Kenneth Feld: “People make an organization.”

Published Mar 7, 2024, 11:01 AM

Audiences love a spectacle, and Kenneth Feld knows better than anyone how true this is. As the Chairman and CEO of Feld Entertainment, he’s an acclaimed visionary when it comes to live, family friendly theatrics. He took over the business from his father, who founded it back in 1967 when he discovered the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. Kenneth sat down with Bob to describe how he maintains the company’s core principles, from valuing families above all else to championing live entertainment as a way of bringing people together–even during a global pandemic.

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Listen to the audience. They always tell you the truth. You can tell by the applause, So you can tell by the lack of applause. Everything we do is for the audience, It isn't for us.

Hi.

I'm Bob Pittman. Welcome to this episode of Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing. On most episodes, we're examining the impact and transformation of products and services into a new digital world. Today, we're going in the other direction and talking to one of the great and most enduring visionaries of live family entertainment. That's right irl in real life, it's Kenneth Feld, chairman and CEO of Feld Entertainment, best known for Ringling Brothers, Sigrid and Roy, Master, Jam Motorsports, Disney and Ice, Sesame Street, Live, Tony Award winning stage shows, and a lot more. Kenneth Eld was born in Washington, d C. In the late nineteen forties. He worked in the family business even as a kid, at all levels, from selling programs to managing the box office. He's got a remarkable, one of a kind story with a lot of important lessons and unique insights which we'll explore today. Kenneth, welcome, Thank you very much.

Great to be with you.

Well, before we jump into the meaty stuff, we'd like to start out with doing you in sixty seconds. You ready, sure? Early riser or night out? Early riser east coast to west coast, East coast, winter or summer toss up Marvel are Classic Disney Aal Disney caller texts Paul all time favorite musical artists, Gladys Knight favorite and greatness live performance of all time.

I have to say, Sigfreedom.

Roy, smartest person you know, I say, my dad, let's jump in. You've got an amazing against the grain story. Everything seems to be going virtual and here you are with some of the greatest franchises in the world filling up theaters, arenas and stadiums. What is it about live entertainment that virtual just can't replace?

The greatest thing about live entertainment is the first word is live. It can evoke emotions like nothing else. If you're watching something on the screen, it's two dimensional, no matter how good the quality is, and people do not respond in the same way. Years ago, we'd done Toy Story on ice with Disney On Ice. I was sitting with John Lasseter and watching the show and it was the first time he had seen it, and I turn around and he has tears in his eyes and I said, John, is everything okay?

He said yeah.

He says, you know, I would go and watch matinees of my movies to see what the audience reaction is. He said, here, I've never seen a reaction like this to any of my movies before. And he said, it's because it's live. It's because the characters.

People think that they're real.

And to hear it from someone who makes movies all the time, it was just astounding to hear that and see his response, and I think that's really what it is. When COVID hit and we were closed completely for you know, a year and a half, and everybody said, well, now everybody's watching everything, they're streaming everything. Nobody's ever going back to live entertainment. And I said, live entertainment is going to be stronger than ever because you can't get that feeling, that response from a screen.

So COVID comes, everybody says, oh my gosh, the world's changed. We're all going to be virtual. You go back in the live business and what was that first live show and how was that versus other shows.

It was interesting because we had about twenty some shows touring around the world. COVID hit and we had equipment Indonesia and Germany, people that we had to get back to their homes and we were basically completely out of business because you couldn't operate anywhere, and it was difficult because we had to let people go and things. And I sat there with the team and I said, look, let's think of our company as a fifty year old startup. What have we been doing all these years that maybe hasn't worked as well as it should.

What are the things that we could do to make things better?

In life, you really don't get a shot at a blank.

Piece of paper.

With COVID, we learned to operate in very different ways. And I think the first thing was we had our Supercross motorcycle racing season and we had seven races left and there were no audiences because people couldn't go out. So what we did is we went to talt Lake City, the Rice Cycle Stadium at University of Utah, and we had the seven final races there in over a two week period. Typically we do one race a week and all the riders came. We were testing them. We had a full crew that was constantly testing all the people involved, and we were in the stadium. We had the dirt for the motorcycle riders in there, and it was televised. So we completed our television commitments, but there were no spectators. And we finished the season and we crowned a champion and we said, wow, it worked.

So now what's the next thing.

We can do, and we went out with one tour of Disney on ice and the challenge there was we were able to have certain states that would allow us to operate, and there were maybe eight or nine states at the time.

But the seating was what we call pod seating.

If you had a family of four, you would have four seats and then there will be four seats next.

To you open.

There would be the rolling back of you in the row in front of you open. So we said, let's try that out, and it worked and people came and I think we played every single city in Texas and we ultimately were the first live entertainment in the world to start touring again, and we grew from that.

