By: Zach Miller

HomeTown CEO Nick Mirisis on persevering through the challenges of company culture, operations expansion, and integration through leadership and vision.

Closing a deal to acquire a competitor can feel like exhilaration after months of negotiation. For Nick Mirisis, CEO of HomeTown, the greatest challenges of the company’s acquisition of Ticket Spicket unfolded in the two years that followed the deal closing. 

Founded in 2016, HomeTown is a digital ticketing and event management platform specifically designed for educational institutions and community organizations. HomeTown emerged as a golden ticket for schools grappling with the inefficient, manual processes involved in selling tickets and managing growth from programming like football games, fine arts productions, and school-sponsored dances.

The platform addresses the pain points of traditional ticketing methods, offering schools a digital solution that streamlines event management, enhances security, and provides real-time data insights. The company today provides services to over 15,000 schools and has over 20 partners across 21 states across the U.S., making it one of the largest players in the digital ticketing space. 

With financial stability and astronomical growth post the pandemic, HomeTown was primed for expansion. For the first time, the leadership team considered an acquisition to further scale HomeTown, setting their sights on Ticket Spicket. Ticket Spicket, a Virginia-based startup, allowed HomeTown to reach thousands of K-12 schools, community organizations, and conferences across all 50 states.

HomeTown’s value proposition for schools is twofold. For schools, HomeTown provides a streamlined system for managing events, selling reserved seating online and overseeing gate admissions. Event staff can set up custom box offices, securely manage payments, and communicate with attendees through various channels. For end-users, the platform offers the convenience of purchasing tickets online, directly from school websites, or through a mobile app, thereby eliminating the need to print or pick up paper tickets and pay with cash.

Following several months of negotiations, HomeTown struck a deal to buy the business, a move that enabled the combined market leader to significantly scale its footprint and enhance its tech stack. It was also a meaningful transaction for the industry, solidifying HomeTown as a peak player in the K-12 and collegiate event growth management space. 

Mirisis, who took the reins at HomeTown after a series of high-profile roles in the tech industry, brings 20 years of experience scaling and growing Software-as-a -Service (SaaS) companies. 

His resume includes driving substantial growth at SamCart, where he served as Chief Revenue Officer and President and General Manager of eCommerce. At GoCanvas, he adopted pivotal roles as Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Revenue Officer, prior to their recent acquisition by Nemetschek Group. And his love of EdTech started with his career at Brightly (former Dude Solutions and well-known under the SchoolDude brand) where his leadership helped propel the company from a scrappy startup to a thriving business with substantial annual recurring growth, before being acquired by Siemens. Throughout his tenure at these companies, Mirisis consistently maintained a growth-oriented mindset and an innovative approach to growth management and retention strategies. Mirisis has been described as a “customer-centric thought leader” by Influential People Magazine, and is adept at navigating changing market dynamics while efficiently meeting customer needs. He is known for his ability to translate vision into action through implementing strategic, hands-on initiatives to meet company goals. 

The largest inorganic growth goal for HomeTown to that point was to make a strategic expansion play acquiring Ticket Spicket. The acquisition allowed HomeTown to reach thousands more K-12 schools, community organizations, and conferences across all 50 states. By absorbing Ticket Spicket, HomeTown grew to serve more than 300,000 events annually, helping roughly 40 million fans. Yet with growth come growing pains.

“Looking back, the hardest part came after the ink dried on contracts,” Mirisis said. 

Mirisis and his team have spent the last year identifying business features from each platform that would benefit the reciprocal user-base, ensuring data integrity, and building a unified user experience across the board. From an internal standpoint, the teams this year worked on seamlessly blending their workplace cultures and adapting to new working styles. When looking at growth maximization, it is difficult to develop digital solutions across different types of educational institutions. Such hurdles, while strenuous, were met with quality leadership from Mirisis and his construction of a high-performing, goal-oriented team after acquisition. 

In the effort to successfully implement new leadership styles after the acquisition, Mirisis credits three key events: aiming people, getting things done, and building relationships. 

The focus on aiming people was crucial during the transition. Mirisis said they had to ensure that every team member, from both HomeTown and Ticket Spicket, both understood the combined vision and value proposition of the merged entities and felt empowered to contribute to them. Empowering team members included clearing the roadblocks that hampered their day-to-day and providing the best possible conditions for them to deliver results and success to the education partners they serve. 

“My philosophy has always been that no real achievement occurs through singular effort,” Mirisis said. “We win as a team.” 

He admits having been surprised by the amount of creative problem-solving an acquisition would require, across all areas of the business and operations. The acquisition has positioned HomeTown to offer enhanced features to its customer base, including more robust reporting tools and expanded payment options. For school administrators and event professionals, this translates to increased efficiency in managing events, from ticket sales, to attendance tracking and beyond. Internally, the acquisition also helped HomeTown mature as a business – a team of people working toward a common goal. 

“We deeply understood the complexities of integrating two distinct technology platforms,” Mirisis said. “The real challenges emerged post-deal, as we grappled with alignment – both the technology and the human capital components – to create blended systems and corporate cultures. We’ve emerged stronger than we were before, but that evolution didn’t come easy.”

Mirisis’s leadership approach during the transition period was marked by a commitment to staying connected with both employees and customers. Since the acquisition, a key component of his routine at work is to hold at least one employee meeting and one customer meeting every week day. While time-intensive, this habit has proven successful in enabling Mirisis to understand challenges, support solutions, and more effectively measure HomeTown’s KPIs, especially customer satisfaction. 

“As CEO, I could sometimes be the furthest from day-to-day operational issues. My thinking is that the people closest to the problem should be tasked with solving the problem, and my job is to empower them to the greatest extent possible to facilitate problem-solving,” Mirisis said. “The daily meetings help me avoid the pitfalls of filtering through layers of management to find a solution to a problem that someone else is better positioned to understand and fix.”

To prioritize this practice within his already-packed schedule, Mirisis and his leadership team have developed a rigorous approach to time management. The team audits their calendars weekly, ensuring that multiple leadership team members aren’t present in meetings where their input isn’t critical. These tactics have allowed Mirisis to maintain his hands-on leadership style while steering the company through its significant growth phase.

“We’re pulling 10- to 12-hour workdays on a regular basis, so it’s essential that we maintain discipline about how we use our time and where we commit to making contributions,” he said.

HomeTown’s journey highlights the potential rewards of consolidation in a fragmented market, as well as the intricate challenges that come with merging competing technologies and teams. As the edtech space continues to evolve, Mirisis’ leadership through HomeTown’s expansion stands as a reliable blueprint for success in strategic growth strategies in what is a uniquely high-touch and highly relationship-centric segment of B2B tech. 

“More and more, schools are shedding their reputation of being old school and adopting solutions to digitize and simplify their operations across all facets,” Mirisis said. “Management and financing tools for event programming are still very much ripe for disruption.”

With the digital ticketing market for educational events projected to grow significantly in the coming years, HomeTown is poised to be at the forefront of the industry. 

“We’re now more attuned to the importance of thorough due diligence and have the experience to anticipate potential challenges that I’m confident will make future partnerships and M&A even more successful,” Mirisis said.

Published By: Aize Perez