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22
May

0

Care for your Team

By Mike Zawitkowski | Filed in Business

Whatever you call them – employees, teammates, coworkers, grunts, bandmates, roadies – your people literally are the gears of your company. When you care for your team, they will be happy and motivated, and your company will run like a well-oiled machine. When you treat them poorly, then the effect will likely ripple down to your customers or fans and adversely affect your bank account.

Derek Sivers, who has done amazing things to help musicians thrive (CD Baby and Muckwork for example), has a great post on his blog about how you should keep in mind that you are communicating with real people. Just like you. Whether it’s a cubicle wall, telephone line, or the vast depths of the Internet that separates you, you must assume there is a living, breathing person on the other end and attacking them won’t help your cause.

Finding the right people to help you reach your goals is so incredibly important, because it’s simply not possible to succeed in life without working with someone else. Once you’ve found those invaluable employees, bandmates, or roadies, taking care of them is the first responsibility of your business. The support networks of other individuals you create in life with work as a multiplier for your success.

The Problem is…

…as musicians, former musicians, people working with current and former musicians, we tend to get wrapped up in the chaos that surrounds the creative process. That chaos can easily get in the way of our ability to operate our business. It also affects the people around us who are trying to help us succeed.

So how do you keep the business machine running smoothly, taking care of these four rules and more, without crippling our creativity?

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20
May

0

Community of Raving Fans

By Mike Zawitkowski | Filed in Business

My most notorious moment during my stint with Poland’s Idol was getting tackled by a big-boned teenage girl who wanted a kiss, outside of a big record store.

I recall it now because I was trying to think of all the times I felt something other than devotion and gratitude toward fans of my art. I was trying to put myself into the mindset of a famous musician who will go nameless, who hid from the world in his dressing room to the detriment of his relationship with his fans.

It took place at a popular US music festival, and he was very late to the stage. He should have started performing an hour ago. Fortunately for the fans, someone from the venue went to see Mr. Late in his hotel room, very apologetic and looking to do whatever was necessary to make the artist happy.

Entertainers and companies both have love/hate relationships with those who sustain them – customers. I think that sometimes performing artists forget that while they may continue to create their art no matter what, the people that enable them to do it are the fans, the customers. The same goes for customers.

Companies are the same way – more than one CEO has confided in me a dislike for customers. Maybe not all, but most of them. Such resentment is a very dangerous way of doing business in any industry.

Have you ever been on the receiving end of really bad customer service?

I think we’ve all had that experience where the attention and care that a business has for you is just pathetic. It makes you want to tell all of your friends, and family, and Twitter followers never to consort with them again.

Now think about the opposite. Have you ever had the most amazing experience in the world from a business or service, and thought, wow they GET me? Again you tell all of your friends, family, and Twitter followers.

I have definitely experienced both scenarios more than once, and told everyone about it. The business that couldn’t care less about me as a customer got burned, and for the business that went above and beyond to take care of me, I was free advertising.

Unfortunately, I have worked for more than one business in my life that actively disregarded its customers, and I was amazed at the measures customers took to hurt the business. Despite having a truly unique and useful product, that business never achieved the success they felt their product had deserved because of this one failing. Fortunately, I’ve also been involved in a business or two that believed that NOTHING was more important than customer service. What resulted is a very loyal and committed following of customers. Those customers would go through great lengths to help us out, and help out our product.

Between the two businesses mentioned above, which would you rather associate yourself with?

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25
Apr

2

Check the SUCK Button

By Mike Zawitkowski | Filed in Inspiration

Turn down the suck with this volume knob from thesuckdial.com (photo credit: The Web Hounds)


There’s a famous recording studio near Berklee College of Music in Boston that, like most recording studios, has a nice mixing console. If you sit behind it, your eyes will scan the typical buttons and faders, until you come across a big red button with the label “SUCK.” The joke is that you could be trying to record a track from a Grammy-winning musician, but take after take just sounds awful. Before recording any more unsatisfactory garbage, it’s your responsibility to quickly check the SUCK button. It’s very possible that button accidentally was pressed several tracks ago, so disable it before you continue wasting the precious time you or the musician have left in this life.


Note that the button is actually fake. It was glued on and doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t even light up, so it’s not a very GOOD fake. The point, however, is that there may be a metaphorical SUCK button in your music career, and it’s about time you found it and turned it off. Read the remainder of this entry »

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