Coming Home

Paul Beard has sat before the blank canvases. With an artist’s deft stroke, he has painted with precision what would turn out to be the final masterpieces for new performing arts centers in Wisconsin, Florida and the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas, where he is the managing director.

The canvases are all different. No two facilities are the same, just as no two markets are the same. Each requires its own customization, its own special signature. Paul Beard’s accomplished career has taught him this, but for all the variables involved, Beard still believes that when all is said and done, he and all other facility managers have a basic tenet of adherence.

“In the end the job is simple,” says Beard. “You are there to ensure the integrity of your institution.”

Living in the Future
Bass Performance Hall celebrates its 10th anniversary on May 1, 2008. Look from the outside and your disbelieving eyes will tell you that there’s no way that this pristine facility can be close to turning 10. Step inside and you’ll discover why the 2,056-seat multi-purpose theater feels and plays as well today as it did when it first opened. Consider the connection to be no accident for a venue that in 2006 opened its doors to almost 300 performance dates.

Beard arrived in Fort Worth in 1993 from the Raymond F. Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. Given a blank canvas and serving as an instrument for the vision of Ed Bass, Beard set about his work those first two years participating in the design of the hall and in raising the capital to build it. The actual building phase occupied 1995 through the opening in 1998.

“I had the opportunity to harness all the resources and prerogatives of the design process for this new building to essentially direct it toward a well integrated and successful future,” explains Beard. “There were a few fixed factors, such as the size of the site and a few other things, but aside from that I was able to help shape the design and all the elements and systems within the building to the eventual service of the end constituencies — the audiences and the artists.

“My job was to function as the advocate for those two constituencies and to make sure their long-range interests were served by the building that we designed, commissioned and eventually opened. I was able to do that under the leadership of Ed Bass, and today it’s nice to look back and realize I’m living in the future that I visualized way back in the early ’90s.”

Man of Vision
The Bass Hall project might be a vision that Beard first dreamt about 15 years ago, but his keen eye for what makes performing arts centers really work for artists and audiences alike goes back even farther.

Born in Appleton, Wisc., and calling his home base Madison, Beard is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, where he was a communication arts major. Beard made some freelance films and was hired by the Madison Civic Center in 1976 to make a documentary film about the new performing arts center. “In the course of doing the research on the film, I discovered a huge vacuum in the middle of it, an administrative vacuum in the middle of the organization,” says Beard.

That vision enabled Beard to become a key figure in the design, construction and operation of the Civic Center. “I took one simple philosophy with me which I would recommend to any young person coming into the business: Make yourself indispensable,” says Beard. “I used that philosophy to learn as much as I could to be useful to the project.

“In the course of it all I abandoned the film because it didn’t look like there was much of a film there, anyway.”

But there was a career that was ready to take off, and in the course of his on-the-job training, Beard was named assistant to the director, where he reported first to Edgar Neiss and then to Ralph Sandler, two men that Beard calls mentors and influences in his career.
The experience in Madison was typical for many starting out in the industry. In other words, there weren’t enough pegs on the rack to fit all the hats that Beard wore. “Having had eight years of experience as the number two guy in Madison, it allowed me to plug myself into all the different jobs,” says Beard. “Whenever we’d lose a box office manager or a front-of-house person, I’d jump in and do that job. After eight years I got to a point where I had a pretty good overview of how these things work.”

Paul Beard: Manager, Mentor and Maven

Rodney Smith, CFE, executive director in the University Events department at the University of Denver, says it best about Paul Beard: “Paul is a manager, mentor and maven to the performing arts community.” Beard might perhaps best be known as someone who has successfully opened new facilities and whose visionary insights are unparalleled. A number of Beard’s peers and colleagues spoke to the qualities that make Beard a respected leader within the public assembly facility industry.

Ted DeDee, executive director, Schermerhorn Symphony Center: “There’s no question Paul Beard is the consummate arts venue executive. He’s the most sought-after authority of good design and function of a performing arts building by communities seeking to replicate what he has accomplished in Fort Worth. Paul also has a keen sense of knowing what attractions will sell well in his building. He does all of this by being a great listener and communicator — always staying in touch with agents, other venue managers, consultants and his constituents to keep a pulse on his community and our industry.”

