You DO have insurance, DON’T YOU?

The county music duo Sugarland has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit stemming from the collapse of the stage at the Indiana State Fair three months earlier.  The accident, which killed seven and injured another 44, occurred just minutes before the group was set to perform.  Yes, having probably narrowly escaped death, the group finds itself at risk again.

It’s a tragic situation and I’ll leave a discussion of the finer points of negligence theory to the legal scholars.  But I want to highlight the importance of taking steps to adequately protect your business.  This includes liability insurance.

I have run shows both ways: fully insured and sans insurance.  The “commando style” show even featured an aerialist suspended breathtakingly close to the heads of the front row audience.  Everything turned out okay, but promoting a show without the financial safety net of insurance was an unnecessary risk that I’m not exactly proud of… or willing to take again.  Several organizations offer group liability insurance coverage for clowns and other performers at incredibly reasonable rates.  I could not have put on a show at a Six Flags theme park–featuring a half-dozen fire performers, no less–without such insurance.

Yes, I’ve gotten away with it, and maybe you have, too.  But for many professional venues, the lack of insurance is a show stopper.  For that matter, so is a lawsuit.  Insurance won’t ward off lawsuits, but policies can be a talisman against the financial devastation that can follow an unfortunate accident.

photo credit: variationblogr

Peter Bregman discusses the personal leadership challenge of repeating the things we do right and not repeating the things we do wrong.

His simple prescription is to take five minutes at the end of each day and ask of yourself these questions:

• How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure?
• What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do — differently or the same — tomorrow?
• Who did I interact with? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question? Share feedback?

Sometimes the most elegant solutions can be the simplest, too.

I’m going to print out these questions and use this hack.  At the end of a week, I’ll report back my results.  What are you doing to improve your situation?

The Best Way to Use the Last Five Minutes of Your Day via Harvard Business Review.

If anybody knows how to improve your chances of sticking with your resolutions, it’s Dan Heath & Chip Heath, authors of Made to Stick and Switch.  Here are their five recommendations:

1. Don’t be ambitious. When change is hard, aim low. A friend of ours, the editor of a wellness magazine, has a “1-Song Workout” that she does on days when she doesn’t feel like working out. She tells herself, “All I have to do is work out for one song,” but of course she often gets in a groove and finishes a full workout. So don’t set an ambitious New Year’s resolution like “I’ll work out four times a week.” Instead, plan to do “1-Song Workouts” on Monday and Thursday. Leave yourself room to overachieve — that feeling of “nailing it” is what will keep you hooked.
2. Watch for bright spots. If you’re trying to eat healthier, for instance, don’t obsess about all the times that you slip and eat an Oreo. Instead, keep a constant watch on what does work. If you ate healthy food all day yesterday, how did you get away with it? Was it because you had healthy “heat & eat” food that was easy to fix? Was it because you never let yourself get so hungry that you’d crave fatty foods? Did you avoid the office lunch at the Mexican place? If you can understand what allowed you to succeed, you can do more of it. That’s bright-spots thinking. (Need a refresher on “bright spots”?)
3. Make simple tweaks in your environment. If you’re trying to increase your savings, pay with cash and leave your cards at home. If you’re trying to diet, carry around a Ziploc of apple slices. If you’re trying to jog, lay out your clothes the night before. If you’re trying to stop oversleeping, set up a double (or triple?) alarm system. (Or buy a Clocky with your Xmas gift cards!) This stuff sounds insignificant, but it will make a big difference.
4. Rely on planning, not willpower. Your Resolution calls for a new way of behaving. And that’s a challenge because you’ve been practicing the old way of behaving for a long time. The old way is well-paved and familiar and comfortable. So you can’t just bet on willpower or good intentions to ensure your success. Use your planning skills. Get yourself on the hook for something! Don’t plan to “learn Spanish.” Register for a Spanish course at your local community college. Do it right now — you’re already online. Or don’t “try hard” to go to the gym in the morning. Email your friend, right now, and tell ‘em to come get you at 7am on January 3.
5. Publicize your resolution. We all know peer pressure works. So use it on yourself. Tell everybody you know what your resolution is. They’ll bug you about it, and you won’t want to disappoint them. Just knowing that they know will make you more likely to succeed. Hell, if you want, tell us. We won’t bug you about it, but we’ll silently root for you.

Courtesy of the Heath Brothers.

Surfing the interwebs recently, I came across this little gem:

Back of every “Success Story” you will almost invariably find a story of hard work.  There is nothing startingly new about this observation, but it is one which can never be overlooked when you are interested in achieving recognition—and remuneration—beyond the average.  I am not denying that some people seem to get “the breaks” which push them ahead faster than others who might be just as capable and deserving, but this is the exception rather than the rule. And a lucky break never helped anyone who wasn’t prepared to make the most of it when it came. In other words, there is no such thing as overnight success.

Those words are as true for artists and performers today as they were when they first appeared in the February 1938 issue of Accordion World.

