Confidence = space

In business I come across as a confident person. I've been doing what I do for a long time now so when I'm brought in to think about an issue I've got a pretty good idea of what the unspoken issues are likely to be and what solutions might fit.

I do everything I can to ensure that my clients have confidence in me because it lessens my workload. A worried client costs me time on additional phone calls or face-to-face meetings that are quite hard to monetise. I need my contacts to exude confidence in me when they're discussing the project at all those internal meetings that I neither get, nor want, to be invited to. When that goes missing I get the dreaded phone call asking for an early look at a draft and my timeline is shot, which can be disastrous for the overall project.

Generally I am paid to design and deliver training programmes. A large part of what 'design' entails is making intelligent decisions in the right order. My favourite example of this is deciding on the PowerPoint template design before anyone knows how much text needs to be displayed on the screen.  It creates unnecessary conflict and heartache every time. The motivation behind this rookie error is usually as simple as someone senior in the organisation asking to 'see something' as assurance that the project is on track and the slide template looks like an easy and uncontroversial thing to show the bosses.  A better response to the political pressure is to have a meeting and run through the development timeline, explaining what decisions will be made in what sequence and why

I see my clients' confidence in me as a tangible asset that allows me to run projects at the pace that best serves that project. As with any asset it needs to be protected: good communications, dressing well and face-to-face meetings early in the process.

Possibility v. Limitation

We are deep in the dark process of buying a London flat (apartment). Inevitably this oh-so-time-consuming process is happening as I'm busier than I've ever been.  Happily, my time poverty has forced me to identify a simple heuristic that has probably been there all along...

When I look at a potential place to live, do I first see possibilities or limitations?

Unless my initial, immediate reaction is 'possibility' I thank the estate agent for his time, turn on my heel and head back to the office.  If I experience no moment of excitement whatsoever when contemplating one of the biggest purchases I'll ever make then I'm in the wrong flat.   Life will force compromises aplenty on me before the sale goes through so I need to start with as much enthusiasm as I can manage.

I can look at other parts of my life through the same possibility / limitation heuristic.  I've pulled back from directing or performing improv comedy because where other, younger actors see infinite possibility in the form jaded old me sees only limitation.  Hopefully one day that'll revert and I can reimmerse myself in a craft I love but until then I stay away. Who wants to be cornered at the bar at the after show party with Captain Buzzkill?

It's important not to overthink the heuristic.  Perhaps in Daniel Kahneman's terms it would be System 1 (fast) thinking.  If the 'possibility' in a given project is that there's much money to be made then so be it.  But if any sense of possibility is overwhelmed in the very first instance by thoughts of 'limitation', be they artistic, social, moral, whatever, then the heuristic has spoken: the project ain't for you.

Death by TC

Sometimes my consulting work has me working with different parts of the same very large organisation.  At the moment I am simultaneously engaged on national, European and global projects for the one company. These projects are not linked but have come about because individual clients in different roles have each seen a need for what I do.

National projects are easy. Client identifies a need.  Client calls.  We meet.  I draft a proposal.  We set a date.  I deliver.  I get paid.  At some later time the client identifies another need and we start again.

European projects are more complicated, not least because of my pathetic Australian monolinguality.  These projects are by definition more ambitious with a greater number of moving parts and thus requiring better political skills.  My client can sit in the European office and identify a need but rarely can he act on it without first persuading the local offices.  For the project to get off the ground a mix of personal entreaties, subtle bribery and naked threats is deployed to manoeuvre the one or two dominant markets to adopt a 'pilot' version of my programme.  Once this is deemed positive the rest of Europe will fall in line.  The short list of these dominant markets always includes Germany and usually Spain but never the UK and rarely France.  Success in Britain is routinely ignored in Europe and the French predeliction for agonisingly long planning processes is a sure fire momentum-killer of wider projects.  So I spend much of my time in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Stuttgart in the company of my German-speaking facilitator.  The best operators working at a European level do this politicking face-to-face, but once a pilot programme has been agreed the national pattern kicks in: we meet.  I draft a proposal.  We set a date.  I deliver.  I get paid.  Often, at some later time the national client identifies a local need, finds money in her own budget, and we start again.

