Front-of-House Tech at an Outdoor Festival
Last weekend I spent as the Front-of-House main tech at an outdoor festival. Something completely different from my main business nowadays, but what I used to do quite a lot in my twenties. Every now and then I get invited back from my “retirement” to handle a role like this, and I always say yes. Not because I need the work, but because it reconnects me with a version of myself that I genuinely enjoyed being.
The responsibilities of a FOH tech at an outdoor festival are more complex than most people realize. You are responsible for making sure the guest artists’ expectations are met, that the main sound system is performing up to standard, that wireless frequency coordination is handled cleanly across dozens of channels, and that noise level compliance is maintained throughout the event. That last one is surprisingly political – you have artists who want to be loud, an audience that paid to hear them be loud, and local regulations that say nobody gets to be that loud. You sit in the middle of that tension and make it work. It requires technical precision and a lot of diplomacy.
What strikes me every time I do this is how similar the core skills are to what I do in tech leadership and cloud infrastructure. At a festival, you are managing complex systems that need to be reliable under pressure. You are coordinating with multiple stakeholders who each have different priorities. You are troubleshooting in real-time with no option to “roll back” because two thousand people are watching. The tools are different – mixing consoles instead of Kubernetes clusters, RF scanners instead of CloudWatch dashboards – but the mindset is the same. Reliability, coordination, and the ability to stay calm when things go sideways.
There is something grounding about working with your hands and ears instead of spreadsheets and strategy decks. In a boardroom, problems are abstract. At a festival stage, problems are visceral and immediate. The feedback loop is instantaneous – if you get the monitor mix wrong, the vocalist will let you know within seconds. If the subwoofers are not phased correctly, you hear it in your chest. There is no ambiguity, no six-week review cycle, no “let’s circle back on this.” You fix it or everyone knows you did not.
These occasional returns to a former career keep my perspective fresh in ways that purely staying in the tech and consulting world cannot. They remind me that competence is transferable, that people skills matter at least as much as technical capabilities in any field, and that the best work happens when you genuinely enjoy what you are doing. I will always take these invitations when they come. The outdoor stage and the boardroom are further apart than they seem, and closer than you would think.
