To me the manager is the one friend the artist has; if he’s doing his job, it’s the one friend that the artist can count on to get the right answer or at least an opinion about what he thinks is the best for him. I’ve always said, I had a line with Michael Bublé, I said, “When your career is over, you and I will go fishing, but it’ll only be in a boat that holds two because that’s the only two people that really care about you is yourself and me.”

I believe when I find an artist I have to totally respect what an artist wants to do. My job is to buy into the artist’s vision and do the best I can to help him maximize it. If I can help the artist maximize his vision then I’ve done my job. My job is not to create an artist, my job is to take an artist and make him happen on the world stage. That’s what I believe.

Without a manager I don’t believe an artist can do the job himself. I believe the manager is the most key guy on the artist’s side. I was told long ago when I started the business with Randy Bachman who had been in the Guess Who and sold a lot of records, he really didn’t, I knew in my heart that he knew more about the business than I did because he’d been a big success and had a big star before I was. So he’d seen more problems, dealt with more things than I had, and I was young and I said to him, “Randy how can I manage you? You’ve forgotten more things than I know. How can I actually sit there and manage you?” He said, “Listen, I can help you and I can guide, but I can’t walk in there and say ‘I want this, I want that, I want to do this.’ I need somebody to say, ‘He wants to do it.’ ‘We want to do it.’ ‘This is what we believe.’ I need a spokesperson.” It’s very hard for an artist to sit there and go I, I, I, I all day to a record label head and so he wanted somebody to be his spokesman.

I have a partner who is a partner in my overall business. He has a partner in his acts because he believes that the two of them can do a better job, but they have a bigger volume of acts; he might have 12 acts and he’s got a partner, okay? I, we disagree with that. I believe partners are brought in only for a couple of reason: expansion, if you want more acts, or to take some of the heat off. And I believe also it might help in a good cop, bad cop if you have to deal with an artist.

I think that one on one thing, I feel so privileged when an artist sits down and talks to me, maybe not only about his music or his art, but his life. Okay? What he’s doing with his family, what he’s thinking about spiritually. I think that’s really an honor that he’ll do that one on one. I don’t know if I’d have the same conversation one on two and that’s what I think a personal manager is.

The hardest thing about being a manager, one of the hardest things, is delivering the bad news, okay? And we have to deliver the bad news. I’m sorry we’re in a building with 7,000 people; I’m only at 3,000 tickets. That wasn’t my goal. My goal I was in the 7,000 seat building because I thought I could sell 7,000. I mean the artist goes out there and sees half a house. It’s frightening when you’re standing up there. You know, what’s our defense? Turn up the spotlight so he can’t see any further back? Papering the houses, we try. You know, because they’re fragile. If they see 3,000 in a 7,000 seater, they think their career’s on the slide. Because they’re artists they go right to the disaster scenario. It’s not a disaster, it’s just it didn’t work here; next night it’ll be, you have to walk people through this stuff.

The best part there is about being a manager is seeing a plan come to fruition and work and I think that’s the high of highs. Okay? I’ve been fortunate enough to break and act every decade from the ground up. There’s not many people who’ve done that, take an act from nothing to world global thing. America’s one thing, you can get caught up in saying we break America. It’s a big world out there. You can sell a lot more records around the world than you can in America.

So when you see a plan come to fruition, when you have a dream, you and the artist and you realize that dream or even surpass it, I mean an artist like Michael Bublé said to me when I started, “Bruce, my goal, if I can make 100,000 records, if I can sell 100,000 records, I know they’ll let me make another one. They told me.” One hundred thousand records? If I sold 100,000 records you’d be playing the lounge downstairs, you know? I mean so his goal, I want to get to 100,000 records. Then all of the sudden we got to a million, then his goal changed. Okay? And that’s great to see. That’s great to hit a homerun, and the homeruns are few and far between but when it happens and everything all comes together and everybody’s pushing and things running all eight cylinders and it’s clicking, that’s a big high. That’s a big high for a manager or anybody, or the artist or anybody else involve in the project.

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