Meet Ed Vincent, founder of festivalPass, the world’s first live events subscription service across music, film, food and wine, sports, theater, tech innovation and more. Betsy Westhafer and Tony Bodoh excitedly talk about how this model changes customer experience! For a long time, concert-goers and show-watchers have been trained to be subject to crazy convenience fees and surcharges for each performance. But now, users can enjoy thousands of events locally and globally for one monthly fee.

Ed talks about the desire to build a community around the $200B live event industry to make things easy, social and frictionless for his customers. While data is a huge part of their business, his approach is not something we’ve discussed on the podcast before. Ed covers four fundamentals needed to really make a marketplace successful:

1. Root vs global density
2. Hetero vs. homogeneous inventory
3. Inverse Volume Price (1 high/1 low)
4. Reason to come back

He is also generous enough to share his untraditional methods to raise capital.

What does this all mean and how can it help grow your business? Listen to find out more!

Watch the episode here:

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About Ed Vincent

Ed Vincent is the founder of the world’s first festival and live events subscription service providing access to music, film, food and wine, and tech and innovation — festivalPass. Enjoy hundreds of festivals locally and globally for one monthly fee. festivalPass is a story about community and creating experiences that changes you. We as humans need connection; it’s in our DNA — as strong as the need for food, water, and warmth. We are bringing our members the only place to make accessing, discovering, and attending festivals spanning industries the most user-friendly, frictionless, and affordable member experience possible. We strive every day to secure new event partners and think about what our customers want from a mobile app that complements their lived experiences.

Ed is an entrepreneur with over twenty years of business, technology, and management experience having founded and exited several companies in that time including helping to launch film festivals in multiple locations and creating the concept for a Maxim branded hotel in the Caribbean. Most recently, he led a data platform and consultancy in the entertainment space with clients including A&E Networks, AMC Networks, Screenvision, MovieTickets.com and was brought into MoviePass as an interim head of data. These experiences gave him the insight needed to make festivalPass a reality. Ed has learned what works and what doesn’t work in this space and looks forward to inspiring people to lead active and engaging lives every day by participating in live community events both locally and globally.

How One Company Is Changing The Customer Experience In A $200B Industry With Ed Vincent

The Essential Fundamentals To Making A Marketplace Work

I’m so glad we are here, Betsy, because we’ve got a phenomenal interview with Ed Vincent. He is the Founder and CEO of festivalPass. He’s based in Austin, Texas and this company is phenomenal. They’ve gone through a challenging year with COVID but they are focused on the live event space. They are a marketplace online and it’s such a fascinating conversation that we have with Ed.

A couple of things that stand out in my mind are how they understand who their customer is and they are in this B2C space that you and I talk about all the time where it’s almost like this triangle, where you have the company serving both the businesses, they are a vendor and they also serve the consumer at the same time. They are in this position between the two. Ed has such interesting things to share with us, from financing to the fundamentals of a marketplace and so many more things. I just cannot wait to get into this interview.

For decades customers have had more of a transactional experience. There’s a huge opportunity for the ecosystem to build a community.CLICK TO TWEET

It was an awesome education for our audience. What I took away from it is how much you can learn by listening to other successful entrepreneurs. He’s an educator, he has been there. He’s succeeded at that. What I love about having the show is that we find these people that are willing to share what they have learned on their journey. Our goal always is to make sure that our readers gain value. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is one of those episodes where people will walk away with multiple key takeaways that will help them in their own businesses. With that, let’s jump in.

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Ed, thank you so much for being here. We are glad to have you on the show.

It’s great to be here. I’m looking forward to it.

Customer Experience: When you have heterogeneous inventory, the bigger your moat the more supply you gather over time.

You are doing some exciting stuff. Post-COVID, you are doing something that everybody wants a piece of. Start by telling us a little bit about how you’ve got into the work that you are doing and the path that led you to this point. What’s getting you up and going in the morning? What gets you so excited about the work you are doing?

