Festival Operations

I'm Operations Manager for London Ribfest, which runs roughly 200,000 people through Victoria Park, and for the London Children's Festival and the London Food Festival, through our family company, Family Shows Canada. My dad, Doug Hillier, is President.

Beyond those three I work festivals right across Southwestern Ontario as a jack-of-all-trades, and I mean that literally: I do whatever the event needs doing. I've run the bars and the booths, done the setup, hauled the trailers, operated the equipment, placed the vendors, handled crowd control, and fixed the machinery when it died halfway through a shift. On a festival site the job is never one job. It's whatever is failing at that moment, and being able to take any of it is the whole skill.

Festivals are the most demanding operational environment I've worked in, because the date doesn't move and there is no second attempt. Vendors, power distribution, permits, site layout, staffing, cash handling, and weather all have to resolve into one working system on a specific weekend, in public, and you plan on the assumption that something will fail on the Saturday afternoon, because something usually does. Most of how I think about redundancy and failure states in software came from there rather than from software.

What I actually do on site

Where it led

Watching sponsorship up close is what produced Brand Activation. Conventional festival sponsorship sells a logo on a banner, and a banner is a limited asset, because few people interact with one and it's hard to measure whether it did anything. If you build the infrastructure attendees actually use and attach the brand to that, the sponsorship becomes an experience somebody has rather than a surface they walk past.