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Masters of Scale

Rapid Response: Movie-theater drama has come to every business, w/Shelli Taylor, CEO, Alamo Drafthouse

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Business, Jeff Berman, Startups, Reid Hoffman, Management, Diversity & Inclusion, Mindset, Bob Safian, Entrepreneurship

4.6 β€’ 4.4K Ratings

πŸ—“οΈ 15 October 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As big movie chains shut down, Shelli Taylor's determined to keep her theaters open. With revenue at a trickle, the CEO of Alamo Drafthouse is negotiating daily with landlords and banks, and even tried her own video-on-demand service. Her balancing act – a conviction that long-term demand will be strong, while near-term economics are dismal – is familiar among entrepreneurial leaders. By defiantly keeping the movie magic alive, she's leaning into hope, the human need for community, and a creative new model. Yet there's no guarantee how this story will end.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

The priority was immediate or theaters had shut down.

0:04.0

How do you take care of your people?

0:05.6

How do you conserve cash?

0:07.6

And what do you do in that downtime?

0:10.2

How do we survive?

0:11.6

We're six months in now without any meaningful revenue.

0:16.1

That's an equation no one's ever had to deal with.

0:18.9

No revenue is a weird place to be.

0:22.8

The real cost is how do you support your people?

0:25.5

And your landlords and your vendors

0:27.3

and everyone, right?

0:28.4

That's hoping to get paid and that you had paid reliability

0:31.9

and had a great partner too.

0:33.6

And that cost is financially and emotionally difficult.

0:36.7

And that's the cost I worry the most about.

0:40.8

Well, there's the magic of the theater,

0:43.0

more social beings, and we need the magic of community.

0:46.2

And community comes in different forms.

0:48.6

And the community that we create is the curated films

0:52.1

that bring people together for a common purpose

0:54.7

to come in and have a great movie experience.

0:58.5

Big theater, big sound, great story.

...

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