We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Phil Harrold a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Phil, thanks for joining us today. Almost all entrepreneurs have had to decide whether to start now or later? There are always pros and cons for waiting and so we’d love to hear what you think about your decision in retrospect. If you could go back in time, would you have started your business sooner, later or at the exact time you started?
We (my brother Steve and I) opened in September of 2020 thinking that the presidential election was going to come and go and take Hurricane Covid with it. When that didn’t happen, we pivoted to doing livestream concerts until the coast was clear enough to start doing regular, in-person events. In some ways I do wish we had been open before lockdown happened. Having our “regular time” footing as an art gallery and event space would have had clear goals of what to get back to once “disease time” wound down. Trying to establish an active venue with lots of weekly events happening after people have been conditioned to stay home all the time has been really tough. Everything’s been a learning experience, it would be interesting to see where we’d be now had we been learning lessons a couple of years earlier. It’s a funny story, we actually looked at the building we’re in now in 2018. We faltered when it came time to submit our business plan to the landlord, it was just not very thoroughly plotted out. Needless to say we didn’t get the lease. I continued working a job I hated at a convention center until lockdown [thankfully] ended my term there. When the business who did get the lease closed during lockdown, we had some incredible help beefing up our plan from our friend Ashley Courts of Black Forge Coffee House in Pittsburgh. That was enough to impress the building owner enough to award us the lease on the second try. And we’ve been space truckin’ ever since!
Phil, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
When my brother and I were growing up, our dad worked in sales for a Christian record label. We ate, drank and slept all types of music in the house from an early age, firmly planting musical passions that would last our whole lives. I’ve been playing in bands since I was in middle school and booked my first tour package at age 17 (with a lot of help from my dad). When it came time for college, I went to Full Sail University to study Show Production & Touring. I lived in different places and continued to be in bands and book shows, all the way up to moving back to Greensburg when our dad died in 2018.
The seed of the idea to open a music venue had been with me since high school, but it was first formally planted when we toured what would become the Green Beacon Gallery in late 2018. This is Greensburg, PA. Unless you are selling out the Palace Theater or stuffed into the corner of some bar in town, there’s really nowhere for bands to play, especially if you’re under 21. That was the main issue we sought to address when opening the gallery. Covid preventing us from being able to hold in-person shows when we first opened gave us time to meet local artists and gather artworks to literally cover our interior walls. It’s an honest delight being able to offer a band their first gig or have an artist hang their work publicly for the first time. That’s why we’re here, to inspire people to create something and give them the space to perform/show it.
We are averaging 3-4 events per week these days, there’s always something going on! Making people aware that we’re here, we’re incredibly busy and we’ve got something for everybody has been our biggest challenge. We offer musical performances, paint nights, comedy shows, drum circle nights, holiday parties, sip n’ stitch nights, 7 art studio spaces, movie nights, gaming days, photo events, trivia nights… lots of irons in lots of fires. We have been operating at a loss since we opened, so it’s not exactly a success story as of this writing.
One of our studio tenants, Practice Makes Perfect Music Studio, offers music lessons & classes along with childrens sessions and soundbath meditations. The building we’re in was a music store & lesson center from the 50’s through the 80’s, it’s so incredibly cool to be continuing the musical tradition of the space!
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Being the only dedicated all-ages music venue in our area has helped us stand out, at least to artistically-inclined folks. Being such a small operation in a small town, it’s easy for word to get around if you’re good or bad at what you do. We’ve been lucky to work with 99% awesome individual artists, comedians, and musicians. Treating everyone professionally, not bringing unnecessary stress on stage and being sure to give stipends to performers have been good guidelines to live by thus far. We’ve only been open 2.5 years, in that time we’ve shown work from 200+ visual artists and hosted hundreds of musicians across various projects. Artsy folks are my people, they’ve all got a couple screws loose. It keeps things interesting and naturally tight-knit!
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
We’re brothers, 18 months apart in age. It’s great to be doing this with someone who has congruent goals, ideals and philosophies. We had an incredibly musical upbringing going to concerts, learning instruments and sometimes jamming with each other. Disagreements happened then and continue now, but we’re family and at the end of the day we are stuck with each other, so we’re gonna make this thing work either way.
Contact Info:
- Website: GreenBeaconGallery.com
- Instagram: @greenbeacongallery
- Facebook: Facebook.com/GreenBeaconGallery
Image Credits
phil harrold