SHE started her working life at the Edinburgh Fringe 18 years ago, as an assistant making tea, answering phones and typing venue listings into the organisation's one antique computer.
Yesterday Kath Mainland was named the festival's new chief executive and will take up the post in May.
Embarrassing technical failures at the box office have angered public and performers, seen the abrupt departure of her predecessor and left
the organisation nearly half a million pounds in debt.
A native of Orkney, whose qualifications include a post-graduate accounting course, Ms Mainland is currently administrative director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
She spoke of her passion for the Fringe yesterday, saying she was no "after-dinner speaker" artistic visionary, but knew how to manage people and budgets.
She set one long-term goal yesterday, saying the Fringe must grow its audience to keep pace with the ever-growing number of performers who make their way to Edinburgh.
The Fringe has roughly doubled in size every ten years. With more than 2,000 shows last year it has 14 full-time staff compared with five when she worked there in 1991.
"I think that needs to be a real focus. It seems to be that there is an unending appetite to take work here. What we need to ensure is that the audience can build, otherwise it's the same butter spread more thinly."
Possible strategies include growing the "cross-over" audience by encouraging people to go to more than one of the Edinburgh festivals, and drawing more people in from Glasgow and the surrounding regions. Local people do not need extra beds in a city where accommodation is in short supply.
Ms Mainland made it clear she would not try and direct Fringe content. "The absolute strength the Fringe is that it's open access and that anybody can take part from anywhere in the world. We have to create an environment where it's possible for anyone to take part."
Audiences must be kept well informed and reassured, she said, with systems that "function beautifully" with a "solid and robust" box office. She has worked before with the Red61 company, setting up new box office systems.
Ms Mainland and Fringe officials insist the signs are already good this year, despite a 10 percent fall in ticket sales last summer.
Extra visitors from Homecoming 2009, the fall in the pound for overseas tourists, a joint festivals marketing strategy, and a high number of people applying early for programme information all bode well, they say.
Ms Mainland has worked at a senior level with major Scottish festivals from the Assembly Rooms venue to Edinburgh's Hogmanay.
"What's needed at this time for the Fringe is administration and management and organisation and I think that's what I have. I'm not an after-dinner speaker or figurehead."
The former Fringe director Paul Gudgin said: "She's someone who will enjoy a lot of confidence and I think she's someone who pulls people together."
Tommy Sheppard, director of the Stand and a Fringe board member, called her "an exceptionally strong candidate" who was both a new broom and knew the city and the city and funding environment intimately.
BACKGROUNDKATH Mainland spent five years working at the Fringe office in the early 1990s after studying at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde.
She moved on to become a freelance theatre and festival producer for eight years, including stints as general manager at the Assembly Rooms, a major Fringe venue, and production co-ordinator for Edinburgh's Hogmanay. Other events ranged from the Burns And A' That festival to the opening of Harvey Nichols.
In 2005 she became administrative director at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
While the Fringe is expected to break even this year, the tasks confronting her will include raising corporate or public funds to help pay off a historic deficit of £4-500,000 blamed on box office problems.
Other tasks include navigating the historic rivalries between big, multi-theatre Fringe venues and small operators, and rows which erupted last year over the new Edinburgh Comedy Festival.
