You weren’t a wrestling fan before you started training. Did that bring any advantages?
I went in and immediately knew it was a form of entertainment. I never thought it was a sport, I never had to fight to show how real wrestling is, like when you see a trainee put up a picture of the rope burns on his back or the chops on his chest. That’s a cry to tell people “Wrestling is tough, wrestling is real, wrestling [gets people] injured” whereas I never fell victim to that mistake. I think if you treat it as a sport you’ll fall away and you won’t understand how to entertain people properly. If you treat it as an entertainment business, you’ll go much further. That’s just my opinion and I’m not in WWE, so people who are in WWE know a lot more than me.
The rules [in wrestling] aren’t different. Something I still hear nowadays is “the business”, everybody calls it “the business” as if it’s something special and something different from normal business. If you treat it as a normal business and set yourself a price, like an electrician does, like a plumber does, you’ll never drop below that price because an electrician or a plumber wouldn’t. But if you treat it as “the business”, you’ll negotiate and you’ll go up and go down and devalue yourself and not see yourself as a product.
How should you move from being a trainee to getting paid?
I would say to people that you work for free for your home training promotion for as long as you feel you are still training. So for me, Irish Whip Wrestling was my home promotion, the first place I ever got inside a ring and therefore I worked for them, I think the first year and a half, I worked completely for free, never asked for money, money was never discussed. As I became more useful, rather than being useful in a wrestling sense, which I never was the best at that, I became useful because I became a ring man, so I was able to charge for setting up the ring, taking it down, storing it, and from that, I was then able to increase my charge to include wrestling as well. This was decided by the promoter I was wrestling for, a chap called Simon. He was the one who decided “Listen, there’s an extra twenty quid in your pay packet because we did well that night.”
That’s how I started to get paid and once that promoter sets that precedent of giving you twenty quid once, that now becomes your wage if you accept it. Once you start getting paid you make sure that you never ever lose money on a job. Once you start getting paid, you’ve now finished your apprenticeship. You’re not a professional wrestler yet, because it’s not paying your rent, but you are a working wrestler. You’re a person who needs to keep everything sound for the other guys. You need to make sure you’re not screwing anyone over with your price being too low, so I would say minimum wage you should be working for in this country is £30. Some people will say it’s too low, some people will say it’s too high, but to me that’s the minimum you should be working for.
Of course £30 is right around the National Minimum Wage for the three or four hours you need to be at the building.
That’s the thing. This is rule one of normal business, not “the business”. I’m now a manager of a chemical and solvent company and the most important thing is that you’re not selling your product at a loss. And so Rihanna doesn’t go on stage and spend thirty grand on staging and sell twenty grand of tickets; she spends twenty grand on staging and sells thirty grand of tickets. It’s real simple business stuff and you have to make sure you apply the rules of normal business to yourself.
Though there are some times when that rule won’t work. For example, when I first worked for 1PW, they contacted me and said “Manson we’re interested in using you; let me know if you’re in the Doncaster area.” So I looked up online, saw he had the first anniversary show on and I said “Oh Stephen, I’m actually over visiting my friend G-man who lives in Nottingham and I’m free on the Saturday, what are the chances of that?” And he said OK, come along to the show and we’ll get you on.
So I lied. I said I was going to be in Doncaster, I booked myself a flight there and then which cost me about £60 return, so I took a chance. I invested £60 on possibly making a loss. I got there, I acted up nicely, I did lots of meet and greet with fans, I was good in the locker room, I was generally a nice person to be around. It’s all an act, but that’s part of what I did. At the end of it he said that’s great, I really liked what you did, here’s the cheque. The cheque was for £150. So I took the chance, I invested £60 in getting there, and I got back £150. I took a risk and it paid off, but I was willing to take that £60 risk because I was sure that my act would catch on for that promotion. I broke my own rule, which is always making a profit, and it turned out to prove the rule because I made a profit!
How do you go about setting a price?
