Fandom Unpacked

Fueling Resilience: As Arts Funding Tightens, Building Connection & Community with Tessitura

• Situation • Season 1 • Episode 11

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Arts and Culture organizations are navigating unprecedented challenges with remarkable resilience. This powerful conversation with Andrew Recinos, President and CEO of Tessitura, reveals how arts leaders are responding to uncertainty with both anxiety and determination.

"I'm seeing a lot of anxiety," Recinos acknowledges, "but right alongside it, I'm seeing grit and tenacity." Rather than freezing or fleeing when faced with funding cuts and political shifts, arts organizations are fighting—not aggressively, but by recommitting to their founding principles and serving communities that need artistic experiences more than ever.

The conversation explores technology's evolving role in arts management, particularly how it should enhance rather than replace meaningful human connections. While AI offers powerful revenue optimization tools, Recinos cautions against treating audiences "like ATMs," advocating instead for community-centered approaches that build lasting relationships.

Beyond strategic considerations, Recinos emphasizes leadership practices crucial for these challenging times: acknowledging anxiety without succumbing to it, providing consistent direction, and prioritizing self-care to prevent burnout. The most resilient arts organizations share three characteristics: they know their mission deeply, provide steady leadership, and focus primarily on serving their communities.

Whether you're leading an arts organization through turbulent times or simply passionate about cultural sustainability, this episode offers invaluable insights into maintaining artistic integrity while building organizational resilience. Take a listen—and maybe a forest bath afterward.

Recorded Tuesday, May 20th, 2025
Hosts: Meghan Goria, Account Group Director for Arts & Culture, Situation & Damian Bazadona, CEO & Founder, Situation
Guest: Andrew Recinos, President and CEO, Tessitura
Producer: Peter Yagecic, Innovation Advisor, Situation

Peter Yagecic:

You're listening to Fandom Unpacked the podcast, an audio version of our regular live stream series where we unpack modern fandom with some of the brightest minds in sports and entertainment. I'm producer Peter Yagecic, and joining me for today's Q&A is Situation CEO and founder, damian Bazadana and account group director for arts and culture, Meghan Goria. Founder, Damian Bazadana and account group director for arts and culture, Meghan Goria. Our guest today is Andrew Recinos, president and CEO of Tessitura, the software platform that powers ticketing, fundraising and more for arts and culture institutions around the globe. Here's Damian to get us started.

Damian Bazadona:

Yeah, no, thank you, peter. Andrew, thanks for doing this. I know you got a lot going on. So, as Peter mentioned, you guys you are like the leading ticketing and fundraising platform for arts organizations across the globe, and I know I see you on LinkedIn. I see your feed of spending a lot of time with arts leaders, both here domestically, but also overseas, and their job at Arts Leadership is about creating environments of resilience. If I were to summarize, I think, one of the major components of leading these organizations what are you seeing and hearing about from leaders in the arts and culture space thus far in 2025 under this new administration, which is creating a whole bunch of new complexities for them?

Andrew Recinos:

Yeah, I mean.

Andrew Recinos:

Thank you, Damian. I think that I'm seeing a lot. I'm sensing and I'm feeling, and I'm seeing a lot of anxiety and I don't think that'll come as a surprise and I'm also seeing kind of right alongside it, I'm seeing grit, tenacity. I don't think I have to go through sort of the litany of why there's anxiety, right, there's societal anxiety, there's financial anxiety, as I'm spending some time overseas. You know this is not contained just to the United States, right, Like our. You know, the changes that we've seen in this administration is impacting our relationships with our organizations overseas as well. Tessitura serves 10 countries, so, and I've been to most of them this year or at least in the last six or seven months, so I've been to most of them this year or at least in the last six or seven months. But at the same time, I'm seeing a lot of grit. If you think about the classic fight, flight, freeze reflex that we have to new situations or to potentially anxiety-causing situations, I'm not seeing freezing, I'm not seeing folks or organizations that are just sort of stultified and I'm not seeing fleeing, Seeing, in a way, I'm seeing fighting. You know, maybe not overt fighting, but I'm seeing hunkering down and figuring out how to continue to go forward in the best possible way.