Genuinely global initiatives inhabit an entirely different world.  There is a huge and varied constituency that must be convinced of the worth of a project and this cannot often be done face-to-face.  Yesterday I spent five hours on a series of teleconferences (TC's) helping a global client sell a programme that is to be deployed on five continents.  Anonomised, often heavily accented voices dialing in from cars, homes and offices spent the day jockeying for the last word in an effort to make a valid critique of our offering, to promote a national cause or just to sound sage.

I'm not used to this way of working and being unable to put faces or even countries to the voices makes it doubly hard.  For me this is just another project, albeit a very important one, but for anyone in a global role this is a way of life.  Even doing the sensible thing by doing as much business face-to-face as possible doesn't solve the problem because the global TC's never stop.  Being at a meeting in Japan just means that you dial in from your hotel room in Tokyo instead of your office in London, stifle a yawn and start by thanking everyone else for taking time out of their busy schedules.  A quality much overlooked in good global marketing people is the patience to chair these endless phone calls.  This requires an ability to distinguish between those unhelpful comments which are born of miscommunication and those which are deliberately aimed at derailing a project.  The second category demands a response of 'taking the discussion off-line', which of course means setting up another TC.

Corporate karma

Tuesday of the first full week of the New Year is apparently the busiest day for job-hunting.  You've given yourself at least a day to get your feet back under the desk but not left it so long that the resolution to work someplace else has been forgotten.

This is also the week that old clients are most likely to get that Happy New Year! email from a consultant like me.  I send these out in waves to ensure that I properly personalise each one.  After all, these are all people with whom I have a history that must be reflected (leveraged) otherwise I might as well be cold calling. And like anyone embarking on that January job search I wait until Tuesday before starting.  That way maybe I'm less likely to be caught up in the First Great Inbox Purge of 2012.

 

With an augur’s intensity I watch my own inbox for replies.  There’s a hierarchy of outcomes from the exercise:-

1. The quick note proposing a call or meeting in the coming weeks is absolutely the most I can hope for
2. The longer note with specific feedback on last year’s results and the plans for the next twelve months isn't awful.  At least my contact took a few minutes to setout the issues that affect me personally
3. The email saying that there's been a change of roles but also giving me the name of the new contact (cc’d) isn't bad.  Managing a baton-change in a client organisation is part of my job
4. It’s hard not to read a quick note announcing a change of roles without any further information as ‘goodbye and good luck’
5. The cursory Happy New Year reply is the email equivalent of a stilted exchange of pleasantries whilst waiting for an elevator

Optimist that I am, getting no response at all is still reason for hope.  Maybe my contact isn't back at her desk for another week.  Maybe she’s gone straight into a procession of heavy-duty meetings.  Or maybe she’s surreptitiously on the job hunt herself, in which case there's no point me being on her radar until she either gets settled in a new position or resigns herself to the current role and refocuses on her 2012 To Do List.  I make a note to try again in mid-March.

I've long believed that no genuine marketing effort goes ultimately unrewarded.  Those efforts must be genuine, an ongoing part of the day-to-day job and not just the occasional paroxysm of activity intended to refill an otherwise empty calendar. And don't be surprised when that reward arrives from an unexpected direction.  Yesterday I got an unsolicited email requesting a meeting in Italy as soon as is convenient.  Not so much attributable cause-and-effect as ‘corporate karma’.

 

Approach the low-yield tasks with the right attitude and trust that the cosmos is taking note

The art of selling

The Schumpeter column in the October 22 Economist (no link available) explores the issue of variability amongst sales teams: -

the performance of salespeople within a single company typically varies by a factor of three.  And the difference between the best and worst companies when it comes to selling is far greater than the difference for functions such as supply-chain management, purchasing or finance.

I guess I'm so close to this issue (I spend so much time with sales teams, albeit only in health care) that the cross-departmental comparison surprised me.  An acceptance of such a broad spread in performance within a team undoubtedly leads to this greater variability between teams or companies.  Most of my clients implicitly employ me to improve the performance of the middle 70%; the thinking being that the top 15% are alchemists who we do well to leave undisturbed and the bottom 15% are heading out the door anyway.

