OHM Berlin

My first major managerial role after moving to Berlin was Tresor's sister venue, OHM, where I inherited a venue running 70 client events a year with no rental income line at all. Over eight years I built the commercial infrastructure that didn't previously exist, not just for the venue, but for the clients whose campaigns depended on it.

The foundation was a venue-hire model: clients kept their ticket revenue, OHM earned hire fees and bar revenue. 2017 and 2018 were spent deliberately on retention rather than acquisition, giving resident clients room to grow before chasing new ones. I authored the ticket-price cap system, where clients set their own price under a ceiling benchmarked against capacity and production quality. Criteria were also weighted against the physical space being situated in the same building complex as Tresor: although the audiences differed, the two venues were easily compared when evaluating ticket prices. The ceiling was raised only when the fundamentals justified it. For example, when we made a significant reinvestment into OHM's sound system and acoustic treatment, I managed the underwriting process for new venue-hire rental costs. The ticket-price cap existed because clients routinely over-estimated their own draw, and it prevented them from signing themselves up for a loss.

The client resident system I later scaled at Tresor was first built here. By 2018, 30 main clients were integrated into an annual schedule based on performance, market demand and conceptual depth. Utilising a hybrid version of a distribution model, I avoided cherry-picking premium clients to allow room to invest in campaigns with grassroots connections. The challenge was finding the balance between financially stable clients with strong audience demand and new clients that needed time to grow. There is always a risk that a model misses what cannot be measured. Mitigating this bias, I remained in constant communication with clients, OHM staff and, where possible, the audience themselves.

OHM stopped being a room people just rented and became somewhere Berlin's DIY performance scene could build something lasting. A first show that turned into a residency; a residency that over time eventually grew too large for OHM and still found success elsewhere. Each year between 2017 and 2019, four of our thirty residents scaled to much bigger events and campaigns across Berlin and Europe. These are the results I'm most satisfied with, and the examples I point to when I discuss my success at OHM. By the time I transitioned full time to Tresor, OHM wasn't just a venue with strong numbers behind it, it had become a landmark for a scene that rarely gets one..