Over thirty years in the events industry, professionally and as an amateur. Twelve years of Sonic EMS in active use. It was not designed in a workshop with sticky notes - it was built inside working venues, by someone doing the job it is meant to help with, and shaped ever since by the teams using it.
I have been in the events industry for over thirty years, professionally and as an amateur - village halls and school productions as much as touring shows and receiving houses. I came up through the entertainment side of it: live sound, lighting, production. I spent eighteen months as acting technical manager for a theatre, which is where most of this system comes from.
Every feature in Sonic EMS exists because one of those things went wrong, or nearly did. Event Health exists because the small forgotten things are what actually sink events - not the big obvious ones.
I still work in the industry. I run Sonic Sound UK, a sound and lighting hire and event production company in Somerset, and I am on the road with hire firms, producers and venues regularly. This is not a market I read about.
I served as a trustee of a professional receiving house - a producing and receiving theatre with a board, a budget, an auditor and all the obligations that come with charitable status.
That matters more than it might sound, because it means I have sat on your side of the table. I know what it is like to be asked to approve a software spend when the reserves policy is tight and the last system nobody used cost four figures a year. I know that a board wants to hear about supplier risk, data protection and exit arrangements, not feature lists.
It is also why Sonic EMS is priced the way it is. The established venue systems - Artifax, Yesplan, Momentus, Priava - are good products aimed at organisations with procurement departments. Most theatres in this country do not have one. They have a general manager doing four jobs and a board meeting once a quarter. Sonic EMS is built for those venues, deliberately.
Built for the venue with a general manager doing four jobs and a board meeting once a quarter.
The rest of my career has been in technology. I moved from production into IT, spent years as IT manager for a medical software company - a regulated environment where data handling, auditability and uptime are not negotiable - and I am now Head of IT and Data Protection Officer for a large motor retail group, running infrastructure, security and compliance across multiple sites and companies.
Venues hold personal data on staff, casuals, hirers, participants and often young people. It is treated accordingly - UK-hosted, backed up, exportable, with a documented lawful basis and retention position.
Per-role permissions and ACL templates exist because I have spent years enforcing least privilege for a living, not because a feature list demanded them.
Who changed what, when. Boards, auditors and awkward conversations all want the same thing.
Built the way an IT department would expect to find them, along with the rest of the unglamorous security work nobody puts on a brochure.
This is the part you cannot see from the outside, and it is the part your board will ask about.
The fair question to ask about software with a single named founder is what happens if that person is not there. Boards are right to ask it.
Sonic EMS is backed by Wolf Logic, a software company with full knowledge of the system and full access to it. They know the codebase, they can support and maintain it, and they can keep the platform running and customers looked after if I am unavailable - for a week or permanently.
You get the responsiveness of dealing directly with the person who built the thing, without your organisation depending on him being at his desk.
You are not buying from a sales team working from a script, and you are not buying from a hobby project either. You are buying twelve years of a system that has been used in real venues, built by someone who has run the technical department, sat on the board, and spent a career making sure systems do not fall over.
If something in Sonic EMS does not fit how your venue works, tell me. That is how most of it got here.
Andrew Samuel
Founder, Sonic EMS
Both are fine. There is no sales process to get through and nobody will chase you.