The Devil is in the Details

For a good majority of the semester, our group focused on painting with a wide brush when it came to figuring out our operations. By keeping at a high altitude, we were able to consistently hit the major, more obvious details of The Party Brigade, but after our mock presentation last week it became clear that we had skipped over some of the finer details of our messaging and operations. This resulted in some confusion over some of our programming and whether or not we had truly kept art at the center of our venture. Thus, our group spent the last week diving into these finer points, attempting to pivot our messaging and flesh out our programming so that we are able to communicate as clearly as possible come time for our pitch.

What we discovered as we went over all of these details was that there was quite a bit we weren’t on the same page about. In some places, this lead to rather long discussions about which direction to take The Party Brigade, and luckily at least one member of the group at any given time always reminded us to bring our plans back to the arts. Looking back to our artful center was often the thing that led us to a decision. Despite the fact that we had times where we wanted to take the messaging or program in a different direction, we were always able to agree that if the decision didn’t keep art at the center, then it wasn’t the right one to make. What this resulted in was a final operational plan that I believe transform our initial party concept into an arts focused events company that uses the arts as a way to combat the negative aspects of campus living. While it may seem like a slight adjustment from the outside, it resulted in a quite a bit of overhaul on the small details in order to create a consistent message around keeping arts at the center.

I for one am quit excited to see what kind of feedback our group will receive after our pitch this Wednesday. I’m quite proud of the final product we were able to put together, and am excited to see where our group can take The Party Brigade in the future. We have most definitely created something that feasibly extends beyond the walls of our classroom, which means on some level we’ve reached our major goal for the semester. Now, let’s just hope our out-of-the-building research holds up as we talk to potential clients and investors this week and that The Party Brigade will then receive the launch it deserves.

Designing for an Audience

This week, I have been down in the trenches of The Party Brigade. With a heavy amount of our audience testing and research behind us, we have spent much of the last week arranging our pitch and putting together our MVP–a proposal package for potential clients. My part of the proposal package has mostly centered around design of the physical material, which has been both incredibly informative as well as mind numbing.

Speaking as someone who considers themselves an amateur designer, or a hobbyist as we like to say in our class, I always find it interesting how much the art of designing for a project can teach you about your product. For weeks we have spent time discussing our programming, surveying our audiences, researching numbers for our three year projection and just generally becoming well acquainted with the business we’re creating. However, this week of designing the look and feel of our proposal package has been one of the more informative processes during our entrepreneurship timeline. Sitting in front of a blank screen, attempting to visually represent everything we’ve compiled has forced me to take a deeper look at our intentions, mission, values, and how we want to be perceived by our audience. Do we lean into the military iconography that our name suggests? Or do we really pull out the artful center of the company? (Linda will be happy to know that we’re leaning towards the artful center!) These, and many more, have been questions that I’ve been grappling with as I’ve worked to design a logo and branding that fits our identity.

Overall, I feel as though we should discuss the design and branding side of entrepreneurial ventures more than we do, especially as artists. How many new businesses have failed to get legs simply because their messaging and branding was off? Even better, how many unoriginal, derivative ideas have taken off at unprecedented speeds simply because they knew how to brand, message, and market better than anyone else? It is a vital part of the process that can often times get lost in the research and survey heavy nature of new ventures. We at the Party Brigade have certainly learned the importance of such things, especially when our final minimum viable product for the company is focused around design and messaging.

Next week, I’ll make sure to post the final designs and messaging that our team was able to develop and craft. I’ll certainly be curious to see what kinds of feedback we can gather from our loyal blog readers in order to further perfect The Party Brigade’s message.

Finances and Future Steps

This week was all about gathering data for our team. We spent lots of time in the last couple of weeks finalizing aspects about our offerings, branding, and artistic motives for launching this product, and then came the financials. Initially we felt like we were floundering to find the data to even begin to make decisions about pricing, cost of goods, etc. We each spent our fair share of time on Google, and emailing potential clients, and companies we felt were doing similar work. The information came in slowly, but luckily it came in and we have been able to piece together our numbers in a way that seems to make sense both from a revenue and sustainability point of view.

