Clay Sifford and the cost of getting there

Clay Sifford was passing through Atlanta on his way to London when he spotted an expensive piece of geography. A technician from Spokane, Washington, was working a six-day event in Georgia. Getting him there meant travel, accommodation, and time. Sifford knew the customer’s travel allowance would not cover the full cost. Somewhere in Atlanta, he believed, an equally capable person could have done the job.

The crew coordinator had filled the position. The show could proceed. The business had nevertheless paid for a journey it might have avoided. In an industry devoted to making everything happen on cue, the missing information had arrived fashionably late.

Sifford would later describe that encounter as the trigger for LASSO. Today he is its founder and CEO, building software for the companies and crews that produce live events. His starting point was wonderfully unglamorous: why were people making consequential staffing decisions without knowing who was nearby, available, and qualified?

A show can work while its economics don’t

Before software, Sifford ran productions. His earlier company, OVATION, supplied the technology and creative work behind complex live events. Its work extended around the world. Equipment, presentations, streaming, and people had to meet in the same place at the appropriate moment. Anyone who has tried to assemble a dinner party can appreciate the difficulty, although dinner guests rarely require a lighting console.

OVATION’s acquisition of Nashville’s Rabbit Hole Creative expanded its technical and creative capabilities. Sifford eventually stepped away from daily operations while retaining his founder’s interest. By 2017, managing director Shannon Durrett was independently leading that business, and Sifford was concentrating on LASSO.

The transition matters because it explains what he brought to software. He knew the customer’s predicament from inside the customer’s office. An event company could deliver an excellent experience while struggling to see the costs that made it possible. A successful performance and a profitable business were separate achievements, requiring different kinds of attention.

First, 350 conversations

Sifford’s account of LASSO’s beginnings includes an unusual piece of restraint. Before the first line of code, he spoke with more than 350 industry leaders. The point was to discover how widely the problem extended beyond his own company. A familiar frustration can feel universal when you are the person experiencing it; talking to other operators is a useful test.

Those conversations gave the product a constituency beyond the executive desk. Event businesses needed to connect scheduling with communication, onboarding, hours, travel, and pay. Moving one item neatly into a calendar would leave a good deal of the work untouched. The person booking a technician and the person processing that technician’s time needed a shared account of what had happened.

There is a revealing modesty in Sifford’s description of his original assumption: “I thought that we were solving a scheduling problem.” The company’s scope grew as he learned what the schedule was attached to. His own operating experience supplied the question. Other people helped establish how much of an answer was required.

The company inside the company

Another lesson came from examining how his production business engaged its workforce. An outside audit challenged assumptions about the people working across its many locations. Decisions about tools, schedules, and supervision carried implications that a booking sheet did little to explain. Understanding the work meant understanding the relationship with the worker.

This is a recurring concern in Sifford’s public conversations: operators need enough information to recognize what they are responsible for. People can work hard, care about their crews, and still inherit processes they have never properly examined. He includes his former self in that description. It makes his criticism less comfortable, and more useful.

LASSO’s 2021 acquisition of Intrinsic Meeting Solutions brought another part of the workforce equation into the business. Intrinsic supplied technical talent for events. Its addition expanded the crew marketplace, joining software for managing people with a larger pool of people available to work. Todd Walton, Intrinsic’s CEO, described the companies as sharing values and business philosophies.

Thirteen people, two cities, one awkward hiring problem

By May 2017, LASSO had 13 full-time employees. Eight worked in Nashville; the others were in the Atlanta area. A Vanderbilt engineering student was also interning with the team. The company had been registered in Tennessee in 2014 under the earlier name 4C Talent.

Sifford wanted customer success centered in Nashville, even while acknowledging Atlanta’s larger supply of experienced software workers. Finding people with the relevant background was difficult. The concern was practical: selling a system is one job; helping a customer change the way a business runs is another.