The article speaks to the problem that it is so difficult to first standardise, then reproduce, the behaviours of the high performers that companies are left frustrated, reduced to describing selling as an 'art' as opposed to a 'science'.  I have no problem with this frustration (in fact it benefits me) because I don't see science and art as polar opposites.  Furthermore the better metrics that science requires are often fool's gold: -

Firms are starting to track reps much more closely, usually to their dismay.  Salesforce.com sells tools which allow sales managers to track on a daily basis what their minions are up to.

A number of clients of mine have been taken in by salesforce.com and similar tracking systems and after nine or so months the same 70-30 rule applies: 15% are unreplicably good, 15% aren't suited to the gig and then there's everyone else.  The problem with tracking that middle 70% and the rewarding them on measurable behaviours is that, as the old sales axiom has it, you should expect what you inspect and alas, the measurable behaviours of the alchemists aren't the ones responsible for their success.  Furthermore, systems like salesforce.com only work at all when the reps themselves enter the information about what they're doing into the system.

I like salespeople.  It's isn't hard to like people whose job it is to be likeable.  The immeasurable that I recognise in the good ones is the same as with high-performing actors, improvisers and stand-up comics, all of whom say words aloud for a living: when they are on the job they are present.   This translates into a wonderful ability to slow time such that the thing they say is the only thing that needs saying.

Part of my job is to encourage my clients to see their employees as artists of sorts (we're called Dramatic Change after all).  Too much salesforce.com has the effect of turning them into data entry clerks of their own behaviour, which isn't science so much as drudgery.

Full of bile and venom

Last night's sleeplessness, Manila traffic and the ambient chaos of Niño Aquino International Airport had me arrive at the departure gate chock full of bile and venom.

Of the myriad vestigial rituals clinging to 'luxury' travel the procession of interruptions that are supposedly the hallmark of good service pisses me off the most.  As pointless as airline safety demonstrations may be I accept that a legal logic is in play.  But tell me why I must hear from multiple crew members on other topics?  Why is the captain as well as the purser compelled to make an announcement before take-off then again 'once we're airborne'? Why interrupt the inflight entertainment (wishfully claimed as a USP) to tell me that you're going to interrupt me again later?

Am I alone in measuring good service in terms of the least number of staff intrusions? Who was the last person actually pleased by hotel turndown service?  I don't understand the logic: if I'm out I most likely won't notice the alteration in bedlinen when I return.  If I'm in then whatever I'm doing is interrupted whilst I answer the door and say, "No thanks".  Not all porn channels have a pause function you know.

The threat of a hovering proprietor is the main reason I shun the English Bed & Breakfast.  Once you price in the energy expended gushing over the farm fresh eggs and the wasted ten minutes being shown the frankly troubling collection of objets d'art on the mantlepiece that country house hotel down the road looks like a bargain.

But whereas creepy B&B's can be avoided air travel is inevitable.  Scripted platitudes droned out in multiple languages (I've been on Korean Air lately) and of course the seatbelt sign is illuminated before it starts so we can't even bury our ears in headphones.  Any airline that starts from the assumption that I don't need to know by name the captain, first officer, whoever else is assisting them on the flight deck, the person heading up 'my' cabin service team and the rest of the crew will get my business.

Wow. One solitary solid week of travel and I'm whining like Tyler Brûlée.

Blue chin syndrome

Thinking further about this need to earn an audience's attention reminded of a phenomenon that Grainne Maguire, a stand-up comedian friend of mine, calls 'blue chin syndrome': -

The gig isn't going well when out in the darkness you see all these blue chins; audience member's faces uplit by their mobile phones as they text their friends

This is bad enough when the device in question is a Nokia.  If they bring out the iPads it's probably time to vacate the stage.

A price-maker but a date-taker

I've found myself musing on the nature of success.  When you're in the middle of a life how do you know if it's going well?

This is especially acute if you're self-employed and thus denied the external loci of the annual performance review, the promotion achieved or denied and the size of your bonus.  What indicators can you look to to vindicate the choice you made to go out on your own?  I don't think it's enough to get to the end of the tax year and check the bank account, especially as money is rarely the chief reason why people start their own businesses.  Making money is necessary for survival but not sufficient for success.

I need an array of projects at different stages of the development cycle.  These projects should be with a range of clients and preferably spread around the world.

