Minsk Models Ticketpro

Serge Grimaux’s novel way of spreading his Ticketpro brand has spread to Minsk, Belarus, where a group of three local entrepreneurs have set up a company bearing the name.

Rather than expand by making acquisitions, which is costly, the Grimaux business model involves selling his own expertise, experience and company infrastructure.

Having selected and thoroughly vetted potential partners in a given country, he allows the local entrepreneurs to be the sole owners of their own Ticketpro company.

Grimaux provides the Ticketpro company name, along with its software, trademarks and trade names. The new companies join the Ticketpro network and report to him on a regular basis.

He maintains a vested interest in overseeing the business as he is paid a small royalty on every sale, a figure included in the ticket agency’s booking fee.

It’s a model that’s proving to be more and more attractive and efficient, as the Belarus company has followed quickly from similar setups in Estonia and Croatia. It began selling tickets in August and is the country’s first ticket company to become part of a fully computerized network.

“If I buy half of a company and leave it to be run by the people I bought it from, then I don’t believe these people have as much incentive as if they own all of the company,” Grimaux told Pollstar.

Tallinn-based Ticketpro shifted the majority of the tickets for Madonna’s 70,000-capacity sellout at the city’s Song Grounds.
More than 36,245 were E-Tickets, which Grimaux said is the largest number of print-at-home tickets ever sold for a concert in eastern and central Europe.

All the fans were inside the grounds within two hours, which demonstrated the speed that Ticketpro’s unique 16-digit barcode ticket can be scanned and traced back to the original application.

A couple of weeks later, Ticketpro Croatia had an equally auspicious start with U2’s Aug. 9-10 sellouts at Zagreb’s Maksimir Stadium.

They were the fastest-selling stadium shows ever staged in the Balkans. Once again, Ticketpro’s “Gatekeeper” system enabled everyone to get into the stadium in less than two hours.