It’s funny you mention it’s something everybody wants a part of now but before, that wasn’t the case. We have a live events marketplace. It’s an events marketplace for the live events industry. I like to say when people ask about what is the business model, it’s like an Airbnb meets ClassPass. Some people know what the two are, some people don’t. I can get into some of that from an underlying business model perspective. On the simple side, consumers come to festivalPass, sign up for a monthly subscription, pay a monthly fee and get a bunch of credits. They can then use those credits to go to thousands of live events across music and film, food and wine, and tech and innovation. The reason why it’s fun is they never pay a ticketing fee and they are always getting other membership value for being a subscriber. Your real question there was, “What led up to what we are doing now and why?”

There is always context to any kind of entrepreneurial journey. Part of it is I have been an entrepreneur for many years. Throughout the various businesses I have had, this culminated in me being the right person at the right time to launch this business. I can dig into a lot of that depending on how deep you want me to go. One of my businesses along the way was an experiential marketing company, about 70-person agency and we would bring a lot of big brands into big events. It was when I started falling in love with big events. We had film festivals and big music concerts. We helped launch a few film festivals, Vail, Sonoma Valley. We even owned a film festival down in the Dominican Republic.

Fast forward, I then had a SaaS business. Most recently prior to festivalPass, I had a data business in the entertainment space. We helped a lot of big television brands like A&E Networks and AMC Networks understand their consumer data, as well as a few other subscription-based businesses. One was called MoviePass, which was a client of mine. I was their interim Chief Data Officer for a little bit but very different business models than what we have now.

In order for something to sustain and exist, it has to be more convenient.CLICK TO TWEET

We are going to dive into that data piece because Tony and I are both very fascinated by that. You relocated to Austin. It’s so cool to have Tony in Nashville and you in Austin, thinking about the whole music piece of it, where are things now as far as ramping up post-COVID?

It’s a huge pent-up demand. Especially in some Southern states where there are a lot of outdoor environments. There are events every day, every night. Even the largest event producer, which you guys probably know who I’m talking about, in the country, already has over twice as many events planned for 2022 than they did in 2019. You can just imagine, across the board, the number of artists and people that want to go out and tour. They have been sitting in their houses for a year, writing music. They just want to go out and share it.

It leads me to something I noticed on your website as I was perusing it, the tagline, “Experiences that change you.” I love that because there is nothing like a live event to change how people view the world. You have people talk about Woodstock and some of those key events like Live Aid and those types of things. Even on a smaller scale, people go to concerts and they are like, “This was amazing,” and they talk about it for years to come. How does that play into why you do what you do? That seems to be a big part of it. You seem very passionate about that. Talk a little bit about that.

It comes back to the community. Live events, in general, can’t be repeated. They are a thing that happens at a moment in time. That’s why in the old days you would get all those live albums that were so important because it was the one time this band played at this one place with these specific people. That’s true across all live events. Music tends to be transformational globally. That is another cool thing about what we are building. We are building a global business that works in various countries but the other thing is live events don’t only have to be music.

The same passion comes through when somebody is at their favorite college football game or they are watching the way the crazy football fans are in Europe. They are just rabid fans and it’s all about time, place and that live event. Here in Austin, the Austin FC, which is a new soccer team, depending on soccer or football, depending on what you are thinking, have already sold out their season and have 20,000 people on the waiting list. The point of it is that there is such a passion around live events and even food and wine. You talk about knowing your customer. Even in the food and wine environment, people have epic experiences. The one time they were at South Beach Food & Wine, Aspen Food & Wine or even the Burger & Brew Festival in their local hometown and they got to taste the local beer they love.

Ed, when we had a chance to speak with you before, you talked about learning some of the problems and mistakes with previous models that were along the lines of what you are doing but different. Talk to us about your model, what that solves for your customers, for the event vendors, and just how you are approaching this differently so that you don’t meet the same fate that some of the previous generations of this type of model have faced.

