Posts Tagged ‘Priorities’

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Roosevelt Assignment: Develop and Share Business Plan

Saturday, June 25th, 2011
    Roosevelt Business Plan Seminar

    A few clips from the seminar at Roosevelt including: seminar lesson #4 “knowing is half the battle” (© 1985 by Hasbro, Inc), strengths & weaknesses form, strength areas discussion. See the bottom of this of this post for images of the E-Workbook.


I had the rare privilege of creating an entirely new approach to artistic business planning this spring. What a blessing to start from a blank slate like this and dream up what would be the most effective method of helping fourteen highly-talented and motivate singers developing a plan for their futures!

Where do you start? How do you bring structure to what can be an amorphous pile of worries and stress? Also, these students are already highly informed and charged up. What can I offer that will really challenge them?

This was part of the spring semester of Dr. Dana Brown‘s Graduate Seminar, “Topics for the Professional Singer” at Roosevelt University, Chicago College of Performing Arts.

I had already connected with this group of singers earlier in the fall semester. They completed several homework assignments using Velvet Singer Software to quickly generate a database of professional contacts, repertoire lists and audition history reports. So coming back in the spring to talk about the planning side of the business was a treat.

We spent a fair amount of time discussing what the purposes and benefits of developing a business plan might be. I was impressed with their ability to take this so seriously and to generate many good uses for having a written plan. Before we decide what a plan should contain, let’s make some commitments to how we intend to use it and who we are going to share it with.

Among the purposes of a business plan that they came up with were:

  • To help organize your thoughts and gain clarity
  • To involve stakeholders in furthering your career
  • To persuade others to support you

That is powerful stuff!

So who are we going to share this with, and when? These students were busy singing graduate recitals and preparing for graduation. What a perfect time to make a plan and share it with your stakeholders!

Here are some of the folks with whom they committed to share the business plan executive report:

  • My voice teacher
  • My parents
  • My girlfriend / boyfriend
  • My director from last summer

How powerful and rich might those experience be?

Imagine that you are a director and you receive a courteous email from a young singer you had worked with the previous summer. Attached to the email was a nice report outlining that singers plans, strengths, weaknesses, priorities, mission, values, vision and strategy. Holy cow, that could have a profound impact!

Now imagine that you get to know this young singer better and she includes you every year with an update. When you need a last-minute Despina, who is going to get the call?

Click here to learn more about Velvet Singer Seminars.

During this seminar, we rely heavily on the E-Workbook. In this video clip, we mention the Product Strengths & Weaknesses Forms and then generate the “Strength Areas” bar chart as a result. The E-Workbook has been a great framework for meaningful conversation.

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E-Workbook is Here — v2.9.2

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

We have been holding on to this release for quite some time, trying out the new E-Workbook in seminars throughout the country. Tweaking, building and refining what we think is an excellent add-on to Velvet Singer.

After automatically downloading the newest update, v2.9.2, you can open up the Workbook add-on from the Main Menu.

This is an entirely separate file (the first add-on that we have released) and it is a very feature rich application of its own. We may even begin to sell it as a separate product. For our current customers? Free!

From the E-Workbook menu, you can open up the workbook for either of our Seminars:

- Seminar A: Organization / Goal Setting
- Seminar B: Business Plan

There is tons of information and TLC poured into both, but we think the Business Plan workbook functions really well as a stand-alone application.

The Bottom Line: Persuasion and Communication

The Workbooks walk you through everything you need to know, helping you generate rich and persuasive prose. For example, rather than trying to describe your values from scratch, you can first pick from a list of 39 common values.

E-mail Reports

From the Business Plan menu you can generate two types of reports, opening them in your web browser to print or preparing an HTML email to your family, friends, teachers and supporters. You can also Resume your workbook from the last page you edited, Backup your data, Submit your data to our compilation project or Clear all of your previous responses.

The E-Mail report allows you to send a beautiful and colorful HTML report directly from the system with no setup required.

Customize your message to request feedback and direction, or make an appeal for direct financial report. The more you involve your stakeholders, the more they will support you.

Business Plans

Your business plan will arrive with professional and colorful styling. It will contain copious amounts of valuable information, yet it will also be well organized and readable.