Andrew Recinos:

I think that for arts organizations and for arts leaders, if they've been around for a while, this is not their first rodeo when it comes to a big sort of uncertain external force that is impacting their business.

Andrew Recinos:

This is a group of leaders who are still, you know, still feeling the after effects of the COVID pandemic, which was, you know, five years ago now. This is a group of arts leaders that survived the financial crisis of the 2000s, you know, all the way back to the dot-com bubble, all the way back to even to 9-11. So when you think about the word unprecedented one of my least favorite words when you think about the word unprecedented, there's a lot about this time that's unprecedented, one of my least favorite words. When you think about the word unprecedented, there's a lot about this time that's unprecedented. But at the same time, unprecedented has kind of become the norm. It makes you start to wonder what precedented even was, and I think that the leaders who are thriving right now are those that have sort of embraced that this kind of uncertainty, this kind of volatility is just part of the gig now.

Damian Bazadona:

Yeah, yeah, it feels listen a fair number of leaders that I've talked to it's a little bit like rolling up the sleeves and let's get to work. And have you seen new strategies that leadership might be turning to and navigating? Again, a lot of it's about resilience. I mean, yeah, and to be in listen, to be in the arts business, you need to have resilience, no matter who's in office. This is just part of the game. It's just a different, very different dynamic now with probably new levels of stress. But what are the new strategies you're seeing in terms of how leadership is navigating?

Andrew Recinos:

You know, for those organizations that are being really directly impacted by these changes right now, where they're getting their funding pulled at the last minute, that kind of thing, certainly seeing strategies around, you know, crowdsourcing to find other funding sources, that kind of thing. If you had a good playbook coming into this, it's leaning into the playbook you've already got and to me that is things like your mission and your values, right, leaning into that. I think that if there's one thing that this period in time is forcing a lot of us to do as institutions and as humans is to really stop and think about what we stand for in a way that maybe had become not something we thought about a lot. I see organizations kind of sort of like renewing their vows, right, with their mission and with their values, like what do we really stand for? I think about Tessitura organization, baltimore Center Stage, for instance, when the National Endowment for the Arts said that they wouldn't fund organizations that have DEI programs, you know that organization just said we won't be accepting federal funding because if we don't do DEI programs, if we don't do programs around equity and inclusion, then who are we anymore? I think was the quote right Adam Frank, the managing director. Their vision is to create theater for everybody and they didn't see how that matched with what they were being asked to do in order to get funding. So that to me is like the number one thing that I see leaders doing right now is really rekindling and recommitting to their founding principles whether it's a mission or a vision or values A couple other things that are again kind of the playbook providing steady leadership, consistent leadership.

Andrew Recinos:

You know, I know this in our team and I know in many of their teams. There are your teams are anxious, right, so many folks working in the arts are walking around with sort of this, you know, perpetual pit in their stomach about. You know, whatever today's news is bringing, that in so many ways is counter to what arts organizations are trying to do, so many ways is counter to what arts organizations are trying to do, and that takes a toll, right, it takes I call it the anxiety tax like on top of your day-to-day. You know you can't help this stuff kind of coming in through your airwaves. So I think that consistency of leadership, not happy talk, not, you know, and I see leaders they're not saying everything's great, ignore it, but it's saying you may not be feeling great right now.

Andrew Recinos:

This is a difficult time.

