National Post (National Edition)
Bums on seats
A tiny software company in Saint John may hold the key to getting fans back into NHL arenas.
Fans rejoiced when the National Hockey League finally returned to the ice in early January, three months later than usual due to the pandemic. The players are back, though like many workers, they have to go through COVID-19 protocols, and their goal is the same as it always was: the Stanley Cup, often called the toughest trophy to win in professional team sports.
The one thing missing: the fans. Rather, bums on seats. Most professional sports teams aren't selling any tickets, but are instead playing in empty or practically empty arenas.
A few teams in the southern United States have a smattering of fans. For example, the Nashville Predators cap attendance at 15-per-cent capacity to follow local health rules, but fans have not been allowed back in Canada and many other parts of the U.S.
The public appetite for attending live sporting events, whenever the virus ebbs into history, rates among the great unknowns, but the fans will eventually be back and teams will need to maximize revenue while ensuring their safety.
For the NHL, that unknown is an existential threat to a US$5-billion (pre-pandemic) industry, whose franchises count on gate receipts as a major revenue source.
The solution could lie with a new piece of software from a Saint John, N.B.based company, with all of five employees, including the boss, Emmanuel Elmajian, a self-described “programmer through and through.”
For several years now, Spinzo Corp. has been revolutionizing the way his clients sell tickets in the NHL, National Basketball Association, National Football League, various minor leagues and even the Australian Football League.
In the days of yore, for example, a company wanting to purchase 100 tickets for an employee appreciation night would call a ticketing agent at their local pro sports team. Nowadays, or at least in the days immediately prior to COVID-19, the company might offer to cover 60 per cent of the ticket price, leaving the employee on the hook for the rest.
Enter Spinzo's “social group ticketing” platform, which handles the when, where and how of the transaction, freeing up a team's sales staff to focus on pursuing new sales instead of labouring over clunky, time-consuming processes.
Consumers are picky and Spinzo empowers them to be so. The software lets teams better accommodate such pickiness, while offering a bevy of special group promotions with add-on components, such as buy-a-ticketplus-a-beer, buy-a-ticketmeet-a-player, or whatever other marketing scheme they dream up to get people into games. The kicker is that neither side has to pick up a phone and speak to an actual human being to complete the sale.
“What Emmanuel and Spinzo bring to the table is an easier customer experience of purchasing tickets coupled with an easier means, internally and operationally, for us to manage that piece of the business, and so when it hits both sides of the business, it is a home run,” said Sara Daniel, vice-president of ticket sales with the Carolina Hurricanes.
Said Elmajian of his company's software: “It is really an automated beast.”
The quarry now, of course, is COVID-19, which means the ticket guy and his four employees aren't just writing new software these days, but potentially safeguarding the viability of his clients going forward, including NHL teams in Anaheim, Calgary,
Carolina, Columbus, Detroit and San Jose.
The NHL's revenues dipped to US$4.4 billion for the 2019/20 season, US$1.5 billion of that from seat sales, according to research company Statista. Both figures are going to drop again this year given that only part of the season was affected last year.
If Elmajian is intimidated by the challenge, it doesn't show. Entrepreneurship to him is about the problems: wrestling with them, finding solutions and seeing the next problem and the next before they arise.
He's also accustomed to being interrupted, now and again, particularly when he parks himself, laptop and smartphone in the spare office above his parents' restaurant in Saint John.
Elie and Maria Elmajian are also entrepreneurs. Their specialties are sending diners home happy with Mother Nature's Mediterranean-style fare, supplying local grocery stores with fresh-baked pitas and, should the internet conk out, stealing their son away from his own professional preoccupations to solve a technical glitch.
“Having entrepreneurial parents helped me, because it eliminated the guise of what entrepreneurship was about, in that you see the ups and downs and that it's not always rosy, and that there are a lot of challenging aspects,” the younger Elmajian said on a recent February morning from his restaurant office digs.
He also enjoys working from his kitchen table, couch and, pre-pandemic, in airports and airplanes and Ubers while on his way to and from meeting clients as the founder and chief executive of Spinzo.
“I am not a workaholic,” Elmajian said. “I like the game, or the chase, where the goal is to accomplish more using less tech.”
Making money is nice — and he said Spinzo has been profitable for a few years — but he doesn't need a Tesla to be happy. What motivates him is testing his abilities.
Elmajian's current test involves saving the Florida Everblades of the East Coast Hockey League, two rungs beneath the NHL. The Everblades are among the canaries in the live sports coal mine, and have been operating the 7,200-seat Hertz Arena near Fort Myers at 50-per-cent capacity since the season started in December.
Masks are mandatory at the arena, but the concessions are open, as are the beer taps.
Mike Kelly, the Everblades director of business development, characterizes the team's fans as true “fanatics,” though ones with competing wants: the majority of season-ticket holders surveyed before the season indicated they would happily sit “elbow to elbow,” while others wanted their space.
To accommodate both groups, and to encourage casual fans or those concerned about COVID-19 to attend games while maximizing ticket revenue in a business that would perish without it, Elmajian created Spinzo's “pod system” over the summer.
Now the elbow-to-elbow crew can sit as they would, while Elmajian's platform finds socially distanced room for everybody else, grouping them in pods of two, three, four and six depending on their personal relationships. The Everblades are averaging 3,300 fans a game, and have avoided laying off any staff.
“It has been ideal for us,” Kelly said. “What Emmanuel has done is to help us stay on the bridge to the other side, in what has been an incredibly challenging time.”
What truly amazes Kelly, Daniel of the Hurricanes and Carl Manteau, a senior group sales director with the Chicago Blackhawks who worked closely with Elmajian and Spinzo during his years with the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks, is how he pulls things off with a staff of only four people.
“He never really shows us how the sausage gets made, but I just know that it gets done, and that it gets done at the speed of light,” Manteau said.
By utilizing Spinzo, Manteau said Milwaukee's human ticket “sellers were freed up to sell,” and in some areas sales were doubling and almost tripling.
About all the praise, and wonder, Elmajian shrugs: “I don't measure a company's success by the number of employees it has.”
The 35-year-old retains majority ownership of the company he founded a decade ago, following a twoyear stint as an analyst with McKinsey & Co. in New York.
Becoming an entrepreneur was always the plan, and it helped that Elmajian was a math genius, piano prodigy and systems design engineering program graduate from the University of Waterloo in Ontario.
He also played tennis in high school, cheers for the Montreal Canadiens — but can't claim them as a client — and has a mom and dad who keep an office space for him upstairs at the family restaurant.
But solving the sporting world's problems isn't the only thing Elmajian has on his plate. He and Kaitlyn Assadpour are getting married in December. The couple hope to host a sizable number of guests, should public health measures allow for it, and who better to execute the seating plan than the groom.
“I am up for any challenge,” Elmajian said, with a laugh. “If I can solve industry problems, I can solve this.”