Ep. 329 — Building Tours Around A Single Unforgettable Experience

Mid-America Productions builds five-day tours around one thing: getting a choir on stage at Carnegie Hall.

James Redcay and Stephanie Tiboris run Mid-America Productions, a company that takes amateur choirs, church groups, university ensembles, community singers, on tour to perform at major concert halls: Carnegie Hall, Paris’s La Madeleine, and venues in Vienna, Stockholm, and soon Reykjavik. Each residency runs about five days, split roughly in half between rehearsal and free time. Hotels and sightseeing are handed off to local partners and travel agents rather than run in-house, because James says the company sticks to what it knows: producing the performance itself.

For operators, the transferable move isn’t about music. It’s about identifying the one thing a trip has to deliver, then building everything else, pacing, free time, what gets outsourced versus kept in-house, around protecting that centerpiece instead of spreading attention evenly across a checklist of activities. James and Stephanie talk through what that discipline produces: choirs return decades later, first-time travelers get their first passport through the company, and revenue has grown every year since the pandemic on repeat and referral business rather than new-customer acquisition. They also cover what it took to keep that formula intact after founder Peter Tiboris passed away in September 2024.

Resources:

• Website: midamerica-music.com

Key Takeaways

• Niche audience positioning beats one-size-fits-all sightseeing, and Mid-America Productions built a company around it decades before “niche” became a buzzword. 03:36 to 04:18 Mitch compares the model to EF Tours founder Bertil Hult, who built educational student travel around an empty UK campus in the 1960s. Mid-America’s niche is classical music: bringing choirs from across the US to Carnegie Hall rather than selling a standard sightseeing package. The pattern in both cases: a founder identified an underserved audience and built the whole operation to serve them, not to sell a generic itinerary.
• The five-day residency structure gives clients two full free days, and the company deliberately stays out of planning them. 07:49 to 08:47 James describes the rhythm: roughly half of each day is rehearsal, the other half is open for clients to pursue sightseeing on their own. In New York, the one activity the company runs directly is a harbor tour past the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. Everything else gets handed to local partners and travel agents who specialize in it, because “we try to stick with what we know.”
• A hotel without bathroom doors taught the company a hard lesson about what “cool” gets you with a church choir. 12:47 to 13:46 Stephanie describes scouting hotels roughly 20 years ago when the company first expanded into Europe, starting with a small festival in Greece tied to her father’s heritage. An art deco hotel that looked great online turned out to have no bathroom doors, a dealbreaker when two adults from a church choir share a room. The story marks how much trial and error went into building the European program from a cold start, with no existing supplier relationships to lean on.
• New destinations get added when repeat clients ask for them, not when a strategist picks a market. 14:40 to 15:25 James says the Iceland program started because longtime clients asked for it more than once. He and Stephanie flew to Reykjavik and met with local travel agents, churches, and orchestral contacts before building the tour. The company now performs in Reykjavik’s cathedral, which James compares to “performing on the Iron Throne.”
• The company just had its biggest Carnegie Hall season in eighteen years, built on a turnkey production model. 10:26 to 11:08 Mid-America hires the New England Symphonic Ensemble as house orchestra for every Carnegie concert, so no individual choir needs to bring or fund one. A dedicated audience development team fills the hall, so performers aren’t singing to empty seats. That combination, orchestra, marketing, and production bundled together, is what lets choirs from Iowa, Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma combine into a single program without ever rehearsing together in person before arriving.
• Alumni return as paying customers decades later, sometimes as the conductor bringing their own choir. 11:16 to 11:54 James says this happens roughly every two months: someone who performed with the company as a student calls wanting to bring their own choir now. He cites a specific case: a singer who was six years old in the world premiere of John Rutter’s Mass of the Children, produced by the company, who now runs a community choir and has brought them to perform. That multi-decade repeat cycle functions as the company’s real retention engine.
