Skip the Queue

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

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Competition ends July 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://ats-heritage.co.uk/

https://twitter.com/ATS_Spencer

https://twitter.com/ATS_Heritage

https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencerclark/

Spencer Clark

As a newbie to the sector, I started my career in attractions back in 2012 when I joined ATS to help grow the business. There was so much to learn, but I used my experience in design and creative problem solving and a natural ability to understand clients needs quickly.

Today I am in the privileged position of co-owning and leading the company as MD with a fantastic team and a reputation to match.
My underlying passion is in creating value through great design and unrivalled customer service. I love nothing more than to listen to clients describe their problems and to be asked to help them overcome them, often in a highly creative yet pragmatic way.

I love how we can use technology (thoughtfully) to elevate an experience. At ATS, we are pioneers of on-site and on-line digital visitor experiences across the cultural sector, delivering amazing audio & multimedia tours, digital apps/tools, films and tailored consultancy services.

We help our clients to engage with millions of visitors and we’re privileged to be trusted by attractions small and large across Europe, including St Paul's Cathedral, Guinness Storehouse, Westminster Abbey, Bletchley Park, Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Titanic Belfast and Rembrandt House Museum.

Outside of work, I’m busy keeping up with two active daughters and try to get on the water paddle boarding, on the hills mountain biking, or roaming around in our camper van.

Transcriptions:

Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. 

In today's episode I speak with Spencer Clark, Managing Director of ATS Heritage.

Spencer shares his insight into what the biggest pain points are for attractions when developing their stories, and the ATS methodology that helps bring out the very best experience for your guests.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. 

Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, Spencer. It's lovely to have you on. 

Spencer Clark: Thanks for having me, Kelly. 

Kelly Molson: It's taken a while for me to persuade Spencer to come on. I'm not going to lie, I've had his arm right up his back for a while, but he's finally here. 

Spencer Clark: I've relented. 

Kelly Molson: He has relented, but he might regret it. Right, icebreakers. What's the worst gift that anyone's ever given you? 

Spencer Clark: Who's going to be listening to this? I'm not so much worse, but once you get, like, your third or fourth mug, it might be personalised and tailored to you, maybe they're quite amusing, some thoughts gone into it, but when you get a few too many mugs, that creates a little bit. 

Kelly Molson: Would you rather socks than mugs? 

Spencer Clark: Yeah, I'm getting into my socks now. Yeah, some nice socks would go down a treat, I think. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, I'm with you on this. So this was a Twitter discussion, so the team at Convious sent me some lovely Convious branded socks the other week. They're great. And I had them on. I took them a little picture, I put them on social media and then everyone was like, "Oh, socks. Yeah, were going to do socks for giveaways", but everyone said, "No, socks are rubbish". And I was like, "Absolutely not". Socks are, like, low of the list of things that I want to buy myself. So if I get free socks, I'm going to wear them. 

Spencer Clark: That's it. And you get your favourites. 

Kelly Molson: Good. No mugs for Spencer. Okay, this is a random one. If you can only save one of the Muppets, which muppet do you choose and why? 

Spencer Clark: Oh, man, that's quite a good one. Miss Piggy is a little bit hectic for me. I don't think I could spend a lot of time with her. The chef's quite entertaining, though. The hoodie gordie chickens, I think is. Yeah, I think he was smiling face and, yeah, I like a good chef, so, yeah, I keep him. 

Kelly Molson: It's a good choice. And I wasn't expecting the impersonation either. Impressive. 

Spencer Clark: There you go.

Kelly Molson: Really, we're taking this podcast to new levels, people. This one would be quite easy for you if you could only listen to one album for the rest of your life. What would it be? 

Spencer Clark: That's a good. That's really good. Back after Uni, 1999, I went travelling with my best friend and we had a little campervan and went around New Zealand for four weeks and we bought two tapes when we landed in Auckland and we had those two tapes and we listened to just those two tapes for four weeks in a camper van. And one was Jamiroquai Synchronised album, big Jay Kay fan. And the second one was Californication by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. 

Kelly Molson: Excellent. 

Spencer Clark: And I can still listen to them over and over again now. 

Kelly Molson: I think I'll let you have the two because it's a great story and really good memories attached to those two. 

Spencer Clark: Oh, every time we put it on. And Dave is not a great singer, but it's a memorable voice he has. So we're travelling around, these tracks pop up and I'm taking straight back to a certain lovely mountain right here in New Zealand. It's Delcito. Thanks, Dave. 

Kelly Molson: Lovely. Thanks, Dave. Good memories, good story, good start to the podcast. Right. What is your unpopular opinion? 

Spencer Clark: So it's QR code, but in a particular setting. And that is where, in restaurants or places to eat, where the QR code is that's your menu. It's the way you pay and everything. And I think just sometimes it gets just a bit frustrating. It's not a great experience because I like a big menu, not necessarily with pictures on the food, I don't need that. But a good menu with everything on it, so you can kind of see the choices, but on your phone you can't really see the whole menu, so that's a bit annoying. And then you got to just order it and add it to your basket and then you think it's gone, then do all the payment. 

Spencer Clark: I know it's supposed to be easy, but in that environment, I prefer just chatting to a waiter or a waitress and just and having a good experience. 

Kelly Molson: I agree. When there was a need for, it was great. Obviously, during pandemic times, that was great that you could go in and you could do that. But, yeah, I want to ask questions. I can't decide between these three dishes. What would you pick? You want that conversation, don't you? That's the whole part. It's all part of the experience of eating out. 

Spencer Clark: It definitely is. And I did a lot of time as a waiter in my late teens and early twenties. And a great waiter makes your night. That's the way I see it. All your day. It's just under use. You don't want to cut them out, you want to go just all on the app. 

Kelly Molson: Right, listeners, that is a good one. Let me know how you feel. Are you up for having a little chat with your waiter? Straight waitress? Or do you just want to go QR code, cut them out, no chat. No chat. Let me know. 

Spencer Clark: Sometimes I have those moments as well, of course, but overall, I'd rather chat with someone. 

Kelly Molson: All right, tell us about your background before you got to ATS. It wasn't in the attraction sector, was it? 

Spencer Clark: No. So ATS where I'm at now, I've been eleven years and this is the first entry into attractions culture sector. So I did product design at uni and I was never going to be the best designer. It worked out, but I love design and I love the process of essentially being given a problem and find ways in which you can design something to solve it in the best possible way. So to design was definitely in my interests. And then after Uni, I had an idea. My sister is profoundly deaf and so we had an idea for some software, or had some ideas for some software that helped communicate with businesses using your PC. This is pre Messenger and pre WhatsApp all of that. 

Spencer Clark: So it's kind of when using modems, if anyone remembers those, I'm really sure my age when talking about modend dial ups and yeah, I went to the Princess Trust actually for a bit of funding, a bit of help, and kind of did that start up. So that was inspired by trying to find a solution for an issue that my sister was facing. But then, yeah, the internet really hit us and we had messenger and thankfully, communications with deaf people are far better now. And on almost any cool playing field we've got WhatsApp texts, all of that sort of stuff, and email everything, so it kind of levelled it a bit. Then I set up another business with her and it was deaf awareness training. So we would train healthcare professionals, predominantly. The front of house, health care, how to communicate better with deaf patients. 

Spencer Clark: Again, driven off of a pretty horrible experience that my sister had. And so, yeah, trying to sell something and making the experience better was really important to us. So that was really good. And through that, funny enough, I met ATS along that route because ATS were looking for some sign language tours. They were the first company to really start to do it on handheld devices. And yeah, that's how I met them, because they found us doing deaf awareness training and signing and asked us for some help. That was the seed. But then at the same time, when I was doing small business consultancy around childcare businesses, really random, but it was the same sort of thing. 

Spencer Clark: I love working a bit of entrepreneurial spirit in me and I loved helping organisations, smaller businesses, particularly with their cash flows and their marketing ideas, and just general small business help, really. And then I found ATS and that's a whole other story. 

Kelly Molson: I love that. Yeah, well, great story. I didn't realise that you had a startup and you've been part of all these quite exciting businesses and it's those businesses that kind of led you to ATS. 

Spencer Clark: Yeah, I had a moment and as many of us do, I suppose I was getting married and I was working in these different jobs and it was quite randomly kind of moved to different things and I was trying to find the focus, what do all these different businesses and these things do? And I was kind of looking at what I enjoyed, what I was good at, and I went through a bit of a career reflection and had someone help me do that. And we're looking, what's the common thing here? And it was creativity, it was working with people. It was definitely small business, not big corporates. And at the time, because I'd already known ATS through doing some of the sign language stuff, they went on my list as, “I need to have a chat with Mike about that one day”. 

Spencer Clark: He's the founder of ATS. And then yeah, eventually we sat down in the chat and invited me on board to try out. And that was eleven years ago. 

Kelly Molson: And that was eleven years ago. Tell us about ATS, tell us what they do for our listeners and what's your role there? 

Spencer Clark: Sure. So I'm now Managing Director ATS. So I've been there in that role for two and a half years now, two or three. Prior to that, I was Business Development and Sales Director, so driving new business. And yes, so ATS, we've expanded out now, but I guess we're a full service. From Creative Content so predominantly known for audio multimedia guides to on site interpretation and storytelling. So our core business is around coming up with brilliant stories, working with our clients to write scripts, and then looking at the creative ways in which we can tell that story to their target audiences. So whether it's families, adults, overseas, we then come up with all these great ideas. And whether it's audio or multimedia, with film or apps, with interactives and games, we try and find all the unique ways of telling that story, of that unique site. 

Spencer Clark: So we have predominantly in house, fantastic production team, editors, filmmakers, developers, we have interpretation specialists and script writers. So once we've done all the content, we've also got all the technology as well. So part of our business has we manufacture our own hardware, so multimedia guides, audio guides, we have software that runs on all of them. We also do apps and PWAs, and we have a tech support team as well, who are out managing all of our clients. So we have 45,000 devices out in the field at the moment, so there's a lot being used, a lot of experiences being had one of our devices, but they all need battery changes, servicing, all that sort of stuff. So we got a tech team for them as well. So complete end to end from consultation, content, hardware, support.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, and great sector to work in. You talked about developing stories. Heritage organisations have the best stories, right? So it is an absolutely perfect fit. I want to talk about the process that you go through and how you make that happen for the heritage sector. What is the biggest pain? So I'm in the marketing team of a heritage organisation and I've got a pain and I know that ATS can probably help me solve it. What is that pain that I bring to you? 

Spencer Clark: There's a number that we get approached about and I guess the first one, though, is we've got great stories. So, yes, heritage and cultural sites naturally have loads of great stories, so the most prime problem really is them to say, "We want to understand which audience we want to tell our stories to", number one. And then number two, "once we know that, how do we tell the stories in the best memorable, entertaining, educational way?" So really, they're the starting point, really, is helping them understand who their audience is and then going, "Right, how are you telling that story?" I often say with a creative conduit between the site and its heritage and their audiences. And we're the guys in the middle. 

Spencer Clark: You go, Right, we're going to understand these really well and come up with really great ideas to tell that story to that person in that experience. And that's the prime too. But then it expands out because once you start chatting to them and you go, well, those stories can be told in different ways to different audiences, but also the experiences are very different across sites. So you could have a linear tool, so you kind of know that the story has to make sense stop after stop and it's kind of a narrative thread, whereas other sites are random access, so you're moving around. And so therefore, everything needs to make sense in that situation as well. 

Kelly Molson: Very interesting, isn't it? I hadn't thought about how the building itself or the area itself can have an influence on how the story is told. 

Spencer Clark: Absolutely. So we do guides at St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and you're thinking, "Right, big ecclesiastic sites, they must be very similar", but they're not. St Paul's random access. So once you've done the introduction, you can go wherever you like in St Paul's and access that content. The storytelling within that space, however you like. Westminster Abbey is very linear and so you start at point 1 and you have to go through and there's a fixed route to it. They're two very different buildings architecturally, so the challenges with that, for example, is when we're designing the scripts and designing the experiences, saying, "Well, what is the visitor journey here? And where are their pinch points?" I think in one spot in Westminster, we had 10 seconds to tell a story. 

Spencer Clark: People can't stay more than 10 seconds in that area because it just ends up backing up and then it's awful for everybody else. Whereas St Paul's is very different. You've got a lot more dwell time and a lot more space that you can sit and just listen. So two very different experiences that we design. 

Kelly Molson: That's really complex, isn't it? So you're not only thinking about how to tell the story in the best way to fit with the venue and the access and how people walk around it, but also from a capacity perspective, people can't stay in this area for longer than 10 seconds. So you've got to get them moving. 

Spencer Clark: Exactly. 

Kelly Molson: It blows my mind. Talk me through your methodology then, because I think that's quite interesting. Like, how do you start this process? They've come with the pain. We've got this great story, we're not telling it in the best way that we could. How can you help us? Where do you start? 

Spencer Clark: It's a good place. What we love is you get face to face and you walk the current experience and you walk through it. And it's great to talk to visitor experience teams, curatorial, front of house, as well as senior stakeholders and having a conversation with all of them to kind of really get a sense of what's the outcome I'm starting with what's wrong or what do you want to better? What do you want this outcome to be? And then we kind of work backwards because we have a lot of experience to share. And so there's things around this routing, wayfinding, dwell time. There's things around operations and logistics of handing out hardware or promoting an app if that's what clients are pushing out to their visitors. But we all got to understand there's lots of different models as well. 

Spencer Clark: So some sites, for example, you may pay to get in, but then you may pay for an audio or a multimedia guide or an app afterwards. So you're paying for your ticket and then you've got a secondary spend for a guide. I have seen a lot of our sites, especially some of the bigger ones, they have an all inclusive. So you buy your ticket and you get your guide included. But those two models means two different things because on the all inclusive, the majority of your audience are getting that guide. Therefore that story that we're going to create for you is being told to the biggest proportion of your audience, whereas those who buy additional, you know, the take up is going to be lower, therefore that message is not going to get to that many. But you don't need as many devices. 

Spencer Clark: And so we look at kind of whether they can handle a stop of hundreds or thousands of devices in some cases. 

Kelly Molson: Oh, you mean like where they're going to put them? 

Spencer Clark: Exactly. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's all about that. 

Spencer Clark: These castles and heritage sites didn't really they weren't designed to hold racks or racks of guides, which is why they end up in some funny places, sometimes moat houses and whatever. So we start there, that's kind of walk it through. We want to listen and understand what everybody as a stakeholder, what they're wanting from it, but then we really kind of go, what does the visitor really need and want? What are they paying for? What are their expectations? And how can we have our impact on the visitor experience, which is essentially what it is. We're involved with storytelling content, visitor experience and technology, essentially the delivery method of it. 

Kelly Molson: What's a good case study, then, that you could share with us? I guess the proof of the pudding is in people being engaged with those stories. So it'll be about the feedback, right, that the organisation gets once people have been through the experience and they get good TripAdvisor recommendations and all that kind of thing. What's a good example that you can share with us of something where you've worked on it and it's made quite a vast difference to that experience?

Spencer Clark: I'd like to say every single project. We generally want every client. We're passionate about making a difference. You're investing in time and money and we want to add as much creativity to it, but we want it to be as effective as possible, which is why I really want to understand what clients are wanting to get. If we look at this in a year's time, what do you want to see happen? And if it is better, TripAdvisor does that. I think we're hitting that really well, because not many sites, I'd say you have visitors kind of commenting on the audio or the multimedia guide back in the day. But when you look at a lot of our client sites, they get mentioned in TripAdvisor and how it's made a massive difference. 

Spencer Clark: So I was chatting with a client today, the guide is eight years old, a multimedia guide. We did a full film production for the introduction film, but then we also put that content into the guide, so it felt like this really the continuity in the storytelling. So once you arrive, you watch the film, you got the characters on the film, but they also feature in your guide. So as you've watched it, you go off and you go to a dinner party and we're just chatting today and they said, eight years on and it's still really good and getting reference to and we've got prospect clients and new clients who go over and check it out and they just love it. Just because we've designed it to last a long time, it shouldn't date because it's often our sector. 

Spencer Clark: They're not refreshing content like that every couple of years. It needs to last as long as it can and get its money's worth. The output is a great Visitor experience. Hopefully we're inputting on the NPS score, so hopefully people are saying, “yes, the overall, we're one part”. My colleague, Craig, he says it people don't go to a site for the multimedia guide. Right. They're not going, oh, we're here ATS are great, let's definitely go to one of their sites. They don't they go there? And then once they get this wonderful experience with the front of house with a fantastic audio multimedia guide that's been thought about and really designed well. 

Spencer Clark: And then the retail was great and the food and beverage was good and there was parking and whatever, and it was a sunny day because if it's a rainy day, everyone has a really bad experience. It's raining, which is obviously out of control of many sites. So, yeah, we're one element, but an important one, we feel, that really impacts on ATS and TripAdvisor and feedback and repeat visits. 

Kelly Molson: Do you get asked that question, actually, about how long this will last? So you said that guide has been around for about eight years now and I'm thinking, "yeah, that's good going, that's good return on investment, right?" We get asked that quite a lot about websites. "How frequently do you need to update your website? How frequently do we need to go through this process from redesign and development?" And I think it really depends on how well it's been done to start with. So we've worked with attractions where we did their website, like six or seven years ago. It still looks great because it was thought out really well, it's planned well, the brand was in place and it's the same, I guess, with your guide, if it's done well from the start, it's going to last longer. 

Spencer Clark: Absolutely. And to me, that's part of the brief, that's the design process, looking at the brief and the clients and asking those questions, "Well, you're, you can update this" and you kind of know they're not going to update it in a year. So how long was the shelf life of this product? What do you want it to last? And so once you know that at the beginning, you start producing it in a way that you say, well, that might date, you could have contemporary fashion, but that might look a bit dated in five, six, seven years time, whereas if we go animation, you can make things last a lot longer. But then, yeah, realistically you could be looking at how long does this last? Eight years, nine years? 

Spencer Clark: We've got clients up to ten years now. As long as you write it, you have an awareness that you don't mention potentially people's names who work there because they may move on and maybe even the job title might change. So you got to just be a little bit careful of kind of mentioning that, especially at site’s consideration. When you've got 12, 13 languages, you make one change in the English, you've then got to change all that. So again, it's this understanding at the beginning saying, well, the risk of having a celebrity or whoever if you don't want them and they're out of faith or whatever, or they're not available to do any rerecords you got to think about that and say, well, that's going to have a knock on effect, and that will change then eventually. 

Spencer Clark: So, yeah, there's all these little secrets of the way in which things are, but we're aware of them. And that has a massive impact on the cost down the line. And the quality, of course.

Kelly Molson: That's the benefit of the consultancy approach that you take as well, isn't it? Is it, that you are asking those questions up front and you're thinking long term about what's best for the organisation, not what's necessarily best for you? Is it better for me if they update this every three years or every eight years? But what you want is to get them the best experience from it and have the best product possible. So you ask all the right questions to start with. 

Spencer Clark: Absolutely. And sites are all different. The story at one place might not change, but they might have a different view on it and so or a different angle coming in. Well, there's a different story or theme within that place. So we did know National Trust site, so they had a big conservation project and so we've done the restoration conservation story. They've come back to a couple of years and now we're looking at different stories within them and telling stories very much around female stories at the house as well. So we're bringing that in. And what we can do, we're going to layer it and put in with the content so it will start to really. You have this lovely kind of layering of story and content that people can dip in and out of depending on what they're interested in. 

Spencer Clark: But that means it is evolving, but you're not recording loads of other stuff, you're just starting to build up on this nice kind of collection of content. But then you got sites such that you know they're going to have temporary exhibitions every year. So Buckingham Palace, we do their permanent tour, but then the exhibition changes every year, so we'll be going in there and rewriting content just for that element of it. So, yeah, most places don't change a lot of their content, but when you do, it's usually just elements of it, or adding languages or adding an access tool or something like that. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, and I love that.  But actually what we're trying to do is just make something better. And that doesn't always mean that you have to spend a shitload of money on making something, you know what I mean? You don't have to start from scratch, you can make something really great with what you have. So we've been talking a lot with attractions about just making what they have better. They don't need a new website right now. What you could do is just add these things in and that would make your website 10% better than it is now. Amazing, right? You've saved yourself a lot of budget, but you've still got this brilliant project and that's the same with what you're talking about. It's not a start from scratch, it's just building on and improving what you have. That's a good place. 

Spencer Clark: It's a good offer to have. I think it is, because sometimes you just want a little refresh and actually just slightly dated or that's not the language or the tone we use completely. So we just want to change this intro and often the introduction is the beginning of the experience. So if you can tweak and change that can actually set the tone for the rest of it anyway. We often go and say, "Well, what have you gotten? What improvements can you make on a minimal budget?" And that's the honest conversation you have early on and you're going, "What do you want to happen realistically? What are your budgets, what's your time scales?" And then we'll come back to you with something that's tailored to you and see what we can do. 

Spencer Clark: And often a review of the current experience and will be constructive and we think you could just improve these bits at the moment. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, I love that approach. And also, do you have a moathouse that you can keep all these devices in? And while we're on the topic of that, let's talk about something that you mentioned earlier, which is this app versus devices debate. So you mentioned, and it hadn't even occurred to me. Do people have the storage space for all of these devices? Are they going to be able to put them somewhere? And I bet you get asked us all the time, isn't it going to better if we have an app because people have got that phone in their back pocket all the time and so then you don't necessarily need as many of the devices as you might need. There's quite a big debate around this at the moment, isn't there? What's your take on it? 

Spencer Clark: Well, of course I've got my opinion on this one, Kelly. But you know, these questions when I joined the ATS, so I joined eleven years ago and I started going to the conferences and the shows and the exhibitions and you know, apps were around and it was the, "Oh yeah, they're going to be the death of the audio guide". So there's me, joined a company thinking, "Oh okay, I wonder how long I'll be around for". But what history has shown me is that what drives a really good product and a good solution, whether it's an app or a device, is really understanding those outcomes and visitor behaviours and COVID was obviously a point in time where people weren't touching things.

Spencer Clark: And it was a concern at the time like, “okay, I wonder how long is this going to play out?”. But what we found is humans fall back into an ease of life and convenience and quality, I think is kind of where people say, "Oh, no, they won't use devices anymore and they won't use touch screens". And I remember chatting with Dave Patton from Science Museum and he said, “Yeah, in COVID, we turned all the touchscreens off”. Everyone kept going up to them and touching them because they thought they were off to turn them on, so they turned them off so that people wouldn't use them. And actually what they're doing was touching that device more. Do you remember the days people were wiping down all the trolleys? I'm quite an optimist, so I was sitting at the time. 

Spencer Clark: Once we passed this and through it, I feel we will kind of fall back into, you're not going to take your own cutlery to a restaurant a year, so that hasn't happened. And QR codes are less and less visible on those restaurants. Yeah. What it really is about for us is, and I touched upon it, there's a few things around why ultimately you can do everything. Our multimedia guides and audio guys can do pretty much one of these, but for a number of reasons, visitors aren't necessarily going straight over to these and dropping the hardware. If I rock up with my kids, got two kids, they don't have phones, so they're not going to download an app when they get there. My phone is my car key, it's my travel, it's my wallet, it's everything, so I'm using it all day. 

Spencer Clark: And there's obviously battery concerns there as well, so you kind of start getting kind of battery anxiety of that where you carry around a charger. But there is something and the more and more we work with clients and we compare, we put apps in places as well as multimedia guides or audio guides, and we look at the take up and we look at the behaviour of visitors. And even more recently, we're doing a site. At the moment, it's got temporary exhibition for six months. I'll be able to say a bit more about it once we've done the end of the review, but essentially we've had kind of AB testing and looking at how the take up is for guides versus apps and we're positively seeing big demand for devices for a number of reasons with the audience time who were there. There's the quality. 

Spencer Clark: As far as I've paid my ticket, especially on the all inclusive, I get my guide and it's really well designed and this is part of the experience designed for it. I'm not worrying about battery and the headphones are in there. I haven't got people walking around with audio blaring out because they've gotten their headphones, which is really annoying to all the other visitors that I've been to a few museums and seen that and heard that it's not a great experience. There's definitely a quality thing there about it's part of, this is part of. 

Kelly Molson: Do you think it's part of, it's escapism as well? So, like, for me, I'm terrible if we're out and about, if me, my little girl and my husband are out for the day, my phone is in my bag the whole time and I forget to take pictures. I forget to tell social media that I've been to a place, "Oh, God, what I've got for lunch”, because I'm too busy doing it. And I think with the kind of headsets thing, there's an element of escapism there, isn't there, where you don't have to have your phone. I like not having to be on my phone. I like that for the whole day. I've had such a great day, they haven't even thought about looking at my phone. So I don't know whether there's an element there. 

Kelly Molson: We're so tied to our phones all the day, all day, aren't we?  For work and things.  I'm just going to put these headphones on. I'm going to escape into a different world where I don't need to think about it. 

Spencer Clark: Yeah, don't get me wrong, there's definitely a place for apps and there's a use for them, which is why we've developed a platform that makes apps as well. But the devices over this recent exhibition, I'm just learning more from visitors and the staff who are there, and they're saying, "Yeah, you take your phone and you might have the tour going, but I don't turn my notifications off, so I'll still get interrupted by things". And you're right, I want to be in this experience. And my attention, I'm hoping, is mostly on what's there and the stories that are being told to me. So, yeah, there's a lot around there. There's also perceived value. 

Spencer Clark: I did a talk at Historic houses pre covered, but I had like 160 people in the Alexandra Palace and I asked them all, "how many of you just have downloaded an app in the last twelve months?" A few hands put up and then said, "Okay, how many of you paid for an app out of those?" and all the hands went down. There's this thing about, would you spend £5 on an app? Probably not a lot of people would. It's got to be really well promoted and maybe in the right circumstances, the right place, the right exhibition, you'd get someone doing that, but people will pay and you see it. They will pay £5 for a device that's being designed and put in there as part of the official experience of this site. 

Spencer Clark: So you've got to look at the take up and the reach that an app will bring over a device as well. So there is perceived value. See if you can charge for it great or if it's in ticket price, it just makes the whole value of the experience even better. I'm not sure what's your experience when was the last time you paid for an app, Kelly? 

Kelly Molson: Bigger question, as you asked it, I was thinking, and I can't remember. There must be something that I've paid a minimum value for, like it was like, I don't know, £0.69p or £1.29 or something like that, but I couldn't tell you what it was or when I downloaded it. 

Kelly Molson: I mostly have car parking apps on my phone. Honestly, I think at one point I counted I had seven different car parking apps on my phone because all of the car parks obviously stopped taking cash. I'm terrible with cash, I never have any of that. A lot of them. But they’re all free.

Spencer Clark: There's definitely something there around perceived value and what it means to the experience, I think. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's really interesting, actually. 

Spencer Clark: The debate will continue for years, though, Kelly. The debate will carry on.  And if that's about telling a great story to as many people as possible. Right now, in our view and our data that shows across all these sites is devices that are doing a better job than apps at the moment. But there's still a choice. Some people will have them. And I think it's going to be a blend. It's going to be a blend, but overwhelmingly the device is more. 

Kelly Molson: But it's interesting because you mentioned and one of my questions is, how is ATS evolving? Because I guess that you didn't always have apps as an option for people. So that's probably one of the ways that you've evolved over the years, right? 

Spencer Clark: Yeah. So we started doing audio guides. That was the initial and then again, Mike, the founder, was really spotted multimedia as an opportunity, screen devices as we started coming through. Not everyone had smartphones at that point. And so to provide a screen device, it was great for putting additional content and film content and also accessibility, sign language videos and things like that, which is how I got into ATS, sign language videos. So putting them on a screen and you look at how much audio visual content we now all consume on a small handheld device, he definitely saw something. And that's where ATS kind of drove that element. A lot of our work was multimedia guides over audio guides. 

Spencer Clark: And it was about not just playing audio with an image on the screen, because that's not adding much for the sake of this device, you need to add a lot more to it. And that's where we grew our in house production team. So all the editors coming up with really good ideas and animations and videos or interface designs, all that sort of stuff, and interactives and games and things like that, you could be really just opened up a whole world of opportunity, really. Yeah. So we started pushing that. But again, part of that design process was, and going back to the kind of we only had 10 seconds to tell this story or whatever, it's the same with these devices, and when we're creating content, visual content, it's got to warrant the visitor's attention. 

Spencer Clark: If you've got an amazing masterpiece in front of you, then of course you don't want to be head down in the screen, you want to be looking at it. But what could that screen do, if anything? We may decide not to even put anything on there, just go audio. But there could be something there that you want to, a curator might be interviewed and show you certain details on the painting and you could point them out on the screen. That then allows you to look and engage with the art in front of you. But, yeah, we drove that kind of way of delivering interpretation on site through multimedia guys, but we do a lot of audio as well. 

Spencer Clark: I'm just plain, straight, simple audio, I say simple, but lovely sound effects, really nice produced, choosing the right voices, really good script, sound effects, that sort of stuff. So, yeah, it's quite a pure way, I guess you would say, with audio owned.

Kelly Molson: Nice, you mentioned the word warrant back there. Which brings me to my next question, which I think is fascinating, because there aren't many organisations that are ever going to achieve this, but ATS has a Royal Warrant now. 

Spencer Clark: Yeah, yeah, we got it in March 22. 

Kelly Molson: Absolutely phenomenal. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Spencer Clark: Yeah, so we've worked with Royal Household for quite, well, a couple of sites for over 15 years. We provide audio multimedia guides across pretty much all of the raw sites now, which is a wonderful achievement, we're really proud of it. And, yeah, we applied for a Royal Warrant. They're awarded to about 800 businesses in the UK and they range from one person, sole trader, craftsman, craft people through, to multinationals and SMEs and everybody in between. And it's a mark of quality and excellence in delivery of service and sustainable as well over a long period of time. We applied for it and were awarded it in March. It was a really lovely accolade for us as a business and it was a great moment to get so we've got a hold of that now. 

Kelly Molson: That must have been lovely. So, again, at the start of the episode, you mentioned that you'd moved into the MD role, and that was a couple of years ago. Right. So you've been an MD through COVID times, which must have been a challenge for you. As a founder of an organisation myself, I know that was a big challenge, having to learn how to do things in a completely different way. That must have been a really lovely kind of success story of those times. 

Spencer Clark: Definitely. We have got such an amazing team and one that people stay with us, our team stay with us for a long period of time and it was also a point where I was taking over and the founder, Mike, was properly retiring. So for him, it was really great to get for him. And we had one made up for him as well, a plat, so you can have his own he's got his own rule warrant, but yeah, for the rest of the team, it is a recognition. What's really important for me is that everybody in the team is responsible for the quality of service that we deliver from picking up the phone and working on projects, the development team, the service team, the teams that go on site. 

Spencer Clark: We've got staff as well, so we staff at St Paul's Cathedral and Bucks Palace and Windsor Castle, so we got members team handing out guides and operations there. And it's everyone's responsibility in our business to offer a great service in everything we do. And it definitely was yeah, it was a really great recognition that we could share with the team. 

Kelly Molson: Amazing. Right, what is next for ATS? What exciting developments are they're coming up that you can share with us? Anything on the horizon? 

Spencer Clark: Yeah, I guess this year feels like many, and I've been speaking to, you know, it's nice to get back into conferences and exhibitions and stuff where you kind of chatting to the sector, but this feels a little bit more normal as a year. I think last year was still a kind of bounce back out of COVID but this year seems to be mor. There's tenders coming through. People are now doing new projects, so that's good to see. So there's an appetite. I think what it's really shown is there's an appetite in the sector to really improve the quality of visitor experiences. I think that's what's really that I'm seeing and something that we're well positioned to support clients in is that quality of a visitor experience. On the back of that, we're looking at always continuing to look at different ways in which to tell stories and the way in which we can engage with the visitor, which doesn't always mean the latest tech. 

Spencer Clark: We've looked at AR and things like that and we've tried it, but what you got to be careful, what you got to understand is, instead of when you've got visitors from 8 to 85 year olds, your solution has to be accessible to everybody. And as soon as you might put in something that might if the technology doesn't quite work in that environment because it's too dark or too light or whatever, or the tech just isn't there to do it, then it suddenly breaks the magic of that experience. 

Spencer Clark: And so you look at different ways of being innovative and that can just be through a really different approach to the script writing, or putting a binaural 3D soundscape instead, or having a really good interactive that just brings the family in to answer questions or something like that. We will always continue to innovate, but it's not necessarily about technology. But we love tech. But you've got to think about the practical implications of tech in the projects. And that goes back to earlier I said about sustainability in the budget and some organisations just don't have the appetite or the budget to invest in some of this tech, even though they see it and they say, “we want that”. Okay, “this is how much it’s cost. And it's brand new”, so you'd be developing from scratch or whatever. 

Spencer Clark: And it's not always palatable with the budget holders. So, yes, you got to think about operationally sustainable. What's the best solution that reaches your outcomes, essentially? So, yeah, where else are we heading? Great content. We've got new products coming through, new devices, that sort of stuff, which has kind of been, like I said, our core business. But we're also doing a lot more online, so digital exhibitions, things like that. So we're taking our onsite storytelling experience and moving online. So we've done some virtual tours, but not just 360s where you've got hotspots. We add the ATS magic to it. What else can we add into those kind of online experiences? It's a different experience, but we can definitely add some lovely creativity to the storytelling on that. So we did that with a number of clients, including Glenn Palace. 

Spencer Clark: We did the Churchill exhibition, which was a full three day film shoot over COVID, which was a huge challenge. But yeah, there was a high risk factor there when your main star is a Churchill lookalike and if he got COVID, the whole shoot pretty much cancelled, but we managed to get through that, so that was good. So, yeah, more of that sort of stuff. So, looking at the online space, we're getting into 3D digitisation of collections, so we've got a partnership going on where we can photogram using photogrammetry to create 3D models. And then what we're saying is we add the ATS magic to that, where you got that model. Let's put it in context, let's tell that story around that actual object. 

Spencer Clark: It's a 3D model, so, yeah, we're playing around with areas on that and some other things that I'm sure I'll share in the future. We're not standing still. That's for sure.

Kelly Molson: No. And I'm sure I'll hear about it at whatever conferences that we're at together at some point, Spencer. We always ask our guests about a book that they love that they would like to share with our listeners. What have you prepped for us today? 

Spencer Clark: I'm in the car a lot, so I do a lot of audio books, if anything. I don't know if it's an excuse, but I just don't find time to sit and actually read. Busy family life, busy work life, all that sort of stuff. So a lot of audiobooks. But also, I love business books, whatever you can learn from kind of business and marketing. And obviously I had that role previous to ATS, I was kind of supporting small businesses and stuff. So there's one I had, I attended a session by a marketeer called Bryony Thomas and she's got a book called Watertight Marketing. Her session was brilliant, it was really practical, it's really scalable. So it could be for a one person company, sole trader, up to an organisation that has multiple products online, wherever. 

Spencer Clark: It was just a really good book that just gives you clarity and thinking. And there's this takeaway straight away from it and a really good approach to kind of reviewing your marketing and how well it's working, and then just picking those things that are going to work quickest to find out where the weaknesses are, the leaks, essentially, she calls them. So, yeah, I'd really recommend it. I'm hoping quite a lot of your listeners are interested in marketing. We're all looking at trying to get visitors back in and what our service and products are. So I'd recommend Watertight Marketing by Bryony Thomas. 

Kelly Molson: Oh, I think that's a great recommendation. I've read that book, I've met Bryony once a very long time ago and it's so simple, it's ridiculous, isn't it? And you think, "how is this the first book that's talked about marketing in this way?" That's what blew my mind when I read it and it is, it's just about plugging the gaps, filling the holes in your bucket. It's absolutely brilliant concept, great book. Thank you for sharing. 

Right, listen, if you want to win a copy of that book, and I would recommend that you do, if you head over to our Twitter account and you retweet this episode announcement with the words I want Spencer's book, then you might be lucky enough to win yourself a copy. Thankfully, it was only just one book today. Everyone else tries to kill my marketing budget and goes with two. 

Kelly Molson: So well done you, Spencer. Thank you ever so much for joining us on the podcast today. It's lovely that you came on, I'm really pleased that you did. Lots to think about there and loads of tips for our listeners if they're thinking about enhancing their stories. So thank you. 

Spencer Clark: It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Kelly. 

Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

We have launched our brand-new playbook: ‘The Retail Ready Guide to Going Beyond the Gift Shop’ — your go-to resource for building a successful e-commerce strategy that connects with your audience and drives sustainable growth.

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Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends July 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikwyness/

https://tankmuseum.org/

https://tankmuseumshop.org/

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTankMuseum

https://www.tiktok.com/@famthetankman

Nik Wyness is Head of Marketing and Engagement at The Tank Museum in Dorset.

He has led the digital transformation of this rural regimental Museum and registered charity, creating an industry-leading strategy in the development and monetisation of a global online community.

The Tank Museum tells the story of the tank and the people that served in them, with a collection of over 300 vehicles dating from World War One to the present day, displayed in modern awe-inspiring exhibitions.

But the Museum’s rural location poses an ever-present challenge – how to make people aware it exists?

With the simple objective of “Being more famous” and a passion for powerful historical stories, Nik used social media channels like Facebook and YouTube to begin building a niche following worldwide.

This laid the foundations for a base of advocacy and support that would lead to 27% of the Museum’s total 2022 turnover generated online in 2022 – albeit somewhat inadvertently at first!

Transcriptions:

Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. 

In today's episode, I speak with Nik Wyness, Head of Marketing and Engagement at The Tank Museum. 

Nick developed a genius strategy to grow audiences and communities online, which has been phenomenally successful. Listen along to hear how The Tank Museum earned around 25% of a total 6 million turnover from online sources. 

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on itunes, spotify and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. 

Kelly Molson: Nick, I am very excited to have you on the podcast today. Welcome to Skip the Queue. 

Nik Wyness: Thank you very much for having me.

Kelly Molson: As ever, I'm going to start with some ice breakers, though, and I've got a topical one for you. 

Nik Wyness: Okay. 

Kelly Molson: So, last week, the BBC reported that a visitor had broken Jeff Koons iconic balloon dog sculpture. I know its  awful, isn't it? At a high end art fair in Miami. I want to know, have you ever been told off by security for touching a museum exhibit that you weren't supposed to touch? 

Nik Wyness: Oh, that's a good one, actually. I obviously work at The Tank Museum. That's why we're talking about. But I first visited The Tank Museum when I was about eight years old and I was a cub scout, and this was obviously quite a long time ago. Different decade, probably the 80's. 

Nik Wyness: They used to have a little arcade machine in there. I know it's kind of weird, like arcade machines in a museum, but they used to have one of those little kind of like, penny pushes. 

Kelly Molson: Oh, yeah, I love that. 

Nik Wyness: Yeah. I mean, it's a h*** of a way to lose money. And that's what happened. We were getting a bit frustrated with this thing. It kind of like, hangs over the edge, doesn't it? A really sort of tempting way. So my friend and I, we couldn't resist giving a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of a rock, and this guy came out and he told us off. And when I started working at The Tank Museum in 2004, I met the same guy. How funny is that? 

Kelly Molson: Wow. I mean, one, that's lovely. Very high rate of retention of staff at The Tank Museum. So that's a plus. Oh, my God. Did he actually recognise you? 

Nik Wyness: No, thankfully not. Otherwise things could have got different. But I definitely recognise him, that kind of ferocious look in his eye.

Kelly Molson: That is a brilliant story. My Nan just while we're on the subject of penny machines, because I really like those penny machines, they are a very good way of losing a load of money, but only go for the 2p ones. Right. And then it doesn't feel as bad. 

Nik Wyness: High roller. 

Kelly Molson: High roller. My Nan had a bit of an obsession with those and the grabber machine, so they had a caravan in Walton-on-the-Naze, and she used to spend a lot of time on the old penny slot machines in her day. And I reckon that she might have had a little bit of a nudge of some of those because she used to win a lot. And you don't win that much on them, do you? I reckon she did a little hip bash, grandma. 

Nik Wyness: I think everyone must do that from time, so how could you not? It's so tempting. But I think the trouble is, if you go too far, that alarm goes off and a man comes out and tells, “you off”. 

Kelly Molson: Especially at The Tank Museum. 

Nik Wyness: Especially at The Tank Museum. 

Kelly Molson: That is excellent. Thank you for sharing that story. Right, okay, next one. I was going to ask you what your favourite tank is, but I think that'd be quite boring. 

Nik Wyness: You're like choosing a favourite child. You can't do that. 

Kelly Molson: I know. Unless you just have one and then it's easy. What one thing would you make a law that isn't already? 

