Rick Jurkiewicz (The Rugby Football League) bonus episode: You've got to be willing to put the hours in

You're in for an absolute treat in this bonus episode of TicketingPodcast.com as we sit down with Rick Jurkiewicz - Head of Ticketing at the Rugby Football League - to discuss how he ended up just here. 

Rick's tale is a captivating one, chronicling his journey from the music scene of Nottingham to the sports arenas of Manchester, providing unique insights into how the ticketing game changes from concert hall to sports field. Along the way, he spills the beans on the intricacies of this ever-evolving industry, with anecdotes from his time at the iconic Wembley Stadium, and a rather amusing fan encounter thrown in!

As we continue our heart-to-heart with Rick, he offers his insider's perspective on the ticketing industry – a world rife with opportunities and challenges. From touring with the likes of Coldplay and Metallica to running ticketing for an entire sports league, Rick’s career path is nothing short of extraordinary. He wholeheartedly shares the lessons he learned, the hurdles he overcame, and the rewards he reaped; painting a vivid picture of the commitment and responsibility it takes to succeed in this field. 

All in all, this episode promises to be a deep dive into the enigmatic world of ticketing, offering a blend of personal narratives, professional wisdom, and a sincere appreciation for the realm we often take for granted.

The episode was recorded on 20 June 2023.

TicketingPodcast.com is powered and sponsored by TicketCo and hosted by TicketCo’s CEO, Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to this bonus episode of TicketingPodcastcom, where ticketing experts reveal their secrets and share their insights. My name is Kallarik Moberg and my guest today is Rick Jörgavic. Rick is head of ticketing at the Rugby Football League. Feel free to listen in. You don't want to miss this one. It's a pleasure to have our guest, rick. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. So, for the listeners who haven't heard the full episode of this podcast but came directly to this one who is Rick Jörgavic and how did he end up as ticketing manager at the Rugby Football League?

Speaker 2: 0:42

Yeah well, it's a long story to get to here. Where do I start? I'll listen to the other podcast for this bit and I can just start from 2004. I finished joining ticketing and becoming a ticketing person In 2004,. My wife decided that she wanted to move to Manchester and I was working in notting him at the sea tickets at the time and you know I'd done seven years learning how to become a ticketing person, put my hand up and doing every job in the building, offering it to work, every event And typically working away.

Speaker 2: 1:12

You meet a lot of people that work with other organisations and, at the same time as me, deciding that maybe it's time to move to Manchester and see what the big, wide world has to offer me. When I get there, i got a phone call from my chap at the ticketmaster saying hey, you're here, you're coming to Manchester. Why don't you come and have a chat and let's talk about what you're looking to do when you get here? Interestingly, an hour into the conversation I realised that I was actually in an interview rather than just going for a cup of tea, and then I was offered a position to lead the client services team in the Manchester office, which was primarily tasked with looking after live nation relationship with the SGM concentration relationship, the SMG arenas and a number of the sort of big theatre and music clients And at that point I became sort of the festivals and stadium guys Just every time that there was a festival and a stadium tour. That's the job that I did, whether that was access control, whether there was the ticket aspects, managing and allocating an inventory in just kind of doing all the agency bits that we do when we're in agency work And that was great.

Speaker 2: 2:13

And I worked on Coldplay tours and Metallica tours and Foo Fighters and Rolling Stones shows and the like, those big shows, and I enjoyed it and it was so tiring and to be out and about for so long. And every year it was autumn would put things on sale. All the shows are gone, sale. They'd sell out. Christmas would get a couple of weeks off and then come January, end of January, that's it. We're back at full speed ahead all the way through to May and then we're going delivering events from May to September And I was on the road quite a lot.

Speaker 2: 2:41

So I got to 2011,. The take that tour in 2011 was the point where I decided this is really tiring, this is something that, like 26 stadium sell out shows. It was an amazing tour. It was a lot of middle-class, middle-aged women drinking wine straight from the bottle and generally just making a mess of themselves, which was brilliant. It was fun, it was safe, it was a lovely environment. But I got to the end of that tour and I thought there must be something else for me here.

Speaker 2: 3:10

And chances has it that January the following year so January 2012, i got a call to assist with one of our ticket master teams who were working in Warsaw, poland, and in Donetsk during Euro 2012, so the football tournament. So somebody offers you to go and work with you away from overseas and work in Poland. It was like, yeah, absolutely well that my hand is up, it's raised, i'm totally going. I've packed my bags. My children had been born at that point. My son was like three or four months old and I had to say you know, sorry, mrs Rick, but I need to go and do this. This is really important. So Flowey has Poland and I was commuting back and forth.