It’s good to know that even at the outset, some have been wildly successful. We have looked at the market to try and understand, which ones were successful and why, and how can we learn from or utilize some of their successes while at the same time, understanding some failures and try to understand what not to do. There are a couple of things. First of all, the industry in general, that we have chosen to participate in, not only am I super passionate about it but it’s an industry that the word, ripe for change, wouldn’t be the right way.

It’s consumers for decades have had more of a transactional experience with the way they approach live events, how they get tickets and admission to it, where there’s a huge opportunity for everybody in the ecosystem to just build more community around that. It doesn’t have to be transactional. It doesn’t have to feel like you are fighting to get your ticket to be able to go to the thing you want to go to. It should be easy, social, frictionless and part of the experience.

The industry in general is something we are excited about. It’s also a $200 billion industry globally so it’s a pretty big industry. Outside of that, to answer your question directly, there are things make sense in marketplaces. There are four fundamental concepts within a successful marketplace. Some of those other subscription-based businesses that you are referring to weren’t truly meeting some of the fundamentals of why a marketplace works. For example, there’s route density and global density. Companies like Uber and Lyft share in that route density world. That means that it’s local, if there are enough customers on one side of the marketplace locally and enough suppliers on the other side of the marketplace locally, you can have a route density marketplace successful in its own right only in one city, town or industry.

Then there’s the global density side. Those are more folks like the Airbnbs of the world where people don’t necessarily sit at home, go to Airbnb and use it four times in the month in their own hometown. It’s all about building a heterogeneous inventory globally that for every piece of supply that comes onto the marketplace, it becomes more powerful and unique. That spins right into the next thing, is the type of inventory. There’s heterogeneous and homogeneous inventory. In the world of Uber and Lyft, if you get a car that’s clean with a capable driver, that’s usually all you are looking for. There are tiers, XL and Black Car but those are irrelevant to the model. At the end of the day, it’s the same thing. It’s a safe ride. Whereas when you have things like Airbnb, that’s heterogeneous. You have a little treehouse in somebody’s backyard and you have a chateau in France.

The reality is there are certain kinds of businesses that have to apply certain fundamentals to certain kinds of product. The Ubers and Lyfts of the world, because it’s homogeneous, you saw billions of dollars get pumped in. They had to build market share fast, which creates something that exists in homogeneous inventory. When you have heterogeneous inventory, the more of that supply you gather over time, the bigger your moat, the idea that you have unique inventory that only you have that people can go to. There are a couple of others. I don’t want to bore your audience with all the different fundamentals but you ask the why.

Customer Experience: The financing of the company should be almost as fun as building the company.

I would love to hear those next. I know it wasn’t part of our original plan. The reason I love these is that you are getting to the heart of what the show is about. It’s knowing your customer. This is a big piece of it. We have never had anyone talk about this before. I would love it if you want to go into the next two as well.

It’s the volume and price of the transaction. A successful marketplace only exists if you have high volume, low price transactions or you have low volume, high price transactions. If you think about the Ubers and Lyfts of the world, you probably use it 4, 5 or 6 times a month, that’s relatively high volume. It might be a $5, $10, $20 ride. It’s a relatively low transaction, that can work. I’m using these examples because they are easy to understand.

Airbnb, you might use it twice a year but you are spending $500, $800, $900 every time you are using it. All of a sudden, it can sustain itself with one transaction a year because the marketplace is making $80, $90, $120 off of that one transaction. If you have a low volume and low price of the transaction, probably not a good marketplace at the end of the day. If you have a marketplace that could exist with either of the two, great but if it has both, even better.

One of the things we like about festivalPass is going to a physical live event it’s not generally cheap. Tickets are $20, $50, $120, sometimes $300 or $400. We have something that could create high-volume transactions. If you have people signing up for festivalPass in this route density marketplace of just Austin, New York or Nashville, I might go to 3, 4 or 5 events a month. That might cost 8, 10 or 12 credits. Once a year I might travel to Coachella or I might go to South Beach Food & Wine and I might spend 300 credits because I want to go to this big event. We are lucky to have fundamentals that could exist for both of those concepts.