With promoters who are ex-wrestlers or current wrestlers, you can’t really bullshit your price on them. They know your price or thereabouts. For example, my price in general was sixty quid and near the end was eighty or a hundred quid. For the boys, if I’m working for T-Bone or Dave Mastiff or Ligero, they’d know I’d get into that ring and dick around for £60, therefore they’d offer me £60. And I’d take it and there’d be no problem.
But when you get joebloggs@gmail.com contact you and says “Hi Mad Man Manson, do you want to work on my show on this date at this working man’s club in this place”, I’d look around and say “Does this guy exist?” I’d Google him and say “I’ve never heard of ABC Wrestling” so I’ll get back to him and say £120, but I also say “I live with T-Bone, I travel with him, his price is £120. I can also provide you with…” and give a list of the people I represented at the time, guys like Stixx, El Ligero, girls like Jetta, all that gang. I’d get us together because we’d do a bit of price fixing. It’s looked down on in some business as more of a cartel, but you need to fix prices, you need to look after yourself, you need to look after the interests of people around you.
If I’d not done that and just said “Yep, great I’ll work for £120; Here’s my mate T-Bone’s email” and then T-Bone says “Yep, it’s £100”, I’ve fucked myself because they’ll pick him over me, but I’ve also fucked him because I know I could have got him £120. That’s an old example by the way, because now T-Bone’s way over my level, and he’s working for big money for the fucking yanks!
Mastiff was always good for that. If he could a good booking, he’d put the word out to all of us and say “Listen, there’s this shitbox promoter, I’ve given him your email and I’m charging £150.” So he’s not telling us what to charge, he’s telling us what he’s charging. Because in my mind I’m not as good and never will be as good as Dave Mastiff, so if Dave’s charging £150, I’ll say right, I’m charging £120. The reason being that I’m not fucking him by charging £30 and I’m not fucking myself by asking for £400. That was the basics of price fixing: it seems like a negative way to explain it but I don’t have a positive word or phrase. I guess I’d just say “valuing ourselves.”
Don’t make money a fucking taboo subject. I was more than happy to talk about money in front of everyone, talk about money backstage and be very candid because in business that’s what you do anyway. Everyone here in my office know what we pay for these solvents and they know what we sell them on to customers for. There’s no surprise about these things. In wrestling there used to be this absolute secrecy about ‘we can’t talk about what we get paid’. Nonsense. Talk about money, talk about it with your friends, with your trainer in particular. If your trainer is half good, he’ll know all these things.
Is there a balance between squeezing as much as possible out of a new promoter and making sure they still make a profit so there’ll be more shows to work on in the future?
This is where myself and Dave Mastiff, who’s one of my best mates, have different opinions. Dave takes the stance that all the people within the business must protect the business, whereas I take the stance that all the people in the business must take as much as they can and pay their rent that month. So mine is a selfish view, Dave’s is more of a benevolent view and it’s a better view. Dave is one of the reasons the scene is so good at the moment, whereas I’m one of the reasons I once bought a car based on one promoter paying me.
For me, take as much as you can get where you can get it because nobody will care about you when you’re gone. It’s selfish, but 90 percent of it is true. Dave’s way of looking at things is if we all improve the scene together, we all grow together, we all make money together, and everything goes well together. Dave’s predictions are coming true: the scene is better than it was five years ago. There are more places for the boys to work, some of the boys are doing unbelievable business worldwide, I’m talking about Scurll, Ospreay, Pete Dunne, those guys are doing crazy business and it’s because they have an unselfish attitude to wrestling. They work really fucking hard, they always give 100% even when the show is shit. I used to give about 70 percent; if the show was shit, I used to give about 20 percent. That’s my own failing as a performer, but that is what I chose to do and as a result I’ve never been injured.
That was the two different stances on “take all you can get because the promoter might fuck off tomorrow.” If you ever look at my previous history of results, I worked for lots of promotions you have never fucking heard of and you will never hear of because they only did one show and we took all their money and we fucked off with it. That’s the two schools of thought: both have merits, but nothing in wrestling, because wrestling is entertainment, is right or wrong
How should new promoters make the right impression?
