The ideal customer Mitch Francis wants coming to a Tix4Tonight booth in Las Vegas is that person making a spur of the moment decision to have dinner and see one of the many shows offered at hotels and lounges. The business model of Francis’s company Tix Corp. is based around the impulse buy in a city offering a myriad of impulse buys. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the company sold 363,000 tickets with an average price of $57.89. Dinner reservations mount up to 33,000 a month. While the discount show tickets remains the core offering at Tix, that division is tied in with two others – live event production and merchandising. Each division can bring business to the other, Francis said. The initial success of Tix can be credited to Francis’s background in commercial real estate and choosing the right locations for the discount ticket offices. They can be found in shopping areas along the Strip, putting them front and center for the visitor making last minute plans. Taking the company forward, Francis looks to expand into other U.S. cities and finding other live events to produce. Headquartered in Studio City, many of the 180 employees are located in Las Vegas. In December, Tix was granted a patent that has far reaching potential for how the company does business. “We are exploring how to monetize the value of the patent at this point,” Francis said. Question: With the recession and cutbacks in spending has there been a broadening of the number of budget-conscious consumers? Answer: Absolutely. We’re finding our business did extremely well during good times and in these tough economic times we are finding a much larger slice of the American public are seeking value. Even those who are still employed and have a job seem to be watching what they are spending. We have this great answer for people. You can still see great shows in Las Vegas, have an incredible time, and wait for the last minute to decide what you want to do for that evening and we are going to have something you want to see. Q: Can this work in other cities? A: We’re exploring going to other cities actually. Vegas has this perfect model where you have a high concentration of shows and people in a concentrated small area. New York, Broadway has that. Think of that in terms of Los Angeles. There is no cross section where you’ve got literally 80 shows within a three-mile radius and certainly all the people concentrated at the same time in such a small place. Q: You’ve been adding locations in Vegas to sell the discount tickets haven’t you? A: We have. We have 13 locations now. We just bought another company in a similar business and they had five locations. We had eight before the beginning of (March). We are finding even with the trying times the shows truly need us more. The producers need us more. They are asking us to sell more tickets. More locations means we are selling more tickets right now. As the economy turns and they ask us to dial it back we can do that. Q: How did the Tix Corp. start? A: We had a different core business initially. We had 3D motion simulator attractions in the U.S. and Canada. We owned and operated them and we discovered we were really good at selling tickets. Our flagship location was at the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace. We spent a great deal of time and effort in the Vegas market and had our eyes open to different opportunities that were there. We were really surprised when I realized this idea that had been so successful in New York with (ticket discounter) TKTS had never been done in Las Vegas. We spent two or three months just checking to see if there was some kind of barrier to entry. There was none. It had never been done. We had a great amount of resistance at the beginning. It took us two years just to get 12 shows to say they would try it. The shows in Las Vegas sell a large percentage of their tickets on the same day of the performance. They were very concerned we would negatively impact their full price ticket sales. From the very beginning it worked to the point where we have 70 shows every day. That’s only in a period of seven years. Q: Along with the discount ticket, the company also does the live event production and the merchandising. How did you get into those areas? A: We were exposed to those companies and those directions by some of our major shareholders. In fact we found a great synergy with our ticket business that for live entertainment we could support by having the discount ticketing capability across the country, which is where we are trying to go, and also have the merchandising company, which can also get support from live entertainment. The idea was that all three of our divisions could give business to each other. We are starting to see that pan out. Q: How is that? Can you give an example? A: We are the producers of the “101 Dalmatians” musical. We have the merchandising rights for that show. We can add to the profitability of both divisions that way. We do that with many of our shows that we produce and promote where we handle the merchandising part. We haven’t handled a lot of the ticketing part because we are not across the whole country yet. Title: CEO and Chairman, Tix Corp. Age: 55 Education: University of Colorado Most Admired: Groucho Marx, who said, “I don’t want to belong to any club who would accept me as a member.” Career Turning Point: A brilliant secretary told me at the very start of my career, “It’s not being in the right place at the right time – it’s knowing you are.” Personal: Married Q: How do you go about choosing what companies to acquire? A: We’ve been exposed to the companies that we have acquired and saw the match, the principals, understood the personalities and they meshed with us, which is very important to do because acquisitions are tough. Having different corporate cultures is a very difficult thing to overcome. We have great principals who have stayed with the businesses we have acquired. We’ve always had three criteria in the acquisitions and that was they were profitable, the business had to make money. They had to come with the management that made them a good company to begin with. And finally they had to fit that synergistic support of the other divisions. That has worked for us. Q: What do you see your role in the company and its future growth? A: I am pretty good at seeing opportunity and capitalizing on those opportunities. We have an incredible team that can execute. And by execution it’s about operation. Everybody can come up with a great idea. That is the easy part if you ask me. It’s operating, that is so difficult to do; operating a business profitably and getting all of the people you need to execute to be playing the same symphony, and do it all it in accord and treat your customers well and do it day in and day out. That comes down to the quality of our operational people, who then impart to great staff, and our great staff support. Q: Considering you got your start with 3D motion simulators, what do you think of the 3D craze taking place in Hollywood? A: I am getting a great kick out of it. When we did this in 1994, we had to create our own 3D film library. We got Chris Condon, who literally wrote the book on stereoscopic filmmaking, and hired the best people we could. There was very little that existed. It was really pioneering. Our audience loved our 3D attraction. Now to see it becoming so important in theaters, it’s exciting. I believed in it long ago.
Last Minute Deal
