What Music Taught Me About Business

As an avid lover of music and actively performing musician, it's safe to say that I meet a lot of people.

I've gotten used to having different faces staring at me, watching my every move, and the relationship I've developed with my audience is one I believe is authentic and genuine.

I can only be myself and hope for the best.

I've also worked in business for many years. It turns out there are some similarities between art life and business life after all.

I think entrepreneurs are like solo performing musicians. If anything goes wrong, there's nowhere to hide. If you play a wrong chord, forget a lyric, or have a gear malfunction, you can't blame the bass player, just like if sales are down, you can't blame the sales director. The upside is that if everything goes well, the rewards of success are concentrated to one person or group.

Performing live music nearly every week has allowed me to test new ideas and take chances, because I'm always looking for ways to make things interesting for myself and the audience.

Do these new ideas always work? Certainly not. I've had many flops along the way. But music gets stale quickly if you don't change up the process and break out of your comfort zone, and while you're taking risks, you become a better risk taker as a result. The aggregate is positive if you pay attention and learn from your mistakes.

As managers, we can get locked into a conservative mindset and feel we must always mitigate risks, seeing the unknowns as threats while becoming blindsided to the opportunities that risk can present.

So, for artists, risk taking is really the key to developing a sound of your own and finding your audience, and I think it's the key to becoming a better manager too.

Playing music has taught me to be more comfortable with trying new approaches.

A few years ago I translated the piano part for "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey on a bass guitar. I wanted to play something unexpected that the audience may not have thought possible. When they hear it, they wonder how I'm doing it, and it often becomes a moment they remember. I can get a reaction playing it because nobody else does it.

When Eddie Van Halen first invented and recorded his unique tapping solo technique, he would turn his back to the audience so they wouldn't know how he did it. Eventually other guitar players caught on, and before long metal guitarists around the world were using the same trick. Music from the 80's became saturated with tapping guitar solos. The technique was no longer revolutionary. Eddie had to come up with new tricks and up the ante and keep it fresh.

He even recorded himself playing guitar with a drill. Believe it or not, people eventually copied that too.

Being a trend-setting band, The Beatles would change their sound with every new album release, since so many other bands would copy them. Capturing their sound became more difficult since The Beatles made it a moving target. They evolved and offered something new with each release, without forgetting the basic elements that earned them so many fans to begin with.

The same holds true in business. Through music I've learned that just because something works well doesn't mean you should stick with it. Chances are if your service approach, product or process creates a competitive advantage, your competition will catch on and emulate your success. Like an artist, you need to constantly re-invent yourself to stay ahead, or else your success will be your own demise.

One of the most important skill sets of a gigging musician is the ability to listen to your audience. So many musicians get that relationship backwards, believing they must be the center of the universe on any stage.

Unless your audience consists of loyal fans who hold on to your every word, you'll do much better when you pay attention to them instead of expecting them to always pay attention to you.

How do I know if I'm being too loud? I watch how they interact with each other when they talk, and if they are struggling to hear one another. The opposite holds true when I worry I may be too quiet.

Apply this to the world of business. You can get a wealth of data on your customers simply by tuning in to what they are doing in the environment you do business with them in.

Too often managers get closed off from the actual sales environment because they get so stretched too thin over the management side of business. Getting out of your regular working environment and observing what is actually happening on the sales floor can pay off in spades. Your offering is the song you are performing for your audience, and when you pay attention, you can better understand who is buying what, how they go about making the decision to buy, why they are or aren't purchasing from you and what works and doesn't work for them.

Just once, let the customer be the rock star - you be the adorning fan.

When I gig, I make an effort to meet everyone. This isn't always easy, because I'm by nature a shy person who has traditionally put self-promotion on the back burner.

Once I started making an effort to meet as many people at my gigs as I could, I began to realize that most people are actually looking for some kind of connection, and are actually pretty eager to meet new people. They are just looking for a genuine connection, not a sales pitch.

By putting in a bit of effort, I've made contacts and booked future gigs I otherwise wouldn't have gotten.

It's made me more comfortable knowing the audience and I are in this together, they are just people on the other side of the stage.

I've received important feedback (no pun intended).

I've gained insight into my craft, making me a better performer.

I've made friends.

In any business, including music, If you have a tendency to always seek today's influencers, gatekeepers and decision makers, how will you ever meet the people who will lead the way tomorrow?

A good rule of thumb is to remind yourself that every customer is important, and find the time to meet as many as you can. You'll learn things about them that you could never predict when you do.

Now, let's talk about payment.

I'll admit, I rarely perform without getting paid.

That's not to say I don't play the odd community event or charity fundraiser, but I do avoid playing too many unpaid shows.

There are a few reasons for this. For starters, developing any skill requires a large time commitment with dedicated study. Music is certainly a skill, and you can sit in a room playing music by yourself, but you'll never experience validation until someone is willing to part with their money in order to experience the skill you have developed.

Getting paid for your skill also creates confidence in your abilities. Social credibility is important, but when there is a monetary value connected with your talents, you feel good about the fact that you're doing what you love while at the same time earning money doing it.

If you give away too much of your craft for free, you begin to diminish the value of what you do, and you're going to find it harder to justify charging for it down. If enough people do that, the entire industry gets hollowed out, and quality suffers because not enough people can make a living doing it. You'll then need to spend more time doing other things to pay the bills instead of learning on the job.

So, what does getting paid to play music have to do with managing a business?

In today's business environment, in the face of competition, companies are now expected to give away some portion of their business for free in return for the chance to covert to a sale, otherwise known as the "sales funnel".

Monetization can come in many forms, and it's important to balance the added-value "free" items with those core paid products and services. The odd give-away is fine, but make sure to stick with the long-game and focus on how these freebies covert consumers into long-term loyal customers.

I've seen companies who take monetization too far - focusing on making money from every inch of space in a room. I've also seen companies who spend most of their time delivering value at no charge when their customers are perfectly willing to pay for it. The right mix is key.

Music has taught me that business and art aren't so dissimilar after all. I will admit I wish more people would buy albums, but that's another story for another time.