The last is something that I truly believe in, is what makes people tend to use that marketplace that they can’t do elsewhere. I remember when I was in New York, I used to see this years ago with some models where a lot of people were using a marketplace model to get house cleaners. The problem was a lot of them ended up moving to a totally different business model. The reason is once you meet your cleaner and they come once or twice, you just call your cleaner, you don’t need the marketplace anymore. In order for something to sustain and exist, it has to be more convenient, safer or there has to be some other reason why people will keep coming back to the marketplace rather than transacting off the marketplace.

This was educational for us as well because we have not had that conversation before. We talk about the experience and I know I’m not unique in saying that buying tickets online can be a not fun experience. Particularly when the tickets are X amount and the bottom line when you are checking out is a whole lot more than that because there are all these additional fees and all of that. From a customer experience standpoint, it sounds like a lot of room for improvement, your model helps solve that problem. What I’m getting to is in your company, thinking about the customer experience and what you want to bring to your customers what’s the culture inside your four walls at your company? I use four walls metaphorically, clearly, not everybody is in four walls anymore. As a leader of the organization, what are you instilling in your team in terms of how you view your customers?

I have had the benefit of having businesses in the past and knowing that from day one I’m building this business from a lot of the learnings I have had throughout my entrepreneurial journey, as well as a lot of the help and peer groups I have had through my EO, Entrepreneurs Organization. I spent three years doing an EMP class at MIT but the things I have learned right is culture is important. From day one, we have a mission statement and we have core values.

I have learned that core values, you can’t have too many. The ones you have, you must use as filters to the business. The way that, culturally, we instill those is we have a weekly all-hands call and we are remote. We have dozens of people that all sign into this call and we go through a pretty tight agenda. Prior to even beginning the business part of these agendas, I usually do a centering technique where I start it sometimes, then over time I call on people to bring people together. It could be a breathing exercise or a visualization exercise, 30 seconds to 60 seconds to bring everybody back to a centered place before we begin.

At first, everybody thinks you are weird until they are like, “That was helpful.” I always love to watch when a new person is joining the call for the first time, because every week that goes by, there’s always a new person joining the company. Usually, they are quiet and looking around because I don’t tell them what’s going to happen. Afterward they are like, “I like that.” That proceeds with somebody reading the mission and through the core values. As we go into the marketing update, the biz update and the tech update, each one of them has to go back to the filters.

One example is gratefulness, it’s one of our core values. If we are not grateful for working together, if we are not grateful and we don’t display that, it doesn’t help and work. Another one is design thinking. Everything we do has to be based upon design thinking because that’s what we believe is the right approach to building a business. Anyway, we go through that, and then usually at the end, everybody has to give a closing word, an emotion, a feeling. “Am I excited? Am I frustrated? Am I happy?” whatever it is. I always love by the end of the meeting, everybody seems to rally around one path and it’s great. Culturally, that’s what we do to try and instill it, and hopefully, live and breathe what we ask them to do.

Make gratefulness one of your core values.CLICK TO TWEET

We do something similar but not quite as well as what you do. I’m taking copious notes on how to even enhance that because it’s so easy. When you have been around as long as Tony and I have, you see companies that spend so much time and money on mission-vision exercises only to be put on a shelf. It happens so often. Having that front and center every week is such a great idea.

It reminds me of one of the other episodes we did. John Boggs, he’s a CEO of a personal development company. It was almost word for word like you guys may have been reading the same book or follow the same mentor in that. I’m hearing this more with companies with start-ups in that. That’s a big reason you see companies that are successful because they get those core values, they get the culture right and live it.

I’m going to switch gears here. I want to move away from the soft side and we are going to go toward the data side because I’m a recovering data junkie here. I know you guys have a ton of data. You are an online platform. You are designed to be collecting data and it’s not just for the sake of having data. Tell us a little bit about what you do with the data and maybe whatever you can share from a perspective of where you see data transforming the industry going forward.

There are a couple of pieces to it. One is the general consumer data that enhances the experience. As members join, there’s the self-reported data. There’s music, food and wine, and tell us a little more about what you like. Two, there’s the demographic and psychographic data that can be acquired. We live in a world where we are able to enrich data by bringing in some kind of aggregated data across the ecosystem to know a little bit more about your customers.

