2B or not 2 B2C
On Thursday I did what I suspect was one of my last ever stand-up gigs. I'm not sure when the absolute last one will be but it's fair to say that I have many more gigs behind me than ahead. It was a pleasant enough show run by an old comedy friend in a country pub. My set went well but it's a long time since a gig felt like a portal to anywhere special and in the five years I've been learning this craft my life, especially my business life, has moved on.
This was crystalised for me by a throwaway line in a podcast about the 90's Dotcom boom. The discussion centred on the two basic business models operating at that time:-
Business-to-Consumer (B2C) versus Business-to-Business (B2B)A distinction that perfectly illustrates the divide between my comedy and my consulting. It is the divide between Art and Commerce. As much as I like to think I have something to say to other individuals (B2C, Art), I have twenty plus years evidence that what the cosmos wants to reward me for are my insights into how companies operate and how they could do so better (B2B, Commerce).
Set out in print it's obvious. I am a journeyman comic who's happy to pick up a few quid for a twenty minute set in the back room of a pub in rural Wiltshire but I am also one of the highest paid consultants in my field with clients all over the globe. My ability to make a few punters laugh on a Saturday night is passable whereas the effect I will have on your pharmaceutical sales/marketing operation is unsurpassed.
From an early age it seems as if we're programmed to aim first for Art. My parents stumped up for lessons in music and drama and art. They spend their weekends ferrying me and my sisters to performances on stage and sporting fields across rural NSW. Yes, I know that a child's participation in sport or art is its own reward but buried in there somewhere in there was the message that if I had the talent then Art (including sport) was the direction my life should take. How many conversations have we each endured with disillusioned friends and colleagues revealing that they were actually 'quite good' at some Art or other, lamenting the day they threw it over in favour of the financially secure embrace of Commerce?
Commerce is Plan B.
In generations past Art was something that you did on the side. Few people could afford to give up their day jobs. Nowadays new media's appetite for 'content' has led to rampant inflation in the earnings of our top sportsmen (but not sportswomen), actors, comics and the like. Papers and magazines responded by overpaying snarky columnists to retain readers. Needing something or someone evermore 'outrageous' to write about they in turn opened the door for the BritArt master branders like Tracey Emin and especially Damien Hirst to parlay scarcely deserved notoriety into massive financial windfalls. For a chosen few Art now pays like never before. The rest of us stand, necks craned, on the far side of the velvet rope.
I've suffered ferocious writers block with my comedy for almost two years. It's gotten so bad that in the cause of generating interesting and unique material I've contemplated taking on some strange, arduous new experience like the Three Peaks challenge, the Alpha Course or fatherhood. This is what middling comics do when they've extracted all available humour from their upbringing and neighbourhood. Yet my experiences as a stand-up have helped take my consulting to another level. Not only has my ability to command attention in a room been strengthened but my arduous experiences in comedy have also afforded any number of interesting and unique angles as a consultant. Oh, the irony.
I am a quite exceptional marketing consultant and an entirely unexceptional stand-up comic. My talents obviously lie in B2B. Why is it so hard to admit this fact? When I meet someone at a party why do I want to describe myself as a performer and writer rather than as 'a marketing consultant who helps drug companies sell their drugs better'?
What isn't to be just isn't to be. I think I'm sufficiently free of self-delusion to know that I'm not just one more stand-up gig away from fame and fortune. The fortune is more or less covered. It's the fame I'm denied.