Scott Harrison built Charity: Water into a $5 million organization in less than three years.  But to do so, he relied on an e-mail list of 12,000 names he’d developed over years of working as a nightclub promoter, as noted by Chris Guillebeau in The Art of Non-Conformity.

It took Gary Vaynerchuk a mere 18 months from the launch of his site, winelibrarytv.com, to get a guest appearance as a wine expert on the Conan O’Brien show.  As Vaynerchuck explains in Crush It!, he’d been working in his family’s liquor store since age 16–selling the stuff before he could even drink it himself–and spent hours training his palate to discern exotic tastes ranging from mango and papaya to sweaty socks.

Look past the public hype, and you’ll see someone who’s been at it for years.  Even the youngsters.

Tiger woods might have been, at 21, the youngest player to ever win the Masters Tournament, but by that time he’d been playing golf for 19 years.

So the next time you hear some story about the latest phenom who seems to come out of nowhere, don’t get jealous.  Okay, maybe a little jealousy can be a motivator.  But don’t fall into the trap of thinking they got there–and “if only” you could get there–without hard work.

Photo by ACME-Nollmeyer

A lot of arteestic types say they’re too busy or they can’t be bothered to learn about commerce.  Some go so far as to say they’re not interested in material things.  They act as though they enjoy starving.

I call bullshit.

Arteests don’t try to learn about these unfamiliar, uncomfortable topics because it’s scares them.  Don’t underestimate how powerful The Resistance can be, and how easily our fragile egos will trick us into rationalizing away our fears as something–anything–other than what they really are.

Money, in and of itself, is merely a tool that simplifies the exchange of value between people.

For instance: You’re a goat farmer with a broken truck and I’m a truck mechanic.  You might offer me one of your goats as payment for my repairs to your truck.  If I like goat meat, we’ve got a deal.  Now if I’m a vegetarian who hates goat cheese, the goat’s value to me is questionable and the deal is off.  But what if I love goats so much I set the price for the repairs at one-and-a-half goats?

Money is society’s workaround for the one-and-a-half goat problem.  Or, as one of the central characters in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged explains it:

Money is the material shape of the principle that [people] who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.  Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force.  Money is made possible only by the [people] who produce.  Is that what you consider evil?

Where people and by extension, money, get a bad rap is when they want money without having to provide value for it–Rand’s moochers and looters–or they just accumulate money for the sake of having more without making or doing something meaningful with it.  Like animal hoarders or junk hoarders, money hoarders aren’t much fun to be around.  If all you’re focused on is counting ducats while you ignore your audience and your craft, then you deserve every bit of nothing that heads your way.

If you want to create art for art’s sake, then do that.  Have a blast and don’t worry about the money.  Your art is your gift to society.

But if you’re trying to earn money from your creative efforts, then you need the marketplace–the intersection of art and commerce–because that’s where value is exchanged and, as British writer and metaphysicist Stuart Wilde reminds us, “the Universe cannot mail you a check from the clouds.”  And the better you understand the marketplace and commerce, the better you can “find other humans, satisfy their needs in some way, and have them transfer a little symbology into your bank account.”

It’s an unfortunate fact that most ideas just never happen.

After some extensive research with creatives, Scott Belsky writing in Making Ideas Happen, said that creativity itself is, “the greatest obstacle to seeing our ideas through to the finish.”

Whoa.  A bunch of real, working artists said the thing that goofed up their work the most was their own creativity?

Yep, and it gets worse.  Belsky goes on to identify the series of negative tendencies and challenges that accompany the creative psyche:

• self-doubts
• distaste for negative feedback
• tendency to use idea-generation as a way to escape the pain of self-discipline and execution
• rampant disorganization that (supposedly) fosters creative thinking

In my humble opinion, this is the real root of all evil… or at least the evil that stands in the way of our success.

Photo by sean94112

Writer’s Digest has compiled a list of the top 15 “secret” expectations, customs, and norms that aspiring writers tend to violate when working with editors.

The points boil down to basic professionalism and common courtesy that are applicable to anyone wanting to succeed commercially while working for, with, or through a client or some kind of gatekeeper. Non-writers can substitute the word “artist” for “writer” and nearly every point will still resonate. But the list a refreshing reminder of what editors are looking for in the writers they work with.  One of my favorites is:

10. FINISH THE JOB.
“I often feel like writers fall back on lazy tendencies. Quite often, I’ll give a substantive editorial suggestion, only to have the writer write or call back and say, ‘Great idea. Can you go ahead and make the changes required?’ “

Do professional creatives really need to be reminded that getting the job done to the client’s satisfaction is the surest path to swift payment and repeat business? At least in the eyes of the editors surveyed in this article, the answer is yes.

What Editors Won’t Tell You, But We Will via Writers Digest.

Karol Gajda, guest posting on zenhabits.com, has authored a succinct and excellent guide for beginners starting a small on-line business.  Here’s the summary:

1. Focus on what’s important: Action
2. Invest in education
3. Ask for help
4. Participate in the community
5. Don’t quit your day job

His post is absolutely worth the 7 minutes you’ll invest in reading it, even if your business isn’t primarily on-line or that small.

