Fyre Festival Business Mistakes

February 25, 2019 by Dr. Letitia Wright
Filed under Crowd Funding, Featured Articles, Front Page

What can we learn from it?

First of all – if you have not heard of the Fyre Festival is was a great sounding concert that went bad.

There is a great crowdfunding story that goes with it and I talk about it here

Now that you are all caught up, let’s talk about the Business Mistakes made and what can be learned.
Netflix has a great documentary on it that I watched. I really liked how they covered it. I am using the information
from that documentary.

When they put together the team they really
Did not think things through as a business. Tasks were being asked or required but no real rules about working. People were drinking on the job. No real job descriptions or goals setup fro the day. They had a pilot with a plane who had taught himself to fly using Microsoft flight simulator. They thought it was fun because he took people to zero G but he did it because he did not know what he was doing.

They oversold the concert and when the guy in charge of tents told them you need a ship, the island can’t hold that many people and there is not going to be enough infrastructure, he was let go. Always listen to the people you hire, even when they tell you what you don’t want to hear.

They used the models to get a lot of press, which was a smart move. The more influencers you can get do be a part of what you are doing, more the legit your event looks. They were able to start booking some great bands, however, they did not understand what any of these bands required to preform.

I love how shell shocked the people in the documentary look as they tell the story, they are still upset from the experience.

The most interesting thing to me is that even the people who could see it was going to crash and burn and would warm Billy ( the founder) that it was not going to work, they never actually left the job. Billy would say keep going and ignore their clear warnings. They would say, ok and keep going. I have done the same thing in the past, although the stakes were not as high. I have ignored what my gut and personal experience taught me and followed what the leader said to do, only to find out I was right. I does not mean I would never follow this leader again on things, it just means, my inside intuition is still the first thing to be listened to.

He had factored receivables so he had money that had to be repaid and had told investors they were guaranteed money when they were not. He felt pressure to put on the event no matter what. People felt bad for staying on for so long. The Festival was attached to an app. The people working on the app had nothing to do with the festival, the festival was a marketing piece.

The people working on the app felt frustrated. They felt like they lost everything. They felt they were kept out of everything. The public perception was not something they could overcome. The founder actually fakes documents and had the FBI after him. Eventually the founder when to prison for 6 years and is barred from being a CEO of a company or a director of a company but there is a lot to learn from this.

Check out the youtube blog post here