Let’s hire robots!

Small business owners have trouble with automation and outsourcing. Let’s talk about automation — setting up systems to run themselves.

Entertainment companies are often small-profit-margin organizations who end up competing with larger-margin companies. Eg: a couple friends could go to a play or to a bar. Competing in this way means amusement companies need to get every leg up they can.

Automation can take the humanity out of entertainment and it can also do the opposite.

Over-automating

Some people are trying to save themselves all the time in the world. They want everything to be a hands-off system before it’s even a system. They want all the tools to do all the cool things tools do. I can fall victim to this.

Symptoms:

1. You pore over the latest productivity apps trying to find what’s new and next
2. You get dragged into ads that promise an all-in-one package or some efficiency
3. You hate paper
4. You spend time figuring out how to do something for the first time instead of doing it for the first time

Under-automating

Some people are stuck doing the tasks that are better done by machines. Machines are good at repetitive things and memorization (storage).

Symptoms:

1. Every task takes your brain
2. You’re using your mind to remember things like schedules, contact info, what you are doing, your goals, etc.
3. Your day to day has many easy tasks

This is better use of resources

I think of time, energy, money, etc as one collective of resources called “jellybeans”. Automation might not save you time, but it might save you a lot of decision fatigue, so overall may save you more jelly beans. Choosing the wrong automation could cost you jelly beans, so who has the jelly beans to really figure all this out?

Solve the problem at the right time

If you’re in the “over-automating” category, you might start a project with a perfection mindset of “what do I want this to look like at the end and how do I get there the fastest” If you’re in the “under” category, you can probably just jump into something and start going. Then, you keep doing it the same way for the duration.

The happy medium is to jump into a project. Start doing the next task. Then, when you know what the project is, and you know what tasks are required, sort thru the process and find repetitive and storage needs.

If you go to early, you’re gonna waste too much time trying to solve issues that might not even be issues. You might say “I’m going to need to organize thousands of clients” then you later realize that you get three clients that pay for your year of operations.

If you go too late, you could be totally drained, and have let a lot of work that fall aside — the work that only humans can do… the work that humans want from you!

Easy evaluation

The easiest way to assess your automation potential for stuff is to take inventory of your jelly-bean-heavy-tasks (JBHT) and then compare them to the value you provide. See, I’m starting with the tasks, not the tools.

• Look at your books and see where you spend all your money. Look at each one to see if there’s an automation solution that will save you money.
• Spend a week or a month tracking all the time you spend on your business. Figure out if there’s automation to save you time, even if it costs you money.
• Look for things that take your energy leave you exhausted.
• Keep a journal for a week and see what burns through your emotional currency where are the headaches, what drives you to a feeling of helplessness?
• There are a lot of other resources you can examine too, like social currency, equipment damage, etc.

You don’t want to automate your main value. If people come to you because of original thinking, you don’t want a robot to post quotes randomly on your instagram. You want to spend all your jelly beans on sharing original thoughts and ideally automate or outsource everything else.

For example Scot Nery’s Boobietrap

The main value we provide is curation, communications, and community. So, even though it takes a lot of time and emotions for a neurotic person like me to go thru act submissions, respond to emails, and write good comedy newsletters; I do it. Co-producer Meranda spends a lot of jelly beans on connecting with people and building the community. These things might feel repetitive, or like they don’t always warrant a human brain, but they do… if we don’t offer them, we don’t have anything proprietary to offer.

Here are some examples of automations

We do things with light automation like using an abbreviation app for repetitive chunks of text that we need to add to messages. When someone asks us how do they submit an act, or if i need to send a rejection email, or a piece of contact info, this is crucial.

I use Copia. It’s an app for keeping a clipboard history. Basically, you copy and paste something, then you copy and paste something else. If you wanna go back and paste that first thing again, it will store that for your easy access. It keeps a long history so you can move a bunch of chunks around to different things.

We use apple’s reminders for storing and syncing shopping lists. We use calendar syncing for day-of special todos. We use air table to store data that we need to share but doesn’t need to be constantly easily accessible. We use Asana for weekly repeating checklists.