Andrew Recinos:

What we're doing is really important and we need to keep doing it, which brings me to, kind of, the next thing that I think about, which is, yes, it's anxious for us who work in the arts and it's anxious for the communities that we serve. Right, and arts is here to provide comfort, to provide entertainment, to provide joy, to provide a sense of community and convening, and these are things that your communities really need. Not everybody in a community feels this way, but there are plenty of populations that need this right now. Way, but there are plenty of populations that need this right now. So, remembering to continue to focus as much of your energy on your community, on your customers and I honestly think, and not just think I see that when organizations really live their mission right they can quote it chapter and verse and they can live it in their values and when they have steady, consistent leadership and when they put the bulk of their effort on their customers and their community, on their fans, to use the name of this podcast that financial sustainability follows.

Damian Bazadona:

Yeah, no, I agree, I think you hit. The word I was going to go to is fans, given this whole podcast has been centered on essentially talking and getting around the idea of fandom across. Different from sports to race car drag, but we've interviewed such amazing people and um, and the arts is no different. And I think the point of anxiety around the community, which is I want to get megan in, I know megan's got a bunch of questions is you know the idea of community and anxiety and what it's sitting with them I'd love to talk a little bit more about in the. Let's talk a little bit more about the community, because I think that is a big part of this. And Megan, who oversees our arts and culture business. What do you think, megan?

Meghan Goria:

Well, I think everyone who works at Situation knows that I've been a tessitura girly since the beginning of my career in the arts and I think one of the key things about the Tessitura community is that you really genuinely are a community, you are a nonprofit, you are community owned, and so I'm just kind of curious. As you mentioned, we had to kind of just go through this about five years ago with COVID and there really had to be pretty significant technological upgrades very quickly to adapt to this new world. And so I'm just kind of curious, from the Tessitura side of things, how do you see the role of technology and customer management in being able to kind of support the arts community as we go through these times of anxiety and times of change?

Andrew Recinos:

Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think it's the same and it's also quite different. Right, with COVID, the way that people went about their daily lives dramatically changed, and so you know, during those times, tessitura put out three or four dozen features that were just all about that, whether it was integrating with streaming platforms or coming up with ways for people to, you know, scan a barcode from a distance. Because of social distancing. What we're doing now, we have not changed our playbook, right, we have. Certainly, from a company sort of governance and risk perspective, we added a whole lot of things to our risk register as a result of these changes, as you would, probably every arts organization on this call has as well. But from a product development perspective, we really do come back to the foundations of helping our organizations build that community, create those fans and center their customers. So that means to us technology should not be replacing meaningful human interaction. It should be enabling it.

Andrew Recinos:

So when there are interactions and we think of what we do as a business and, frankly, the folks that we serve, we're all in the business of connecting people with culture. Situation and the arts and culture business is about connecting people with culture and we think about those connections a lot. And what are the connections that are frustrating or mundane and trying to eliminate them? Right, having to call the box office to do something you wish you could do online, that's what we're here to eliminate. What are the connections that are meaningful? And wanting to call the box office? Because you're trying to decide between you know two different shows, the Sondheim or the Lloyd Webber, and you want to talk to somebody about sort of the, the, the ups and downs, the benefits of each.

Andrew Recinos:

I was just talking with uh, the director of marketing at the signature theater in in, uh, outside of DC. You guys probably know Jen Bazell. Yeah, um, outside of DC. You guys probably know Jen Bizzell and she was. You know, they just launched this great new website and it ties into Tessitura, of course, and she was talking about how there's all the self-service that they can do. But it's not to eliminate connection, it's to allow room for much better connection. She oversees the box office as well. She was down there the other day and was having it was hearing this long conversation one of their box office staff was having with a patron about sort of you know what's your favorite Sondheim musical and why, and they know from those connections that that improves their fandom, that improves the donations that come in. And so that's really what sort of centers our roadmap from a technology perspective is how do we take away those mundane interactions so that we can lift up those meaningful ones?

Meghan Goria:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one thing that we learned during the pandemic is that nothing can replace that genuine human interaction, and that's such a cornerstone to why the arts are so uplifting to all of us, to why the arts are so uplifting to all of us. But at the same time, you know, it's a business. We need to make sure that we are as efficient as possible and trying to, you know, as you say, get through the mundane tasks that we need in order to run our business, but not to ever replace that human connection and that community.