Nik Wyness: Well, I think it should be law that everyone should visit The Tank Museum more than once a month. More than once a month. There you go. 

Kelly Molson: More than once a month. That's a lot of tanks. Okay, good one. All right, last one. I'm always intrigued by this. I think I'm going to start making this a regular question. I want to know if you now, or if you did when you were younger, if you had a collection of something?

Nik Wyness: I've never really been one to collect things. I'm a bit sort of rubbish and a bit lazy. I get really into it and then I kind of lose interest in what I do. I used to collect stickers and that kind of thing. I remember my sister used to collect key rings, but, yeah, I'm not much of a collector. But I know you collect. Is it rubbers?

Kelly Molson: Oh, you've done your research. 

Nik Wyness: One of the first things you told me about yourself when we first met, grew up at that Edinburgh conference. I thought it was an interesting thing to go in with early, but you did it and I respect that. So I'm sure we have a Tank Museum rubber and I kind of feel that I should maybe send you one. 

Kelly Molson: I would love that. 

Nik Wyness: It might even be tank shaped. 

Kelly Molson: Wow. Also, just for anyone that does meet me in the future, I'm really sorry. That is what my starting lines is, "Hey, I've got an 80s rubber collection". Excellent. Well done, me. Okay, let's move on to your unpopular opinion, Nik. 

Nik Wyness: Okay, so I thought long and hard about this because I have many unpopular opinions, so I'm going to go with this one. And that is I do not like Twitter. I can't stand Twitter, which is quite ironic, given what we're going to be talking about. I know, the shock, the despondency on your face. But hear me out. I've got three reasons why I really don't like Twitter. So the first reason is that Twitter, in my opinion, just seems to bring out the absolute worst in people. It's kind of like golf. If you've been on a golf course and a normally perfectly rational person can just turn into this kind of like snarling clubs, napping. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, you've met my husband. 

Nik Wyness: There's plenty like him. There's plenty like him. I'm probably one of them myself, which is why I don't play golf. But, yeah, I don't know. On Twitter, you can see normal people, what appeared to be at first sight, normal people, anyway, kind of turn into vacuous, narcissists, all trying to show how clever they are or how virtuous they are or how much funnier they are than the other guys. It's kind of like a playground one upmanship, but it's quite derogatory and quite negative as well, isn't it, really? It's all sort of a bit sort of unpleasant. And I'm just amazed there are so many people out there who are willing to spend time arguing with people they've never met on the internet. Surely there has to be more to life. 

Nik Wyness: But the second reason is that, and this is the one which is always probably wound me up the most, is that lazy journalists mistaking what happens on Twitter for actual news, or worse, for actual public opinion, when it's actually neither. And so the fact that journalists do that is it kind of gives all of this rubbish a bigger platform and gives it greater credibility than I think some of it actually deserves. But the third reason, I just like Twitter, and there are many reasons why I think they have an increasingly polarised society, but Twitter is definitely not helping. And one of those general things that we worry about is what you see on Twitter being kind of manifested in just the greater public discourse. It's just like we've forgotten how to have a disagreement, respectfully, do you know what I mean? 

Nik Wyness: Nobody can have an argument these days without having to play the man or kind of take the other person out on every level. There's no, well, I respectfully agree with the opinion, but I will agree to disagree. There's none of that on Twitter, really, is there? Everyone's basically hacking the other person to death verbally until somebody gets bored and has to get off the bus or something. So for those three reasons yeah, and I hate all that abuse of public figures as well, whether it's just general hate or misogyny or racism, all that kind of stuff. Interesting, none of these people well, hopefully none of these people would have the courage to say the things that they'd say on Twitter to another person's face. 

Nik Wyness: And I always think that you should never say something in writing on Twitter, on social media that you wouldn't want to say to their face, because you've got to accept the consequences, right. Of the things that you say. And I think people hide behind the anonymity of the Internet. I don't think that's healthy. Gosh, that was quite a moralistic rant, but, my God, do I feel better. 

Kelly Molson: It really was. But, wow, what a great one. And I really love how in depth you went with your unpopular opinion. I was nodding along there, because I think that point 3, there is a dark side to Twitter, and I was agreeing with you on point 3. 

Kelly Molson: I like Twitter and I enjoy it, but I think that I'm probably in my lovely, happy, safe, kind of comfortable bubble there, because I follow really nice people and I engage with lovely people. And actually, there is quite a big kind of attractions and heritage and cultural community on Twitter that I feel quite part of. So that all feels very nice, but I absolutely agree with you that there is a dark and destructive side of it which isn't healthy for anybody to be involved. 

Nik Wyness: I respectfully disagree with your opinion. There you go. See, it is possible. 

Kelly Molson: Absolutely. We're still friends. You're still going to send me a rubber. I'm still going to start our conversations in strange and weird ways whenever we see each other. Let me know, listeners, what you think about Nik's unpopular opinion. I know a lot of you talk to me on Twitter, so it'd be interesting to hear if you agree. I think you probably agree with both of us. Good place, bad place, brings out good in some bad in some. 

Nik Wyness: Absolutely. I mean, sure. Just tweet me. 

Kelly Molson: Tweet Nik. Oh, God, please. Go, tweet Nik. Go tweet him. Make him respond on the platform that he finds appalling. 

Nik Wyness: Yeah, exactly. I'll just kind of go straight for the abuse. 

Kelly Molson: Great. Okay, Nik, you work at The Tank Museum. Tell us about your role there and what you do. 

Nik Wyness: Okay, so I, as you've heard, my association with The Tank Museum goes back an awfully long way from trying to rob arcade machines until when I first became a paid member of staff, which was in 2004, which was a very long time ago, almost 20 years, which is absolutely terrifying. So I first started working there as the PR officer, and this was at the beginning of a very transformational period for The Tank Museum. We applied for Heritage Lottery funding. There was this big redevelopment project in the office. And so it was very exciting, it was a very exciting time. And it was great to see the organisation go through this kind of great arc of transformation, which was supported by public money. But what was particularly good about that is it was really successful. 

Nik Wyness: And we achieved, with that Heritage Lottery funding, all of the things that we said were going to do. So we're bringing more people in, really making the subject a lot more accessible to a wider audience, all of those things absolutely fantastic. So it's been a big part of my career. I did leave The Tank Museum back in 2012, 2013, and I went to work at a very well established visitor attraction in another location. But I missed my tanks. I missed my tanks. And the First World War centenaries were coming up as well. I am quite into my military history. So the opportunity came to go back to The Tank Museum in a very different role, a much more senior role. And I took that opportunity back in 2016, and I haven't looked back. 

Nik Wyness: So my role at The Tank Museum, my job title is the Head of Marketing and Engagement, which means I'm head of marketing and engaging things. But in English, what that means is obviously I'm responsible for ensuring that the visitors show up. So The Tank Museum is a medium sized visitor attraction. We have about 200,000 visitors a year. When there isn't a pandemic. We have a portfolio of special events. Our big fundraising event every year is Tank fest, which if you haven't been, you absolutely must. 

Kelly Molson: Top of my list. 

Nik Wyness: Top of that. I'm sure it is. Although I'm surprised you haven't been already. 

Kelly Molson: I haven't been to The Tank Museum. 

Nik Wyness: You have the rubber if you did. 

Kelly Molson: Right, exactly. It's not in my collection.

Nik Wyness: There you go. We'll have to put that, right. So that's The Tank Museum. Responsible for making sure the visitors show up and all of that kind of external communication, whether that's stakeholder communications, the public relations activity, the media relations activity, and the social media activity and the ecommerce activity. And a big part of what I've been doing, particularly since I returned, was basically building up these online audiences and building this online community. And latterly of sort of successfully monetising that, really. And what we've done is create an entirely almost distinct business from, if you like, our visitor onsite income. We've created this separate, sort of almost separate moneymaking enterprise, which is all about our online audiences that are online followers and supporters. 

Kelly Molson: This is what I want to talk about today, Nik. I have heard Nik talk about this. Well, the last time I heard you speak was up in Scotland at the Tourism Associations Conference, which is incredible. What you've achieved is pretty phenomenal, I have to say, and just so incredibly impressive. And I'm so glad that you've been able to come on and share it with our listeners today. So I think I'm not sure if I've got the date right, but was it in 2020 that you started to develop this strategy, or was it pre pandemic? 

Nik Wyness: It was pre pandemic, yeah. So it's kind of what I've been working on since I came back in 2016. 

Kelly Molson: Right, okay. 

Nik Wyness: I wouldn't say what I started working on is where we've ended up. So what we started doing, it was all about basically building up these online audiences. And it was all really about if I just wind back a bit, one of the problems with The Tank Museum, I'd say problems, I mean, it's a fantastic location, being endorsed as we are, but we are absolutely in the middle of nowhere. We are in a tiny garrison village of Bovington. The nearest big town is like Bournemouth, that's an hour away by car. So we are absolutely in the middle of nowhere. If it wasn't for the fact that Dorset, sorry, was a successful domestic tourist destination, there's no way The Tank Museum could have survived at all, really, because lots of people come to Dorset on holiday. August has always been our busiest month, for example. 

Nik Wyness: So the fact we're out there in the middle of nowhere means we have a real sort of challenge to get people's attention. And so this whole strategy came out of our requirement and our desire to just kind of let people know we existed. And the objectives that I set myself was we just needed to be more famous. So everything we did was about making The Tank Museum more famous. 

Kelly Molson: That was it. That was the key objective for the whole strategy. Love it. 

Nik Wyness: That was literally it, be more famous. Because if people don't know you exist, they're not going to come and visit you. And so, like I said, I'm kind of from the sort of more PR end of the marketing spectrum. I did like a journalism degree and I've always been really interested in storytelling. And The Tank Museum, as you can imagine, we tell stories and we tell some amazing stories, and warfare is one of those bits of history where you get to see the very best in humanity, but you also get to see the very worst. And some of the stories we deal with are just absolutely fascinating. Sometimes there's goodies, there's baddies and there's loss and love and all of that kind of thing. Really good story. 

Nik Wyness: So it's always been, in my view, the case that storytelling, PR, those kind of traditional ways of reaching an audience with stories, was going to be the way that we can to achieve that cut through making The Tank Museum more famous, making our objects speak for themselves, if you'd like, and the stories that we tell. And so the strategy really grew out of that PR strategy. And when social media kind of came around and we started to take things like Facebook more seriously back in, I don't know, 2010 or something like that, it was about using social media as a means to reach people without the filter of the media, if you like. There were specialist magazines and there were national newspapers that we could get the occasional story in, but it would always be heavily edited to be more in their voice. 

Nik Wyness: But social media allowed us to sort of speak with our own voice and get our stories out directly, unfiltered to a much bigger audience. And we started to see that audience online grow. And basically what we're doing at that point was very much alongside what we're doing offline, as it were. We started to see that audience grow and as it grew, it started to become clear that actually, the majority of people that were actually hitting with this weren't British, as in they weren't resident in the UK, and so they were therefore quite unlikely to be able to visit The Tank Museum. 

Nik Wyness: And that in itself did pose a bit of a kind of intellectual dilemma, really, because it's like, if you're putting all that time and effort into reaching people, you want them to visit, but if they're not actually going to visit, well, what's the point of actually reaching them then? You're just kind of making a lot of noise and it's unsustainable. And so the whole monetisation piece came out of this sort of really, I think, for me, being challenged by the trustees of The Tank Museum to say, well, this has got to pay for itself somehow. How are you going to do it? And if you don't do it, you got to stop. And so I like a challenge, so I stuck in. 

Kelly Molson: You really got stuck in, so I love this. So you achieved your objective, right, so we go back to 2016. You said the objective would be more famous. You drive that objective and you achieve it over the next few years. But actually, in achieving that objective, it's not bringing any more revenue to the organisation because your audience is.

Nik Wyness: Lot of PR activity, it can be quite difficult to sort of measure. It can be quite difficult to track that back to source. 

Nik Wyness: I think the big change for us came when we introduced YouTube to our sort of social media marketing mix. And again, we've got a very visual subject matter. Tanks are big objects and they move so they look good on camera. And I launched the YouTube channel originally, I don't know, it's been about 2010, I bought a little rubbishy sort of digital camera and basically, for me, the idea of making videos for YouTube was I just had this idea of doing like, visual press releases, basically, because it might make them a bit more interesting. And were starting to see at that point, other people were coming to The Tank Museum, with camcorders and making little videos, and they were doing quite well. So we thought there was clearly a bit of potential in this. 

Nik Wyness: And then as time went on and we kind of introduced what is our sort of flagship YouTube series, which is The Tank Chats, where we have one of our experts literally standing in front of a tank, just talking about that object, the history of that object, how it was developed, blah, blah. And that's what really set our YouTube channel off. YouTube is quite a labour intensive. You need to have the kit, you need to have the people to make films, then they need to have spent time editing those things as well. So I think at that point, were getting really great views, really great engagement, but the reality was, we're a charity, we have to be careful how we spend our money. We're not rich like, say, we're in the middle of nowhere. 

Nik Wyness: This all has to go back to some kind of important box ticking objective and that has to be sort of financial in some way or other. We have to make sure it's washing its face. And whilst we could see, as the YouTube channel started to grow, 2014, 2015, we could see that were starting to see more international businesses, for example, rocking up our special events like Tank Fest. And we could see that our experts that were putting in front of the camera were bizarrely starting to get, like, people coming up and asking for autographs, which is kind of adorable in many ways, so we could see that, but you can't really put a figure on that. So, like, I say, like, a lot of PR activities, just really difficult to quantify in that way. 

Nik Wyness: And we've got a very switched on group of trustees and they were basically challenging to say, well, put value on this and it's very difficult unless you find another way of literally making it clear how it's performing for you. 

Kelly Molson: Okay, so we get to that point and trustees challenge you. What did you then start to do and how did you start to develop the monetisation strategy that you've put in place? 

Nik Wyness: Yeah, so there was this trustee meeting and I was very pleased with these massive numbers because it's all about on social media, the bigger the numbers, the more successful you are. So I think we're all feeling quite pleased with ourselves about that and say, "Look at all these people in America watching us. People have never heard of The Tank Museum, have now heard of The Tank Museum. Isn't that great?" And in a way it is great, but they were absolutely right to sort of say, well, hang on a minute, because actually that intervention has just led to things being better, really.

Nik Wyness: And that's what you want from your trustees. At the time, it probably felt like a little bit deflating. Yeah, because my first thought was, goodness me, how on earth are we going to do this? Because there's no model in our sector for doing this at all. And normally, if you're short of a good idea or two, there's plenty of other people in our sector, bigger organisations, more established museums. You can just help yourself to an idea from really or talk to them and say, well, how have you done it? And what ideas can we basically steal and reform? But this one, there was nothing. So it was a real challenge, but actually, that's what made it fun in a way. 

Nik Wyness: And so what I did is, because I was then, and I still am now, a bit of a YouTube addict, I definitely think I probably watch more YouTube than Netflix and certainly much more than terrestrial television. I just like the variety and the randomness of the things you can see in my son, who's only eight years old, is much too my disappointment. Equally addicted to me, which is you spend hours watching people play minecraft and what is that about, how is that enjoyable? And they're all quite irritating as well, but that's why this isn't a therapy session, I must remind myself. 

Kelly Molson: Get it all out.

Nik Wyness: Anyway, back to monetisation. So, yeah, so what I did is I had to look at YouTubers and how they were making a living effectively from just running a YouTube channel. And that became a thing, if you like, sort of 2012, 2013, 2014. And it was just literally a case of saying, right, how are they making their money? And identified there was four key ways in which they were making their money. The first thing was through advertising revenue. So when you are on YouTube and you're playing your videos, google basically puts ads at the beginning of those videos and I'm sure you've seen them, I'm sure you've skipped many of them as well. And basically they do operate a revenue share scheme with their creators. So you basically get a percentage of every ad that's played. So the second thing is memberships. 

Nik Wyness: So Patreon had just launched at that time and Patreon is like an online modern membership platform which allows you to facilitate an online modern membership scheme and it's very closely linked to YouTube. At that time, YouTube kind of endorsed it. A lot of YouTubers were using it, as well as a means to provide sort of tiered memberships where people could give monthly micro donations, whether it was one dollar a month, $3 a month, $5 a month or more in exchange for a tiered set of benefits, whether that's additional access to the creator, early access, that sort of thing. The third way was through sponsorships. 

Nik Wyness: And I'm sure we've all seen YouTube videos where at the very beginning of the video, no matter what it's about, there might be somebody who's promoting a product, whether that's like a VPN service or a pair of gaming headphones or whatnot. And the final way was merchandise sales. And even people with modest merchandise, YouTube channels will be using Printly or something like that to print their own T shirts with their like channel logo on it. So basically, using those methods, that's how we sort of built the strategy around kind of making it happen. And ad revenue is all about the more views you get, the more ads get served to your content and the more money you can make. So to give you an example, last year we had about 22 million views and we earned £90,000 from ads. 

Nik Wyness: And it's not an immaterial sum of money, it's completely passive as well. Once it's out there, you don't have to do anything apart from just kind of take the payment every month. And the other thing about that was really interesting to us as well, was that what we saw is that the overseas audience, particularly the American based viewers, were actually a lot more lucrative than the UK based viewers. So last year, about 30% of our viewers were based in the USA and basically 45% of our total ad revenue originated from those American viewers, because the ad market is much more developed on YouTube in the USA than it is in the UK. So the UK viewers contributed just 20% of our total views, which is, of course, a lot lower as a proportion than the USA, but just 23% of our ad revenue. 

Nik Wyness: So you can see it was actually a benefit all of a sudden to having these American based viewers. And you can see how in the future, it might beneficial for us to actually aim our content a little bit more at the American audience for that very reason. 

Kelly Molson: Gosh, that's fascinating. I can't believe the numbers on that as well. For passive income. That's incredible. 

Nik Wyness: Yeah, and that's from what you can that's not particularly stellar either, I have to say. There are people who do much more kind of commercial content than we do, because ours is very much educational, who would probably do a lot better than that, like the guys who make those Minecraft, but here that my son watches are probably absolutely pointing it in. So it really makes you question your life choices, doesn't it, really? 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, if it does. 

Nik Wyness: And then we launched our Patreon, and again, that was just a case of setting up the platform and then sign posting it in all of our videos, basically saying, if you want to support the town, it's easy for us, we're a charity. So if you like the ask is a lot more straightforward, you know, support our work, help us keep the channel going. We were able to eventually fund an internship using the earnings from Patreon. It built up such I think it was just over £20,000 after the first couple of years. So went to our local arts university and brought in a graduate placement, who had just graduated from the Film Study schools to help us make more content. So it became beautifully self fulfilling. 

Kelly Molson: That's wonderful that you could do that as well. 

Nik Wyness: Yeah, and it was all funded by the patrons and then yeah, we work with partners to generate sponsorship income. I think because we're a charity and because we're a museum, we're not going to just accept any old sponsorship opportunity that wanders by. We have to be a bit careful about our brand and who will work with and that sort of thing, but we're already working with a video games company called War Gaming. They make a video game called World of Tanks, which I'm sure you're an avid player of yourself and I need to introduce it any further. But basically it's one of those massively multiplayer. It's free to play online. 

Nik Wyness: And basically what you do is you kind of drive around in a tank and you sort of shoot at other people who are driving around online in their tank, played by literally millions of people worldwide. And they're already sponsoring like exhibitions and events at The Tank Museum. So it wasn't really a big leap for them to start sponsoring our online content as well. And a really good example of how their sort of support and sponsorship for our online content on our YouTube channel in particular could be found in 2020 during the pandemic. Because I'm sure you can remember all too well, weren't able that summer to hold our Tank Fest event because obviously everything was shut down, which left us with a real big problem because of course, Tank Fest is our biggest fundraising event of the year. 

Nik Wyness: So were able to use our YouTube channel and a bunch of edited footage to bring a Tank Fest 2020 live stream to the Internet with World of Tanks' financial support. So they basically gave us the sponsorship to kind of bring in the technology to live stream this stuff that we'd edited together, which was sort of live hosted and create a live stream. And that video did really well. It's had over a million views and still growing now, which is quite remarkable. From that live stream gained £50,000 worth of additional donations from the viewer base and it led to an additional £20,000 of sales in our online shop that weekend as well. So it was staggeringly successful for us, but we wouldn't have been able to do it without World of Tanks to support. 

Kelly Molson: That is an amazing achievement. So just thinking about what you said about the Pandemic there and not being able to do certain things because of it, but then being able to do this quite transformative project. Did the Pandemic speed up some of the things that you were going to do? Or were these things kind of naturally in progress anyway as the pandemic hit? 

Nik Wyness: I think were lucky in the sense that a lot of this stuff was just starting to get rolling when the pandemic hit. The fact existed when the pandemic hit. No question about it. I think it saved jobs at the time. No question about it. 

Nik Wyness: And I think that's really good news story, isn't it? At the end of the day. We were already in a place where we built these really big online audiences into a sort of a loyal community of almost advocates. And so when we were asking them for help, they were happy to support us. So we saw an increase in our Patreon age. 

Nik Wyness: During the pandemic, we saw an increase in ad revenue as well, because across the board, more people will have more time to sit and watch YouTube videos. And obviously, we work with a lot of tanks on that occasion to do this kind of big set piece, live stream, special event, which yielded great results. But probably for us, the most important thing, and the biggest chunk of our online income comes from e commerce. And so the fact that when the pandemic hit, we actually had the time, for the first time ever, to really focus in on e commerce and make it work, get it sorted out, get the website sorted out, sort out our logistics and yeah, I mean, in 2019, we took £120,000 in our online shop, which were quite happy with. In 2020, we took £1.2 million. 

Kelly Molson: Oh, wow. 

Nik Wyness: Exactly. And we wouldn't have been able to take that if we hadn't already built this enormous online audience organically. So, sure, were using, were advertising the products and that kind of stuff online during 2020, but the fact is that we kind of went in from a sort of a running start, because the audience was there, the product selection was there, we knew what were doing and what we wanted to achieve. We just actually had times to get on with it and actually, there's nothing like a crisis of that sort to really focus the mind and for everyone to be pulling out the stops. It was a fantastic team effort.

Kelly Molson: Oh, absolutely. It's amazing what you can achieve when you're under that kind of pressure. And you've got nothing to lose, right? There's no barriers there. You've got absolutely nothing to lose by doing it.

Nik Wyness: Nothing else to interfere with. 

Kelly Molson: There's no people, we don't have to worry about them. So was that a one off or has that continued since this big increase in your online sales? 

Nik Wyness: So, I think for us, that was always the concern, wasn't it? And I'm sure a lot of e commerce, of course, are a massive boom because there was literally nothing to do all day apart from watch YouTube and buy stuff on the internet. We were obviously worried that, how will things be in 2021? Is this just a blip? Is this just a bit of anomaly? So we did 1.2 million in 2020. In 2021, we did the same, I think 2.1 million again. So were like, well, that's interesting, but it's been a funny year, there's still lots of covered hangover. We locked down at the beginning of the year. So for us, 2022, the year just gone was a real test for us. This is going to tell us whether or not we managed to create sustainable growth. 

Nik Wyness: Actually, last year we did 1.4 million, so it was a huge effort. We had to work really hard for it, but we’re far better set up for that. We've increased the size of the team to cope with this. But actually what we've shown is that we've got some really good foundations here and some really good foundations for future growth as well. So it wasn't just I mean, that was the concern. It could have all fallen away last year and we've been sort of sat wondering what we’re going to do with all these people who were sat on their hands. But fortunately, so far at least, knock on wood has shown to be holding up. 

Kelly Molson: And is that the same with some of the other things as well? So is that the same with, like, your YouTube views? And has everything stayed the same or increased since then? 

Nik Wyness: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, that was for us. I think the big thing in 2022 was about basically kind of stepping back and letting your hands off and going, "Right, is this still, is it still there? Is it still happening?" So we didn't set, like, massively ambitious targets for 2022. It was all just about zero. Okay. But, yeah, we still continued. We had, I think, 22 million views last year, which was 2 million more than the one before. The membership income was £2000 more than it was the previous year. So what we saw is a lot of people who signed up to support us during the pandemic, when the pandemic was over, kind of fell away, but that's fine. 

Nik Wyness: We also know that people have been hit by the upheaval in financial uncertainty, so we've certainly lost a few, but we've had to work hard to gain a few as well. And our sponsors, War Gaming, have sort of stuck by us as well. And the e commerce, as I've just said, has continued to work really well. We had an incredibly strong Christmas season and we've continued to do some of the things that we started doing in 2020 as well. Like these self published books. We've got the audience we can sell directly to them. 

Nik Wyness: So what we do is we'll take a book that's out of print that we've got the rights to, you know, we know we can be relatively comfortable that we'll be able to shift 3 to 4000 of those based on the fact that we've got this really loyal audience in a real niche. We don't have a great deal of competition for that niche, and those have been really good for us as well. Really good things to drive sales and bring in the customers here. 

Kelly Molson: Are your Trustees happy? That's what I want to know. Are they happy? 

Nik Wyness: They're never happy. And I don't want them to be happy either, because if they're happy, that just makes life easier. They're always pushing us to try new things and just try and push it a little bit further. But that's why I believe The Tank Museum is very successful. We get the finger in the back, you can't get comfortable, you can't get complacent, and that's the way I like it. That's why I like working in The Tank Musuem. 

Kelly Molson: Yes, that's a good place to be, isn't it, where you're always challenged, so there's always more that you can do. You said earlier about.. The attraction sector is one that is incredibly supportive of each other, and you mentioned earlier that there's normally a model or someone's done what you're trying to achieve, and you can often go and ask people, but in this case, you are the model, right? You have developed the model. So what would be your tips for other museums that are looking to implement a really similar strategy to this? 

Nik Wyness: That's a good question. I guess part of the issue is we never really set out to implement the model. It kind of just awkwardly fell in this way. But I'm always looking at what other, whether it's attractions or museums in particular, really are doing in this space and how they're trying to do it. And I often wonder why there are much bigger, more established organisations than ours that aren't doing better than us. And I kind of feel like they arguably could be. I do think there's an issue with that. I have made the same museum because I've always had a lot of support from particularly my director, who's just kind of let me get on with it. And it's a bit of a smaller organisation as well, so working cross functionally is a little bit labyrinth. 

Nik Wyness: It's easier to get things done in a smaller organisation. You can be a bit more nimble. But I think a lot of the reason for our success really goes down to this obsession with really getting to know the audience and really sort of cherishing them, so you can really understand what they want and then you give them what they want. So it's not really rocket science at that point, if you know the audience. We've got a niche audience, obviously. People who are into tanks, they're quite easily defined, aren't they? "Is it a tank? Yes. I like it. It is not a tank. No, google don't like that", so we'd know when to talk about sharks or fish or anything like that. 

Nik Wyness: But the other thing I think that's made us successful is we throughout the course of this journey, because we didn't set out to achieve everything all in one go. We didn't realise were doing it at the time, but we've got these really strong and consistent online brand values. So I've always thought that the content we produce, anything we put on social media, has to be useful. It's got to give the audience something interesting, something they actually want, it's got to satisfy a need and we give them, hopefully, interesting stories and engaging facts. You've got to lay off on the sales on your social media, really, haven't you? It's a long game. You've got to earn the right to sell to people by giving them lots of useful, sort of free stuff. 

Nik Wyness: I think it's really important that organisations on social media are authentic to their own sort of organisational voice and not trying to be something else, not trying to follow what other people are doing necessarily. You've got to kind of cut your own path. I think being original is really important. There's no point trying to imitate what others are doing. I don't think it would be seemly for The Tank Museum to be trying to sort of imitate other online influences with the kind of things that they do, because that's not us, we're The Tank Museum. We're trying to be serious content creators and we've got a serious message. 

Nik Wyness: I think simplicity is important. And I mean simplicity in terms of sustainability to create, because we're not a massive team, but we have this requirement now to put a video out on YouTube every week and actually that can be quite labour intensive. So you need to make sure that you're not trying to achieve more than you actually can. And of course, the content needs to be good, simple. And what I mean by that really is easy for the audience to consume. Those would be my tips really. Gosh, there's quite a few. There's a lot there. 

Nik Wyness: I don't even know. I have no idea what happened. 

Kelly Molson: This has happened. They're really good tips, though, and if I'm honest, so they're tips that I took away. So I have heard you talk about this a couple of times, Nik and I've taken those tips away and I've implemented them, or I've tried to implement them for Rubber Cheese ourselves. So I think that there were a few things that were already doing, but I think just coming back to those every time to be useful, that everything that you push out has to be useful, is so vital. And that's the one takeaway that I took from your talk, is that if you are trying anything that you're trying to do on social media, whether you're trying to grow your audience or grow your presence or your brand or sell something, but not in a salesy way, it's just about being useful. 

Kelly Molson: What can we do? What do we know that would really be helpful for our audience? Just share that stuff. And that, for me, is the biggest takeaway from the things that you do, is about being useful. 

Nik Wyness: Absolutely, yeah. And it's sure, it's not useful to anybody, is it? But we're not after anybody online. We're particularly after that niche audience of enthusiasts. But because it's online, there's lots and lots of them scattered all around the world. The Tank Museum itself, and this is one of the really key things that I really kind of really grasp, and it's difficult to get other people to understand, is that the online audience, particularly for The Tank Museum, is totally different to the onsite audience. And that's how I want it to be. So the onsite audience is all about being accessible to the widest possible group of people who are endorsed and able to visit. We want families to visit, we want older people to visit, we want younger people to visit, we want schools to visit. 

Nik Wyness: But online, we're just going for those sort of military history aficionados. And you can see that, if you like, in the actual demographics of the audience. So I think on site, our gender split is 60% men and 40% female, which actually, I think we need to do better on. If I'm being honest. 

Kelly Molson: That's not bad, though I wouldn't have said that was too bad for what seems quite stereotypically male. 

Nik Wyness: Absolutely. Yeah. And it has got better. But the reality is actually, for me, is actually the subject matter The Tank Museum really is, particularly the way it is presented in recent times, because we've completely redone the entire museum. There is no reason why anybody couldn't come to The Tank Museum. There was nothing in here for me, because we just tell really good, fascinating stories, really. So you don't have to be someone who cares a great deal about tanks to get something out of The Tank Museum, but you do have to be someone who cares about tanks to get something about online content, and that's the way you want it. So online, our audience is 90% male, maybe more, probably more. And it's also very international. We probably struggle to get 10, 12 percent international visitors onto The Tank Museum site. 

Nik Wyness: It goes up during our special events, but not by much, probably to 20%. And we know that our online audience is probably 20, 25% UK. The biggest single segment would be North America, so that's USA and Canada. And what's left is everywhere else. And we've got Europeans, Australians, South Americans. 

Nik Wyness: It's a very global audience. And that's the thing with niche audiences. A niche audience in the UK is not so small when you take it to a global scale. And that's why this strategy is able to succeed at scale financially. 

Kelly Molson: It all comes back to what you said right at the beginning. Know your audience. 

Nik Wyness: Know your audience. Absolutely. And care about them.

Kelly Molson: Good advice. Yeah, not just no care. Exactly. Okay, what is next for The Tank Museum? What can you share with us that's coming up? What other ideas have you got in the Tank?

Nik Wyness: I like it. 

Kelly Molson: You're welcome. 

Nik Wyness: Well, I think for us, the biggest thing is we have to focus on COVID recovery. Last year wasn't horrendous, but we know that there are further headwinds. We know that there's a bit of an economic uncertainty at the moment. We're not quite sure how that's going to affect us on the door. We are very heavily dependent on The Tank Museum site, at least on the vagaries of UK domestic tourism. So there is a bit of wait and see. This year, we'll see the first normal Tank Fest since 2019, you know, because we've had to reduce the numbers or we've had to operate it in a very different way. And that event is so very important for us. But I think on the online side, I think there's still so much that I'd love to do.

Nik Wyness: If only there was the time and the resource to do it. We want to get better at doing this stuff. We want to get better at the community development side of things. I think that's obviously going to be the future. And I mean, that niche broad is sent from starting with growing the amount of emails, engaged email subscribers that we have and kind of nudging them up that fabled ladder of loyalty. We want to increase the output of our content. So one of the big things that we did last year was launch a TikTok channel because TikTok is where the younger people are. 

Nik Wyness: And you've got to think about the future in terms of getting your brand in front of the younger audience because just because they're young and they're on TikTok doesn't mean that among that will be people who are interested in military history. It's not all about sort of funny dances and twerking. Although that's a good time, I'm sure. Yeah, if you're on TikTok. 

Nik Wyness: Check out famthetankman, who is our in house TikTok, he did really well last year. He only launched the channel in late April and he's accumulated 271,000 followers and 51 million views last year, which I think is pretty impressive. He's doing really well. 

Kelly Molson: That is phenomenal. I'm not on TikTok because it's another thing that I've got to learn and understand and to find time for. So I'm not on it yet. I need to be I do need to understand it. But that is a really big achievement in such a short space of time. 

Nik Wyness: Yeah, absolutely. And it shows that there is an appetite for serious military history content. And of course, we change, if you like, the tone of voice that we're using and we change the conventions that we're using in the kind of presentational sense. But the messages are still the same, the stories are still the same. Do you know what I mean? So there's still that consistency of authority and kind of our authenticity coming out through TikTok. Even though it's a very different approach and a very different audience to our YouTube channel, which is, you know, 45 plus, I suppose it's biggest continuing with TikTok, we know that the biggest audience is 18 to 25. So it's really important, isn't it, to find a different avenue and a different way of communicating with different generations. I mean, that's basically marketing, isn't it, really? 

Nik Wyness: But the other thing we really want to do, and I really hope we get to do it this year, is launch a second YouTube channel. And the reason we want to do that, again, it's part of this audience diversification piece we've done really well targeting that really hard core of sort of armoured warfare, history and enthusiasts. But we want to go a little bit broader than that. We want to sort of almost use a second YouTube channel as like a funnel to the main one, if you like, by telling more broader stories about people and events. Whereas our current main YouTube channel is very much focused on objects and things and stuff, if you know what I mean. 

Kelly Molson: So why set up the second one out of interest? Do you feel like you would dilute the first one if you put those kind of stories on there? 

Nik Wyness: Yeah, I think it's about when you because we've got some 477,000 subscribers on our YouTube channel at the moment, and so since the channel is launched, particularly in the last sort of seven years, we've really given them a very strict diet of very strict, kind of very in depth tanky information. So that's that audience, that's what that audience likes. It really is that kind of granularity they like, and they do prefer, generally speaking, those stories about the stuff like the objects. It's more, perhaps more engineering, more development, less about human history. Perhaps at times, we go there, but not very much. This is mainly about the kind of the machines and the objects, really. So with this second channel, we are looking to tell more interesting stories about what happened, when, and the artefacts are obviously a big part of that. 

Nik Wyness: But this is more about the human story. 

Kelly Molson: That's the kind of stuff that would appeal more to me than the real kind of specifics. So, again, it's looking at broadening that audience online, too. Got you. Brilliant. Great advice, great achievements. I'm so glad that you've been able to come on and share this with us today. Thank you. 

Nik Wyness: No, thank you very much for having me. It's always great to get out The Tank Museum and have a chat with people. 

Kelly Molson: Well, before you go, we always ask our listeners if they've got a book that they love that they'd like to share. 

Nik Wyness: So I had a look at what your other guests had recommended. I thought, my goodness me, there's lots of really worthy choices in there. I'm not really one of those people who particularly enjoys reading those, like, management strategy books, because I was like, in my own free time, I want to read for fun and obviously a bit of a nerd of military history. And there's interestingly a bit of an overlap, I suppose you could say, between sort of like military and marketing. We use a lot of the same terminology, like strategy and tactics and deployment and cut through all of that sort of thing. So I'm going to recommend a book which kind of overlaps a little bit with a professional, with the military history. That book is quite an old book, actually. It's called Hal Moore on Leadership: Winning When Outgunned and Outmanned. 

Nik Wyness: And basically Hal Moore was an officer in the US Army. He died a few years ago, I think. But I don't know if you've ever seen the movie. The Mel Gibson movie came out in 2002 called Weaver Soldiers. Have you ever come across that one? Okay, it's quite a good film but basically it's a Vietnam War movie and basically the star was this Hal Moore guy. It was biopic and it was about the first major engagement in the Vietnam War between the US army and the North Vietnamese Army. And basically his unit, 400 blokes were dropped in the jungle by helicopter. They quickly found themselves surrounded by like 4000 north, the emission soldiers and they found themselves cut off and basically having to fight off the determined and repeated attacks. 

Nik Wyness: And basically Hal Moore keeps his unit together through this tremendous series of challenges. And so that book is all about his perspective on leadership and what he learned during his military career. And actually I've worked with several ex soldiers and actually what you learn from soldiers is that the military is one thing that they're really good at and they're very good at many things is training leadership, if you know what I mean, and training people how to be a good leader. And I don't think that's something that the civilian world and the business world is actually very good in. 

Nik Wyness: But what's interesting as well that I've learned from these former soldiers that I've worked with is you get a completely different perspective from them, particularly those who have seen sort of action or any form of operational deployment on things like resilience and what tenacity is and what courage is and even what stress is and what a bad day in the office is like. Because of course a bad day in the office at The Tank Museum is nothing like a bad day in the office on a front line somewhere unpleasant in the world. So that perspective I think is really useful. But Hal Moore comes up with these four kind of principles of leadership, which is a book. The first one is something like, "The battle only stops when you stop fighting". Which basically means don't give up. 

Nik Wyness: Doesn't matter what you're facing, you've got to keep going. A bit like Winston Churchill said, "When you're going through h***, keep going". And the second one was that, "When you're in a tight spot there's always one more thing you can do to influence the situation positively in your favour". And that's about being proactive, right? Because when you're in a tough spot the worst thing you can do is nothing is freeze. You've got to be proactive and you've got to keep going. And the third thing was, "If there's nothing wrong, there's something wrong". So basically what that means is don't be complacent. Keep your garden up, be alert. And I think there are times when you're running marketing campaigns when you almost think, “well, everything's going all right". But actually, that's probably when you need to check in on things the most. 

Nik Wyness: And the last one was, "To trust your instincts". Basically, he argues that you're well trained, you've got plenty of experience, and so is your gut, so you should listen to it. And the other thing, of course, is your subconscious is much more observant than you will ever be. As marketers, we're very analytical. We like to look at our data and that kind of thing. But your gut can tell you if you're interpreting that data correctly or if you need to look at it again. 

Kelly Molson: Gosh, what a book. Wow, I've never heard of that book. 

Nik Wyness: That's pretty old. 

Kelly Molson:  Never been recommended before as well, so that's a great one. As ever if you would like to win a copy of Nik's book, if you head over to our Twitter account and retweet this episode announcement with the words, "I want Nik's book", then you'll be in with a chance of winning it. Maybe you'll come back on in a year from now and tell us how 2023 went and how the first Tank Fest since pre pandemic went. 

Nik Wyness: Yeah, I'd be delighted if my hair has gone completely grave at that point. You'll know, it wasn't a great year. 

Kelly Molson: I'm sure it's going to be a good year. Thanks ever so much for coming on, Nik. It's been a pleasure. 

Nik Wyness: Thank you. 

Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends July 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

www.matthewhenderson.net

Creative Ideas and Solutions. Innovative consultancy and support for visitor attractions, specialising in commercial and  product development. 

https://www.beamish.org.uk/

https://culturalenterprises.org.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hendersonmatthew94/

Matthew Henderson is well known across the sector, having won many awards for his creative approach to retail and product development, and is a Trustee of the Association for Cultural Enterprises.

Having increased sales and developed commercial activity as Head of Commercial Operations and Development at Beamish, The Living Museum of the North, Matthew has been inspired to launch Creative Ideas and Solutions. The aim of which is to support other organisations in enhancing their visitor engagement, commercial strategy and product development.

Transcriptions:

Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. 

In today's episode, I speak with Matthew Henderson, founder of Matthew Henderson Creative Ideas and Solutions. Matt was previously Head of Commercial Operations and Development at Beamish Living Museum, where an abundance of innovative ideas drove their commercial income. 

We talk a lot about product development and how to develop commercial products and experiences that truly reflect your organisation. 

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on itunes, Spotify and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. 

Kelly Molson: Matthew, it is absolutely brilliant to have you on the podcast today. I'm just going to tell you, you have been, like, one of the most recommended people to me ever to come on.

Matthew Henderson: Really? 

Kelly Molson: There are so many people, “You've got to get Matthew on. You need to get Matthew on to chat to” and finally, we are here. 

