‘It’s not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.’
—Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist
SO, HOW HAS this week gone? It’s time to check in and review using the Play Cycle from Day 6. Look at the questions below and make notes in your Playbook.
It’s time to set your commitments for your third week on your project. Open your Playbook and write the following:
If you find you’ve hit a bit of a slump, tomorrow we’ll get you back on track. Meanwhile, take some inspiration from the story below about what happens when it all goes right …
DJ and club promoter Sean Rowley on noticing when you have a hit on your hands
THERE ARE SURE to be plenty of setbacks along the way on your entrepreneurial journey but it’s also important to recognise when you might have just hit the jackpot. DJ Sean Rowley was presenting live on BBC Radio when he accidentally discovered a hit concept that he then turned into a brand, a successful club night and a series of compilation albums.
I’d just started hosting my own radio show on BBC Radio London on a Tuesday evening. And it was a joy to be able to play whatever I wanted to and not be restricted by a playlist. But not long into it the head of the radio station called me into a meeting and told me, ‘You’re just a bit too out there with your music choices. You need to play some more familiar choices.’ I remember leaving the meeting disappointed and thinking, ‘This isn’t me, I don’t want to be Tony Blackburn playing mainstream music.’
But I went away and thought about it and realised there was all this old pop music, like David Cassidy, 10CC, Queen and ELO, that I’d bought as a child that I still loved. And a phrase from a friend of mine popped into my head from when we’d been listening to an old song by Wings; he’d described the track as ‘a bit of a guilty pleasure’. And I thought that’s what these old, supposedly unfashionable records are – guilty pleasures.
So I went on the air next week and said, ‘I’m going to do something a little bit different now; I’m going to play a record that I would call a guilty pleasure,’ and I played an old record from the 70s by ELO. And the switchboard just lit up. I thought, ‘Oh no, they’re all calling to complain. What was I thinking? What am I doing playing this cheesy old stuff?!’
But in fact it was the exact opposite. They were calling to say, ‘I love this record! And what about this one as well … ’ Everyone wanted to confess to their guilty pleasures – records they loved but had been too ashamed to admit it because the music was no longer deemed to be cool. My producer said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this!’
So we went from playing one or two guilty pleasure records each week to eventually doing a full two-hour guilty pleasures show. Later I started to play these records at a festival and the reaction was incredible. I knew I was on to something.
Sean could have seen the response from his radio listeners as curious and not very important. I see many beginning entrepreneurs make exactly this mistake, writing off an unusually good response to something they do as no big deal. Then they go back to what they were doing before as if nothing had happened. Luckily Sean pays attention and he recognised the response he was getting as meaning he’d accidentally hit on something with huge VALUE to people. So he took the guilty pleasures concept and ran with it. He created a Guilty Pleasures club night that has been running for a decade with up to 1,800 attendees, released two compilation albums and helped create a spin-off TV show.
So when, one day, a post on your blog gets a much bigger reaction than usual or everyone wants to hire you to do something you never considered to be very important, pay attention.
Read more about Sean Rowley and Guilty Pleasures at www.guiltypleasures.co.uk.
Watch my interview with Sean in his record library at home at www.screwworkbreakfree.com.