My development cycle runs something like this: -

• Initial inquiry ➙ credentials presentation
• Identified need ➙ costed proposal
• Project sign-off & timeline agreed
• Design ➙ delivery ➙ invoice
• Feedback
• Initial discussion on follow-up

My business model relies on me delivering twenty or so projects a year.  Obviously life is so much easier when they spread out over the calendar rather than the stress of 'feast or famine' but of course that's preferable to no projects at all.

Because my work requires largish numbers of people to be herded into a single room I have very little influence over the delivery date of the project.  I'm a price-maker but a date-taker.

Summer is always quiet in Europe because of holidays.  January is busy because everyone wants kick-off meetings which means that December is a high-stress month of preparation interrupted by the 'silly season'.

So can I achieve this even spread of projects over the year?  Geography helps as America takes shorter summer holidays than Europe and my Asian clients operate with less seasonality still (Chinese New Year notwithstanding).  More important is upping the variety of my offering: if my business is built solely on 'energiser' sessions for sales teams then I'm going to be busy at New Year and a la rentrée and no other time.  That's not going to make me feel successful.

A good starting point is actually documenting the development cycle.  Understanding where each active project is sitting on the continuum helps me to spot upcoming periods of stress.  It also forces me to keep prospecting for new work through the busy patches and it forces me to develop offerings that aren't so seasonal; for example working with smaller, more easily assembled groups of marketing as well as larger sales teams.

If in the course of a week I'm pitching, writing proposals, meeting new clients for the first time and actually delivering a project then I'm pleased.  Whenever I can see months that look like this I sometimes go crazy and start wishing for a vacation.

The self-employed: often pleased, rarely happy.

High priority

Spent the day in Switzerland talking to a couple clients about upcoming product launches.   In both cases I'd been assured that my involvement was 'high priority'. I've been on holidays for ten days and, in one case, nothing has happened in the interim.  Literally nothing.  My carefully crafted proposal hadn't even been read.
Merlin Mann is brutally realistic about this: -

The only way that I will be able to tell if you thought something was 'high priority' was that you finished it. If it's not done it's not really a priority

When a client tells me something's 'high priority' mostly she's just making nice.  I'm not saying that she's lying, but rather there's a misuse of the phrase.  What she actually means is that there's an inclination within the company to get a project up but that inclination hasn't yet been matched with the necessary will.  It does me no good whatsoever to call her on it; she is still the client.  Instead I smile and put a note in the diary to follow up with her in a month or so. If she indicates commitment with action in the mean time then I'm ready to respond immediately.

The other client demonstrated what 'high priority' actually looks like: upcoming meetings diarised, purchase orders generated and a timeline for senior management sign-off. The actual phrase 'high priority' didn't rate a mention.

Why consultants aren't popular

I spent much of the week working with a team of experienced and largely successful salespeople.  As my job was to change them in some way they rightly resented me from the off.  Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, said it best: -

People hate change and with good reason.  Change makes us stupider, relatively speaking.  Change adds new information to the universe; information that we don’t know.  Our knowledge – as a percentage of all the things that can be known – goes down a tick every time something changes.

And frankly, if we’re talking about a percentage of the total knowledge in the universe, most of us aren't that many basis points superior to our furniture to begin with.  I hate to wake up in the morning only to find that the intellectual gap between me and my credenza has narrowed.  That’s no way to start the day.

On the other hand, change is good for the people who are causing the change.  They understand the new information that is being added to the universe.  They grow smarter in comparison to the rest of us.  This is reason enough to sabotage their efforts.  I recommend sarcasm with a faint suggestion of threat.

The Dilbert Principle (1996)

The cliches imply that unless you 'embrace change' and 'face the fear' and 'seek out new experiences' and so on then you're some sort of loserish Luddite.  This is offensive towards anyone who aspires to be good enough at her job to get paid fairly so that she can channel her enthusiasms elsewhere.  Like raising a family.  As a friend of my father's used to say: -

You can't argue with decency

Every time I walk into a new room my first task is to overcome the natural, rightful resentment of the decent people whose behaviour I've been paid to change.

Appealing to the better angels

A big part of my job is motivating sales/marketing teams; getting everyone to do the right thing for the right reason. Getting a large population to do anything in unison is challenging but the starting point is always cohesive self-image. We have to see ourselves as part of the group before we can develop group values.