Matthew Henderson: Well, thank you so much. That's an amazing thing to hear, but, yeah, thank you for inviting me on. It's a real honour to be on it. 

Kelly Molson: Well, shuffed. It's going to be good. Okay. Right, I've got some ice breakers for you. I want to know what is your favourite crisp flavour?

Matthew Henderson: Favourite crisp changes rigged, but at the moment it's probably squares just for how vinegary they are. 

Kelly Molson: Oh, the sort of vinegar ones? Yeah. 

Matthew Henderson: I would go with them, but occasionally a knickknack I would go for as well, which is quite a controversial opinion. 

Kelly Molson: Spicy knickknack. Did they used to do like a hang on, they did like a fishy one, didn't they? 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, I wouldn't go near that, but, yeah, the spicy one, yeah. Normally I'm a chicken corner kind of guy, but I can handle a knickknack spice.

Kelly Molson:  Spicy knickknacks. I'm with you on that one. That is a good solid, crisp flavour. Right, good. Okay, if you had your human body but the head of animal, what animal would you choose? 

Matthew Henderson: Strangely, I actually do have a pet owl, so I feel like just to keep on theme yeah, probably an owl. I think their school is taken up by three quarters. Their school is hitting up by their eyes. Their brain is very small, so maybe I'll retract that. But wise old owl is quite a myth. But they are sort of very attractive, aren't they? 

Kelly Molson: They are. Wow. Oh, God. So many questions. You've got a pet owl, you're like Harry Potter. This is incredible. How have you got a pet owl? 

Matthew Henderson: Well, yeah, it's sort of a bit more run Weasy than Harry Potter would say. Growing up, I used to help my grandma nature reserve and every weekend she used to take me to there on the Saturday and then the Budapest Centre on the Sunday. It was just the sort of thing that we always did and I ended up volunteering there and fell in love with it. And then I had this little owl, who, when he came in, was written off that he would die overnight. It was so unwell. And I think a cat tried to eat him. All this sort of tragic story. And then every day he got a bit stronger, to the point where he used to come home with me every night. We've got a tesco together because you couldn't leave. It was kind of in my hoodie pocket. 

Matthew Henderson: And then when I sort of stopped volunteering there and got a job, he would have died of heartbreak, really. And I think so died by that point. So 14 years on, he still lives with me. Probably the funniest thing that's ever happened with Bug is when everyone did Zoom quizzes during lockdown. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. 

Matthew Henderson: And my friend works for Capital FM and Bug the Owl just happened to be in the background while were playing this quiz. And my friend from there was on, to which he told Roman Kemp the next day about Bug the Owl at work, to which Roman Kemp and FaceTimed me the next day to see Bug the owl. And then me and Bug coal hosted capitol breakfast for 20 minutes one morning, you think lockdown life couldn't get any stranger. And then you describe what an owl looks like on Capital FM. 

Kelly Molson: This question has gone to a place that I would never expect him to go to. Oh, my God. 

Matthew Henderson: We could get him at the end. 

Kelly Molson: Oh, my God. Please, I would love to meet Bug. And also, my heart has just melted massively from that story. 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah. I love him.

Kelly Molson: Absolutely incredible. 

Matthew Henderson: My friends always say that I should do TikToks with them because I have a dog as well, and the owl will sit on the dog's head and groom and they'll play together. And I think if I had more time, they'd probably be a TikTok account for them. 

Kelly Molson: You have to make that. I would download TikTok just for that. Just for you, and Bug and your dog. Oh, my God. Honestly, Matt wasn't expecting that response. That's got me all the feels. 

Matthew Henderson: On the random way, I think I would have an owl's head as a head and a human body. 

Kelly Molson: An excellent reason why. Well, this is random. My next question was, have you ever met a famous person and lost a tiny mind a little bit, but I don't know if Roman Kemp is enough to make you lose your mind. 

Matthew Henderson:  Yeah, I think I actually met Russell Brand. This is another sort of bizarre lockdown story, just as it happens, but I went to his gig, he did an outdoor, socially distanced gig and then at the end he walked past and I got a selfie with him, to which I just put it on Instagram. We haven't broken any rules. It was all fine. And the Daily Mail lifted that photograph and ran it on the front page of their website with a story around Russell Brand refusing to social distance, which wasn't true. But, yeah, he ended up on Hollywood Reports and all sorts of zoom called with him afterwards to talk about it, and he absolutely loved it. But, yeah, meeting him was amazing. And then my ultimate hero is Mike Skinner from the Streets. 

Matthew Henderson: I have his lyrics tattooed, and that probably the only time in life I've been absolutely speechless. I just could not say a word when I met him. And he was very nice and very polite. But, yeah, meeting him was pretty amazing. 

Kelly Molson: Oh, my God, Matt, I want your life. 

Matthew Henderson: We might go downhill from there. I think they're only sort of two impressive odd stories. 

Kelly Molson: They're probably the best answers to any icebreaker questions I've ever asked. 

Matthew Henderson: It's quite nice because they don't naturally come up in conversation, either of those points. But maybe that's the art of icebreaking. 

Kelly Molson: Absolutely. Totally fascinating. Right, well, I don't know where this is going to go, but what's your unpopular opinion?

Matthew Henderson: My unpopular opinion is that I've never had tea or coffee and I have no desire to. 

Kelly Molson: You've never had a brew? You've never had a cup of tea? 

Matthew Henderson: Never had one. Yeah. Shocking. And I actually went on a half day course about coffee once I've smelled this and learned all about it, but it's not for me. 

Kelly Molson: I think the coffee one I can get. I think that there's probably quite a few people that because tea and coffee are very different and I can understand that. But to never even have tried a little sip of tea?

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, nobody's ever really that impressed with it. Yeah, maybe it's TikTok and tea this year, maybe that’s the aim.

Kelly Molson: 2023, we're coming at you. 

Matthew Henderson: About two or three years ago, I tried to grip for the first time, much to all my friends amusement. And I remember afterwards my friend Ben, who's a very loud lad, and he took me one side and said, “I'm so proud of you for trying that, man”. So I just loved, like, how genuine he was. 

Kelly Molson: Matt, it's already my favourite podcast. Sorry, everyone, Matt's got me in tears here. All right. Okay, let's start where it all began, shall we? Let's talk about Beamish. So you were there for ten years and you started out as a costume demonstrator? 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, that's right. 

Kelly Molson: And then your path went further and further and further in. 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, it was the best thing ever did. So, like I sort of mentioned, my grandma used to run a nature reserve, a little small cafe and gift shop, and she would let me organise the Christmas tree fairs when I was little. And sometimes I do little markets and fundraisers and stuff. So I think, looking back, I was always sort of destined for a career in tourism from that, because my mom always laughed that I was more excited about seeing the gift shop than I was the attraction a lot of time. When you look back, it's so obvious, really, but from there I started volunteering at the Falconry Centre, which is obviously where Bug the Owl came from, and got really interested in the sort of business side of it and the customer service side.  

Matthew Henderson: And I was studying business at college, a six month college, and they said to me, "why didn't you go and try somewhere else on work experience?" And I was like, "no, I'm going to work at the Falconry Centre. That's my sort of thing I'm going to do". And they were like, "Why didn't you just go for four half days, like four afternoons to Beamish, which was about 20 minutes up the road, and just see what it's like?" And instantly, within about an hour of being there, I realised it was the people that I loved working with. And for all I loved the animal side, that it was that tourism, that business, that people and that culture that I loved. 

Matthew Henderson: And then, yeah, from there, I think it's sort of seven different jobs, but progressed from work experience to being a volunteer to then a costume demonstrator, and that's how it kind of started. 

Kelly Molson: Amazing. So many people start their career at one level in an attraction and just work and that's what happened, isn't it? So ultimately, you ended up as head of commercial operations. 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, several different jobs, and was really fortunate with my time at Beamish that I did an apprenticeship, which I'm really sort of proud to have come from a non traditional route into the sector and then did an assistant role and an officer role and started did a maternity cover. And all these sort of real brilliant opportunities from Beamish led to that head of commercial role, which was final role at the museum. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. So Beamish, to give context to people that haven't been to Beamish, and don't understand what it is. It's a living museum, isn't it? And you've kind of got like little mini attractions within this attraction itself. It's absolutely incredible. 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, definitely. It's a living museum. It's around 400 acres in size and Beamish tells a story of everyday life in the Northeast in various different time periods. But the majority of the buildings have been moved brick by brick or stone by stone and recreated. So the buildings themselves are as much as part of the museum and the museum's collection as the object inside it. But they use everyday objects to tell the story of life in the Northeast. So rather than having it in a glass case and obviously there's a need to protect some object in the museum's collection and stores, sometimes it's replica. But the majority of real collections that have been really used, whether that's a teapot or a post tube or how can that history be brought to life? So, yeah, there's some amazing museum living museums around the world. 

Matthew Henderson: I think Beamish is one of the standouts, really.

Kelly Molson: Yeah. I think the term immersive is being thrown around, like, a bit willy nilly at the moment. But for me, that is a really immersive museum experience, isn't it? Because when you go, people are in traditional costume and you can go and see things being made. Like, Matt very kindly people that are listening that won't be able to see this, but Matt very kindly sent me some sweets in the post from Beamish, which I'll just show on camera here. And the sweets get handmade in the shop and you can go and see that happening. And using all the traditional methods, So it is a fantastically kind of immersive museum experience that you can get involved in. So everything's going swim and knee and then all of a sudden there's a global pandemic. Life takes a bit of a turn, doesn't it?

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, definitely. So I was working on product development at Beamish at the time, so we've been doing a lot of really exciting work about how could we use the museum's collections to create products that truly reflected that experience. And Beamish is a dream for that kind of thing, because, like you say, there's so many sort of hands on opportunities and there's so many stories to be told. And I think one of my favourite things about working in Beamish was that you have these pockets of specialism right around the museum. So you could go and have a conversation with the curator of transport and learn the intricacies of sort of steam and charms and buses and then try and come up with product from that. Or you could go and speak to the garden team or the horse team. 

Matthew Henderson: So were making all this sort of exciting product and then, yeah, the museum was on the rise. Visitor numbers have been going up, income had been going up, and then, yeah, the gates were shut and 95% of the income comes from visitors. And suddenly there was a need to try and diversify and to engage that audience, which is where some of the sort of work that we did during lockdown came from. 

Kelly Molson: And some of the things that you did are absolutely brilliant. So I saw you speak at the Museum and Heritage Awards last year and you shared some of the things that you did during lockdown that helped to drive revenue and they're so good. Some of the examples that you shared are just so creative and so genius. Can you tell us a little bit about some of them? 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, so the first thing we did was set up an online shop. So the idea being that we didn't want it to feel like a traditional online shop, we wanted it to reflect the museum experience, where you can go into the sweet shop and buy sweets, you can go into the cooperative store and buy biscuits, you can go into the various different sort of exhibits and participate. Like the chemist, for instance, has a cold cream that's a recipe from 100 years ago. So we set up that online shop and literally between a very small team of used our existing ticketing platform. And it was a little bit like an episode of The Apprentice, really. There was like no budget, there's a half a platform there for us to use and how could you turn this around? 

Matthew Henderson: And I think because everyone at Beamish had such passion for it. It was a very concerning time, but also a very exciting time, thinking that we could try and drive some income. And we started seeing support from around the world. People were ordering these sort of tins of sweets and all this sort of product development work that we'd been doing. It was actually perfectly aligned that we had these unique products that could be sold. And then we started to think, well, how else could we use online? So the Head of Learning, Simon Woolley, who's a brilliant person, he started doing school lessons. So he would do murder mysteries online and Victorian school lessons for schools around the world. Me and him said, “there surely must be an opportunity for home schoolers here”. 

Matthew Henderson: So we started putting Victorian lessons on for home schoolers where they could order a slate and pencil in the post from the online shop and then Simon would essentially sort of scare them for an hour at the Victorian Headmaster. And the day was basically with the parents that we look after your kids for an hour, you have an hour off and they can participate in this living museum. Then we did things like afternoon tea deliveries. So we have famous of amazing bakers. They came to the museum and created these unbelievable afternoon teas along with tea and coffee that were sourced from local supplies and branded as Beamish specific blends for them. And we sent out costume staff to deliver them. 

Matthew Henderson: So you could only order them, you could order them from around the world, but they would only be delivered in the Northeast because we wanted to deliver them by hand, safely, but in full costume. And I remember a quote that came from Jeff, who was one of the costume team that was delivering them and he said, "people ordered them from as far and wide to the nearest and dearest, the United States, Australia and Europe. And occasionally there were real tears of gratitude from the receiver where it felt a privilege to be bringing a ray of happiness to someone." And that sums it up for me, really. 

Kelly Molson: That is incredible, isn't it? 

Matthew Henderson: Because it wasn't only about generating income, it was about keeping connected with that community. And 50% of Beamish's audience is local, so being able to sort of literally go to the doorstep of 1200 people, which is like the equivalent of visiting every family that came on a bank holiday. If you think in terms of scale of two or three drivers out there for a few weeks delivering them and that was a really special thing. And then I think probably we still we started wholesale ventures, we started selling to the likes of Fenix and farm shops when retail shops could be opened. But museums and visit attractions weren't just a diversified income and that was like, again, about generating income, but also that connection with people. 

Matthew Henderson: And it was really exciting for those shops when Beamish returned up in full costumes with these handmade sweets and keeping that name out there, that sort of museum alive. But I think for me the most special thing was were faced with the prospect that maybe Father Christmas has grown, wouldn't go ahead and how could we do an online offer of that was the challenge put forward. So we did for 13 hours a day, we did zoom calls with Father Christmas around sort of well over 1000 children took part in that.  And every ten minutes, Father Christmas would call a different family and would have these absolutely amazing moments where grandparents would join in the call and seeing their children engage, their grandchildren engage with Father Christmas. 

Matthew Henderson: And you would see parents, grandparents just in floods of tears saying these really special moments because we could collect information in advance that Father Christmas could use to make it even more special. And really did sort of bring the magic. So that was me and Father Christmas and a small team for sort of hours a day and it was just a really special way of connecting with our audience. 

Kelly Molson: There's so many different ideas there as well, Matthew. I mean, obviously you've got your team around you as well. How did you go about working out what you were going to do? Because I can imagine that there were more ideas that actually didn't happen as well. Right, so how did you work out that process of going, yeah, that's the one, we can run with that. No, these ones, they're just not going to work for us. 

Matthew Henderson: I think essentially there's a little bit of looking at the resource that was available and the sort of finances behind it. If it was a nice thing to do, was it at least going to sort of generate a small income and then what were the things that were going to really drive income from the museum? And Rhiannon Hiles is the CEO of Beamish, was incredibly supportive as she was sort of leading the museum and me and her would have these conversations where one of us would come up with an idea. And the Father Christmas thing actually started out it was going to be pre recorded videos and it was her that said, “no, this needs to feel exactly like the experience of the museum. We need to create that magic”. 

Matthew Henderson: So, yeah, just really great support from her, really great team that were willing to give everything a go and it was just a real chance to bring commercials to the front of everything the museum was doing. And I think from there we really did connect with that audience. I remember one of the Father Christmas calls, a parent had written that a child no longer believed in Father Christmas because the last time they saw him was in America, and he has an American accent. And our Father Christmas, luckily, could speak different languages. So straight away he said, "loving to meet you". If it was Bethany, he said, "Love it to meet you, Bethany. I saw you last time in Florida, didn't I?" And you could see a little bit of magic. 

Matthew Henderson: He said, “the thing is, wherever I go, I change my accent, I change the language, like when I go to France”. And then spoke in fluent French, and you could see this kind of like moment where the magic was just literally back in that house. It's like on a film where you sort of see the sort of stars coming back in and it's back to life, and you could see the joy in her parents face. And you think, if we hadn't been allowed to do those calls, what would that magic have been for her in these horrible circumstances? Equally, on the flip side, our Father Christmas only really knew French and English. 

Matthew Henderson: We were hoping there's not going to any last minute request as we kind of moved on the conversation. 

Kelly Molson: So you saw magic in one window and sweat in another window.

Matthew Henderson: Behind the zoom screen. Yeah. Father Christmas sometimes had a little auto queue that I could give him prompts on, and we had a great time doing those things. 

Kelly Molson: It's incredible to go to that level of detail as well. To be able to put that magic back is absolutely phenomenal. What you mentioned, you said that everyone was willing to give it a go, and I think that's something that's really important to talk about because there was a level of like during the pandemic, well, let's just try it, right? What can we do? Can't do anything worse than actually is what's happening, right? So let's just give it a go. So people were quite brave in some of the things that they were doing. Do you think that's got lost a little bit now? Do you think people are a bit more cautious about what they're doing? 

Matthew Henderson: I think there's definitely a thing where the day to day takes over again, and I think there's a real opportunity to look at sort of strategy and given the opportunity for teams to come up with ideas, creative ideas, and then allowing them to happen, I think, with Beamish, I'm not certain we would have made an online shop within the last few years because you managing multiple different exhibits, outlets, operations, and it was never sort of creeping to the top of the priorities list.  So I think the pandemic offered an opportunity to really question what you were doing and like, I said, give things a go. And Beamish has certainly carried on that sort of innovation with Rhiannon Hiles, CEO, I'm sure that will continue.

Matthew Henderson: But, yeah, I think there is perhaps a thing where the day to day takes over and I think it's maybe coming together through things like the podcast that you do and the work at  Association for Cultural Enterprise does and Museum and Heritage Show and hearing those inspirational stories. And I think we've all got those moments where you sit and hear somebody speak and then you just can't wait to get back to where you work to try and sort of pivot from that point, really. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. It's the same with me, to be honest. I went on a new business and marketing workshop last week and came out of that completely and utterly inspired by the people that were delivering the course, by the people that were on the course with me as well. And now we're kind of back in the day to day doing. You have to really be careful to make sure that you carve out the time to do those things, don't you? You have to give time for innovation, you have to give time to be creative because you need the headspace to be able to actually do it, don't you?  

Matthew Henderson: Definitely. And I think if you're working in a visit attraction, there's a lot to be said around the fact that it is a joy to work in these places, because the whole purpose of them is to bring joy to people. So for me, it's often about sort of standing and looking at the attraction, walking through it when it's busy, sort of hearing those conversations, working front of house. And then I always find that at the moment when you realise, for me, I started as a costume demonstrator and that was the thing that I loved. Every time you got the opportunity to work with the visitors, to work with those people, it reignited that passion of, this is why we're here. So for all in management, you might sort of step further away and you might be more in sort of meetings and the like. 

Matthew Henderson: I think it's about still being connected and realising why we're all in this industry. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. Off podcast earlier, when Matthew and I were chatting, we actually had a conversation about how our earliest memories are from attractions, aren't they? They're from places that we've been to, so I can remember one of my earliest memories is feeding the ducks, a place called Forty Hall in Enfield. It's a lovely heritage home. It's got beautiful grounds. It was really close to where my nan and granddad lived, so we used to always visit my nan and grandad and then go there afterwards. And it's one of my earliest memories of really happy times. And it's a visitor attraction, so we have to remember the impact that we're having on people from a really young age. And that's a huge responsibility and also something wonderful to be part of. 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, completely. I went to Sovereign Hill in Australia, which is a living museum, a few years ago, and one of their directors said to me, "it's an honour to bring joy to millions of people". And often you might see that joy firsthand, but then it's like you say, you would never really know the impact of that work. You would never know that people like you and me are talking about feeding the ducks all them years later. And I think it's every time you get an opportunity to create something or to work with someone, it's about making it the most special thing and that's how you get that legacy. 

Matthew Henderson: And I think for Beamish in particular, the people of the Northeast have a real love for it because everybody has a connection to it, whether they donate as an object, whether they know somebody that used to live in one of the houses before it was moved, whether they went there on a school trip. And I think it's about working with all those generations. And I love the idea that we might create retail products and you don't really know where in the world they end up or who's going to treasure them. And it's a real honour and I think you have to keep remembering that, especially when sort of day to day work maybe sort of takes over or feels a little heavy. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. So you've moved on from Beamish now. Let's talk a little bit about some of the things you're doing. I'm a recent Trustee of the Museum of the Broads, which is quite a big responsibility, actually, and I'm really enjoying it, but it's all quite new for me. But you've been a trustee for quite a while, haven't you, for the Association for Cultural Enterprises? 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah. So off the back of the work that Beamish did during lockdown, I've got the opportunity to speak at the Cultural Enterprise Conference and then met some of the team there and had kept in touch with Jill, who's the brilliant CEO. And then yeah, the advert went out that they were looking for trustees and it was one of those things I spoke to Rhiannon at Beamish and sort of said, "do you think you would apply for this?" And she was saying, "Well, I think you should." And it said, "Why didn't you give this a go?" And I think that's what I was really asking was, "should I give this a go?" So I applied and interviewed and, yeah, it's been one of the best things ever done, connecting with the work of the association, but also the other board members. 

Matthew Henderson: So sitting on a board for me, like some of my sort of industry heroes, really, and getting to hear them speak. And sometimes I'll be in these board meetings and I'll realise I haven't spoken in a little while because you're so busy listening to them and you kind of forget that you're part of it, really.  So, yeah, they've been really welcoming to me and been a big part in the decision to give this new venture a go. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. So this is exciting. So I am going to guess that everyone that you've been speaking to there has been really supportive of this. But you have jumped in with 2ft and you've set up a new consultancy. Tell us a little bit about it. 

Matthew Henderson: So where it came from was, through the work that I've been doing and the work for the Association for Cultural Enterprise, people had been very kind in the sort of words that they were saying about some of the work we've done. And then often I was visiting other attractions or meeting them and helping to come up with creative ideas. So the new sort of venture is allowing that to be a full time thing for me so that I can offer more support to these organisations, whether that's on product development, whether that's on community co production, creative strategy. So, yeah, it's a very new thing, but really exciting. 

And like we sort of said at the start, I think from that moment of helping my grandma at the nature reserve, you kind of look back and it was always meant to be that you would work in tourism and then this path has come quite naturally, really. 

Kelly Molson: It's really exciting. And congratulations on getting set up and taking the big leap into doing it for yourself. How do you start this process with an attraction? Because I guess just thinking about what you've been through at Beamish, I mean, it was perfectly set for all of the things that you did. You've got this amazing heritage there, you've got these artefacts that you can take design elements from for packaging and everything kind of came together so beautifully. How do you start to look at that, doing those things in a different organisation? 

Matthew Henderson: So I think if it's a product development, there's a lot to be said around, hopefully getting to know the team that are working in the shop. They'll know what sells well and what doesn't, and if they have any data to sort of back that up. But a lot of the time, those informal conversations of, "I wish we had a magnet wave exxon”, or speaking to the front of house teams of what are the things that the visitors find emotive, what do they laugh at? What do they cry at? What do they take a photograph of? And then, how can we draw inspiration from that to create product ranges? And that's a lovely challenge and it takes working with the team, I think, because it's a new venture. 

Matthew Henderson: One of the things I'm really keen on is that the support isn't a standard package, so depending on the attraction, I can sort of flex up, flex down and take different approaches, but very much about putting those people at the heart. It's not a consultant coming in to say this is how you should be doing it's more about allowing them to discover this is the different way you can do it. And we don't all have to have the same I keep using magnets, but magnets or food and what are the opportunities to support local, to create different things to be sustainable in terms of packaging and environmental impact? So, yeah, really exciting. But it's about putting those people at the heart of it all, I think.

Kelly Molson: Because we talk quite a lot, don't we? About having things that are niche, like products and things on your shelves that you can only get at that attraction.  Not just the blanket. Everybody's got these things. It's just another thing with the logo on it. And I think there's also a big part about at the moment especially, where we still don't really know what's coming this year. Attractions, I guess, still pretty nervous. They've had a really rough time the last few years and this year might not be that much better, we don't know. But it's thinking about what more they can do with what they already have. So looking at the products they already have and actually can we improve those rather than something from scratch? What more can we do to make this better? 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, definitely. And I think people understandably in the current climate are even more cautious with money. So it's about making sure that it's an experience, that the experience doesn't stop when you get to the gift shop door that carries on. So how can you create product that is reflective of that amazing day they've had that memory and that they can take a piece of it home? And I think that's the challenge and one that is really exciting to work with organisations and attractions to do and not always the most expensive thing to do. I think there's always ways to find smaller suppliers, local suppliers that can offer that bespoke and offering support both ways. 

Matthew Henderson: So if it's a small producer that works in a certain town, reassuring them that, "look, it is a risk for you, it is an investment for you to partner with an attraction and to do something bespoke but look at the benefits when this happens”. What can we put in place to work both sides? Do we make an agreement that we'll keep stocking it until you've run all those labels out? Because those labels might be a big investment for a small company or a small business. So, yeah, it's adaptable solutions, but making sure experience is key, I think.

Kelly Molson: That's really nice as well, isn't it? Because it builds the partnership between local organisations and therefore you're kind of actively both promoting each other. 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, completely. And I think especially now, I think there is so many from lockdown. A lot of people change their lives, didn't they? And a lot of people set up as local producers or suppliers. And if they were there before, I think they had a really rough time during that. And that was one of the things with the work at Beamish, was really support and local and it's such an exciting thing to find a coffee supplier or a tea supplier. Not that I'd be sampling either of them.

Kelly Molson: Wasted on you. 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, a fudge supplier, and bring them into the heart of the thing that often they pay to take their family to. And how can you find opportunities to involve them? So could they go to morning briefings and bring everyone a cup of tea to try it? How do you make sure that the person stands in behind the till has as much passion about that coffee as the person that makes it? And it's by showing them that connection that every time they get an order that there's sort of a celebration in that office. Really, that, "wow, look, we've had another order from this organisation". Our business is strengthening and it goes back to the point where the customer is buying something and you want that person selling it to have as much passion. 

Matthew Henderson: So a lot around staff ownership, I think, is quite key with it. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. I love that idea of celebration, isn't it? That's really important, isn't it, to drive that kind of passion for what you're doing. 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, completely. And I think in all of our own businesses, often that's a private thing, isn't it, to celebrate it and while we're chuffed, because you have to kind of look cool and as if you don't really need the work or don't. But actually, it's about sort of really celebrating those moments. And I think through the work that the Museum and Heritage Show do and the Association of Cultural Enterprise, I think it's about celebrating those moments and really enjoying it on a bigger scale. But for those local producers, I love the idea that someone might buy something local and have a feel good moment. 

Matthew Henderson: So, yeah, it's really nice to buy something that's a memory or a part of the attraction, but also that feel good of supporting the attraction, which is often a charity within the cultural heritage sector, but then also supporting local and UK businesses. So, yeah, there's a lot of lovely moments to be had, I think

Kelly Molson: Isn't there? I've got, like, a big grin on my face while we're chatting about now. It's lovely, Matt. And I think, actually, we can't talk about celebrating without discussing your recent award, because you won quite a fantastic award recently, didn't you? Let's talk about it. Let's celebrate it. 

Matthew Henderson: Thank you. Yeah, it was an amazing thing. So my great friend Matthew Hunt, who was formerly at the Science Museum, nominated me for Rising Star, the Cultural Enterprise Awards. And then I was sort of blown away that he would even consider that and then somehow won that. And literally this isn't something maybe I shouldn't be saying on the podcast, but I was literally talking to the person next to me and didn't hear because I didn't know that ever seen that I would win. So went up and was like, over the moon to win. And to be in that room full of those people years was I remember getting back to the hotel. I just couldn't sleep. Sort of reliving that. But then actually, there'd been a vote for the overall winner during the conference and amazingly won that as well. 

Matthew Henderson: So, yeah, it was certainly something that it was something that sent to my mom, really, a photograph of those two awards. And then the museum had great success as well, with Best Shop for the market stalls, a lot of market stalls that they did in the museum. And heritage awards and the Pandemic Pivot award. And best products for the cold cream and the chemist shop. So it was lovely as a team, really, at Beamish to celebrate those wins. And Allison, who's the stock manager at Beamish, we had a little shelf for those trophies and it was just in our little stock room. But it's a really special thing for a team that had sort of been brought to the front through lockdown because of the needs. 

Kelly Molson: I think that's wonderful and it's really good. Like you say, it's really important to celebrate all those little wins and they're big wins and they definitely need to be celebrated. It's been phenomenal talking to you today. Thank you so much for coming on. We always ask our podcast listeners to recommend a book that they love for us, something that might be something that they just enjoy reading to their children. It might be something that's helped shape their career in some way. What have you got for us today? 

Matthew Henderson: Thank you. So I'm actually, in between leaving Beamish and this new venture, I had four weeks off where I went to the movie theatre to volunteer. So my thing was that I was going to take loads of books and to sort of read. And actually being a walking by lines in the middle of the night and not being able to sleep was a need to do that. And I read a book called A Bit Of A Stretch by Chris Atkins, and it's not a book that would normally jump off the shelf to me, but it's a real story about his time that he spent in Wandsworth Prison after being involved in a tax avoidance scheme. And it's this day by day diary of his time in Wandsworth. And the reason that I picked that is previously, Johnson King hearing outreach, working in prisons.

Matthew Henderson: And I think at the moment, everyone's looking at the things that we can see in terms of cuts and the things that need support, but actually, for prison and sort of rehabilitation, it's behind a wall. And we never sort of look at it or think about it because it's not in many of our day to day lives. But that book and that sort of time for the work that I did in there really brought those people and those people that work there to the front. So I would recommend that I feel like every person in the country should have a copy of that book and it's just the most emotive funny book that I've ever read. So, yeah, I would definitely recommend it. 

Matthew Henderson: You could keep out the lions roaring over the top of it, but certainly I would recommend to anybody to read that. 

Kelly Molson: Brilliant. That great recommendation. Never been recommended before either, so this is a new one for us. Well, listen, if you want to win a copy of that book, as ever, if you go over to our Twitter account and you retweet this episode announcement with the words, I want Matthew's book, then you'll be in with the chance of winning it. It's been brilliant to have you on, Matthew. I'm so glad that everybody recommended you to come on. I'm so glad that I took their advice. Your new venture is called Creative Ideas and Solutions. Your website address is your name, right? 

Matthew Henderson: It is, yes. It's MatthewHenderson.net. 

Kelly Molson: There we go. We're going to put all of that in the show notes, so if you do fancy a chat with Matt, you'll be able to find him there. Matt, keep being you, because, honestly, this has been such a delight to talk to you. I've loved every single minute of it. I hope Bug is well and continues to be your best bud. 

Matthew Henderson: Thanks so much for the invitation here. It's a real honour. So thank you for that. 

Kelly Molson: It's been great. And maybe you'll come on again. Maybe come on again next year and you can tell us how things have been going. 

Matthew Henderson: Yeah, that'd be amazing. Yeah, I'll bring Bug with me. 

Kelly Molson: That's what I was hoping for. 

Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

We have launched our brand-new playbook: ‘The Retail Ready Guide to Going Beyond the Gift Shop’ — your go-to resource for building a successful e-commerce strategy that connects with your audience and drives sustainable growth.

Download your FREE copy here

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

Transcriptions:

Kelly Molson: Hello, hello lovely listeners.

Have you heard about the Ticketing Professionals Conference?

Ticketing Professionals Conference (or TPC for short)  is an educationally-led event focusing on innovation, best practice and continued improvement in the ticketing sector.

Run by people who work in OUR industry, not for commercial gain but to improve how we all work and develop as professionals.

Delegates come from all main strands of entertainment ticketing, attractions, performing arts, sports, and festivals.

I attended in 2022 and absolutely loved it, and this year I’m lucky enough to be speaking at the event.

It’s taking place from the 22nd to the 24th March in Birmingham, and I’ve been given a lovely discount code just for all of you.

Visit www.ticketingprofessionals.co.uk and you enter Skip10 in the discount box at checkout, then you’ll receive 10% off the price of your ticket.

Come and join me, and over 500 other ticketing and marketing professionals for a really fantastic conference.

That’s www.ticketingprofessionals.co.uk and Skip10 is your discount code.

I’ll see you there!

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

We have launched our brand-new playbook: ‘The Retail Ready Guide to Going Beyond the Gift Shop’ — your go-to resource for building a successful e-commerce strategy that connects with your audience and drives sustainable growth.

Download your FREE copy here

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends July 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/

https://culturalenterprises.org.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kingston-myles-080088118/

Kingston Myles is Head of Commercial Development at English Heritage. He describes his role as “seeking out and executing opportunities to generate new income for the charity and improve on processes to reduce expenditure”. Kingston is responsible for a number of growing and emerging businesses that intersect the Charity and its assets (sites, collections and brand) with commercial businesses (Venue Hire, Licensing, Holidays and Compliance). 

Kingston has a varied background and prior to joining the heritage sector in 2017 worked in numerous venues and across several high profile events including Glastonbury Festival. Kingston has a passion for both sustainability and equality, he describes this passion as being a positive culture amplifier. He plays an active part of driving change from within – currently sitting on the Organisations EDI Steering Group and is the founding member and chairperson of English Heritage’s BAME Staff & Volunteer Network. 

Kingston is driven by wanting to see more senior leaders that are representative of society across the arts, heritage and cultural sector. Kingston is also a Trustee for the Association of Cultural Enterprises – a sector supporting organisation focused on the advancement of commerce in the cultural sector.

Transcriptions:

Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world.  

In today's episode, I speak with Kingston Myles, Head of Commercial Development at English Heritage. 

Kingston shares his insight into where the biggest opportunities lie for diversifying income streams and his top three tips on how attractions of any size can utilise these strategies. 

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on itunes, Spotify and all the usual channels by searching to Skip the Queue. 

Kelly Molson: Kingston, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I'm very excited to have you here. 

Kingston Myles: More than welcome. 

Kelly Molson: Hopefully you'll feel as excited after I've asked you the icebreaker question. Who knows. But let's go. Right, this is quite topical for today, so I want to know, what are you most likely to buy when you exit through the gift shop. 

Kingston Myles: Me personally, probably a bottle of gin or alcohol. That's probably my go to when I leave through the gift shop. 

Kelly Molson: Good choice. A gin man. A man of my dreams. Not going to lie. Okay. All right, well, this is another one that leads on from that, actually. Do you have or have you ever had a collection of anything? 

Kingston Myles: Yes, when I was growing up, I had a collection of the James Bond videos and used to put them all together on the shelf and they used to paint a picture and that one was missing. My nan used to buy them for me when I was a kid and, like, only one of them was missing right up until videos kind of got killed by DVD and DVDs got killed by Netflix. So, yeah, I guess that was probably the one thing I can remember having, like, a proper collection of. 

Kelly Molson: Did you ever get the missing one? 

Kingston Myles: No, it was like number 13, I think, from memory. Not that it's bugged me for all these years. 

Kelly Molson: Look, someone listening to this is going to send you that now. They're going to hunt it down on ebay and be like, “Look what I found you”. 

Kingston Myles: And I'll be in the loft digging out the videos and then trying to find a video player. 

Kelly Molson: Have you still got them? 

Kingston Myles: I think they're still at my parents house and they're lost. Yeah, we don't throw stuff away easily. 

Kelly Molson: No, we're hoarders as well. It's really sad, though, isn't it. Because my mum did this when I was younger with Disney videos. So every new Disney film that came out on video, she bought, and I think she was thinking, “Oh, this is lovely. You know, one day I'll have grandchildren as well and they can watch them”. 

Kingston Myles: Yeah. And then streaming came along and now we've kind of just got everything at the click of a button. 

Kelly Molson: Disney+ mum, taken over. Right, good. I like this. Okay, last ice breaker question. What's the best attraction event that you've ever experienced? 

Kingston Myles: I went to the Ally Pally fireworks last year, which is the big fireworks show for London. And I'm not a Londoner, so you've got to imagine, first of all, I was in South London and I told friends I'll pop up and see them. There's no popping from South London to Ally Pally, as I found out the hard way. But I've just never seen a pop up one night fireworks show on the scale of that with like, the infrastructure and all the different bits that kind of make it what it was. I really underestimated it. I thought, I will turn up, there'll be like, a few burger vans and like, a bit of music and a bar. No, it's this just incredible pop up experience that takes over Ally Pally. 

Kingston Myles: So that was probably the one that surprised me most because I went thinking it would be like every other sort of local firework display and it was huge. 

Kelly Molson: Everybody rates this. I've never been to this. I can remember years ago, ice skating at Ally Pally, and I used to have to get three buses to get to Ally Pally to actually do that. But everybody speaks so highly of this fireworks attraction. Fireworks night. 

Kingston Myles: Never been. It's phenomenal. It's huge and there's literally tens of thousands of people go to see it. So it's definitely worthwhile going to. I think also it's one of those once you've been to it, you want to go and find something else because the magic will probably fade potentially relatively quickly and there's lots of other incredible displays around London, but it's definitely a worthwhile experience. 

Kelly Molson: Excellent. Good choice. Wasn't expecting that. Okay, right, your unpopular opinion. What have you prepared for us?

Kingston Myles: I think my really unpopular opinion is that actually we over-index our focus, especially in the culture and heritage sector, on gift shops, on catering and on membership. And actually the future is way beyond that. So that's probably my unpopular opinion. We over-index on shops and cafes and forget that there are dozens of other ways that you can generate income. 

Kelly Molson: Oh, I like this. And very topical for the things that we're going to talk about today as well. It's an excellent lead into the conversation. Okay, well, we are going to talk about diversifying income streams today. Your role. When we spoke pre interview, we had a brilliant chat and I just found your role so interesting and so diverse. Can you just share a little bit of what you do with our audience and kind of what your tasks are with achieving?

Kingston Myles: Yeah, sure. So my official title is head of commercial development, which is best summarised as being responsible for this kind of incubator of business growth and efficiency. So I'm responsible for four business areas within English Heritage: our brand licensing program, our portfolio of holiday cottages, and our venue hire business. And those are all income generating parts of this sort of incubator and then also responsible for managing a suite of national contracts. So the provision of services to all of our site operations teams and that's really about looking at efficiency opportunities, the chance to rationalise contracts and reduce perhaps the supplier debt that we have in terms of the number of suppliers we're working with so we can get better value for the charity. 

Kingston Myles: But all of those business areas are kind of unique in that they've got such scope to grow at a point they will eventually have their own, hopefully their own allocated head of department when they sort of graduate my care and then something else will fall into, I'm sure, my sort of pool. 

Kelly Molson: It feels quite entrepreneurial, your role, is it quite a unique role for English Heritage or is this something that you've kind of defined for yourself within the organisation?

Kingston Myles: Yes, I'm the first head of commercial development. The role was created back in 2020 with an initial focus on looking at brand licensing and contracts and compliance and then there was sort of an opportunity to pull the holiday cottage piece in as well. And then various sort of personnel and structure changes meant that I inherited the venue hire business, which is exciting because it's kind of the closest thing to sort of my previous job roles, sort of pre culture and heritage, but yeah, it's definitely unique in a sense of various business areas rather than sort of one specific focus, that traditional focus of having either like ahead of retail or ahead of catering, which we do have all head food and beverage, but within the cultural sector, sort of heads of business development, heads of business innovation, change, transformation. 

Kingston Myles: I mean, they all sound very buzzworthy, but there are definitely more and more roles emerging as institutions say, well, actually, how do we diversify our income streams. Strike up more partnerships. We kind of need somebody who is almost like a paid entrepreneur and I'm so privileged in that. That kind of really is my job. I'm paid to be entrepreneurial without the risk of having to invest all my own cash and capital into an idea, 

Kelly Molson: It’s the perfect role. 

Kingston Myles: Yeah, definitely. Especially because when it's successful and when we do great things, they contribute towards this sort of wider charitable purpose. So you get this real benefit of creating a business, but that business has this incredible sort of halo effect of doing good because we all work for a charity. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. So it's the warm and fuzzy feeling as well. You mentioned just briefly there that your roles previously outside of the sector, what were those roles and how have they helped you with this role? That's quite an interesting thing to understand. 

Kingston Myles: So I used to work in bars and nightclubs, hospitality and events, sort of a real event and hospitality sort of butterfly as that industry kind of is. You kind of chase progression, opportunities, new openings, there's always something sort of shiny and new moving in the hospitality space and managers move around a lot. But I think the transferable skills from that, it's everything from just general business operations and financial acumen which especially if you're in an independent operator, you're really close to both the PNL but also the balance sheet and cash flow. And then also kind of innovation and that entrepreneurial spirit that sort of need to be able to grow a business, whether that's more people through a door, a higher transaction value or a more efficient control of your suppliers and contractors, kind of it's all transferable into the sector. 

