(gentle chiming music)
- Hakkasan group is very much a portfolio of brands.
Our portfolio is now increased to about
50 venues worldwide.
My name's James Algate,
I'm the Executive Vice President of Entertainment
at Hakkasan Group,
and this is how I got here.
(upbeat chiming bells )
First to describe myself growing up,
I would certainly say I wasn't a model student.
I was definitely, you know, into sports.
Into enjoying myself more than
I was into doing schoolwork.
I really didn't have any plans of what
I wanted to do out of high school.
Certainly knew that further education wasn't for me.
One day I walked past a bar, a local bar,
and had seen a job advertised for collecting glasses,
and I was only 17 at the time.
So I thought, "Well, I'll give it a go."
The job role progressed over time
from you know, serving drinks,
collecting glasses, cleaning the place.
To, you know, stock rotation and rostering all the staff on
and then you know, turned out to be over time
to making sure that the business was profitable
and really sort of every facet of running a business.
(gentle techno sounds)
A few years into that I was only, you know, mid-twenties.
One day we were flicking through a magazine,
which is a trade magazine called Night,
and there was a small little box out section advert
for a nightclub in Birmingham.
This was the opportunity for me to like progress my career.
So, I sold my house, I sold my car
and basically put every penny that we had as a family
into this new venture,
which was the nightclub in Birmingham.
We opened the club in 1999.
We didn't sell tickets 'cause we wanted to create a buzz.
The capacity of the club was 15 hundred people,
20,000 people turned up for the opening
of a small, you know, nightclub.
And it was really from there that we understood
at the time that the brand and the club
and the marketing that had been done,
we'd created a monster.
The club then rolled for the next 10 years,
very, very successfully.
But off the back of that we span out a music festival.
It was around 2011, 2012 and my partner at the time
had sold his piece of the business to Live Nation.
So, it was at that time that I sold my shares
to them as well.
And I was really, you know, looking for what was next.
My former partner had moved to the U.S.
and had built, or had started to,
to build Hakkasan and he said why don't you come over
and help run Hakkasan over here.
Vegas at the time was certainly moving
towards electronic music.
I had a good amount of relationships
with electronic music artists.
Having booked them for, you know, for the previous
15 years at clubs in Birmingham
and the international festivals.
It just felt like a perfect fit.
(upbeat techno music)
First role I had when I moved here
was the Vice President of Music.
So I oversaw all of the artist bookings
and the programming for the venues.
And then over time I've gone from being
the vice president to a senior vice president,
and now executive vice president.
The part of my job I enjoy the most
is definitely developing new concepts,
or developing new venues.
This is also Las Vegas so it's the
entertainment capital of the world.
Everybody wants to come here and have an amazing
experience and that's what we strive to do,
night in night out, is create unforgettable
moments where everybody leaves and says,
"Oh my word, I was at Hakkasan last night."
That's really what keeps us coming back
and striving to create unbelievable production
or keep booking the likes of,
Tiesto and Calvin Harris, and Steve Aoki, and Zedd,
and Martin Garrix, and all these guys
that we've been working with for so long now.
(gentle techno music)
I think one of the benefits that I have is that
I've really done every job in a night club.
From cleaning out bathrooms when the cleaners
didn't turn up, to, you know, collecting glasses,
to serving drinks behind the bar,
to even trying to work out and learn how to do
the lighting when the lighting guy
doesn't turn up one night.
So I've sort of, you know, I've been there done that
so to speak, which really is great for other
people to now understand that.
For staff that we have to, don't think that,
you know, anything was beyond me.
I'm always willing to muck in.
I'm always willing to get my hands dirty.
And that really gets you the knowledge
of the industry and of the business.
Night life is the epitome of working hard.
You have to get your foot on the ladder
and you have to take your opportunities and
I think that's my biggest piece of advice
would be to anybody is, take that opportunity.
There isn't a college course that you can go
and study at and say, "I wanna be in my position
in 20 years time, how do I start that."
It's impossible to even advise somebody
how to do that and what college courses to take.
You have to experiences,
you have to have on the job training.
You have to not be afraid to get your hands dirty
and really strive for whatever that next step is.