From The Desk Of... Ron Bension
PRESIDENT/CEO, ASM GLOBAL
THE MARCH 2021 announcement that Ron Bension had been named president/CEO of ASM Global, the world’s largest facility management company, was received with great interest in the live-event industry. And it wasn’t just because Bension had spent 11 years at the much larger competitor of ASM’s AEG Presents division. (Many of the sector’s major players, including Live Nation president/CEO Michael Rapino and Full Stop Management chairman Irving Azoff and his Oak View Group partner, CEO Tim Leiweke, have been both colleagues and rivals.) It was that Bension’s run at Live Nation had largely been spent overseeing the company’s House of Blues nightclub chain, which has an average venue capacity of about 1,850 people.
ASM Global formed in 2019 from the merger of AEG Facilities and SMG, then the No. 3 and No. 1 facilities management companies, respectively. As its CEO, Bension now oversees 350 venues on five continents — 25 stadiums, 109 arenas, 87 convention centers, 79 theaters and 50 mixed-use facilities — that, by his account, annually host
“164 million people [and] 20,000 live events across sports, entertainment and business categories, supported by 61,000 employees worldwide.” It’s a portfolio that includes Chicago’s Soldier Field, Sydney’s ANZ Stadium, Stockholm’s Avicii Arena and Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah Convention Center, as well as the sites of the next three Super Bowls: State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.; Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas; and the Super Dome in New Orleans.
Bension says his time at Live Nation, as well as previous jobs running MCA/ Universal’s Recreation Group, which included overseeing its theme parks, and at Tickets. com — where he played a key role in Major League Baseball Advanced Media’s acquisition of the company — prepared him well for the work ahead. “I’ve either been building, operating or creating content for venues my entire career. I’m really comfortable in that environment,” he says. “There aren’t many people who have experience with buildings of the size or type [that ASM manages].”
Although many in the industry speculated that Bension had been nudged out the door when he departed Live Nation last December, he insists that he orchestrated his own exit prior to a pandemic-induced companywide reorganization that September, when other senior staff members, like Ticketmaster chief executive Jared Smith, left in similar fashion.
Bension says his relationship with Rapino remains strong and that his time at Live Nation was “one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.” That bond will be important as the live industry ramps up again. While AEG Presents and Live Nation compete for the opportunity to land tours and grow their market share in cities around the world, ASM is reliant on Live Nation to bring concerts to the buildings it manages.
A year into the job, Bension faces a number of challenges, including future-proofing the facilities ASM manages and building new revenue models as the live-entertainment business learns to live with COVID-19. There’s also the added muscle that chief rival Oak View Group acquired through its 2021 merger with Spectra, the second-largest facilities management company.
Bension spoke to Billboard about these developments, as well as his bullish five-year plan and his expectations for the full-scale return of the facilities business.
Why did you leave Live Nation in December 2021?
I went to Michael [Rapino] in December of 2020 and said, “My job here is done.” I helped with the reorganization, thanked them for the opportunity, and it was time to move on. I have an affinity for Michael and Live Nation. They were good to me, and I think I was good to them.
What attracted you to ASM?
It was the biggest company nobody knew about. I started getting into it and understanding the value proposition of the business. I met with Onex, which is the private equity firm that owns SMG, and I met with the AEG guys. At this stage in my career, it was important that I had great partners since I was stepping into a big and quite challenging role because of the merger’s timing with the pandemic.
You recently put together a five-year plan that calls for dramatic growth. Why do you see so much potential for growth?
We are seeing strong growth within our existing portfolio through many of the partnerships and initiatives we put in place during the shutdown. We closed 27 new deals during the pandemic and are still on a roll with the recent announcement of our deal to manage the Olympia London exhibition center in the U.K., which was a huge win for us. In the past year, we’ve closed big partnerships both in the U.S., with T-Mobile Arena and Honeywell, and in Europe, with [management contracts for] OVO Arena Wembley [and] Sage Arena [both in the United Kingdom] and Rudolph Weber Arena [in Germany], among many others. We will be announcing several other major new partnerships shortly.
Is part of your strategy to create new business divisions for ASM’s clients?
You can call them divisions, but ultimately, they are added value for the client. We’ve quadrupled our content teams for convention centers, arenas and theaters around the globe. We’ve developed technology platforms with Honeywell and Mobilitie, and our own ASM Insights division is developing an entire [customer relationship management] marketing apparatus for our clients. We’ve launched a social responsibility and corporate services platform called ASM Acts that includes a charitable component along with apprenticeships, internships and scholarships for all our venues.
We acquired partnership interest in AGP, the leading digital technology consulting firm in the country. We aligned ourselves with Qualtrics, the leading customer experience tool, to create a proprietary customer tracking capability that will help our venues understand their customers. We have an unbelievable sponsorship group, and with 350 buildings around the world, we have scale — and scale is good for procurement, for content acquisition, for sponsorship. And it’s good for information and understanding what’s happening around the world.
How does ASM differentiate itself from its main competitor, Oak View Group?
There are other companies that are noisier, but we’re managing more buildings, with more content from Live Nation and AEG than anywhere else in the world. There are some strong competitors on the convention side, but when it comes to arenas, theaters, stadiums and professional teams that we work with and the value of the assets we manage, there is nobody else. You can do your own homework on how many shows we’ve done compared with our competition, and it is not even close.
What is the biggest challenge you face as CEO?
Besides the potential for another wave of a deadly variant, our biggest challenge is finding good people. We’ve hired 15 directors and senior executives over the last year and have been very lucky there. But hiring at the local level — whether it’s due to the great resignation wave or some other factor — remains a challenge. So instead of running a job fair at one of our buildings, we conducted a global job fair for more than 100 buildings in five separate countries and received over 1,500 applications.
What kind of contingency plan does ASM have in place to deal with another deadly variant or pandemic?
We all know how incredibly unpredictable this disease has been. Hence, although it’s impossible to have a specific plan, over the past year, we have prided ourselves on being nimble. We created Venue Shield, which is the leading venue reopening safety protocol. We were the first venues to have fans back with a sold-out UFC event. We stay close to the situation on five different continents, so we have become very good at responding and changing on the fly.
When do you see business returning to pre-pandemic levels?
Concerts are back in most countries — not in Asia or Australia, but they’ll come back as long as there’s not another pandemic. We’re already seeing some life in the convention and exhibition business. Unfortunately, it’s all long lead, so we are projecting continued slow improvement into the third and fourth quarters. I think you’ll see corporate events start up sooner. They’re able to move faster. We expect to see a return to normal during the fourth quarter of 2023.
There is long-standing speculation about what happens in five to 10 years when arena and stadium stalwarts like The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney curtail their touring, or even stop. Is that a concern?
I’m not necessarily buying that argument. We continue to have record concert attendance and show counts. Billie Eilish, Bad Bunny and many others are selling out throughout the world. Some artists may not have the staying power of those you mention, but the desire to see your favorite artist and the experience and memories that come from that live show are priceless and enduring. There is no replacement for the live experience.