Kingston Myles: And there's this kind of really interesting change in the sector at the moment in that more and more people are transitioning into the sector. Rather than kind of perhaps growing through the sector, it's becoming more attractive as a sector to work in, which is exciting because it used to really be a case of sort of join and you had to work your way up, whereas actually the sector is recognising those transferable skills, add value, especially in this current climate. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, I like that take on it, actually, because we have a lot of guests that come on that work within the attraction sector that would start at quite a low level entry point and then work their way up. You're probably the first guest that's come in from a completely different perspective. It hasn't been your beer or endo. You haven't had this huge desire to work in it from the minute that you came out of school. You've transitioned from something that's completely different but really transferable. So I'm excited to hear where today takes us. All right, well, let's start. What I'd like to understand is how attractions start that process of diversifying its income streams. You talked a little bit at the beginning about we're quite tied to admission fees and membership and retail. How do they start to look beyond that?

Kingston Myles: Yeah, I think part of it is taking stock of what you have. If you've got big open green spaces, then great. You could focus on large third party events, working with production companies and clients and promoters. If you've got this really interesting design Led collection, or if you've got a really interesting story to tell, then perhaps it's more around sort of brand licensing and leveraging the intellectual property. So I guess step one is asking, what do I have beyond my shop, beyond my Cafe, beyond admissions. What product could I create? 

Kingston Myles: And what product is going to be the easiest to create is probably the best place to start because I speak to a lot of colleagues within the sector or a lot of sort of commercial managers within heritage and culture institutions that are like, right, well, we want to do everything that your job does. And I'm like, well, you don't have a portfolio of properties that could be transformed into high quality lets or accommodation. Never going to have a holiday business. So don't try and squeeze glamping into this really small corner of your estate. Focus on something else. So, yeah, I guess it's taking stock is key. 

Kelly Molson: That's really good advice, isn't it. And I guess it's looking at what you already have and making the most of it, which is a message that is quite key at the moment, where we're seeing budgets being marketing departments all over. You don't have to necessarily start from scratch. It's just about making the most of what you already have and developing that into something that you've already got quite a captive audience for. 

Kingston Myles: Yes, definitely, 100%. 

Kelly Molson: Great. Okay, so what are the areas that look quite exciting at the moment. If we're an attraction. Where can you see some of the biggest opportunities?

Kingston Myles: Yeah, I mean, so filming location hire. We've seen this huge boom in domestic filming location hire. Domestic film shoots, domestic productions, regional screen tourism offices are popping up. There are some incredible partners within the film sector. Film London, Creative England, Screen Yorkshire, sort of all these bodies that really drive trying to connect people with great spaces to production companies that want to film domestically. And I think as we see the kind of challenges of the cost of global travel and the strength of the pound in the sort of wider economic world, although I'm not an economist, sort of change, there's a real opportunity to capitalise on productions that say, actually, we can unit base. We can produce here, we can shoot here. We can shoot on location. We've got this tiny little island, the UK. 

Kingston Myles: And I predominantly focus, obviously, on England because of my role, but we've got this tiny little island. But there's so much in it, so much to see, so much diversity. So I definitely think there's an opportunity to unlock more spaces for filming a location hire, for sure. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's a great one. I guess that's relevant. If you have a stately home, for example, it's a perfect opportunity. But it kind of doesn't matter what your attraction is, right. Because we've seen TV shows be filmed at places like Bembom. I call it Bembom Brothers. But Dreamland in Margate. We've just seen a film that's been released very recently that's been shot as part of that. And I guess so there's opportunities regardless of what the size of your attraction is and what it actually is as well. 

Kingston Myles: Completely. And I think it's about for each attraction, they'll have unique challenges. If you're a high footfall visitor attraction, sort of a theme park, for example, then yeah, you're going to have the conflicting challenge of foregoing admissions revenue to potentially reduce your operating capacity to shoot a film. If you're the custodian of a collection of national significance or an indemnified collection of art, then you're going to have all of the unique challenges of working in a space with all of the environmental controls required to protect pieces of artwork and historic collections. And if you're an independent stately home, you're potentially going to have the challenges of the knowledge base required to execute a filming location hire, sort of safely, efficiently. So I think each part of the attraction sector is sort of a whole when you sort of that really broad spectrum of attractions. 

Kingston Myles: Each will have their own unique challenges. There's a real benefit in networking and learning and working with those within sort of business specific areas that already do it and do it well. So, yeah, hopefully that helps. 

Kelly Molson: Definitely helps. We'll talk a little bit about sector collaboration later as well. So I've got a few questions around that. What does English heritage do. Can you share some of the examples of the diversity that you've been able to develop within the organisation?

Kingston Myles: Yeah, so staying on the subject of filming location higher, as an example of an income stream that isn't purely based on what people might perceive, which is we've got historic properties, so they must just do period dramas. Actually, we make our properties available for blockbuster films. Obviously, I can't disclose what those are, but there are some that are in post production, which I'm really excited to see how they bring our properties to life in these really incredibly creative and thought through worlds and spaces. But it doesn't just have to be big major film shoots. We work with fashion houses, brands and editorial magazines to provide spaces for photo shoots. 

Kingston Myles: And then of course, within that same genre, we work with individuals, couples who might have a real affinity to a property that want to shoot an engagement shoot, or a wedding shoot, or a celebration of life shoot. So there's a real broad spectrum in that you don't have to suddenly close everything and have these massive film crews turn up with all these incredibly ginormous, almost intimidating pieces of equipment. It could just be a really lovely local couple that met at a property that are getting married down the road and on the day of their wedding, what they'd really like to do is jump in their wedding car, pop up, take some photos for a couple of hours and leave again. So it's that real spectrum of like two people in their camera person to two to 500 person strong film crew. 

Kelly Molson: I love that as well because that it means that regardless, again, of size of attraction, there's still something that you can offer in some way. And I think that's really important to point out is that these strategies, they aren't just for English Heritage is a very large attraction organisation, but it's not just for those. There's plenty that the smaller attractions can take from this as well. What other things does English Heritage do? Because I know that you've got partnerships. I know you mentioned holiday lets.

Kingston Myles: Yeah. So we've got an incredible portfolio of holiday lets. So we're really unique in all of our holiday lets are situated within sort of the boundary of our properties and then when the properties close in the evening to guests that are staying overnight, so day guests leave and our overnight guests can sort of explore the exterior spaces and gardens and landscapes overnight. So they're really popular. We're really lucky to welcome sort of just over 1300 holidays a year across our portfolio, which is exciting, and that's an expanding portfolio. So we're imminently about to open a new holiday at the Head Gardeners House at Audley End in Essex, and that's been through a renovation process. So that was sort of bringing the property out back into use. 

Kingston Myles: And we opened a property at Rest Park, which is not too far from Audley End End in 2021. But it's not just sort of holiday lets and filming. You know, we've got the brand and licensing program. So it's really about rather than sort of doing something at our site, if you kind of, you know, generalise the holiday business and the venue hire and filming business as sort of something that's happening at site, there's an activity at one of our properties. Our branded intellectual property licensing business is all about unlocking the assets that we have in the collection to tell the story of England we're really uniquely placed as English Heritage. Our CEO, Kate May referred to us once as the sort of the Museum of England, which is a really nice way of looking at the stories that we can tell. 

Kingston Myles: So our brand licensing program will do the things that one would expect. We'll use an incredible archive of wallpapers captured from properties over the years in sort of design led work. But we also try to work with a range of licensing partners or licensees that adopt some of our core values. Are they established English business manufacturing in England with some really incredible conservation and stewardship credentials? Are they celebrating sort of traditional ways of working. Because we're not only this sort of steward of nearly 400 historic monuments and the blue plaque scheme in London, but we're really here trying to preserve the sort of art, the craft, sort of the true vibe of Englishness. So we get this real opportunity to play from sort of design led work right through to sort of culture, craft and Englishness as a brand itself. 

Kelly Molson: Oh, my goodness. I have so many questions on these, but also a statement. I live like five minutes from Audley End and I had no idea that you were opening the Gardener's Cutters as a holiday let. I actually had no idea that English Heritage had a holiday let side to its organisation. So this was all quite new to me when we first spoke. What I really love about it is it really drives into the message that we're hearing more and more frequently now as we come through into 2023, that people are willing to pay more for something that is a really unique experience. And when you mentioned there about the holiday lets and people can then walk around the gardens at night and get a completely different I just thought, “Oh my goodness, I had no idea that you could actually do that”. 

Kingston Myles: Of course. So there's like an added reason to go and stay book somewhere. That's beautiful. Obviously it's going to beautiful, it's an English Heritage property, but you have this unique opportunity to explore the place that you're in when nobody else is there at a time that you would never, ever be able to be in it. And I just think that's amazing. 

Kingston Myles: Yeah, they're phenomenal and we've been really lucky. We've worked really hard tirelessly to drive up the quality of our offer. So we started a refurbishment program of our holiday estate towards the end of 2020, 2021. We're sort of now sort of at phase three of what will probably be five phases of bringing all of those holiday lets up to standard. So at the moment we've got a suite that are being refurbished as we speak. When the Head Gardener's House opens up Audley End, that will be sort of kitted out with I mean, the kitchen is beautiful, but so is the interior. And it's not just a case of, well, actually if we just thrown a load of stuff in there, we work really closely with the business that won the tender for the refurbishment. 

Kingston Myles: So we're working with John Lewis on that property and we work with their interior designers. We're trying to create and I know we'll touch on it later, but we're trying to create these experiences where actually, if you really enjoy being in one of our holiday cottages, you can go away and you can buy pretty much anything you see inside. And as much as possible, as the licensing program evolves, those products will be English Heritage products. So you'll be sat below a wallpaper that's inspired by a clipping from a collections archive down the road that actually was in a building on. So we have this incredible piece of wallpaper from Great Ormond Street. 

Kingston Myles: So the same road as the famous hospital that's used on product, and you'll be able to go and buy that, but you also might be able to buy it on a cushion or on home furnishings or on a bed spread, but you get to experience the quality of it first and then you've really got this sort of continued storytelling. Like guests don't just leave because they've checked out, they kind of take a little bit of us with them, which is the aspiration, and I think it's what the Premier ended this years ago. They had this whole campaign where you could buy the hypnos bed that you slept on in a Premier inn. And they were one of the first brands to sort of say, all we are as a Premier inn right. 

Kingston Myles: But if you had a great night's sleep, have this great night's sleep at home, because you can buy the same bed that we have. So, yeah, it's just kind of trying to perfect that wheel, if you like. 

Kelly Molson: You described it as experiential shopping, which I think is a great term. And I just love how many facets are waving into this in that you're celebrating artifacts, artwork, craft that has come from, you know, all these incredible places, and you're allowing people to now stay in a beautiful holiday cottage, purchase part of that experience to take home with them. If that's not diversifying countries, I don't know what describes it any better, to be honest. 

Kingston Myles: Yeah, and I mean, you know, as a charity, we're on this incredible mission to be financially self sufficient. So, you know, we are an independent charity from 2015, so and then this financial year is the last year that we received sort of government tapering relief. So we're really out there to become much loved to connect with our members, our visitors and our audience. And what better way to do that than not only offer them a great day out. Because that's like a core part of what we do. Offer them a great day out that really tells the story of England, offer them this opportunity for a great stay out that tells the story of England, and then an opportunity to sort of take a piece of that. Experience home with them or to go and shop for that experience. 

Kingston Myles: Because we'll never be able to put a three piece sofa or a kitchen in one of our retail spaces. They're gift shops. They're exit through the gift shops. They're incredibly well run by my colleagues in our retail team. So how can we do that? How can we showcase those other products through our holiday laps, et cetera.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's brilliant. If I can ask you a little bit about partnerships, I just think that this is so relevant to this part of the conversation. But what I'd love to understand is how you define what a good partnership looks like. How do you choose the products and how do you choose the organisations that you do partners with? 

Kingston Myles: Yeah, I guess the first thing to say is, and I can touch specifically on products because we have a real robust roadmap for how we choose who we're going to work with when it comes to sort of licensees. And partners to create product with in that aspect, but broader than that sort of partnerships for us. Touch on. Especially for me, on all of our business areas. So we've just closed a 30 night Christmas light trail at Kenwood in northwest London, which we run in partnership with Kilimanjaro Live Christmas at Kenwood. And we are hosting again Gardener's World Autumn Affair, and Audley End in Essex, that will be there for the second year this year. And we run that in partnership with the team behind Autumn Fair. 

Kingston Myles: I guess I bring those up because it really symbolises how partnerships work best for us, which is that there's an equal contribution where both parties are adding value. It could be really easy to mistake working with a charity or working with an attraction as potentially very one sided. We need, they have, or they have and we need, but actually it's not. We've got this real opportunity to grow combined audiences, add combined and shared value and celebrate sort of everything that stands true in both camps from a value perspective. With products, it's a slightly more robust roadmap because we are manufacturing something, we're creating something that's going to carry our trademark, our logo. So we have five core values that I apply to our licensing business. So we look for products of quality, we look for products which carry hallmarks of authenticity. 

Kingston Myles: Are they telling a story accurately? Because we are the storytellers of England, it has to be, right. Are they responsibly sourced? Is the organisation a responsible organisation. Is it fun? Because ultimately fun is one of our core values and it can sound really cheesy when you say one of our corporate values is fun with a capital F. But no, we are fun. We're ultimately a day out for lots of people, for nearly sort of pre pandemic, 10 million visitors a year and our 1. 2 million members. And then with products, we look at sort of, is there something imaginative here. Are we doing something different. Are we going to tell a really cool story of England in a way that people might not expect. 

Kingston Myles: Or is English Heritage as a brand going to appear somewhere that you might not expect but are sort of surprised and delighted by. And you could, I guess, engineer those values back over all the other partnerships that we have as well, because actually they're all of quality, they're all authentic. Everyone that we work with is respectful and responsible and lots of the stuff that we do, especially the events, are really fun and imaginative. So, yeah, I'm going to go away and add that into my own strategy now. 

Kelly Molson: I'm glad that you've been inspired by this conversation. What I really liked about that is that the way that you describe the products is that they're very unique to your values and very unique to your organisations. And that's what people are looking for, isn't it. They don't just want another cushion with something on it. They don't just want another thing that they can buy. They want something that they can only get when they visit your organisation. They can only get it if they go to Audley End. They can only get it if they go to it wherever else they go to. That's what's really important to people at the moment. That uniqueness completely. 

Kingston Myles: And I think one of the cool things about our brand licensing program is that we are loosely making products. We make the products available on site as much as we can and off site with retail partners, but you'd never normally expect to walk into. So I walked into Sainsbury. So I used my very first ever job, when I was like 18. I was on like I took a gap year and I guess a big regret. I should have just gone traveling it's in the world, right. But instead I was like, no, I'm going to work, I'm going to save, I'm going to go to university, I'm going to be really responsible. So my first average job was in Sainsbury's, and I went back to that Sainsbury store in Barnwood in Gloucester and I walked into the Beers, Wines and Spirits aisle. Shock. 

Kingston Myles: People are going to get a real perception of me here and they're hanging there on a Clip strip. I mean, I knew they were going to be there. Their hanging there was this chip shop, Scraps and Fries, a crisp product that we made with our partner, Made for Drink. So, you know, here I am, sort of twelve years on stood, you know, the shop still feels the same. You still recognise some of the colleagues stood in the Beers, Wines and Spirits are looking at this product that is made in partnership, crafted in partnership with Made for Drink. They're carbon neutral when they're produced, they're in recyclable packaging and they celebrate sort of flavors and stories of England through food. And it's an English Heritage product in a Sainsbury. 

Kingston Myles: It's not necessarily the type of product that people might expect to see our brand on, but actually when they learn about the story and then they learn about the partner that we've partnered with, they're surprised and delighted, and I always like to share. We had several different reach outs from prospective partners to create snacking products, crisps, et cetera. And we chose to go with Dan at Made For Drink because they best matched all of those values. I spoke about sort of quality, authenticity, respect, imagination and fun, rather than perhaps maybe a global snack manufacturer that, yes, we could have made tens of thousands of packs, but it would have been just our logo on just another bag. There wouldn't have been the depth of storytelling. 

Kingston Myles: And then when you look back to us being that sort of Museum of England with our sort of ambition of telling England's story, you kind of have to really stay true to those values to create a quality product and to create lasting partnerships and relationships. We don't want to feel like we have something. Our logo, they want it, great, have it. And then what do we get beyond that. Very little. Whereas with the partnership with Made For Drink, there's been lots of innovation. We're getting to work with lots of domestic food producers and flavor houses. So it's really exciting and it really kind of embodies everything that partnerships should for an attraction or a cultural organisation. 

Kelly Molson: A great story. So did you feel secretly pleased when you were stood in that same Sainsburys that you didn't go on that gap year and that you did save up and go to university to do all these wonderful things. 

Kingston Myles: Yeah, I felt a bit smug because I was like, from the shop floor to the shelf, this guy. So I had a little moment in the aisle and I took a little selfie and did that thing that everyone doesn't post it on LinkedIn, sort of with all of the sort of faux pas of the average LinkedIn post ending on a rhetorical question. But yeah, so it was a little moment of joy as I took it and I went through the self gang check out and bought it. And I was like, yeah, here we go. And I've got the receipt somewhere. It's nostalgic. It was fun. 

Kelly Molson: That's brilliant. And well deserved as well. Congratulations. Great story. Okay, what I'd love to do, we talked a little bit about how a lot of the strategies that you've worked through are they're not just for huge organisations. There are things that any size attraction can do. How can they utilise these strategies. Is there any way that you could summarise kind of like a top three tips for us. 

Kingston Myles: Yeah, so I have, like, I'm really a staunch believer in the working methodology, “Know, do and review”. So that'd be my first tip. Right. Know what you can't do. Because all the way back to sort of our first part of the conversation, like, know what you can't do, know what you can do. So take the time to look at, take stock, understand what you have, what you don't have, what you might need to be successful, then get on and do it. Because I'd say all managers at some point have definitely written or all leaders have definitely written a strategy that they've then done absolutely nothing with other than PDF it and shove it in a OneDrive or a folder somewhere. So get on with the doing, which is so important. And that means rolling up sleeves. 

Kingston Myles: You can't be a bedroom leader. You have to get out. Get out on the ground, stand there and really understand if, “Did I know everything or do I need to know more?”. So you're constantly learning through the due process and then review, right. Like, stop and wrap it up or think about it, perfect it, tweak it, don't let it just roll downhill, out of control. And equally, don't hold it at the top. Sort of afraid to let go, but yeah. So no do and review would be my first tip. My second tip, especially for smaller organisations, so the institution I worked in prior to English Heritage, so I worked for the University of Oxford in two different museums. One very big museum and one very small museum. My second tip really comes from there. Which is one meeting, one topic, one focus. 

Kingston Myles: When you're in a smaller institution stakeholders often have really wide reaching job remits and they're covering operations, commercial planning, health and safety, finance. You could be talking to the same person for all of those things. So don't sit down with that person and have a million different conversations. Really focus your time and energy one meeting, one topic, one focus. And I still use that to this day. I'm a real believer in like let's just talk about just this and then let's have a separate meeting to talk about something else. And then my final tip would be like the Power of no. I sound like I'm about to release three books, don't I. First book, know, do, review with Kingston. Second book, one meeting, one topic. 

Kelly Molson: And I would read these books. I would buy these books and read them. 

Kingston Myles: I'll brand license them and I'll put them in the holiday cottages. But yeah. The power of no. Right. It's okay to say no to things like if in the no process when you're doing all the research and all the groundwork does it not feel right. Do the numbers not stack up. We have human instinct and we've almost been programmed out of that. And there's lots of different analogies people run down and different avenues. Is it because actually we've got this hustle culture and we have to give everything a go. No, you don't have to give everything a go. If your expertise and skills and knowledge are telling you this is not going to work then just say no. And that's sometimes a really difficult decision. 

Kingston Myles: And I have lots of conversations with people recently I really want to do this but and I'm like if that butlist is factual and it's going to create a great amount of risk and don't do it. So yeah, the Power of no would be my third top tip. 

Kelly Molson: That is a great top tip for life in general, I think at Kingston. Weirdly. So every year I kind of set a word that I try to use as a guide for my year and this year's is reflect because I'm a bit of a people pleaser. So I say yes to many things and then run out of time and then end up not being able to do those things or just do them as badly. I do them to a level of degree that I could do better. So learning to say no I think is the most powerful tip that you've shared in that process and I'm going. 

Kingston Myles: To remember that and I've used it and I'm proud of the fact that we've said no to potential partnerships, we've said no to potential events. We've said no to certain activity types at certain types. Because when we take stock of everything we're trying to do there's already so much we say yes to that actually it's okay to say no because we can do really well over here. You know, the sort of the middle area. You know, sometimes the entrepreneurial spirit in you pushes the yes through. But a lot of time that sort of, “hold up, wait a minute”. Actually, no. It is so important and it saved us from going down in so many of my job roles.

Kingston Myles: It saved me from going down like the rabbit hole of sort of you convince yourself that then you have to put all your energy and time into something and actually it doesn't yield the result that time could have yielded if you'd have focused somewhere else. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's really important advice that everybody should listen to. Thank you. Brilliant tips. Thank you for sharing. You just touched on something there that I'd like to talk about because you talked about entrepreneurial spirit and I think there always is that element of wanting to do more and wanting to get stuck into doing the excited things. We talked a little bit about sector support at the beginning and you did mention that this role is quite relatively unique. Where do you go to find your kind of support network for the role that you have. 

Kingston Myles: So I'm really lucky in that I'm a trustee for the Association of Cultural Enterprises, so I sit on their board of trustees. I'm also a director of the trading company that we have. And the best way to summarise the association is that it's all about advancing commerce and business innovation in the cultural sector. So I appreciate that for sort of the wider attraction sector sort of culture and heritage is a swim lane sort of in the pool that is attractions. But that's incredible because all of the organisations that are members and nearly 400 cultural organisations are members sort of across the country, all of those organisations have got an appetite to do more. 

Kingston Myles: So you end up finding that actually this commercial manager in this really small museum somewhere has got this really incredible idea and we can help them with that, or I can help them with that, or one of my fellow trustees can help them with that, or this massive organisation wants to turn to a small organisation because they send something incredible. And I always think back to and I referenced the marketing of this, but there was the Museum of English Rural Life had this incredible Twitter explosion with some of their content, and suddenly everyone turned to their monsoor. How do you go viral? How has Murray gone viral? How can we go viral? And I guess the association is the best place to go and find the person likely to behind something commercially innovative. 

Kingston Myles: If you want to see something incredible that's happened at English Heritage, I mean, I'll shamelessly promote myself, but I'm probably likely to be able to point you in the direction of the commercial leader responsible for that. And everyone's really up for networking there. It's kind of the backbone of how it works is that willingness to share and support one another. And I think the culture and heritage sector within the attraction space is really good at that because we're quite comfortable with the fact that there's enough success there for everyone. I appreciate that. When you've got a competitor potentially down the road and you're a purely commercial attraction that's a little bit of a difficult conversation to have in the first instance. But actually it opens up doors and access to resources and also access to people's mistakes. Right. 

Kingston Myles: Like, what if people said no to. Or would they have said no to. Now that you can learn from and say no to yourself. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. Again, brilliant advice. And it's so good that there are organisations out there that offer this level of support. What we'll do is everything that we've talked about today we'll pop links to in the show notes so you can access information about English Heritage. You can see some of the products and we'll pop the link to the ACE organisation as well. And if that is useful to any of our listeners you'll know where to go and find it. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing. Kingston. This has been a brilliant chat. I'm so grateful for your time, for your insight into this. We always like to ask our guests to share a book that they love at the end of the podcast. So what have you prepared for us today? 

Kingston Myles: Yeah, so I'm waxed lyrical about this book. It's called First Break All The Rules. It's a gallup study of what successful managers do differently. So First Break All the Rules is probably one of the most powerful leadership books I've read for a couple of reasons. One, it's backed by this phenomenal global study of businesses, their leaders, their people, their results. So there are some great books out there but they're theoretical, they're someone's opinion. This book is etched in statistical facts. So I quite like that. That pleases the inner nerd in me. And secondly, it really does force you to think differently about especially if you're leaders or a leader of a team. Really forces you to think slightly differently about how you can get the best out of your best people, how you can recruit for the best people. 

Kingston Myles: And at first read, it can read quite controversially because what's called First Break All the Rules so you would expect it but it can read quite controversially. It will force you to really think about Do Leaders Play Favorites. Is a really great chapter in that book and the difference between skills, knowledge and talent and coming to terms with the fact that you can teach people skills and knowledge but their talent, their behaviours. You can do your best to bring out what somebody has but you can never add to that in the book. So I would definitely recommend especially leaders of teams and leaders of leaders to read that book or listen to them. 

Kelly Molson: Great book choice. So that has not come up on the podcast in, what, 60 odd episodes. So that is a really good one to go on the list. And as ever, listeners, if you head over to our Twitter account and you retweet this episode announcement with the words I want Kingston's book, you'll be in with the chance of winning a copy as well. Amazing. Thank you so much again for coming on. It's been a really interesting chat. I am sure that at some point we'll get to meet each other at Audley End maybe as well. One of the next events that you're running there.

Kingston Myles:  100%. We should do like an ad hoc episode live from  Audley End. 

Kelly Molson: Okay. Let's talk about how we can make that happen. Excellent. Thanks again. 

Kingston Myles: You're welcome.

Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

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Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

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Show references:

https://arival.travel/

https://twitter.com/douglasquinby

https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglasquinby/

Douglas Quinby co-founded Arival to fill the huge void in insights, information and conferences for travel’s third-largest and most important sector: Tours, Activities & Attractions. Since its founding in 2016, Arival has become the defining platform for the sector, with three conferences worldwide, a series of definitive research reports and the Arival.travel media site and newsletter.  

Prior to co-founding Arival he served as Senior Vice President, Research at Phocuswright, where he led seminal studies on numerous travel trends and sectors, including Tours, Activities & Attractions, as well as programming for Phocuswright conferences around the world.

Transcriptions:

Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. 

In today's episode, I speak with Douglas Quinby, cofounder and CEO of Arival. Douglas and I chat through a few topics covering the economic outlook for 2023, the big shift in discovering new experiences, ticketing tech, and a little bit on dynamic pricing. 

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on itunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. 

Kelly Molson: Douglas, thank you so much for joining me on the Skip the Queue podcast today. I'm so excited that you could come on. 

Douglas Quinby: Well beyond thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation, Kelly. 

Kelly Molson: Very, very welcome. Straight into our ice breakers. So, Doug, I would like to know, do you have any hidden talents that we should know about? 

Douglas Quinby: Hidden talents? Let's see. I actually was a music major in college and I have a music degree and studied composition and piano. Haven't done much with that talent in some time, much to my wife's chagrin. She complains about it and I get a little embarrassed about it, like, we'll have friends over and she wants me to play the piano for everybody, and I get a little self conscious about it. So that's actually one of my commitments to my wife, is I'm going to get our piano tuned, I'm going to start practicing again, and I'm not going to be bashful about playing when we have people over or when she wants me to. 

Kelly Molson: I think that is such a wonderful talent. I genuinely said to my husband it a couple of weeks ago, if there was two things that I could do, one would be I'd really love to be good at languages, and then I would really love to learn to play the piano. I think it's great to be able to do that. Do you not find it quite mindful as well when you play? 

Douglas Quinby: Well, I do, and actually, when we had our two boys, I made a deliberate effort of teaching them to play piano. And so for years, I would sit down every day, or maybe almost every day, four or five days a week and make them practice. And we also hired a teacher to come in. But a lot of stress with that, with forcing two boys to play the piano and sit down every day. And I can tell you it was not always mindful and peaceful. Anyone who's raising kids will know, right. So I think when they turn 15, like, okay, if you want to go and do something else, that's fine. 

Douglas Quinby: And I just took a pause from the whole thing, so but, yes, I think as you get older yeah, I would get back in and there are moments when you can be mindful and just relaxing and pleasant. 

Kelly Molson: Okay. All right, next one. What is your ultimate guilty pleasure song? 

Douglas Quinby: A guilty pleasure song. Oh, yeah, I know, but I don't know the name. 

Kelly Molson: Are you going to sing it for us? 

Douglas Quinby: Oh, goodness. What's the song? There's also that song by the Black Eyed Peas. I'm terrible with names. 

Kelly Molson: I've got a feeling. 

Douglas Quinby: Yeah. So that's one. Like, sometimes I'll put that on with my boys in the car and we'll totally jam out together. Like we're dancing around stage. But no, let me. Okay. Now, that's important. This is an important question. 

Kelly Molson: It is an important question. I genuinely thought that you were going to break out into song and do it that way, Doug. I thought that was where you'll go over this. And if you want, feel free. 

Douglas Quinby: Oh, my goodness. Gosh. It's also what happens when you get older. I just find..

Kelly Molson: The suspense is killing us. An easier final question for you. What is the one thing you would like to do this year that you've never done before? 

Douglas Quinby: Well, this is going to be a kind of boring one. I've had a pretty amazing career. I've been able to travel to so many different places and have so many amazing experiences, and in particular, working in what we at Arival, we call the best part of travel. Right. So tours, activities and attractions all of those things that travellers do when they get there. I've been beyond fortunate to have an opportunity to just meet so many amazing people whose whole lives are all about delivering amazing experiences to people. So I've done things like when I was in Dubai ATM through an industry connection. We did a climb up a sand dune in Sharjah. And then when we came down, we had an ice bucket, like an ice immersion experience, things like that. When I think about bucket list stuff, I don't know. 

Douglas Quinby: To me, that's not as important. My commitment this year is my 17 year old is in his senior year in school, and he's going to be going to college in the fall. And I've had so much travel and devoted so much of my life to starting my career and then starting Arival and building it over the past five years or keeping it afloat over the last two. And so now I'm actually committed to I'm not doing any travel other than what's absolutely essential until he goes to school. And I'm going to spend as much time as possible with him and make sure that he knows as he goes off into the world, how much his father is behind him and has his back. 

Kelly Molson: That's a great answer to the question, Doug. And I think that is the most brilliant thing that he could be able to do right now. And I'm sure that he will very much appreciate that time with you as well. 

Douglas Quinby: Well, I hope so. Nothing more important. 

Kelly Molson: Absolutely not. Right, Doug. It is time for your unpopular opinion. What have you prepared for us today? 

Douglas Quinby: Well, my unpopular opinion well, I don't know if it's unpopular or not. You can tell me. But I'm continually amazed at how terrible so many attractions are at marketing to travellers and understanding the traveller psyche and understanding how travel distribution works. And it's completely different from how a kind of a local thinks about visiting an attraction or having an experience. And so how you find them, how you target them, how you get into their mindset. That's one piece and then the other piece is also understanding travel distribution and the systems and how to optimise that. It's something that's dramatically overlooked. So here's just one example. 

Douglas Quinby: In fact, one of the things that we do at Arival constantly is where we pulse the industry on a variety of trends to get a sense of what's happening, especially over the past two and a half years, which has been so crazy for all of us. Well, now, I guess it's three years now, is it? It is It is almost it's coming up on three years since the pandemic started. So just here's one example. In 2022, in a survey we had done, of almost 400 attractions over the past year, 23% are not using a modern booking or ticketing system to manage their business. To me, it's incomprehensible. I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. I mean, think about it from an airline perspective or a hotel perspective. Imagine if 23% of airlines did not use a central reservation system. 

Douglas Quinby: Or imagine if 23% of hotels did not have a property management system. I mean, travel wouldn't exist, right? The way it does today. It wouldn't even be possible. So I find it interesting. It's a real challenge to the industry and it's very common, I think, across experiences. People get into this business or an attraction is started because it's based on a mission. They may have a cultural mission. It may be a notforprofit. They may or they may be passionate about, like, say in the case of the tours world, like they want to be out in the water taking people on kayak tours or walking them up a mountain. 

Douglas Quinby: But at the same time, to have a business, to be able to deliver those experiences, to be able to advance the cultural mission, you want to have as many people come to your attraction as possible. You want to share that. And that requires an investment in the operation and the business. It requires understanding who the customer is. But it's a natural thing of most businesses. You tend to be focused on your own product or your own thing, but you also have to shift and think about the orientation of the customer and where they are and what they're looking for. I don't know if it's an unpopular opinion because frankly, it's just a fact. It's just a fact when I see how most attractions market their experience to travellers and the challenges that the travel industry has. 

Douglas Quinby: For example, in accessing attraction ticket inventory, when I see that less than 1% of attractions worldwide engage in any kind of dynamic pricing which is not just a tool to charge more money, it's actually a tool for things like optimising the guest experience because you can more effectively disperse your customer demand over the course of a day or a week in order to make it a better experience for everybody.  There's so much opportunity that's missed in the world of attractions. 

Kelly Molson: I would love to know what listeners think about this. So, as ever, if you want to feedback on Doug's unpopular opinion on our Twitter account, feel free. There's definitely a conversation. I mean, there's a whole podcast piece around your unpopular opinion. I think there Doug. We're going touch on a couple of the subject matters from it today. But yeah, I think there's a whole piece around exploring that. I don't know how unpopular it is because I would tend to agree with you. And I think, like you said, it is a fact. I think the attractions industry has moved on dramatically from a digital perspective in the last three years. 

Kelly Molson: They were forced to move quicker, they were forced to innovate, they were forced to introduce things that they might have been thinking about doing them, but might have taken another two or three years to actually implement because they had to. But I think that some of those decisions and some of the things that they've implemented have been done in a quite rudimentary way because there was a time element attached to it. In the UK, attractions couldn't open unless they could do pre booked and timed tickets. Small attractions, I mean, all of a sudden you've got to have the infrastructure to be able to implement that. You've got to find the right booking system, you've got to be able to pay for those things for you to be able to open safe. 

Douglas Quinby: Yeah, but this stuff is not this is not rocket science. No one needs to have expertise in artificial intelligence or you don't need to. In fact, a lot of the systems that are out there today, and this is one of the most amazing things in the world of, say, in the tours and activities segment of the experiences industry, which has many more smaller businesses, there's been an absolute revolution over the past decade. There has been literally dozens upon dozens of startups that have stepped into the market. They offer very simple, easy to use, SaaS platforms. You can get your business up and running within a couple of days, if not less. You get your tickets loaded and you flip a switch and you can start selling that stuff directly through online travel agencies, through other resellers. You can set different rules. 

Douglas Quinby: And this is stuff where often there's not even an upfront cost, it's just your own internal resources. So there's been a dramatic change within the enterprise software side of the sector that has opened up all of these avenues to this industry. Now, of course, it's one thing if you're a small tour company and you do five or six departures a week, and you're a one or two person shop and you're a visitor attraction with thousands or tens of thousands of guests a year.  

Douglas Quinby: And you've got operations and you have a board or you have of course, there's a lot of other things to consider there as well. There's no reason for it. And again, I think for attractions, especially those that have a not for profit mission, some of the great and even where I live in Atlanta, Georgia, there are some terrific and very small local museums and places to visit that explore history of the south in small towns here outside of Atlanta, for example, or the Atlanta the City History Museum. But accessing the content and discovering it as a consumer is hard. It's not easy. So it's just a huge missed opportunity. 

Douglas Quinby: Of course, there's a lot of the big attractions, the great ones, they do a great job and there are many amazing. I want to be clear, too, there are many incredible travel marketers within the world of attractions, right? And you all know who you are and you're out there. So I just want to say, for those of you like, this is not aimed at you, but it is aimed at, I think, the mid to long tail of amazing experience operators out there that could just benefit. So much more and not just benefit themselves commercially, but benefit people who haven't experienced their attraction, haven't experienced their museum or that little that special thing that they create that could delight so many more people. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, I agree. There's a lot to pick here, Doug. Well, let's go back to what you said. So in the UK, so 2022, we really focused a lot about staffing challenges and the rising cost of labour. That was a huge topic across the board. That's still a challenge. But in the UK especially, we have got currently a very high cost of living crisis. Utility costs have been driven up predominantly by the war against Ukraine. We have attractions that are reporting a rise of between 200 and 900% in their electricity gas bills. So there's been a recent publication in The Guardian saying that rising costs have led to staff redundancies. They've curtailed open hours and nine out of ten sites fear that they could close permanently, and that's in castles, museums and theatres. That's really drastic. That's the real bad end of what's going on at the moment. 

Kelly Molson: We've had things like train strikes in the UK, which are a necessary evil. I personally am, for one, support the rail strikes, but they do have a huge impact, especially on theatres. People that are going into London suddenly can't get into London, or they have to drive into London, and it bumps the cost up for parking. All kinds of things going on. There's still very few visits from international travellers, although that's on the rise. But Asia is only just opening up the borders, so we still have a lot of attractions that are very heavily dependent on international tourism that are nowhere near back to the visitor numbers that they did, that they should be out and just to throw into the rigs. 

Kelly Molson: We know from speaking to many attractions that marketing budgets are looking to be cut this year because of the high cost of utilities being risen. So marketing budgets could be cut by about 15% to 20% in the UK. What does it look like, Doug, for you? You're US based, but you speak to a lot of US and international and European based attractions. Is it a similar story there? What's happening? 

Douglas Quinby: It's not, actually. Fortunes are quite mixed. I think the UK in particular and parts of Europe are being hit especially hard. In the United States, it's a very different picture. In fact, it's one of the most confusing times in terms of trying to forecast what the economy is going to do. Everyone is talking about recession. It seems like the Federal Reserve here is committed to putting the country into recession by tamping down inflation and raising interest rates. But at the same time, our federal government has just pushed through, at the end of last year, a $1.7 trillion spending package. And so it seems like we've got the Fed and the government kind of at odds in terms of where the economy should be going. We are seeing mass layoffs. 

Douglas Quinby: Well, mass layoffs is probably a strong word, but widespread layoffs in certain sectors like tech and in certain areas of the corporate world, an expectation that earnings are going to be depressed. And this is in the US. But I think also globally through the first half of this year. Yet at the same time, the labour market is extremely tight. There's a lot of demand. We just had our conference in Las Vegas in October, and for all the talk of recession, the hotels were full, the casinos were packed. We had a hard time getting restaurant reservations to feed the team during the event. So it's a very confusing time. I think one of the things that I think every attraction needs to be thinking about and honestly, it's not even an attraction. 

Douglas Quinby: What I'm going to say is I think it applies to all industries, although I think in particular with regard to travel and to experiences because one, there's still very clear demand for getting out and doing things. We're still very much in a kind of COVID hangover. We see from all of our consumer sentiment work that they are prioritising getting out and doing things, being with people, with the people they love, having experiences whether it's local or it's travel. We measure this across a variety of ways, but just in a very simple way. Three out of five kind of Gen Z and young millennials are clearly prioritising experiences over stuff. That's where they're spending their money. That number actually jumps to almost three and four for Gen Z and millennials who are in that upper income bracket. 

Douglas Quinby: For us, that metric is a household income of 150,000 USD or up. And that's actually for us, that's very important and for all attractions and experience providers to think about because we really have to put it very simply, a kind of bifurcated consumer landscape. I think of it as the haves and the havesums. So you have the lower middle income segment and this applies to the US and Europe where, okay, they are being more directly affected by inflation, by rising cost of living, and a little bit by more the kind of recessionary impacts which are a bit deeper in Europe than they are in the US. And so yes, their spend is going to be a bit muted around travel and around experiences and they're going to be a bit more price sensitive. 

Douglas Quinby: But you also have this upper income segment which we see despite everything that's happening in the world, there's no the gas is on the pedal all the way down. They're going for it. They intend to spend, do more, they want to travel more, they want to see more. And also we've seen an extraordinary shift coming out of the pandemic, which I think of it as like a post COVID kind of convulsion period that we're in right now. Just to give you and this is in a recent report that we've a research, report on the experiences traveller and the global attractions traveller that we've published over the past couple of months where just a dramatic shift in the demand for small group and private experiences, even around attractions. 

Douglas Quinby: So as I've been covering this industry for many years, we've always seen it's been the iconic visitor attractions that have been the primary driver of tourism. I want to go to London and go to see the Tower. I want to go to the National Gallery or I'm going to Paris. I got to go to the Louvre, I've got to go to Buzzed or say and so on and so forth. But increasing, well, not just increasingly.  

Douglas Quinby: It's been a dramatic shift as travellers have come back. It's not just that I want to get a ticket to the Coliseum, but I want to have a private or special small group experience with my friends and family. I'm going to book that tour that will include the ticket, but I want all the bells and whistles or yes, I want to go to the top of the edge in New York with my fiance, with my wife. I want to do the Champagne Sunset Experience and I'm going to pay twice the price and we're going to linger there and have that's the kind of extraordinary shift that we're seeing. And I've been saying this very clearly, one for any experienced operator or attraction, one understand who your customers are. Are they more price sensitive or are they more in the kind of the haves? Right? 

