Industry veteran Tony Conway’s, Conway Entertainment Group Live (CEG Live) has started offering consulting services, venue booking and boots-on-the ground support to help independent and municipality-owned venues succeed in today’s competitive market.

“CEG Live sees an opportunity to use its collective expertise – developed over decades of booking, managing, producing and venue representation – to help municipally owned venues achieve financial stability,” explains Conway, founder and CEO of CEG Live. “Historically, cities have viewed their live event facilities as expenses intended to enhance the community’s quality of life. CEG Live partners with local governments to help these venues evolve into financially self-sustaining entities rather than ongoing municipal costs.”

Conway has decades of experience to draw from. A native of Kentucky, Conway grew up playing drums in school and a local rock band that traversed the Midwest playing clubs and frat parties. After graduating from Northwood University in West Baden, Indiana, he opened his first talent agency in Lexington, Kentucky.

In 1975 he moved to Nashville and met renowned talent agent Buddy Lee, who saw potential and offered him a job at Buddy Lee Attractions, Inc. In 1987, Conway was named President of Buddy Lee Attractions and he eventually became CEO and co-owner of the company in 1998, which represented some of music’s most legendary acts including Willie Nelson, Garth Brooks, Bill Monroe, Roy Orbison, George Strait, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Ronnie Milsap and Emmylou Harris.

Conway’s tenure at BLA set the stage for CEG Live.

“It’s what I would call a division of what I’ve already been doing through the years,” he explains. “I started a company called main stage productions back in the ‘80s when I was at Buddy Lee, and that was to produce events, consult events that didn’t have access to buying talent or hiring production. Most of it was fairs and festivals. So, our company would basically consult them and book the talent, help them on marketing, help them with production, sound, lights, stagehands, everything.”

CEG Live draws on that experience and is a separate division of CEG and Conway’s Ontourage Management firm, which represents artists including Country Music Hall of Fame legends Alabama and Randy Travis as well as industry stalwarts Exile, Mark Chesnutt and Lorrie Morgan.

“Through the years, I had different venues, theaters, amphitheaters, arenas, call – just conversations – to say, ‘You know, we’re not making any money at this venue.’ Or ‘Our venue manager is not up to par. We’re thinking about getting another, do you have a recommendation?’ That went on a lot and you help them out as much as you can. But then, people started saying, ‘I need somebody to come in here and look at what we’re doing and see if it can be improved.’ Or ‘What changes we should make?’”

It wasn’t long after hiring venue professional Blake McDaniel from CAA that Conway turned off-hand conversations into hand-shake, formal business deals. The rest of the CEG Live team includes Scott Welch, Sherry May and Brandon Mauldin.

“We thought this is a good time to do this,” says Conway. “We don’t want to be in the facility management business, at all. That’s not what we’re doing. We want to assist a venue that may have some needs and they really don’t know where to go. That’s why we created it.”

Conway says the venues interested in their services are independent or municipally owned. Many are historic with numerous issues from ongoing preservation needs to production value being operated by people who don’t have the depth of operating experience to make them not just operational, but profitable.

“They’re very important to the community. But you’ve got people who inherit them, who aren’t necessarily, venue operators,” explains Conway. “They just don’t have the experience or knowledge. Because a lot of times, in those situations where it’s city owned, state owned or privately owned, they’ve got their hands full. They’ve got to report to a board of directors or to some committee on what this venue is generating – or not generating – and most of the time it’s venues that have been around a while that really need an overhaul.”

Combining live event management and consulting services, CEG Live just completed its flagship project at the historic Lerner Theatre in Elkhart, Indiana.

The Lerner Theatre is a municipally owned venue, and the city needed professional assistance to make it financially solvent. CEG Live was hired to bring the theatre up to the operational standards of similar venues that are privately owned and managed by major live entertainment companies.

CEG Live acted as an interim manager while conducting a nationwide search for a permanent general manager and booking director. Carl Thompson, formerly of Nederlander, was hired as the permanent GM and Bob Garcia, formerly of the MSG Group (Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden), was hired as the permanent Booking Director and Finance Director.

After training the staff, creating new policies and procedures, retooling vendor deals, facilitating new industry relationships and onboarding the new management team, CEG Live completed the project, leaving The Lerner in a strong position to manage the venue independently. The 1,600+-cap venue opened in 1924 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

The project culminated in a record-breaking milestone for the city: a free outdoor concert featuring Kool & The Gang and The Commodores, drawing an estimated 15,000 attendees, which was the largest community gathering in Elkhart’s history. The celebration not only honored the Lerner Theatre’s 100-year anniversary but also marked its renewed standing as a vibrant cultural anchor for the region.

“We appreciate the Conway Group’s support for securing an interim GM and leading a successful national search for top-tier permanent management,” says Megan Erwin, City of Elkhart Chief of Staff. “As interim GM and strategic consultant, Sherry May revamped policies, trained staff, and in partnership with Conway Group, helped produce a record-breaking downtown concert that drew over 15,000 people. Thanks to their strategic vision and expertise, the Lerner Theatre and the City of Elkhart are better positioned for long-term success.”

The Lerner Theater and other projects in the works came to CEG Live for help.

“We haven’t called anybody,” laughs Conway “Bottom line – this was a needed service, and we provide the experience, research and data-driven information that administrators and owners depend on to make informed decisions.”

Conway has been in the industry for 53 years. He was presented with the J. William Denny Award by the Country Music Association on Dec. 4 for his decades of service, including acting as executive director of CMA Music Festival for 11 years and spearheading the event’s successful move to downtown Nashville. In 2019, he received the CMA Touring Lifetime Achievement Award.  He was the coordinator of the very first FarmAid in 1985 and has also served as the Executive Producer of the Verizon Wireless BamaJam Music & Arts Festival in Enterprise, Alabama, and the new ShowMe Music & Arts Festival in Springfield, Missouri.

“I love what I’m doing,” he says. “I don’t look at it as coming to work every day – I can’t wait to get in and get going.”