Of course with every high comes a low. I can still remember the way my chest felt from the minute my eyes opened in the morning to the moment they closed at night . . . that is, if they closed at all.
I was constantly reassuring myself that certainly thirty-four years old was far too young to have a heart attack. But it didn’t matter; it felt like my world was falling down around me. Thinking back, I am quite sure that this was also when my marriage started to suffer.
It’s just business, right? Wrong. When you have wrapped all your money, your friends’ money, energy, time, love, into taking a risk, there is no way not to be emotionally invested. And it’s incredibly idealistic to assume otherwise. But this, this was worse than I could have ever imagined.
I was actually getting death threats. The one thing I hadn’t expected was that the launch of a new Halloween attraction would ever end in having to fear for my safety. It sounded ludicrous to me.
Ghost Ship was our second attraction and brand. And I must start by saying, the concept is incredible, and it’s an attraction that I will bring back using the hard lessons and uppercuts to the jaw I took that year.
It was the definition of our company philosophy to create attractions that have never been created in their respective markets, and to create them in environments that have a built-in mood of being haunting, creepy, disturbing . . . before we even put our blueprint into the space. This was to be the first haunted attraction to take place on a ship that actually would set sail into the dark, open ocean at night. There are haunted attractions on ships but not ones that actually set sail. The dark, wide-open ocean is the most haunting part, so it seemed like an obvious move that had been missed. And I wasn’t going to miss it.
I activated and began my search for a ship with the girth and capacity to house an entire attraction with hundreds of people.
To this day, I think Ghost Ship was beautiful. I had a hard time figuring out what went wrong when the first patrons started to complain. Were there opening-night kinks? Was I too close to it to see that it actually really sucked? This was our second attraction, and it was taking place in October 2011 simultaneously with our giant attraction, Los Angeles Haunted Hayride, which was already iconically popular. Two attractions happening at the same time meant I couldn’t be at one of them every night. Had I taken on too much too soon?
We were, by that time, well-known in Southern California, so we even had a built-in population to whom we could market our new attraction. We publicized it as “From the Creators of the LA Haunted Hayride,” and you could almost hear the swoon of Halloween fans far and wide twitching with excitement.
That was mistake number one.
Ghost Ship was built for the forty-something, disposable-income Orange County, California demographic. It was themed booze cruising, so to speak. The passionate Hayride fans wanted terror, blood, guts, and content that would epically ruin them for life.
The wealthy folk of “the OC,” who rolled up in their Benzes wearing their Rolexes, ready to get hammered on the high seas, actually had fun and liked the ride.
The nineteen-year-old cult-horror lover, who had sixty bucks to spend to pick one attraction for the season, then figure out a way to get from LA to the OC without breaking the bank on gas money—just to arrive there and have to spend the night with a boatful of the aforementioned demographic and not even be old enough to drink—was pissed.
It may not sound like a big deal. Some liked it, some didn’t. The problem was that the demographic that liked it wasn’t the demographic that was all over social media and vocal about it.
The conclusion of each voyage added to a wave of negative Yelp reviews, Facebook comments, and threads on Ghost Ship press articles. At first I thought we could pull up from the nosedive by adding more content, making some changes in timing and capacity of the voyages, but nothing seemed to work. Nothing was effective because I was not yet aware of what was going wrong. People were getting angrier and angrier and now starting to feed off each other’s anger. I couldn’t believe how angry a Halloween attraction could make someone. A mob was growing.
I reached out to our publicity team at the time and asked for help. They saw the magnitude of the rumble and basically left me to deal with it on my own. They wanted nothing to do with what was becoming the redheaded stepchild of Ten Thirty One Productions. They wanted only to be associated with LA Haunted Hayride, which was getting rave reviews.
I decided to take to the Facebook page and start addressing the anger. Remember, this was my creation, my blood, and I was emotionally attached. When someone calls your baby ugly, you want to lash back. And naively, I did just that. I had noticed there was a group of aggressors, or haters as they were often referred to, who appeared to be friends and worked for another Halloween attraction in Orange County, so I quickly jumped to them as my scapegoat and called them out on social media.
By this time, I had already been losing sleep, having panic attacks about this attraction being the downfall of my company. This was my company. I had always had the insulation of a corporation behind me, so this kind of fear and anxiety was new territory.
