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Last Friday night my wife and I took the kids to see Ed Sheeran at Wembley.

It’s been three years since we saw him there, this was to celebrate the end of my eldest daughters GCSE exams.

We were separated into two groups, the boys and the girls as we went with two friends. Myself, Callum and Shaun (he talks on our Business Course) got to be in the boy’s end which turned out to be near the hospitality seats.

The thing about coming back for a second time meant I was able to see things a little bit differently whilst watching.

I spend no time during concerts videoing them and never will when I go to events like this. I’d rather have the memories in my own head and get the full experience.

Almost everybody else around me videoed though.

The thing that struck me about watching it was how things have changed for Ed Sheeran during the time I’ve been going to see him.

It’s years ago since I saw him in Nottingham do his biggest gig to date at the Nottingham Ice Arena on Halloween where he was dressed up as Chucky.

That night it was all about him doing what he wanted, he would have played the same track twice if the audience had shouted it; he could have probably have done tracks in the order that you wanted depending on what he thought was working.

He could have changed the set up list 7 times and just shouted to his sound booth that he was doing something different.

He couldn’t do that on Friday night.

Ed Sheeran has an amazing ability to make people feel like they’re still in a pub listening to him when he plays a stadium, but the truth is it’s manufactured and strictly controlled; they know exactly what time he will be walking off stage.

More than that the light show behind him needs to be carefully coordinated with the sound guys, it’s all pretty much controlled by the guys in the booth. There is no way he can change his set list because 1,000 people working back stage are expecting that set list.

The set list is published online before he does the show.

The old Ed, the Ed with smaller organisation and the one that could move box cleverly could move the set list whenever he wanted. Ed Sheeran INC has to stay between the lines.

Please don’t get me wrong, he does a great job of doing that. The show again was quite amazing but I wonder how much it upsets him that he struggles to freestyle or perhaps he just goes and does a show somewhere else as a random.

Same for the rest of us though, when we work with big companies we have to stay between the lines because the lines are there for everybody. When we work for a small company we get to blur the lines to step outside them any time we want.

There are pros and cons to both, and ideally it would be fantastic to have the opportunity to jump from one circle to the other.

Blog post number: 1677