Angela Alea was already part of that effort as president and chief sales officer. Their partnership would become a visible part of LASSO’s public life. On Corralling the Chaos, the podcast Alea hosts, the questions frequently return to choices that happen far from the stage: how companies communicate, manage costs, and look after the crews whose work the audience sees without necessarily noticing.

Money for the work between shows

In November 2022, LASSO announced a $5 million Series A investment from McCarthy Capital’s Emerging Growth Strategy. It followed a $3 million seed round in December 2021. The company said the new money would support operations, product development, hiring, and expansion of its crew marketplace.

At the time, that marketplace covered 25 technical production positions in 25 US markets. The specificity is useful. A crew platform has to work at the level of actual jobs in actual places. A person available for a show in one city is not automatically an economical choice for a show across the country, as Sifford had already discovered.

The funding announcement also reported triple-digit growth during 2022 and LASSO’s inclusion in the Inc. 5000. These were company milestones, attached to a product with a less photogenic daily purpose: helping the people responsible for an event see what needs doing before it becomes an urgent telephone call.

Gaff tape has its limits

By 2023, Sifford’s conversations had expanded to inventory and logistics. The title of one podcast appearance invoked a familiar event-production implement: gaff tape. It is a useful material with an unreasonable number of applications. Running an entire information system is asking rather a lot of it.

The discussion examined slow proposals, fragmented tools, and the difficulty of getting a coherent picture of an operation. Switching software repeatedly could be a symptom of systems that failed to match the work. Sifford argued for tools that were intuitive, reflected daily workflows, and brought information together.

LASSO’s writing on hidden costs made the same concern concrete. Travel overages, disconnected applications, and manual payroll and billing could accumulate across events. A late truck could leave a paid crew waiting. The business problem was multiplication: an inconvenience repeated often enough becomes a material expense. Sifford’s interest in details makes sense in that arithmetic. The details are where the money goes.

“Shoflo was purpose-built for our industry.”

Clay Sifford, recalling his first encounter with Shoflo

A conversation that took seven years

In 2018, Sifford and Alea were walking the aisles at the National Association of Broadcasters show when they came across Shoflo’s booth. Its software helped producers manage a show’s running order and teleprompters. They saw a fit with their customers and raised the possibility of an acquisition. The timing did not work.

An investor helped reconnect the companies in August 2024. On June 18, 2025, LASSO announced that it had acquired Shoflo. The financial terms remained undisclosed. A chance trade-show encounter had become a transaction after years in which the original conversation could easily have remained a pleasant memory and a business card.

Shoflo extended LASSO into the running of the event itself. Project, crew, inventory, and financial management could sit alongside the live rundown and prompter. Sifford said the company would maintain and enhance Shoflo’s products. The acquisition made his ambitions more visible: he wanted the software to follow the work all the way into the show.

Back in Nashville, still asking

There is a life beyond the production schedule. Sifford is a Hampden-Sydney College alumnus from the class of 1994. His full name is John Claiborne Sifford. In 2017, he joined the college’s board of trustees; its fall 2025 magazine recognized him in the James Madison Society, which honors people who have completed a full trustee term.

His college biography also described work with the Young Presidents Organization, including co-chairing its London Business School program for fast-growing companies. Away from those responsibilities, it listed running, biking, fishing, snowboarding, and skiing among his interests. There is a pleasing range of speeds there. Fishing, at least, permits the occasional delay without requiring a revised run-of-show.

In July 2026, Sifford opened LASSO’s Saddle Up Summit at Virgin Hotels Nashville with a keynote called The New Era of Live Events. Customers tried LASSO Intelligence, introduced that May, using questions about their own operations. Sifford and Alea also took part in the closing question-and-answer session.

The tools have changed since the Atlanta encounter. The underlying question remains close to the one that bothered him then: can the person making a decision see what they need to know? For Sifford, the place to look is still behind the performance, among the people trying to get the next thing right.