Image courtesy of Tessitura Network
Andrew Recinos is the new president and CEO of Tessitura Network. Well, he’s not exactly “new.” Recinos has been with Tessitura since 2002, not long after the company was founded. He was initially a contractor, then he became executive vice president in 2012 and president five years later. Adding the duties and responsibilities of CEO places him firmly in charge of the organization.
So, how does he plan to put his own personal stamp on things? “Since I have been here for almost the entire history of the company, I would like to think that who we are today already has my personal stamp on it,” he says with a slight chuckle. “What I have tried to bring to all this is to make sure our head is in technology and in business, but that our heart is always focused on the success of arts and cultural organizations. The soul of what we do is making sure this industry continues to thrive.”
Tessitura is an enterprise CRM system used by performing arts and cultural organizations to manage their activities across ticketing, fundraising, memberships, marketing and more. The organization does not spread itself thin, instead staying laser-focused on a clientele it has served for two decades now. “We are not about sports or amusement parks or any of the other wonderful industries in the world that are ticketed and/or a part of the universe of INTIX,” Recinos says. “We are very disciplined about that. The other thing that makes us unique is our business model as a nonprofit. Among other things, it protects us from the mergers and acquisitions and the various changes or events we see throughout the ticketing profession. We have the same business we had when we started 20 years ago. We are not a roller coaster. We are a straightaway.”
Recinos’ career, on the other hand, has been a bit of a roller coaster, albeit a fun one. It has had four chapters thus far. He started out as a musician, majoring in music composition at college. Then, he worked at Carnegie Hall as an arts administrator for about 10 years. After that, he became a management consultant. Tessitura is the fourth chapter.
Even with his longevity, though, he’s never experienced times like the pandemic era. You would think that taking on the CEO’s job during such a crisis would be daunting, even though it was a long-planned transition. But Recinos is up for the challenge. “The No. 1 challenge — and the one our team has felt most acutely — is because we care so deeply about the arts and culture market, and because most of us have come from the live entertainment world, sharing the pain of the job losses, the doors being shut, the organizations that have not been able to share their gifts with the world has been psychically traumatic for all of us. And there is no replacing that.”
He continues, “Our whole business works to support those organizations in the best of times. We have now put literally every ounce of our being into supporting them through the worst of times. We provide 24/7 support. That has never stopped during the pandemic, and we have been leaning even more into that. Organizations have been calling us up and 60 or 70% of their staff has been laid off. So, we will get somebody calling us with the voice shaking and saying, ‘I am the only person left in the office, and I have to understand how Tessitura works.’ We have the ability to just swarm in and help them figure it out. Being able to take in money and communicate with your audience have become the two most important things you can do amid the pandemic, and those are the two things we do for [our clientele].”
Tessitura has proven to be such a solid and invaluable resource during COVID-19 that the company actually added 50 organizations to its community last year. Recinos says the reason for such success was twofold. “One, there were some organizations that — for whatever reason — found that this quiet time was actually a good time to implement software. That was the pragmatic side. The other side of it is, because there is so much change going on in the industry right now with consolidation and moving from one platform to another, we have been a port in the storm. We are the known entity.”
As you might imagine, Recinos has a number of anecdotal stories of how Tessitura has helped clients in need. One of the more recent examples is that an executive at one of the theaters Tessitura supports emailed him out of the blue. The client is based in Florida, so it has had the benefit of being able to offer outdoor performances in these colder months. “They had built a stage outdoors, come up with social distanced seating, and they had to figure how to sell tickets and scan people in in a contactless way,” Recinos says. “We supported them through every step of it, helping them sell tickets and put the events online — all in a seamless way. We were not a barrier. Quite the opposite. We were an enabler.”
Looking ahead, Recinos describes himself as both “an optimist and a realist” when discussing the prospects for 2021. One of his favorite phrases is “Success isn’t linear.” “Taking the long view of the next 12 to 18 months, things are going to be better,” he says. “But it is going to come in fits and starts. There will be setbacks. And in the face of a setback, it will be quite easy for human nature to say, ‘Everything’s falling apart’ or ‘Everything is sliding back.’ But you must take the long view of things. From the arts and culture business perspective, the pandemic has stripped away everything that is not essential. What is left is our essence. People who are naturally angry have become angrier. People who are naturally generous have become more generous. When you see cultural organizations that are doing amazing things right now in these moments of turmoil, they are returning to their essence.”
He adds, “I was talking to the CEO of a symphony just last week. And by hook or by crook, they are still performing live music on stage where others are just taking small ensembles out on road shows. He said, ‘Yeah, but … we are a symphony! Small chamber ensembles are great. I love them. But we are not them. We are a symphony, and that is what we do!’ I think that on the other side of this, you are going to have the essences of these organizations growing back from a central place. And I think they are going to be stronger and more resilient as a result.”
Regarding new innovations, Recinos agrees with the technologists who say that the cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics will continue to be the big buzz technologies in 2021. “I also think that the democratization of some of these technologies that have been for large organizations like advanced analytics and AI are going to play out with more modest-sized organizations. With respect to the INTIX world, I think what we have seen and will continue to see is — and I think this is a good thing — the continued reduced reliance on people for mundane or commodity work like transacting and selling tickets. Staff will continue to move toward the much richer, more personal human-customer-centric experience — helping to curate experiences, helping to provide the best possible customer service, creating those warm connections that cultural organizations need to have with their audiences in order to connect with them. Technology should play both roles in taking a lift off the mundane and enabling those transcendent moments that humans have with each other.”
Through it all, Recinos hopes to guide Tessitura with a steady hand and a calm head. As a leader, he prefers to listen more than talk. He preaches kindness and, most of all, discipline. “Discipline does not mean rigid, and it does not mean, not being creative or curious,” he says. “It does mean being thoughtful and intentional about what you do and sticking to it.”
He concludes, “I go all the way back to when I was a kid and a musician. A music teacher of mine said, ‘You are what you eat.’ That was an interesting thing to say. She was basically saying that in order to become a really good composer, you have to listen to a lot of good music. And she did not assign what good music was. It was whatever I thought was good. It could have been Bach or The Beatles or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But she inspired me to spend a lot of time on my craft and to read books on famous composers and those sorts of things. I take that forward now and I am, to this day, a voracious consumer of management books, technology blogs, TED Talks. I love having one-on-one conversations with people I respect. Researchers and biographers will often tell you that the greatest leaders are lifelong learners. So, if you eat good music, you will create good music. And if you eat good research and literature, whether contemporary or from philosophers from thousands of years ago, you will produce smart leadership.”
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