It's amazing what you did during COVID and the way you came back from it, and you know, you go against the grain and being live when everybody else is trying to go virtual. The other thing you do which is against the grain is you know, talking about the business, is this is really still a family business. Other family members have joined the business. You joined the business early and really built the business up. How do you think about the pros and cons of everyone in the family working together and having it as such a family focused business.

It's a wonderful business to be a family business, just because my theory is anybody that's born is a potential customer. And when my daughters growing up, they grew up with primarily with Ringling Brothers.

And Disney on ice and that was.

Just part of their life and I don't think they thought it was strange. And then they all went to school, they married, they have children, and they worked in different parts of the business. My youngest daughter, Juliet, is the chief opera off the company. Now my other daughters are on the board and it is really interesting dynamics and it makes every day come to work and I feel good. And we do have a great team and one person can lead, but you need a team to make things work. What I like best about the whole business is the people and I get to come in. I see them every day I go out to the shows. It's energizing and keeps me a lot younger.

Quick factoid here, how much time do you spend on the road pre.

Covid was probably for fifty some years, traveling three to four days every single week. I did that from the time basically when I started working summers when I was in college and after that and I were just constantly traveling every place.

So usually we jump back in time to add a perspective on our game. In your case, jumping back in time is really the origin story. You were born in nineteen forty eight Washington, d C. Just as your dad and uncle were about to start new careers and live entertainment in the early fifties, they took over management of an amphitheater in Washington, d C. Your dad managed Paul Anka as a young breakout star. He promoted major acts including the Beatles and the Stones, and even promoted the Greatest Showwner at Ringling Brothers, and in nineteen sixty seven actually bought it all. This before you finished business school. Tell us about growing up like that. What did it teach you about business and about life and family and how did it shape who you became.

I'll go way back.

My mother passed away when I was nine years old, and my dad was always working. He wanted to go to college, he couldn't because he was supporting his family. And my dad had a record store in downtown Washington, DC, And if I want to spend time with him on the weekends, I would go to the record store, which was great because I got to listen to all these different records. And he was a consultant early on for RCAA Victor Records, and he would get all of these white label forty five rpm records, which were the singles that somebody was going to release maybe three or four months later. And my dad would listen to the records and recommend what he thought were great, and he would bring these records home. Or when I went down to the record stores on Saturdays and Sundays, say listen to these records, what do you think? And he listened to what I said. When I was nine and ten, And also he would have eighty one night ers of tours so that he would have a fall tour. It went for eighty nights, that was eleven weekends. And in the spring he'd have a spring tour. And these were in days in DC and in the South there was still segregation early on, and he'd have a show with James Brown, he'd have a show with the Drifters, with all the motown acts, with every act that you could ever think of music acts, and he would tour them. And by doing this he went all over the US and Canada. He learned about all the arenas. And if you think about in the early sixties, there were only six teams in the NBA and six teams in the NHL, so there were these arenas, but they lack content. So his rock and roll shows would play in all these venues. And nineteen fifty six Ringling brothers born in Bailey, filed bankruptcy and they went out of business.

And my father calls John Ringling.

North, who was the owner of fifty one percent of Ringling at the time, and he said, look, I have an idea how you should bring back the circus.

And he said, what do you mean?

And my father said, look, you've always played Madison Square Garden, You've always played the Boston garden. Why don't you just play arenas instead of the tent, and I'll promote it because I know all the arenas.

I'll book the.

Arenas and you deliver them the show, and I'll promote it to all the advertising marketing and we'll figure out how split on the dollars. And that's what happened. It just grew, and he was innovative at the time. Everybody had newspapers delivered, and every Sunday you get a newspaper and it would have comics in it, and parents would read this to the kids. And so he did so much of his marketing for Ringling Brothers in the Sunday comics because that's what parents read to their kids, and that was a great way of marketing, and nobody ever bought ads in the comics section.

It was also the least expensive way.

To advertise, and so that really kicked off his promotional success with Ringling. And he did that from fifty seven to sixty seven, and at that point there was a lot of absentee management and the show was deteriorating, and he said, if I can't buy it this year, I'll just stop promoting it. Because he didn't like the quality of the show, and so it took him all year to raise the money, and he and my uncle acquired Ringling Brothers Born and Bailey, and the partner was Roy Hafeines, who had built the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, and my father and my uncle ran the circus. That was in sixty seven, and my dad's idea was, hey, to cover the entire United States, we really need two circuses, and so he said, I want to create a second tour, and so in sixty nine there were two tours of Ringling Brothers Born and Bailey.

And then in.

Nineteen seventy one he actually sold the company to Mattel and by this time I was out of college so worked for Mattel running Ringling. And then in nineteen eighty two, Mattel got in some financial issues and they had a lot of non core assets, so we said we'd like to buy Ringling back, and that's what we did. We took a private again, and that's sort of how it morphed into what it was. And two years later, in nineteen eighty four, my father passed away suddenly, so.