Just spell things correctly, sign off correctly. This is basics of business. It should say “Dear Mr Manson, my name is John Lister and I’m running XYZ promotions, I’m running on this date at this venue.” Don’t make the wrestler have to work and say “Yes, what date? Yes, where is it?” Give them all the information and maybe drop some names if you want to protect yourself as a promoter. If you can say “I’ve got Doug Williams on my show”, it makes me feel a bit better that this is going to be a good show. It makes me feel that it’s going to be a legitimate show because you’ve got a legitimate guy on there. Don’t say “Our championship belt is going to be made out of the purest finest gold and we’re going to have six ladder matches and a cage match.” Treat me like a professional and I’ll get back to you like a professional. I’ve ignored lots of emails over the years because I’ve had no faith in the writer of the email. I didn’t think they’d have insurance or any of that nonsense.
What should you do if you take a booking and then get offered another job on the same day that either pays more or offers better exposure?
Stick with the first one. That sounds different to what I was saying before because it sounds like an unselfish move, but I think it’s really important that if you commit to something — and that’s with anything in life — if you make a commitment, you honour the commitment, even if you get a better offer elsewhere. The only difference to that is something like WWE where you’re going to get a serious wedge out of it.
But you can always go back to the original promoter and discuss it with him. So let’s say you’re working for Southside Wrestling: good promotion, you get decent money, decent exposure and you have a good time. But all of a sudden ICW or Progress are doing a show. They are a step ahead of Southside: nothing to do with the quality of content, it’s just where they have got to in the world. I’d got back to Ben and say ‘listen mate, I’ve got this opportunity elsewhere, I really want to take it, would it be OK with you?’ Do it in a nice way.
He might say no, in which case you’ve got a decision to make. You can dick him and make your move elsewhere, in which case, you’re probably not going to get booked by him again. But I would always stick with my regulars. I have sacked off shows in the past for a big money single booking, but most promoters understand that. With [Preston City Wrestling’s Stephen] Fludder, a couple of times I had to pull off his shows to do some shitbox promotion. I just said to him “Fludder, these cunts are offering me £200″ and he said ‘You’d be mad not to take it’ because I was honest with him, I was straight with him. Don’t do the old injury gimmick and then you turn up on the results of the other show: that’s a bad way to do it. But I would honour my first booking unless I knew the promoter would be understanding and would accept what I’m talking about.
How should you go about raising your standard fee?
I’d say “Hey Ben, my price as of January next year is going up to £50. Really hope we can keep working together. I will of course honour all bookings you’ve given me to date.” So if you’ve taken a a booking at a price, never ever try to wince the price up higher: that’s a crazy thing to do and you’ll make enemies that way. You accept the booking at the price and then say “As of this January my price has got to get up.” People understand these things: this is business after all. You might lose some bookings, absolutely, but if you’re working for more than four or five promotions, all those extra tenners will cover the ones you lost from the first promotion.
What tips do you have for social media?
I find it extremely embarrassing and cringeworthy when I see someone on Facebook with their real name but all their status updates are embarrassing things like “Man, I can’t believe Stixx beat me for the championship.” By all means have a gimmicked Facebook or Twitter account or whatever social media saying “I can’t believe Damien Dunne beat me tonight, I’m going to get him next week.” Great, you’re pushing the gimmick and hopefully mentioning when the show is on. That’s what you’ve got to do. But don’t embarass yourself (on your personal account) because later on it will be a picture of you and Damien Dunne at the services together having a great time.
Look at how Spud does it. Absolutely brilliant. His normal one as James is talking about wrestling, having a good time, not embarassing himself. His Twitter one is worked, in character, absolutely brilliant. It’s not too cringey, not too over the top, but well within character. That goes to show that’s someone who thinks about his character, who thinks about his gimmick 24 hours a day, that’s all he thinks about in life.