We also have a heavy duty app that I built that organizes all the acts in our database and all our ticket buyers. It lets us send out emails to acts as soon as their booked with all their booking info. It sends them an email the week of the show to let them know what they need to do. It allows us to keep and organize the lineups for each week. It sends out a playbill of the show to everyone in attendance. It manages our staff and warns us if we’re low on staff. It helps us keep track of the diversity in our shows. We wouldn’t have been able to manage 5 years of weekly shows involving 30 volunteers per week without it. It would have been expensive if we had to pay to develop it.

We use Buffer for automatically posting to social media on a schedule. We create the posts ( communications are part of our value ) but Buffer schedules and distributes (scheduling, and repeating are not part of our value).

Repeat

The biggest gap companies face with automation is forgetting to reevaluate. You might have had a JBHT years ago that was too expensive to automate, but maybe now it’s costing you more jelly beans, maybe your jelly beans are worth more, or maybe the automation solutions are cheaper.

Got an email from someone fresh outta college who is about to do some great stuff as a writer. Here’s a basic path toward picking next steps. I walk entertainment companies through this even when their career is established. It’s really powerful to reevaluate the purpose of what we’re doing and get on a simpler trajectory instead of shotgunning creativity out into space.

This is kind of an open letter to the writer, but I hope it’s useful as a worksheet for anyone open to doing some rewarding work for their entertainment company.

You can set out on a total plan in a day. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Whatever you do will help you a ton, as long as you make bold specific choices. I promise.

Pick the mission.

1. Why did you first want to be a writer?
2. What is a piece of writing you envy or want to match?

What’s at the core of the first experience and what’s at the core of the piece of work of your dreams?

Your mission / reason might sound like “Writing accesses imagination in a way that breaks down barriers and mobilizes real change within people.”

Pick a direction.

This is your initial trajectory. Narrow focus. Super Narrow! Not “I want to be a professional writer.” something more like “I want to write books about how technology can preserve nature in California”

Make your direction sustainable.

As the world changes, you’ll want your assets to become more valuable, not less. Books will probably become less valuable and writers with them. You will want your direction to be proprietary (something someone can’t take from you and make it with the same perceived value for cheaper).

So maybe it changes to “I would like to be a thought leader and influential copy writer who improves adoption of California’s environment saving technologies.”

You might notice that it’s not “writer” as a job title and that might feel like a “hold on a minute!” way of thinking. This direction choosing can be a little surprising once you realize that your mission doesn’t align directly with the job title you originally applied. Nothing is lost. You’ve just improved on all the work you’ve done so far.

Freelance or corporation

You don’t have to decide at this point, but down the road, you’ll have to figure out if you’re going to be by yourself ( you build your brand based on you), or you become anonymous in a group of your own creation. it will be easier to figure out once you’ve experimented a little and adjusted your direction

3 month project : Build assets, serve your audience, improve workflow

Work every day for 90 days. 45% on assets. 45% on audience. 10% on observation and flow. So, if you have 5 hours per day to commit, you’re gonna do 2:15 on assets and audience each and :30 on organizing.

Your assets are the things your business is going to use moving forward.

Hopefully they’ll add value to your company for years. As a thought-leader, your assets are knowledge, ability to share that knowledge, and proof of both.

You might decide you’re going to blog every day a research topic that interests you. Every blog post has to be about California, technology, environment.

Look at you! You’re already doing your dream! You wanted to be a writer. Now you’re writing every day.

You’re a writer!

It’s best if your assets are proveable.

The blog is not the asset. The asset you’re building here is your experience, knowledge, and understanding. The blog is the proof of your assets for the outside world.

If you are a performer, it could be writing/ rewriting your show. If you’re a game designer, it could be making a game. It’s helpful to make your assets something you can show to your audience at some point. Either the physical proof, a case study, or maybe quotes from clients that proves you have great assets.

Serve your audience

Figure out who an audience might be for you. What kind of people will be able to pay you enough down the road for the thing you want to do? Maybe your audience options are civil engineers, environmental technology innovators, politicians.

Pick one of them and start serving them. The way you serve them doesn’t have to be the way you’re building assets. It doesn’t even have to be in your normal skillset.

You could find all the mayors in california. Figure out what they need individually or as a group and give them something great.