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide To Starting A Small Online Business

As a performer, the perils of picking a stage name are plenty.

Writing in the NY Times, Allan Kozinn charts the decisions of pop performers and bands—and even a classical music group or two—as they struggled to find their perfect name. Here’s one of his most astute observations:

Sure it’s about marketing. Welcome to 2010. But it’s about music too. Getting listeners stuck on your name is just about getting noticed and guaranteeing you’ll be remembered. That could be a double-edged sword. If, having lured the curious, you give a killer performance, the name becomes a gift that keeps on giving. On the other hand, if you fail, you fail in a bright spotlight, and that catchy name will have listeners saying, “Oh no, not them.”

Learn the name-picking secrets of the best by reading Would They Sound as Sweet by Other Names? via NY Times

Photo by Gene Hunt

Most people carry some debt, whether it’s a credit card balance or the money they owe on a car loan or home mortgage. Debt is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can become a problem if you allow it to get out of control. The Texas Society of CPAs offers these tips on mistakes to avoid in managing your balance.

Don’t Forget to Pay With Cash
If you have enough cash to pay for a purchase, don’t be tempted to put it on your credit card instead. That’s an easy way to spend more than you intended–and in many cases more than you can really afford. Before you reach for that plastic, think about whether you’ve got the dollars you need for the purchase. If you do, set the credit card aside for the bigger-ticket items that are on this month’s budget.

Don’t Ignore Your Credit Report
Credit agencies maintain information on your credit history and give you a credit score based on whether you make your payments on time, run up heavy balances and other factors. Lenders use your credit score to decide whether you qualify for a new loan and what interest rate you ought to pay for it. If the information in your credit report is incorrect, you could end up being denied a loan or paying unnecessarily high interest rates. You are eligible to receive a free credit report from each credit agency once a year, so take advantage of this option and review the information carefully. If there are errors, inform the agency and ask how they can be corrected. Be aware, as well, that any suspicious entries in your report could be an indication that an identify thief is using your identity to run up debt without paying it off. That’s another good reason to keep an eye on your credit report.

Don’t Miss a Payment Deadline
Skipping a payment or mailing your check a little late may not seem like a big deal, but it can cause a big headache. Not only will you likely be stuck with a late fee, but your creditor may also raise the interest rate it charges you. When other creditors see the late or missed payment, they may deny you credit or raise the rates they charge you. This small step can become a costly mistake.

Don’t Stick to the Minimum Payment
If you’re squeezed for cash, it is better to pay a little rather than nothing at all, but try whenever possible to pay off as many of your recent purchases as possible. If you pay as you go, you avoid interest charges on your purchases altogether. Even if you can’t cover your full balance, paying only the minimum that’s due lengthens the amount of time you’ll have that outstanding balance-—and that you will be paying interest on it.

Don’t Leave Your Creditors in the Dark
Creditors understand that good customers sometimes fall on hard times, especially in the current troubled economy. And they’re often willing to work with you to prevent your account from falling into default, but you have to let them know that you’re facing problems. If you lose your job or face some unexpected financial hardship, contact all of your creditors immediately. Ask them if it’s possible to pay a lower interest rate or minimum payment for the time being, or if you can skip payments altogether for a few months until you’re back on your feet.

Consult Your CPA
Whatever financial issues you’re wrestling with, remember that your local CPA can help. Turn to him or her with all your questions about any financial issues facing your family.

Not saying “no”

Growing up, saying the word “no” usually got us into trouble.  And even though as adolescents and adults saying the word “no” usually kept us out of trouble, we still carry around a deep-seated bias to tell people “yes” when we really mean the opposite.   Artists, especially performers, have a strong need to seek approval from their audiences, and saying “no” isn’t usually a crowd pleaser.  But there are times when saying “no” is the better choice… for your business, for your artistic career, for you own sanity.

Why should you want to say “no” to something?

• it isn’t in line with your long-term plans
• it keeps you from accomplishing more important results
• it doesn’t provide you with learning or growth
• it’s not worth the headache or heartache you’ll feel doing it
• it doesn’t pay you timely

These questions apply equally to potential jobs as well as your daily activities.  When a client calls with a request, don’t just say “yes” automatically.  First, consider if what you’re being asked to do is in line with your business plan.  If it isn’t, turn down the work.

Some film crew friends recently complained that they haven’t been paid for a job.  They’ve spent more time collecting their pay then they did earning it.  Even if the production company eventually makes good, my friends won’t do another job for that company… because strong cash flow is a key component of my friends’ business plan.

Saying “no” to potential customers, to potential income, can be one of the most difficult actions a business owner can take.  But if it’s in line with the vision and written plan you have for yourself and your business, it can be the right action.  Marketing guru Seth Godin offers some reassuring advice:

You can dissipate your gift by making people with the loudest requests temporarily happy, or you can change the world by saying ‘no’ often.  Saying ‘no’ to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.

Learn to strategically say ‘no’ to others and say ‘yes’ to your success.