BC Business
Alvaro Prol, Blueprint | BCBusinessAlvaro Prol, co-owner of Blueprint
BCB: Were Blueprint and Adelphia working together before the merger in January? Prol: About five years ago I got hired on to be the marketing director of the whole thing Adelphia had. So in a sense Blueprint and Adelphia worked in the same office, and we did functions together all the time, but we were still two different companies. We’ve been partners forever, but the decision as to which brand do we go with and how we best present ourselves took years of conversation. This January we actually rolled it out and now we’ve formed one management company called Blueprint.
BCB: How far back does your business relationship with Bill [Kerasiotis, co-owner of Blueprint] go? Prol: Bill and I go back to the first ever event I did in 1997. You remember the Red Lounge [in Vancouver]? It was called the Shaggy Horse prior to that and Bill’s family—his father and uncles—at the time they owned it. That was Bill’s first ever management job, and the first ever event I did was there with Bill. From there he went and started the management company called Adelphia and I, as a promoter, continued to align myself with Bill and his properties. We worked strategically together and the relationship has evolved that we just said, “This is silly. Let’s just be partners across the board and do everything together and have one pool of resources instead of two.” It just makes more sense the way we work now.
BCB: What is the biggest benefit of joining forces? Prol: The idea is to become one bigger, larger brand—a lifestyle brand that can go anywhere from a pub to a gigantic dance party to a music concert in Victoria. That’s what we want to be: we want to be flexible.
BCB: What businesses now fall under the updated Blueprint portfolio? Prol: It manages Celebrities, Caprice, Venue, Shine, Charles Bar, Colony, Dover Arms, Pivo and three liquor stores, plus the 200-plus events we do, the arena shows—all the stuff we do—is now Blueprint.
BCB: So your personal involvement in Colony is from the marketing side only? Prol: Bill and [brother] Chris are the owners of that particular business. There are some businesses that we own together, but that business is owned by them. Celebrities and Shine—I personally am invested in those properties. But conceptually everything that happens [at Colony], every piece of branding, we did out of our office, we did that together.
BCB: Will this merger cut into your time producing music and putting on events? Prol: It just allows me to continue to take on other resources and continue to. In the last three months I’ve hired three new people, a marketing director, a hip-hop buyer and another guy that’s a straight-on promoter for Blueprint, so [the merger] allows me to grow and diversify as an individual and as a group. I’m great at what I do [with events], but I’m also good at things like marketing and operations, so it allows me to float around as an owner and not have to just do one thing. I can put people in places that I overlook and make sure they get done properly.
BCB: So we can expect even more from Blueprint on the events side as well. Prol: We intend to do more and more shows. I just bought a promoter in Victoria who works underneath the Blueprint brand as well. His name is Lars Taylor and he had company called Innergroove for 10 years. We have just acquired his company and now he’s a Blueprint asset. We’ve been doing shows in Victoria for 10 years, but now we intend to double the number of shows we do there and obviously be as busy as we possibly can here [in Vancouver]. We did the biggest show that ever happened in Western Canada at BC Place on Boxing Day, which was a record breaking event with 12,000 [attendees], the event was called Contact and it was the biggest event of its type in Western Canada. We just did a concert at the PNE on Sunday for 6,000 people. So we’re still as active as we could ever be, the idea is just to grow with the team and have the right team members in place so we can continue to grow more and more.
BCB: What other kinds of establishments is Blueprint considering? Prol: Well, we want to be diverse. We want to have a cool bar in Kits and not just own every bar in Granville because you end up competing with yourself, which we already do, but we want to do things like pubs and little restaurants because they’re different and more neighbourhood based.
BCB: How will Colony differ from Blueprint’s other properties? Prol: Colony is very much a neighbourhood place. I actually live four blocks away from there so it’s perfect for me. It’s a very casual modern pub where you can watch sports… we will also have a DJ set up so on weekends we can have a little more dance atmosphere. We have 100 seats and a full kitchen, so the whole campaign behind the thing is ‘Keep Good Company,’ that’s our marketing hook—very similar to Charles Bar in Gastown.
Located in Kitsilano, Colony will offer a stocked bar, ten beers on rotating taps, $4 daily beer specials, a full menu including $10 lunch items on weekdays and a patio when the weather warms up (3255 W. Broadway, Vancouver).