Your three month project could be to setup a way to aggregate mayoral news from every city and make a news source that’s for mayors to see what everyone else is doing. Make the feed compelling and make it a celebration of mayors so everyone wants to compete and get news up there about them (not just environmental news). If they get a flattering article, they can share it. That makes them feel and look good and maybe helps them get reelected. You’re serving them where their needs are.

Workflow

To start, these two above projects have to be on mission with building assets and audience. That will make you feel more flowy. It will give your work purpose and it will be easier once you get derailed to re-rail. You’re not doing this stuff because it’s fun or because it’s bringing money in the moment. You’re doing it because it’s part of a higher purpose.

Think about what hours you’re putting in. think about whether you’re benefiting from your trajectory. If you have notes about big picture, or things to do later, jot them as notes to your future self. Don’t jump in to new commitments until you’ve gotten thru this period.

Adjusting

You can adjust and you will adjust. Maybe after this 3 months you’ll decide to throw away all your work completely… but you gotta get through the grind of it. You have to let yourself feel like it’s not working, then find what works better. You’re not just building assets and audience. You’re building a muscle for taking responsibility for the direction of your work. You’re heading toward a place where you are not relying on luck or privilege. You have some control and that feeling of agency toward your mission will be the most empowering thing you do with creative work.

Accountability

I recommend working on this with one or more people. This is very hard stuff to stick to. It’s scary, boring, and off-putting, but it’s going infuse your work with so much more value than waiting for magic to happen.

It’s really good to have someone else sign off before you make a trajectory change. That way you know you won’t be riding whims. You’ll be making strong choices based on your mission and that will give emotional fuel to all your work.

Not what you wanted

Creating a news site is not your dream. I know. Figuring out how to do the layout, the publishing, the promotion, the communication with mayors. This is craziness. Here’s why, though. There are about 500 cities in California. You could become a god-send to 20% of the mayors. 100 powerful people who are grateful that you exist and are waiting to be served the next thing you have to offer.

You’re going to have to do other things than write no matter what. Do you want the other things to be helping people, or do you want them to be mastering the food stamp system, or writing rejected cover letters to publishers, or applying for newspaper jobs, or interning at buzzfeed?

Let’s say in 4 months, you have a great keynote speech put together based on your blog writings that’s about bringing small communities together to affect environmental change. These 100 mayors help you get 100 speaking gigs for $1000/ea (which may be a low fee). You just made $100,000. I’m not trying to make you promises and I’m not focussed on a specific result. I’m trying to show you how the work can be channeled toward your mission.

The Goal is working on the mission

The point of this work is not to make a perfect plan and execute it perfectly and get a paycheck or have a measurable goal at the end. It’s all an experiment. Experiments never fail. They either prove something, or show that more experimentation is needed.

The stipulation, though there isn’t a measurable goal, you have to at least guess at a market that is going to pay off in the future and work toward that.

No matter what, you’re gonna gain…

1. Improve your value through asset building
2. Clarify your focus by getting in the trenches and seeing what really works
3. Improve your value through audience building
4. Learn a lot about audience building
5. Trying to manage an entire career with all the issues and goals and stuff is really frustrating. Doing something simple like this can help you demonstrate real progress and give you lots of confidence to continue. As a freelancer, this can be one of your most valuable assets.

All 5 star reviews might be a bad sign.

My show has an issue from an advertising perspective. We are too loved. What can we do to get more haters?

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I am an anti-circus circus pro.

My dad was in the press and he got free tickets to the Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey Circus and to Disney on Ice. I was afraid of clowns. I started doing magic shows for money when I was 11. At age 15, I found old programs from the circus and pulled them out to enjoy the artwork. There was an ad in each one for Clown College. I decided that was for me. Thought I needed to get good at everything: juggling, unicycling, balloon animals, cartwheels, etc.

I didn’t get accepted into Clown College. I’m not bitter. I swear.

My performances gained more than magic and were eventually juggling, comedy, and contortion solo shows. I performed on the street for my crowds doing my stuff. Loving it. Getting paid more than I would have in my first year of the circus and living free.

After my first year on the street, I toured with Brooks & Dunn’s Neon Circus and Wild West Show Tour. It was huge. The highest grossing country music tour ever. We played in giant arenas and Amphitheaters in 41 cities.

It was amazing to have these huge churning crowds gather together and see eachother celebrating this common thing. I loved that.