In the last few weeks I've been lucky enough to get along to two big international sporting fixtures; England v. France in Six Nations rugby at Twickenham then Chelsea v. Copenhagen in Champions League football at Stamford Bridge. At both occasions the crowd was asked to stand in silence to honour the victims of two horrific earthquakes (Christchurch and Japan respectively).

Getting a crowd to stand in silence is a really interesting challenge; it can only work if absolutely everyone participates. The many are held hostage by the few.

At Twickenham 80,000 people were so quiet, so still, that I could hear traffic noise outside the ground. It lasted two whole minutes and made the hair stand up on the back of your neck.  At no time did Stamford Bridge manage complete silence, even for a few seconds. A few people in the South Stand kept talking and were shushed by others nearby.  They reacted by talking louder. More shushing. Louder talking and so on until some presumably well-meaning soul from the other end of the ground screamed: -

"Shut up you c***ts!"

At which the referee decided enough was enough and blew his whistle to end the ordeal.

Much has been written about the contrasting ethos of football and rugby and here it was writ large. Twickenham had many French supporters just as lots of Danes were at the football so I don't think the differing behaviours can be attributed to a misunderstanding of language.  Rather it seemed to me that the rugby crowd wanted to behave well whereas the football crowd didn't care so much.  Rugby celebrates universalism, football cherishes tribalism so perhaps it will always be easier to appeal to the better angels of a crowd watching rugby than football.

There's no point in trying to influence group behaviour if no self-reflexive sense of the group exists in the first place.

You might be a bad client if...

Are you a bad client?  Maybe you are but just don't know it yet.   From time to time we all need a little help in recognising our shortcomings.  As the joke goes, everyone thinks they're funny and no one thinks they're bad in bed, so here's a handy spotter's guide.

You might be a bad client if you...

1. Get your advertising agency to write your internal emails for you
2. Insist that the entire project team sit in on four-hour teleconferences that are really just a procession of one-on-one conversations between you and individual suppliers
3. Openly refer to your co-workers as idiots who cannot think for themselves
4. Don't bother printing out materials ahead of teleconferences then complain that you can't open the PDF file on your iPhone and then insist that the tabled multipage documents be read aloud
5. Talk to your legal department before picking up a phone to discuss a problem in person
6. Demand a discounted fee for the privilege of working with you for the first time
7. Refer to internal processes by acronyms and individuals by their first names and get annoyed when asked to explain what you mean
8. Respond to verbal questions via email and emailed questions verbally
9. Schedule daylong meetings  the week before Christmas that start at 9am (and so require people to fly in the night before, thus spending more time away from family) and then fail to produce a daylong agenda
10. Let relationships between suppliers fester to the point where turf wars develop
11. Demand 'world's best practice' proposals where cost, timing and every other conceivable parameter are ignored because you can't be bothered thinking through the inevitable and necessary limitations your company will impose on the project from the outset
12. Insist on having a personal but not necessarily amicable relationship with subcontractors thus disrupting your suppliers' delivery chains
13. Fail to master MS-Outlook and so force everyone around you to second guess whether your hour-long meeting will take fifteen minutes or half a day
14. Identify a non-problem, insist that it be solved and then accuse everyone else of acting like old maids when it doesn't come to pass
15. Can't imagine how salespeople of different nationalities might just get along over drinks and dinner
16. Aren't really sure if you're negotiating in £ or € (seriously)

Glad to have that off my chest.

An eighth of a second

Kevin Kelly is republishing his wonderfully prescient New Rules for the New Economy, first written in 1998.  I wasn't all that aware of Kelly ten years ago so it's all new to me.

In a post entitled From Places to Spaces he turns on its head an old Tom Peters maxim that cheaper products made in the developing world, American manufacturing's worst nightmare, are now just an eighth of a second away; this being the time that it takes to communicate an order from one side of the globe to the other.  But as Kelly points out: -

The good news is that those geographically far away competitors will never be any closer than an eighth of a second.  And for many things in life, that is too far away 

The trainer in me really likes this idea.  So does the comedian.  Both jobs happen in real time and I thrive on the intimacy that comes of standing at the front of a room and changing the way the audience thinks or what it feels.  By Kelly's logic the feedback loop between speaker and listener has a margin for error of less than an eighth of a second.  This is why I travel for work.

