Opening Minds of Close-Minded Customers

Business Brain, episode 490 for Casual Friday, October 6, 2023. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take a topic or three, we crunch on it, we analyze it, we cogitate on it, we discuss it so that we can tune our business brains, yours, mine, Shannon's. We tune our business brains together so that we can each keep living that charmed life. Sponsors for this episode include my email, provider of choice, fastmail.com businessbrain. That's where you can go to get 10% off your first year. We'll talk more about that in a little bit here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out here in Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. How goes it?

It comes and it goes, you know, every day. It keeps on trucking. Yeah, man, that's great.

Hey, so I was at a pretty large convention this weekend. Topic is irrelevant to my, you know, what I want to talk about. And one of the things that happened at this event was that we all got a chance to vote on kind of of the, the platform and the underlying reason why this group existed. And it was fascinating to me. So I, I wasn't involved in how that the information was presented that we were voting on, but I was right there when I was involved in how it was received.

And sure. Yeah, you had. It sounds like you were a recipient of it.

In fact, I was a recipient and so I had kind of been eased into it. I'd been talking to people that had been, you know, reaching out to me before this, this convention took place.

Sure.

And so I had some sense of the.

Why. You were educated on it. Yeah.

And I also to, to put it out there. I love change it. It's exciting for me. I get bored really quick. I always say I have adhd, you know, for related to business and other things. So for me, I was like, this is great. This is something new. We can try it out. So, so that, that was my framework going in.

But that's because you come into things with the two week test mindset. Yes. Right.

That's exactly where I'm headed.

Okay.

Because. Yeah, because that, the, the major. I could just see it the minute this whole thing came up, even before we got in the room, there was a lot of significant confusion about why we were voting on this and what it would mean. Why change it? Why change? Yes. And I, I watched the, the folks that presented this new, these new options to this group try to explain it. And I walked away. And it did not pass. No surprise.

Okay.

It failed, you know, 65 to 35.

Oh, that's huge. That's a huge, huge. Yeah, yeah, huge.

And I really, as I left and I started talking to some of the sponsors of these changes, I said, you know, I think one of the problems is that it was just too much to take in at once. It's too much change. It was an entire reframing and changing of nomenclature and the way the words in this, in this thing we were voting on versus making small incremental changes over time. And using your two week experiment trick, that framework, it would have gone much better and it really hit home and I'd never seen it in a loud, almost hostile crowd because they were so upset that someone was taking away, wanting to take away and change something they had worked on for years, decades. If you. And it was not. The key is not that the change was that broad, that they were such dramatic changes. It was, it was the way it was presented.

Yeah.

So if you have something you're going to roll out with your employees or your customers, you know, bringing them along a little at a time, making sure that you explained the, the reasoning behind it, taking their feedback op, you know, doing certain things, little pieces of it with this, hey, we're going to try this for two weeks and see how it works. If, if you want to get this thing done and in your head, you know, hey, this is permanent by the end. Yes, this is going to happen. This massive change to the way we do things is going to ha going to happen. But if you want to get that buy in that you need for it to be successful, you, you need to think about how you roll it out and you know, go to businessbrain show and search for the word change because we've done a bunch of episodes.

I'll put a link in the show notes for that search, in fact. Yeah, of course.

One of the reasons we keep talking about it over time is because it's so important to the success of your business and for you personally, is to get people on board to adopting your framework.