With the self-reported data and then the enriched demographic data, the third piece for the consumer side is behavior. They are on the platform, they are logged in as a member, we want to know what they like. We want to know, just like any social network, there are little heart buttons if you would like an event even if they don’t go. There’s something to be said about what they do and when they decided to go to events, what they like to do. Take all that information and bring it together. We are in the process of continuously enhancing it as we go. The more data, the more customers we have.

A little bit like a Netflix recommendation engine. When you are on Netflix, there are thousands of pieces of content. You are not going to be able to see and search for all of them. The 20 or 30 that appear in front of you when you log on is going to be relevant to you or at least going to try to be relevant to you. The same goes for live events. We have thousands of live events on the platform. When I log in, in Austin, Texas and I’ve got back from a country show or I went to an EDM concert, we are going to know that maybe if you went to this concert, you might like to go to this as well.

I know that you said you like sports so maybe you want to go to an Austin FC game or maybe you want to go to a Minor League Baseball game, you pick your choice. The idea being is we are presenting the 20 or 30 pieces of recommended content in front of each individual at the time and place that makes sense for them. All three of us would get a different experience when we log on because of location, behavior and everything else.

That’s the first consumer side and that gets enhanced over time. We are going to allow people to integrate with friends and family on the platform. We will give them an opportunity to know who’s going to that show. When I log onto an event, “John and Susie are also going, awesome.” I can reach out to them through the platform and we can decide to meet up when we are there or whatever the concept is. There are a lot of product feature sets that we all have on our roadmap that will continuously get more social and enhanced through the data.

The other side is more of a B2B side. Traditionally, over the last few decades, most venue owners only know 1 in 10 people in their audience and that is for various reasons. It’s, whether they are smaller venues that are less sophisticated than they are not capturing the data, they are individuals. There’s sometimes ticket transferring happening in secondary markets. There are a lot of things that are there. Some of the big ticketing companies do a pretty good job at understanding the data.

What happens is across the board, the people that should have access to that data, the people that want to use it for marketing purposes often don’t. For us, when we have partners coming on board, we are developing a bunch of products for our B2B partners that will help them understand their consumers more. When you think in the traditional live event, arena spaces, it’s very important for them to understand who’s sitting where and what they are doing. It’s helpful for them to see it in a bigger picture.

Even on the festival-like events or just any kind of event that might be GA where sponsorship has a big aspect in how they fuel their business, knowing that 34% of the people were male, they were 35 to 55 years old and have a household income of $50,000 to $100,000 is super helpful for them either selling or at least serving their sponsors. There’s a lot to it that goes on each piece, but it all starts with us. This is what we did for five years in my previous business. We have to aggregate the data. You have to collect it, enrich it and then activate it. Collected data without activation is unhelpful.

Customer Experience: The more a consumer’s value grows based on their contribution to the platform, they will then pay less for going to events.

Tony and I have talked to a lot of different companies on the show and outside the show that are B2B2C. It’s such an interesting model because it does incorporate both sides of that house. It’s very similar to the way Tony and I work because his work is more B2C, mine is more B2B. What you mentioned about building the community piece, I love that thought that we could get on there and see which ones of our friends with these common interests. It’s so great to find commonality because it’s easy to find division.

At a more spiritual type level, I love that you are doing something that is bringing people together because there are so many forces working against that now. I love that piece about the community and being able to see who might be there or somebody who knows somebody who might be there and building out that community of common interests. Kudos to you for that piece of what you are doing.

Ed, talk to us a little bit about how you are financing the company because from what you have hinted at in conversations, it’s an interesting thing that you are doing.

In the past of building different companies, I have been lucky to have experienced all different types of financing. I have raised traditional VC money. I have done some private equity, debt financing, I have done bootstrapping. In the process of thinking through all of it, I set out to build a dream where the financing of the company is almost as fun as building the company, meaning that I want to build a $100 million revenue company without taking traditional venture capital. Not to say that there’s anything wrong with venture capital and if the right partner at the right time in the right place came to help enhance our business, I’m open to whatever helps the shareholders grow.

