WHY YOU MUST THINK BIG…AND SMALL ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS FOR SUCCESS

Steve Martin’s first huge comedy album was called, “Let’s Get Small.” That title is great advice for a business, particularly a big company. Unfortunately, I tend to find that the bigger they are, the worse they are at the small but really important things that make it easier to do a deal with them. And I was reminded of that fact recently.

I’ve been putting together “The Ultimate Business Celebrity Mastermind” – an elite Mastermind group for some of my top clients, where we travel around the country and experience things that only entertainment celebrities usually get to experience while working with each other to build everyone’s businesses using an array of strategies that are working right now across multiple industries. As part of the package, I’m also including some really special Celebrity Events, two of which have been locked down for a while — the Grammys and the Kentucky Derby. Pretty cool, right?

The problem is that these events are so cool that when it came to putting together the third and final Celebrity Event for the year, I wanted to make sure it could hold its own and didn’t look like a weak excuse for a celebrity event!

Since I live in Orlando, and since I have a family I like to see occasionally, I thought it would be nice to set up one of the events here. And there is a bunch of cool stuff to do in Orlando that is a great mix of business and entertainment, so I contacted a venue that I thought might work for this new Mastermind group.

Again, since the Grammy night has bumped everything up a few levels, I wanted to make sure this place could deliver something special. So I called my usual contact, who transferred my call to a really knowledgeable colleague. I was very upfront and said I needed something with the “wow” factor to really make this work – and that she was, in effect, competing with Las Vegas, which was my other choice for a Celebrity Event site.

She was very helpful and indicated she would work with me on making the event happen and at a magnitude I’d be happy with. She said she’d email me contact details, and we could go from there. Awesome.

Except this is where the problem started. She never sent the email. Instead, a week or so later, she called and left a voicemail with another colleague on the line – again, it sounded like these folks were all over this and ready to make it happen. She ended the message by saying I should call her back at a phone number with a very long extension, which in corporate America is not very unusual. What I usually do is just call back the number on caller ID and ask for the person I’d like to speak with instead of using the extension, mostly because I’m often driving or traveling when I return calls and I don’t have the best circumstances to stop and take notes! I looked at my iPhone for the caller ID – because, normally, I just hit the button that instantly calls back the person who left a message – and the number pops up on my screen as “Not Disclosed.”

A private number. In the words of many a comic book character, “What th-!”

I thought about the business associate I have in New Zealand. I can even push the callback button to get him on the line! And, at that moment, I didn’t have time to listen to her message again, write down a of string numbers that probably would have taken two or three tries to get right and call her back.
So I kept the message, and kept meaning to find a time to call them back when I could write down the number.

In the meantime, I continued to explore the Vegas option, which looked better and better as time went on. If she called back or sent me the email with her contact info, I would still give the Orlando venue a fair shake, but my time was wearing thin! As I worked on the logistics of a Vegas trip that would be both educational and entertaining, I hit the mother load! I was able to connect through a friend with Tony Hsieh, the billionaire CEO of Zappo’s, the online shoe-selling phenomenon, and he agreed to host our Mastermind group at the Zappo’s facility in Vegas and do an in-depth brainstorm and Q&A, revealing some of the secrets that made him the mogul he is today. That’s Grammy-caliber to business people and exactly the kind of event I was looking for. Orlando, sadly, was left on the outside looking in.
Don’t get me wrong – the Orlando venue is not about to go under because it didn’t host our Mastermind group. But it did miss out on tens of thousands of dollars worth of business because it didn’t make it easy for me to get back in touch.

Which is surprising – on almost all counts, because the staff at this venue excels at customer service, they’ve always been great in the past. But the private phone number mistake is the kind of little mistake a big company might not ever notice and correct.

When it comes to our own businesses, I think the mantra needs to be, as I said at the beginning of this piece, “Let’s Get Small.” We all think our own customer service is top quality, but are all our systems really seamless? Are we really making it as easy as possible for our clients and customers to connect and do business with us? Are sales phone calls being handled correctly by the people answering them? Or, worst of all, are calls from interested prospects just getting lost or unanswered?

Yes, the Orlando venue made a mistake. Let’s not make the same one with our own operations. Otherwise, after we’ve lost a big client, we might end up wondering why the phone isn’t ringing!

Nick Nanton, Esq. has been named “Best of the Bar” and has been referred to as “One of Orlando’s Top 10 Young and Powerful,” but prior to becoming an Attorney, Nick spent more than a decade immersing himself in the entertainment industry, as an award winning songwriter and television producer, and surrounding himself with celebrities. He has worked on projects and negotiated deals, from large scale events to reality television shows, involving celebrities from many genres including: President George H.W. Bush, Comedian Bill Cosby, Coach Don Shula (The Miami Dolphins), Bobby Knight (Legendary College Basketball Coach), Roy Firestone (Emmy Award Winning Host of ESPN’s “Up Close” and “Up Close Prime Time”), Stan Lynch (Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Famer, Multi-Platinum Recording Artist, #1 Hit Songwriter and Drummer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), and many, many more. Nick has taken his years of experience with Celebrities and has “Cracked the Celebrity Code” and now teaches business owners to become celebrities in their business niche to lock out their competition.

An energetic speaker and author of the books Celebrity Branding You™, and the Dicks & Nanton Business Law Library as well as the educational courses “7 Secrets to Making Real Money With Your Music” (co-authored with Bob Baker, author of the Guerilla Music Guide to Music & Marketing), “Celebrity Franchising You™” and “Blueprint to Millions,” Nick is known as a taste-maker and has been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur®’s Start Up Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun Times, The Arizona Republic, The Dallas Morning News and many other national publications on subjects ranging from branding, marketing and law to American Idol.

Nick is a Managing Director at the Law Firm of Dicks & Nanton P.A., is a member of the Florida Bar and holds a JD from the University of Florida Levin College of Law as well as a BSBA in Finance from the University of Florida’s prestigious Warrington College of Business. Prior to founding Dicks & Nanton P.A., Nick served as CEO of Cinemark Music Group LLC a subsidiary of Cinemark USA, Inc., one of the largest motion picture exhibitors in North America with 3,288 screens in 33 States and Internationally, as well as CEO of Loud Entertainment LLC and Director of Business Development and Assistant Corporate Counsel for PremiereTrade LLC.

Nick is a currently a member of The National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (Also Known as NARAS, Home to The GRAMMYs) and casts a vote on the annual GRAMMY® Awards, is the past Chairman of the Orange County Bar Association’s Entertainment Law Committee, serves on the Executive Council of the Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law Section of the Florida Bar, the Board of the Florida Hospital Foundation and is a member of Florida Blue Key – “Florida’s Oldest and Most Prestigious Leadership Honorary.” Nick spends his spare time rooting for the Florida Gators with his wife, Kristina, and their two sons, Brock and Bowen.

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