I didn’t love performing for 15,000 people at a time. It just becomes an ocean of roar. Connecting with the front row is detrimental to the experience of the person in the 50th row. The person in the 100th row can’t see what’s happening without a TV screen. No matter how good the sound was, the sound was bad. I heard Brooks & Dunn’s new hit all summer on stage, but didn’t recognize it in the fall when I heard it on a juke box.

It seemed like the big shows left some to be desired by the bands too. They would occasionally sneak off to a country bar at night and play a surprise show after their big ones. Those nights were epic!

My conflict

As you can see, I appreciate giant gatherings for the energy; but the big shows, even in 2001, were kinda lacking. Now, we have more technology that gives us more of what we individually think we want. Our instagram feed is custom entertainment. Netflix is just for us. People aren’t looking so much for mass-appeal shows as they are looking for personal experiences.

Cirque Du Soleil kept growing. It sucked to be one of 1500 ticket buyers and sit half-way back, but going to THE Cirque was a good story to tell. Then, they added more shows. A lot more shows. I count 47 from the Wikipedia page? Each has a seperate name, but who cares… We still call them each Cirque Du Soleil (or whatever mispronunciations you choose). It’s not as special to go to one. The conversation changed from “it was an incredible night like nothing I’ve ever experienced” to “there was this one act that was incredible” to “it’s pretty cool.”

Circus skills presented in a small crowd are intense. At Scot Nery’s Boobietrap, the biggest crowd we’ve had is 400 people and it’s amazing to see someone risk their life almost just for you.

There’s something about small circus, though. It’s cool to see it small because it’s made for something big. The reason circus acts could do Boobietrap is because they make a living (and pay for their equipment and training) by doing big shows.

Under capitalism, big circus has to get as big as it can get until the audiences start rejecting the generic. Before the pandemic, that was already happening to Cirque. Ringling was already closed. Now Cirque is applying for bankruptcy protection.

Things get old and die

I am not shy about my stance on history. Tear down all the statues. We don’t revere the actions of the past by putting them on a pedestal but by burying them under a better future.

In high school, I made a geocities website dedicated to the history of PT Barnum who I thought was awesome. He was not. His greatest virtue was that he was a liar, he bought at least one slave, abused animals, and most likely burned down multiple shows including living caged animals. You can watch the PBS documentary on him if you can stomach it. For some reason it tries to say all this stuff was cool.

The circus has done a lot of animal abuse and people abuse and has been used to manipulate people for a long time.

We don’t need to give circus CPR if it isn’t what people want – just like we don’t need to save the horse carriage industry.

Go forward

The new game is taking all the powerful experience of what circus was to people, and making a new powerful experience using as much of the carcass of old circus.

I’ve wanted for years for Cirque to go small and special again. Make 500 ticket experiences that are completely different from other Cirque shows. Bend the possibilities of what can happen live.

The CDS brand wasn’t to me about people in weird costumes doing ambiguous stuff to alien music with some big stunts. It was about making wonder and exposing what’s possible for humans to create. There are a lot of ways to express that.

We can reinvent the circus. Or we can keep trying to play tennis with Jello.

This is for entertainers pivoting.

I’ve been a “Hard to follow act” for a long time, and maybe I’ll write about that at some point, but right now, I’d like to talk about what if you’re the act that hasta follow?

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A lot of the entertainment companies I work for are small or solo. Here are some ideas for being your own boss.

Please appreciate that it’s hard

You will never catch up. You’ll never do it right. You’ll always feel like you’re missing something. You’ll have lots of blind spots.

Bosses at companies get paid more (theoretically at least) because it takes an emotional toll, it takes responsibility, consistency, and mostly responsibility. Responsibility is heavy. Anyone can make high level decisions, but it’s not worth it to take responsibility for the fate of the company if you’re getting paid minimum wage.

Separate your boss work

The high level thinking, the big picture stuff, the things only you can do get done when you’re wearing one hat. Maybe literally. Put on a boss hat and figure out where your business is going, what needs to be done to get there. What kind of people do you need to hire, etc.

It helps to delegate work to yourself

… by making a todo list or a bunch of todo lists. I like the Getting Things Done (there’s a short course on Lynda.com) method. You can set up todo lists for your different levels of focus.