Speaker 2: 3:48

I wasn't just gone permanently, i just sort of coming back into and again, it was an incredible experience, but my first real experience of working in sport and it was an interesting one because I assumed that because I'd worked on all these huge tours and the major festival shows and all of that, i thought at that time that I was great at ticketing. I thought I knew everything about ticketing, what there was to know. I knew it because I'd worked on these massive tours and we'd been able to sell everything out and do really well and understand audience profile and stuff. And then I came to sport and realised that I actually knew nothing about ticketing and what this is and it was really interesting. You know, i've spoken to other colleagues, people I've worked with in the past, who've also said the same thing that it's brilliant working in music. It's just such a buzz. It's amazing that the experience you get is incredible, but it's limited in so much as you sell a lot of tickets. It's the best experiences we're in a live environment.

Speaker 2: 4:41

But from a ticketing purist point of view, that move from music into sport was like night and day almost. It was almost like I've opened my eyes to realise that ticketing is actually huge and the bit that I knew that I thought I was really good at it's only a tiny fraction of the huge stuff that I've not considered or not really appreciated, and that is the sports genre, and there is so much more to get from this. And so, rather than saying I've done my euros, i'm going back now to music. Actually, i stuck around, i did an Olympics. I thought that was pretty cool. I don't mind Olympics in the grand scheme of things. Tick, i'll do that. And then 2012, 2013, rugby League World Cup. So that was my first taste of rugby league World Cup over 18 months. That's fine.

Speaker 2: 5:26

We did that, moved on, and then I moved on to Rugby World Cup, based in Twickenham, and at that point I'd been away from my family for like four years. I'd not really seen my kids growing up and it was starting to sort of pull on the heartstrings a little bit. There it was like I'm away way too much. As cool as this is, as big as this is and as amazing as it is, flying up and down the country and going overseas and working with so many new people who are interested, i have to pull it back a little bit. I've stopped being a bit selfish and actually start thinking about being a parent, and that's where it changed for me is that I'd gone from chasing around and being a party guy to actually no enough. I need to be a parent, i need to get a stable job, i need to stay put, and so I changed departments with the ticketmaster and they were great about that and they really sort of helped me get to where I needed to be and that was fantastic.

Speaker 2: 6:12

And then at that point that's where I really started to understand club sport and I started working with the likes of Middlesbrough Football Club, saracen's rugby, the NFL in the UK, the rugby football league where I am now, and a number of other clients and really start to understand what their challenges were and what the difficulties were. And that was what kind of prompted me to shift from being full on 100% yeah, metal rules, yeah, all the time to actually stop listening to my slipknot albums at work and actually maybe start switching on the classical music and just relax and calm down and just look at what we need to do and just focus on the thing. And actually that move to sports, that greater depth of data and understanding the audience profiles, that has over the years now it's really got me to appreciate what I was trying to do before. I guess the point I'm trying to make is is by understanding that and having a period of time doing this, it's allowed me to appreciate the job that I was doing prior to this. So where I am now, i understand what I was trying to do before I arrived and now I'm here doing what I do now in governance. Now I look at what I do so the constraints and the requirements or the needs of the agency business or the software business or the supplier side. I understood that because that's what I did. But what I needed to do was actually I needed to climb over the fence and say, actually I need to be the producer, i need to be the rights holder, the governing body, so that can understand from this side what the challenges are, what the difficulties are And actually having spent seven years here now to really get to groups with what this side of it is, i can understand where the business needs are.

Speaker 2: 7:46

I understand the suppliers. I understand what they're trying to bring. I understand that they're obviously they're trying to make money, but they're also trying to improve services and make things better for our side And from our side collectively, we rely on those suppliers to bring the intelligence, to bring you the new technology, the new developments to us. We're not going to be asking for things because we don't know what to ask for. The difficulty, i suppose, is when you are on this side, is a lack of information, a lack of awareness of what the new processes are and what the new technologies are. Unless you're coming to me and telling me exactly what these things are and how they affect me, i'm not going to know about it because I'm not always looking for those things, because I have a job. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 8:29

It's a super busy job in ticketing. That's definitely the case. But you mentioned Glastonbury, right? You've been working with Robbie Williams, james Blum 26 sold out shows would take that. You have the Euro also. The London Olympics Sounds like a dream. Would you recommend people to go into ticketing?