In the immortal words of Neil Peart, change is not permanent. Changes aren't. I'll get it right this time. Changes aren't permanent, but change is. All right, look, one of the things that we can do to ensure we keep living that charmed life is to have a reliable email provider. Right? And this is important for our businesses here. And it's not just reliability that we need, it's a provider that has the features that we need and a provider that puts our privacy first. And that's why I am so happy to to have Fast Mail on board as our sponsor this week. For over 20 years, Fast Mail has been a leader in email privacy. It's ad free and there's no tracking. And they've been around 20 years. I've been using Fast Mail for my primary email for probably about five years now. You can improve your email productivity with features that they have using things like masked email so that you can create an address that you use for a certain purpose, but that and it's not there as just like your main address being out in the world. You can use scheduled send. My gosh, we've talked about the value of that here on the show. Fastmail supports it natively. You can snooze emails. You can build these custom rules. Fast Mail understands that email needs to be simple. And speaking of, switching providers is super simple. With Fast Mail's easy import and export, I migrated over from my Google accounts and I just gave it the login for my Google accounts. Like, I went to Fast Mail's web interface, gave it the login, went to sleep and woke up the next morning and all my email had been imported from my Google accounts. I was ready to go. You can use your own domains to make custom email addresses and then you can customize Fast Mail in so many different ways. To learn more about their service, visit fastmail.com businessbrain for 10% off your first year. And then you can follow them on like Facebook and Twitter X Mastodon and LinkedIn. Again, fastmail.com businessbrain for 10% off and our thanks to Fast Mail for sponsoring this episode. All right, we on a different podcast, I do Giggab, which we did a crossover episode. You know, we did that crossover episode of Gig Gab and Business Brain here because we talked about the business of running a band. I think we did it with the wrong episode, Shannon, because last week we interviewed a guy on Gig Gab, this guy, Adam Moskowitz, who has really systematized the business of running his band. And I'll put a link in the show notes for anybody that wants to listen to it. Whether you are a musician or even like music or not. I think you're going to find that fascinating. But that's not why I bring this up. I bring it up all right, Because Adam wrote into us and he says, I was recently interviewed on Gig Gab discussing how I run my band as a business utilizing a model that's unique for this part of the music industry, but that I'm Taking best pack best practices from the theater industry. Typically, he says, a Broadway show has a cast, but all major roles have what they call understudies. That way the show and therefore the business is not reliant on any one individual and cannot be canceled since there's a backup for each role, he says. I have used that philosophy to to build and run my regional music band business and it's been very fruitful to embrace. The band that he runs is a function kind of COVID wedding band. They play songs that other people wrote, cover songs and they'll play corporate functions, events like town fairs and those sorts of things, weddings, that kind of thing, he says. Similar similarly, sports teams have more players than they need for any one game, a deep bench, if you will, they can pull from for different types of situations that arise. It's out of the ordinary for what people typically know a band to be. And I sometimes get pushback from booking agents that are closed minded about the possibilities that this arrangement allows. They just see different faces in my photos and videos and don't understand how we can possibly be great with a rotating cast. Some pros are that we've never had to say no to a date. We've also never had to cancel a show. I can always find a replacement even with less than 24 hours notice, he says, which has happened a handful of times. But he explained on the show that he has for every position in the band, he's got essentially a bench of four players deep. So you know, he calls his first call or maybe, and maybe he doesn't even have a first call. But you know, call his first call bass player. If that person's not available, no problem, just call the second person on the list. They're all up to date. And the system that he has built for ensuring that everyone that shows up to play the gig with him is playing the same arrangement of the songs with all the lyrics. He's got teleprompters, he's got this whole. It's more than that though. It's crazy how he has built these tracks that that guide the band through the songs, making sure everything's at the right tempo. It's no wonder that he's able to put on a great show every time. So he asks do you have any advice on how to convert those with a fixed mindset to my new way of thinking or am I better off expecting them to stay as they are and focusing my energy on new connections that understand the growth mindset? So really, yeah, the question here is how to Open the minds of closed minded customers.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. I, I like this concept and, and I like the way I wish the.

Wedding band that I played in operated under this concept because it would, it would actually alleviate my stress. If I have to say no to a gig now, it means the band probably isn't going to be able to play or if they do, they've got to rehearse with a new drummer. If it was Adam's band, I'd just be like, well, yeah, go get number two. Great. Now if I say that enough, number two becomes number one. You know, there's that risk too but you know, that's how it works. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that the, I think the key is perhaps is in one of the ways he explained it where he really. They're really a band of professionals. He explained it as a pro sports team, but he's a band of professionals as such. We have this so, so that, that, that's the way I would frame it. But one question I have is do they have to know? Do people care? Are they going to see a specific now lead singer or guitarist to see this band?

The only person that's the same is Adam. He plays guitar in this band. Now in theory he could replace himself too. In addition to being the guitar player though, he is the music director. So he is essentially conducting the show. So he would need to bring someone in who could conduct that show for him. But I mean it's trainable I think. And I mentioned this on a follow up episode on Gigab. I think this is a concept, right. I love it for franchising. I, you know, because he's already built so much of these tracks and guide. It's really guide tracks with lyrics and chords and a click track in the, in the player's ears so that everybody's on the same page. And the click track isn't just a click. It'll say all right, we're going to play Superstition by Stevie Wonder next in the key of E flat. Here's the count in is going to be four. It starts with drums. 1, 2, 3, 4. Drums, 2, 3, 4. Keys, 2, 3, 4. And the keys are in like it guides you through, says where the choruses are, where the verses are. It's amazing. But it keeps the prep time for any musician that comes in. If they are a pro, they need very little prep time because everything is just spoon fed. Yeah. Why wouldn't it be like this isn't. You're. You're going and playing songs other People wrote for an audience that isn't there to see your band. They're there to be entertained, and you guarantee that. So I. I really think that, yeah, the marketing of this is the key. Now, one way to do that is to obscure the fact that there are different members every time by. By maybe making the pictures and the videos. I don't want to say blurring faces, Right. Like, you need to be more creative about it than that, but.

Well, maybe you got to go with kind of the caricature type of logo and. And for your. Your promotional material and your website where you have a, you know, kind of a more vague image of what. Who's playing guitar and drums and that kind of thing.

Yeah.

And. And then I think you go one of two ways. You just don't mention it because it becomes irrelevant because you're. You're so professional, or. Which I like better. Turning that weakness into, you know, a strength of why this works. And to your point, trying to, you know, expand beyond your local market to get other people to use this technique. I think it's a great idea.