I was sort of left with the whole business.

And you know, my kids were very young then, and that was a real challenge overnight to take over the greatest shaw on earth and try and grow the business, which we did.

I want to give you a shout out that probably one of the biggest shows we'd do at iHeart is our jingle Ball each Christmas season around the country ten cities, and it is really inspired by those rock and roll shows that your dad did way back when the best artist, the best songs, the biggest stuff of that particular year. So what he started lives on and I'm sure an inspiration for many others. Let me go to a story. In the summer of sixty eight, while the world was between the Summer of Love and Woodstock, you were actually, as I understand, in Eastern Europe behind what was then the Iron Curtain, looking to recruit circus performers. Can you share that story?

Sure?

My father bought the show in sixty seven, so the show was basically dumb for the sixty eight season, and in the summer of sixty eight I went with the talent scout that had been with the circus for many years, a Swedish man who spoke seven languages and knew all the best circus at primarily in Eastern Europe. So I traveled with him all summer and learning for me what was a good circus act and what happened.

In Eastern Europe.

And if you go even today all over the world, their circus literally in every country on the planet. They may not call it that, it might be acrobatics, it might be something else, but it's circus or there's potential circus acts. And they had these schools and it was entertainment for the masses. We would go to the circus schools and they would bring every act in the country and in a three day period we would see everything and then we would negotiate. Basically, it was with the department of Culture in these countries because that's what the circus was considered for the acts to bring the best to Ringling for a period of time, and at that time it was one year or two years and then they would go back. But it was negotiating with the countries that acted like the agents for the performers. So it was fascinating for me and especially as a young person, to have that opportunity and to really understand what these people were going through, what it was like. And we would hire many, many people from all over the world and great performers, and you know, you would get to know them. And every time I would go back, they would have family and different things and introduce new actsor they would say, what kind of act do you want? We'd sit down and create an act, and you'd come back in a year and they had it perfected, and then we'd hire it for the following year.

And it was a great way to learn.

But the best thing was we're bringing talent and things to American audiences that they would never see otherwise.

More a math in magic. Right after this quick break, welcome back to Mathemagic. Let's hear more from my conversation with Kenneth Feld. Let's jump to another big moment for you. Nineteen eighty one was a big year for you because you started Disney on Ice and you were able to do a deal with Disney that was legendary for sort of doing it all themselves, not about partnering. How did that happen?

We, while we were with Mattel in seventy nine, acquired Ice Follies and Holiday on Ice, and there were two traditional ice shows and it was really something that I got into right away and put together a new Ice show and business was okay. And I went out there one Saturday and I looked up and I didn't see kids, and it was a Saturday matinee, and I said, oh no, this is a problem. So I went to Disney. I got an appointment there with a gentleman. He was head of their publishing at the time, and this was nineteen eighty and I said, I have a great idea. I want to do a twenty minute segment in our Ice show with Disney characters and we'll use it for marketing and we'll figure out an arrangement.

Be great.

And he says, no, we're Disney, We're not part of anything else. And he says, but you're a nice young man, and I wish you well. And we're walking literally, this is in Burbank at the Disney studio.

We're walking out of his.

Office and I turned around to him and I said, what if we took one of our Ice shows and converted the entire show to Disney characters and stories, and we'll call it Walt Disney's World on Ice.

We literally turned around, went.

Back to his office, and he liked the idea, and within two weeks we had a deal and we opened it in July nineteen eighty one, and it had every Disney character you can imagine at that time. And at the opening, Ron Miller, who was the CEO of Disney at the time, came and he was married to Diane Disney, and nobody knew if it was going.

To go well or not.

And I turn around and Diane Disney is sitting there and she said to me, she said, oh, my father would have loved this. And that was the ultimate endorsement that you could get. And from that point on Disney on Ice it was formed, and it became a real rite of passage for every kid now around the world.

You rolled the dice on Disney on Ice. Although you might argue Disney was big, you thought it was going to be big. Let me talk about an even bigger role of the day. I secret in roy as I understand that the story was nobody thought that would work in Vegas. It was so against what Vegas was about, and it was so against that you actually had to bankroll it because it was so out of the mainstream and so risky and again obviously turned into a monster hit. What did you see that others missed? And how did you make that happen.

The first time I ever saw Sick Freedom Roy was on spring break from college. I was at Puerto Rico and there this follies bridge air type show at the Americana Hotel and they were in it. And there's two guys that at the time they had a leopard and they were doing magic and the leopard would disappear and all this stuff.

They were amazing.