Douglas Quinby: Or if you serve both, then how can you really think about the products that you offer in a way to get the most out of them or deliver the best? And so a really great example is that it's not just the ticket to the top but it's the ticket to the top with the Champagne experience at a special time of day. Or maybe it's offering a VIP behind the scenes experience or a special meal or something that just makes it a little bit more special and there's just a real opportunity to sell more and to do more for that. Right? And then I think the one last thought is for those travellers or visitors that are a bit more price sensitive, really to think about, definitely you don't want to get into the discount game. 

Douglas Quinby: I'm always very vehemently opposed to discounting unless it's done in a way that really can help you drive demand during low volume periods, but really to think about how can you deliver more, maybe deliver more value, right? Or more incentives. So maybe build something in to the experience, to the ticket or through a membership or subscription that creates a sense of more value for the guests. But don't simply go to discounting, especially at a time like this when we're all feeling pressure from the bottom up in terms of our balance sheets. 

Kelly Molson: Great advice. And what you've described is exactly what we've been talking about as well and what we've been hearing. So just before Christmas, I attended the Heads, a marketing meeting that ALVA run and Bernard Donoghue talked exactly the same scenarios that you just had. It is down to the experience. People will pay more, but they are looking for something that is outside of the ordinary now. So it's not just about come to the attraction, come to see this thing, what does that package look like? How can you exploit what you have in a more interesting way for the audience that are already going to come but they'll probably spend more if you have this VIP package or this next level package if we talk about. A question for you. So we talked about the haves and the have not as much. 

Kelly Molson: So how did you define it? 

Douglas Quinby: The haves and the have-sums. 

Kelly Molson: The haves and the have-sums. Okay, so the haves and the have-sums. Where do you think this fits in terms of membership? Because that's been quite a big discussion topic recently in that during the pandemic membership sales went up phenomenally, astronomically actually. So it was an altruistic purchase. You were doing what you could to support your favourite attraction while they couldn't open. What we're starting to see is a decline in people renewing memberships because of how nervous the cost of living crisis is making people. And the assumption that Bernard described this dispute is that previously if you had a membership, so I have a membership for the National Trust, your previous mindset would be, "Oh well, let's go to the local National Trust today because that's free because we've got our membership, we've already paid for that". And you wouldn't really think about the secondary spend. 

Kelly Molson: So you're going to buy lunch while you're there or you might get something in the gift shop. Whereas now people are starting to go, "that's not a free visit for us anymore". So we need to think about whether we go, what we spend while we're there. So maybe we take a packed lunch rather than we buy in the cafe, which is obviously then going to start to have a significant effect on the attraction itself. How can organisations do better with their memberships to kind of help those people that maybe have them and are thinking about letting them go? 

Douglas Quinby: That's a really tough one, especially in this environment in the UK. And I think again, it comes down to what more can you layer in to really make it valuable? So what kind of additional kind of benefits or perks or things can you expand to really tie that in? But that's something that I think really has to be addressed at the attraction level. There's no way around this. You've got to understand your customer and who they are. Why did they become a member? What were the key drivers and how can you keep that going? I can tell you, for us, when our kids were younger, were members of the zoo here in Atlanta. We were members of another museum, a local science museum that we would take the kids to on a regular basis. 

Douglas Quinby: But as the kids aged out, weren't going as much, right? And there wasn't a need. And their programming or their content was not compelling enough for us to stay with it. For example, now since they've actually introduced some things like at the science museum, like you can go to the observatory and they have cocktails under the stars at night and things like that, which might be a little bit more interesting for parents to still be involved. There's no, I think, blanket easy answer for the industry as a whole. That's something that you've really got to understand your triggers and what do your guests really value the most about the membership and what are things that you can do to really kind of leverage that to drive that engagement. But there's one thing too, I'm just going to throw out there. 

Douglas Quinby: This is maybe more of an idea I think could be, I don't know, a million dollar idea or 100 million dollar idea within this sector. One of the businesses that has been a clear use case for travellers is that City Attraction Pass, right where you come into a city and you can buy that pass. You give access to so many attractions, and you get so many visits over the course of four or five days, or whatever the duration of the passes that you purchase. But there's a missing, I think, business opportunity within the world of experiences, which is the equivalent of like a multi attraction membership. There's actually an interesting little startup based in New York called Sesame which is doing something where you basically you pay almost a negligible. 

Douglas Quinby: I think it's like 15 or $20 a year, and you get access to opaque pricing, to attractions all over the world, but even just something where you become So I guess the corollary I think of is something like class pass in the US. Or gym pass where you subscribe to the service and you can get access to gyms all over the country or to yoga classes or whatever it might be. And I think there's a huge opportunity for some entrepreneurial startup to step in and aggregate a lot of this content in a subscription or a membership service, or you can do a zip line in North Georgia and then you can go to a National Trust experience somewhere in the UK and you can do this and you can do that. 

Douglas Quinby: And to build that in, I think there's an incredible opportunity there for something like that. A multi attraction subscription or membership service. Yeah. So I'm going to throw that out as my 100 billion dollar idea for some listener to your podcast. 

Kelly Molson: There you go, listeners who's going to grab it and run with it. It's a really good idea. As you were speaking, I was just thinking we work with a number of attractions on the North Norfolk in the North Norfolk area, which is a lovely coastal area in the UK. And like a Norfolk path for all of the attractions would be incredible because they're all within an hour's drive of each other. So something like that could work really well for those regional areas. So, yeah. All right. There you go. Norfolk attractions. What are you saying? Hit us up. Okay, let's talk about, you wrote a brilliant blog last September called The Future of Discovery in Travel. Very welcome. It's excellent. And it's about the big shift in experiences, discovery, and marketing. So we know that marketing teams are stretched in attractions. 

Kelly Molson: They're normally on the small side, and they're doing a million different jobs at once. We also know that they need a really clear strategy, and they also need to focus on the right time, on the right channels for them to find where their existing audiences and where their new audiences are. And we've talked a little bit about it's really vital at the moment to know exactly who your audiences are and where they are. This blog, you start off with a really great story about your son, and I wondered if you could just share the story about your son and sneakers. It's a great start and introduction to this. 

Douglas Quinby: Yeah, sure, I'm happy to. Well, so first there's a paradigm within the travel industry. There's a phrase that's used quite a bit called the "Path to Purchase". And there's a well worn paradigm. It's almost accepted, like gospel within the industry of how a traveller goes about finding where they want to go, what they want to do, all of that stuff. And there was a study that I think was done maybe, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago that was sponsored by Expedia that kind of walks through the path to purchase. You start on Google, you do a search, and then statistically, you visit 38 websites across online travel agencies and review sites like TripAdvisor and whatnot. And from that you kind of figure out, okay, where you want to go. And then you go through the actual shopping phase. 

Douglas Quinby: You do your flights and your accommodation, and then you get your things to do or experiences, which are often you're booking that the day of travel or very close in or even while you're in destination. So that's the kind of well worn path of like, Google to OTAs to booking sites and, you know, boom, you're off. But I've been I was just struck by something. So this happened in the spring where one day this package arrived at our house, and it was this pair of sneakers. It was like this $200 pair of sneakers that my 17 year old bought. And I mean, first of all, I have no idea where he got $200 to buy a pair of sneakers, but that's a secondary issue. So I was just curious. 

Douglas Quinby: It was like a designer pair of sneakers, like a certain type of Nike or something, but it wasn't something maybe you'd go into a Nike store and find I don't know, I just asked him, “How did you choose this pair of sneakers?” You have a teenage boy, they don't talk, they don't tell you anything, right? So that was like, I'm never going to find out the answer to that. But one of the things that I definitely know is I know how he didn't buy those sneakers. I know he didn't go on to Google. I know he didn't visit 38 different sneaker websites to find the best sneaker at the best price, the best time. He didn't go through all of that process. Now, did he see somebody on TikTok or a friend of his on Instagram? I don't know. 

Douglas Quinby: Was it a friend of his at school who was wearing the sneakers? I have no idea. But that paradigm of how people find and discover what they want to do, what they're going to do, is shifting dramatically, especially for that teenage, that Gen Z, and even the younger millennial set in a very extraordinary way. So, in a great example, I was speaking to Dan Christian of Dharma, which is a tour company, who actually would be another great person for you to have on your podcast, by the way, who's very focused on the passion economy. 

Douglas Quinby: And he had this quote that sticks to my head, which is, "The tour happened to be in Costa Rica", which basically means increasingly younger people, they are connected to friends, they're connected to particular brands or experiences, or they're going to see something on TikTok or Instagram and they're going to say, "oh want to do that thing". And that is going to drive the whole path to purchase and I want to do that thing. Oh, that thing happens to be in Costa Rica, or that happens to be in London or whatever. It could be anywhere, but I want to do that thing with those people. And by the way, I'll say to you, I'm just a guy who runs an event and research company for attractions and experiences, but don't take my word for it. 

Douglas Quinby: Just look at what Google has done over the past year. They've completely and are continuing to revamp, in particular, their mobile search experience. And a VP at Google made an extraordinary statement at a conference, a tech conference last summer, where he said, we are seeing 40% of Gen Z. They are turning not to Google, not to Maps or search to find where to go or where to eat nearby. They're turning to Instagram, they're turning to TikTok. And it's amazing when you ask these young people and there was a great story in the New York Times about this, I think last August or September, where young people were saying they're being asked to compare, let's say, a review of a restaurant on TikTok versus a Google review. And it's like, I don't have to read anything because young people aren't reading. 

Douglas Quinby: They don't have to think. Literally, they're saying, "I don't have to think. I can just see the people at the restaurant. I can see them experiencing it. I can see myself in that. And that's the kind of experience I want to have, and that's all I need". And that's an extraordinary shift. So I think the next question you would probably ask is, okay, so what does that mean for an attraction or experienced operator? How do you deal with that, right? Especially when budgets are stretched and your marketing team has already got too much to do. 

Kelly Molson: You're suddenly asking them to take part and create shortfall video content. Right? That's the bottom line. We know that is the future of this type of search. That's a massive ask, isn't it? It seemed far more complex than sitting down and writing a blog article, for example. There's a lot more involvement in it. 

Douglas Quinby: I'm not asking to do anything. I'm just simply saying, "look, this is what's happening, and you all can decide what you want to do". That's up to you. But there is a profound shift that is underway. It's happening so quickly, it's hard to get your arms around. It's very hard to understand, okay, well, "do I suddenly stop spending my money on Facebook and Google and put everything into TikTok?" No, of course not. Right? But because there's still intentional demand on those channels, and we detail all of this in the research and the reports too, you can just very clearly see it. So in terms of where younger travellers are going to discover things to do. 

Douglas Quinby: So TikTok has already surpassed Twitter, and I think for Gen Z, it's going to surpass Facebook within the next probably in the next year or two. Because we can already see Facebook is now like, it's people my age, like it's Gen X and maybe older millennials, but it's really falling off for young folks. But it's not an either or. This is always the thing that kind of comes up, oh, well, it's another channel, that's marketing, that's never going to change. Your marketing teams are always going to be strapped. They're always going to have too much to do. It's. How are you going to work through that? So, yes, you still have to do Google, you still have to do Facebook, you still have to do the photos on Instagram. 

Douglas Quinby: But now you need to add reals, you need to add short form vertical video. And I would say you just begin by testing. And, you know, the best thing you can do, and there's so many great examples of this is hire one of these. Hire a young person who does this stuff. Hire a 22 year old who lives in this world and ask them to start creating stuff and give them some license just to do things. And there's so much great guidance out there as well on that. We've got some great content, too. We had an influencer at our Vegas event, a guy named Robbie Roth, who is an influencer for LGBTQ travel in general, and he gave some incredible sessions on how to deliver authenticity through social content. 

Douglas Quinby: He's all like, the number one thing, the next time you take a video, make sure it's vertical. Just everything has got to be vertical first and foremost. But just experiment and keep going and start to develop that muscle because it will become very important. It already is very important. 

Kelly Molson: So I had a couple of questions on this topic, I have to say, we've had a couple of brilliant past podcast guests that have come on and talked to us about building great social community channels. We had Danielle Nichols and Ross Ballinger come on from Drayton Manor, which is a theme park based in the UK. So they talked a lot about how they had started their TikTok channel, and they've just got a really great kind of social community that they've been able to build, and it allows them to engage with their community, ask them for feedback, and in turn, the community feels like they've got their back in decisions that have been made. 

Kelly Molson: The theme park went through a rebrand process a little while ago and they were really able to kind of engage with their audience because of the work that they put into it. Now I can totally see TikTok working for Drayton Manor, like even if they hadn't have done it already, I can see it because of the type of people that would go there, the thrill seekers, that kind of Gen Z, but where's the opportunity for the attraction sector that are very kind of family orientated? So we think about the team market that we've talked about. They're thinking about travel and experiences, potentially gap year, that kind of thing. But a lot of the attractions that we work with are really focused on that family marketing. So ultimately it's going to be the parents that are making those purchasing decisions. 

Kelly Molson: Is this still a channel that you think that there's opportunity for those kind of attractions? 

Douglas Quinby: Well, fine, the parents might be ultimately paying for it, but we're the kids. The kids are on TikTok and Instagram, they're not on Facebook. So that's number one. And the best way to get families there is to get kids excited about something. So that's even more of a reason to be on there. And also something that we've seen as well across every social media channel. Well, maybe not everyone, but most certainly is. It starts with kind of the younger, more digitally, kind of switched on generation, but very quickly becomes widely used across all generations. Right? We saw that in Facebook, we saw that in Instagram. We're seeing it in Twitter as well. 

Douglas Quinby: And the demographics for TikTok as well, I think I'm sure already rapidly evolving to cut across a range of generations. That should definitely be a part of the family kind of marketing plan. And to try to reach parents and show in particular kids having an amazing experience at your experiences is great. And by the way, those videos too, I point out as well, it's not just platform specific. Like we use TikTok and Instagram. That's what we're currently using because as the language or how we talk about this media format, because TikTok in particular has advanced this incredible idea of watching these 15, 30 second videos and then swiping up to the next one. But they've identified this extraordinary way to connect with people and make an experience or access to information really extraordinary shift. 

Douglas Quinby: And so I think we're going to see that basic principle of what they've learned be adopted by other platforms. So for example, I think back in December, the news broke that Amazon was launching a TikTok style video feed within the Amazon app initially going to be in the US. And a kind of a beta test so you could actually do discovery shopping within Amazon in a TikTok style video feed. I mean, obviously Instagram is going all in with reels you've got on YouTube. You now have YouTube shorts. And I've been noticing when I pop into YouTube every now and again, that sometimes they're experimenting with defaulting to shorts as opposed to the pull type of YouTube experience that they've done that I think we're more accustomed to. 

Douglas Quinby: I have also written about and I'm kind of waiting for a travel platform and really a travel experiences platform to experiment with a TikTok style shopping experience on their website. Because, you know, quite frankly, when I think about my 17 year old in his sneakers when he takes his first vacation, right? Or, you know, maybe when he goes off in his first college, you know, spring break trip, you know, with his friends, and let's say they go to the beach or something, and they're going to look for things to do. I mean, how is he going to find experiences? Is he going to go on to Google or via Tour or Expedia and say, oh well, let me find fishing trips or let me find this jetski rental or let me do this. 

Douglas Quinby: I think he's going to be on Instagram or one of his friends is going to be on TikTok and they're going to say, “Oh, I see this experience of these guys on a boat doing this. Doesn't look like fun, let's go find that”, right? And that's going to drive the search and the booking. I think that the model that TikTok is showing for all of us. I expect to see that replicate in some way. And I'm actually in the experiences world and travel in general, I'm still pretty shocked that you don't have the widespread use of a video in the shopping experience. 

Douglas Quinby: It's still very much like go in, there's a tour, there's all the inclusions, there's the exclusions, or I go onto an attraction site, or there's this ticket and I can do this and I can do that, and there's this, and I've got to read all this stuff. These guys, they don't want to read, they want to say, "Oh, there's this experience, there's this attraction. Let me see myself. Oh, that's great. I don't give a s*** about any of all the rules and all the things and I have to be here at ten and bring this. No, just show me this thing. Let's do it". That's the shift that I think has got to happen, and it's very common for product owners and marketers. Well, I've done all this work, I got to put all this detail out. But your customers, they don't care. 

Douglas Quinby: They don't want to know about the sausage and how it's made and all the details. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's a bit like the tipping point from like, cookery books to cookery shows, isn't it? What's more engaging for someone, don't get me wrong, I've got a bookshelf full of cookery books out there, but actually, show me someone making it and show me the kind of sizzle and show me that I'm going to engage with that more. 

Douglas Quinby: Kelly, I'm going to go even further and I will tell you so one of the things that I did over the pandemic was since were all cooped up, so I just said, “you know, I'm going to learn to become a better cook,” right? Because it was mostly just hamburgers and pasta and sauce from a jar, right? Because both my wife and I were working and all crazy. And whatnot this was in 2020, early 2020, mid 2020, and TikTok was really becoming a phenomenon. So I downloaded TikTok and I started using it. And one of the first things that popped up was a recipe for Thai vegan lemongrass coconut pumpkin soup. And that's never anything I could have thought I would have been able to make. And it was a 30 second video. 

Douglas Quinby: It wasn't like a detailed recipe or anything, it was just a video of the bowl. And you see the hands and there's like nice music in the background and you just see everything that the person is doing and there's a little text. This is what the ingredient is. Then it's next. And so within 30 seconds, I watched this video and I'm like, “holy s***, I can do that. I can make that”. And that looks really amazing. And so I went and made it and it was amazing. And suddenly it was like, wait, I just watched a 30 second video. I could make something that was really what I thought in my mind would have been a real complex undertaking. 

Douglas Quinby: I think that's an extraordinary outcome from what TikTok I think is shown from a communication standpoint is how the genius and the possibility of delivering an extraordinary amount of information in a very short amount of time, but more importantly, making the viewer feel like they can relate to it, like they can participate. I can make that soup. I can have that experience. That's the power of that. And no incredible tour description page or attraction description page with a list of inclusions and exclusions and all of this. And, you know, it's not it's never going to be the same. 

Kelly Molson: It's never going to be the same. A 30 second video has empowered you to be a better chef. I love that, Doug. 

Douglas Quinby: Well, there you go.

Kelly Molson: I want to talk a little bit about dynamic pricing. Gosh, we've been talking for ages and I feel like we've covered loads today, but I think this is really important to talk about. So there's different pricing strategies for attractions at the moment. So you've got the traditional kind of static price model where operators sell a ticket for the same time, same price, no matter when that ticket is purchased or when it's going to be used. You've got variable price and strategy which might be based on the day it's purchased or the time slot for when the ticket is purchased and each day is priced according to demand. I kind of like this approach. 

Kelly Molson: We had Simon Addison from Roman Baths come on and talk about their approach to this. And I think I find this approach quite empowering for the visitor because it gives them the choice of when they're going to come, depending on what they want to pay for that experience. But dynamic pricing is a strategy where attractions can adjust the prices of their offerings to account for changing demand. So, for instance, like, an airline will shift seat prices based on seat type or the number of remaining seats and the time until the flight as well. Now, that's what some attractions do, but it's actually quite a small minority at the moment, isn't it? Are we seeing an uptake in dynamic prices or are we still finding that it's just the big players that can actually use this strategy at the moment? 

Douglas Quinby: Yeah, well, so first, from our surveying, like it's less than 1% of attractions and operators are doing any type of dynamic pricing. And just to be very clear, the distinction between dynamic and variable. So a variable is something like, “okay, I'm going to have a different weekend price versus a weekday price or a different price for a 09:00 A.M entry on Monday versus a 03:00 P.M. entry on Saturday or something”. But those prices stay the same over the course of the season or over the course of the year. Whereas dynamic, it's like, “okay, it looks like my 03:00 slot on Saturday is nearly a capacity. We've only got 10% left. Let's increase the price by 5% or 7%”. So there's still pretty low uptick, very low, less than 1%. 

Douglas Quinby: However, we've also seen in our surveying, in terms of technical technology related priorities, that is one of the in fact, the top priority for visitor attractions heading into next year, I think it was 57%. So that they were looking at it very seriously and were quite interested, which is a really big deal. And so one piece to this is, well, there are a lot of okay, there's a lot of complexities. So, yes, there are a number of providers in the market, technology companies that are stepping in and offering this capability. These could be either companies like there's a company in the US called Diginex which is basically it's a layer on top of the ticketing system. There are other companies like Schmidt's out of Switzerland which is more of a ticketing system provider that has a dynamic pricing layer. 

Douglas Quinby: And there's some other company, there's some other booking system providers like Mantrada and others that are layering in dynamic pricing within their booking system capability. But there's still some big issues that need to be addressed within the space. I mean, one is there's still just a gap in just the fundamentals of the technology. You need to have a robust solid ticketing system and just control of your basic inventory and pricing. And once you have that, then we can start to think about dynamic pricing. That's one. Then the next piece is what are the signals and what are the triggers to drive that? And it's going to vary a lot from attraction to attraction. But it could be things like weather, it can be things like demand. 

Douglas Quinby: There could be things like maybe there's the World Cup in Qatar and there's going to be increased demand for a great attraction there than you would want during that time when the destination is going to be overflowing. You can increase your prices. So there's a lot of different kind of factors and inputs there and there's a lot of debate about it too. I think at a consumer level, there's that old thing of while you're sitting on the airplane and the guy next to you spent half the price on the plane ticket and does that frustrate you? But I think increasingly consumers have come to understand this. It's become pretty commonplace and I think people will understand it. 

Douglas Quinby: And I also think as well, it's an opportunity for attractions, not just to make a little more money, but it's also, as I said, I think at the outset, to provide a better guest experience. I think especially for tier one attractions and top destinations, that's got to be the top priority. How can you disperse your guests in a more effective way? Because there's no question we had a little pandemic induced hiatus from over tourism, but it's already back in some places fast and furious and attractions are going to be very quickly overrun, especially when Asia really opens up and comes back. So how can you use smart pricing strategies to create a better guest experience, to have a better impact on your attraction and on the local community? I think it's not just about making money. 

Douglas Quinby: So yeah, this is going to be a major theme within the sector over the next couple of years and I would expect the industry to take it up pretty rapidly. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, I really like the definition of putting your prices up actually gives the customer a better experience because it comes down to the operational factors again, isn't it? If you know you're going to be extremely busy for this period, you put your prices up a touch, but that touch allows you to hire X amount more visitor experience people that can greet your guests and give them that experience. So it's all about it still is all about the customer, which is really important. 

Douglas Quinby: And it surely can also potentially enable an attraction to lower prices during certain times. Right. If you can yield up during certain times, you can make the attraction more accessible. Again, it's not just about making more money. I mean, that certainly should be a benefit, right, but it's also about can be about making your venue more accessible, about making the guest experience better. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. And I think that's the message that has to be driven to your audience as well, isn't it? Because otherwise it just feels a little bit unjust, but they're not being given the information to understand that actually this is a better decision for them. There's so much that we could talk about. We are out of time. We're basically out of time. We always end up podcast by asking our guests to share a book that they love with us. Have you prepared for us today? 

Douglas Quinby: Yes, I have. And actually, this is a book I recommend quite a bit. And it might be it's not like a typical book because I know you've got lots of great recommendations and there's lots of amazing business books out there. But one of the books that has always stuck with me, it's actually it's a service manual. It's called Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Customer Service. And it's a short paperback. It's I think it's like 109 pages or even less. It was written as a manual for customer service teams. But actually, as I read it struck me as basically it's a guide for being a great human being and how to treat people in an extraordinary way and how to respond to questions when you don't know the answer, how to make people feel like you care about them. 

Douglas Quinby: And one of the things my wife has always said is, "people never remember what you say, really, but they remember how you made them feel". To me, that book is basically it's a guidepost to leaving people feel like they matter to you and that you're going to serve them well. And that also ties into your brand. Like everyone is their own personal brand and every action that you have with every person is a reflection of that brand. That book impacted me in that way and I've always kind of thought about it as a way to be a guidepost for how I interact with everybody. Not just with my customers or clients or our event partners, or our employees, with my friends, with my family, with everybody. 

Kelly Molson: Doug, that is a book that is right up my street and that's going to go top of my pile. And I'm going to buy it. I'm going to buy it from my team as well. 

Douglas Quinby: Highly recommended. 

Kelly Molson: As ever, listeners if you want to win a copy of Doug's book, then if you head over to our Twitter account and you retweet this episode announcement with the words, "I want Doug's book", then we will enter you into a draw to potentially win it.  You'll have to come back on because there are so many other topics that we could have covered. So come back in 2024 and we'll see how some of these predictions and things that we've talked about have worked out this year. But thank you. It's been lovely to chat. 

Douglas Quinby: Well, just for all of those attractions who are listening, we have our Arival Berlin Conference right before ITV March 5, 6 and 7 in Berlin at the amazing Estrella Hotel, where all of the things that Kelly has been bugging me about over the past, what has it been, 45 minutes or an hour or so. We have a couple of days just devoted to all of these topics in the world of experiences in the future. And we've got speakers from Google and Get Your Guide and actually the Moco Museum, which is all in on dynamic pricing, by the way. And they're going to be leading an in depth workshop on what they're doing and among so much else, on distribution and growth. And you're going to meet a lot of incredible experience operators and attractions and distributors and technology providers. 

Douglas Quinby: It's really for us, it's our vision to create the hub of the experiences sector for travel and to help this industry grow and improve. And Kelly is going to be there. 

Kelly Molson: I was going to say Doug, the highlight of it is that I'll be there speaking as well.

Douglas Quinby: That's right. That's right. Which we're really looking forward to. So please do consider joining us. We promise you have an amazing time with an amazing community and learn tons. 

Kelly Molson: It's a great line up of speakers and it really does look like an absolutely incredible conference. We'll put all the details in the show notes so none of you will miss out and you'll be able to book online. And even if you don't make the conference, go and check out the Arival website because some of the reporting on there is really phenomenal and so valuable to the sector. And I've learned a lot in the last couple of weeks just reading through some of the reports that Doug has been able to send me through. So that is well worth a visit, everyone. Doug, thank you. It's been fabulous. 

Douglas Quinby: Thank you, Kelly. 

Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast..

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends July 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/

https://twitter.com/McKayEli

https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethmckay1/

Elizabeth McKay is an award-winning creative leader with experience in heritage, public-service broadcasting, and commercial advertising. She joined London Transport Museum as Chief Operating Officer in September 2018 to lead the design and delivery of its future vision. Elizabeth is an active Trustee and Deputy Chair of Kids in Museums, an independent charity dedicated to making museums open and welcoming to families, and a member of the Insights Council supporting the English National Opera. 

Elizabeth was previously Chief Learning Officer at Historic Royal Palaces, where she developed a new strategy that doubled the reach with new audiences. Her large-scale events and activities were recognised for excellence in the sector with awards including from Museum + Heritage and Learning Technologies. 

Before that, Elizabeth was the Head of BBC Knowledge Campaigns and an Executive Producer. Her projects won a Webby, Peabody, Children’s Bafta and a Royal Television Society Education Award for Best Campaign. Elizabeth had a successful career working on leading brands at Grey Advertising in London and New York. 

Elizabeth holds a BA in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University and an MBA from Oxford’s Graduate School of Business. She lives in London with her husband and two children and enjoys taking part in the many rich cultural experiences that London offers. 

Transcriptions:

Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. These chats are fun, informative, and hopefully always interesting. 

In today's episode, I speak with Elizabeth McKay, Chief Operating Officer at the London Transport Museum. Elizabeth shares how else LTM has developed a culture of innovation and how creative and entrepreneurial ideas are encouraged and supported at the museum. 

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on itunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. 

Kelly Molson: Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. It's lovely to see you. 

Elizabeth McKay: This is really exciting. I wasn't sure when you asked me to do this, but it would all be about but now we're here. 

Kelly Molson: It's going to be wonderful, Elizabeth. But first, as ever, I have to ask you some ice breaker questions, because that is the rule of the podcast. 

Elizabeth McKay: I understand. 

Kelly Molson: Okay, so if you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you choose to be? 

Elizabeth McKay: Oh, on top of a ski mountain, no question. 

Kelly Molson: Oh, you're this is fabulous. We're recording this in the run up to Christmas listeners, and it is snowy in London, so this is fabulous for you. 

Elizabeth McKay: London does not have the slopes or the incline that I would like, and the powder does not remain on the ground for long enough. 

Kelly Molson: And let's face it, trudging through London in the snow is not like being at the top of a mountain skiing down it, is it? 

Elizabeth McKay: No, it's not as beautiful as it might be walking around my local cemetery before it melts. Not the same. 

Kelly Molson: Okay, good. So would you rather travel back in time to meet your ancestors or go to the future to meet your descendants? 

Elizabeth McKay: That's a really good question. I probably want to do both. I'd like to go back in time because some of my ancestors travelled across the plains in America in covered wagons, and I think that just slightly blows my mind. They even took English antiques with them. It just doesn't seem right. All that pain they went through. The future would be really good, too. Oh, my God. 

Kelly Molson: That is absolutely fascinating. 

Elizabeth McKay: It's part of our lore.

Kelly Molson: And I love that you've come full circle, as though they trust you all the way over there and you've trusted all the way back. 

Elizabeth McKay: I know. Yeah. I don't know how they feel about that, but I'm making the eastward migration. 

Kelly Molson: All right, as I mentioned, we are recording this just in the run up to Christmas. So what one thing would you most like to achieve in 2023? 

Elizabeth McKay: Well, we're working on our five year strategy right now, so I'd probably most like to land that, be very clear about our forward direction of travel and be kind of aligned with that view with a bunch of happy, engaged, enthusiastic people. 

Kelly Molson: Excellent. And that sets the tone for what we're going to talk about on this podcast today. But unpopular opinion first. What have you prepared for us, Elizabeth? 

Elizabeth McKay: Dark unsweetened chocolate is much better than milky sweet chocolate. So the nastier the better, the more bitter, the less sugar, higher the cocoa. 

Kelly Molson: What percentage are you going? Are you going 85 and higher? 

Elizabeth McKay: Yeah, 85% or 90 if you're really brave. 

Kelly Molson: I like this unpopular opinion and I'm going to say I don't know how unpopular it is because we made a bit of a shift over to Dutch. So my husband is a massive chocoholic. Like, if a pudding on the menu is not chocolate, he's not having it. And if chocolate is in the house, he's eating it. But he made the switch over to dark chocolate because he can eat a smaller amount and it actually satisfies his cravings quicker. So he would be with you on that. 

Elizabeth McKay: I thought I was going to be unpopular. 

Kelly Molson: Well, you might be. This is just me. You might be. I'm with you on it. But listeners, let us know, are we going dark chocolate or milk chocolate? 

Elizabeth McKay: My kids are not happy with this decision, but there we are. I buy the chocolates. So they just have to get on board with that. 

Kelly Molson: They have to lump it then. That's the rules of the house. 

Elizabeth McKay: Grandparents indulge. 

Kelly Molson: Excellent, excellent unpopular opinion, let us know, listeners, if you are with us or with Elizabeth or against Elizabeth. Tell us a little bit about your role at the London Transport Museum. 

Elizabeth McKay: Okay, well, I'm the chief operating officer at the London Transport Museum. That's two acronyms COO and LTM together. I think the COO is kind of do everything and anything role. So for me, that's strategy, forward planning, capital projects, innovation, DNI, green agenda safeguarding, and basically all the internal stuff. And so I get to poke my nose into everything, anything that needs kind of help, support or advocacy, really. And I'm also the Deputy Chair of Kids in Museums, so I get to be on the other side of the kind of governance table in that role. 

Kelly Molson: It's a big remit, what you have on your play, isn't it? I hadn't really considered how many different hats that you would have to wear on a daily basis. 

Elizabeth McKay: I think it's different at different organisations. So I was really fortunate it was a new role when I came into LTM. So you get to shape a role if you're not just picking up what something has been done before. So that's useful. So I could just add in all the stuff that I really wanted to do. 

Kelly Molson: I love it. That's a dream role, right? I would like this and all of these things, please. 

Elizabeth McKay: Yes, exactly. 

Kelly Molson: So we had a little chat prior to talking today and this is really the driver for what our conversation is going to be about today. But you said that culture was the driver for why you joined the organisation. So I really want to talk about kind of culture and innovation today. What was it about the culture at LTM that really appealed to you? What made it really stand out? 

Elizabeth McKay: Well, I read somewhere that 75% of people consider a company's culture before applying for a job. That was really interesting and, you know, generally, organisation cultures, you know, values, beliefs, and attitudes and all the things that influence how people behave, really. So it's authentic. It's how an organisation responds in a crisis, how teams adapt, how people interact. And it's also one of those things that's a real top indicator of employee satisfaction. So it's a real top reason people stick around and stay in the job. So it's super important. So what attracted me to LTM and this was four and a half years ago was this kind of can do attitude. I really liked the entrepreneurial spirit. 

Elizabeth McKay: People were really nice and struck me as genuinely collaborative, and there was a real openness I was struck by this, by the people I met, by the kind of process I met when I first met Sam, the director, like, genuine good people vibes. And I didn't feel there were any barriers or that people were precious. So all of that really kind of struck me. 

Kelly Molson: It's interesting that you mentioned entrepreneurial, because that's not often a word that is associated with museums or culture or heritage. Not in the sense of not in the sense of sometimes how they view things. 

Elizabeth McKay: Yeah, I think it's really interesting, and it's part of what attracted me to LTM, and it's part of what drives us all. It's absolutely great. And one of the first things I did when I joined is ran a series of workshops to kind of codify, you know, our culture, because all of these stuff was just brilliant, but it felt like it needed to be pulled together, so and I'm kind of a self confessed strategy geek. So we got everybody together and ran serious workshops. And entrepreneurial was so key to how people thought about what the museum did and their own roles. So was the word playful, which is something that the people had used a lot and, you know, was in various documents and things. So those two things together were really important. 

Elizabeth McKay: And then other words like collaborative, active, courageous, and inclusive came out as partly it's how people describe themselves, and partly it's kind of aspirational. Right. So all of that. I worked with everyone and kind of came up with a strategic framework that we use. As I said, it's kind of codifying all of this. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. One of the things he mentioned is that the culture there is kind of forgiving and encouraging. How did you define that? As part of these kind of strategy workshops? Or was that already defined before you kind of arrived? 

Elizabeth McKay: Oh, that's interesting. Did I say that those are really good words. 

Kelly Molson: They are really good words.

Elizabeth McKay: Those are really good words. And I think what that means is it's an environment where creativity is really encouraged. So our purpose, which we kind of defined in this process I mentioned, is igniting curiosity to shape the future. It's always there. It's an ether right, a culture. So what you're trying to do is always ensure you understand it and then develop it in different ways. So I think we have a culture that people really thrive on ideas and making things happen. I think now, thinking about it, I'd really underline courageous as an important word too. And also having just navigated through COVID, I'm really acutely aware of my colleagues, what they've been through, what so many people in the sector have been through, just keeping it all together and keeping the show on the road. 

Elizabeth McKay: So I think courageous is something, a word we use, and I think it's increasingly more important and valuable and accurate. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned creative there, which is interesting because one of the things I want to delve into a little bit is about the innovation and the culture of innovation that you've created. So we had Pete Austin come on from Imperial War Museums quite a few episodes back now, and he talked about innovation in marketing. And one of the things that he really stressed is that a lot of people hang on the idea of innovation as always being something new or a new idea or a big idea. But actually, innovation can be about making what you already have better. And I think that's really important to hold that in your mindset, is that it's not just about the big and new and shiny. 

Kelly Molson: It is sometimes just about a small change that's really innovative in the organisation with something that you're already doing and just doing it in a better way. So I wanted to kind of understand, what does innovation mean to you from your perspective, from the organisation? 

Elizabeth McKay: Yeah, that's a good question. And one thing is so important that it's not about innovation for innovation's sake, always have to have a purpose and an outcome. That's why you're doing it. So it can't be gratuitous. So I think it's really difficult to define. And there's a whole industry around innovation, isn't there? Writers, businesses, agencies, people who help you define it or harness it or provide methods or just basically hand it back to you. Right, but I'd probably go back to defining it as a new idea. But it could be a concept or product or a method, as you say. It can be incremental, those little twists, but also it can be disruptive, it can be radical, but I think it has to lead to some kind of change or improvement. 

Elizabeth McKay: I think there's an element of agility and adaptability that's required to and going back to the idea of kind of courageousness, it needs to be an element of bravery. You got to take some risks because it's changing something. The safe thing is just keep doing what you're doing. The brave courageous thing is push the boat, try something new. Experiment, pilot, innovate. I'm real big believer in all of that. I was remembering this like, great quote. I don't know who it was. Some strategy guru said, "whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision". 

Kelly Molson: Yes, very true. I like that quote. 

Elizabeth McKay: Maybe somebody can tell us who've said that. 

Kelly Molson: Let us know, listeners. It's an excellent quote. We'd love to be able to attach it to somebody.. 

Elizabeth McKay: Find it. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's true, isn't it? And I think that what you said about courageous, it can be a really small move as well because I guess there's an element of courageousness needed when you bring ideas to people, your team will be empowered by you to think about ways that they can be more innovative. But they do have to be courageous in coming to you with an idea that they might think is a bit out there or they might think won't be accepted that well, who knows? So it starts off a really small level, doesn't it? Or a small part.

Elizabeth McKay: It does. And it goes back to the culture of the organisation too. So I think there are different ways to unpack this. Right? So going back to talking about articulating your principles, so entrepreneurial and playful, for example. There's a lot in this. So entrepreneurial is priding yourself to be financially sustainable. We earn 80% of our income, so we have a really diversified income stream. So it really helps in periods of uncertainty. Great shop, corporate membership in London, which was originally a tour business, now it's a whole multichannel experience, right? And then playful is a brand strong brand. It's a word we love. We fully embraced it in all levels. So you can see it in the marketing and the product, our tone of voice, programming, all those things. So that's a lot to play with. 

Elizabeth McKay: And then I really think that innovation can come from anywhere. So the challenge is you kind of say about how you bring those ideas forward. You need to have ways that people can meaningfully input, right? And you can do this in so many different ways. We can consultation, so you ask for input or co creation. So you're working together on something and you need some kind of systems, right? If you have a creative proposal format or a form or something, it needs to kind of go somewhere, it needs to be looked at, needs to be discussed, it needs to be responded to. All that stuff plays together, really. I think about this a lot, actually. 

Kelly Molson: I can too. 

Elizabeth McKay: Because my background is kind of creative person. I started in advertising, I moved to the BBC, I've led creative teams. I've always done that. So, yeah, I think you have to have both the strategy and the values and you have to have the kind of systems and processes. systems and processes.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's really interesting. I didn't know this about your background, but I sensed that you might have had a creative background because the way that you've talked about how you would approach certain things is the way that I have been taught to approach certain things from my kind of graphic design background. So I did wonder if you'd been trained in a similar way. 

Elizabeth McKay: Yeah, exactly. And that's why I get really excited about this. That's why the most fun I have in my job is my meetings with my head of design and they always overrun and we always come up with all these great things and then we have to step back and apply all the principles and the financial sustainability and the models and everything. 

Kelly Molson: Actually, that leads me to a really good question. One of the questions I had was how does London Transport Museum approach innovation? How do you encourage ideas? And you've talked about workshops and co creation stuff. How do you overcome the challenge of choosing and managing those ideas? You can talk for endless hours with your design manager. I'm sure there's some incredible things that have come out of that. How do you refine those ideas and choose which ones you actually bring to market or bring to the organisation? 

Elizabeth McKay: Yeah, good question. Million dollar question. You've got to be agile, I think. Not all ideas also come up at convenient times to fit into planning processes. That said, I think you could build flexibility into your processes. It's really important that no is not your default answer, which is true in parenting as well as business. So what's an example of that? So this year and last year, we staggered our planning processes to allow for early ideas to come out that were unfunded. Don't worry, we just want to hear what they are. And it gave them time to be kind of shaped opportunities for the fundraising team to look at them, nurture, develop. So that's one, as I mentioned, love a good workshop with lots of post it notes. But yes, there are so many ways to generate and iterate and choose ideas. 

Elizabeth McKay: I think that the other thing is you really need to delegate down to the people who are the creative engines too. That's rich coming from me, because I like to get involved in all this stuff. Right. But I know when and where to step back. And so, good example. Our social media manager, super fabulous, basically pitched, starting a Tiktok channel, said, yeah, go and do it, and it's just taken off. Phenomenal. 

Kelly Molson: Great. 

