Yet more thoughts on 'professionalism'

Professionals don't waste each other's time. More than that, they actively manage time. If a meeting starts with the question: -

"When do you have to leave by?"

I pretty much know I'm in good hands.

Tribes

Seth Godin is sort of obsessed with tribes and since finishing his new book I've started to find them everywhere.

The UK stand-up comedy scene is especially tribal and membership comes with a definite code of conduct. When circuit comics socialise they spend most of the time talking about all the out-of-London venues they've played. The room is usually described as either 'hard' or 'easy' depending on layout and the crowd as 'really nice' or 'neanderthal' depending on how the gig went last time.

It's easy to see why: out-of-town gigs are almost always paid so it's a way of staking your claim as a professional comic.

Consultants talk about the various airline lounges for exactly the same reason.

More musings on success

Following yesterday's musings on the nature of 'success', I was reflecting on the notion that most of the 'successful' stand-up comics that I know want to work in television. The frisson that goes around a room at the Edinburgh Festival when the guy from Tiger Aspect arrives is almost palpable. And everyone I've met who started an advertising agency or research firm has some unformed fantasy about the day that WPP buys them out.

This question occurs: -

Isn't a successful career just one where you do what you love until you don't have to do it any more?

Is this what success looks like?

This week I gigged in Swindon and so spent 5+ hours in a car with two other London comics. Being the least experienced act of the three I spent the time listening as the 'alpha comic'* held forth.

He'd been on the professional circuit for twenty years and was a ten-year veteran of the Jongleurs chain of comedy clubs that is the equivalent to Yuk Yuk's in Canada and that club in every American city that caters for office parties, birthdays and bachelorette's nights. Jongleurs is simultaneously the holy grail for UK comics (it pays well) and a focus of intense derision (audiences full of drunk 'comedy illiterates').

His conversation (well, monologue) was peppered with the names of comics from back in the day. Some he mentioned are now genuinely famous and others would be known to British comedy aficionados but most were common-or-garden variety circuit comics still telling their jokes at clubs and pubs up and down the country.

As a headline act he was earning between £150 and £400 a set, so a show a night for five nights a week means he probably earns about £70K before tax. As I was musing a few weeks back, here is a man who's his own boss and who gets paid for doing something he obviously loves, occasionally as far afield as Germany, Holland, Dubai and Singapore. He even has a mortgage; the gateway to Middle England respectability.

So is this what success looks like?

Ten years ago his thinking had been that now he'd made it to the rarefied heights of Jongleurs, it was just a matter of time before he picked up a radio or TV deal. After that he'd be in a position to cut back on the unedifying experience of spending your nights in strangers' cars driving to places like Swindon to perform to fifty non-paying punters for £150.

His analysis was that just as he'd paid his dues multichannel digital television came along and changed everything. Time was when once you'd been on the box you didn't look back. Even if you chose to do a live gig those magic words As Seen On TV! meant you'd be in a larger venue, perhaps even an actual theatre with a proper dressing room and seating hundreds.

In other words his career plan was based on a world where television equaled popularity. Unsurprising when a full 50% of the population of Great Britain watched the 1977 Morcambe & Wise Christmas Special. These days the fact that a comic has appeared on television is no indicator of anything more than the fact that he's been around for a few years. Stick it out on the circuit and sooner or later you'll find yourself doing something for BBC4 at midnight. Except now it's just another £150 gig and only your mum will care.

The fact that I was going to Swindon in the same car to do the same gig for substantially less money means that there's always going to be downward pressure on his earning ability. That mortgage isn't success so much as a predictor that he'll be spending the next twenty years as he's spent the last twenty; in cars going up and down the M4.


* In his wonderful book House of Lies: How management consultants steal your watch and then tell you the time, Martin Kihn has a fantastic graph showing how much junior McKinsey consultants should talk when interacting socially with senior team-members. The parallels between my two worlds never end

The early bird and all that

In the last few days I've received confirmation that I'll be staging at least two shows (and possibly as many as four) at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.

An annual gripe-cum-conversational bonding topic amongst Fringe performers is the dearth and therefore expense of decent accommodation. Much of the joy of the event stems from Edinburgh being quite a small city but that means that demand for flats will always outweigh supply.

