Rick Lester - Chief Executive Officer
Rick Lester built TRG on a 30-year career in entertainment marketing. Since founding the firm in 1995 as Lester & Associates, Rick and his partners have built TRG into America’s largest consulting company dedicated to arts and culture.
Rick leads TRG’s counsel on patron behavior trends and their impact on patronage and revenue generation for organizations and communities. His pioneering work in demand management, pricing and cost-of-sale focus in marketing have become industry best practices. Hundreds of organizations in North America have generated successful revenue and audience results by following the data-driven strategies and counsel that Rick and his TRG colleagues recommend.
He is a frequent guest lecturer and panelist nationwide. Rick’s presentations on pricing were featured in panel discussions and workshops at the 2010 INTIX, PacNet, and ArtsReach conferences. He led sessions at the 2009 national conferences of Opera America, Theatre Communications Group, and the League of American Orchestras. He also was the keynote speaker and session leader at the March and October 2009 ArtsReach conferences. Rick spoke to arts professionals on thriving in an economic downturn at the 2009 Virginia Commission for the Arts annual conference, the Irvine Foundation’s Central Valley (CA) executive director’s group, Seattle’s Market the Arts Task Force and in San Francisco for Theatre Bay Area.
Early career success leading the marketing programs for the Cincinnati Symphony and The Cleveland Orchestra led Rick to senior leadership positions in the orchestra field. He was president / executive director of the San Antonio Symphony, the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra of North Carolina, and the Knoxville Symphony in Tennessee. In each of these organizations, Rick helped achieve records for both earned and contributed revenues. For more than a decade before he founded Lester & Associates, Rick had also been a freelance consultant to orchestras, as well as to numerous state and national nonprofit organizations.
Rick has assisted with projects for the American Symphony Orchestra League (now the League of Orchestras) where he was both vice chair and chair of Group 2 Orchestra Managers and a frequent presenter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, he was a member of the National Endowment for the Art’s Challenge Panel for Policy Review, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Cleveland Foundation.
He holds a B.A. in political science from Drury University and today serves on his alma mater’s board of directors. Rick earned his M.B.A from Queens University in Charlotte, NC.
Jill Robinson - President
A co-owner of TRG, Jill leads day-to-day operations and charts the firms’s future service to arts and cultural organizations and to the industry. Under Jill’s leadership, TRG has expanded its scope of service to all arts genres throughout the United States and into Canada. She also developed and now leads TRG’s counsel on integrated patron loyalty programs, bringing together colleague departments across organization silos to build stronger, longer paid patronage.
Jill helped craft TRG’s best practice revenue development counsel, serving as leader of the firm’s consulting team and as lead consultant for scores of clients ranging from the Kennedy Center (Washington, DC) and New York City Opera to the San Francisco Ballet. Her own work and the consulting practices she now presides over have generated hundreds of millions of revenue dollars – earned and contributed -- for orchestras, opera, dance, and theater companies, arts centers and festivals.
Jill is TRG’s catalyst for new ideas about revenue operations that help institutions work better and help the industry advance on the cumulative strength of individual organizations. The firm’s relentless consulting focus on measurable revenue results is a hallmark of Jill’s stewardship of quality standards at TRG. Jill also is manager-in-chief of client relationships on behalf of the entire TRG team, helping to ensure that TRG recommendations become a working, workable set of operations for clients.
TRG’s client retreats, revenue, and pricing summits are among the service innovations Jill has developed. She has served as summit leader and faculty member, providing clients and invited organizations with revenue-focused learning opportunities in the beautiful Rocky Mountain s setting of TRG’s Colorado offices. TRG’s signature workshops also now are available online through periodic webinars, including the 2009 series Jill developed and led on the impact of the current economy.
Jill makes frequent appearances as session leader and panelist at national service organization and arts marketing conferences. Her workshops and webinars on patron loyalty informed development of new operating paradigms at several organizations and for a national audience development program. She continues to drive creative thinking and new practices around institution-wide patron development programs aimed at ongoing, lifelong loyalty and investment.
Jill joined TRG in 1998 and soon partnered with Rick Lester to build the consulting firm as co-owners. Prior to TRG, Jill served as marketing director for several American orchestras, including those in Milwaukee and Kansas City. She earned her MBA from the University of Colorado, and a Professional Direct Marketing Certification from the University of Missouri.
Will Lester, Vice President
Over the last 10 years, Will Lester has been the architect of TRG’s database technology, community database services, and patron behavior research. His work has enabled the compilation of audience purchase and donation statistics on more than 20 million U.S. arts consumers from more than 500 arts and cultural organizations, representing every major market in the nation and growing rapidly to include most medium-tier markets.
Under Will’s leadership, TRG has become the largest provider of community database resources in the United States. Will and his colleagues manage the nation’s three largest list cooperatives in Philadelphia, Houston, and Denver. The Philadelphia Cultural List Collaborative by itself houses more than 1.4 million patrons and their transactions from more than 135 partner organizations. TRG’s approach to technology and professional development enables this large collaborative to work effectively.
Will leads TRG’s internal “Data Lab” team in quantifying national norms around consumption patterns, an effort the consulting firm has undertaken to provide clear patronage insights and actionable understanding to the field. He developed reports from Data Lab that have provided industry benchmarks on topics such as database marketing response, new patron activity and loss, and patron lifetime value. Recent published work was presented at the 2008 Opera America conference and for the 2009 Engage 2020 Research in Action Report by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.
Will is a partner in TRG with senior management responsibilities for the firm’s business success. His unofficial role is that of “innovator-in-chief” as Will designs new analytical projects, initiates new partnerships, and creates new technology. Will helped design and managed the development of eMerge and eMergePRO, TRG’s proprietary online database management tool.
Prior to joining TRG in 2000, Will was a product analyst for Meritor Automotive (now ArvinMeritor). Will was a liaison between headquarters and the company’s parts distributors in South Africa, Asia, Europe and Brazil. He also developed a new competitive aftermarket product line for the company’s international division.
