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Ask The Punk Rock MBA
– Finn McKenty
Pollstar is excited to welcome our new business advice column, “Ask The Punk Rock MBA,” where Finn McKenty will answer business questions you need answered for operating a successful business.
Mckenty is an American marketing strategist, music commentator, writer and graphic designer who currently runs the YouTube channel and podcast The Punk Rock MBA. He is director of marketing at the online education platform URM Academy. Please send all questions to [email protected].
I’m a booker at a club. I’ve been downsized and am thinking about going independent, how do I go about trying to market myself and my services?
My first suggestion is to re-frame the way you think of yourself. That simple little flip of the mental switch can help you see a whole new world of opportunities.
Rather than identifying yourself as “a booker at a club,” which is a fairly narrow corridor, consider thinking of yourself as something more like an event producer who owns a budget, a P&L, and has the rare and extremely valuable skillset of fitting all the moving pieces together in real time to make it come together, night after night, with all the crazy challenges and unpredictability that come with the music industry!
Second, look outside the music industry. Just about every big company on the planet is rethinking the way they produce events like trade shows, conferences, all-hands meetings, product announcements and so forth. For example, look at how Apple pivoted their WWDC event to an online format that was in many ways even more compelling than the in-person version had been in years.
These companies are scrambling to figure out how to pull these events off, and for every company like Apple that does it well there’s 100 that do it very badly — and that’s where you come in! Find someone who you can partner with on any technical knowledge that you may lack, and you’ve got a great team that can parachute in and help companies figure out how to pivot to online events.
Their culture may be a little different than what you’re used to in music (although you may also be surprised at how cool a lot of the people at “uncool” companies are), but this helps you get at least some of your eggs out of the music industry basket. And it doesn’t hurt that corporate clients pay way, way better than their music industry counterparts do!
Use this as an opportunity to re-frame the way you think of yourself, package the skills you’ve spent years honing, build some new relationships, and you’ll thrive!