Welcome to the Eventful Entrepreneur Podcast. This is the first in a new series where we will be sitting down and covering Dodge's point of view from the world of business, events and anything else we find interesting.

This week we're diving into the world of festival headliners. I'm producer Dan

and I'm here with the eventful entrepreneur himself, Mr. Dodge Woodall. Hello Dodge.

Hello, mate. How you doing? Very well. Thank you. Looking forward to having a chat on a

different subject with you today. Yeah, mate. Let's see what happens. Let's see what comes out.

So we've spoken before about how you want to avoid getting into the world of relying on acts to sell tickets.

But can you see why and how other event promoters get caught up in that aspect?

Yeah, I can.

I can see how promoters these days are wanting to go and book X.

And I think it's a really dangerous game.

And it's been a dangerous game for many years, Dan.

We held off for about 10 years at the Bournemouth Festival of booking any big acts.

And I never wanted to go down that route.

I wanted people to come to the festival knowing they're going to have a great experience, number one. And then as the years go on, it became a decision. It's like, well, why don't we actually

look at an act now? We got to year 10. We've built up the core audience. We've built so people

know what they're coming to. People know the excitement and the buzz and the vibe that

they're getting. Now once we sell out, now we're put an act on as a cherry on the top, as a

thank you. And it's a bit of a well factor really. Like if you've already bought a ticket and you're

already going to the festival and you know the promoter drops a headliner in of, I don't know, chasing status or Professor Green or example or Elear, whoever it may be, the customer of the fan is like, wow, thank you very much.

And that creates a real solid core audience. And when you're building a brand or you're building a business,

you have to have a core audience, you know, especially in the events world, festival world. You get

that core audience and you can build from there. The danger that I've seen promoters, younger

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