You’re a former wrestler while your two co-promoters are still active wrestlers. What are the main advantages and disadvantages that brings to your role as promoters?
The benefit I guess is mostly experience in working for good and bad promoters. So having some experience of when we felt valued as a talent and when we haven’t necessarily felt valued as a talent and what we thought worked on shows before we started running our own shows. Being involved in it for so long, we can see what will work in front of the type of audiences we were trying to cater to.
The biggest drawback is that we’re acutely aware that we never want to push ourselves too strongly because we’re aware of how that can come across. There’s a lot of having to check your own ego in terms of thinking about “what’s the biggest thing for the story” and trying to book yourself as a talent. That’s where I think it works by having the three of us because we can talk objectively about each other. I think if it was one of us it would make it very difficult. A lot of times now it’s almost a case where we are each almost underselling ourselves and depushing ourselves because we don’t want to seem like that and the other guys are trying to come up with ways to do it. For example, the way I left [losing a career match to Flash Morgan Webster], I didn’t want it to be as big as it became, but they both felt that was the way to do it.
Was there ever a temptation to push yourselves not out of ego, but because you knew you could rely on yourselves?
Absolutely, plus the fact that we are relatively cheap compared to the rest of the people when we first started because we weren’t taking a wage out of it! So it was as much a financial decision as anything else, particularly for the first couple of shows because we didn’t know if it was going to be a financially viable proposition. You’re certainly right in that we know what we want to do in terms of the stories that we wanted to tell, because we talked about them a hell of a lot more than we would do with the talent, but again we were quite fortunate that a lot of the people that we ended up using we knew. I’m pretty sure that everybody we used on that first show, we had a relationship with: we didn’t book anybody that we didn’t know fairly well, so we were relatively confident.
How does becoming a promoter affect how you interact with wrestlers?
It has been difficult. I’ve definitely seen a shift from what was being one of the boys. Now that I’ve definitely stopped wrestling, I hardly spend any time in the actual locker room. Especially on show days I’m very detached from the guys — it’s not on purpose, I’m just very busy. I’m thinking about the big picture now.
It used to be when you’re a wrestler, you’re thinking about your 20 minutes that you need to go out there for and you need to spend a lot of time prepping and making sure that 20 minutes is as good as it can be. I’m now thinking that’s a cog in a bigger machine and I’m thinking not just about that match, but the match before, the match after, the production particularly now we’re live on Powerbomb.tv. It’s been a complete shift in terms of where my relationship is with the talent and how I am at shows now I’m not wrestling. I don’t have the time to go down to that granular level of detail for one particular match: I’m sort of 100 feet above the whole thing. We trust everyone to do their jobs and I’m just there to make sure everyone knows their positions and where they need to be for it.
Does having your co-promoters still wrestle help build a bridge between the roster and you as a purely management figure?
One thing that’s started to happen is that Rob for example hasn’t actually wrestled on the last couple of shows and that’s partly on purpose because I recognise that a lot of people see me as “the guy” because I don’t do the wrestling on the show and I’m the one that’s easiest to get hold of, but we’re trying to delegate some of those management responsibilities as well. Having Nick and Rob be in the locker room helps the locker room because then if they’ve got any questions specifically about the match then they can be there for that, but I’m still doing the production side.
The three of us are aware that at the moment we’ve got a fairly bloated roster and they don’t have to work every show now because the product is and always has been bigger than the three of us. I’m almost seeing those guys now start to transition into the stuff that I’ve been doing for a while and I think it’s because of how big this has now expanded to. It’s almost too much for one individual to run a show so everyone’s getting more delegated duties.
Do you feel being a former or current wrestler give you more credibility in telling or asking wrestlers to do something in a particular way?
Possibly. It’s a difficult one for me to answer because I don’t know how [the wrestlers] treat other promoters: the one thing I’ve noticed since I’ve gone into purely just being a promoter is I don’t spend a lot of time seeing other shows because we focus so much on our own. I don’t spend that much time with other promoters.
I’d like to think that whenever I give people suggestions or feedback or what I want from a match, I’d always give it at the high level. I always leave the actual nuts and bolts of the work to the guys themselves. We book them and they’re employed by us that night because we recognise how good they are. There’s no point getting somebody and trying to get them to do something that isn’t their sweet spot and what they know is their act. At the same time we will say very high level story arc stuff: “We were thinking about this kind of finish” for example. We won’t necessarily tell them “it has to be this finish” or “we need to see this particular thing from the match” but give them a flavour of what we are looking for
I’ve been involved in it, I’ve been a wrestler, but I’ve never been a big enough name that I think I have enough clout that I’d sit down and try to get anyone thinking my opinion is greater than anyone else’s, because it’s not. The one thing that we’ve got is a lot of goodwill in terms of what people have seen when we invest in a storyline because we are a really storyline-driven company in terms of if we can map out not just what we are doing in this match but what we are doing in the whole story and the guys can understand what we can do, then they can see that next level, big picture stuff.
