Our Sales team works tirelessly to drive our continued growth. As the first to welcome new partners to ShowClix, they essentially serve as ambassadors for the company, speaking about our commitment to our partners with professional knowledge and expertise. Today we’ll meet John Cornett, our Head of Comedy Partnerships! With a career dedicated to every facet of the comedy industry, he brings years of knowledge and experience to the team.
John graduated from California State University Chico in 1989 with a degree in Business Marketing. John spent most of his career in the live events industry one way or another. He co-founded an Electronic Dance Music label in San Francisco called Om Records. In 2007, he decided to pursue his interests in technology and found himself working for a mobile app startup called Kyte, which provided live streaming to artists within the music industry, including John Legend, Alicia Keys, 50 Cent, and more. He even established a comedy podcast network called All Things Comedy in his free time!
In 2015, John became drawn to the ticking aspect of live events, and spent some time at Ticketfly before eventually joining the ShowClix team in 2018. John knew that his deep understanding of all things live events would be a huge asset for any ticketing partner, and in the six months since joining our team, he’s proven to be an expert in the field. When not at work, John can be found spending time with his 16 and 8-year-old boys, or focusing on permaculture, which is an idea of designing food growth systems around the natural ecosystem.
What does the average work week look like for you?
This is a tough question, because no two weeks are the same. In general, I send lots of emails and have many phone calls to potential partners, past colleagues, and current partners. I make sure to nurture my relationships with my industry friends as well. A good deal of leads come from my connections with them, and they’re just good people, so I like to keep in touch as much as possible!
As the Head of Comedy Partnerships, you spend a lot of time introducing potential partners to our system and products. What are some of our features that you find are most helpful to event organizers?
Much depends on the opportunity. For venue owners who book and produce multiple events per week, and sometimes multiple events per day, they typically rely on a solid calendar/event listing view to organize their events for a fluid audience. A solid website is essential. Customer data, customer communication reporting, and marketing tools are also all very important. For festival organizers, all of the above features apply, and in addition they can benefit from some of our other solutions like mobile app development, operational management, and experiential marketing solutions.
As a primarily remote employee, what are some techniques you use to make sure you’re maintaining efficient communication with our team in our Pittsburgh headquarters?
Slack, Zoom, email, and phone are my main tools for communication. Zoom and Slack allow me to feel most connected to headquarters (and other remote team members). It’s important to keep everyone in the loop, while prioritizing and disseminating all the necessary information. We’re most successful when we work as a team, so maintaining strong communication and getting input from others is very important.
You’ve been working with comedy event organizers for nearly 4 years. How does focusing your efforts on a single vertical help hone your strategy?
A singular focus on a vertical helps to create our story as a player (and eventual dominant player) in a space, and in my case that space is comedy. With that said, I have music industry background as well and intend to leverage that knowledge and those relations, too.
One of your current hobbies is permaculture, can you talk a bit about that?
Permaculture is a set of design principles centered around whole systems thinking, simulating, or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems, with the goal of creating a regenerative system. In early 2018 I received a certificate of permaculture design and plan to apply it to local work in my community.
The three core tenets of permaculture are: Care for the earth (support for all life systems to continue and multiply), care for the people (all can access the resources necessary for their existence), and fair share (each of us should take no more than what we need before we reinvest the surplus.)