Fiona Stewart, the owner and managing director of Green Man festival in Wales, compares launching a festival to opening your own restaurant. You love eating out. You have superb taste. All your friends say you’re a great chef. How hard could it be? Harder than you could possibly imagine. “I have lost all the money I had in the world at least three times,” she says.
Sitting in Green Man’s airy London office, surrounded by posters and awards, she recounts the catastrophes. The first crisis came in 2008, a year after Stewart became MD. The company underwriting the ticket sales went under in the recession, taking all of Green Man’s money with it. Stewart cleaned out her savings, remortgaged her flat and borrowed money from family members and it still wasn’t enough. She was advised to sell Green Man to Festival Republic, owned by Live Nation, but “they wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole”. Eventually, two months out, a group of contractors held a summit at Glastonbury and agreed to work on credit. Green Man survived.