Ken DiCamillo, vice president, William Morris Agency Inc.: ”I’ve known Paul for a number of years, and it’s a pleasure to see him run the Bass Performance Hall. The market really didn’t have a place like that before Paul got there, and he continues to take it to new heights. Paul is the type of person who is always on an even keel, the kind who says that there are no problems, just solutions. He’s a very fair negotiator. I have had lots of acts like the Neville Brothers, Smothers Brothers, B.B. King and Lily Tomlin play his hall, and they all love it. Paul never flies too high or gets too low.”

Bud Franks, president, Franks and Associates: “When one contemplates knowledge, leadership and innovation in the arena of performing arts center development and management, I think that most individuals knowledgeable of the industry would single out Paul Beard as being among, if not at the top of, an elite cadre of professionals at the forefront of the industry.

Paul is truly aware of the complex art of properly phasing the development of a performing arts facility from inception through opening and beyond. His leadership in putting those pieces in place during the development of Bass Hall was classically ‘by the book’ and obviously extremely successful.

“As many of us know, developing and opening a facility can be difficult and perilous to one’s well-being. However accomplishing that is only the tip of the iceberg. Creating a successful operational culture, while successfully developing productive occupancy, is the key to providing one’s community a facility that is relevant and accessible.

Paul is just a master of that art and of successfully managing the tricky balance between resident company relations and needs while presenting a commercially viable hall season. It’s no secret that Bass Hall is one of the most successful and financially stable performing arts centers in the country, and that Paul is in continual demand for facility development and operations advice.”

John Kimpton, manager of Performing Arts and Special Market Projects, Wenger Corp: “Paul is one of the best delegators I’ve ever met. He has an incredible knack for knowing people’s strengths and weaknesses. When he delegates, he gives you the authority to do things.

Paul is also extremely fair in how he challenges you. He’s never crude, rude or raises his voice. He jumps past fault and blame and looks for solutions. Paul knows how to walk away and take his foot off the accelerator, something not always easily done in this business.”

Michael Martin Murphey, president/founder, Wildfire Productions/Timberwolf Inc.: “The genius of Paul Beard is his ability to be so open-minded as to pull in a diverse selection of cultural shows that appeal to everyone. Paul knows how to reach the people on the street as well as the people in the ivory tower. He knows that ‘culture’ has its roots in the common people and the masses who will find a way to express themselves.

Paul is an easy-going man who doesn’t sweat the small stuff. He helps all kinds of artists realize their vision. He’s much more than a man who buys shows; he’s a man who makes shows work.”

Andrea Stevenson, vice president, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts (formerly with Bass Performance Hall): “Paul’s commitment to professional development and mentoring is the trait that most stands out when I think of him. He introduced me to IAAM when Bass Performance Hall hosted PAFAS in 1999, and he has steadily pushed me to join the Performing Arts Committee, host a PAFAS and speak on panels and boards.

“Paul is fully committed to improving the profession of venue administration and believes industry associations are invaluable tools for learning from our peers’ successes and challenges. He views the cultivation of the next generation of industry leaders as part of this commitment to professional development, mentoring young managers and helping us notso- young venue managers make strategic career decisions. I’m indebted to him for countless pieces of good advice and wry counsel, and I cannot imagine I would’ve had any success in the field if he hadn’t drop-kicked me into the industry and into IAAM.”

Pebbles Wadsworth, director, University of Texas Performing Arts Center: “Paul is simply one of the brightest arts businessmen I know, from building an arts center all the way to running it (including listening to his audience and programming superbly for them). He is successful for a number of reasons. He has the highest integrity and does not let his ego get in the way but truly understands the role that he is ‘playing’ at each moment in time. Paul is a visionary but at the same time very, very practical.

He has a sense of humor, even about himself, and balances his life well so that he is objective about what he does. I look up to Paul, respect him deeply and see him as a leader.”

Caroline Werth, president, Turnaround Arts Management: ”Paul is a consummate pro in the world of arts administration. I have worked with Paul in programming conferences, as a presenter and in my current work as a consultant doing feasibility studies and planning new performing arts theaters. The relationships have all been very collegial.

When people think of Paul they think of someone who is generous and with an intellect, experience and knowledge to be admired and respected. He’s never too busy to open his door and give an honest, accurate opinion.”