Meghan Goria:

I'm curious, it kind of leads us into the scary question of AI and the arts, because, you know, certainly as a technology company, it's the first thing that anybody wants to talk about when we're talking about tech is what is the role of AI, what is the future of AI? But for the arts, you know, in some cases it's a bit of an existential threat in terms of, you know, artistry and that true kind of human creation. And so I'm curious, just as a company that kind of straddles both of those sectors, how are you thinking about AI? What are you planning, how are you having conversations with arts organizations about what the future of AI could look like?

Andrew Recinos:

Yeah, I mean, it is complicated, it's hugely complicated. It's one of those general purpose technologies that's here and it's not going away general purpose technologies that's here and it's not going away. And at the same time yeah, to your point we stand with sort of a foot in two different worlds One foot is in the tech world and one foot is in the arts and culture world. And from a tech perspective, from a technology perspective, our team is all in on AI, right, and how we code is now informed by AI, and how we run our business, and we are also very respectful to the fact that AI, as you said, is an existential threat to you know, protecting the livelihoods of artists and other creators. So the way that we think about it is, you know, we're not looking at AI as an artistic replacement, right, that's not even what we do. What we do is, you know, is help people connect with culture, and so we look at it much more from a how can we improve your business perspective.

Andrew Recinos:

We look at it from how we can leverage it for fraud prevention, huge problem, especially in the US. We've got all kinds of AI that is helping dramatically bring down fraud and chargebacks right now. That's a huge win for AI, something that a human or 10,000 humans, couldn't have done. We look at it in our security stack as well. From an end-user perspective. Our members are already seeing AI in our product when it comes to forecasting our data analytics huge upgrade coming starting this year where analytics will have all manner of AI driven forecasting, ai driven natural language processing that that spits out a visual or a visualization. So hopefully that sort of sort of is the tightrope that we walk and that we walk it successfully. I don't think I haven't talked to any arts leader that suggests that we should, you know, bury our head in the sand about AI or not use it. In fact, most of the arts leaders that I talk to are very curious about how we are approaching it from a business perspective.

Peter Yagecic:

Peter, I think we have a couple questions coming in from our fantastic audience is the ability to come together and help each other out. How are you seeing that in the grit you talked about? What would you say to organizations that might be reluctant to kind of reach out and ask for help? Any advice?

Andrew Recinos:

Yeah, I mean, I think, certainly within our community, and thank you for all the nice things you've said about the community. It is foundational to who we are. Right, it's probably the first thing people know about Tessitura, and rightfully so's probably the first thing people know about Tessitura, and rightfully so. But the first thing to know about it is that it is we love our conferences, right, we have three a year. This one's in Anaheim, we just finished in London and in the fall we're going to be in Melbourne, australia. The vast majority of our community interaction doesn't happen there, right, it happens on our forums. It happens in our individual user community groups. We've got over 100 of them around the world that either get together regionally, virtually or in person, or they get together based on a topic, and people are leaning into those groups right now, and so I would encourage you won't find a friendlier group of people if you've never waded into that water, right? Megan's nodding.

Andrew Recinos:

Megan's been a part of the community for a long time.

Andrew Recinos:

If you have a question posted on the forum, if there is a community group happening in your part neck of the world, and it probably is attended, or attended virtually, um, if there is a topical one, right, like, we have user group communities for finance, for box office, for development, for museums, for zoos, um, and we have affinity groups, right, we have people of color, we have neurodiversity, um, lean into those.