Elizabeth McKay: So the downside is she's just been poached and she's going off to a dog. Watch the space. In the new year, we're going to have an opening. Retail, I mean, our retail is..

Kelly Molson: Your shop is fabulous. Your shop is fabulous. There is a gift under the tree for my dad from your shop for this year. It is absolutely brilliant. 

Elizabeth McKay: Root master of PJs. 

Kelly Molson: No. Excellent Piccadilly Line socks because really good memory. So my dad is not a fan of the Underground, so we used to drive to Arnold Grove, get on the tube there, so we could come directly into Covent Garden on one tube. Just one tube. So the Piccadilly Line holds good memories for me. 

Elizabeth McKay: Holds good memories. Yeah. Well, the Moquet socks in a box is a good one too. But all of those products, they're just fabulous. And we have great brand icons to play with, granted. And it was really helpful of TfL to open the Elizabeth Line for a number of reasons. Whole new product line and obviously all made for me. So I think my husband's drawing the line at the Elizabeth Line Moquet sofa in the living room. 

Kelly Molson: I saw the chair in the shop and was like that. It's a bit of me, I'm not going to lie. It looks fabulous. Is your whole house kitted out in the London Transport Museum memorabilia? 

Elizabeth McKay: No, I think the divorce court would be calm. I don't have the room. I do have my mug. Small bits. Small bits that I channel. All that said, another team which is super creative is the Hidden London team. It's a little juggernaut and has its own internal experts, like Chris and City and we pivoted during lockdown, they launched a YouTube channel, it had its 100 episodes. We're now doing a tele series. And all the guides, they all are so kind of really inspired about finding new sites and new tours and new facts and new ways and ways to communicate with people. So you just need to enable that. And that's what I think our culture does. And hopefully the systems we put in place give people freedom and all the right motivations to kind of innovate. 

Kelly Molson: It's nice, isn't it? Because the way that you've talked about it, you've got these kind of like mini teams that work within the organisation, you've got merchandise in Hidden London under your social media. And then I guess they are inspired by the things that those other teams are doing as well. How Hidden London had to pivot during the Pandemic is hugely inspiring to the social media team or the shop team about how they promote their products and things. So then you get this kind of crossover of ideas and entrepreneurialism across the organisation. 

Elizabeth McKay: Yeah, it's a real synergy and it goes back to being clear about your purpose, I believe. And we talked a lot about how certain things are kind of in our DNA. Boards are really interested in that and trustees. So going back to that idea of you don't innovate for innovation's sake, it's all consistent and relevant. So the shop and the products are just as interesting and relevant and researched and authentic as, say, our learning programs. So our learning programs are doing quite a bit around our green agenda sustainability, sustainability of London and you see that mirrored in products that are ethically sourced and sustainable practices, et cetera. 

Elizabeth McKay: And of course we're all here about public transport which is the green way to travel and that's about the future of London and the exciting bit about what kind of city that we want to live in. So all of this is synergistic, isn't it? Past, present, future and that's what I think makes it so interesting. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, it is super interesting and I think what I love about the organisation is how many different remits it actually has that you don't think about. You come along and it is a fantastic museum to walk around. It's really engaging. It is very playful. See, everyone always highlights the buffs and the things that they can do but you forget about the other remit of actually you are highlighting transport which is sustainable and green and you've got a requirement to be showcasing that and explaining that to people about what that means for London. 

Elizabeth McKay: Absolutely. We're an educational charity but we have all this great stuff behind us. One thing that's different about LTM from other museums is the corporate membership the sponsors that are linked to TfL's pipeline. So that gives us a whole other way to engage. We have spot leadership programs, kind of Chatham House Rules type thing where we're kind of a safe place for bringing together people to talk about the future of transport and London. Yet another thing people wouldn't necessarily know. That's why my job is so cool. 

Kelly Molson: Super cool, but tiring. Yeah and actually that touches on something else that we should talk about because you talked earlier about people having to pivot during the pandemic and well, you set yourselves as a purpose fuelled organisation through the Pandemic. That was one of the things that we talked about prior to this and one of the things you mentioned is that you're all still doing a lot more with a lot less than you had which obviously can cause burnout. How do you maintain that from a cultural perspective? How do you maintain a healthy culture without you're asking people to kind of give quite a lot and being really engaged with the organisation but we're all kind of running on a little bit of empty. How do you kind of maintain a healthy culture and make sure that people aren't getting to burnout stage? 

Elizabeth McKay: That's a really good question and I'm also reminded of that other quote, “culture eats strategy for breakfast, for lunch, dinner”. I feel like I'm pretty high energy going into kind of all the workshopping and thinking about our strategy. I do look around and pay my life myself. God, I drink so much coffee now. So it's a really good question. We're all dealing with it in the sector and all businesses, right? And next year is going to be h***. I mean, when I listen to this in 2023 I'll probably be like, oh my God, it's even worse than I thought. So first, again, I think about this a lot. So first you have to give permission to slow down, to slow the pace. Have realistic what one of our trustees calls heroic targets. Don't have heroic targets, have realistic targets. 

Elizabeth McKay: Then change your plan if there are external issues. For example, we have a real issue with slow recruitment right now. We have support from TfL HR. We have some back office support from TfL, also quite interesting. But it also means when they stop, we stop. And so that's been a real challenge. You cannot hire people quickly when you have an opening, that's an issue, and in a small team that will just grind you to a halt, right? So you have to recognise that. Second, I think we have really good ways of working. So we have a people plan. We have working groups, comprised people from across the organisation. We use our strategic principles like, we're here for everyone and we go the extra mile, but we also have deliverables with that. And we have annual survey. 

Elizabeth McKay: We try to stay on top of these kind of issues. So think about what you're measuring, I guess is another way to link to that. So we have an inclusion index and a well being index, and it gives us a little kind of sense of how things are going. Not that we wait around every year to find out what the score is because you're always getting that kind of feedback. 

Kelly Molson: So that index comes from kind of continual asking people how they are like mini surveys.

Elizabeth McKay: Yeah, well that's the kind of annual survey. But we know that's important, so we're working on it in different ways. So it has lots of kind of action plans and activities around it. So we're really conscious of well being and kind of inclusion and the things that help with that culture. I think regular communication then is another thing. So my big insight is whatever you're doing with communication, there could be more, it could be different, it can better, and it could be even more regular than it is, I often think. But I know we shared that with people, but if they didn't get it, then you haven't kind of shared it right.

Elizabeth McKay: So we have a weekly email, we have zoom sessions, we have in person online staff forums, departmental meetings, chats in the corridor now that we're back and we have corridors and then I guess the last one, I'd say really listen and adapt. So when people say, oh, that's the problem, really listen and change. And I would say the way we're going about our five year strategy right now has taken that into account so we can't make that deadline. I went, oh, okay, so I kind of redesigned what we're doing and gave more time, and it has to work or otherwise if we all fall over. There's not going to be a strategy. 

Kelly Molson: The communication thing is so important, isn't it? It's interesting because we run very different organisations, but that was the one piece of advice that were given by so I run an agency, I'm a member of a number of agency networks. During the pandemic, they were incredibly supportive to all of the agencies under their membership. And the biggest piece of advice they gave was just over communicate. Over communicate with your team, over communicate with your clients. Just let them know all the time what's happening, how things are. Because people just needed reassurance, and the only way that they could get reassurance was by talking about things openly and having that two way dialogue. So, yeah, I just can't stress enough how important that is. And a lot of organisations don't get that, right? 

Kelly Molson: They don't have enough time with their line managers or enough time with their colleagues to talk things through. 

Elizabeth McKay: That's so true. And I think we stepped it up during COVID really, because initially we just had to were online with Zooming and living from our bedrooms, et cetera. But we started doing a weekly well, three times a week, email out to all staff wherever they were, and then it became weekly, and then it improved to kind of this bulletin that is quite good. I know people read it. We basically send it to our trustees. The sense of everybody's in touch. But yeah, you cannot over communicate. 

Kelly Molson: I love that. What would be your advice for organisations that want to foster a culture of innovation more? 

Elizabeth McKay: Well, one level, it's probably simple behaviour theory. Encourage and celebrate creativity, right. Reward the thing you want to have, so that's something to think about. And then I think a more sophisticated approach is focusing on that triumvirate of culture, strategy and capabilities because they all have to work together. And then I go back to that little kind of MOT for a healthy culture, that permission to slow down, have a plan, think about what you're measuring, communicate, communicate and listen and then adapt. That would be my little thing I run through in my head. 

Kelly Molson: Excellent advice, Elizabeth. Thank you. Just thinking about what we said about creative background. Do you look for people with a kind of creative background when you're hiring? Do you think that's quite important for an organisation that is quite driven by innovation and driven by being quite entrepreneurial? 

Elizabeth McKay: Well, I do. I hand everyone a paper clip when they sit down and say, give me ten reasons, ten things you can do with this paper clip. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I think it's important.. we all get stuck in these kind of structured interviews and which capability am I assessing and this and that. And so my default is stick innovation in there because it needs to happen in every job and every role at every level. So it's never one department. It might go back to my early life as a young referred stepper in advertising, but I never believed in the creative department and then everybody else.  

Elizabeth McKay: So I really liked moving on and becoming going on the other side and being the kind of, I guess, more the marketing director type role at the BBC, which is commissioning and developing and producing. And I always thrive being around creative people, and they can be in any job, really. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Innovation comes from anywhere, any department, any person.

Elizabeth McKay: Definitely. Definitely. And the places that get that right and I'm not saying we always get that right, or I have always done that brilliantly and everything I've done, but I think the places that get that right are the ones that really succeed and people are happy. They have a culture that you're enthusiastic about and excited about and you want to go that extra mile and all those things, words on the page that don't really mean anything unless it's been lived. 

Kelly Molson: That's a really good point, isn't it? Because I think when you work at an organisation, you take ownership of it, don't you? And if you're encouraged to be part of it, and you're encouraged to share your ideas, share your innovation, it becomes yours. You take a level of ownership of the organisation that you work in because you've been able to input into the ideas and you can see those things actually happen. 

Elizabeth McKay: Yes. And I was just thinking about how you might kind of slightly shift your culture if you need to do that and tweak that. I mean, it's a bigger change program, really. Everyone is part of that kind of shift. But I think it can go back to those stories that you tell and you celebrate. And also you can't define what stories people want to tell about your organisation. Right. They're just out there. But if you try to give some of that focus and pick the things that you're really proud of, or that our teams are proud of, and are examples or exemplars of that kind of creative and innovative culture, then it can start to be what you're known for. 

Elizabeth McKay: I mentioned the shop or the learning programs that are kind of blowing me away right now, or Hidden London just kind of firing on all cylinders. Those things get us talking internally and excited and then that works outside, too. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah, I love that. And as we end our podcast, you mentioned stories. I always ask my guests to share a book that they love with our listeners. What would be your book for us today? 

Elizabeth McKay: Well, can I have two? 

Kelly Molson: No, you can't have two, but it's Christmas when we're recording, so I will be kind and generous and let you have two. 

Elizabeth McKay: I know that you'd allow, thank you.

Kelly Molson: Because I'm so weak, Because I'm so weak, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth McKay: You're so generous. You're so lovely. One that I mentioned when we met was this book Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. And it's just so good that I think if people haven't heard of it, they should pick it up. I mean, he wrote The Tipping Point and Blink, and he's just an excellent writer. He talks about data in such an interesting way. But this book is all about big questions in history and psychology and has case studies about Fidel Castro and Sylvia Plath and Bernie Madoff and Campus Rape, and I guess it's a bit dark. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. 

Elizabeth McKay: Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Hitler? There's just so much in this book that's super interesting. 

Kelly Molson: Excellent book. 

Elizabeth McKay: My other one is I just bought this book from my son, fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I read it when I was a teenager and it had a huge influence on me. I think it was my first Dystopian novel. So I'm just reading it again and my son may not get it or it'll be so well. 

Kelly Molson: You've done the classic. Buy a gift for someone that you're keeping. 

Elizabeth McKay: Yes, and I realise they're both very dark. Did that say about me? Oh, no. I mean, I'm actually quite optimistic. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. But, yeah, maybe you just need an outlet to channel the dark stuff and that you can do that by reading these books. And everything else is fun and light. 

Elizabeth McKay: Yeah, that's it. The dark side. I probe the dark side between the pages. 

Kelly Molson: Great books. All right, listeners, if you would like to be in with a chance of winning Elizabeth's two books, then head over to our Twitter account and retweet this episode announcement with the words, "I want Elizabeth books", and then you can share in her darkness. 

Elizabeth McKay: Oh, dear. 

Kelly Molson: Elizabeth, thank you so much. It's been a joy to speak to you today. Thank you. I know how incredibly busy you are, so I'm very grateful that you could come on and spare us some time just before Christmas. And I am looking forward to seeing what you accomplish in the new year. I definitely know you're going to hit that strategy and get that up and running, so no challenge there. 

Elizabeth McKay: Well, thank you so much, Kelly. This was fun. And I guess anyone who's thinking about coming on, I would say it was not as painful as what I thought it would be.

Kelly Molson: Excellent recommendation you can write that on our Apple ipod recommendation list. That would be excellent. Not as painful as I expected quote. Thanks.

Elizabeth McKay: Quote. Thumbs up. No. Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it. 

Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned.

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast..

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends July 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://twitter.com/AndyHygate

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-hygate-50351a45/

https://www.blackpoolpleasurebeach.com/

https://www.blackpoolpleasurebeach.com/events/walk-the-big-one/

Andy Hygate is the Director of Operations at the iconic UK amusement park Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Andy has worked in visitor attractions for over twenty years - including as a General Manager of Blue Planet Aquarium in Cheshire and also Oakwood Theme Park in Pembrokeshire. 

In Blackpool Andy heads up a team of almost 200 staff who operate the rides and deliver the guest experience - including High Adventure Experiences - 2023 will be his eight season in Blackpool.  Andy also claims to be a rollercoaster aficionado having ridden over 600+ coasters worldwide. His current favourite coaster (though it changes all the time) is Iron Gwazi at Busch Gardens in Tampa.   

Transcriptions:

Kelly Molson: Happy New Year, everyone. 2023 at Skip the Queue is packed with more amazing guests, and we're starting the new year with a really great one. 

In today's episode, I speak with Andy Hygate, Director of Operations at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. We are talking about walking The Big One and how to develop an exclusive experience from an everyday safety process.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. 

Kelly Molson: Andy, welcome to Skip the Queue.

Andy Hygate: Hello. It's nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Kelly Molson: Well, it's my pleasure. Just to let everyone know, we're recording this today, as we do, on YouTube and I've got this halo-like effect over my head.

Andy Hygate: Okay. Ray lights.

Kelly Molson: I look quite angelic, don't I, Andy? Quite festive. If you're watching this on the YouTube channel, you will understand what we're talking about, but this is not good podcast material. Sorry. Anyway, Andy, we're starting with some icebreakers.

Andy Hygate: Okay.

Kelly Molson: I've got a good one for you. I know that you are a big old rollercoaster fan. So I want to know, and this might be a little bit like asking who's your favourite child, or who's your favourite dog. But I want to know, what's your favourite rollercoaster?

Andy Hygate: Oh, wow. I mean, it changes all the time. I guess I have kind of a top three, but I've recently been lucky enough to go to Orlando and I went on a ride there called Iron Gwazi, which is a RMC rework of what was a classic wooden coaster into a steel coaster that's got inversions and so on. And it's one of those rides where if you're a roller coaster fan, it's everything that you want from a roller coaster, from an incredible, and I think it's almost beyond vertical first drop. It's got inversions on a wooden structure.

But it was one of those rides that just didn't let up until it hits the brakes at the end. I mean, it blew me away. It was incredible. But then I say that, I also went on the VelociCoaster and I was lucky to get in the front seats, which is the Islands of Adventure. I went on that at night. And again, I mean, that was an incredible ride. So at the moment it's probably between those two. Maybe I can't pick a favourite. But yeah, both incredible intense, fabulous long rides. Really, really good stuff.

Kelly Molson: Okay. Do you know what? The VelociCoaster, feel like I've been watching that happen for years on Twitter, because they've been really good at feeding little snippets of what's been happening before it's launched, like the design of it. I just feel like I've seen it. It's just been happening for so long.

Andy Hygate: The weird thing is sometimes you watch these things on YouTube, particularly if you watch POVs of rides and you think what the ride is going to ride like. And we've got a double-launch coaster and effectively that's what VelociCoaster is. But that last inversion, which is really low over the water, you have to go on it to experience what it's like. I can't describe it to you. It's one of those you think you're coming out, which is not good, but you are obviously not. But it is just, I mean, yeah, it just blew me away. Absolutely blew me away.

Kelly Molson: Amazing. Great recommendation, Andy. All right. Okay, next one. Who's your idol and have you ever met them?

Andy Hygate: I don't know. I mean, there's a rollercoaster designer, a German guy called Stengel who is behind many, many of the designs of the world's best coasters. I'm a coaster geek and I'm a big fan of B&M, and I guess I would love to meet them, but I haven't. I don't know because they always say don't meet your heroes. And so I kind of think that I'm not really sure that I would want to.

Kelly Molson: Keeping a distance, probably safer. What's the weirdest food you've ever eaten?

Andy Hygate: Weirdest food. Before I was five years old, I'd had more birthdays in America than I'd had in the UK. And I remember on my fifth birthday having an ice cream birthday cake. And the fact that I can still remember this, 30 whatever years later, I remember that being something that was very unusual at the time. I don't know now. Yeah, I mean, that's quite cool, actually. To be honest, I've got a big birthday coming up in a couple of years and I'd quite like an ice cream birthday cake for that now.

Kelly Molson: There you go.

Andy Hygate: I suppose that's weird.

Kelly Molson: Putting it out there, just getting the hints in already for Andy's birthday.

Andy Hygate: Pretty much. There you go.

Kelly Molson: Love it. All right, Andy, what is your unpopular opinion? What have you got to share with us?

Andy Hygate: You know what? I think camping should be banned. And particularly, level above that, glamping. I guess, again, for me, if you go on holiday, you want to stay somewhere nice, I think. My experiences of camping are always being freezing cold, in soaking wet, and being covered in mud. When you wake up in the morning and you've been like you've slept outside effectively, and it's just a different level of cold. And I don't get the whole thing about... People say, oh, I don't know, "I'm connecting to nature, or the great outdoors."

And I actually do like the outdoors, but if I go anywhere, I want to at least stay... Well, if you come to Blackpool, you don't want to be in a tent. You want to be in a nice hotel, which you can obviously do here. But I don't understand the appeal of it. I haven't done it for probably 30 years, but my whole recollection of camping is being freezing cold, soaking wet, and it being thoroughly unpleasant. So yeah, I would ban the tents.

Kelly Molson: Oh, Andy. That's a really strong opinion and I like it. Have you ever been glamping? Have you ever done the one level up?

Andy Hygate: I've seen it because it appears. I mean, a lot of places and particularly there seems to be a thing with safari parks. I can't think of anything worse than being asleep in a safari park. It's always a beautiful white tent, isn't it, when it's glamping? But ultimately, you're sleeping next to a lion enclosure. And in the middle of the night, you get picked off by one of the animals. I obviously sound very passionate about this, but glamping is supposed to be a luxury, but it's not a... I don't know. Having plastic champagne glasses in a canvas tent, to me is not luxury. Sorry. That sounds awful.

Kelly Molson: No. Do you know what? I think it's my favourite opinion of the year. Listeners, let me know what you think over on our Twitter account if you agree with Andy. It's very strong, very strong unpopular opinion today. Oh, I love that. All right. Well, Andy, I'm going to guess that your background isn't in camping or nature, but tell us a little bit about your background.

Andy Hygate: Okay, well, I'm the Operations Director for Blackpool Pleasure Beach and I've been here for eight seasons. But I've worked in attractions for over 20 years. I actually used to work at a famous aquarium in Cheshire for many, many years. I basically had the opportunity to go and run a theme park, a small theme park in Pembrokeshire down in Wales, beautiful park in the country, a theme park called Oakwood. And I went and worked there.

And one of the reasons I went and worked there is because I've always liked roller coasters. And so from as young as I can remember, I grew up in Kent and we used to go on day trips to Margate. Not camping trips. And I used to go on the rides at Dreamland there. And I was hooked, I was obsessed with it. And so obviously when I got the chance to come work at Oakwood, it was a no-brainer because they had big rides. And I learned about rides, how to operate rides, the maintenance involved and all of that kind of stuff.

And then that kind of opened the door, really, for me to work in other parks, and that's ultimately why I work here. But I think I'm very, very lucky to work in an industry that I'm passionate about. And the fact that I love roller coasters, we've got 10 roller coasters at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. And so for me to work with those every day is a real privilege and really good fun. And part of my job is literally to go and ride rides. And if you told me that when I was 10 years old, I just never would've believed that that was a possibility.

Kelly Molson: That's very lovely. This comes up quite a lot with our guests, actually, because it is an industry that people tend to work in from a young age and then work their way up. And they love it, they really love it. And it's really nice listening to people where they're like, "I get to do this for my job, but this is fun." And it's really nice to hear. I'm going to guess, Andy, only because you mentioned that you got a big birthday coming up, but I'm going to guess that you are maybe a similar age to me and you would remember Dreamland as Bembom Brothers.

Andy Hygate: I do, yeah. Bembom Brothers Amusement Park.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, because I can remember, because I'm from Essex and then I can remember my granddad taking me to Bembom Brothers when I was really little and riding the wooden rollercoaster that they had there.

Andy Hygate: Railway, yeah. It's still there.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, good times. Good times. All right. So Andy, today, I'm really interested in this. I think this is such a great topic for our listeners. What we're going to talk about is how you've developed an exclusive experience from an everyday safety procedure, which sounds crazy, but tell us a little bit about how this idea came about.

Andy Hygate: Well, it's a strange one. But we're talking about an experience called Walk the Big One. And for those of you that don't know, Blackpool Pleasure Beach has a very large roller coaster, which is still, some 25 years later, the tallest rollercoaster in the UK, a rollercoaster called The Big One. It's 235 feet tall, and basically guests can pay to come and walk up the ride after the park closes, up the main pull up, which is the main lift and the sort of slow part at the start of the ride.

And we're obviously located right next to the beach, so you get an absolutely spectacular view. And when I say spectacular, it's a really difficult one to describe. But if you don't know Blackpool and saw the sunset. So something else, I mean, I said I've just been to Florida and I think I would say our sunsets are comparable with theirs. Maybe the temperature's not quite the same. But what we were ultimately able to achieve is roller coasters generally have steps running up the lift hill and that's no different to our coaster.

They're there for safety reasons so that ultimately if there's a stoppage or you have to clear a train of guests or whatever, that you can walk people down. But by using those we were able to give people this very unique experience in a controlled and safe way, where they get this unbelievably photogenic and unique experience, which only really, and certainly compared to the number of people that ride the ride, only a handful of people get. When people go on roller coasters, one of the things that you don't want, it's a very modern problem, is trying to stop people from taking photographs or filming on rides, because inevitably they drop their phone, and you don't want things falling and all of that kind of stuff.

But by doing a controlled walking experience like this, it means that people can get those amazing pictures and so on. And people love putting that on social media and all of that kind of stuff. So how it actually started, though, well, again, there's two versions of this depending on who you speak to. And I can say that because it started before I started working here, so I don't know which one is true. But one of them is that we had a corporate inquiry from a group that had hired out a room and were having an event at the Pleasure Beach. And they wanted to do something different with the boss of the company. And again about taking a crazy photo or whatever and they asked if they could take them to the top of The Big One.

And so they looked into it and the safety aspects and so on and were able to achieve that. So that's one possibility. And then the other one is that a member of staff went on a trip to Australia and walked up the Sydney Harbor Bridge and came back and said, "That was an amazing experience. Wouldn't that be really cool if we could replicate something like that in the park?" And so depending on who you believe, depends on where this started from. But all I know is that when I started here, we were running on Friday evenings throughout the year, we were running three walks a night taking groups of six people up the structure for an hour.

And an hour is the whole thing. So you come and you do a little safety briefing, we kit people up. You'll be pleased to know people are connected with a safety line whilst they're doing this and we show them how to use it and so on. And then we walked them up the structure to the top. We do it in stages, because, as I said, it's over 70 meters high, so it's 420 steps to the top. We do it three times in an evening, so our leg muscles are quite...

Kelly Molson: Nice. Good workouts.

Andy Hygate: Quite good. But you basically walk people up and you stop at 50 foot intervals. We tell them a little bit about the history of the ride and some facts about the ride and so on. And also, what you notice is as you get higher up you get to see more and more at the park and also beyond the park as well. And you get that different sort of vantage point. And so by the time you get to the summit, which is the bit that everyone's looking forward to, if it's a nice clear day, you can look one way and you can see across the estuary, and you can see as far as Southport. And then you look the other way and you can literally see the Lake District. And you've got the Blackpool Tower and you can see the whole of the town set out below you.

And it's an incredible experience, and even though I've walked up the structure loads of times, for me, I still get a thrill out of doing it and I'm still always impressed by the view. So for the first-time guest that's coming to do it for whatever reason, because we get loads of people doing this for... We get rollercoaster enthusiasts, which obviously you can understand why they would want to do it. But we also get people that are doing it for charity events and we get people that have had it as a surprise present and they've turned up at evening and didn't know really anything about what they were going to do. And so there's that whole mix of different people doing it and for different reasons and whatever. And again, once you get to the top, again, other people are getting different things out of it.

We get the people that are serious photographers that want the sunset walk and so on. And then you get the people that are Facebook crazy and want to do Facebook Live at the top so all their mates can see it and so on. And it caters, really, for all of those people. What's quite cool is you can start with six people that don't even necessarily know each other. Sometimes you do get a group where it's six people that do, but we've had it where you've got six people haven't met before and then by the time they get to the end of it and they're back down on the ground, there's this kind of camaraderie that's been built up by having this experience.

And they're always towards the staff because it's us that do it, it's the rides team that walk up. They're always so appreciative. And I think finding out stuff that you wouldn't find out normally when you visit, little tips and facts about the ride and little interesting oddities about how roller coasters work and so on makes it a really good experience. So yeah, I mean, I know that was a very long answer to-

Kelly Molson: That was a great answer. It's a great answer and it leads me on to some of the questions that I've got about what's it brought the attraction? Because you talked there about a lot, so there was a lot to take in there. And some of the things you talked about were when people go up, you've got these incredible views and people want to take photos of that, they want to do Facebook Live. I guess you've got so many different audiences that that appeals to as well, like the rollercoaster nuts or just people that just want that Instagram moment. What has it brought, the attraction?

Andy Hygate: For us, it's brought us into the experience market in a way which is something that we wouldn't have necessarily... I mean, the rollercoaster was never built with that in mind. It was obviously built as a thrill ride and the fact that are stairs there, and I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about Walk the Woodie later on. But the stairs are there for a functional reason and so you can do track inspections, and so in the event there's a stoppage there's a way for people to get down and a safe way and so on. And I think it's been able to make use of something that's already there or existing in a different way that's also such a memorable way.

And invariably, I said, for all those people doing those different things, whether it's taking photos and posting them on social media or whether it's Instagram or whether it's Facebook or whatever it is that they're doing it for. And we have seen, particularly over the last five years doing it, there is, I think, this explosion in experiences and experience culture and people wanting, instead of... You are buying an experience, ultimately, and then you are showing other people that you've done that experience.

So that's a big part of what social media is and a big motivator for doing it. But I think it's great that you can have that mix of people. And you even get the people that quietly... We've had people that live in Blackpool that can see the structure from their house because it's a tall structure I have always just been curious about it and just want to come and walk up it. And that's what's great, that you get that mix, really.

Kelly Molson: It's opened up the park to a different audience, I guess, because those people might not have come along and come on and taken a ride on the rollercoaster or spent the day at the park. But there they would come along in the evening and walk up it and be able to spot their house from the top of it, I guess.

Andy Hygate: Yeah, no, it's definitely true. And also you get people that have driven up from London, which is quite a long way from us, and so on, to do an experience which is pretty unique. And it's certainly unique in our location. And there are all those different reasons for doing it, makes it a really good thing. And I also think we are catering for a desire to have an adventure. I mean, roller coasters ultimately are that as well. I mean, the great thing about roller coasters is that people are searching for a thrill and an experience. I mean, even me talking about those rides that I was talking about before, I was absolutely thrilled or blown away by them and so on.

But people want to go on a ride where you have the illusion of danger, that ultimately in reality is actually a very safe experience. And actually you could relate this to that as well, this experience, walking up something. You're at a very high height, you're on a slender gantry. And the structure moves, it's designed to, it's good that it moves in the wind and so on. You wouldn't want it to be brittle and so on. That all adds to the adventure. So you're getting that experience but in a way which is actually a really safe way of doing it.

Kelly Molson: Yeah. It's brilliant. It's still incredible to me that something that you would've done on a daily basis anyway you've been able to develop into this incredible experience. So it's brought you a different audience. It's obviously brought you more revenue, right? So you mentioned earlier you do three walks.

Andy Hygate: Yeah, so we take six people on each walk. And they pay obviously for that experience. And it's a premium-priced experience because you're getting something which is a small group of people, it's after the park is closed and all of that side of it. And this is with the experience economy or people looking for those things. People are prepared to pay extra. For one, you're getting that level of service and insight that you wouldn't get necessarily normally, and talking directly to people that work on the ride and know about the ride and so on.

If you were here as a visitor, you'd probably just queue up and go on the ride, have a great experience, find it thrilling and then off you go, where people like to, I think, have a curiosity about the behind the scenes, how things work and so on. And Walk the Woodie, which is the version of this that we do on one of our wooden coasters, is the classic example of something where we've taken something that we have to do every day. So this is the rollercoaster geek in me. There's two different types of coasters. There's steel coasters, which are the ones that you find where they invert, and most modern coasters are steel coasters. And then you get wooden coasters, and Blackpool Pleasure Beach, we are really lucky to have four, which is really unusual, classic wooden coasters, all built in the 1920s and '30s.

I mean, these rides, rides like the Grand National and so on, which are iconic rides. When you think of our park, if you ask people about our park, they'll mention those rides. But for me, the fact that people want to come and ride a wooden coaster. It's 90 years it's been thrilling people and they still find it a thrilling ride and still want to go on it and so on. I think that's incredible that people want to do that, and what that says is those attractions, even if they were built in the 1930s, are still brilliant attractions and that people still want to come and ride them.

Now, part of looking after and the maintenance of a wooden coaster is that you do daily inspections of them, and you literally walk the entire track of the ride, which you can do on a wooden coaster because unlike on a steel coaster, you've got a walkway literally the entire length of the ride. And so we have an in-house structures team and construction team here, which is part of how we maintain the coasters and are able to keep them going and so on, have to walk the entire track every day. And so every morning before the park opens, nice and early, doesn't matter what the weather is, our team of structures people will come and walk alongside the entire track, carrying out an inspection and making sure there's no problems, no issues, no rot, no nails where there shouldn't be, all of those kind of things so that the ride's ultimately safe to open.

And with this stuff I'm talking about with offering experiences, we suddenly thought, well, wouldn't it be great if the general public had the opportunity to do something that this very selective group of people were having to do every single day of the year when we're open? And that's really how that experience came about. And I think The Big One gave us the confidence to look at other rides and other attractions that we've gotten and start to think, actually, what is it that we do that people would pay to come and do as well? And Walk the Woodie a hundred percent came out of that.

Kelly Molson: That's absolutely brilliant. And I think when we spoke briefly before today, you mentioned that you've got special merchandise that people can buy. And do they get a piece of Woodie? Don't worry, folks, it is structurally sound but they do get a piece of Woodie.

Andy Hygate: I have to say, with wooden coasters, people... And I can use this, I said this to some of my American friends and they have no clue what I was talking about. But wooden roller coasters, it's like Trigger's broom. And part of the maintenance of them is that you are constantly working on them and you are constantly replacing the wood. So actually how much of the structure, the original structure is still there a hundred years later or whatever. And anyway, so we're always carrying out that work. And when we did Walk The Big One, we wanted people to take away something after the experience. And actually I've got one here, look, to hold up for you.

Kelly Molson: Oh, brilliant.

Andy Hygate: You get this medal at the end of it. And it's for some people, particularly if you're scared of heights, which we do get, it's an achievement if you've made it to the top and all of that kind of stuff. And invariably, what actually happens with that as well is that when you get down and you give them a medal, they all immediately have their photo taken with it and so on.

So again, it feeds into all the stuff I was saying about social media and so on. So anyway, with Walk the Woodie we thought, well, wouldn't it be nice if we could do something like that? And we thought about a medal and so on. And then we thought, well, hang on a minute, we've got all this wood that we've removed from the ride as we've replaced and updated it. Why don't we chop it up into little pieces and give people a piece of the ride to take?

Kelly Molson: It's a genius idea. Not only is it a brilliant piece of memorabilia, it's sustainable too.

Andy Hygate: Well, yeah, exactly. And actually what's cool about it is the wood itself often has... You can see the rungs of the original growth in the tree and so on in it. And I'll tell you a really nice piece. People always want the chunk that's got the nails sticking out a bit or the bit with the flaky paint or whatever it is, just because it's all... There's a certain, again, this whole experience thing, people want authenticity. And I think that just plays into that. And also if you are going back afterwards and you've got home and you're telling your friends or your family what you've done, if you're producing a piece of wood from that very ride that's a piece of history and all of that kind of stuff, it just adds to the thing.

So yeah, I mean, we always say to people that do it, look, we don't do any hard sell or anything, at the end of it you get those things as part of the experience regardless. But then we do some merch which is exclusive. I mean, I'm wearing one of The Big One pieces of clothing, which we only sell to people that have been on the walk that evening. So the guests in the park can obviously, when they come and visit they can buy Big One mugs and pin badges and Big One everything if that's what they want, of course. But you can only get this stuff by participating in the experience. So it makes it quite special, really.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, it does. It's brilliant. I mean, really, we are recording this episode in the run up to Christmas, listeners, but this will launch, this is obviously going out in the new year. And I think this is such a good message to start the year on. And it's something that has been talked about at a number of the ALVA meetings that I've been to and it's something the industry's been talking about in the run up to Christmas season is about that level of experience and doing things that are different, because it is what people are absolutely craving for. And they will be happy to pay the higher price point for doing something that's really special and something that's really unique, and just something that's of real interest to them as well. You are hooking into people's real desires with these unique experiences. I think this is such a brilliant story. Your dates sell out really quickly as well, don't they?

Andy Hygate: Yeah, I mean, we've just put on our 2023 dates online. And what we find is that there's a lot of... Well, because of the social media aspect of it, there's a lot of word of mouth about it anyway. And also we got a lot of repetition. Again, I think it's because it's so unique, but in the case of Walk The Big One, the other thing that we find, because we do it from March but we also do it through until the autumn. And you can come along in, I don't know, in the spring and do it and it can be sunshine and lovely and bright and so on. But then you hear that actually you can come back and you can do it in September when the illuminations are on in Blackpool, when it's dark, and the experience takes on a whole different thing altogether. And to walk up effectively in the darkness and just see the lights along the fragile miles along the coastline is a beautiful and very different experience.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, I bet that's amazing. So do you get a lot of repeat visits for something like this?

Andy Hygate: Yes. What you do is you'll find that those people that do it in the spring, we say, "Oh yeah, we do it in September." And they say, "Oh, I didn't know that." And so that happened certainly early on with it, we were finding that people came back to it. And then obviously once it built up a bit of a reputation when we started thinking about these like Walk the Woodie with the wooden coasters, what you found is that people had done Walk the Big One and knew it was a really fun experience, had a great time. Suddenly thought, oh, well, actually I want to try that as well. And I think it was emotive in a different way because with The Big One obviously it's really tall, and there's no getting away from that. And the thing is, the payoff on that one is that you're going to get that amazing view right at the top and so on.

With Walk the Woodie because we've walked the track on them on the Big Dipper, you're not going to go as high at all because the ride's only like 60 feet tall and so on. It's a different experience but in some ways it's, I don't want to say more fulfilling because they're fulfilling for different reasons, but it's certainly more challenging because you're walking a lot more of the track than you would do on Walk the Big One. But also it's that insight that you're getting and that understanding of how the ride's maintained, how it works.

And as much as I can describe to you what it's like to walk along a rollercoaster track, when you actually do it, you suddenly get some kind of... The bit that always shocks people is that we start at the end of the ride and we actually walk backwards. And you walk from where the break run is and where the ride would normally end and you do the last little bunny hops, which are the last part of the ride when you're on it, and you do them first. When you're on the ride because the ride's coming to an end, those little bunny hops don't feel like the first drop.

You think, that's the end of the ride, they're not very big, and so on. When you have to walk them actually you realise that what you thought was small bunny hops are actually quite large and steep and so on. And it gives people a different appreciation for the ride. And so we've had people that have done Walk the Woodie and then gone back on the Big Dipper when they've come back to the park as a regular visitor, and said that it has totally changed the way that they view the ride and they've got a totally different appreciation for it and how we maintain it, how we look after it, all the work that goes into it. But also an understanding of the scale of these things and so on. And you would never get that just by going on the ride itself, I suppose.

Kelly Molson: That's really cool, isn't it? I mean, there must have been, with both of the rides, Walk the Big One and Walk the Woodie, there must have been some challenges that you had in terms of opening this up to general public. I'm sure health and safety was an absolute nightmare. What kind of challenges did you come across, and how did you overcome them? And what would be your advice for other attractions that were looking maybe to do similar or just looking at things that they already have that they could make more of?

Andy Hygate: As an idea, I mean, what I would say to people is don't be afraid of an idea. And it was true, when we first came up with Walk the Woodie, and said, this is what we want to do, or we want to try and do it, before we'd even touched the ride or even looked at what the reality of doing of that, I do remember, I remember being told by several people, "You're not going to be able to do that. Not with the general public. It's not going to work." Then there's this problem, this problem, this problem and all that. And we kind of chipped away at those things and thought, well, okay. Well, we know that we do this every day with our staff, and how do they do it safely? And so what do they know that we don't?

So we spoke to them and we started doing risk assessments and all the sort of boring stuff, I guess, but the stuff that you really do need to do. And then we did some practices. And we literally walked the entire track with a team of the operations staff in conjunction with engineering and worked out a way to make it work. And some of the challenges were one, yeah, because whenever you do anything different you have to convince some people that it's going to work. So you've got to make it, whatever you're doing, safe. But what I've found is that by actually physically having a go at stuff and getting input from other people and feedback and so on, in the case of Walk the Woodie, we were able to work out a route that we thought, yeah, actually we could do this with the general public.

There were bits of it where there's some of the ride, you don't walk the entire track, you walk probably about a third of it during the experience. There was some bits of it where I thought, actually, I'm not sure that this is going to work really well with the public. I'm not sure what they would get out of that. I'm not sure if this is too challenging, this bit, and so on. And we sort of just crafted it into something which also had to work in a certain amount of time and so on. So I guess my advice would just be, don't be afraid to think about doing something that you haven't done before. We've got a great team of people that I work with in my department, and often it's just by chatting to people, you can come up with these ideas, which at first might sound silly or whatever. But I remember us talking about it and someone saying, "Wouldn't it be fun if we could walk in the footsteps of the engineers?"

And that sounded really exciting, before you've even heard what it is. It's peeking behind the, I don't know, the curtain to see how things work and so on. And there's a natural sort of curiosity to do that. So I would say to any other attraction that they will have stuff which is unique to them, which people will be interested in having that experience. And the trouble with, I think, one of the things that we always warn our staff about just generally is that in terms of guest service in an amusement park, there's a massive difference between visiting an amusement park for one day as a guest maybe once or twice a year and going into an amusement park every single day because you work there.

You have to be really careful when you work there you don't become complacent and you lose that air of magic that a guest will have when they go there just once or once a year or whatever. And so we do a lot of reinforcement with our own staff to make sure that they're remembering that that's the first time that the guests have seen that, when you might have seen it or experienced it 500 times. I think that aspect of it's quite important as well.

Kelly Molson: That's really good advice, actually, and that's really interesting, isn't it? Because we always talk about that it's the people that make the experiences, but those people have to genuinely still be excited about it even though they've seen that thing 50 billion times. Because it's the visitor's first time they've seen it and they need to be equally as excited about it as that person that's seeing it for the first time.