Yeah. It's brilliant. Yes. He was expl. To us. I was like, oh, man. Like, this is. He put a lot of work into creating these tracks, right? But now he says they play. You know, they'll play every weekend. They play a new song. Some. Probably multiple times in. In some weekends, I would assume. He says they play a new song at almost every show. No cover band that I know of does that because, you know, you got five people, six people. You get them together, you learn all the songs. It's like, okay, great, we've got 40 songs. Let's go. We're ready to rock. He's got, like, 150 songs, and every gig, he builds a new one. He says it takes him about an hour to build the new song, and then he just tells the people who are on the gig, learn, you know, this song. He builds it all, and then he just triggers it from his laptop as from the stage, and everybody's got the guides. It's brilliant.

Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I like it. And I think that it's all in how you present it. I like, you know, this caricature idea.

I mean, you know, if you take the theater idea, I mean, you could put people in wigs or you could just say every.

Every musician has an understudy. So you'll be, you know, going a little further with that theater thing. Every one of our band has an understudy, so. So there will never be Someone that's not there, that doesn't know how everything works. We're one of the few bands.

Oh, there you go.

Maybe. Maybe the only band you'll book that has an understudy for every position in the band. Now, does it matter that there's three or four understudies or whatever that he moves around? I don't think so.

No, of course it doesn't matters. Yeah, yeah.

What matters is it's super professional. But most, and I'm going to speculate here, I would imagine that most, those kind of bands maybe aren't run as professional as a business, or the ones.

That are do this anyway. Now, they don't have the guide tracks that Adam does, but they. You know, it's not uncommon at all for, like, I play in this band called Uptown Celebration. It's. It's. It's this kind of band. We play weddings and functions. We very rarely play just like, public gigs at clubs because they don't pay what this band wants to make. And we showed up at a person's house that played a private party this summer for him. And I got there, our band leader was already there. He was kind of coming out of the backyard as I was sort of walking in, and the owner of the house came up to me and said, hey, you know, thanks for being. I'm like, yeah, I'm Dave. I'm the drummer. Thanks for having us. It's great to be here. And he moved on. And then Gary, our leader and guitar player, came up to me and he's like, yeah, by the way, you aren't meeting him for the first time. We played for him, you know, six years ago before you joined the band. And he doesn't know that we've changed out any members. And I'm like, great, perfect. I'm like, did I say anything wrong? He's like, no, if you did, I would have nudged you. I'm like, okay, got it. Yep, all good. And, you know. And like, it didn't matter. I knew we were going to put out a good product, but there's no reason for the client to know that there's a replacement or a sub or whatever. Like the gig we had played the weekend before. What? Our bass player was sick. So we had a bass player that none of. Well, one of us had met. It was the brother of our singer, but none of the rest of us had ever met. And certainly we'd never played with this guy before. He showed up, he prepped all the songs. Now he had to do the work to prep them. And then he, you know, he. He rocked it. He was great. And the client never knew. In fact, unless they can deduce what gig I'm talking about, they still don't know because it's not relevant. So I think that's the. That's the thing that, that Adam needs to embrace here, is that these people are only obsessed about it because you're telling them. Now, if your videos are communicating this and you're. And they're going to find out, then to your point, Shannon, you've got to lead with this and make it a strength. And I think so. We're the only manual book that has an understudy for every position. I mean.

Yeah.

What more do you need to say? Reliable.

Yeah. Everybody knows. Yeah.

Yeah. You're not a band of subs. That's the. Don't call them subs because they're not subs. You have a band of.

They're understudies.

They're understudies. Yeah. Great.

I love it.

I love it.

Great idea. I like the. You know, it's an interesting concept because in business, often, especially as you're growing, people get used to dealing with one person all the time.

Yep.

And it can become problematic when you're like, okay, that. And maybe it's you. Or, you know.

Yeah.

That you're moving to another role or offloading the client to someone else that can better serve them. So getting your customers used to having other people interface with them is important.

And, you know, with. With it, with this concept, with the band, get some testimonials from people who have booked the band multiple times that, that speak to this. Right. Like, oh, it's. I love Van. Van it. Everyone that they've brought is fantastic. The show is always high quality. It doesn't matter. You know, like when people go see Wicked on Broadway, they don't say, well, you only want to go see it if it's all the principals, not the understudies. It's not going to happen. You don't know until you show up. It shows up in your program long after you've paid for a ticket. So. Yeah.

So good stuff.

I like it. Yeah, man. It's great stuff. Thanks for that, Adam. Good stuff. And you, Adam, are entered into a drawing to win a new MacBook Air. Maybe it's something if you win it, you'd use on stage, folks. Feedbackusinessbrain Show. Email us there your questions, your comments if we include them in the show in any way. You are entered into this drawing. 10 more episodes. We will be doing that drawing for the MacBook Air and you could be the winner of the pool is smaller than you think. I mean, you could do the math. You know how many we've mentioned in.

The shows Y it's the in your favor.

Absolutely. Yep. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for sending in your stuff too. Again, feedback, businessbrain show. Keep living that charmed life and have a great weekend. We'll see you next week.