Speaker 2: 8:49

That's a tricky one really. On balance, yes, and the balance being there's a thing called a work-life balance And I genuinely was talking about this today that this industry doesn't really allow as much as we'd love it to, Doesn't really allow for the life part of the work-life balance as much as maybe we'd like it to. And that's not because the people that manage the teams insist on hard work or insist on longer hours than anyone else. It's just that there's always that little bit more that needs to be done. There's always that extra layer of checking. There's always that preparation for the worst thing that could possibly happen happening. And so if I haven't checked every see, if I haven't checked every turnstiles correct, if I haven't checked the access control set up correctly, and I'm not sat here doing all of those things prior to an event happening, whether that's the day I've printed the tickets, all the day before an event or whenever it is, i know that I'm not prepared and I'm not ready for what could potentially happen. I haven't found all the problems, i haven't found all the issues. Nobody gets anything perfect, and if you're confident enough to think you've got it all right, then you're in the wrong job, because you definitely haven't And you're going to get into sort of trouble.

Speaker 2: 9:56

Having said that, there is a lot of reward and there's a personal sort of sense of achievement for people like me, especially you. I struggled at school. I didn't do great at school. I found it hard to engage. I didn't mature mentally probably until I was into my 20s and at which point and then I started really appreciate there might have been a correlation between young Rick versus older Rick, where I'd gone from rock and pop metal. I played in bands on my life as well And I still do now That style of music that we always played. Thrash metal was always awesome And I've always enjoyed it. We still do a bit of that now, but we're all almost in our 50s And it's kind of like thrash is a little bit harder to achieve these days. However, you gradually over time you chill out and you sort of settle down and you start to find better ways to do it. But you become more prepared and you do the preparation earlier. But if you can do that, the rewards are fantastic. This is the life of. Money can't buy situations. There is nowhere in any industry, unless you're actually an athlete, that you would be backstage at Wembley Stadium or backstage. If you're an artist, backstage at download festival or backstage at Glastonbury Festival or wherever you know, it doesn't matter where it is, it's. All of that is irrelevant. Nebworth in 2003,. It was a fantastic place to work for a weekend. It was a bonkers place to work for a weekend.

Speaker 2: 11:14

I still laugh about some of the nonsense stories that we had at the time a kid coming up to myself and a colleague of mine asking if we were connected to the darkness, which I wasn't sure if that was a spiritual thing or if it was an actual. It was actually the darkness, the band. But that's made me laugh ever since And that was 20 years ago that I still look back at that particular moment and remember thinking what a weird thing to ask me, but clearly I look like the sort of person that might be connected to the darkness. What do you hear? Did you find out what it meant? I have no idea.

Speaker 2: 11:46

To be honest, i just and, to be fair, i did. Actually, i was on my way to the bar and when I arrived at the bar, on one table there was the band Moby and on another table was the band The Darkness, and I sat right in the middle of them, both looking a little bit sheepish and a bit embarrassed. Because why did ticketing people have to interact with the talent? Because we don't literally nobody ever speaks to us, so I'm probably in the wrong place. So I quietly drank my drink and left.

Speaker 1: 12:10

But it also sounds like a good place to be for sure. Oh yeah, yeah, Very few people end up in a situation like that, I suppose, And I guess the only way is a career in ticketing.

Speaker 2: 12:20

Yeah, i mean there are other ways in, i guess. But it's tough. You've got to be willing to put the hours in. You've got to be willing to just say if something goes wrong you have to be willing to just stay and finish the job. And if that job takes another three or four hours, then you have to be willing to do it. And if you're not willing to do that, then you'll find that it's likely that you're not going to last very long. It's that willingness to say I'm going to put my hand up again and I'm going to say I'm going to stand here and I'm going to do the work until it's done. And that's probably why I do the job. That I do is because you know sometimes somebody has to take responsibility, and that's always been me. So I guess you know I could not take responsibility and go home early and let everybody else do it. But then how do I make sure that nothing's going to go wrong that way? Love it.

Speaker 1: 13:01

Thank you so much, rick. It has been a real pleasure to have you on this episode as well. Thank you so much, rick. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. As mentioned, there is a richer, in depth version with Rick And if you would like to hear more from him, you should check out that as well. Super interesting and some really good key takeaway, especially for ticketing managers. You'll find it on the very same platform as you found this one. Thank you so much for listening And thank you to our sponsor, ticketgo, for powering the ticketing podcastcom. Have a great rest of the day.