I chose to attack back, and that was a really bad move. The Ghost Ship bashing quickly turned to Melissa Carbone bashing. There is no doubt that I can be hotheaded, and it really clouded my judgment in that moment. I basically started a mosh pit on social media. It was me against them. Join me or die. I took to the social waves ready to go to war with every bad commentator I could find. I’d prove them all wrong and, at the end of the battle, stand victoriously on top of the mountain of slayed bodies of my social media enemies. I’d say things like “Your misguided hostility is polluting these pages,” then ban them from the page, or call them bad seeds. In direct emails with people, I’d have full-blown arguments. These were my customers and many of them were Hayride fans. The snowball was getting bigger, insults growing more vicious, the social media attacks started moving onto the Hayride social platforms, which I knew I had to stop. The Hayride was our flagship and if that was too adversely affected, it could be a fatal hit.
My final breaking point was the online posting: “Does anyone know where Melissa Carbone lives?” What? It had gone too far down that road, and it was obvious this had gotten way out of hand.
The nucleus of the problem originated from the fact that we had built the attraction for one demographic but marketed it to another. The passionate Hayride fans were the ones buying the tickets. After all, everywhere you saw the illustrious Ghost Ship logo, the tagline “From the Creators of the LA Haunted Hayride” would follow. And instead of tackling that as our issue, I created a much bigger one by declaring war on everyone who dared to judge our blood, sweat, and tears.
And now someone wanted to assassinate me! Yup, that’s what being an asshole gets you.
That was the turning point or the day I started learning how to become a much better problem solver and communicator.
Alyson was feeling the brunt of my mania and I remember we were fighting a lot. I was ruining the thing in the world that mattered most to me, which may be surprising, but it was not my career—it was my life with her.
Alyson is very safe with her decisions and I’m very risky with mine, so the two of us together were a match that worked very serendipitously. We were both exasperated and concerned. Her cautiousness really came in handy at that time. She stopped me in my tracks and made me really look at what I was creating. I needed to get out of my own way and figure out how to de-escalate the angry mob, not pour lighter fluid on their already flaming heads.
We started to implement big changes on Ghost Ship to make it more extreme, and invited people to come back again (on the house) to try it out. If they didn’t want to do that, we invited them to be VIP guests at the LA Haunted Hayride, where we treated them like royalty. I individually spoke with each and every angry customer in a tone of offerings and solutions.
The tide starting changing, and I took note of how learning effective communication was one of the most important things you could do for your company, relationships, career, and every other multiperson endeavor that crosses your path.
Our customers wanted to feel heard and know that they had value. I realized that not everything would be successful right out of the gate, and to be an effective leader and entrepreneur, I would have to learn how to really hear the problem to fix, reinvent, or rebuild it.
Ghost Ship didn’t pull up from the dive, but we stopped the bleeding, which was the best alternative at the time. We stopped it late in the game, though, because I unfortunately didn’t start communicating effectively until the last week of the attraction.
It took a little while for me to bounce back from that one, personally. I can’t tell you how different it feels to have a corporate leviathan behind you. When I worked at Clear Channel, I was the same hotheaded, mouthy executive that I was when responding to my Ghost Ship haters. However, at Clear Channel, I knew it wasn’t my money, the money of all my closest friends, and ultimately my life being threatened or celebrated. If I lost money, missed budgets, or produced a failing event, other than the shame I’d feel internally, it really was someone else’s money lost or problem to solve. That’s a much easier environment to harbor self-righteousness.
But the other side of that is when you win, hit budgets, make tons of money, and produce epic events, it’s also someone else for whom you are making the money and whose empire you’re building. And that wasn’t a choice I thought would lead me down my most extraordinary path.
I believed in myself and it really was just that simple. Don’t misunderstand for one minute: the education I got from growing up as a corporate executive was invaluable. But now, I was willing to fail in order to learn the things I could never learn under the wings of a corporate entertainment giant.
It would have been easy and safe, in the short term, to make it to the end of the season never to revisit Ghost Ship or any other new ideas again. We could have just stayed with our sure thing, LA Haunted Hayride, and had a cushy, mediocre success story. But remember, we have the choice to do anything . . . to be extraordinary . . . to take our best ride.
So let’s get up, wipe the blood off our chins, get some veneers to replace a couple lost teeth . . . yes, take some time for a breather to get our focus back and strategize using the pain of the past and then, hit it even harder.