Andy Hygate: Absolutely. And then on these experiences, that aspect of it actually becomes easy and quite infectious. Because what you see, particularly with... We've involved some of our seasonal staff in delivering these events and they get massive amount out of it. And they learn a few facts or a few stories or whatever and they retell them. The reaction that they get from the people that are stood in front of them when they're stood on the ride talking about it is always positive and that builds their confidence. I've seen members of staff go from being shy and retiring to being stood 150 feet up The Big One, talking to the general public, answering questions, pointing out things on the horizon, all of that kind of stuff. And I'm quite proud of the fact that we've been able to achieve that, both for the guests and also for the staff as well.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's brilliant. It's really interesting as well, in a couple of weeks on from this episode we have an episode speaking to the London Transport Museum. And it's all about innovation and fostering a culture of innovation. And what you said earlier about don't be afraid to have those ideas and come up with those ideas with your team, I think that just goes to show that you have fostered a culture where people are comfortable to bring those kind of ideas to the front, regardless of how crazy they might seem at that point. But they're encouraged to bring those ideas to you and to see where they can go.

Andy Hygate: Yeah. And we've been lucky that that also continues. I mean, Walk the Woodie, we are really excited about 2023 because the ride that you are basically walking, which is The Big Dipper rollercoaster, it's a hundred years old next year. So it's got a big birthday coming, a big centenary and so on. And so we were thinking about Walk the Woodie and thinking, well, actually, now that we've done it and we know how to do it and so on, what can we do differently? Because it's its birthday coming up and people are excited about it, enthusiasts know about it and they're expecting us to do something and so on. And so we started looking at what we could do differently. And so anyway, we've come up with a product for one year only for next year, which is a version of Walk the Woodie but it's called Walk the Woodie 100, for obvious reasons. And we're going to do it differently.

And so again, it's about not just resting on our laurels. We've come up with something which is we think guests are going to like. We went through a very similar process to how we came up with the original idea, but we went back to the idea and thought, well, actually, what can we do that we didn't do last time, and what would be different? And we've now got the experience of we had people telling us what they liked about it and so on. And so I'm not going to tell you exactly what we're doing because we want it to be a bit of a surprise. But we are going to do something different with it next year. So people that have done it before can come and they will have a different experience, and people that don't know anything about it or whatever and maybe they're hearing about it on this, I don't know, will come and have a hundredth birthday special version of the experience.

So it's always about innovation and keeping things moving and trying to come up with other stuff. And in this particular instance, the fact that it's a ride's hundredth birthday, which is a big deal, really, for a ride, was the motivator, but it could be for any other reason as well.

Kelly Molson: Love it. Again, brilliant advice, Andy. It is about coming up with these unique ideas with things that you already have, generating that repeat interest from people that have been on it once but can come back and do it. And then you are expanding on that again by developing on the experience because there's a big event or a big thing happening that year. I think it's such good advice for attractions. So thank you for sharing today. What else have you got coming up? Is there anything else that's coming next?

Andy Hygate: We're always looking. I mean, obviously, Walk the Woodie 100 is the big thing. We've done Walk the Woodie, but we haven't done it in the way that we're going to do it. And I think making it unique just for one year, so we're only going to do it like this for one year, it's kind of a cool thing. But I haven't mentioned our other experience, which is Walk the Big One XL, which I probably should because in a way that's a similar kind of... We only introduced that in 2022 and so that's a relatively new version. But what we did with that, and so this will be the second year that we've offered this, basically was quite targeted. And it was targeted at enthusiasts, and I've said that I'm a ride enthusiast, and so we knew that there was this demand there for people to find out more. And Walk the Big One, it's an amazing experience, but it's done in an hour.

You're here and gone in an hour, which is fine for a lot of people, but for enthusiasts they might want to know a little bit more and they might want to see some other locations around the ride. So again, we revisited Walk the Big One and thought, actually, what is it that we can do differently that would specifically target that group of people that want to see more or want to know more in depth information? And so again, we went and looked at the ride. Again, we were careful not to get blinded by the fact that we see things like the break run every day. So for us that's not a big deal. But actually for a guest to come and stand on the break run, learn about the station design, learn why it's the way it is, how we put trains on and off the ride and so on, to them is actually really interesting because that's not something that they get to see or hear about every day.

And so we worked out a way to take people to different locations on the ride, including a couple of locations that we've never been to really with guests before. Which we've got a platform, and because The Big One is a gravity driven ride, like a lot of rollercoasters. So what that means, in case you don't know, is the train is taken up to its highest point, usually with the click click click noise. It's on a chain and that's the anti-rollback because you don't want to go backwards down the hill. And then when the train is released at the top, it's free-rolling. And there's no brakes on the train, it's only when it goes to a block section, which is either partway round or near the end of the ride, that you can actually stop the train. So a rollercoaster, particularly in our case, which are built right next to the sea, can be affected by wind and so on.

And you have to make sure that in the event that a train dipped or didn't make the course, maybe it was slowed down by the wind or whatever, although we do monitor that while we're operating, obviously. But on the rare occasion that something like that could happen that you could get people off. So what that means is you have platforms around the ride, where if the ride stopped for whatever reason, again, gravity would kick in, the train would stop at the lowest point, and you've got to be able to go and get to that train and take people off. And so we thought, well, wouldn't it be cool if you could take people to those locations and they can stand on them and get to go... Again, bits where you would never normally get to go anywhere near. So we take people on, we take them to the brakes first, as I said, then we take them out onto... There's one that has a particularly good view of the beach and the sea and so on.

So we deliberately, because it's the most photogenic, we take people there and they get to stand on the platform next to the track and they get some amazing photos that you would never, again, never normally be able to get. And then we take them to the block brake. And we were quite deliberate in this, in that we were increasing the height throughout the experience. And so each location that you went to was higher up than the one before. So it effectively gets more exciting as the event goes on. And the block brake's 110 feet off the ground or whatever. If you've been to the ride, you think that's near the end of the ride. It's not that exciting. And people, when you walk them up, are suddenly shocked at actually how tall it is and the view that you get across the whole park. You get, again, these wonderful photos. And the feedback that we get from guests when we do that is that it is just we couldn't believe that they were able to be up in that location.

And then we end, effectively, with the regular Walk the Big One. So we take people right to the top of the ride. It's a much longer experience. The whole thing lasts about 90 minutes. If you're a coaster geek, then you're going to love hearing all of this. And the fact that you get to go to all of these places. And we deliberately walk people through the staff route through the park rather than the guest route through the park.

Kelly Molson: That's cool.

Andy Hygate: Again, they get to see bits that they would never normally get to walk and so on. And again, it'll be our second year of doing it. If you are a rollercoaster enthusiast and you come on Walk the Big One XL, we're hopefully going to deliver you a proper geeky in-depth look at how a rollercoaster is operated. And again, going right back to the start of it, it's offering an experience that... You're almost offering, although you do have to pay for it, it's almost like a money can't buy experience. Because to be able to do that is really rare.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, I guess as you were talking, when you were talking about taking guests through the operators' way through and not the guests' way through, I was like, it's really an alignment to being a zookeeper for the day and being behind the scenes on that kind of thing, that kind of level.

Andy Hygate: Yes, absolutely. You go through a gate that to us is a gate that we go through every day and we are not bothered about it, but to a guest it's somewhere in the park they've never set foot in before. It's underneath the structure of another ride. They can get a photo of somewhere where they wouldn't be able to go normally. All of that stuff, all that which just adds to that feeling of, one, it makes the person feel special because they're being given information and a look at stuff that they could never normally see. And two, they're getting this experience that runs alongside it that's just really, hopefully for them a really memorable experience. And then they get all this other stuff, optional stuff at the end of it as well.

And I think one of the big bits of feedback that we have about it, and it was interesting that you said about the people, and I do think that you can take people to all of these cool places. The bit that brings it alive is the staff talking about it. Particularly when it's staff that work on the ride and have that knowledge of the ride and know the park and all of that kind of stuff. It's those bits and pieces that when we get feedback about this, and they're the bits that people really love and really latch onto. And yeah, I'm pleased that we're able to deliver that for people.

Kelly Molson: Oh, it's brilliant. I've loved talking to you, Andy. This has been so interesting to hear about. I love how passionately you talk about it. You genuinely love it and it really comes across when you talk.

Andy Hygate: Hopefully, I mean, roller coasters are fun ultimately, aren't they? But to be able to do these kind of things with roller... I think back, I was saying when I was a kid going to Dreamland or whatever, if I could have walked up the roller coaster in Dreamland, I would've been the happiest kid in the world. So we are trying to offer that, I guess, now to-

Kelly Molson: Well, there you go. Andy, you've got your big birthday coming up. I hope you're listening, Dreamland, because you know what will make Andy happy for his birthday. You should do a little hookup, maybe do a little trade with their team and your team.

Andy Hygate: I'd love to.

Kelly Molson: Brilliant. Andy, what book have you got to share with us today? We always ask our guests to share a book with our listeners.

Andy Hygate: Yeah, I've picked a book by a director, a film director called Derek Jarman. And it's a book called Modern Nature. And don't worry, it's got nothing to do with camping or anything like that. He's sort of an inspirational person to me. But why it's important to me is actually it's based around... The guy lived effectively in a beach hut in Dungeness, which is down in Kent, which is where I'm from originally, in a situation which is considered by many to be... It's somewhere that's not that far from where my parents live. It's probably about 20 minutes drive.

And to some people you would describe, particularly in the winter, you'd describe it as blink. And it's a pebble beach and so on. And there's something about the English coastline and beaches and so on that I really like. And I like the fact that we have seasons. I like Blackpool in the summer, but I actually like it in the winter as well. This book is kind of like a diary, really, about how he's built a pebble garden, because it is literally on the beach, in the shadow of a nuclear power station, which sounds horrible, but actually I think it's a really inspirational thing. And I think you can see beauty in stuff which is unconventional and so on.

And the fact that he's managed to build a pebble garden and have plants in an area which is a harsh environment that can be seen as bleak, but actually I think there's great beauty in that. And that all comes across in that book and its very inspirational, conversational style makes it a really memorable book for me. And it's also somewhere where whenever I go back to Kent, I always go down there for fish and chips. And there's something, it sounds really strange, but sitting in the car in the winter, having fish and chips and listening to the power station humming in the background, it's actually really sort of reassuring. I don't know.

Kelly Molson: It's not an experience I've ever had, Andy. I feel like I'm going to have to add that one to my list.

Andy Hygate: No, I realise that sounds really odd, but I guess I've got an emotional connection to that place as well. And the fact that someone's written a whole book about it and their connection to it is what connects with me. So yeah, that's probably my choice.

Kelly Molson: I think that is a great book choice, Andy. I've never heard of that book, but I'm absolutely going to check it out. Listeners, if you want to win a copy of Andy's book, you know what to do. Go over to our Twitter account, retweet this episode announcement, and you'll be in with a chance of winning it. Andy, it's been an absolute pleasure to chat with you today. I think this is a wonderful podcast to start the new year off on. So thank you for coming on and sharing with us. And I look forward to joining you up in Blackpool at some point to Walk the Woodie.

Andy Hygate: Yeah, you must do. Looking forward to it. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned.

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast..

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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EPISODE NOTES

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends January 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://www.convious.com/

https://twitter.com/MrTicketeer

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andypovey/

https://blooloop.com/technology/news/convious-consumer-pricing

https://blooloop.com/technology/news/convious-digital-trends-webinar/

Andy Povey joined Convious in November 2021 as managing director for UK and Ireland. 

Andy has worked in the attractions industry since the early nineties when he began as a ride operator at Chessington World of Adventures. He stayed with the Tussaud’s company and later Merlin Entertainments for another 18 years, working in a variety of operational jobs at Rock Circus, Madame Tussauds, and central support, where he was responsible for the group’s ticketing systems. After Merlin, he worked for Gateway Ticketing Systems for ten years, opening and then overseeing their UK operation, before transferring his experience to the Convious team. Outside work, Andy enjoys visiting attractions of all shapes and sizes with his family.

Transcriptions:

Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in, or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. 

In today's episode, I speak with Andy Povey, Managing Director, UK and Ireland for Convious. Andy shares with us the five key digital trends attractions shouldn't miss out on and research into dynamic pricing for theme parks and tourist attractions. 

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue.

Kelly Molson: Andy Povey, it's so lovely to have you on Skip The Queue podcast today. Thanks for coming on.

Andy Povey: Thank you. It's my absolute pleasure.

Kelly Molson: And I know you've been a bit poorly. So let's just state now, poor old Andy has had COVID, and he's got a little bit of a cold today. So be kind to him.

Andy Povey: It's man flu.

Kelly Molson: It's always man flu, Andy. Right. As ever, we're going to start with icebreakers and I've got a really good one for you. So how would you describe your job to a three year old?

Andy Povey: Oh, to a three year old? Well, I've got eight year old twin girls. So as far as they're concerned, daddy gets to go to zoos and theme parks without them, which is not brilliant. But no, I make computers work, I suppose.

Kelly Molson: Make computers work for cool attractions like zoos and theme parks. I think that's perfect.

Andy Povey: Absolutely.

Kelly Molson: Good job, Andy. We'll talk more about that later. Okay. What one thing would you make a law that isn't one already?

Andy Povey: That's a really difficult one.

Kelly Molson: They're always difficult, Andy. It's always.

Andy Povey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're being mean to me. Yeah. Oh, I'm in our office in Amsterdam at the moment, so I'm traveling a bit. And I do have a theory that you should never, ever fly from an airport where people feel it's appropriate to turn up in flip flops.

Kelly Molson: Well, even if you're traveling back from holiday and it's a bit warm.

Andy Povey: So the law would be, if I'm at the airport, and I'm waiting in the back to get to Carousel, you need to get out of my way.

Kelly Molson: I think that's fair. Everyone goes a bit savage at the airport. Don't you think? You know when you go into London, and there's a certain way that you act on the tubes to get to places. You've got to walk really, you've got to be very determined, haven't you?

Andy Povey: Absolutely.

Kelly Molson: That's how I feel when I go into London. I've got my London walk on. And I feel it's a bit like that at the airports as well. Everyone's all in it for themselves. They don't care about anyone else around them. It's all just-

Andy Povey: No, no. Get out of my way.

Kelly Molson: Yeah. It's a good law, Andy. Right. Everyone has to get out of Andy's way at the airport. That's the law. Nice. Okay. And this one, I've asked a few people this one. Because I really like this one. What would you buy as you exit through the gift shop?

Andy Povey: I'm not really into things. I'm much more of an experience kind of person. So if there was another experience, or something to enhance the experience, then it would be something like that.

Kelly Molson: Okay. Good answer.

Andy Povey: Yeah, something to enhance the experience.

Kelly Molson: Good answer. I like that, Andy. And we'll talk about that a little bit more later as well. What would your twin girls pick? What would be their things from the theme park?

Andy Povey: Oh, cuddly toys. You must be the same. Shelves and shelves and shelves of these things in the house.

Kelly Molson: My daughter is doing incredibly well from all of the visits though that I have been on recently. Yeah. Let me tell you the gift shops, I've been [inaudible 00:03:28].

Andy Povey: Squish 'em alls.

Kelly Molson: To the gift shops. Yeah.

Andy Povey: What do they call them?

Kelly Molson: Squishy animals, all sorts of stuff. She's now got from various attractions that she's never been to that I'll have to take her to, to say thank you.

Andy Povey: No, when mine were the same age as your daughter, I went to Orlando a few times for IAAPA. And I would buy them Mickey Mouse and Mini Mouse cuddly toys, and bring them home. But because they'd never seen anything to do with Disney, these were just referred to as Boy Mouse and Girl Mouse.

Kelly Molson: Oh, bless them.

Andy Povey: They didn't know what Mickey Mouse was.

Kelly Molson: Oh. And I'm sure they do very well now.

Andy Povey: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Kelly Molson: All right, Andy, what is your unpopular opinion? What have you prepared for us?

Andy Povey: I actually did a poll of my colleagues in the office, because I was looking at something to do with Eurovision, and actually trying to work out whether my opinion was unpopular or not. And unfortunately it wasn't. So Eurovision massively overrated is my opinion of this.

Kelly Molson: Gosh. So-

Andy Povey: I knew we were going to fall out over this.

Kelly Molson: Well, it's not just me. There's a lot of listeners that you are going to make very unhappy about that statement, Andy. Not to mention Rachel MacKay, who, if she hears this, I don't know how she's going to feel the next time she sees you. So that is for you to feel awkward about.

Andy Povey: You asked for an unpopular opinion.

Kelly Molson: Okay, let's put it out there. How does everyone feel about Eurovision? I feel like this is definitely going to be an unpopular one, Andy. Thank you. Right. Okay. Andy, so you have got over two decades in the attraction sector, self proclaimed attractions industry nerd. I think that's fair. Tell us a little bit about your background, and how you ended up working in the sector.

Andy Povey: A colleague did tell me the other day that it's actually 30 years, and I was trying to hide away from this. Yes, I am old. So many, many years ago, started a temporary seasonal job at Chessington World of Adventures, having left college without a clue about what I wanted to do when I grew up. My first job was driving the train around the park at Chessington, and absolutely fell in love with the attractions industry. And then stayed with Merlin or The Tussauds Group, which then became Merlin Entertainment for about 18 years, and doing all sorts of different jobs. So that's how I fell into it. And I've never looked back.

Kelly Molson: It's a really common theme actually, from guests that come on who've gone to work in a theme park or an attraction as what they probably thought would be a temp job for a while. And then absolutely loved every minute of it, and then have just risen through the ranks. Whether they've stayed in one group or they've moved around. But they've just continued to learn, and learn, and learn, and progress. And that comes across so frequently with our guests. It sucks you in.

Andy Povey: It absolutely does. And it's a great industry. And I love the fact that you can build a career within our industry from starting right at the bottom, and just work your way up. I think it's a testament to the industry.

Kelly Molson: What kind of roles did you work in then as you moved your way up?

Andy Povey: So I did four years at Chessington as a ride operator. Then went to Rock Circus, which was a subsidiary of Madame Tussauds in the Trocadero and Piccadilly Circus in Central London. It was there for four years, and we were told that someone from head office was going to come and install the till system and tell me how to make it work. At which point I went, "Oh, maybe not." So I went and became that person.

Kelly Molson: Oh, you were a tills man?

Andy Povey: Yeah, I was. It was a tills man. So I started in ticketing before the internet.

Kelly Molson: Yeah.

Andy Povey: Before anybody really knew what the internet was, and then moved to Madame Tussauds for a short period of time, and then to what was Tussauds Group head office in Tottenham Court Road looking after all of the till systems for the organisation. And then did that for about 10 years, and then left, went and joined the supplier that we were using, Tussauds, so gateway ticketing. I was with them for 10 years. 

Basically convinced them to set up a UK office, and I ran the UK office for 10 years. And then after COVID, decided it was time to go and do something else. So came across Convious, the company I work for now, and whose office I'm sitting in today. And that's it, really. That's a very brief summary of Andy's career.

Kelly Molson: Excellent career. I'd like to hear a little bit about Convious. So I am aware of you, and I think that most people at the moment would be aware of Convious. They're everywhere. Convious are everywhere.

Andy Povey: Yeah. We're bright pink, and we shout a lot.

Kelly Molson: And they're pink.

Andy Povey: Don't know what they do.

Kelly Molson: You have fantastic stands, events that we all attend. But I think there's something really different about Convious. Can you just tell us a little bit about it?

Andy Povey: So it's not just what Convious are doing. There's something going off in the whole world of technology that the sales force are referring to as the fourth industrial revolution. And so competing with third industrial revolution from sort of 1949 to 2010, the fourth industrial revolution's all about data. And five years ago everyone was talking about big data. That was the buzzword that was everywhere. So we were just storing loads and loads of information. The fourth industrial revolution we're seeing now is actually doing things with that data. Because there's no point in just paying for a load of storage somewhere, if you're not going to do anything with it.

So what we're doing at Convious with that data. It's really sitting on top of our partner's websites rather than being a page that you go off to, and gathering as much data as we possibly can. So we pull in long range weather forecasts, we're pulling in all sorts of information about how people are interacting with the website. And ultimately just using it all to drive sales and increase sales for our partners.

Kelly Molson: I know that the weather thing is a really small thing of the system. It's a tiny thing, but it's the thing that sticks in my head the most. Because I just think it's blooming genius. I know. It's such a small thing, but it's such a clever thing to have.

Andy Povey: It really does affect attendance at so many attractions. And I love Dom Jones when he was talking to you. I love his take on the weather, of actually, if you're going to blame the weather, you should also give the weather credit when you have a great attendance.

Kelly Molson: I agree. Yeah, I love that quote from Dom. So it is really interesting in terms of what Convious do. Because I think that one of the things that attractions could be better at is using the data that they already have in more sophisticated ways. And the Convious platform allows you to do that really easily. Because let's face it, marketing teams are overstretched in attractions. And they can be quite small at times as well. We had Danielle and Ross on from Drayton Manor a few weeks ago. And the two of them pretty much head up their department. And I know they're a head of marketing as well. But that's a small team for what is a significant attraction.

Andy Povey: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Kelly Molson: So anything that we can help to put in place for those teams is ultimately going to make it easier for them, and make it better. And they'll be able to understand better what their customers are actually doing.

Andy Povey: And ultimately it's about making it easier for the customer. There's a whole focus on personalization at the moment, again, across the industry. So rather than it being one too many, it's one personalisation. And looking at, if we know something about the customer, so take me for example. I buy family tickets, and I love industrial heritage. So Google knows that about me, and Google will tell every website that I go to, that's who I am. So if we've got a family offering as an attraction, then let's promote the family offering. If you've got an industrial heritage offering, let's promote the industrial heritage offering to the people who've identified that they are. Ultimately it's about giving people what they want.

Kelly Molson: And that's the really smart bit, isn't it? That the system can identify the person that's coming, and show them the things that are more relevant to them from that attraction. Then the standard things that they might like, they might buy. But actually this is the one that they really want, because that's connecting with them at a completely deeper level. That's some of the stuff that I want to talk about today. 

So one of the things that's good about Convious, and I'd like to hope that Rubber Cheese are aligned in this way as well, is that when we think about talking to attractions, we're giving them things that are useful. I think, that ultimately from any marketing perspective is how useful can you be? This content that I'm putting out, what value does it bring somebody? And how can they engage with it? And is it helpful for them?

And that's what I feel Convious does really well. And I see a lot of your articles on Blooloop for example. And a month or so ago there was an article about the five key digital trends for attractions as we roll into 2023. And I think that this is a really good time to talk about these things. Because people are doing a lot of planning at this time of year. They're in Christmas, which this year feels very busy, because it's the first Christmas people can-

Andy Povey: It certainly does.

Kelly Molson: It's the first one though, if you think about it, that people can actually go out and feel comfortable that the things they're going to book, they can actually do. Last year we still had that Omicron. Do we do big groups? Do we just stay inside a little bit longer? But this year feels busy. And I think that attractions will get through Christmas, have a brilliant Christmas. And then January will be that time when they go "Right, what are we doing? This is what we need to focus on now." So this is very pertinent. It comes at a great time. One of the key trends that you just mentioned was personalization. So you talked about making things relevant to your audience. Really, really relevant. Are we talking about exclusive here as well? Because we talk about that quite a lot. Exclusive events and things that they can only get at certain places.

Andy Povey: Yeah, I think so. And I think that's one of the things that, not just around digital, I think it's one of the things that the attractions world will do to really weather the economic storm that we're going through at the moment. Generally what we've seen over the past 12 months is that if you've got a short event, or a short-term event, it tends to sell out. So looking at what you as an attraction can do that creates that exclusive event. 

So if you are a park, can you get Peppa Pig on site for two or three days? Can you get Paw Patrol there for a couple of days? So giving people their incentive to come, and come again, and come again. So not just being, this is the six weeks of the summer at my theme park. This is the Peppa Pig, fortnight, although two days. And this is the Paw Patrol for two days. So improving that repeat visitation.

Kelly Molson: And what you talked about data, I guess that comes back to really understanding your audience.

Andy Povey: Absolutely.

Kelly Molson: So you need to be collecting the data to understand what those people want in the first phase to then be able to tailor your offering to what they like.

Andy Povey: 100%. 100%. There's no value in creating a Peppa Pig experience if none of your visitors have got kids. A great way to waste a load of money.

Kelly Molson: I don't need to see Peppa.

Andy Povey: No. No, no, no.

Kelly Molson: You can keep Peppa. So you talked earlier about what you like, and that Google knows that about you. How do attractions tap into that? I guess through advertising, right?

Andy Povey: Well it's not just advertising. It's actually looking at... And you did the survey a few weeks ago about the attractions, and understanding Google Analytics, that kind of stuff. It's free. You do not need to pay to get Google Analytics data. It's there for you. And there are so many venues, and so many prospective clients that I'm talking to now, that don't have access to it. It's almost criminal. There are still vendors out there that don't share this information. So I suppose to come back and answer your question is, go and look at the data that you've got. Google Analytics will give you a view of everybody that's coming to your website.

Kelly Molson: Find out who they are, what they like, and then give them what they want.

Andy Povey: Well, yeah. But tailor something for them. So if you've got a large foodie audience, then look at your catering.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's really good advice.

Andy Povey: Can you put on a Heston Blumenthal event, or a Jamie Oliver event?

Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's really great advice actually, taking it to that deeper level. The second key digital trend was about online and offline, which we're talking a lot about online and offline as well. So this isn't just about digital, but I guess one of the things that was mentioned was about digital experiences. And I guess you can talk about that from a pre-visit perspective. How do you engage people digitally before they turn up at your event? But also, once they're at your venue too. So digital experiences that deepen or extend the experience that you were already giving them. Can you think of any really good examples of that, that we could talk about from an attractions perspective?

Andy Povey: That's really difficult. The reason that we go to attractions as human beings, is because we like doing physical things. We want to be with our friends. We want to be with our family. Particularly after COVID, it's has been difficult to go and see granny, and whatever. So it's safer to go and visit a park, or to visit a garden than it is to possibly all sit around in the lounge, having a cup of tea. I can give you an unusual example, I suppose. The Forestry Commission did something a few years ago with The Gruffalo, and it's an augmented reality thing.

Kelly Molson: Yes.

Andy Povey: So as a parent, you could sit your child on a tree trunk and hold up your phone, and the augmented reality would superimpose an image of the Gruffalo sitting next to your child. They pulled it within six months, because the parent is having this experience of looking at their child through a phone. Whereas the child's sitting there going, "Well, mummy and daddy's just on their phone again."

Kelly Molson: "Where's the Gruffalo?"

Andy Povey: "Mummy and daddy's just on their phone again. What are we doing?"

Kelly Molson: Yeah.

Andy Povey: So in that situation it's about getting back to reality, rather than being digital. So it's a really fine line. At what point does an app, or a park map, or something like that, at what point does it enhance your visit, versus intruding on your visit?

Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's a really good question. It's really funny, because when you mentioned that, I was like, that's a perfect example of this, how digital interacts with nature. But you're right, aren't you? Because the child doesn't interact with it. They just see you pointing a phone at them again, or you interacting with your phone and not with them. I hadn't considered that, and what message that actually sends out to them while they're outside in nature as well.

Andy Povey: Yeah. And so I'm not a [inaudible 00:18:44] who's going, no, no, digital should be nowhere near your experience. It should be there, and it should be enhancing. But actually really understand that it is enhancing. So if you talk to the guys from BeWILDerwood, I know there was a podcast with Hannah. They delight on the fact that you can't get a mobile phone signal in Norfolk. Because you should put your phone away. You're here to have a day out with the kids.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's a really good point. I actually quite like it when I can't get any mobile signal, because it means that I'm present.

Andy Povey: Yes, absolutely.

Kelly Molson: It means I'm not worrying about having to check something. I'm actually not even that concerned about, oh I needed to get this picture for the gram. I just forget about it if I've got no signal. It's just not going to happen. One thing that we do have to think about though, from an online perspective, is about bookings. So what we have seen, and again we've seen this in our attractions website survey that we've just published, is that bookings are increasing on mobile year, on year, on year, on year. So we do have to think about that pre-visit, and how easy we make it for people to book tickets. So actually, someone asked me this question on LinkedIn yesterday. What's one of my top infuriations with attractions websites?

And I said for me, I'm often on my mobile phone when I'm doing things, because I'm out and about and I might be booking my tickets on a mobile phone. And I really hate when you're forced to create an account before you can actually buy anything. And I'm like, "God, I've got literally five minutes before I get off the train, and onto the tube. And I've got no signal. And I've got to get this ticket. I don't want to be creating an account right now."

Andy Povey: No, no, no.

Kelly Molson: Just give me the ticket. I might get an account afterwards, but just give me the ticket.

Andy Povey: That was one of the things from your report, wasn't it? The account creation is a massive turnoff to conversion. And for me, I never remember any of those passwords. So every time I go back to their store, I'm having to reset my password, because it's just an absolute pain in the butt.

Kelly Molson: I'm with you. So there you go.

Andy Povey: Don't do it.

Kelly Molson: Top tip from this podcast. Don't make people do that.

Andy Povey: Yeah. Don't do accounts.

Kelly Molson: Two very angry consumers here.

Andy Povey: Absolutely. 100%.

Kelly Molson: All right. So number three on our digital trends list is increasing loyalty. Now this is a big one, isn't it? Right? So again, it's interesting. So from a personal perspective, again, I was asked about memberships. We have a National Trust membership, it renews in January. I'll absolutely be renewing it. It's great value for money. It gives us so many places locally that we can go to. It's not a free day out, but it's a great day out, and we can take quite long.

Andy Povey: It feels like it.

Kelly Molson: It feels like a free day.

Andy Povey: Yeah.

Kelly Molson: Yeah. But do attractions need to think a bit more about that now? So should attractions be rewarding loyalty? So member perks for example? Or just small things that members get for being a member, that you couldn't get unless you were a member?

Andy Povey: Absolutely. It's almost those money-can't-buy experiences. So it doesn't necessarily cost the attraction anything to do these things. And you can go have a member exclusive event to walk a coaster track, or to a behind the scenes tour of something. But yeah, all right. It might cost you a couple of hours for a member of staff to put it on. Again, as we came out of COVID, the first people that came to your rotation, were your most loyal customers. They've come to see you as the first thing they can do. 

So as an attraction, you have the opportunity to harness that loyalty, and turn these people into advocates. And that's going to be your best marketing resource, where they're recommending to people to come along to you. So if you can deepen that relationship by rewarding, by sharing, then absolutely you should do it.

Kelly Molson: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's understanding what they want as well. So when we talk about delivering what they want, should attractions be surveying their members, and finding out what more they can give them? And again, it comes back to the data thing again, doesn't it? How well do you know your audience? From a member's perspective, are you actually giving them what they want?

Andy Povey: No, absolutely. And surveying's great, but there's so many other ways you can capture information about members and what they're doing that isn't actually going and asking them a question. It was interesting when we did the dynamic pricing consumer research. The responses that you get from people when they're answering a survey aren't necessarily what they're doing in real life.

Kelly Molson: Interesting. Give us an example.

Andy Povey: There was, 30% of people believe the airlines aren't charging dynamic prices. And I'm looking at this going, well, this can't be right. This is obvious. But actually, if you dig into it a little bit more, and we did with the guys from Baker Richards. And it's actually, the consumer's not looking at the price changing. The consumer's interested in the price they're paying for the date and time that they want to get on the plane. It doesn't matter that the price changes. It's how much am I paying today? What's my price now? That's a very long winded way of answering your question about the value of surveys.

Kelly Molson: Yeah. No, it's really important, isn't it? So how else do you get to know your members? If surveys are giving us not quite the full picture, what other ways can we find out about-

Andy Povey: So if you are looking at app, then obviously you are tracking, or you have the ability to track where people are going, how they're engaging, that kind of stuff. I was at IAAPA a couple of weeks ago in Orlando. And there's guys there with a new product that's actually harvesting location data from 200 different apps, and bringing all that, and presenting it back to you. Which I'm not a hundred percent sure that it is GDPR compliant, or [inaudible 00:24:44].

Kelly Molson: Is that okay though? I'm not sure about that.

Andy Povey: Yeah. But there it's looking at where people are going, how long they're staying there, and that kind of stuff. So that's one example. Going back to what we do at Convious, we don't capture addresses, postal addresses. Because we're not interested in old school CRM. We're not going to produce a mailing, a physical piece of paper and post it out to somebody. So why are you asking them to fill in all those fields with their address on?

Kelly Molson: That's interesting. So even from a geographic perspective, it's not always relevant to understand where your customers are traveling from.

Andy Povey: You can get all of that from the IP address that they're coming from.

Kelly Molson: Sure.

Andy Povey: So obviously it's really important to understand whereabouts in the country, and how far away your customers are from you, and that kind of stuff. But there are other ways to gathering that information, rather than traditional filling in. Back to your comment about filling in my address on the phone. Yeah, I've got fat fingers. I'm not going to type my address in on the phone.

Kelly Molson: And I'm busy.

Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah.

Kelly Molson: It's not going to happen.

Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Kelly Molson: All right. Yeah. No, I like that.

Andy Povey: Make it as simple as you possibly can for people.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, absolutely. And the data's already there, so just gather it from the right place without giving people something else that they need to do. Good. Okay. All right. Well, our next one is about engagement, digital engagement. So digital engagement, from a marketing perspective, I always think about user generated content at this point. Because you're asking your visitors, from an offline perspective, you're asking them to engage with something that's at your physical attraction, but then you then encouraging them to share that digitally. 

So you're getting that double exposure and, you're also generating content from your users, which is invaluable for your marketing team. So that's the thing that I always focus on from digital engagement. What other things can we ask attractions to focus on?

Andy Povey: A story someone told me many, many years ago was that their marketing guy actually ran a training session at this attraction, I can't remember which one, for staff on how to take the best photos.

Kelly Molson: Oh that's great. Yeah.

Andy Povey: You see a family, and mum or dad's taking a picture of the other parent and the kids, obviously the member of staff is going to offer to take the photograph for them. That's just human nature. That's what we do. But if you've already identified the most memorable background to put these people in, then the member staff can just move them slightly. And it improves and increases the rate of those photos being uploaded and shared.

Kelly Molson: That's such a small thing, isn't it?

Andy Povey: Isn't it?

Kelly Molson: But again, that's genius. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get a better picture for people. They're more encouraged to share it. I love it. That's so clever. I hadn't even considered that. But again, that comes back to the people. People make places.

Andy Povey: Absolutely.

Kelly Molson: So you empower the people to make those things happen better for those guests. I love that. Yeah, great one. Okay. And then I guess reviews is something that's really important about engagement. And how do we encourage people to leave reviews about the venues?

Andy Povey: It can be as simple as your post visit survey. Standard. Everyone's doing them.

Kelly Molson: Ah, are they though? Are they though?

Andy Povey: Well, yeah okay. Everyone should be doing them.

Kelly Molson: Okay. Should be.

Andy Povey: Everyone should be doing them. And then you can have some intelligence sitting behind it, that if you get a lot of high scores, whatever, then direct the consumer over to the review site at the end of the review. If you're getting some negative scores, then direct them to your customer service team and do something about it. As human beings, we're happy to share this kind of information, as long as we're getting something back from it. It's a transactional relationship at that point. So we talk a lot about harvesting data. But morally, you can't do that if you're not giving the consumer something back, and giving them a benefit for doing it. Back to your comment about accounts. What's the point of me creating an account? What's my benefit of doing this? There isn't one. I'm just going to get annoyed about it.

Kelly Molson: This is the thing, actually. So most of the time when I've had to create an account to get my ticket, there hasn't been any further interaction other than someone's whacked me on their mailing list. And I'm probably going to unsubscribe from that mailing list, because I'm annoyed that I've had to make the account in the first place. So what is that benefit? Yeah. Think about if you are going to force people to do something, at least make it worthwhile for them than a newsletter. Just sticking them on the newsletter list is not going to cut it.

Andy Povey: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And then for a long time I was on the Encore Hotels mailing list. I get an email from them a couple of times a week. And it started, Dear Povey, you-

Kelly Molson: Dear Povey.

Andy Povey: Dear Povey, you have got that so wrong. You cannot. Your CRM is so bad.

Kelly Molson: Can I tell you though? So sometimes when I have to sign up for stuff and I have to put my company name, I get emails to Dear Rubber. That's not okay. I'm quite used to it, but it's still not okay.

Andy Povey: No, no, no, no. So yeah. We're talking a lot about examples of how not to do it, than how to do it better.

Kelly Molson: Well I think this is important, right?

Andy Povey: It is.

Kelly Molson: There may be attractions listening to this, going, "Oops, we might have done that. We might need to change that." So it's all relevant.

Andy Povey: Oh no, on a positive. I got an email from Father Christmas yesterday. It's from an attraction we took the kids to last year to go and see Santa. And it's the first mail I've had from that venue since visiting, so 12 months. So I'm not getting spammed. And you see Father Christmas arrive in your inbox.

Kelly Molson: Oh, that's nice, isn't it?

Andy Povey: It's a very special moment. So that was very well done. Very well done.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's really smart, isn't it? If you're just going to send one email a year, make sure it's from Santa.

Andy Povey: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kelly Molson: Right. Let's talk about pricing, because that's our number five key digital trends for attractions. Now pricing's really interesting. We've talked quite a lot about pricing recently. So we had Dominic on from Mary Rose, talking about pricing. We also had Simon Addison from Roman Baths, talking about pricing.

Andy Povey: Yes.

Kelly Molson: Let's talk about dynamic pricing, because it's something that we touched on just earlier when we were talking about the airlines and the surveys. So airlines use something called real time pricing. When a plane's almost full, the airline company's going to bump their prices up. Because they know they're going to sell out, and they know that somebody really wants that ticket, because they have to get somewhere on a certain day at a certain time. So it's a bit of a no-brainer for them. Is that something that attractions should be doing?

Andy Povey: I think so. And as an industry, we've talked about dynamic pricing for the past 20 years. And when I was Madame Tussaud's, we implemented what then was peak and off-peak pricing. And so we changed the price of the ticket three times during the day. And actually, because we were very explicit about what the price was, we were stuck at this 1995 price point, and had been reluctant to change for a while. We actually increased our ticket yield by about 30%, whilst also increasing our value for money score, which seemed counterintuitive. And actually what was happening there was that the consumer was choosing how much they were going to pay.

So rather than being told what the price was, the consumer chooses. So naturally we are more comfortable about a situation, where we feel that we've had some choice. Dynamic pricing does that. Real time pricing, which is where we sit at Convious just makes that run much more efficiently, much more quickly. So a lot of dynamic pricing consultancies out there at the moment will talk about changing prices every day, which if you think, generally people are buying tickets to an attraction three to five days before they visit. They're only going to see three to five different price points. Whereas the way the modern world is going, or the way we are is, we're changing prices, or we can change the price as a result of every single transaction.

Kelly Molson: Does that make it more difficult from an operational perspective, if you're constantly changing your prices though? Is it harder to do your forecasting, for example, if that's your price strategy?

Andy Povey: If you are forecasting on individual ticket price level, yeah, absolutely. So don't do that.

Kelly Molson: Good advice.

Andy Povey: Yeah. So every attraction that I've ever worked in and around has a target yield, or a target ticket price to achieve. And we've been doing variable pricing through all the coupons that get put out on all the leaflet racks that you see on every motorway service station. So you can't control how many of those coupons are coming back, and how much discount you're going to get. So having much more control makes it easier for you to manage that, and get the computer to do it. Obviously if you're sitting there changing the prices all the time, then yes, it's going to be a nightmare.

Kelly Molson: Nobody wants that job.

Andy Povey: No. And the other thing on dynamic pricing is, we still get hooked up on the idea that dynamic means increased, and it doesn't. If you're doing it properly, then it doesn't mean the price is going up necessarily. Obviously you get a better yield. But the guys at Pleasurewood Hills down in Lowestoft, they have a very transient market. So there are loads and loads of holiday parks in their area. So Mondays and Fridays are change over days. So their total addressable market on a Monday and a Friday drops by 50%, because people are packing up and going home. So if you drop the price on a Monday and Friday, or drop the price on a Monday and Friday. Someone who may have come on Wednesday, is now going to come on Monday or Friday, have a much better experience, because venue's not full. And so it smooths their demand. So there's a lot of science behind it.

Kelly Molson: Yep. And that all comes back to data, what we started talking about, right?

Andy Povey: Absolutely.

Kelly Molson: Knowing-

Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kelly Molson: Knowing where people are coming from, what they're doing, how you can change their mindset about things just from the data.

Andy Povey: Yeah. And actually watching what they're doing. So we have an artificial intelligence engine that sits behind what we're doing. And it can monitor in real time what's happening about your conversion rate. So if you put the price up by a pound and then your conversion rate drops by 5%, you've probably gone up too high. So drop it down a little bit. So just manage it better, I suppose, in summary.

