“If growth comes from failure, surely by now I am a giant.”
I have attempted to launch the idea behind The Experiential GOAT several times before, each time ending in failure. But each failure taught an important lesson. Here is the story of the first attempt.
I got into experiential marketing entirely by happenstance in April 2013. By that time, I was tying up the loose ends on my scientific career and preparing to move to Los Angeles fresh off the release of my very first studio album, Inception. Even though I was able to work a few more events before my move in May 2013, Los Angeles was a massive culture shock. While there were a plethora of jobs at any given time, getting an agency to take a chance on you required sheer luck. Even once you got your foot in the door, staying consistently booked is a job in and of itself. There was no online guide to the industry at that point and most of booking gigs was through word of mouth at other gigs. So through a lot of trial and error, I finally was able to develop a system that allowed me to be able to book consistently while having full control over my schedule so that I could book the events I WANTED to work, not the ones I had to for the money.
My system was so incredibly efficient and I was booked so consistently (not just with live events, either. Working on movie sets, audience coordinator for major shows, studio vocalist) that I was started to show signs of extreme exhaustion by March 2017. In June 2017, I made the extremely difficult decision to move back to North Carolina for the sake of my physical health and family. I took some months to rest, but after a while I was ready to go back to work. I started working the system that I had developed in Los Angeles in Charlotte and was greeted by the shock that the markets varied GREATLY.
I was able to adjust and figure out how to evolve the system on the East Coast. So I was able to start being booked consistently in Charlotte and then expand out once I got the infamous PromoMobile.
Now, the entire time that I was doing all of this, the one question that I got asked EVERY SINGLE TIME I told anyone what my job description was (which would also have to include pulling up pictures and videos of myself at events to prove that I wasn't making it all up):
“When are you going to get a REAL job?”
My friends and family would ask me this all the time. Random strangers standing in line waiting to do the activity at an activation would say that to me. I got the question much more on the East Coast than the West Coast and I realized that most people have absolutely no concept of this industry despite participating in it on some level at some point in time. Conversations with my fellow experiential peers revealed that they got the same questions all the time too and the general mood is always amusement: the perks of the job definitely outweigh the downsides (at least they did then).
Then there were the people that wanted to figure out how to do what I was doing but wanted me to hand-walk them through it. The number of “friends” that I tried to refer to agencies that would refuse to do it because it wasn't “sustainable” or that would actually book the gig but complain about the conditions is ridiculous. I got to the point that I refused to refer anyone to agencies that I had a good thing going with and would instead send to agencies that were just looking for a body (cause those were agencies I only work for once). I am extremely meticulous about data collection and when I would meet up with other event professionals, I always tried to incorporate their perspectives into my notes. Hearing about Trusted Herd was a God-send because it meant that someone recognized the issues that plagued the industry and was creating a community to share that information. But the one thing that was missing were in-person educational courses on what it would take to be a great experiential professional. The idea was simple: create a series of in-person classes that would allow live event workers to learn about the different tools and resources available.
So in September 2019, a friend and I started researching the experiential marketing industry with the goal of creating short workshops for those in Charlotte that wanted to learn more about live events. The idea was that there would be a series of in person classes that would be tailored for specific audiences: brands wanting to do live events but not knowing where to start, people looking to get into working in the industry but not having any idea where to start, and current professionals looking to take the next step in their career. Everything was going along perfectly well and we had set a date to begin the first class in May 2020, with an advertising campaign starting in April 2020 under the banner of
PROMOLIFE
So what went wrong?
The Failure: COVID-19
This is probably the only attempt that does not make me sad or upset in any way because the circumstances were just so far out of everyone's control. The shutdown started in March 2020 and by the time May 2020 rolled around, it was clear that in-person anything was not going to happen. Trying to translate it to an online class was not feasible at the time because almost all the data that we had been gathering and carefully organizing into presentations became obsolete almost overnight. Without being able to know when the industry was coming back and what it would look like, there was no way to make a pivot to salvage this attempt.
So I shelved all the information and went on with my life. It would be March 2022 before I revisited the idea again.