Could you be the CEO of an up-coming band?
by Chris Howard
Bands are businesses — and you better not forget it.
Successful businesses are principally made up of three key things: a talented team, a great product or service, and a core ‘people’ the business is designed to serve. So if bands are businesses, how would such a breakdown of business factors apply to modern bands and artists? In this post, I will share my general views on one specific factor of successful businesses: the team.
There is arguably a snobbery around band-formation that you must always seek the most skilled musician — whether it’s the best ‘drummer’, the best ‘lead guitarist’, or even the best ‘songwriter’ etc. There can be no doubt these schools of thought are important when searching for the elusive ‘prodigy’ that makes your skillset extraordinary, however this approach of finding specific ‘roles’ for your band echoes a similar trap early-stage entrepreneurs fall into when trying to build early ‘teams’ for their businesses: the ‘Talent vs Roles’ dilemma (http://bit.ly/1Kt04fl). Boiling this dilemma down for the intrepid reader-in-a-rush sat patiently in an underground tunnel crammed next to 50 unfamiliar souls on their daily commute, the ‘Talent vs Roles’ dichotomy emphasises that for any small and agile team, multiple business ‘hats’ (think of them as ‘accountabilities’) must be worn by each individual within that team. As such, when hiring someone into a small team, entrepreneurs should not be thinking of what ‘hat’ their prospective new employee needs to wear — but how many ‘hats’ they can wear well, if required. From my own bitter experience, this school-of-thought applies to teams typically less than 10 people, and it’s pretty much irrelevant whether that business is a coffee shop, a tech-startup, or — you guessed it — a band.
So, what does this mean for our aspiring Terrorvision-replicas of Generation Z? Well, with the exception of the lucky few musicians & songwriters who are ‘hired’ into well-funded manufactured groups, band-members must not only be the musicians of their budding organization, but the folk who grow that band into a viable and thriving business. And who is it, typically, that ‘hires’ the early team-members of any early-stage business? That — good people — would be the ‘CEO’ (or MD, or Founder, or ‘Prime Minister’ etc.)
So, could you be the CEO of an up-and-coming new band? To answer that question successfully, you need to be confident you can proficiently execute (‘get-shit-done’ in startup-speak) on the following things:
- Identify talented individuals who are capable of more than just playing an instrument, but have the potential to build a business with you
- Be strong and forthright in your ability to understand when a product is right for your market as well as the humility to admit to others when you are wrong?
- And most importantly, can you lead and inspire the talented people around you to be better than they ever could be individually.
If you’ve fist-bumped the air above you to each of these three points AND you feel you are a musician that is ‘of talent’ to pursue a career in music, then — my friend — I raise my glass in your general direction and salute you on your journey to becoming a successful band CEO.
Hugs.
About me: Chris Howard is a serial entrepreneur and adviser to founders of high-impact disruptive businesses. After completing a Ph.D in computational Physics, Chris spent a decade creating and advising businesses in the media industry from scratch out of MIT and Harvard as well as setting up the world’s largest support organization for entrepreneurs in London — MassChallenge. He can now be found in the halls of various governments, universities, and thought-provoking bars rambling on about the importance of ‘getting-shit-done — quickly’. He also has a cat called Thundercat.
