Fulfilling expectations? Bah! Overrated!

Participation, participation, participation. Keys to the kingdom.

I wrote this on Saturday morning, prior to heading to the Expo (it'll make sense in a minute):

I got up at 6:00 this morning to go to the Chicagoland Kid's Expo where I'll be manning a booth with 2 magician acquaintances, pitching our shows to families from all over, well, Chicagoland. Last year there were 10,000 attendees, so there is a lot of potential. I spent all this week before and after work (and sometimes during lunch) working on promotional and marketing materials: a party tips newsletter, a raffle entry form, a coupon, a "book it now" discount form, show descriptions, etc. None of the sexy fun stuff, but all the important business stuff. And I enjoyed this"business" work more than I thought I would.

The thing I'm most excited about is the opportunity to sell my magic to 10,000 people for two days. Regardless of the outcome, this is a great opportunity to practice having conversations about people hiring me to perform. Practice, practice, practice. THEN the key will be to take my share of the leads and market intelligently to them. Hot damn. The game is afoot.

That was written on Saturday morning. So how did it go?

Good. Really good, actually. Would say minorly great, but not fantastic. Got a number of leads (fewer than I thought we would), made a good number of contacts (more than I expected) and just got to practice being in the business frame of mind and taking action correlate to that. I felt very competent, confident and up to the task. All those years of thinking, reading and absorbing the business side of show business paid off. Despite the general lack of practice in the "business."

The biggest lesson, though, was that things are generally not going to go as I expect. Especially early on. We had too much material to hand out (which is better than too little), there was less traffic than I thought, the kids were generally younger than I expected, the presentations didn't go as I imagined, and the people I was working with didn't behave the way I thought they should. Pretty much everything, to some extent, didn't follow the plan I outlined in my head.

However, it still went great. Lots was produced and I'm definitely glad I did it.