The Gigging Musician Podcast

Why I Stopped Relying On Myself Coordinating My Group

March 18, 2021 Jared Judge
The Gigging Musician Podcast
Why I Stopped Relying On Myself Coordinating My Group
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, Jared talks about the struggles of managing the group members. Most members have no communication problem but there's always a time that it will occur and it will affect everything, especially you, the bandleader (and we made a solution!). Listen in as we dive into the topic of automated communication.

What's up everybody? It's Jared Judge on the gigging musician podcast, I want to tell you a quick story about why I never manually coordinate musicians for a gig ever again. And I refuse to. And so I'm going to start by telling you a little story. It's about two years ago, pretty early on into the booklife Pro process when I was building it, and staffing was not yet automated. And so here's what happened is that we had a gig at the Black Swan, which is one of my favorite venues, it's where me and my wife got married. And it was a string trio, two violins and a cello for a wedding beautiful wedding ceremony. And I it was at the end of a very, very busy summer for me, because you know, we'd implemented the booking optimize webpages and all that, and we were just very busy. And so by this point, the end of the summer, I needed a break from playing gigs, and everyone's entitled to a break, you should definitely take them if you don't, otherwise, you'll burn out. And so I was not playing this gig. I had coordinated it, though. So I used my spreadsheet and texted and emailed the three musicians that we're going to be playing, heard back from all three of them, they are good to go. Got them, their music, still pretty manual at that point. But they confirmed and I believe that they were going to do it. So I was what a relief, you know, I could finally take that break that I deserved. And so the day comes, it was a Saturday, pretty chilly, kind of like it's cold out right now. And I decided, like I wanted to go on a refreshing walk downtown, and just see what happens. So I walked downtown. And it was about the time that the gig was supposed to start. And I was like, Well, you know, as a business owner, you're always worried about what can happen because there's a lot of unknowns, you're relying on a lot of people. And so I was just walking around trying to relax, and I couldn't, I just kept feeling like I want to go see what's happening at that gig. And so I walked right to that venue, the Black Swan, and just decided to poke my head and listen for a little bit. Hopefully, I was gonna hear some beautiful music and be relaxed enough to go about my day, poked my head in. And I hear the music. And it sounds very treble. Like there was no bondman there was no base end to this. You know if you know anything about string trios, and the sound of a cello is that it's in the low frequency spectrum. And you should hear it. And I didn't. And I was freaking out. I said, What the heck is going on here. And so I decided to just poke my head in the liver a little further looked. And I saw two chairs filled with violins and an empty chair right next to them. And my heart sank. And it was, you know, at that point, I was the worst thing that happened to my string quartet. And so, I get on my phone, I call the cello player, and he doesn't answer his phone. And I'm like, Oh, crap. I mean, I definitely was worried about his health, like Is everything okay? But I was also worried about my reputation as a string quartet, operator and business owner. And so I couldn't hear from him. And so I go into problem solving mode. And I call around to like all the cellos and in my city that I had on my roster, and finally got hold of one. Shout out to Yang if you're listening to this, thanks for saving the day. Yang answered, he said yes, I'm available. I'll get him concert black and just raced downtown. And he Unfortunately, he didn't make it in time for the ceremony, which is not his fault, obviously. But he did make it for their cocktail hour which they string trio was contracted to play for. And he saved the day. So I after this, this event, I mean I was my whole relaxing day was ruined. I felt terrible about this, I was very grateful that Yang saved the day. But afterwards, I called you know, I left the the bride and groom have a couple of days to enjoy their honeymoon and just settled down from the wedding. And then after those days, I called them and apologized profusely. They Canadian geese What's up? So I called the bride and groom apologize profusely. And let them know like this has never happened to us, I will be making some changes for it. I refunded them a portion of their ceremony because they didn't get the service that we were contractually obligated to provide them and promised them. So I refunded them a little bit. And they were happy. You know, if they understood. I called the cello player, I was able to eventually get a hold of him. He was having a family emergency which totally understandable those things come up. The issue was that he didn't let me know but he didn't let me know that he wasn't gonna be able to make His professional obligation, which that's a big No, no, like, yes, we're all human things happen, we get sick, we have family emergencies, and so forth. But the most important part of any business really is the communication. So I felt he'd let me down. And that was the last time that he played form, my string quartet found some other cellos to fill in. But more importantly, I was never going to let that happen again. And so that was really the last time that I ever used a manual way of coordinating a string quartet or coordinating any musicians, because it was so unreliable. So came up with a plan, that book life pro was already helping people, you know, book, the gigs, and plan out the music. Next, it was going to automate the contracting of the musicians, and the reminders. So I built this whole plan where, once I said, which musicians were going to play the gig at something request, via text and email with all the gig details, date time payment venue, they got two buttons, are you available? Yes, or no. all they had to do was click one of those. Once they clicked, yes, they were locked in for the gig. And then after that, I had it automatically send some reminders to them three days before the gig via text and email, and then on the day of the gig via text, and email and day before too. And then I made it customizable for other groups, because some people might not want such an aggressive reminder strategy. I did, because I didn't want that happening again. And so once I finally set that live, that was when a huge sigh of relief, huge burden lifted off of my shoulders. Being that I never had to manually contact. The musicians for a gig never had to remind them again, because I knew that the system was going to remind them 100% of the time, and I take that weight off of my shoulders. So that was the last time I ever contracted musicians manually. And if you're interested in seeing that in action, learning a little bit more about that, definitely go ahead and sign up for the masterclass that is at www dot booklive Pro dot com slash masterclass. And I will show you tell you the stories about some of the other parts of the app that I built and why I did that, and I'll show you a breakdown, a demo of how some of these features work. It's super cool. And it helps us gigging musicians do more of what we love. It's after all, that's what we all want to do more of us play music and get paid to do it. So thanks for listening to the gigging musician podcast, guys. See you next time.