Andrew Recinos:

The most active community we have is a virtual community and everyone in the Tessitura community is invited is mental wellness and neurodiversity. They meet weekly and that has been, you know, such a salve, such a comfort for so many of our members around the world. And it's led, it's led by by nationally right, like we've got one of the leaders in Australia, we've got another one of the leaders is in the US. They do, you know, breathing exercises, they do meditation, they just do like let's hold space together because we're really stressed out and we're scared. So this is this is always curious to me, because none of this has to do with software and yet all of it has to do with lifting up arts and culture professionals and making sure that they can do that work to bring arts and culture to all of our communities.

Peter Yagecic:

Built for live entertainment that champions the power of unforgettable shared experiences around the world. We offer full marketing and creative services for experience-based brands in live entertainment attractions, theater, sports, arts and culture, and more. Check us out at SituationInteractivecom. Now back to our Q&A.

Damian Bazadona:

Let's talk, I wonder, about living the mission, because I this is thing that I'm sort of um very curious by in and I and this brings in sort of the ai topic. Overall, what we have seen on our side at our agency is the ability for ai across multiple live experience brands figuring out that AI appropriately can really maximize revenue per ticket. The amount people will pay for an experience worth experiencing. We're starting to see the ceiling is very high and so in a weird way it's kind of turned into a drug where it is the smarter that system gets, the higher the revenue per ticket can go and show.

Damian Bazadona:

You know, arts and cultural organizations and brands can maximize their revenue and AI is sort of showing at least at this point I'm going to probably make a generalization that is a lot easier to get another $10 or $20 out of a patron than it is to find a new patron, and so I just would love to get your take on this of just really where I see AI right now isn't necessarily being reflective of let's match this with the mission, given the power it's showing that it can raise ticket price. I'm just going really to the variable ticket pricing conversation here and I think it's a missed opportunity because I think, if we looked at it and going, what does success look like, aside from just revenue? It's what is the theater makeup look like? You can imagine a chart that says percentage of new folks, percentage from particular zip codes, percentage of name it you name it, you know I just I'm just curious what your take is on that and um, and whether or not you, I guess you agree with some of my theory.

Andrew Recinos:

Yeah, I think it's a really it's. It's a really provocative question. Um, and you say there's no ceiling, and maybe that's true, right, or the ceiling is pretty high and that AI is going to go out and find match those people who have the discretionary income to pay, who will buy those seats. And I think, from a short-term thinking perspective, that is kind of a drug right. And I don't want to discount the fact that there are so many cultural organizations out there who are staring down some pretty scary financial numbers, right, and this predates all of the sort of what's happened in 2025. You know, the longer story is post-COVID. There was a lot of government money. The government money has sort of finished up. Now Audiences are coming back. Some of them are at or above. I heard just heard that Broadway is kind of now above COVID and expenses went up a ton, right, so even if your audiences are back, chances are you're still having a financial struggle. So I want to say all of that, because the last thing I want to say is how could you be thinking about maximizing revenue using AI and getting the highest possible, you know, squeezing the highest possible dollar amount out of your patrons? And I will quote a friend of mine, alan Brown, who's a principal at Wolf Brown they're an arts research company when he says stop using your audiences like ATMs. I like that one really, really well. And plenty of them are using variable pricing as a technique, right as a tool in the toolkit, but that they actually have a much more holistic, much more customer-centered approach.

Andrew Recinos:

One of my favorite, favorite examples is Ballet, austin, austin, texas. They are a visionary organization. They rewrote their mission statement a few years ago. It used to be, as you would expect, about ballet and dance in the life of their community and they actually flipped it so that their mission is about serving their community. Go back to grammar. The subject of the mission of that sentence is community and the object is dance. Right, the community is the most important thing when it comes to their mission statement and, as a result of that, that centers them on everything that they do and that centers them on saying when you know you use this example they found that when people came to see the ballet, some incredibly high percentage never came back. It was one and done. Incredibly high percentage never came back. It was one and done.