Enough of life thrives on subtle instantaneous responses that one-eighth of a second kills intimacy and spontaneity

If the secret of comedy is 'timing' then an eighth of a second is more than long enough to be the difference between success and failure, between laughter and silence.

Seniority v Talent

Last night I caught up with David Shore, an amazingly talented Canadian improviser who's relocated to London.  He is an alumnus of the mainstage shows at The Second City, Toronto and Improv Olympic (IO) West in LA and his move here is great news for the UK scene.

Both Second City and IO have well established highly formalised improv training schemes that produce some of North America's best comedic talents and generate massive sums of money along the way.  London has nothing like it.  People get into improv in the UK either through the traditional drama schools such as RADA and Guildhall, through university troupes like the Oxford Imps or via a myriad of classes being run in school halls and dance studios all over London every weekend.  Potentially there's a gap in the market for a London equivalent to these great American institutions.

Certainly there's money to be made and therein lies the rub: that money will be made not in ticket sales but rather through the classes: -

More students = more money

Only a small percentage of those who sign up for improv classes should ever be put on a stage in front of a paying audience.  Certainly there are many corollary benefits to such classes in terms of creativity, life skills and so on but there is a clear need to manage the expectations of each student.  There are plenty of people who will pay good money to lock into a system where seniority supposedly trumps talent.  The North American schools are generally pretty good at selling the classes without an implicit promise of 'stage time' because unless they maintain the quality of their mainstage shows then sooner or later it all falls apart.

Bad mainstage shows = fewer famous alumni = less students = less money

Sydney Theatresports, where I was trained, went into precisely this sort of downward spiral about ten years ago and it's never quite recovered.  Some of our senior people began to see the classes as an income stream rather than a way to reinvigorate our performing company with fresh talent.

An interesting metric might be this: -

The total amount a student pays from first class to first performance

In 1990 I took my first class.  It cost me $3 (three dollars).  After five classes I was onstage at the legendary Belvoir Street Theatre.  My intake included lots of writers, comics, cabaret performers as well as the usual teachers, plumbers and lawyers.

Ten years later my equivalent was paying as much as $1500 before playing to a paying audience.  That 9900% increase drove out everyone but the lawyers and teachers.  Not only were the classes drawing from a smaller pool of potential students but the sheer enormity of the fees led to increased pressure on the system to cast every graduating student in a mainstage show regardless of actual talent.  We ended up with overpopulated casts full of people who only loved the idea of performing.  Even at a distance it was obvious that they weren't having any fun on stage.  No one pays to watch that and our audiences fell further.

So does David start by staging the best possible shows with performers already on London scene in order to attract more talented students or does he start from scratch, relying on his considerable reputation to fill classes and then launch his style of improv with performers made in his own image?

Creating conversations

This week I enjoyed a very interesting conversation with an up'n'coming comic en route to a far flung gig.

When not doing comedy he 'creates and maintains an online presence for bands'. Meaning that he uses Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and blog posts to create a conversation between artists and consumers (aka 'the fans').

If cliches like 'unlocking the power of new media' have meaning then presumably my friend would be seen to be at the forefront of this new way of doing marketing. But often he's just an old-fashioned ghostwriter and happily admits as much.

The Holy Grail of his craft is the 'high involvement response'; the fan who, of her own volition, remixes a bands' latest song or creates a mash-up or cuts together a new video and posts it on YouTube and then Tweets the link to her fifty followers who each re-Tweet it to fifty more. The payoff comes when the band emails the new music guy at BBC1 saying that their Facebook group has 2,000 UK fans and the YouTube link of the song (MP3 attached) has been hit 3,000 times in the last month. A quantifiable number of fans, presumably your listeners, have endorsed us already so get on board.

But it all begins with an authentic act of homage and my friend sees his job as to create an online environment where that might occur. The operative word is 'authentic'; something a ghostwriter can never be. He admits that he's only ever achieved this 'high involvement response' with acts that got personally involved ("they touched the keyboard"). Those clients who leave everything to my friend get mediocre results. No Facebook, no fans, no buzz.

The gods of cyberspace help those who help themselves.