• Forty years of relationships with a small number of major composers is what still opens doors in Europe. 16:25 to 17:00 John Rutter, one of the best-known living choral composers, has conducted more than 140 concerts with the company over four decades. Mid-America was directly responsible for commissioning and producing premieres of his Magnificat and Mass of the Children. James says that legacy, not a sales pitch, is why venues and conductors trust the quality of what the company brings.
• When the founder died, the successors’ first move was deciding what to keep exactly as it was. 18:20 to 20:57 James, who worked alongside Peter Tiboris for a decade before his death, says the fundamentals, the residency structure, the venue relationships, the production model, stayed untouched after Tiboris passed in September 2024. What changed was tone: sales collateral, marketing materials, advertising. James’s advice for anyone inheriting a legacy business: know honestly what it offers customers, then be true to that in your own way rather than copying the person before you.
• A dozen people run outreach to a standing roster of 20,000 to 30,000 choirs, planning two years out. 25:17 to 26:20 About a third of each year’s participants are new clients, but most growth runs on referral: a conductor who has traveled with the company brings a colleague’s choir into the program. That referral chain has built a contact list of 20,000 to 30,000 choirs the team checks in with annually about travel plans two years ahead. The outreach team is small, roughly a dozen people, and most of them also carry production, marketing, or logistics work.
• The company runs on Salesforce and a third-party platform called Group Collect for trip payments, and stays deliberately remote otherwise. 26:39 to 27:43 The team works remote year-round except when physically producing concerts in New York, Paris, or Dublin. Group Collect has handled online trip payments and account setup for about four years and keeps expanding. James is candid that he still composes by hand with paper and pencil and only bought an iPad for his own performances after a decade of people telling him to, because he worries technology can get in the way of a business built on person-to-person relationships.
• Folding local choirs into international tours upgrades the experience for both sides, not just the visitors. 28:13 to 29:22 For a recent Sweden trip, local contacts recruited 30 to 40 Swedish choristers to join the visiting American ensembles at concerts in Stockholm and Uppsala Cathedral, Scandinavia’s largest. James calls Swedish choral singing among the strongest traditions in the world, so American singers performed alongside a noticeably higher level. Several Swedish singers have already said they want to return for next July’s tour, which means the addition works as a local retention tool too.
• Producing a concert in the church where the piece premiered over a century ago is the kind of moment that justifies the operating model. 30:22 to 32:00 James describes performing Fauré’s Requiem in Paris’s La Madeleine, the church where Fauré served as organist and music director and where the piece premiered roughly 140 years ago. The choir combined singers from Georgia, Vermont, and New York with members of a French youth choir founded decades earlier by the company’s Paris contact. The concert filled the church to roughly 80 percent capacity, and James says he drove home afterward finding it hard to believe the company can produce something at that scale and quality at once.
• Stephanie Tiboris says fear about classical music’s cultural decline hasn’t shown up in the business, and she doesn’t expect it to. 33:51 to 34:18 Asked directly whether shrinking arts education is a business risk, she points to the size of the potential audience, roughly 350 million people in the US, and argues scarcity tends to make people fight harder for something rather than abandon it. She recalls her father’s own response to the same question: whether music endures gets tested over centuries, and classical repertoire has already passed that test many times.
• Revenue has grown every year since the pandemic, and this year was the best in nearly two decades. 36:39 to 37:03 James attributes the growth to consistent demand rather than a single new tactic: the desire for the experience isn’t the constraint, affordability and logistics are. The company’s response has been to keep expanding the infrastructure around that demand, new residencies, local partnerships, and payment technology, so more choirs can say yes when they already want to.
• No recording reproduces the physical experience of a live performance, and that is the actual product Mid-America sells. 34:22 to 36:25 Mitch and James agree no speaker system replicates the resonance of hearing a choir in a cathedral or concert hall. James frames the company’s output as fundamentally human, not just musical: it involves people’s lives and what they want to accomplish, at a level a recording can’t touch. For operators, the point generalizes: an experience that can’t be reproduced or streamed is defensible in a way packaged content never will be.