I for one appreciated this week’s task of stepping out of the more creative and communications sides of our business in order to focus on hard data and numbers that would help move us forward into a real working business model. As a theatre artist, I have always been more comfortable focusing on the artistic and creative sides of any project that I am working on, and I’ve never found my greatest talents to lie in the math, money, and data. (As someone who is hoping to go into commercial theatre producing, I recognize the irony). However, working on this week’s task has further expanded my appreciation for the numbers side of the arts, and has helped me to improve on a skill that I feel I need to develop before I graduate with my MFA. Do I expect that we may be tasked to make some changes, or better back up our projections with more data? Potentially, but I also feel as though I personally made great strides this week in being able to sit down with a blank spreadsheet and create something sensible and usable from it.

As our team ventures further into this project and draws closer to our MVP (a proposal package), I do feel like we’ve been able to create something that people have a desire and need for. Many of the potential audience members and customers that we spoke with during the last week expressed a great deal of excitement about our new business, telling us that they would most certainly use its services in order to bring meaningful arts experiences to their university students. Seeing this excitement has made me consider how a model like this might work in my own future career, and how the work we’re doing in this class can inform my future artistic endeavors, and potentially my MFA applied project. Whether or not we stick together as a group and launch this particular venture, I do feel the information and data we have been able to collect has been useful to all four of us in a variety of different ways, and its almost more exciting to see what else we might do with it beyond The Party Brigade.

Settling into a Model

Last week, we had the chance to sit down and meet as a group to make some concrete decisions about where we wanted to go for our branding, and what our minimum viable product needed to look like. It’s amazing how much progress a meeting of the minds can make, especially when you change your surroundings. Our group decided to meet in an outdoor space that we were considering using for our MVP, and it gave us lots of room to play with names, images, and branding concepts for our company. (Something called the Party Brigade may be coming to a university near you!)

What has been helpful about this week was having concrete talking points to use when sharing our ideas with potential costumers/audience members. Over the last several weeks, whenever I sit down to talk with someone about our company it has been very abstract, surrounded by “what ifs” and “maybe so’s.” While it has been enough for the purposes of this class, I hadn’t had a moment where I was able to give a more concrete pitch to a potential audience member until this week.

Being able to show potential names, slogans, and images for what we’re now calling “The Party Brigade” has been incredibly helpful when talking to students and university presenters alike about our project. Has all of the feedback been overwhelmingly positive? No, but the criticisms and positive remarks alike have been incredibly direct and helpful, rather than hypothetical and vaporous. This week has instilled another round of confidence in me about our project idea and has certainly allowed me to see exactly the direction that we are headed with our event production services idea. No longer is the group operating from a place of confusion, but rather a place of creativity, understanding and power. I certainly think that we have gotten to a place where we can launch a successful prototype to find out even more about our ideas and plans.

Testing a New Audience

This week, as a part of the group focused on events for 18-25 year olds, we were tasked with talking to University student event coordinators, campus life representatives, and similar parties, to see whether or not Universities would be interested in the services we have been discussing providing as a part of our venture. I used this time to discuss our venture with representatives from my undergraduate university.

Initially, the reps I spoke with indicated that they liked the idea of having a service that could act as a one stop shop for event production on campus. Planning these large scale “party” events themselves were often too time consuming and costly to make feasible. They indicated a desire to have more events like this, and said that for the right price, they would certainly be interested in the venture that we were proposing. There were, however lots of questions about pricing and revenue streams for the University that could potentially act as deal breakers for these reps. For example, when paying to bring in a concert artist, the University is able to make back a portion of the money in ticket sales, however with the free to students model we had discussed, this would mean the University would be paying for our services with no hope of future reimbursement. Certainly this is something that we should figure out and discuss in our groups.