I asked him who were the most successful acts to follow this marketing model and he rattled off a dozen names that of course I'd never heard of,

"But why would you? You're 43 and you're never going to pay to see them play live so you're no good to them anyway."

Exceeding expectations

An easy point of differentiation between stand-up comics and improvisers is their attitude to collaboration.  An interesting question to ask a performer on a long car journey is this: -

Would you rather be recognised as the best act on a mediocre night of comedy or a good contributor without being the stand-out act on a great one?

Every decent improviser opts for the former; the audience experience (aka 'the night') is all that matters.  Far too many stand-ups measure their performance comparatively against the rest of the bill rather than in the absolute terms of audience appreciation.  When I'm going through a bad patch I fall into the same relativist trap and my post-gig analysis starts sounding like the ravings of a paranoiac: -

Was I the weakest on the bill?  Was there a sense of palpable relief when I said goodnight?  The audience only talked during my set and listening intently to everyone else didn't they?  The other acts were all backslapping each other but did anyone say anything complimentary to me?  In fact when I came off stage I don't think that anyone even looked me in the eye...

And so on.  As such schadenfreude is the default setting for most stand-up comics.  This is why a commonplace on the English scene that Michael McIntyre is a poor comic, hardly better than Jimmy Carr really but at least he's no Joe Pasquale.  This mindset is self-destructive in the most obvious yet insidious way and we each need to guard against it.

Conversely, in consultingland it's been years since I've watched another external consultant or trainer work.  I often share a stage with internal speakers but it's very rare for direct competitors to speak to the same audience on the same day*.  The only indicators I have that I'm any good are that (a) my clients pay me on time and (b) keep asking me back.  I find that it's actually pretty easy to 'exceed expectations' when a client has paid thousands in travel, accommodation and fees and effectively gambled tens of thousands more in taking the sales team off the road for a few days because I'm given a brutally clear sense of what those expectations are.

Part of the frustration in performing comedy on most nights is that the audience has no more than a shaky idea why they're there in the first place.  Expectations usually range from the depressingly downbeat (I just hope no one embarrasses themselves, I couldn't bear to watch that) to the ludicrously optimistic (What do you mean a tenner in a room above a pub doesn't get me Eddie Izzard?) making it hard to judge your performance on anything other than your fellow acts.

None of this improves the mental health of your average stand-up comedian, who was unlikely to be especially sane before he took up the craft.

* The exception to this rule are those showcase events where speakers are allotted stage time in front of an audience of would-be buyers.  It's been years since I've attended one.  My business is totally driven by word-of-mouth recommendation amongst a small number of potential clients so the effort needed to make a showcase work has never justified the return.

Red Letter Days v. Accretion

Life is slow in consultingland at the moment.  After a massively travel-heavy first ten weeks 2010 has slowed down dramatically.  I hesitate to say alarmingly.  It's the usual combination of postponed meetings, a decrease in the speed of clients' email replies and a consequent upsurge in my tendency to look for Red Letter Days. 

Human nature to attaches significance to points in time.  Every well-told story has its then-one-day moment.  We celebrate anniversaries and birthdays to reinforce this significance.  When my To Do List shortens I find myself combing my diary for upcoming events that I can turn into these Red Letter Days; high-stakes moments when I have to 'bring my A-game'.

After twenty years you'd think I'd know better.  We can celebrate success any way we want but rarely is it achieved in one fell swoop.  It is accreted.

accrete [v] grow by accumulation or coalescence

It is the days spent drafting and redrafting whatever it is you're writing and nights performing in unnoticed venues.  It is the expectation that a decent client base will be built over years not months.  It requires a combination of experience and circumspection.

That's not to say that Red Letter Days don't occur or that they aren't important when they do.  We have to bring our A-games to the job interview, the pitch to clients or investors, the presentation to the senior management team or why bother showing up at all?  But we can overemphasise their importance; if a Red Letter Day is all about downside then not enough has been accreted beforehand.

How much is cool worth?

In the past fortnight I've performed in four improv shows; three in California and last Saturday an eight-hour shift in London's 50-Hour Improvathon. The most commercially successful of these was also unabashedly the least cool.