Rodney Smith, CFE, director, University of Denver: “I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Paul for about 15 years. During that time, he has been a resource for me in times of confusion, he has been a model of business acumen when the stress of a bottom-line orientation was a challenge, and most importantly, he has been a friend and confidant when I needed one.

Paul is definitely one of the most respected managers in the industry today. The success he is experiencing can be attributed to his dedication to a career focused on excellence in the ‘business we call show.’

His prowess as a manager and promoter have made him the first person many managers call for assistance. During my career, I’ve been able to call upon Paul with a myriad of questions that he answers honestly and without hesitation. He’s always ready to share his vast experiences with other managers in order to help avoid mistakes or bad decisions that would be inevitable without his guidance.

He has an uncanny ability that enables him to look at an idea from many different levels and viewpoints and then ask very direct questions that help to determine whether or not my harebrained ideas have any merit whatsoever.

When it came to how the jobs worked, Beard admits that what he saw wasn’t always pretty. “I thought if you could just start with a blank canvas and do it properly, you could actually make some kind of sense out of not just the architectural challenge but also the operational programmatic challenge,” he says.

Armed with that knowledge, Beard answered when the Kravis Center called in 1985. The task: Plan, organize, build and open a $55 million performing arts center. “It turned out to be a very challenging and difficult project, but we succeeded in achieving what we set out to do, which was opening a successful hall,” he says. “I utilized some of the precepts there that I learned in Madison, basically that a busy building is a happy building. Put another way, high occupancy puts you in a position where the gap between expenses and revenues can come down to a manageable scope.”

One Happy Building
If a busy building is a happy building, then you should get a look at the smile painted on the façade of Bass Performance Hall. By hosting close to 300 performances in 2006 (when an average for most facilities is about 125), Bass Hall is an active asset in Fort Worth and enriches the lively Sundance Square entertainment district. The mix of programming includes Broadway, symphony, ballet, opera, Van Cliburn and some 40 commercial shows that the venue presents.

“We operate in the black or can sustain this enterprise on earned income,” says Beard. “At the same time, we provide a de facto subsidy to the resident companies. We charge them rates that are below our costs and offset the loss that comes from that with productive activity in terms of commercial shows, Broadway product, parking, retail, ticketing, food and beverage and space rental.”

When Beard was working with his blank canvas prior to opening Bass Hall, he colored his palette with a strong nod toward the future and the ability for the hall to be a home to many forms of arts.

“This is a multipurpose concert theater, and to achieve the high occupancy you need to be able to successfully accommodate all different kinds of art forms,” says Beard. “If all you could do is symphony or classical music, you would only be useful up to 90, 100, 110 performances. With a mulitpurpose hall, you not only accommodate more events but you are able to do them all with excellence.

“You need wonderful natural room acoustics for symphony, a certain kind of deck, rigging and lighting for ballet and opera. You need to be able to change the acoustics radically to go from being a very reverberant room to a drier room in order to successfully do Broadway shows or concerts where verbal intelligibility is a key factor. To present all those disciplines with excellence the building needs to be adaptable and to give you the technical resources you need for each of those disciplines.”

While still working with the canvas that is the building design, Beard says the crucial step is to “trap the weak link in the chain, identify in the design those things which potentially would create a fatal flaw in what you are trying to accomplish in your ability to do all those disciplines well.”

“You could have inadvertent mechanical noise,” says Beard. “That would defeat the symphonic acoustics. In that instance you are dealing with engineering, structural isolation, attenuating the sound in the mechanical systems, in the air handling systems and all of that so that you have an absolutely silent room.

“A flaw you’re trying to trap would be the potential for any noise to invade the room because that would be fatal to the excellence of the symphonic acoustics. If you had one compressor sitting in a place that was not structurally isolated, that would be a flaw. That’s just one tiny example.”

Beard adds that a hall manager should use his blank canvas to maximize earned income in every possible way. “You want a building that is productive,” he says. “You need your bars in the right places. You need your valet parking to work well. You don’t want valet parking retrieval that takes an hourand- a-half to get your car back.”