The other thing that I discussed at length with my university’s reps was that they weren’t sure students would be interested in the event without some sort of known brand or name attached. They discussed having brought in musical acts in the past that didn’t have good attendance because of low name recognition. They also discussed that when they had tried to plan their own party like events, the turn out was often mediocre and they had a difficult time engaging students in such activities. They seemed to think that students often already had their own plans or places to hang out on the weekends, and didn’t take advantage of campus activities unless they had a large name or brand presence attached. While they agreed our events may be at a different and more interactive/engaging level than parties they had planned in the past, they expressed concern about how to demonstrate this to students and said unless a tested and easily executable on-campus marketing strategy was given along with our services, they would be hesitant to invest the money into it.

Overall, it seems that University presenters are certainly interested in a product similar to what we have talked about providing, however the details on execution are a bit murky and should probably be cleared up before we finalize anything in our business model. Perhaps some of this is getting too far into the weeds, however these topics seem important as they naturally arose in conversation with these reps. I certainly left the conversation feeling good about our base plan, and ready to make necessary changes to our model in order to make it more successful and marketable to universities around the country.

An Important Intervention.

After working together last week in class to hone our audience and discover who it is we’re creating our ventures for, we have spent the last several days engaged in discussions with people who line up with our archetypes. The week itself was a test to find out whether these archetypes we created were actually audience members who cared about what we’re doing.  As always, we are working to keep our art and our audience at the center of what we’re doing.

For me, the interviews I conducted this week turned out to be a very positive thing for the venture that we are working on in class. The archetype that I was seeking out this week turned out to be incredibly interested in the venture that I was pitching. In fact, at one point I was even told that what we were thinking of creating was “an important intervention” for people like her. To me, over the course of the entire semester, it was that sentence that made me feel like our team was on the right track. Throughout the semester we’ve had questions about whether what we were thinking was innovative enough, or viable enough, or relevant enough, and we’ve spend lots of time discussing back and forth what these words even mean in regards to our ventures. In the end however, knowing that someone who fits your audience segment finds your work to be an important intervention…well this seems to confirm that the work is in fact innovative, relevant and viable enough to be worthwhile. Is our company going to launch the next piece of tech that changes a generation? Probably not, most ventures won’t. But the art we’re hoping to create and foster is important to the audience we selected. So far, we’re doing exactly what we’ve set out to do. Will there be some tweaks next week based on what we’ve heard? I surely hope so. But, our base idea is something that is resonating, which will give us just the right amount of stamina to continue on to the next step, making our venture a more concrete reality.

We’ve Got Some Tweaking to Do.

Each week brings a new challenge. It surely would be the mantra chosen for Arts Entrepreneurship were we to choose one. As we progress further and further down the road towards our two ventures and subsequent business models, each new step forward only creates a new task or obstacle to figure out.

Last week, as the class sat over two different business model canvases, we found ourselves stuck in a loop. Somehow, our collective mind had begun to go through a process of fitting our pre-established venture ideas into the framework of the canvas, rather than allowing the canvas to shape the ideas. For an hour we were all trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. After a bit of discussion to reframe our situation, group switching (and breathing), Dr. Essig brought us instead to a place of field testing. Why not get outside of the classroom and figure out what it is people want and need rather than trying to solidify everything on our own in a class session.

And so, for the last week, all members of the class have been working towards speaking with potential target audiences in order to get a feel for whether or not our ideas were worth pursuing. I myself have discovered quite a bit, not just about our venture ideas, but about how important it is to get out of your workspace and talk to your community or audience.

For the last several weeks, our class has collectively yahoo-ed and encouraged and dreamt up lists full of venture ideas that we felt were innovative and viable in the Phoenix area. I felt as if we were certainly on the right track and had dug deep in our brainstorming sessions, creating brilliance. It wasn’t until I had my first field test conversation this week that I began to see things differently. My first conversation ended with the person pulling up company websites that were already focused on exactly what we were proposing, with a few of them already planning a launch in the Valley.

