Fyre Festival Business Mistakes

Fyre Festival Business Mistakes

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

Revisiting: Is Word of Mouth Free?

I used to talk to a lot of people who said they did all their advertising word of mouth and that they didn’t spend any money on ads. I would remind them that effective word of mouth is not free. If you think word of mouth is free, you don’t understand word of mouth. Word of mouth has evolved a lot since I first wrote this article. Word of mouth at it’s best is now influencer marketing. Influencers work well to get people to your page or event. It worked so well that in April 2017, Instagram Influencers got many rich kids to pay around $10,000 per ticket to a music festival in the Bahamas. The young organizer ( he was 25) was inexperienced and things did not go well. See #fyrefestival on twitter for the details. He spent money on Influencers and got a packed house, only to be unable to spend money on infrastructure. It was a huge fail but pure proof that Influencer marketing works.

Many of you think word of mouth is free advertising. One person tells another person and it grows exponentially. What examples can you think of that worked like that? All of those big word of mouth successes started with a good infusion of cash to get the campaign started.  People who have no budget for marketing and advertising. It starts with a sample. If you can not afford to have people sample your product, it’s hard to make any kind of word of mouth happen.Word of Mouth happens when people get your book, or item and get to use it. Company’s spend millions making sure people sample their products. Online marketers spend lots of money on online and offline ads to get to you take a free ebook/report.I love it when I talk to people who do not do advertising, they are going to make it by word of mouth. I ask them about their goals for their company, and to name a company that made it to that size with word of mouth. No one has come up with a name yet.If you are reading this because of the note I sent you in my auto-responder, guess what? The auto-responder costs money! The good ones are NOT free.Yes, word of mouth is a great tool for promoting your business, however word of mouth is not free.