And fast forward later on, actually in nineteen seventy seven, I did a TV show with a circus performer, gun Thor Gabrael Williams, who did worked with all kinds of animals and as part of that, they were at that time in Vegas show at Ballet's and we got to know each other, and then they went to the Stardust and I produced two TV shows on NBC and then we opened the show at the Frontier in nineteen eighty one, and they had done really well with that, but Steve Wynn was building the Mirage and I went to Steve and we worked out an arrangement and we basically put the show together. Had somebody designed the theater, which he built. It was something that was extraordinary and I thought it was going to be a five million dollar show investment for us, and it wound up being over a thirty million dollar investment to do what it was and there was technology that no one had ever seen. And we opened February first of nineteen ninety and it became a hit and it was unique in the world and it just grew from there.

Let's jump a little bit on corporate culture. How do you think about it, How do you describe your corporate culture, and how do you use it as a tool.

The first thing is that we spend most of our time working, so you want people to have a good experience, to be challenged, to be able to take chances and not be penalized, not having a fear of failure. And I think that's the most difficult thing to express to people, and you want to give them the confidence that they can do it. And I'm fortunate because I have president of the company that is extraordinary in motivating people and mentoring people of bringing them along. It's one thing to have an idea, but everybody has ideas, and ideas are cheap. Implementation is what the premium is. And we have teams of people that love to be challenged, love to do things that no one else does. And that's the kind of culture we have. But I come to work every day, I walk around our facility, I talk to everybody. The people are what make an organization. You have to treat them right. You have to give them a feeling of caring, of belonging, and of making a difference. I think that's how you create a great management team.

Jeff Bezos famously talks about disagree and commit as a way to think about how you channel dissent and how you avoid it killing you. What's your view on descent and how do you use it?

You know.

The problem is when you're CEO of a company, or you run the company, or you own the company, people tend to tell you what they think you want to hear. And I always think I'm right. So I want people to tell me, no, there's another way. Be respectful with it, but tell me that. I think it's one of the great things about having family. My daughters, they have no fear to tell me whatever they think.

I learned from that. The other thing is this, it's seventy five years old.

I don't think like my customer does in the same way because my customers, for the most part, are parents with kids, and so they're a lot younger than I am, and they think about things differently. So I learned when I can take my grandkids out to one of our shows or any show, I learn more from them. And the one thing that we always do is listen to the audience. They always tell you the truth. You can tell by the applause or you can tell by the lack of applause. Everything we do is for the audience. It isn't for us, and I think that's important. So you don't let your quote unquote good ideas or bad ideas get in the way. Because the audience, they vote every time they buy a ticket, and we focus on family entertainment, and that's what it is. It's parents, it's grandparents, it's three generations can go to one of our shows and they can all enjoy it. And everything we do in the relaunch of Ringling Brothers Barnwin Bailey is based on one thing, simple fun that everyone can enjoy.

That's it, Kenneth. We end each episode of Mathemamagic with a shout out from each guest to the greats in the purely creative side of the business. Those promoters, Showman, the Magic the magicians, and then the other side of the coin were also great business people. Are the math people, those who see the world in such clear, analytical terms. If you had to give a shout out to one person on each side of that, who would it be.

Well, I think there is one person because I probably learned everything from him on both sides of that, the magic and the math. And it was my dad. He taught me how to count. He'd bring home before there was ticketmaster, there was hard tickets. That's how I learned how to count when I was five years old, was the deadwood tickets, and so that was a great thing. He was a brilliant businessman, but he was a visionary again when it came to business, he had no fear. And I think those are the things that I gleaned from him that I take with me every day my life.

Kenneth, You've had a remarkable life. You've got a one of a kind business. You've seen so much, built so much much of it against the grain. Thanks for sharing your stories today.

Thank you very much, Bob. I enjoyed it.

Here are a few things I picked up in my conversation with Kenneth. One value people feld entertainment's a family business, and that level of personal commitment benefits the entire company staff. It's ultimately people who have ideas, make decisions, and create products. So invest in them and respect them as if they were your family. Two, put on a show. People are hungry for experiences, whether in a time of crisis or not. Audiences value the simple joy of a jaw dropping spectacle. Even if you don't work in entertainment, the secret of success could be to create a product that, above all else, is fun and enjoyable to a wide range of people. Three, the audience never lies. Your product is ultimately for your consumer, not for you, so listen to what the audience wants. Of course, this may be easy to gauge in live entertainment, but it works for other industries too. Pay attention to what your audience buys or how they interact with your product, and it'll be obvious what they want. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.

That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeart Podcasts. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sidney Rosenbloun for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Math and Magic's producers are Emily Meronoff and Jessica Crimechitch. It is mixed and mastered by Maheid Fraser. Our executive producers are Nikki Etoor and Ali Perry, and of course, a big thanks to Gail Raoul, Eric Angel Noel and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time

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