Kelly Molson: I think that's good advice for life in general, isn't it Andy?

Andy Povey: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kelly Molson: Just manage it better.

Andy Povey: Just manage it better.

Kelly Molson: This has been a great chat, Andy. Thank you. I think there's loads to take away from. So what we're going to do in the show notes. So there will be links to all the blog articles that we've mentioned today about the digital trends. And I believe there is a webinar that you ran about dynamic pricing as well. And I believe that we might have a link to that too that we could share, which would be great. But Andy, we always end our podcast by asking our guests to share a book with us, something that they love or they've really enjoyed that they think our listeners would also like.

Andy Povey: So I've pondered this for a while, and I know that some of your previous people you've spoken to have got away with two.

Kelly Molson: Yeah.

Andy Povey: So I've got a request for two books.

Kelly Molson: Oh, God. Okay.

Andy Povey: One's a business book. Really simple, about a half hour read. It's called Who Moved My Cheese?

Kelly Molson: Good book.

Andy Povey: It's one of my favorites when I first read it 20, 25 years ago, something like that, it really gave me a different way of looking at change. So I really recommend that. And the other one is actually a book I love reading to my kids, called Oi Dog!

Kelly Molson: Oi Dog! Great.

Andy Povey: Oi Dog! Yeah. So there's a child in all of us. And that for me really just tickles all of my childish bones. Yeah.

Kelly Molson: Oh brilliant.

Andy Povey: So it works pretty well.

Kelly Molson: Well, both of those books are right up my street. So Who Moved My Cheese? Unsurprisingly within a company called Rubber Cheese, you won't be surprised to know that somebody bought that for me when I set up the business. And that was nearly 20 years ago. So that was one of the first business books that I think that I ever read. And it did make a big difference about how you deal with change, and how you compartmentalise it into an easier way of dealing with. But Oi Dog! sounds right up my street. I'm going to put that on my list too? Right listeners-

Andy Povey: Absolutely.

Kelly Molson: So as ever, if you want to win a copy of Andy's two books, then if you go over to our Twitter account, you can just search for Skip the Queue, and you retweet this podcast announcement with the words, "I want Andy's books." Then we'll enter you into a draw to potentially win them. Andy, thank you. It's been lovely to chat today. I've really, really enjoyed it. I'm sure I will see you out in events soon. And if I don't see you-

Andy Povey: Absolutely.

Kelly Molson: Before, have a wonderful Christmas.

Andy Povey: And to you. Thank you very much, Kelly.

Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned.

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast..

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

We have launched our brand-new playbook: ‘The Retail Ready Guide to Going Beyond the Gift Shop’ — your go-to resource for building a successful e-commerce strategy that connects with your audience and drives sustainable growth.

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Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends January 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://www.castlehoward.co.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbi-ollive-411509171/

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/castle-howard-through-the-seasons

Castle Howard's love story with China - as told by Abbigail Ollive

Transcriptions:

Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in, or working with, visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson.

In today's episode, I speak with my very first returning guest, Abbigail Ollive, Head of Marketing, Sales, and Programming at Castle Howard, the stately home and visitor attraction in North Yorkshire. Abbi takes us on a journey through the seasons at Castle Howard as she explains just what it's like to film a TV production at a visitor attraction as she shares her advice for other attractions that are thinking about doing the same.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on all the user channels by searching Skip the Queue.

I am very excited to have Abbigail Ollive back on the podcast today.

Abbigail Ollive: To be the first returner. It mustn't have put you off too much first time round.

Kelly Molson: Well, I think it's more like I didn't put you off, because you were episode six of season one, which was all the way back in 2019. And I didn't ask people icebreaker questions then, so you might regret this after this. Who knows? First one, what is the strangest or worst gift that you've ever received?

Abbigail Ollive: Last Christmas, my partner basically took Christmas as an opportunity to solve anything I'd been moaning about. So my Christmas presents were things like those little hand warmers, because I'd obviously been complaining that my hands were cold. And I'd been complaining about my drive to work here at Castle Howard in rural North Yorkshire sometimes being a little bit hairy. So my Christmas present was winter tires and a four by four driving experience to try, which at the time I was like, I really would've loved a baking experience or a pizza making course or something, and I was pretty grumpy about going.

But it actually turned out to be a really excellent gift and I had a fab time. I feel like I'm qualified now to drive people through a field or through a stream if they need, and I know how to use my ridiculous rural vehicle. So I was a bit grumpy about it, because I was like, it's very kind but it feels like you really wanted to come and do this.

Kelly Molson: It's quite thoughtful though, isn't it? That's quite a well thought out gift.

Abbigail Ollive: I guess so.

Kelly Molson: He's been listening. He's just interpreted it in a slightly more original way than you were expecting.

Abbigail Ollive: See, that sounds very ungrateful, doesn't it? And I did have a fab time, but I have dropped some hints this year about... I guess I've decided to complain about different stuff. In case that gets resolved in a different way.

Kelly Molson: I'm running out of mascara.

Abbigail Ollive: My shoulders are really tense. I think a massage might really help me this year.

Kelly Molson: Like it. Yeah, I'm running out of mascara, if anyone's listening. I need some of that on my shopping list. Spa day would be excellent. My shoulders feel tense too. I like this subtle hint dropping.

If you could only listen to one album for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Abbigail Ollive: Whenever people ask me like, what's your taste in music? It's just very eclectic. And at the minute I am listening on repeat to Self Esteem, who I think is just amazing. I don't know if you are at all familiar with her. She's called Rebecca, she's from Rotherham, where my dad is from. I don't think many pop stars have come out of Rotherham, South Yorkshire. But give her album a listen.

We saw her at a festival when she was quite up and coming, and she's just done Jools Holland and is now on a bigger tour next year. We booked again to see her. And it's just hugely empowering. I think for younger women, teenagers kind of finding their way through what can be quite a complex time, I just think her lyrics and her whole approach to empowerment is really, really inspiring.

I don't know whether that'd be the one I'd listened to forever, but it is on repeat in my car on my journey to work constantly at the moment. And that's my top tip I think. Give her a listen. She's very cool.

Kelly Molson: Did you combine that album with the off-road driving as well at the weekend to give you a little bit of an extra boost?

Abbigail Ollive: No, I think maybe empowerment but, yes. Women driving through fields in pickups.

Kelly Molson: Awesome. Good response. Okay, final one. If you could bring back any fashion trend, what would it be?

Abbigail Ollive: I think I was meant to be in the 1950s. I think that kind of grease styling is... I'd love to just look like that every day, really, if I could get away with it and if I had time to properly do my hair in rollers and all of that jazz. I think that's the period I'd probably go back to and I think be quite into, that sort of retro 50s. Really bright. I like the bright, vibrant... I'd happily drive an American pink Cadillac through the country roads of North Yorkshire.

Kelly Molson: I remember this about you. You're all about colour. I do remember this about you when we met in person. You love a colour and you love a patterned dress, an excellently patterned dress.

Abbigail Ollive: Yeah, I do. And I wish I could suit a hat better. Some people are like... My brother's always in a very cool hat, but I just don't suit it. I think it's the fringe. The fringe, glasses, hat combo is one I can't pull off.

Kelly Molson: Fringe with a wooly hat is really difficult, isn't it? Because it just pushes it down into your eyes. I'd like to be a hat person as well. I feel like people that wear hats, they just exude confidence. Do you know what I mean? Just have that... They walk with confidence. They walk high with a hat on. I'd quite like that too.

That's good choices. All right, what about your unpopular opinion, Abbi, because we've never had one of these from you.

Abbigail Ollive: No, we haven't. And I'm sure I've got plenty I could share, I mean, my initial instinct with this was, I would never be upset if I didn't ever hear an Oasis song again, but that's not the one I'm going to go with. Sorry.

It's a podcast related one. I thought I'd be topical. I really hate comedians on podcasts. I just can't be doing with all the trying to be funny and all the chat in between what it is they're actually meant to be talking about. I love the foodie podcast, but I just want them to cut to the chase and I want to hear somebody talk about something they're knowledgeable about. Maybe I just don't really comedians in general, but on a podcast that's my unpopular opinion.

Kelly Molson: Do you think it's because they're trying a bit too hard because that's their job and they're trying to... If a supplier comes on and they're trying to plug their thing, they're trying to plug their I'm funny, really?

Abbigail Ollive: I think it's just like... I was going to try and not name names, but I'm quite a foodie and I like a foodie podcast and I think maybe I've realized that actually I want to hear about the food and not all the chat that surrounds it. So yeah, comedians on podcasts.

Kelly Molson: All right, good one. Glad I'm not funny or I'd be right [inaudible 00:06:53].

Abbigail Ollive: Well, I'm not either, so we'll have no comedy. We'll just get the questions.

Kelly Molson: That's it. We're done now. We're done with anything humorous for the rest of the episode. Excellent. Thanks for setting the tone.

Abbi, just for our listeners that don't know of you, I'm sure there's not many, tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do.

Abbigail Ollive: I at the moment am very fortunate to be kind of running the visitor attraction side of things at Castle Howard. So anybody who hasn't heard of Castle Howard, Castle Howard is a stately home in North Yorkshire. It was designed by Sir John Vanbrugh in 1699, so it's a historic house open as a visitor attraction, but also sits within a 9,000 acre estate. It's still home to the Howard family, they are directly my line managers, and Castle Howard's opened 364 days a year as an attraction.

But I think it's also a really interesting place. I arrived here knowing that I was coming to be involved in a visitor attraction, but I think maybe it was more of a pleasant surprise that we're actually foresters and farmers and we have a holiday park and holiday cottages and a farm shop and a garden centre and all the catering and retail outlets as well.

I think in total it's nine different businesses, and my role kind of heads up marketing and events and programming and sales and that kind of visitor experience side of things. I'm not actually being asked to be responsible for the farming and forestry, you'll be relieved to hear, but it's also just unlocks so many stories that as a marketer at heart, I guess, is really exciting on a daily basis.

We're not a charity, so all the income generated by footfall and visitors paying for an admission ticket goes directly into the restoration and heritage of the building and the listed landscape.

I've been here for just over five years, so I'm just in the middle of Christmas number six. It's a joyous time to be at a place like Castle Howard, when it's all decked out for Christmas and we're welcoming literally thousands of visitors a day over this festive season.

Big day today. It's a kind of rainy, North Yorkshire, midweek day, but we've got 11 coaches here and they're all having a fabulous time. And I've just had a message saying, can someone come and help with the Queues in the bauble emporium? So that's the kind of thing that can occur on an hourly basis.

But yeah, I'm Yorkshire, so I haven't actually moved very far. Not deliberately, but just because stuff's come up here, and it's a gorgeous place in the world to be. I've got a little boy, so living in the countryside and having quite an outdoorsy life really suits us. My background's in theatre, but theatre marketing and comms, so did 10 years in theater before moving across into visitor attractions, which is just a theatre of a different kind, I think.

Kelly Molson: It is. It's a show, isn't it? You're creating a theatre for people that come and visit. And that leads us a little bit to what we're going to talk about today, really, a show of a slightly different kind.

I think there's been a bit of a run of programs like this. I'm talking about programs like the Secret Life of the Zoo at Chester Zoo, Inside the Zoo, Edinburgh Zoo. There's been quite a lot of zoo related TV programs on recently that give you a bit of a snapshot of behind the scenes. I think One Zoo Three was the other one from Paradise Wildlife Park. But you have been involved in shooting TV programs for Channel 4, called Castle Howard: Through the Seasons. Tell us a little bit about what the TV series is, and then tell us what on earth made you decide to be part of a TV program.

Abbigail Ollive: I suppose dialing back a little bit from the TV show we've just been making this year is... I guess Castle Howard's one of the original screen tourism destinations and has been in some pretty iconic period dramas. It's very well known as Brideshead Revisited, both the 1981 Granada TV show and then the later movie in 2008. And we had our Bridgerton moment, so series one, episode six, or episode sex, as most people know it in Bridgerton, was all films here at Castle Howard. And I could definitely tell you plenty of stories from that few weeks of my life that I'll never forget.

But I think we're kind of used to being a location, and Castle Howard plays its own part in a period drama. It's almost a character in its own rights, and we've been in plenty of them. And we've also filmed the Arctic Monkeys music video here from their most recent album, and we've also played host to an American TV reality show, which was... I describe it as kind of Love Island with a Regency twist, which recently someone said should be the name of a cocktail, which I [inaudible 00:11:57]. That was an American reality TV show.

But I think it's the first time then that we've actually considered seriously and gone ahead with us being the subject of what is being filmed, and I think that's the big difference really for us with an observational documentary or, ob doc, as it's known in the business.

There were a few things really that made us decide to go ahead with that, and you've mentioned already a couple of those really reassuring series that happened, mostly zoo related, that made us feel like actually there's a real warmth and positivity to how they're not trying to stitch you up, they're trying to tell a really positive story about your people and your attraction.

I think that's maybe changed over the last few years. So we'd seen Chatsworth go first really, they opened their doors and did a year in the life at Chatsworth, and that actually ended up being during the pandemic, so it was a very unusual year in the life of Chatsworth, in that a lot of the time it was during lockdown. But even through that challenging period of time, when we watched it as viewers, we could see that that team had really taken a lot of care to tell Chatsworth stories and to be really respectful and positive about the whole estate.

I think that that was a huge reassurance for us. I think in the past I've had loads of filming inquiries over my time here and we've really avoided the sort of fly on the wall documentaries. I think there's been a general perception and nervousness that they want to stitch you up. And also, for me, the format only really works if you have the buy-in and the involvement of Nick and Vicky Howard, who are the custodians of this place, and have them authentically involved. And I think they had seen in years gone by maybe some not so positive examples and that had put them off the idea.

I think we started talking to the ITN team who'd been working with Chatsworth during the pandemic, and it was a real slow burn. It was about building that relationship and having meetings with them, them getting to know me and the Howards, and talking really about what the stories were that we wanted to tell.

They came to us originally as part of their Christmas series they were doing, so last year when we had Narnia as our Christmas theme, they made a four part series across four different houses and we were one of those, so it was a more intensive Christmas at Castle Howard experience first off, and that's been quite different to then them coming back and being here all year.

But I think it's definitely, I'd say, we said no quite a lot before eventually we said maybe, and then over the course of probably a year of meetings and building trust and really bottoming out what we all want to get out of it, we eventually said yes. And I think in that time as well we'd seen things released like Secret Life at the Zoo.

I think our other main concern or nervousness about saying yes was we were sort of waiting for a vintage year at Castle Howard. We knew that coming out of the pandemic, everything's been challenging and difficult and we felt like, maybe next year or in a couple years time we'll be doing a really big significant bit of restoration to a monument or we've got plans to reinstate some of our burnt out rooms after the fire that Castle Howard suffered during the war.

I think we felt like there's going to be a big story to tell, and we better hold off for that moment in Castle Howard's history before we let the TV cameras in. And I think actually what changed that was the pandemic and thinking, well, actually, in any kind of normal or abnormal year we have amazing people, we have amazing stories to tell. Sometimes it's those smaller stories of truly getting under the skin of the life in a country estate like this that viewers will ultimately really enjoy. So we stopped holding off for that perfect moment and went for it.

Kelly Molson: It's interesting though, because you're thinking about, I guess, once you agree to go ahead with something like this, you are thinking constantly about, how entertaining is this actually going to be? Is just our day to day stuff that goes on all the time, is that enough for people? Are they going to actually tune in and watch it? And how is that going to... I guess there's a thought all the time about how we're going to be portrayed and how will that come across. So if you hold out for this room needs renovation or looking after, that gives you a focus that will detract from just some of the normal stuff that would be happening.

Abbigail Ollive: We actually started with ITN and Channel 4 in 2020, and we were trying to pull off a Christmas in the middle of COVID. When the tiering system and all that business came in, we couldn't go ahead, like many attractions and houses. So we started making a TV program about... I was billed on this... I was definitely shown as head of saving Christmas, and then we had to cancel it, so we canceled the whole thing and we took the difficult decision actually that it wasn't going to be the show we wanted it to be. We mutually agreed, really, to pull out of that, because we didn't want a show about trying to make a big Christmas happen and then the government saying, "You're in the wrong tier, you can't open," and a show of about how disappointing that was. So we took that decision.

Actually, that was a gamble at the time because I thought maybe that would be that done, really, but they agreed to come back the following year and make Christmas in Narnia as a documentary. I think it's definitely had its ups and downs over quite a period of time. So, again, that build of trust and them getting to know us during the year that didn't happen. I think they saw enough potential to think, actually, we'll come back and go again. But all of that's really challenging when they and us have put budget and resource into a whole period of filming that we then pull the plug on.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, of course. And by no fault of your own. Actually, there was nothing that you really could do about it. You made the right decision at the time.

I guess I just want to step back a little bit, because you said that you... I can't remember if you said that you were approached by them or if you approached them to talk about it, and how do you work out what the focus of the TV show will be about?

Abbigail Ollive: I'd been approached by quite a number of observational documentary companies, and I'd met with quite a few, and it was this exec producer who'd been working with Chatsworth, and we'd seen a bit of what they'd done at Chatsworth, that made us agree and further that conversation with this particular production company, which is ITN for Channel 4.

We've been approached a lot, and continue to be, actually, and I think, like you said, at the beginning, there's a real rise, isn't there, in these sort of observational documentaries at places within the visitor attractions sector. So we didn't actively go out to try and do this, I suppose we were courted and approached and took a little bit of persuading.

Kelly Molson: I guess everyone that's going to be part of this has to be really comfortable with being on camera, right, because they're going to be recording for a whole year at your venue, so you've got to get used to people being around, you've got to be able to run your events around while all this filming is happening as well. So it's not a quick decision to make at all by any means.

Abbigail Ollive: No, there's a lot to think about, actually. And I think we made sure we'd properly thought about that and met and bashed a lot of that out internally before we started. I think the things that made us most nervous were around control and editorial control and how much of that you just have to relinquish and how much we would be allowed to input into the storytelling and storyboarding. I think there was that, but also the ability for us to resource it.

Like you've said, it's no small thing to take on. We're quite a small team, we're still doing everything we need to do in a normal year, pulling off big events and big projects, and having a film crew with you three to four days a week every week of pretty much a year, is quite intense.

I think what we tried to do to overcome that was before anybody had a camera put in front of them, we tried to do a really good amount of kickoff meetings with all stakeholders, with the producers. We were really, really clear with them about our ambitions and the key messages we wanted to communicate by having a year in the life at Castle Howard filmed. It was an opportunity for us to communicate that real conservation aim and the fact we have a conservation deficit, we're not a charity, it was a really good opportunity for us to communicate where visitors' admission fees go.

It's really powerful to actually see somebody restoring a chimney or repainting windows, and understand what resource has to go into that. And that's across the board, across the whole estate. So I think sometimes that's hard to communicate, actually, with visitors, but having this mass market platform to do that.

We were really, really clear about what we wanted to get out of it and what actually goes into running a rural estate and managing that in the 21st century coming out of the pandemic with all the wider world landscape going on as well around us. That was really important, actually, that we felt respected and like the TV crew and their producers understood what we wanted to get out of it. I think that's really helped throughout the whole year, that they can go, "This scene that we're filming now, that really relates and helps tell that story from your objectives." So yeah, that was certainly helpful.

Kelly Molson: That's great, isn't it? That they're so aligned with your objectives that they're actually highlighting things that reference back to them as you're shooting. Because sometimes you might think that gets discussed at the top and then it gets parked and then we might not think about that again until it gets to editing stage and by that point there's so much content, how are they going to really get the message across that we want them to? And I guess that comes forward to one of the questions about that content and the editing process and how much of that were you involved in as you go through the filming.

You've had those initial conversations about objectives, but were there any times where something was happening and they were shooting, and in your head you're watching this thing unfold in front of you going, "This cannot go out on telly, and they're really going to want this to go out on telly and that's not going to happen at all"?

Abbigail Ollive: That has changed throughout the year. We've all learned a lot as the year has progressed. We started very structured and I planned out everything to within an inch of it's life. For last Christmas I kind of diarised everything the film crew were going to be attending, made sure we had pre-meetings with everybody involved, made sure departments were all on board and had key messages and understood what we were trying to get out of every scene. I pretty much storyboarded the whole episode, and I remember the producer saying to me, "We don't normally get quite this level of input from the team on the ground."

I think I'm just a bit of a control freak, because I can't have people just wandering around with a camera, who knows what they'll discover. But actually I think what I quickly discovered is that that doesn't always make the best TV, and they're experts, they're really good at what they do, and I just needed to learn to trust that we were all actually aiming for the same outcome. They weren't trying to sneak around and find stuff that I didn't want to be filmed.

Actually, as the year's gone on, I think by the time we got to the Christmas episode, which they only left last week and are busy editing that now to turn it around, they knew the Castle Howard team so well and our team knew the Channel 4 team so well and are so used to them being around, it just has needed a lot less input from me and my team. They really had a sense of workflows around who's responsible for what. They felt like an extension of our team as the year has gone on and we've really built that trust, so I had no issue then with them kind of going off and filming something happening without me being present, because I'd learned to really trust them. I can't really do this chat without mentioning Peacockgate.

Kelly Molson: Please.

Abbigail Ollive: I think that's an example really early on where it was a day where on my schedule we were having a historic paint specialist scraping off layers of the paint on Castle Howard's windows to try and discover what the original amber colour would be, because we're now in the process of repainting all of the external woodwork, which needed doing, and white paint didn't actually exist then and so was never the colour that Castle Howard would've been painted on the windows and woodwork.

We had this amazing guy doing his historical paint scraping, which is what I had the Channel 4 crew focused on, because I thought that would make a very interesting restoration story. And then got the call from World War III that appeared to be kicking off in the car park because it was breeding season for our peacocks. We've got about 20 peacocks on the estate and, well, we think there was a male interloper to our peacock gang. I don't know where he came from, but this male peacock was very rowdy and very randy, and was seeing his reflection in cars, so in the visitor car park. Any kind of car, especially if it was a dark colour or blue and was clean. So luckily my car was always very safe, it's never clean. It was seeing its reflection and trying to attack what it thought was a rival peacock.

I've got the person who looks after our security on high alert trying to basically chase a peacock out of the car park, and people very concerned that both staff cars and visitor cars were going to get damaged. So this was all kicking off and I was like, "Right, everybody keep the Channel 4 team focused on the windows. Do not let them come anywhere near what's occurring up here." Because I could see our head garden running around with what can only be described as a giant butterfly net, like something a Victorian explorer, trying to literally catch and net a peacock.

Anyway, it escalated fairly quickly and the peacock got onto one of our staff cars and smashed in the back windscreen. So it became actually not that funny quite quickly, because then we were suddenly into a really difficult scenario. The person involved was very upset, as you can imagine, and from an animal welfare point of view we didn't want to do anything to the peacock that... This is during visitor opening hours and, of course, on the day where we had the Rolls Royce Society coming on a trip. So we then suddenly had to pull off people from various parts of the attraction to go and be Rolls Royce security. They didn't even notice the peacock, they thought we were giving them such an amazing service, they were delighted. They couldn't believe the amount of security we have in our car park.

So, all this was kicking off, and we had a couple of emergency senior management meetings assembled that day to decide what ultimately the different options were. And in this meeting we discussed what should we do about the Channel 4 film crew, and everybody's instinct was, we're now involved with insurers, the insurers are saying, "It's a wild animal, so we can't really help you." But we'd just put on social media in National Gardening Week the week before that the head gardener has names for all the peacocks and has hand reared them, so there was kind of an insurance argument going on.

We love the peacocks, and visitors absolutely love the peacocks, and they make Castle Howard really unique, so it's really difficult when you've told that story.

It was like Jurassic Park, I'm not joking. It was absolutely carnage. All the peacocks then got wind of the fact that someone was trying to catch one of the crew and they started... There's a video from inside the main house, which Nick Howard took, of them all lined up on the windows pecking the glass. And I was thinking, they're now going to actually smash in the windows. They just went feral.

But in this meeting we had this big debate then. This is all quite unusual, I guess, maybe not on a Tuesday in whatever it was, April, May. And I brought it up in this meeting, I said, "What are we going to do about Channel 4? We're not going to be able to keep this secret, really. We have to decide whether it's something where happy to let them film and cover, what's it's reality, it's what's going on."

And Vicky Howard, to her credit, she said, "I think it's going to make excellent TV. If you're doing a year in the life at Castle Howard, you want to show some of the slightly more quirky things that go on." And it was reality, it was what happening. So we made the call to their exec producer and explained what was going on, and then obviously you won't be surprised to hear in episode one, which was aired week before last, the historic restoration of the windows does not make the cut, but the whole story of the peacock, which went from the sublime to the ridiculous over the next few days, does make the cut, and we've now got peacock merchandise in the gift shop for Christmas, and he's famous.

Kelly Molson: You capitalised on every element. I love it.

Abbigail Ollive: Yeah, we have. I think that's a good example. You've asked how... At the point where we go, I think we need to relinquish control. I can't storyboard this within an inch of its life. I can't actually control everything I want them to film. And this is going to make great TV.

Kelly Molson: I mean, it makes great TV, but it also makes a great talk. I'm not going to lie listeners, I have heard this story before and I had to go on to speak after Abbi shared this with the room, so you can imagine just how my talk bummed the room. Outdone by a peacock. Thank you.

Abbigail Ollive: I didn't think we were doing Secret life of the Zoo here, but as it turned out.

Kelly Molson: Who knew? It's a brilliant story. I think what you said is, you just at some point have to relinquish control, because it is going to make good telly. It's a bonkers thing that happened that day, you had no way of... There was no part of planning that that was going to happen. It wasn't a normal thing that happens every day. Yes, you've got peacocks, but they don't normally go feral and start smashing up cars. What could have made for a better TV moment than that?

Other than Peacockgate, is there anything else that surprised you about the process of the filming?

Abbigail Ollive: Maybe that the people you think are going to be great characters sometimes aren't, and those who are really reluctant to feature and would naturally run a mile if you try to put them in front of a TV camera, often make the best TV. I think finding your stars and the really authentic people who are incredibly passionate about what they do. And in a place like Castle Howard those are people around every corner, people who are been working here for four generations and have amazing passion and connection with the place. And then those people who have really unusual skills, like my paint specialist, or people who are just doing incredibly niche things.

I think it's not hard to find the stories, but I think it was that, really. There were people who I was trying to navigate the cameras away from and then there was really willing people who... I put myself in that category, I didn't mind at all being on film, but I think I just come across as a Blue Peter presenter, and actually there are funnier, more authentic, lovely people shining through on the series that we had to coerce a little bit more into being involved.

I think that, again, it all comes back to the thing I said earlier about building trust. Our producers had a really good instinct for that. I think they managed really skillfully to get under the skin of the organisation, and by relinquishing control a bit and letting them do what they do really well and trusting their judgment, they ended up putting some of our people and scenarios and stories on TV that I definitely wouldn't have storyboarded, I don't think.

Kelly Molson: I guess we talked about editing and control and stuff and relinquishing that a little bit earlier, but the series is out now, we'll give everyone the dates and we'll tell them where they can find it in a little while, but did you get the opportunity to watch it before it's been out live for people?

Abbigail Ollive: It was a really small team of us who had a low res proof and we were allowed to, within the contract, check all of the facts and also have an opinion and push back on anything we thought might be reputationally damaging. And actually we changed a few facts and corrected people on some stuff. But I think we've been really pleased, actually, with the way in which it was edited and we haven't pushed back all that much.

I think being able to watch it and absorb it a couple of times before giving the sign off, has been a really helpful layer. There were no massive surprises then when it's aired to a million people on TV, because there's already been a layer of fact checking. For me, that's about making sure people's job titles are correct or they're referred to in the right way. I don't want someone to have put a lot of time and effort into a filming sequence and then be called the wrong thing or credited in the wrong way, so I had that layer of editorial input. But ultimately what ends up in and what ends up not in is totally up to them.

I think that's just one of the learnings, really. It's about managing people's expectations. The dog festival we do every year is a good example. We spent a whole weekend, and actually the weeks leading up to it, covering that as a story and lots of filming, lots of people being asked to do bits on camera and the various suppliers and providers we had at that big event, and it didn't make the cut at all. It's just because if they're here for the whole year, they decide, probably because of the peacock, actually, but they decide what flows in terms of their narrative, and we have to just manage people's expectations in that. Helpful for me to see it, so I can also do that, because I don't want everyone sat at home on a Saturday night watching for their bit and me knowing it's not in there.

Kelly Molson: God, can you imagine? So you imagine that your paint history guy ready for his big moment, and then the peacock takes over. Yeah, that's an awful.

Abbigail Ollive: I think internal communication, and I'm sort spending a lot of time, or have spent a lot of time, persuading people to be involved in filming, and then I have to do the bit of time explaining to people that, thanks for going above and beyond to organise that thing so we could film it, actually it's now not in the show.

But I think one of the other things that it's maybe, I don't know if it's a surprise or not, but Castle Howard and a year in the life here is a microcosm for what's happening in the real world. And one of the other things we discussed quite a bit off camera as a senior team was how much we sugarcoat our narrative and want to look amazing and brilliant and positive, and in the end we decided it's better to be really transparent. You see our senior management team then in meetings with the cameras in the room, talking about how visitor numbers haven't been what we forecasted over the summer and cost of living crisis and the things that are happening in the real world.

Because I think the risk was is that people would maybe watch this and think, "Well, they've got no grip on reality and what the challenges are that people are facing." So I think we had to just be very authentic and real.

And we did debate that quite a lot, actually, because it's perhaps a slightly more exposing or brave thing to go, "Well, yeah, come into the senior management meeting, we're going to discuss the figures, we're going to discuss the reforecast. This is why we think numbers have perhaps dropped off. This is what we're going to do about it." And I think, hopefully, that gives viewers the sense of what goes into the running of the business.

You see our, amazingly, they agreed to be filmed, you see our Ukrainian refugee family arriving in an estate cottage next week on the autumn episode, and it reflects what's happening on the estate here is what's happening in the rest of the world. And unbelievably as well, some of it's, like you said, some of it's luck and you couldn't plan exactly where the cameras were going to be at what point, but they were filming a senior management meeting at the moment where the announcement came through of the Queen's death, so they film the reaction to that as it's happening. And that could have happened at 10:00 at night when nobody was even in the building.

Some of it is luck and a lot is planned, but it really is a reflection, I think, on the mood of the nation and what else is happening in the wider sector and political landscape and everything else. So I think, again, how I approached it was, we've got all these great stories to tell and this is who I want in it and what I want to feature, but actually as life happens and as the year progressed, you couldn't have planned half the things that have ended up in the show.

Kelly Molson: No, not at all. But it does give it that authenticity about this is real, this is actually happening and this is our lives. It's not just a TV show.

One thing that struck me, actually, was, when I was watching, there was a moment where one of the senior management teams said, "Look, I think we rule out the fact that overseas visitors are not coming. That's it." And it really made me think back about the last time you came on the podcast, which was in 2019, and when you came on then it was talking about the love affair that Castle Howard has with China and the amount of visitors that were driving through from a famous wedding that you'd had at the castle. And I just thought that is a complete and utter contrast, isn't it, to the things that we are now talking about now and that process and that experience that you've been through to get to this point.

Abbigail Ollive: Because some of those foundations that we've really relied upon in terms of generating income, like our Chinese market, when that rug's pulled from under you, I think it's made us be maybe a bit more brave and risk taking in grasping opportunities that maybe we wouldn't have done in 2019. And I'd say this filming project is one of those, I absolutely put that in the category. We're in a position where we know some of those income streams aren't coming back, so putting ourselves in front of a huge audience and grasping that PR opportunity this year, I think is a direct result of how the world's changed in the last couple of years.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, for sure. So, reflecting on the experience that you've been through, and it has literally just finished, you said that that they're now hastily editing the Christmas episode to go out soon, or winter episode, what advice would you give to other attractions that are thinking maybe we'll do it, maybe we'll start to have those conversations?

Abbigail Ollive: Hopefully got a few nuggets. And also really happy to talk to anybody who is in the process of going into this, having now had some lived experience of it. But I think if you're open to filming in the first place, having clear contact details on the website. For location filming, and obviously this kind of thing as well, we produced a filming brochure, which is a PDF and a physical brochure, to kind of sell Castle Howard. Whilst this observational documentary obviously came to us as an opportunity, we're actively trying to sell ourselves as a filming location.

I think reaching out to... If you've watched a program and you've really loved it, there's always credits at the end and you can kind of say, "Well, that's a really good example of something I'd love to replicate in my own workplace," and tracking down those people and setting up meetings and chats.

Obviously we're part of the treasure houses group, there's 10 treasure houses that are privately owned stately homes in the country and we do a lot as a collective. We're attending a filming exhibition in London together called Focus in a couple of weeks time, and, as a group, making sure we're in those places, meeting the location managers, meeting the people in the industry, starting to form those relationships.

The Christmas series this year that Channel 4 are doing, again, it features of the treasure houses and different ones to last year, so we're a repeat, I guess, in that it's winter for us, it's not necessarily just about Christmas. But then you'll see [inaudible 00:41:26] and Holkham as well. And Holkham were kind of going at it second time round, and Harewood for the first time.

We've shared a lot of knowledge and talked a lot really about how we've approached it. And I've been a real advocate for it. I've encouraged those other houses, sorry, they might hate me for it now, to go for it, because we'd had such a positive experience last year with the team filming. I can vouch for the fact that they want to work with us and we're all pulling in the same direction.

I think for us as well, my other bits of advice are, maximising the opportunity once it's happened. So making sure SEOs all working really hard for you. Making sure as soon as... We had to basically open all those doors to our website, because when a million people are watching you on Channel 4 on a Saturday night, we didn't want the website crashing. We wanted really clear calls to action about booking for Christmas and booking the cottages and campsite. Anything we can sell. When there's that opportunity of that many people Googling you, we wanted to make sure we were ready for it.

We were also really aware that a lot of the people watching the TV show wouldn't necessarily be in the area or region and could just buy an admission ticket. We hope when the Christmas show goes out on the 3rd of December it will sell any final tickets remaining. It certainly did last year, but we've this year decided to do a virtual experience that people can buy, so we'll probably have that on sale to coordinate with the Christmas TV show going out. So for those people who are overseas or who can't get to Castle Howard this Christmas, there'll be a virtual tour, obviously inspired by places like London Transport Museum, who do their Hidden London tours, and plenty of theatre events do similar and do it really well.

And then for us, maximising the press and PR opportunities that come out of the exposure. And then my other advice is the boring stuff, really. Making sure everything is covered from insurance and how we protect our assets. Having really clear guidelines for when the film crew's in the house, what they are and aren't permitted to do. Having all those access arrangements and risk assessments all agreed up front. So there's a leak on the roof, of course the film crew are going to want to be up on the roof at the moment when that happens, and you haven't got time to go through the whole process of doing a risk assessment and talking about insurance at that point. So it's kind of trying to think about all the scenarios up front and making sure all of that paperwork was done. So that's the boring stuff.

And then communication, just communication, communication, you can't over communicate it. I found people get really grumpy if you turn up with a TV crew whilst they're busy in the middle of something highly important or some kind of high risk job, and I'm like, "Could we film you?" It generally doesn't go down brilliantly, so I've been an absolute stuck record in every meeting I've been in this year where I've been asking, "Can Channel 4 film it? Can Channel 4 film it?"

And then making sure people are wearing something appropriate if I know people are going in to film them, like properly branded uniforms, and just giving people a heads up so they know that it's likely they're doing a thing as part of their day and I'm going to be along with a TV crew.

But actually what's happened then is as the year has progressed, people have come forward more and more with opportunities. So people start letting me know, "We're doing a acorn picking," was one thing. I would never have known there was an acorn picking initiative going on in the forestry department. So people have been coming forward to me, and I've now got this brilliant content army of people letting me know what's going on in their week ahead, and they're actively thinking all the time, "This might make a great story for the TV." So I think you can't over communicate stuff.

And then the final thing, which has been my mantra, it's absolutely obvious, but if you don't say it on camera, they can't put it on TV.

Kelly Molson: Such simple advice.

Abbigail Ollive: Simple advice.

Kelly Molson: Abbi, this is going to be one of my favourite podcast episodes ever. You are always so generous with the advice that you give and the support that you give to the sector. So thank you for saying that you will help people and you're happy to talk to them. I think that's really amazing. We will put all of your details in the show notes so people can find out about you. But if you're not watching it already, how do we find out about the show? Where can we watch it?

Abbigail Ollive: Yes, it's called Castle Howard: Through the Seasons. It's a Channel 4 production, so it's going out on Saturday nights, but more likely you'll be able to catch it with it on all four watch on demand. I'm sure it's something that will get repeated variously across the years, because that's great. They're busy repeating, I think, Chatsworth's documentary at the moment as well, and there's one happening at Highclere, and I think these things just kind of have quite a long shelf life actually, so hopefully you'll be able to watch it on demand way into the future, embarrassingly.

Kelly Molson: For sure. Without a doubt. Abbi, we always ask our guests to share a book with us before they leave, something that they love or something that they've just enjoyed as part of their career or personal. What would you like to share with us?

Abbigail Ollive: In my life outside of Castle Howard, I do a lot of baking and cooking. We have a little family business and cafe, so I'm a crazy baking lady some nights for that. But actually, it was difficult to choose, because I've got a whole amazing shelf of cookbooks that I use very regularly, but Sabrina Ghayour, who has recently released Persiana Everyday. I absolutely love Middle Eastern cooking, and I'm not really sure where this passion came from, but I think that particular book I've been using a lot recently, because it's good, quick recipes, they're really reliable, and they're brilliant midweek, not overly complex when you've got your store cupboard of ingredients sorted.

But I actually chose this because it's something that... Our Channel 4 producer who's been with us for a year, Hannah, and I massively bonded over food, both being foodies, and I actually invited Sabrina to our press launch at Castle Howard because she's recently moved to the area, and funnily enough, I got a tweet, I got a DM tweet from Sabrina Ghayour saying, "You work at Castle Howard? I love Castle Howard." And I was like, "Oh my god, I mean, I love you. I've got your book and use it all the time. I can't believe you're trying to befriend me." So I invited her along to the press launch and she came, and Hannah, Channel 4 Hannah, and I had a proper fangirl moment of just basically going, "We really love your recipes." So it felt like a good, relevant, irrelevant one, although there were plenty I could have chosen.

Kelly Molson: Oh my god, I am so with you on this. I have all of her bits except this one. Maybe I'll enter myself.

Abbigail Ollive: Good Christmas present. Good Christmas-

Kelly Molson: Yeah, there you go. They are the books I go to if we're having people over for dinner, or every New Year's Eve we cook a feast for the two of us, it would be three of us now, but we cook an absolute feast, and it's always lamb and it's always something incredibly delicious from one of her books. I think would've fangirled a little bit too.

Abbigail Ollive: I know. And she uses our farm shop a lot, obviously, because we have estate tenant farmers, and I think it's really brilliant to champion that field to fork message. And if you're going to eat meat, it's brilliant that it's local. It's such a treat for me to be able to have a farm shop at work where I can and get that from. So yeah.

Kelly Molson: Amazing. All right, well, look, listeners, as ever, if you want to be in with a chance of winning that book, if you go over to our Twitter account and you retweet this episode announcement with, "I want Abbi's books, book even", you will be in with a chance of winning it.

This is the second cookbook that we've had on the podcast recently as well. There's a little trend here. I'm getting a little message [inaudible 00:49:33].

Abbigail Ollive: The other one that I was close, is when I was on holiday recently, I read, I'm sure somebody must have recommended it, the Bob Iger book, The Ride of a Lifetime, because he was the CEO of Disney for 15 years, and this week's just been announced that he's back at Disney after retirement. Not to go on as a prize, but for anybody working visitor attractions I found it a really inspiring read. The last paragraph of, well, sorry, the last chapter, really, is his bullet points of the kind of things he lived by whilst running Disney. I'm going to do the old school thing where I print it out and stick it on my wall. So that's just a top tip for the sector. I'm sure most people have read it and I'm, as usual, three years behind the trend.

Kelly Molson: No, it not been recommended, though. It definitely has not come up on our... No, I will check our library list, but I am positive that that hasn't come up yet. But you can't win that one, it has to be Sabrina, because you will fully appreciate the cookbook. Trust me.

Abbi, thanks so much for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Abbigail Ollive: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a delight, as always, to talk to you, and I do feel so honoured to be second time round.

Kelly Molson: My absolute pleasure. You're always such a treat when you come on, and I genuinely am so grateful for all the support and advice that you give to people. So thank you.

Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned.

Kelly Molson: Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast..

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