I’ve spent the last two years running support at AudienceView, a ticketing software company. Our customers sell tickets to theatres, festivals, arts venues and sports. By August, those customers had been closed for five months. Rolling Stone reported that Live Nation’s second-quarter revenue fell 98%, with 24 concerts in North America in the quarter against 7,213 a year earlier. That’s the biggest live-event company in the world. If it looked like that, a company that sells software to smaller venues had no hiding place.
I’ve written about reducing a support team by 60% and about keeping the rest of the team motivated. This is the next piece of that year: what it’s like to start planning your own next move while the industry you know has no end date.
Why can’t you wait for your industry to recover?
Because nobody could say when it would. In March, the optimistic version was a few weeks. By August, venues didn’t have reopening dates and the people forecasting for them were saying so. Planning around “when it comes back” had stopped being a plan and become a hope. A hope is fine to hold privately. You can’t pay a mortgage with it.
There’s also a harder truth for anyone leading support in a collapsed sector. The skills you’ve built are real, and they transfer, but the company you’ve built them in may not survive long enough for you to use them. That’s not a judgement on the company or on you. It’s arithmetic. A business with almost no bookings can only carry so many people for so long, and I’d already seen what that arithmetic looked like from the manager’s chair.
So I started looking, while still doing the job in front of me. I’d tell anyone in a similar position to do the same, and to do it earlier than feels necessary. It’s easier to search from a job than to explain a gap, and it’s far easier to be choosy before you’re desperate.
What do you actually have to offer another industry?
Start by writing it down without the industry words. When I stripped out “ticketing”, “venues” and “on-sale”, what was left was a short list. I’d built a support operation from a 20-day response time to a two-day target, with an Operating Level Agreement and a tiered structure behind it. I’d built a certification curriculum, which I describe in the AudienceView University case study. I’d absorbed support teams from acquisitions, as in the Vendini merger. And I’d run support through high-volume events, where a single on-sale can bring more contacts in an hour than a normal week.
None of that is about tickets. It’s about running a technical support operation for business customers through spikes, with structure, with training and with measurement. That’s portable. The industry vocabulary is the easy part to learn in a few weeks.
Be honest about what doesn’t transfer, too. I knew nothing about the products of most of the companies I looked at. Technical depth matters in support, and a director who can’t follow the product will lose credibility with the team in a week. That’s a gap you close by reading, asking and sitting with the people who do the work. You can’t fake it in an interview, and I didn’t try.
How do you pick a sector when everything is uncertain?
By looking for a sector whose demand has a shape you can plan around. My last industry had huge, unpredictable spikes tied to on-sale dates, and an enormous drop when the events stopped. That made me appreciate something I’d never given much weight: predictability. A business with a known calendar, clear peaks and customers who can’t stop needing you is a gift to anyone who has to staff a team.
I looked for companies that sold to other businesses on a subscription, where customers had a continuing need for support and weren’t dependent on one fragile calendar. I looked for teams that were growing, and for leadership that understood what a support operation costs and what it protects. And I looked for places where the work would be hard in an interesting way, because I’ve never done well in jobs I could do with my eyes closed.
One thing I’d paid attention to for years turned out to matter: seasonality that you can read in advance. I wrote about it in Erlang C scheduling long before this, and the principle holds. If you know when the peaks come, you can staff for them. If you don’t, you’re guessing, and the guess is paid for in customer waiting time. A sector with a published calendar, such as one tied to scheduled corporate events, is far easier to plan for than one where demand arrives at random.
What did the search itself feel like?
Slow, and odd. Hiring in mid-2020 was cautious. Plenty of companies had paused hiring, and the ones that hadn’t were getting far more applications than usual from people in the same position as me. Interviews were all on video, which I found harder than I expected. You lose the small signals: the quick look between two interviewers, the way someone’s posture changes when you hit a nerve. You have to ask more questions out loud.
It also tests how you talk about the last role. I had to explain what happened at AudienceView without sounding bitter and without sounding like I’d walked away from people. I settled on a plain version: the bookings stopped, the work went with them, I made the hardest decisions I’ve made as a manager, and I’m looking for a place where I can build again. That’s true, and it’s what a hiring manager wants to know. They want to see whether you can say difficult things calmly.
Keep your own team’s interests in view, too. Looking for a job while still managing people puts you in an awkward position, and I’d rather be straightforward than secretive. I kept doing the work properly for as long as I held the role. A reputation for leaving a team well is worth more than a few weeks’ head start.
What would I tell someone starting this search now?
Four things. Write your list of portable skills before you write a CV. Look for sectors by the shape of their demand, not just the headline. Be willing to learn a new product from scratch, and say so. And talk to people, because most of what you’ll learn about a company’s support operation isn’t in a job advert. Ask what the busiest week looks like, who the customers are and what the team would fix first. The answers tell you whether you’d want the job.
I’m paying particular attention to businesses with quarterly rhythms, because I’ve come to think a predictable spike is an easier problem than an unpredictable one. I’ll write more about that once I know what I’m walking into. For now, the plan is simple: keep working, keep talking to people, and look for a place where the demand has a calendar.
There’s a mental side to this that I’d be dishonest to skip. A job search in a collapsed industry is lonely in a particular way. Everyone you’d normally call is in the same position, so the usual network is also looking. I found it helped to widen the circle on purpose: former colleagues from earlier roles in other sectors, people I’d worked with at vendors and partners, and anyone who’d ever told me they’d be glad to talk. Most of the useful conversations came from people I hadn’t spoken to in a while.
Set a routine, too. A search without structure eats the day and gives nothing back. A few hours on applications and conversations, the rest on the job you still have, and some time that has nothing to do with either. The search lasts longer than you expect, and you need to be someone worth hiring at the end of it.
You can’t control when an industry recovers. You can control how well you understand what you’re good at.
Hutch Morzaria is a Director-level CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building global support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has hired dozens of support and CX leaders across his career and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.
