Run It Like a Business

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Featured on Publishers Weekly 2024 Announcement Issue

TEDx speaker Aubrey Bergauer—“the Steve Jobs of classical music”—reveals how to run a successful arts business in the post-pandemic era, adapting for-profit methods for not-for-profit goals.

In the US alone, the arts are a $763 billion sector whose 100,000+ organizations serve almost every community in the nation. There’s no reason arts organizations should struggle to make ends meet. And now, with arts-tested strategies from Aubrey Bergauer, they won’t. This foolproof guide shows how to reach new levels of engagement—while always putting art first.

Running your arts organization like a business is your path forward to:

• Grow audiences and keep them coming back again
• Make our organizations more inclusive
• Get younger attendees in the seats and on the donor rolls
• Generate millions more dollars in revenue
• Continue to create the art we love—without the stress of figuring out how to afford it

Just because arts organizations are non-profits doesn’t mean they shouldn’t make money; it means the money they make goes back to fund the mission—whether that’s music, visual arts, theatre, dance, or one of many other mediums that enrich our lives.

The for-profit world knows how to achieve success across customer engagement, user experience, company culture, the subscription economy, technology and media, new revenue streams, and brand relevance. Run It Like a Business provides a powerful, proven framework to help all arts organizations revitalize their economic engines and ultimately serve the arts and its patrons.Aubrey Bergauer, hailed as “the Steve Jobs of classical music” (Observer) and “the Sheryl Sandberg of the symphony” (Los Angeles Review of Books), is known for her results-driven, customer-centric, data-obsessed pursuit of changing the narrative for the performing arts. A “dynamic administrator” with an “unquenchable drive for canny innovation” (San Francisco Chronicle), she’s held offstage roles managing millions of dollars in revenue at major institutions including the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, Bumbershoot Music & Arts Festival, and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As chief executive of the California Symphony, Bergauer propelled the organization to double the size of its audience and nearly quadruple the donor base. 

Bergauer helps organizations and individuals transform from scarcity to opportunity, make money, and grow their base of fans and supporters. Her ability to cast and communicate vision moves large teams forward and brings stakeholders together, earning “a reputation for coming up with great ideas and then realizing them” (San Francisco Classical Voice). With a track record for strategically increasing revenue and relevance, leveraging digital content and technology, and prioritizing diversity and inclusion on stage and off, Bergauer sees a better way forward for cultural institutions and knows how to achieve it.

A graduate of Rice University, her work and leadership have been covered in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Thrive Global, and Southwest Airlines magazines, and she is a frequent speaker spanning TEDx, Adobe’s Magento, universities, and industry conferences in the US and abroad.US

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