Move a 140-port ticketing operation across town without dropping a single sale.

A theatrical-ticketing business needs a new office — and the call center can’t go dark.

By 2019, TheaterMania was a fixture of New York theatrical commerce: discount listings, editorial, and a high-volume ticketing call center that handled performance-day phones for Broadway and off-Broadway shows. Its parent, AudienceView, decided to consolidate the business into a new Manhattan office.

The brief looked simple from the outside: move the office. From the inside, it was a full lift-and-shift — a 140-port data network, a PCI-compliant call center, conference-room AV, executive offices, and a multi-site broadcast head-end that talked to remote ticketing operations. Zero downtime tolerance during ticket-on-sale windows. No graceful degradation when curtain is in two hours.

Designed, sourced, project-led, and commissioned the whole site.

One year on-site as Senior AV/IT Site & Project Lead via TriTech, leading the AV/IT side of the office build from RFP through commissioning. Architected the network, the call-center floor, and the AV systems on a $200K capital budget — then ran the project through procurement, vendor management, install supervision, and live cutover.

The cutover happened over a weekend without a missed sales window. The PCI-compliant call-center floor came online clean. Conference rooms, exec offices, and the broadcast head-end were spec’d for the way the team actually worked — not the way the architect’s drawings suggested they should. Training documentation was written so operators inside the company could run the AV-IT and theatrical production systems without a phone call to a vendor.

Then, the part the brief didn’t plan for. When COVID hit and AudienceView decided to close the NYC office, they brought me back to spin it down. Same person who had stood the site up was the right person to take it down responsibly — vendor exits, equipment disposition, network and PCI-compliant decommissioning, knowledge transfer to the surviving distributed team. Trust earned on the lift-and-shift was repaid by being the operator they called for the closure.

A ticketing business is a real-time business.

A Broadway box office hits its busiest stretch in the two hours before curtain. If the network is dropping packets, you’re not selling seats — you’re losing revenue and goodwill at the worst possible moment. The technical bar is set by the night, not the day.

That’s the discipline that runs through every VAAV engagement that came after this one — the WW Connect virtual studio that put 14,000 workshops live in six days, the Columbia Law graduation streamed globally with the Secretary of State at the lectern, the PayPal Investor Day that briefed Wall Street on a half-trillion-dollar payments network. Real-time-first. Broadcast-grade. Run by the team, not by the vendor. AudienceView is where the bar was set.