So I’ve never really had much conflict in terms of things along those lines. There’ll often be debates: Morgan Webster is the worst for it, he gives me a harder time than anyone else, but in a positive way. He’s challenging the way we do things for what he knows is the greater good for the outcomes that we need. We don’t try to run this as a dictatorship: if there’s a good idea that’s better than what we’ve got, we tend to go with what we collectively think is the best idea or that best approach. Just because it’s not something that we’ve thought of doesn’t necessarily mean it’s something we’re not going to listen to.
What’s surprised you most about running shows compared to how you experienced things as just a wrestler?
Never underestimate the ability of people to show up late! The timekeeping of some people can be very frustrating… Recognising that everybody’s different in terms of that. Venues: every venue’s different. Even venues that are still run by the same leisure centre group can run very differently, so never make any assumptions. Fail to plan, plain to fail.
We’ve got it down to, maybe not a fine art, but the past couple of years the shows have run fairly OK in turns of the checklist we’ve got of stuff that we always go through now. I’m aware that I’ve tried to do less on show days and take on more of what we call a site manager role. I’m trying not to get myself down into detail of certain things because I know that the people there can do that stuff. I need to make myself available to everyone but without actually doing anything which is going to take up more than five minutes of my time. Time management and planning is probably the hardest thing and it’s something that I’m still not great at but I think we’re getting better at each time.
Looking back to when you were wrestlers moaning about promoters and what you’d do differently, is there anything where you said “I’d do it this way” or “I wouldn’t do this” but in reality that hasn’t been the case?
We did moan about a lot of promoters — that’s probably why Chaos started! We never wanted to be a “ring in a hall show” in terms of just having matches for the sake of it. We did start doing that if you look back to our first year to eighteen months and I felt [at the time] that we need to do that to get a solid footing, but that isn’t what we wanted to become because we always wanted to be storyline driven.
For example the most work I ever did was for CSF and our biggest frustration working there was they didn’t do the storylines and he didn’t give people a reason to do that. The shows themselves would be absolutely fine, you’d go in and have your match and you’d leave, but there wasn’t a reason for people to pay money to come back or know what was going to happen next. That’s the thing we always wanted: a reason for people to come back.
It’s going to sound very egotistical because I’m not sure there is [anything else]. I don’t feel like there’s anything we’ve gone back on in terms of saying what we didn’t like a promoter doing and now we’ve done it.
If you were to go back to wrestling now, what things would you differently now you’ve had the promoter’s perspective?
My body’s a wreck because the first half of my career I just took silly bumps. I fully believe now in “if it’s loud, it’s good” and you don’t have to do all the moves and try to kill yourself if you are still able to entertain that audience to the peak of its [potential interest]. Every match on our show is different for a reason: we don’t want to have cookie cutter matches. We’re not an indie fed, we’re not what I consider a family-friendly fed: we’re a complete circus in that every match is different and it’s all there to serve a different purpose. Towards the end of my career I was doing comedy matches up in Coventry for Triple X and that was the most over I’d ever been. If I’d known that when I started, I’d probably have had a longer, more successful career.
From my perspective now, a promoter wants somebody who’s over, not somebody who can do loads of flips or can wrestle for 30 minutes straight to crickets. We need or want guys to get a reaction from people because our primary goal is always getting that audience to enjoy that show to the point they want to come back and watch it again. I think it’s very difficult to do that if you don’t have variety and if you don’t have workers out there that are able to gather the reaction that we need.
I would think if I was to try to start now it would be a hell of a lot harder because even though there’s a lot more “ins”, there’s a lot more competition out there, a hell of a lot more schools, a hell of a lot more promotions, a hell of a lot more workers out there. I would have probably have tried twice, three times as hard to break into the business because I was lucky that I found a school that was local that was linked with CSF and I could get in that way. That was more luck than anything. Nowadays if I was to start with someone like Dragon Pro, I know I’d be competing against 50, 60 other guys who work a hell of a lot harder than I ever worked. It would be a hell of a lot harder to start, but I like to think knowing what I know now I’d be able to make it stick better.
Having been on both sides of the fence, what advice would you have for wrestlers on dealing with promoters?
We are all egotistical maniacs, so if you stroke our egos, that’s normally the best way! It’s things like “help promote the product”, use your social media to help get our names out there. We’ve given work to people that have done that off their own back just because we recognise they’re trying to help us. I’d say that’s a key thing. Obviously being really good at wrestling helps!
What I need as a promoter is that the most versatile workers know the matches to put on. We can have somebody on our show that would wrestle a completely different match for an All Star show to a completely different match to a Progress show to a completely different match on our show. We need people that can be versatile for what we need from our product and be on board with what we’re trying to do with our product.
Is there anything you did as a wrestler that you now look at differently with your promoter’s hat on?
I used to love trying to do those ECW starts: loads of quick pinfalls and things like that. We’d do five minutes of a horrific Rob Van Dam-Jerry Lynn tribute act, we’d do all that, quick pins, stand up, do an ECW standoff… to crickets because it was a family crowd and they didn’t want to see that. They wanted to be given a reason to cheer and boo. I completely misread the audience that night because I was too much of a mark for myself in terms of trying to do stuff that I thought would be cool — not necessarily what would work with the audience that were there that night.