How disappointing.

But on another hand, it did give me a new perspective on how important this process is. I’ll admit I was skeptical before, feeling like the diversity of experiences and backgrounds we had in the room was testing enough, but I know now this was incorrect. This week led me to think, how many times has an entrepreneur gone all the way, created a product or a service, only to find out upon launching that they’re not really fixing a problem at all, or what they’re selling is already being done better by someone else? Probably too many. But, going out and talking to your audience can help negate this. It can also help to make your initial ideas better, deeper, and better thought out. Or at least, this is what this last week has done to some of the venture ideas I’ve been carrying in my head since our last class session.

I’m extremely curious to hear what kinds of conversations and discoveries arose from the field testing done by my fellow entrepreneurs this week. I’m expecting a healthy mix of positive and negative reviews. But what I’m more excited and curious about is to see how our collective mind will work together to solve the challenges presented to us from the field testing, and how our ventures evolve because of it.

Gather and Gather and Gather.

Just as I predicted in last week’s blog post, the ideas that we were able to come up with for this semester’s potential ventures could have been endless. Luckily our fearless leader, Dr. Essig, made sure to give us a reasonable limit, or we would have spent hours coming up with what we thought were new and innovative ideas. Coming into the class at the beginning of January, I had already plotted out in my own mind things that I thought would be interesting or fun to work on over the course of the semester, but after our brainstorming session, all of those ideas have been put aside in order to explore, with greater excitement, the ideas of our collective imagination. Once again, a class session has worked to prove to myself and the rest of the class that many heads are better than one.

I have recently been studying my way through a series of books about commercial producing in New York theatre, and I have found over and over again a similar sentiment. Those producers who go out on their own and independently try to mount multi-million dollar Broadway shows are often those that find themselves failing or puttering along as middling successes. However, those producers who engage in 3 or 4 person partnerships, enlisting the brain power and talents of multiple humans, seem to have a better shot at the elusive Broadway hit. When venturing into unknown territory, a collective is always safer than going out on your own..have popular horror movies taught us nothing?

Furthermore, last week’s class has gotten me closer acquainted to the idea that it’s okay to exist in the realm of unknowns. We literally haven’t a clue what the journey ahead looks like, or how we will even begin to make our list of venture ideas come to fruition. In fact, we don’t even know who we’ll be working with at this point. But, that’s okay. What this class has been so effective at teaching me thus far is that you must research, brainstorm, learn, and understand before you ever begin to formulate a plan. Many times in my previous producing or entrepreneurial journeys I have found myself diving in and moving forward long before I ever took a step back to assess the situation and first discover where I am and what I know before deciding where to go and what to do. Already in a few short weeks, the process of this class has given me greater comfort resting in the unknown, especially when that means researching and planning in order to know more and uncover what that unknown is.

In the classic sense, entrepreneurs are the go-getters who run fast, work hard, and hustle their way to the top. And while these are certainly necessary components of launching a venture, I have also come to appreciate the image of an entrepreneur we are building together in our class. One who gathers and gathers and gathers and then uses all of that information to step out into the unknown, prepared for whatever may be inside it.

Entrepreneur Know Thyself

Last week in class, we undertook what I found to be an incredibly eye-opening exercise. After each being given a week to contemplate and discern what our various strengths, interests, connections, and knowledge base was, we were then asked to share this information with the class as a whole. For nearly half an hour we went around the room each adding pieces of our identity to a large sheet of brown parchment paper on the wall. After this brief period of time, we had amassed a sizeable chart of all of our different skills and abilities, all mashed together. It was clear by the end of class that we had essentially worked to lay all of the jigsaw pieces out on the table, and the next task is to figure out where they fit together.

