挺过失败 一家剧院集团的创业心路

We’re standing in a remote cornfield somewhere inIreland, on a weekend away from our office in theWest End. There isn’t a person in sight. We are uncomfortably close to the cliff edge.

我们站在爱尔兰一个偏远的玉米地里，这是我们的周末短假，暂别伦敦西区的办公室。这里看不到一个人影。我们的位置靠近悬崖边缘，有点吓人。

“The business can’t afford us both. One of us has got to go.

“企业负担不起我们两人，有一人必须得离开。

I wonder exactly what my partner (in business and life) has in mind. It’s the last thing I wantto hear but he is right. It was the early 1990s. We were a small production company with justone theatre. We were extremely vulnerable. Our imperative was not about dreaming upgreat shows but keeping the business alive. Hence our al fresco review of the salaries budget.

我揣测我的(工作和生活中的)同伴究竟在想什么。这是我最不愿听到的话，但他说得没错。当时是上世纪90年代初。我们是一家仅有一家剧院的小型制作公司。我们极为脆弱。我们的当务之急不是梦想制作出伟大的话剧，而是让企业生存下去。因此我们在户外野餐时评估了工资预算。

At this point it seemed that my new career as an entrepreneur was about to come to an end.

在那一刻，我的创业者生涯看上去即将结束。

We had lured John Malkovich away from Hollywood to star in Dusty Hughes’ A Slip of theTongue. A megawatt star and a writer with impeccable pedigree. What could go wrong? Butthe ideal playhouses were unavailable and we were pressured into presenting it at theShaftesbury Theatre, a musical house where the play felt lost. Despite decent reviews, it limpedthrough a limited run and we lost our investment.

我们曾吸引约翰氠尔科维奇(John Malkovich)离开好莱坞，领衔主演剧作家杜斯泰休斯(Dusty Hughes)创作的《口误》(A Slip of the Tongue)。大牌明星，大牌剧作家。怎么可能出错?但我们找不到理想的剧院，因此不得不在沙夫茨伯里剧场(Shaftesbury Theatre)上演这部话剧，而那是音乐剧场，不太适合这部话剧。尽管评论还不错，但它仅仅勉强上映了几场，我们的投资打了水漂。

Add to this a new theatre in Woking, launched at the height of summer in the teeth of arecession. The box-office sales reports made grim reading.

这还不算，我们在沃金(Woking)的新剧院在经济衰退期间的盛夏时分揭牌。票房异常惨淡。

Right content, right theatre, right time — easy to say, so hard to achieve when you don’tcontrol all the variables. It wasn’t enough to be a great creative producer, it was clear in thatcliff-edge moment that our success was dependent on factors outside our influence. So weset out to take control: to run a business across the three industry segments of production,venue ownership/management and ticketing. This allowed us to shorten the odds; toengineer the right conditions for creativity to flourish.

合适的内容、合适的剧院，合适的时间——这些都是说起来容易，做起来却很难，因为你控制不了所有的变量。成为一个伟大的创意制作人是不够的，在靠近悬崖边缘的那一刻，我一下子醒悟过来：我们的成功取决于处在我们影响范围外的因素。于是我们着手控制整个流程：经营制作、场地所有/管理和售票这三块业务。这使我们得以降低失败几率，也为创造力的迸发创造合适条件。

“You can’t produce a hit show to order. It has to grow organically, it has to be nurtured, saidour creatives, but dark theatres eat money and staff have to be paid, a constant juggle of cashflow and overheads. It was essential to balance creativity and pragmatism, and my role wasenabler.

我们的创意人员说：“你不能根据订单制作出热门剧。它只能内生式发展，它必须得到培育。但是有大量空座的剧院大厅是烧钱的，我们还得给员工发工资，始终为现金流和人力之间的平衡发愁。有必要平衡创意与务实，我的角色就是促成这一切。

Being a start-up was all about trying things out. We gave our creatives the freedom to developwork with leeway to experiment but not carte blanche to spend up to the max. Sometimesfinancial constraints brought about more imaginative work. And failure is part of the creativeprocess. What we had to do was make sure it was not catastrophic, that we could learn thelessons and move on fast.

初创企业的意义就在于大胆尝试。我们让创意人员自由尝试开发作品，但没有授权他们把预算全部花光。有时财务限制会让作品更具想象力。而失败是创作过程的一部分。我们必须做的是确保失败不是灾难性的，我们能从中汲取教益，然后迅速翻开新的一页。

Start-up finance came from like-minded individual investors who shared our appetite forcontrolled experimentation. The most valuable lesson we took was to confront failure andanalyse it — often a painful thing to do — to gather evidence of customer behaviour and thefactors influencing the decision to buy.

创业融资来自志趣相投的个人投资者，他们与我们一样都对受控的实验感兴趣。我们获得的最有价值的教训是直面失败，分析失败(往往是很痛苦的事情)，收集有关客户行为的证据，掌握影响购买决定的因素。

Our growing database gave us a unique insight into theatregoing in the UK — a valuableasset.

我们不断壮大的数据库也让我们对英国人上剧院看戏的行为有了独特的洞察，这是一笔宝贵的资产。

We decided to expand our own creative assets by forming a number of subsidiarycompanies. This allowed us to retain key creative people who wanted a separate brand,independent recognition for their work, and who were happier and more productive workingat arm’s length.

我们决定组建一些子公司来扩大我们的创作资产。这让我们能够留住关键的创作人员，他们希望拥有单独的品牌、对他们作品的独立认可，而且在一定距离下工作更快乐、更高产。

Sonia Friedman Productions, our first partnership, resulted in a string of hits. As parentcompany, Ambassador Theatre Group provided an environment for this producer to flourish.We used a similar model with First Family Entertainment, a pantomime production company,and with Jamie Lloyd Productions to inject creative dynamism into Trafalgar Transformed.

Sonia Friedman Productions是我们的第一个合作伙伴关系，它产生了一系列重磅作品。作为母公司，大使剧院集团(Ambassador Theatre Group)为这家制作公司提供了蓬勃发展的环境。我们采用了类似的模式与第一家庭娱乐(First Family Entertainment，一家哑剧制作公司)和Jamie Lloyd Productions的合作，为Trafalgar Transformed注入创意活力。

We have been able to grow the business exponentially, largely thanks to investment fromprivate equity. There have always been preconceptions surrounding theatre as a stable growthopportunity but fortunately we found partners with the imagination to make that conceptualleap.

我们的业务之所以能够实现指数级增长，在很大程度上归因于私人股本的投资。人们始终先入为主地认为，剧院是稳定的增长机遇，但幸运的是，我们找到了合适的合作伙伴，他们拥有让这种概念实现飞跃的想象力。

Risk is now spread: we own or operate more than 40 theatres worldwide, have a number ofticketing brands and a creative resource that is the sum of our production division and itspartner companies.

现在风险已经分散：我们在世界各地拥有或运营逾40家剧院，有许多票务品牌，还有创作资源，它涵盖我们的制作部门和伙伴公司。

International expansion will bring challenge — another essential component of creativity —as exposure to other markets and new partners such as recently acquired BB Group (aEuropean producer/promoter) bring new ideas and ways of working into the business, andhuge opportunities.

国际扩张将带来挑战(这是创造力的另一个关键因素)和巨大机遇，因为进入其他市场和新的合作伙伴(比如最近收购的一家欧洲制作/推广公司BB Group)带来了新的创意和业务处理方式。