This story is brought to you by the INTIX Women in Entertainment Technology Program.
Twyla Mitchell is proud to declare that her entire adult life has been spent in the performing arts — first as a stage manager; later in academia; and, finally, in ticketing. Her first ticketing job was at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and it had a great impact on her. She says, “It gave me an incredible range of experiences that I’ve used ever since: different kinds of events, a wide range of audience sizes, implementing Tessitura.”
Twyla Mitchell
She later moved to the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, California, where she further honed her Tessitura and problem-solving skills. Finally, she has had the great fortune to end up in her current position as Senior Director of Ticketing & Box Office at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas. “I primarily focus on strategy, team leadership and project management,” she says. “Alongside my colleague David Yaney, I’m also the subject-matter expert in Tessitura and the system administrator.”
Mitchell says she considers “collaboration” to be the favorite part of her job: “I get to work with so many different people and teams, and finding ways to weave all of our goals together is fun and exciting every day. … I gravitate to the things I find challenging. I like getting in there and tackling problems and situations and solving and fixing. I particularly like getting handed something we have never done before and being told, ‘Make this happen.’”
She then added with a chuckle, “OK, at least, I like it after the initial panic wears off! Where it becomes a challenge, I guess, is when there are large parts that are out of my hands — for example, working on a project with a vendor — but I’m still the one responsible for the final outcome.”
You don’t get to such a position of leadership and responsibility without a lot of assistance and good advice along the way. Mitchell recalls one of her first managers during the very first week of working with her who told her, “In the next few weeks, you’re going to have a day where you screw everything up, because you think you have it down. But you don’t! Forgive yourself. Everyone does it.”
Mitchell pondered the memory. “She was right, I did! And I started to notice it in everyone I trained. It’s somewhere in the three- to six-week mark. You think you know the job well enough not to need your notes or your checklists or whatever, but you’re not quite there. And hoo boy, do you find out the hard way! I’ve also instilled it in my teams along the way to remind them to give a little grace to new hires.”
This being our Women in Ticketing series, Mitchell was keen to give advice to any young woman reading this who is just starting out in the ticketing and live event business: “Please advocate for yourself, whether that means the raise you deserve, the time off you deserve or the credit you deserve. Women, in particular, are [conditioned] that being your own advocate is arrogant or aggressive or whatever, but it’s not. It’s just fair. And because I know many people who can fight for other people but not themselves, here’s a little secret. Every time you advocate for yourself, you make it easier for the next person not to have to fight so much. If you can’t convince yourself to do it for you, do it for them.”
And from there, hopefully a rewarding career will follow. Mitchell has certainly had her share of successes and triumphs. And she has many anecdotes at the ready from her time serving the performing arts. To that end, she recalls, “Stanford used to have a concert in the amphitheater on July 3. The community treated it like a bonus Fourth of July. Since it was in the amphitheater, we’d spend most of the day before preparing to work without computers or internet — pre-printing hundreds of tickets, bringing the old knuckle-buster credit card imprinters, the whole thing. When July 3 was a weekday, we’d be open in the office during the day and then move to the amphitheater in the late afternoon. One particular July 3, I showed up and we had no internet in the office. No printers, no credit card machines, and absolutely no ticketing system! What we did have, though, was a line of people already and one new hire who had just started that day.”
She continues, “We took the stack of printed tickets, and he and I each took a window. My assistant manager took the phones. I gave him a crash course in a manual tally of sales. We sold tickets to that line of people for four straight hours. Somewhere around hour three, I remember a patron grumpily asking why there was a long line. To be fair, it was very long. We ended up doing over 200 patrons just in that block of time. I explained the internet was out and we had to do everything by hand. He then asked how I could still be smiling, and I said, ‘Because now you’re here!’ It made him laugh, and he was much more pleasant after that.”
At the end of that long day, when Mitchell’s new hire left, she remembers turning to her assistant manager and saying, “Well, he’s never coming back.” But she was wrong. “He showed up bright and early the next morning and turned out to be overall one of the best people I’d ever hired!”
That new hire was probably at least partially inspired by Mitchell’s can-do attitude and overall positivity. That optimism extends to both the short- and long-term outlook she has for her Las Vegas venue and for live events, in general. She says, “It looks like audiences are overall approaching the numbers they had before the pandemic and growing all the time. Part of the joy of live events is being around hundreds or thousands of people who love the same thing you do. That’s a beautiful experience that you simply can’t replicate watching on your TV. That energy and exuberance has to be lived in real time and real space. As the lockdown gets further away, I think more people are realizing that!”
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