Tradition dictated that after that show came down we sprinted to the foyer to line up and high-five every audience member as they left the theatre. This was done smilingly without a hint of condescension. As my castmates happily chatted about the show, the cast and life in general it was clear that many, if not most of the punters were returnees. We'd played to a full house so this process took a good fifteen minutes before we could head back upstairs to pack up and change.

This is how you get your 1,000 Fans. By converting monologues into dialogue. By smiling and letting people touch you. By answering questions and asking a couple of your own. By not worrying about being cool.

Cool is the opposite of friendly. Cool is aloof. It's black-windowed limousines, velvet ropes, private rooms and everything else that limits interaction. At a commercial level cool operates on the old one-way producer-to-consumer relationship.

But cool only pays if you've got 100,000 fans each paying $1 for the monologue. This puts you at the traditional end of the Long Tail and good luck to you if you get there. In the book of the same name, Chris Anderson warns that when shooting for 100,000 it's all or nothing. A fanless rock star is just a guy in dark glasses with a day job.

I kick myself for keeping the Scenes from Communal Living cast back for production notes instead of sending them out to chat with strangers who'd come to see the show. By the time we got downstairs only our friends were still hanging around and they were fans already.

Cool doesn't pay as many bills as you'd think.

1,000 fans

Last night's gig involved a six-hour round trip to Lincolnshire on roads that were less trecherous than the British media had warned / wished. Happily I shared the trip with another comic, a newly arrived recruit to the legion of Australian stand-ups based here.

We spent much of the time puzzling over his big challenge: -

What is the quickest means for him to create sufficient demand for his stand-up such that he can provide for his wife and newborn daughter?

His parameters are simple: he sees himself primarily as a storyteller and really isn't interested in TV except to further his live performing. He is a terrific writer and fine comic with a long track record of great shows in Australia. What piqued my interest was his mention of 1000 Fans. This is a new sort of business model ascribed to Kevin Kelly, the logic of which is as follows: -

An artist can make a living from a thousand fans willing to part with a hundred dollars a year

So as well as creating cool stuff we have to usurp the means of distribution (promotion) of our work. The idea also raises something interesting about ambition: -

Is $100,000 p.a. enough?

This is a fascinating question to ask young comics. $100,000 is more money than most comics will ever earn in a year but far less than what they dream of. Like every kid footballer who believes he's the next Christiano Ronaldo, young comics seem to want Russell Brand's life or bust. My new Australian friend is mature enough to see that $100K a year doing the thing he loves as amounts to a successful life. Now all he has to do is find those thousand fans.

Kelly chose his two numbers carefully; 1,0000 is more people than you can possibly know well but not so many that they can't feel that they have a relationship with you, which speaks to the asymmetric (but not didactic) nature of 'fandom'. And $100 a year is neither a throwaway amount nor does imply an obsession.

Cultivating a thousand-strong fanbase means putting the effort into avenues of ongoing two-way dialogues. So setting up your own fan page on Facebook is a wholly illusory step in the right direction. For a stand-up comic the real gain is more likely to come from chatting to the punter who buys you a drink; this is someone showing that they want to give you more, that they want a relationship.

I am a huge fan of The Bugle, the free weekly podcast made by Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver (of The Daily Show). I have no idea how many subscribers they have but right now I'm listening to a 'Best Of' episode featuring 20 minutes of fans' unsolicited remixes of old shows. Because the podcast is free its fans have found other ways to create the dialogue.

So Kelly's metric presents a stark question for a live performer: how many of your Facebook 'fans' would pay $20 a show to see you perform five times a year? You're welcome to include family and friends in that number.

Supporting from afar

Although the London run of Scenes from Communal Living has another five Sundays to run already it feels a little valedictory. Whilst the shows themselves are as strong as ever the houses are painfully small and I feel for my cast. Any dreams of breaking even financially are long gone.

At such times my thoughts get a little poisonous where my 'non-arty' friends are concerned. All of them love the idea of what I do but very few make the actual effort to support a show.

There's a passage in the novel Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes, who also wrote Snobs and the screenplay for Gosford Park, that captures this beautifully: -

As if one is likely to sit down and send off three thousand postcards when a personal appearance is scheduled. Obviously, they understand this will never happen. The message is really: 'We are not sufficiently interested in what you do to be aware of it if you don't make us aware. You understand that it does not impinge on our world, so you will please forgive us in future for missing whatever you are involved in.'