Cocktails with KB | Tim Potocic

You are involved in so much, and wear so many hats. How do you juggle Sonic Unyon, Supercrawl, Mills Hardware, Because Beer Festival, being heavily involved in the Junos? And with such positivity?
Well, it’s all inter-related. It’s all things that I’ve found that I have loved. Over all of the years of being in business, I have discovered that business is always evolving, always changing. Myself and my business partner, Mark Milne, have been part of that evolution together. We’ve always had a label together; we own property. We bought our first property early on, so it has always naturally tied in together. We sat back and thought, “We need space, and we don’t want to rent anymore.” So, we bought a building and then got the bug of doing that and it just naturally evolved, and it was happening around us as well. So many people were looking for spaces so we thought we could buy buildings, renovate them and create culture spaces. It didn’t seem like a difficult thing to do, so we did it over time. We don’t jump into things. Wearing a lot of hats has always been the way it has been [for us]. The music business is an unforgiving business, and a challenging business. We’ve always looked at the perspective of “we really should be diversified anyway”, we should have all these things. There is argument to both. If you put all your eggs in one basket, you might do that one thing incredibly well and become fantastically rich. Or, you diversify your assets just in case a rainy day happens with respect to what you’re doing. It’s always been natural. Organizing that on a daily basis and a yearly basis is really the most challenging part of my jobs, without it being imminent or having the pressure on to get things done. I take a lot of notes, I manage a lot of spreadsheets and documents to try to organize my life. There are certain elements that are easy to manage and run themselves, and we know there are stress times. We know, when we’re a month out from any given festivals that we’re working on, that’s crunch time. So, you have to plan all the other work you need to do outside of that month or organize it as much as you can. Or, there’s a record coming out, you prioritize the month before to make sure everything is in place. There are lots of schedules in our world. The great thing about that is that we can schedule the entire year. Everything is on a 1 year or 2 year basis. With tenants in a building, they are on leases, 3-5 years at a time. There are constant little bits of maintenance, but it’s not an overwhelming amount. When it gets close to the time when leases are coming up, you re-negotiate the leases, or tenants leave, you get new tenants, so there is a little bit of work around that and that’s easy to manage in the grand scheme of things. With music, it’s a year before a band goes into the studio. And you know, a year from then, that’s about when the record comes out. You put a band in the studio, get everything together, line everything up, get the team together, and set a release date. So, there is a lot of long-term planning. Festivals work the same way. In October of last year, I knew exactly when all of our festivals were going to be this year and I know pretty much when they are going to be next year and the year after as well. It’s pretty easy to manage when you can look at it from a big global perspective.