Nexstage Celebrates A Decade

10 years ago, frustrated by a lack of reliably excellent staging companies in The Festival State, a group of events and production professionals decided to start their own in Adelaide. The gap in the market they identified proved to be fruitful indeed, and the company grew exponentially. After the trials of the COVID years, they thrived again, and now Nexstage are celebrating a decade in business, looking back on their achievements while keeping a keen eye on growth and expansion.

Nextage’s General Manager Michael Scheid was at the helm of the company for the first four years and returned to the job in 2024. I sat down with him to discuss the creation and ethos of Nexstage, and where they’re heading in the next 10 years.

“We started Nexstage partly because Adelaide production company Novatech had been looking for a staging provider they could rely on,” relates Michael. “They just wanted everything to be in place; sturdy safe, engineered, ready to go, and presentable. When we formed Nexstage, it was with the same directors as Novatech, and the same overall direction, but run as separate companies.”

With Michael in place as General Manager, the first job was to get the business running. “We had a book of work that Jimmy Hewton-Lamph, our Operations Manager, had brought with him,” continues Michael. “We then grew from there, from our first season. We started in November 2016 and by the end of the next summer, we had doubled in size, and then we doubled again. The first few years were a wild ride!”

Nexstage’s wild ride extended way beyond SA, with shows in Perth, Darwin, Sydney, and Melbourne, as well as in Adelaide, all within 12 months. “Overseeing that kind of growth while making sure our systems, safety, and engineering developed and held together was quite the task,” admits Michael. “When a business grows that quickly, it’s a challenge to keep everything on track, making sure the crew are coming along for the ride and subscribing to our values. We put an emphasis on how we conduct ourselves and how we deal with our clients, and to maintain that culture, everybody needs to be on the same page. When we ballooned out to 80 staff over summer, systems to induct people quickly and safely had to be in place, to ensure that we kept delivering consistent results; consistency is the big win.”

After the years of pandemic restrictions receded and business slowly returned to normal, Nexstage’s relationships with their clients solidified, and took on a deeper form. “We’re regarded as a trusted partner now, rather than just a staging provider,” explains Michael. “We’re often brought in on the ground floor of client projects to help with design. Our skills are leaned upon when people are designing venues; we’ve recently been involved with an arts installation, consulting with them on their roof structure. We’re also a trusted partner at Adelaide Oval. We’ve had a lot of comments to the effect that customers can always rely on us, we’re always here, we always deliver, and we’ve never let anybody down.”

Continuing to grow means continuing to expand inventory, and one of the latest purchases is a 10 metre by six metre mobile trailer stage, joining two eight metre by six metre trailer stages already in stock.

“We invested in our first trailer stage for the Santos Tour Down Under, and that’s been in use for podium finishes at the race for the last six years,” confirms Michael. “For all of our trailer stages, we have multiple capabilities in terms of branding and signage to make them look completely different for every event. In their basic form, they’re an hour set up with two staff, which is a far cry from four staff in a truck with scaff and decks. They really hit the mark with small to mid-sized community level events. The new 10 by six stage is being deployed on gigs up to 8,000 pax at a much cheaper price point than traditional staging.”

“The general challenge in the staging space is making an affordable product that’s got impact, and that’s where the trailer stages shine,” continues Michael. “Cost effectiveness is the key, because everybody’s getting crunched. The whole industry’s feeling the pinch with the cost of tickets and other expenses. To get events actually making a buck at the end of the day, they need to be able to push costs down. We’ve got products that meet those demands. Labor’s the big thing; a trailer stage is a two person operation in about an hour to get them up and ready to go. We can also upscale them with scaff towers either side, signage, wings, and rear change-over; they’re really versatile.”

While the trailers find opportunity with sharp budgets, Nexstage are also working the premium end of the market. “We’ve got some huge sporting activations that we’re doing with LIV Golf,” says Michael. “We’ve incorporated a new engineered system of glass balustrading for premium VIP viewing platforms. That’s our IP that we’ve developed, and we’ve had the crowd loading certified. We do a lot of premium cladding and custom works, making turnkey solutions for our clients. We produce renders so clients can see what the end product will look like. We have our own in-house drafters and engineers that help put it all together.”

Taking stock of where they’ve been while considering where they’re going, Michael is sanguine; “We’ve gone through massive growth, we’ve gone through contraction, we’ve gone through rebirth after COVID, and we’ve re-engineered how we go about our delivery,” muses Michael. “We’re now a company that can deliver two decks for a corporate gig, right up to staging a major music festival, and service everywhere in between. We have people that can pivot into different sectors of the market, whether it be arts, sport, venues, or touring rock’n’roll, and deliver each with the same consistency.”

Now growing well beyond being an ‘Adelaide’ staging company, Nexstage are ready to take the obvious next step; “Part of our growth strategy is to branch out into other markets,” Michael divulges. “We’ve captured the local market really well, everybody knows us, and we’re well trusted. There’s a lot of tours that come to Adelaide that we’ve dealt with in different genres that wish that they could use us interstate. The next logical step for us is to take our product offering to the eastern states.”

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Main Pic: NORWOOD FOOD & WINE FESTIVAL – PHOTO CREDIT DAVID SOLM