It’s an interesting path that happens in the world, where there’s access to capital that isn’t traditional. What I mean by that is we have a three-pronged approach to it. Something that didn’t exist years ago is crowdfunding. There’s an interesting piece about crowdfunding that didn’t exist before either. Now with the Reg CF, you can raise up to $5 million per year. It’s a new law that came into effect. What’s interesting about that from a company like mine, it democratizes the ability for main street investors to participate in something that could be the next Airbnb or something of that nature.

We look at it as letting our members be investors and letting investors be members and build that as part of the democratization of it. They don’t have to wait until we go public to be part of something early. What I’m not doing is fully relying on crowdfunding as a source of financing. I have been an entrepreneur for many years. I truly believe in peer help. In the organization I’m part of, that’s EO, there are 14,000 entrepreneurs globally. There are a bunch of entrepreneurs, some that are in that organization but others that are just friends that have all participated in helping us with this business.

We have been lucky enough to have a professional athlete who has invested. There was a data guy who founded Krux that sold to Salesforce, which became Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Tom Chavez, he’s invested. The Founder of HomeAway, a guy named Brian Sharples, he’s invested. The CEO of Alamo Drafthouse, which is a movie theater chain, she’s invested. There are many more. We have about 20 or 30 great entrepreneurs that have invested in the company. When I look at this three-prong approach, it’s the strategic people that can help you and that has been great. It’s crowdfunding that lets and democratizes the ability for people to participate.

The third piece, this didn’t exist years ago either. There are a lot of low-cost debt out there. Especially with the world of direct-to-consumer companies, there are a couple dozen companies out there now that have hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars that will fund the growth marketing. They will put up some money for any kind of paid media, call it paid social media on Facebook, Instagram, Google, whatever it is.

In the old traditional venture capital space, the whole idea was you get some angels, then you get to the VC world and you are going to do a series A. Series A only happens once you have already figured the model out and the way they used to call it is, “Let’s put gas in the tank.” You can go use that money to go spend it on marketing to fuel the model but that’s not necessary anymore because there’s plenty of people willing to give low-cost debt to fuel the tank.

Low-cost debt, while sometimes debt is a scary word for people when you do it on a revenue-based concept, you can’t get out ahead of yourself because if somebody lends you $100,000 and you spend it and you get $400,000 back in revenue, it’s a win-win for everybody. With the ability to cycle through that constant spend, you don’t have to put $20 million in the bank, and then spend $10 million of it on marketing over the next two years and take dilution from the $20 million. You can constantly roll over some of the debt and fuel unlimited growth without diluting the company. That all goes back to why strategic investors want to be part of it because they don’t want to be diluted over time and why the crowdfund people that come in early get a chance to build value rather than being diluted ten times by a lot of institutional money. That’s a long-winded way to talk about it but I wanted to share it. It’s a different, unique approach and we are excited about it.

I love everything about that because it shows the creativity of a true entrepreneur. That’s so fun and gracious of you to share that knowledge that you have gained over the years in your journey to share that with our audience. Sometimes entrepreneurs get hung up on the traditional in-the-box kind of thinking. Thank you for sharing that.

We have covered a lot of ground here. Everything from what we did, the financing to the structure of the marketplace, to how you know your customers, what do you see is on the radar over the next few years for festivalPass? What is it that you are looking forward to getting into?

I’m looking to probably get six months out where the world is getting back to normalization. All these events are happening. People are understanding that the model we have not only is a better way for consumers but also as something that’s a net positive to the ecosystem so that more and more people want to list on our marketplace and they want to be a part of it. I’m super excited to get there. With scale, all the other fun things that we want to do gets easier.