This morning I went online and started emailing each of the five the accommodation brokers recommended by the Festival organisers. Before I'd finished writing email no. 3 my phone rang. It was a personal response to email no. 1. The woman quickly and efficiently reviewed my needs and then wonderfully put my mind at ease with the following: -

• I was in their system
  
• I was ahead of the pack with sourcing accommodation
  
• I would be absolutely fine if I revisited the issue in early April as many properties weren't listed until then

Why would I bother with emails 3, 4 and 5?

A bad day

As someone who grew up in country Australia, today it's hard to think of anything at all except this.

"I used to be a freelancer, now I'm self-employed..."

An Australian mate was in town this week so Katy and I went along to a dinner with a bunch of his London friends, none of whom we'd met previously.

I was sat next to a woman who immediately declared she'd just started her own events company. She went on to say that she'd worked in the industry for years as a freelancer before starting her own business. I spent much of the evening trying to understand her distinction between 'freelancing' and 'self-employment'.

I think she was describing the transition from price-taking to price-setting. Freelancers provide something commodity-like ("We need a photographer for the shoot") whereas self-employment is about building a brand ("We're getting Mario Testino").

So whilst all freelancers are self-employed, not all self-employed people see themselves as freelancers.

The show must go on

It's not yet dawn on Tuesday and I'm back at the all-too-familiar BA Lounge wondering if / when they'll cancel my flight to Oslo.

I'm delivering a 1-dayer to a new team and because yesterday's flight didn't happen, the earliest I'll make it to the meeting is 11am. I'll have lost over two hours of meeting time so my value proposition has already been compromised. Part of me wants the flight to be pulled so that we can reschedule and I can get / give the client the full day as sold in. But the earliest they can reconvene the meeting is May and in these straitened times too much can happen between then and now.

I have to want this job to happen today and I have to deliver as promised, regardless of the compromises

At least I'm aware of what's going on. A lot of smaller businesses are under unspoken pressure to willfully ignore the compromises (time, budget, deadlines) and simply say 'Yes' to every sniff of work. The danger here is that the little guy gives his (larger) competitors the chance to claim he overpromises and underdelivers.

Unfortunately the only solution is to do more with less. Like I said, I have no option other than to turn up and deliver.

Su problema, mi problema

Like everyone else in Britain my plans for the day were rendered unfeasible by the worst snowfalls in 18 years. Right now I'm supposed to be boarding a flight for Oslo but Heathrow is closed for the day. Perhaps I'll have better luck tomorrow but somehow I doubt it.

So I've spent much of the day dealing with two suppliers: my travel agent and my printer-cum-courier. Given that I have longstanding 'account managers' within both companies I thought that each understood my business pretty well; that I'm self-employed and that if I'm not working I'm not getting paid. I need to be delivering a programme in Oslo tomorrow*.

The travel agent kicked into gear immediately. They checked direct flights out of every possible airport and then every conceivable permutation of European connections. It was all to no avail because the UK has closed up shop for the day and quite possibly the week. Still, when I spoke to my client I could honestly say that I'd left no stone unturned in trying to make tomorrow's meeting.

Su problema, mi problema

The printer was less helpful. They had assembled a pile of documents I need for the meeting but they couldn't get them to me as we couldn't find a mutually convenient drop-off point. The overwhelming impression was that it was all too hard. In the end they simply declared that they couldn't help me and that I'd better arrange my own courier service. This despite the fact that after a well-publicised 2004 merger they are arguably the best-known courier company around.

Su problema, su problema

It's all easy on the easy days. It's on the hard days that we need help.


* And take a moment to imagine the guffaws from my Norwegian client when I said that Britain was closed on account of a 30cm snowfall...

Collaboration and momentum

Project momentum is a strange and wonderful thing. That moment when you start getting disproportionate reward for your effort. Similar I suppose to what Jim Collins referred to in Good to Great as the flywheel effect.

Collaboration requires momentum. It insists that the output of the team be greater than the input of the individual team-members. Otherwise, why collaborate at all? A lot of this year's big projects will take shape in the next month, especially the performance-based ones.

Exciting times.