Andrew Recinos:

Transactional mindset would be let's find another whole audience Relational mindset, customer mindset, community mindset said no, we want them to come back. What do we do to come back? So they didn't just change their marketing, they changed their whole organization. They changed how they. You know what happens to you when you walk in the front door. What happens to you when you get home. How do they get you back? And so, suddenly, because they changed the mission, it's around the community, they changed their strategy, it's around the customer. So they keep coming back. Two years ago they had the highest ticket sales and revenue of their 65-year history. Last year they beat that year right and they're finishing up their season now and it's been a hell of a season. So that is the long game to me. So when you're talking about the ATM thing, the how do we maximize every dollar, I'm down with that, I think, as long as it's part of a larger strategy which is about centering your customer center and your fan center and your community, which goes back, hopefully, to your mission.

Meghan Goria:

I love hearing that and thinking about an organizational strategy as a whole, as opposed to a marketing strategy, a fundraising strategy, a communication strategy, a front of house strategy. You know, really I think the organizations that we see as really forward-looking and the most successful are the ones who are thinking about the whole and thinking about the community and really centering that audience first and trying to break down some of those silos that inevitably build up over the years of the arts.

Andrew Recinos:

Yeah, and it's a drag because it takes longer. Right, it's not a drag Like it's virtuous work, but it takes a lot longer. And it really does take because it takes longer. Right, it's not a drag Like it's virtuous work, but it takes a lot longer and it really does take everybody. You know you can't just say marketing, this is your problem to solve, right, this is everybody's problem to figure out.

Damian Bazadona:

Yeah, peter, any more questions we do we do so?

Peter Yagecic:

coming back to the software for a second, this one says during COVID we saw some features developed to respond to urgent needs at the moment, like streaming of live events. Thinking about the current feature roadmap, is there anything on there that feels more important today than it did six or 12 months ago?

Andrew Recinos:

It's a good question, I would say no, actually. I think that again, covid just sort of did Fruitbasket upset with the way that people interacted with the world and so the technology had to change because of that. This is sort of a slower-moving anxiety, right, and in some organizations it's absolutely crashed ashore, but for most organizations organizations it's just kind of out there, you know, sort of on the horizon. So no, I think our continued focus on having the best possible friction-free customer experience and experience for the business users who are using our software is where we're at.

Peter Yagecic:

Great. You mentioned at the top that Tessitura is in 10 countries, so this one kind of relates to that. Have you heard from some of your non-US members that audience reluctance to vacation in the US right now may actually help ticket sales in their local home organizations?

Andrew Recinos:

I have not heard that. It's interesting. I mean, obviously I've heard the flip side, which is, you know, we have many organizations that rely on international tourism and they're already planning to take a real hit because so many folks don't want to visit or feel scared to visit, frankly, that they're going to get caught up in visas and all of that. But it's interestingly, I have seen that kind of thing happen before during the financial crisis in 2008, 2009. Really really hard time for most arts organizations. But the attractions right, the museums and the zoos they actually tended to have pretty good ticket sales because those folks who normally during the summer would take European cruises or spend their money outside were staycationing instead because they just didn't feel they had the discretionary income. So I remember some of our organizations had bumper years, actually in the middle of the financial crisis, for sort of for the opposite reason.

Meghan Goria:

We're already starting to see a little bit of that. I'll be interested to see how it progresses as we get into kind of peak tourist season here in New York. But we are starting to see a little bit of an increase also in domestic tourism, not just in staycations but in folks from the other places in the Northeast Corridor coming down to New York City or from elsewhere in the States. As you say, it may be making choices to have a slightly less expensive vacation and stick closer to home. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out over the next couple of months.

Peter Yagecic:

Yeah, I think we have time for one more audience question. Then I'll kick it to Damian to kind of bring us home. Andrew, you've shared some great personal anecdotes of things that you've seen and heard, kind of as the leader of your organization. This question asks as a personal supporter of the arts, what type of outreach have you seen lately that you thought was particularly effective? And I guess maybe that one's asking about like messaging or language that you've seen that has resonated with you?