I personally had a hard time in the initial, individual stages of the task. As I sat trying to fill columns on a spreadsheet with every hobby, relationship, or piece of knowledge I felt could be useful for the class, I realized that rarely, if ever, are we asked to do this level of self-reflection. I’m sure that most people can count on one hand the number of times they have been through an exercise of this sort. I brought this feeling up in class, and was met with the phrase you see in the title of this post: “Entrepreneur, know thyself.” While it could be a phrase that is easy to brush off as a cliché, it is the thing we have been working these past three weeks in class to do. Yes, we have built a base of theory and a basic understanding of what entrepreneurship is, but more importantly, we have spent time building a base of trust and understanding with our fellow classmates. Much like the cast in a theatrical production needs time to get to know and “click” with each other, partners in an entrepreneurial venture also need this same spirit of camaraderie. I feel as if the past three weeks of sharing and self-evaluation have set each of us up for success we would not know were we to complete this class as individuals.

It was not only eye-opening to see all of the hidden talents that lay in our classroom, but also exciting to see the diverse and wide range of experiences and backgrounds we are each bringing to the table. Seeing all of these things written down in a concrete way has already begun to spark ideas in my head about what sorts of ventures could be possible this semester. They really do seem endless. And as a quick teaser for what may be to come, I’ll leave you with this–we currently have the talent in the room to do a tuba-played, circus wedding on ice. If that doesn’t spark your interest, what will?

Broadway’s Better Mousetrap

I am a big fan of Shark Tank. Perhaps this makes me a cliché, or it simply reveals both my deep interests for entrepreneurship and reality television. Nonetheless, over the years, Shark Tank has worked not only as a vehicle for hard-working entrepreneurs to reach financial success and profitability, but also as a tool to make popular the idea of small businesses, creative ideas, and the risk-takers who launch them. Every week, the “sharks” encourage people to be bold and relentless in their entrepreneurial journeys. In fact, one thing that consistently comes up on the show is the idea of “building a better mouse trap.” Many of the investors often decline to invest in companies or ideas because they fail to see the innovation, or fail to understand how a particular product solves a real need or problem. As we were in class last week, I began to think about how this relates to the arts world.

My professional interests lie mostly with commercial and Broadway theatre in New York City, and it is difficult, when thinking about this sector of the arts, to make a significant list of innovation or massive disruption that has occurred. In fact, many times, it seems as if the experiences, shows, and ideas that are the most innovative, creative, and “outside the box” are left to their own devices–denounced as being unviable in a commercial market. How strange is it that in many other sectors this kind of innovation and risk is rewarded, while in the arts it is tucked away for a specific crowd to enjoy? Of course, examples like Hamilton or Great Comet come to mind as seemingly disparate music genres blended and diversity was uplifted and celebrated…but how sad is it that in 2018 only one or two shows truly come to mind as examples of innovation (and sadder still that diversity is considered “innovative” on Broadway). It seems to me that this particular sector of the arts has a long way to go in both trial and acceptance of better mouse traps. The ideas, creativity, and talent exist, but how often is it being allowed to rise to the top, and given a voice?

Perhaps the problem is creativity being inhibited by knowledge. For decades, musical theatre has had a concrete footing in western culture. It has its traditions, rules, and expectations, and to defy or stray from these is not often looked at positively by the producing powers that be. (But Gershwin for the 100^th time? Now that will work!) But perhaps, instead of breaking these rules, the disruption in Broadway and commercial theatre needs to be greater still. To return to the analogy of the mousetrap, maybe what we need is not a better way to catch mice, because maybe that is not the core of your problem. This often results in merely a reiteration of the invention, rather than the creation of a new category. It’s time that Broadway (its producers, directors, writers, etc.) start to reframe their problems, their art, and their concerns in order to allow true disruption to begin.

The US Patent Office has issued 4,400 patents for better versions of the mousetrap over the years, and only 20 ever made commercially viable products. Similarly, 8 out of every 10 Broadway shows fail. If that doesn’t indicate it’s time for some disruption, then I don’t know what will.