• I want to do my boss work when I’m very focused and have more jellybeans to take responsibility for bold moves.
• I want to do some communications work, creative drudgery when I’m a little less focussed.
• I want to do cleanup or fun work when I’m tired.

When you’re the employee

… cleaning your office, sending a bunch of emails, the actual work tasks that are not genius, don’t mesh it with boss work.

You might not feel the wind at your back when you’re working for yourself vs when you’re your own boss, but you can make it easy. Putting in long hours trying to please your boss can be rewarding.

Take the emotional weight out of this work, pretend you have a boss that just wants it to get done, and don’t consider whether it’s the right thing todo at the time. Trust that your boss has already figured out what’s best for the company.

If you think of bigger ideas, write them down somewhere for your boss to review later. Don’t expound on them because you will piss off your boss, or distract your boss from the big picture. Your boss does not have an open door policy.

Block out time to be the boss

If you think of a bigger company, a lot of hours are put into the labor force while there’s only one boss putting in boss hours. Similarly, you’ll want to block out a small percentage of your time to being the boss. It will be not a lot of time, but it will be intense.

This practice of separating your boss time can be really helpful when you’re expanding and taking on more of a boss role. You’ll understand the other roles in the company and will be better at delegating to other people that really exist.

If you never separate, you will never be your own boss. You’ll never have the ability to make the boldest crucial decisions and you’ll also have trouble completing the lower level work.

Stick to the time you allocate. Then, you’re not spending a bunch of time dreaming. You’re the powerful executive.

Understand your employee

A good boss incentivizes the work that helps the business. A good boss knows the weaknesses and strengths of employees. A good boss takes long term plans and turns them into short term projects so employees can be motivated. Think shamelessly about yourself as an employee.

1. When are you likely to get distracted?
2. What work are you just never going to do?
3. Why is some work fun and some not?
4. How can you improve your accountability?
5. Where do you flow?

Track something

As a boss, you’re going to track something like audience growth, income, work produced, etc. As the employee you’ll track something like time spent, or whatever other metric your boss wants for representing your labor.

You’re not going to track everything. That gets distracting and tiring. Tracking is for a simple pass/fail scope of the work. Are we meeting our simple goal? Take the next step.

Promote yourself

When things are working, and there’s work that you hate, promote yourself by hiring a freelancer to do that thing for you.

Bosses are usually not at the top

Even if they’re just friends with an outside eye, it can be helpful to have your board of advisors be other people. Check in with them and see how you as the boss can be doing a better job. What are you missing? If your goal is profits, are you meeting your goal? Just talking to someone else about it can make it more clear and more likely.

Something to cry about. We have almost entered the next stage of lockdown in America. The next stage includes no more whining!

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you’re a live performer and you feel you have all this value, but can’t use it anymore, you’re wrong.

YOUR. LIVE. SHOW. HAS. ZERO. VALUE.

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Another approach to being rejected is to set up camp on the chopping block. Stay in it. Set yourself up for rejection a lot. Increase your Rejection Opportunity (RO) rate

This is a 3 part series on rejection. Doing it, avoiding it & embracing it.

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Acceptance is usually a way for us to skirt responsibility

This is a 3 part series on rejection. Doing it, avoiding it & embracing it.

Here’s a scenario. Purely hypothetical. You work really hard on your craft. You decide that someone or some committee has enough authority to rank whether your work was worth it, whether you’re a worthy, valid person. You put yourself in front of them. You get rejected. It’s crushing. All your life is wasted!

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Curation is how we get the good. Someone with a voice rejects stuff.

This is a 3 part series on rejection. Doing it, avoiding it & embracing it.

Humans are basically constantly all curating. We’re saying no to 1000 possible lunches / outfits / tv shows, etc. These are usually kinda easy. It can get scary when we start rejecting people.

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What good’s all this brilliant knowledge I give entertainers if they’re not using it? We gotta get going making entertainment better! I keep hearing similar sentiments from entertainment pros right now.

• “I’ve been really lazy since the quarantine began”
• “I haven’t been very productive”
• “I got really depressed from all that’s going on in the world”

This post is not motivational, it is non-de-motivational.

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I work with a lot of small entertainment companies. Often, there are too few staff members to separate the brand from the product.

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