Steve Wiener, 60, is the American founder and chief executive officer of Cineworld, the UK's biggest cinema chain in terms of box office revenue, with 49 million admissions in the last year. Founded in 1995, it has 79 cinemas with 811 screens and revenues in 2010 of £343m.
My first job in a cinema was at the first auditorium to have rocking chairs in it and the manager wanted to make sure that they were all installed right. The big auditorium had 903 seats and the small auditorium had 548. I know that because I rocked three times in each one of them.
When I was coming up the ladder I would often be told: "This is the way head office wants it done." Cineworld doesn't work that way. We try to listen to the people in the field. I constantly tell our people: "Head office is the tail and we do not let the tail wag the dog."
We've got 5,000 people working for the company and, while the hundred of them who work in head office make the major decisions, if the people in the field say it's not working for them we have to try to find out why and how to fix it because they make the money. So we have focus groups where people from the field come in and tell us what they'd like to see improved and what's making their job difficult.
Anyone who works for us who wants to tell me I'm wrong can come into my office, shut the door and tell me I'm a complete blankety-blank and I'm doing this wrong and that wrong. As long as they can substantiate it it's fine but, if they can't substantiate it: "Thank you very much, goodbye." I respect the people who do that.
A third of all our cinema managers are what we call home-grown people. They started as multifunctional staff members in the field and worked their way up. We're always promoting from within. Even when we open up a new cinema we leave one management spot empty and, at the end of the training, whoever excelled the most among the people we hired as hourly employees gets promoted into management.
About a year after I arrived here (to run Warner Brothers' cinemas in Europe in 1991), the Monopoly and Mergers Commission was doing an investigation into the cinema industry and Warner Brothers appointed me from the cinema side to work with the corporate attorney. There were two lines in the resulting report that stood out for me. The first was that the average person would not travel more than 20 minutes for entertainment. The second was that 60 per cent of the UK lived more than 20 minutes from a modern multiplex cinema.
Our very first cinema was in Stevenage and we opened - and so did McDonald's - while the rest of the 170,000sq ft centre was under construction because we were burning money and our investors wanted to see some cash coming in. Everything went wrong. We had people running over nails in their cars, which meant we had to pay to replace their tyres. People were demanding money for car washing because they had washed their cars and come in and got them covered in dust and dirt from the centre. We were supposed to do 600,000 admissions in the first year but only managed something like 450,000. It did get better though. It was a 12-screen cinema and we added four more and today it's approaching a million admissions. The lesson there is to open as soon as you can because you have to appease your shareholders, but just be prepared for the potential problems, because you will have problems.
If you ask me who is the hottest actor in the world, for years I would have immediately answered "Tom Cruise", but today I think it's Will Smith. I've met both of them and they're both nice guys off screen. But Will Smith, he's not acting, he is that character you see out there. He's just that way: very friendly and outgoing, with a good sense of humour. I think especially when times are bad in the economy people want to see that. They want to have an uplifting experience.
When I was trying to get the money approved for changing our screens to digital the board turned me down the first time because I could not give them a valid reason why. A year later I went back to the board and said, "We have to go digital now." They started debating it. I was sitting next to one of the gentlemen on our board who actually used to be involved with a major studio and I leaned over to him and said, "Listen, you need to say something." And, when the conversation tailed off, he said, "Gentlemen, either go digital or prepare to go out of business in the near future." There was dead silence in the room. The chairman looked around and said, "Okay, does anyone object to us approving x million for Steve to start putting digital in?" No one said a word and he said, "Go ahead and do it."
Our latest coup is that we're showing Polish films. I said to the guys about a year ago, "There's a lot of Polish people here. We
need to find a way to get some Polish films." Fortunately for us, out of the blue this guy who had rights to some Polish movies contacted our head film buyer. We put one on in one cinema for, I think, one or two nights in a week and we sold out the shows. So then we showed it every day of the week and it became the number one show in that cinema. Now we're showing them at 23 cinemas.
We also have about 60 per cent of the UK Bollywood market now. The year Titanic came out every multiplex in the UK had Titanic as their number one film for the year except for our cinema in Feltham. Number one film for the year there was Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, which played over six months at the cinema. It was great. Today Feltham and Ilford are the highest grossing Bollywood cinemas in the world outside of India.
I usually sleep about five hours a night. If I get up at 4 o'clock in the morning I find the time from then to, say, 7am is a great time. It's a time to think or a time to get work done but there are certain mornings I'll get up and say. "You know what? I don't have any paperwork
I really need to get done this morning and I'll watch a film."
The most common mistake people make in business is to become complacent. You always have to think what you have to do for tomorrow. Today has to be taken care of yesterday and tomorrow has to be taken care of today.
Interview by Dominic Midgley
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