The fun benefits we want to give to our members, the access to do things that are fun and unique, the ability to give people that add more to our ecosystem, more value. That’s another data thing. The longer the lifetime value of a consumer continues to grow based upon their contribution to the platform, they will then pay less for going to events. It becomes this overall cycle. Personally, I’m excited to get it sustained here in the US and then go country by country. Open it in Germany, UK and Australia.

Tony and I have been around for a while. We’ve got a pretty wide net. We’ve got a big audience that we love. What is something that perhaps our network can do to help support your efforts?

One is just going to sign up for festivalPass, which is you go to festivalPass.com. You can sign up for a free account. You don’t have to commit to paying a monthly fee yet. Once you sign up, you are part of the ecosystem so that when you see some events you want to go to, you can then choose to sign up for the monthly subscription after that. If people are interested in that financing model, 1/3 of it is the crowd side. If people are excited by that, they can go to invest.festivalPass.com and learn about it. Other than that, get out and go to live events, and be part of the ecosystem. Now that we are, hopefully, post-COVID that most people are vaccinated, we can get out and have some fun.

One of the things that we like to do on our show is to shine a spotlight on organizations that are doing great in the world. That’s a passion that Tony and I have. Is there any organization or charitable organization that you are involved with that you would like to give a shout-out to give more exposure to them in the work they are doing?

In terms of me personally, about several years ago, I founded something called the KHA Foundation, which helps raise money for leukemia and cancer research. That started when a friend from high school had passed away at about 25 years old. It was a way to bring the community together. For the last several years in New Jersey, we hold a 5k running race and bring at least a thousand or more people to the community to be part of it. We have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to donate back to Mount Sinai and Fred Hutchinson’s and a lot of great causes. That’s one. If anybody is interested in looking at that or being a part, BayHead5k.com is the web address for the actual event. They could donate through that platform as well.

I’m so touched by this because I have a sister and a brother-in-law that both had leukemia, thank you for the work that you are doing on that.

My dad had recovered from leukemia as well, he’s in remission now. Thank you.

Thank you so much for being here. This has been a phenomenal interview. I’m excited about what you are doing. The timing for what you are doing now is getting exciting as we emerge. I know you are a busy guy. Thank you so much for spending your time with us.

Thank you, guys. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Ed.

Take care.

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Betsy, I loved this interview. This one to me just stands out though above and beyond. We’ve got off script but I’m so glad we did because the things we covered, the fundamentals of a marketplace, that is huge. I know there are people out there, “That’s like an MBA in a box.” You’ve got to be aware of these things. It shows how you have to know your customer to understand these fundamentals. Do you have these in place if you are running a marketplace-type business? More and more businesses, frankly, are moving toward this marketplace environment.

What it did for me is it’s one of those you don’t know what you don’t know. The way he approached that from such an analytical standpoint of knowing your customer, your market and bucketing it into these ways, I had never heard a marketplace described that way. It was so educational. It was gracious of him to share that knowledge. He was very generous with his knowledge, which we appreciate on the show. The successful creative entrepreneur thing we both gravitate toward was a great conversation. He’s got a fun business. Especially now, when he was talking about the pent-up demand. We are all ready for this. I’m excited to have had him on the show.

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Everything we talked about from the core values to how he knows this customer, the way uses data and the financing models. This truly is a standout show for companies that are in that scaling positioning now. They know their model, they are working that model but they are ready to explode. It was a phenomenal conversation for me.

Being in that place at Congruity Group and Tony Bodoh International, we are in that scaling mode. It’s so educational for us and I’m sure our readers will feel the same way. With that, we will call it a wrap. Thank you, Tony. It’s always a pleasure doing this show with you. To our readers, thank you again for being here. Please subscribe and hit the notification button so you know when we have a new episode on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform and we will see you next time.

Important Links:

• Ed Vincent – LinkedIn
• festivalPass
• Invest.festivalPass.com
• Bay Head 5k
• Entrepreneurs’ Organization
• John Boggs – Previous Episode
• ProphetAbility: The Revealing Story of Why Companies Succeed, Fail and Bounce Back
• The Congruity Group
• Tony Bodoh International
• REALLY Know Your Customer Podcast LinkedIn Page