that's something you want to do.

A lot of times I think, well I like to do the work. I'm not as much interested in leading a team to do the work because I find it so interesting and I'm so curious and I want to dig in and find out for myself. Not so much that I think I could do it better than other people, although I'm sure I've thought that at times. But I like doing the work.

So if you want to expand, though, and you want to have more opportunities, take time to learn about managing and leading people is one piece. Also take more time off and don't worry so much. I've taken so little time off over the years, and I worry too much that the job isn't going to get done. It'll get done just fine whether I'm there for two more days or three more days. It isn't all about me being there.

And I think that's a piece of advice for people. If you want to do the work and if you're in a certain type of work. One thing I regret is I didn't become a pivot table wizard, an excel pivot table wizard many years ago. I can do this much with it, and I know how valuable that tool can be to produce information, results that can help people make decisions, data being one of them. Of course, there's so many other things I'm sure I could think of for advice, but oh, innovation, that's the last thing. So when you advice to people want to get into business, there's so much room for improvement in any industry. But in the event industry, the event business, because people typically start up and they do something and then they go away, and then another group starts up. And does something, go away, you don't get necessarily that long term improvement opportunity.

It's only people that work between the events, event to event, like I have. Like you have, and others, where you really start to realize things that could be done better. And so innovations in this business, it's pretty wide open. There's a lot of opportunity. And I would just encourage people that do want to get into the industry, especially major sporting events. If you're entrepreneurial, you're an innovator, you could probably have some good opportunities if you really focus and put the time in and do the work.

And always be persistent, be prepared to travel. Here's one piece of advice, live in a big city if you can. That's what I did. I was in Los Angeles. I was fortunate that many events came there. I didn't have to move around to get a lot of experience initially. Keep your standards high. Realize that most events, again, you're doing them for the first time, they're not going to be perfect, but you can still have high standards. Be curious, ask a lot of questions. That's something else that I do a lot. Those who know me would got to ask. You got to find out in order to make good decisions. You got to be organized. You got to organize yourself well, or you can't organize others well. And then this sounds simple, but you're going to come across lots and lots of documents in your career if you start in this business. Lots, thousands.

And if you organize them so you can find them and refer to them later, this is a simple thing, then you will avoid recreating the wheel as much as you might otherwise, or somebody might otherwise have to. I refer back to documents from I don't know how far back at times. Somebody will say, well, what needs to be done at venue training? And I'll go back and look at four or five, six documents and see kind of do the best of well, here's what I recommend for you.

So that's a lot, it's a lot more than I thought I would come up with. And I know I keep saying that, but like I said, if we were doing this in a foreign language, back to what I said earlier, I would have been much more articulate and concise. But just throwing out all these ideas.

Well, I think they're fantastic. All those recommendations, I think are fantastic. Of course, being a Microsoft Excel guy, I appreciate the shout out for Microsoft Excel. I love that. But really, really excellent advice and I appreciate you so much, Alan, taking an hour out of your day to have a conversation with me and a little walk down memory lane recounting some of these stories. If people want to learn more about the work that you do, how you could potentially help them, how epic could potentially help them, whether with the event core team model, it's data capture, so many different workforce planning, there's so many different ways that you can help organizations, whether they're local organizing committees, event owners, partners, et cetera.

What's the best way for someone who might be interested in seeing how you could potentially help them? What's the best way for them to actually connect with you?

Email, text, phone call. I'm always open to conversations with anybody, whether it leads to work or it's just to bat around some ideas. I always enjoy the discourse. And as far as contacting me, yeah, [e-mail] is my email address, is that what you're asking? I should just get off contact details.

My phone number is four oh four, so plus one US 404-610-9702. And you can text me or call me on that number. The email address again, [e-mail] is a good way to contact me.

And I'm getting towards the end of my career. I don't know how many more years I'm going to work or want to work. We'll see what opportunities come up, but I would really like to see these innovations. I think the workforce planning piece is pretty well established now. The data capture work, I think has more work to be done there. And I think this latest I'm not sure I'd call it an innovation, but it's definitely a change in the model. This latest idea of consolidation, centralization of resources and resource planning, I think those all have some work to be done. And I love to help anybody that's interested in reducing complexity, risk, waste and cost, which is what I believe all three of those will do or have done. And I would think that just about anybody who is organizing events would be interested in those things. So, Alan, thank you so much again for taking so much time out of your day. I really appreciate it. It's great to see you. Viewers, listeners, please like and subscribe to our podcast and we'll catch you again soon.

Alan, thank you.

Thank you, Christian. I appreciate it.