Maximizing Your Time at Festivals and Events

As you know from last week’s blog, I was at the 8th Pensacola Beach Songwriters Festival when this month started.  True, longtime Now Hear This client Melissa Brethauer was performing there.  This was our sixth time at that event together and is always the basis for making the trip there.  But this time I also put on a “Promoting Your Music Career” workshop.  And, I recorded a couple interviews for soon-to-be-released episodes of “Now Hear This Entertainment.”

It’s no coincidence that all of the same will be packed into a trip I’ll take when next month starts, as I travel to Alabama for the 32nd Frank Brown International Songwriters Festival.  So yes, Melissa Brethauer will perform there too, and I will again put on a workshop and do NHTE interviews.

Just prior to the above I’ll be out in California for a festival, but will also have several business meetings and, yes, do more interviews for NHTE.

It’s all about maximizing an opportunity.

Speaking of NHTE, perhaps no one said it better than Marco Argiro, lead singer of The Killing Floor, when during our conversation on a recent episode he told listeners who are up-and-comers, “Go there and learn something… You want to really maximize your efforts… Go around and meet people and network.  Definitely don’t sleep in and miss everything and just go out at night… You want to catch (industry people) at the convention center and go and actually utilize the badge.  If you were lucky enough to get accepted, definitely take advantage of it and go out there and meet people.”  This was all based on him and his band having recently performed in Austin, Texas, at South By Southwest.

I remember going on business trips internationally and coming back and getting asked, “How was (insert country name here)?”  First, I would laugh because I certainly couldn’t see an entire country in one trip.  But secondly, they were business trips and not personal vacations.  And so the same should hold true for going to festivals and events, whether you’re driving one hour or flying across the country to get there.

You need to think of these as business trips.  They are a chance for you to grow your brand (which is yourself), and thus increase your business.  Don’t measure your success by how many business cards you come back with, though, because that pile sits on your desk and doesn’t mean anything if you don’t follow up and build relationships with those people.

When I would come back from the aforementioned trips, I would always have to submit a trip report to the boss.  And you might almost want to consider doing the same thing.  There will be some accountability if you know that when you get back home you’ll have to write up all that you did and all that you accomplished while you were at an event.  And then you can start to gauge how successful you were and how productive your time was.  If you are in a band, and aren’t a solo act, even better because then you can all meet and hold each other accountable for feedback on non-performance aspects of the trip.