Common Time

What

Common Time works across the full live performance ecosystem: venues, events, and the systems that connect them.

That includes cultural infrastructure, festivals and touring, major events, governance, funding, operating models, and commercial partnerships. If the work involves artists, audiences, buildings, money, or risk, it is in scope.

The focus is on making live performance less fragile. Better venues are useless without compelling activity. Great events fail without the right places, structures, and agreements underneath them.

Common Time helps clients align those elements so ideas can move from ambition into delivery, and then survive once the doors are open.

How

Common Time provides independent, senior-level advice on live performance projects that sit between creative ambition, public accountability, and commercial reality.

The work spans both sides of the equation: shaping places that can be operated over decades, and shaping programmes and events that justify their existence.

• Venue strategy, operating models, pricing, and long-term sustainability
• Event and festival strategy, portfolio design, and content attraction
• Business cases, feasibility testing, and investment logic
• Governance, decision-making frameworks, and stakeholder alignment
• Public–private partnerships and co-investment models
• Operational problem-solving during delivery, transition, and pre-opening

The role is to test assumptions hard, expose trade-offs early, and help clients make decisions that still hold once audiences arrive and pressure is applied.

Who

Common Time is led by Gus Sharp.

His work spans major civic venue developments, national event portfolios, touring and festival delivery, governance reform, and long-term commercial arrangements. That includes taking large capital projects from construction into operation, leading multi-venue sales and planning teams, and advising on event investment at both council and government level.

The background combines senior operational leadership, commercial negotiation, governance experience, and legal training. That mix allows the work to move comfortably between strategy, detail, and delivery.