Not every venue currently on design is necessarily multipurpose, but every venue has ways in which its blank canvas can be sketched to work best for its particular situation. “The Schermerhorn Center does it right in Nashville,” says Beard by way of example. “Ted DeDee has a building that is a pure concert hall, so how does he keep his building productive? He has a system he initiated that was designed by the professionals on his team that allows him to remove all the seats on the orchestra level floor and turn his concert hall into a flat floor ballroom, which is then marketed as a public assembly facility of a different kind. That occupancy augments the symphony occupancy and makes his equation much more self sustaining.”

For Hire
It was by design (so to speak) that Beard moved to Fort Worth and began his Bass employ five years before the facility officially opened. While building for the future is one of Beard’s mantras, another is that the outset for anyone considering building a venue must include a facility manager.

“There are so many critical factors at the beginning,” says Beard. “That’s why you should have a seasoned hall manager at the helm as the first person you hire on one of these projects. Often the people that start these projects are well-meaning citizens who gather together and say, ‘We want a performing arts center in our community. Hand the responsibility for the planning, the development and the future of that project to an architect.’ Wrong guy! It should be handed over to a hall manager.

“That person should then attempt to extract as much creativity, resourcefulness and talent from the design teams as they are capable. I’ve had the privilege of working with great architects like Malcolm Holzman in Madison, Thom Weeks in Palm Beach and David Schwarz in Fort Worth. The result is to have a facility that has a look and feel that’s pleasing to the public and to the performers, that’s financially viable and credible as far as establishing its brand in the community.”

The importance of having the right people in place at the right time these days is even more critical because of the money spent building a facility. “It’s bang for the buck,” says Beard. “The truth is we built this place for $72.5 million. People walk around here and say, ‘Is there a digit missing? We just spent $300 million and didn’t get half of what you got. How did you do that?’”

Beard says the answer is private sector and putting your management in place. “It’s a private-sector project, which means that your prerogatives are open-ended and you don’t have to worry about political compromises that bleed off your resources on extraneous things. You can focus on exactly what you need to get done.

“You need management, and management should know down to the last rivet what’s relevant and what isn’t and how hard it is to make an institution like this solvent. It should be someone very seasoned and well versed. This all sounds so obvious you’d think the world already figured this out. The irony is how if you go around the country and see how these projects evolve, (you see) how little they take advantage of the knowledge available to them.”

Beard knows that any success he has enjoyed has been due in large part to those who surround him. Talk to Beard about almost any subject and he can float to some incredible depths of knowledge. Talk to him about what makes Bass Hall go and you get a surprisingly simple answer. “I only hire nice people,” he says of his staff of 35.

“I hire people who have natural good instincts with regard to how they work with other people.” Beard supports those comments by pointing out that several artists who have played his venue have provided unsolicited testimonials about their first-rate experience. Beard is so proud of that fact that his e-mails end with an artist testimonial about Bass Hall.

Then there are the ushers, in all some 1,500 of them who volunteer for the jobs. “It’s not so we can skimp on paying salary,” says Beard, “but because the volunteer ushers are here for the one reason that they want to be. It completely changes the look and the feel when you walk in the door. That usher is proud of this place. It’s a different mentality than the usher here for $6 an hour who would rather be anywhere else on a Sunday night or whatever. The volunteer usher is here because of the quality of experience he gives the audience members interacting with those ushers.”

Beard rewards the volunteers with an appreciation event that includes free airline tickets, gifts and access to tickets on unsold seats for performances. “That really isn’t the reason they’re here, but it’s one way we can try and express how much we appreciate them,” he says.

As he surveys his career, Beard feels he is truly blessed.

“The people who are really fortunate and lucky are the ones who have the privilege of doing what they love,” he says. “You wouldn’t think a hall manager would fall into that category, but in some weird way I do. I’m not down on the stage singing to the audience every night. I’m a facilitator. I like bringing together all these disparate elements into something that’s very fulfilling to people. I like happy audiences. That’s my contribution to the world.”

As you would suspect, the blank canvas comes again into play for Beard. “The hall manager with the blank canvas has the wonderful privilege of being able to empathize, to put yourself in the place of the customer and say, ‘What can I do to kill that customer with kindness?’ ”

If done successfully, the answer is that the canvas will look just like that of Bass Hall for which Paul Beard has artistically and expertly drawn.