My first taste of road life was on tour with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson in minor league baseball parks across America in 2004, 2005 and 2006 as part of a talent buying team at Jam Productions.  In all, I promoted over 75 Dylan shows in my career. My most impactful contribution was initiating relationships with new ballparks (primarily venues which had never hosted a concert before).  First I had to sell the concept of putting a mobile stage and thousands of people on their very valuable field.  Then I determined the production and financial feasibility, negotiated the venue contract and was onsite on day-of-show.  This was a unique experience to work on tours from the planning stages of routing and budgeting all the way to handling the financial settlement with the venues and artists while on the tour.   In addition to the three summers with Bob and Willie, we also produced ballpark tours with Def Leppard and Bryan Adams and the Counting Crows.  

The other seasons each year were filled with more traditional talent buying work at Jam Productions for theatres and arenas throughout the midwest.  I was involved with promoting 80+ shows per year, primarily with artists from Creative Artist Agency. Green Day and John Mellencamp are two artists I did numerous shows with.  Turns out I’m a roadie at heart, so I left the full time talent buyer position to become a freelance tour accountant.

From 2009 - 2017 I was the tour accountant for the Vans Warped Tour.  The legendary punk rock summer camp typically featured 80+ bands on 8+ stages,  22 production busses, hundreds of production employees and a very, very large volume of cash.  In addition to settling the shows with the promoters, I handled all band payments, production payroll and per diems, bus floats, vendor deposits and more.  Working the same tour each year gave me an opportunity to improve and streamline processes and fine-tune all the spreadsheeting and reporting.   A well designed spreadsheet is my art.

Like all freelancers, I’ve worked a variety of other tours and festivals.  Some are: Suwannee Hulaween, Pilgrimage Festival, Star Trek the Exhibit, America’s Best Dance Crew for AEG, Taste of Chaos, and Peppa Pig.