Catch 22
The corporate workforce is full of jokes about the pain and consternation of Mondays. Those of us who start our own businesses generally would not know a weekend if it stole our wallets, but out of respect for the else-employed I have chosen to dedicate Mondays to the hardest part of starting up your own business. Monday’s are dedicated to the mistakes and missteps I and others I know have made in the working-without-a-net world of entrepreneurship. Here is to hard knocks, prices paid, and lessons learned on the hoof
Today’s story comes from my second start-up, a non-profit music school on the Caribbean island of Roatan.
The business is non-profit, we do not charge our students any fee for their education, but do have to cover operating costs somehow. 501(c)3 filing is a slow process and certainly does not guarantee grants or donations sufficient to maintain a building and instruments (much less educators’ pay).
Thus we pursue some means of income. We had to be careful to avoid what lawyers call “unrelated business activities”, a legal but limited moneymaking option for registered non-profit corporations.
In order to find profit center that falls within the purview of our original charter as a music education institution we conceived of a program called “The Steel Pan Alley Experience.” Targeting the affluent international tourists who are a constant presence on this tropical island, the Experience converts musical education to a tourist excursion. The Experience encourages even the musically inexperienced to pay a small fee for a 90 minute lesson that teaches all the basics and ends with them playing several full songs on the Trinidad Steel Pans.
When we experimented with the idea everyone who tried it raved. Those who joined us for early versions of the experience gladly paid the basic fee and often volunteered additional funds for the support of the school.
This encouraged us to “go public” with the program, inviting guests from the local resorts and the cruse ships. The result was a devastating failure. Stretching our budget to the limit to extend advertising and transportation for the tourist attraction, we managed to attract exactly zero customers in three weeks.
Our problem was that no one understood our advertising. The successful tourist attractions on the island (after whom we modeled our advertising program) all had one thing in common: simplicity. From horseback riding to canopy tours to swimming with the dolphins, everyone actually understood the central concepts of the other attractions.
Our attraction lacked this basic simplicity. We needed to explain to 90% of our potential customers what a Trinidad Steel Pan was, how many types existed, and what the attraction of learning to play them might be, to say nothing of convincing them that the program was valuable no matter how musically naive they may be.
We fell victim to a classic catch 22. They could not understand it ’til they tried it, and they would not try it ’til they understood it.
The solution lay in retooling our marketing from the ground up, hard to for a small operation, harder still after already spending so much on a fruitless campaign.
Remember that innovation and experimentation are good, but sometimes you run the risk of ending up with a product for which no market exists. It is not the end of the world; you just have to create that market yourself, the hard way. Plan for it.
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