Andrew Recinos:

Yeah, I'm just thinking that's a really good question. I think I am on the. As you would imagine, I'm on the mailing list of a lot of our organizations, so I get to see. I'm sure you guys are too right, like, yeah, I love seeing what's going on out there. I think of one which is actually in DC, right.

Andrew Recinos:

So we've talked a lot about the anxiety. I'm from the DC area originally and I have a lot of friends there, I have family there and we have many members there, so I know that that part of the world, right, the DMV, as they call it is at peak anxiety, right. Like it's just you can't get away from it and with the layoffs and the furloughs and the closing of departments or the threatened closing of departments, it's just a really rough time there right now. And we have a member in the city itself of DC called Hillwood Gardens and Museum and they're doing such a lovely job because they're not saying we know you're stressed out, why don't you come spend time in a garden, but they're creating programs that are clearly developed around mental wellness, right. So they're offering they have these.

Andrew Recinos:

It's this incredible estate right in the heart of the city and so they're like offering forest baths, for instance. Right, if you've ever heard of that Japanese term, come do some forest bathing at the hill wood. And so I think that they are saying it without saying it, which I think is maybe the best and most effective and most nuanced way. And I encourage cultural organizations to lean into the fact that there's just a lot of out there in the world, there's just a lot of you know. Out out there in the world there's just a lot of of uh, of anxieties, and and remember, there's nothing better than an arts you know, than an arts experience, to to just let you escape for a while, right, and just clear all that out of your system.

Damian Bazadona:

I. So I I'll take the last question and let me just sort of say, andrew, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time. I feel like you have such a unique perspective. We're obviously big fans of work. Tessitura, does you power the arts and culture community and thank God for Tessitura. Will you guys run your organization Truly? Thank you.

Damian Bazadona:

We end a little bit on a leadership question.

Damian Bazadona:

You know we talked anxiety, rising costs, rising costs is hard to be a leader in this business, in the arts and culture business, but again, it's been like this way for a while, but I would say it's on a new level. It feels that way to me a little bit as someone who spends a fair amount of time with folks but at the same time, I think, real conviction and belief of the impact the arts can have, which is just remarkable, and consumers are showing they're willing to pay for it, like there's a real love for it. But what's your advice to leadership? You know we've talked a little bit on this webinar already of sustaining resilience as we go forward, whether that's with your internal staff, with the artists that are doing the work, with the fans, the patrons of the arts. Like, what do you feel like? If you were to summarize you say just my advice to leadership going forward in this environment, based on everything you've seen and heard from folks on the ground, how would you summarize it as we wrap today?

Andrew Recinos:

Well, this is speaking directly to leaders. I think number one is self-care. To be honest, I have seen so much burnout from folks who literally just gave their all and at some point there was nothing left to give and so so really right, like, like I don't have time for self-care is not acceptable answer. I think that's number one. And then beyond that, from a strategic perspective, I'll go back to what I was saying. I just I see it again and again with the leaders and the companies and the organizations that are resilient. They know who they are right, the mission level. Ask them their mission and they can recite it chapter and verse. They are constant and consistent with their team and they put the vast majority of their effort into their fans, into the customers, and therefore their fans or their customers give back exponentially.

Damian Bazadona:

Well said, thank you.

Andrew Recinos:

Thank you.

Damian Bazadona:

Thanks for the opportunity.

Andrew Recinos:

This is fantastic. You guys are great.

Peter Yagecic:

Thank you, and everyone take a forest bath as well.

Andrew Recinos:

That's great man. It's the best. I'm here in Portland Oregon, where there's an embarrassment of riches when it comes to forest bathing.

Peter Yagecic:

That's going to do it for this episode of Fandom Unpacked the podcast. If you liked what you heard, please be sure to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Find out how to join us live for an upcoming recording at SituationLivecom slash fan. We'll see you next time, true believers.