Velvet Singer business plans contain the following information:

  • Executive summary
  • Mission
  • Vision
  • Values
  • Current approach
  • Entrepreneurship strengths / weaknesses
  • Product strengths / weaknesses
  • Positioning / branding
  • Ambitions
  • Financial outlook
  • Risks analysis
  • Strategy
  • Five year plan
  • Priorities
  • To do list

Trends Module

Rebuilt and optimized to show you only the best information without any setup required on your part, the trends module is completely prefabricated and ready-made. Simply navigate to the Trends module from the main menu, and the system will compile your data. Click around, learn and share.

From each Trend record, you can see composite information describing your progress. For example, this singer has been doing about coachings per month.

View your profitability over the years or show the same data broken out into months. You can also drill down into income or expenses.

Trend reports gather high level data so you can analyze them together or share them with your professional contacts.

This report show a singers has researched 273 auditions, sent out 134 applicat

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Integrating EEP After Longy – A Goals-Centered Approach

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011
    Preparation for Longy EEP Seminar

    A few thoughts before the EEP morning seminar.


Longy School of Music‘s Experiential Education Program is the picture of collaboration. We had a condensed 90-minute session, but it did not take long for this group to begin sharing. Kudos to Dr. Judith Hill Bose and this class for bringing their energy and intelligence to earnestly consider how EEP will play a role in their lives going forward.

“Turning what the students have learned from this project into goals and action items for their future is really important – and I like Bill’s thoughtful and systematic way of going through the goal setting process and learning how to make priorities. It is important for young artists to encounter lots of ways to think about things.”

– Dr. Judith Hill Bose, Director of Education Studies at Longy School of Music.

As I wrote in my blog post from February titled “Longy’s Experiential Education Program”:

Many students choose to tie in a service aspect to their projects. This is a great way to generate an audience and seems like a very natural transition to post-graduate life, where many musicians go on to serve the community professionally and semi-professionally.

I was blown away by the creativity and drive behind the projects: one singer worked with an elementary school group and was already contracted to return to this same school after EEP, a collaborative pianist created an avant-garde vocal recital to be performed in bars and restaurants, a young conductor built off of his previous work with vocal ensembles in working in the community. Service, execution and creativity. This class should be a model for other schools around the county.

Our discussion focused around four questions supported by discussion, small break-out groups, slides and workbook exercises:

1) What new experiences did EEP bring you?

  • List three new business skills / experiences
  • List three new performance / presentational experiences

2) What did you learn?

  • Entrepreneurship strengths / weaknesses, indicating which you discovered through EEP
  • Professional Values checklist, indicating which you discovered through EEP
  • List three key take-aways / lessons learned

3) How would you like this make you different?

  • 5-year plan, broken into six sections (performance, teaching, artistic development, collaboration, financial, life/family)

4) What are you going to do differently?

  • Priorities, indicating which you emphasized during EEP
  • Goals for the next year
  • Action items for the next month

I tried out our new Values checklist for the first time and found that it really fostered an interesting conversation. Most, if not all, arrived at unique lists of their top five values. There were some favorites such as “Improvement” and “Learning,” yet even in these cases, each student derived different connotation and meaning from these words. For example, for one student valued “Improvement” in the context of their instrument performance whereas another saw “Improvement” as a value to pass on to others through teaching.

      Creativity abounds in Cambridge, even on the transit signs. Creativity is a "treasure," to be sure.

This was also my first full seminar with instrumentalists and I was delighted to have Dr. Hill’s support in putting together a meaningful session, and appreciative that these students were able to jump into such deep, structured thinking. Bravo Longy EEP!

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Longy’s Experiential Education Program

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

The Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass offers something very unique to their students — the Experiential Education Program requires all conservatory students to create a music project and carry it out through live performance. It is like what we called in engineering school, a “laboratory.” It is not enough to think about the project or to write about the project, you actually have to get out there and do it.

“Experiential Education is a vital component of Longy’s Conservatory curriculum, designed to prepare student-musicians for an increasingly diverse and complex world, to prepare them – in the words of our mission statement – ‘to make a difference in the world.’

Required of all students, this two-semester course includes interactive presentations, discussions, and readings. Students strengthen their communication skills and understanding of audience education, public advocacy for music and the arts, and entrepreneurship. They are challenged to think more broadly about music, its role in society, their career options, and the best use of their skills.”

– from Longy.edu

Many students choose to tie in a service aspect to their projects. This is a great way to generate an audience and seems like a very natural transition to post-graduate life, where many musicians go on to serve the community professionally and semi-professionally. I have found singing for children to be personally rewarding, artistically enriching and lucrative. By way of example, I had the good fortune to perform with Opera for the Young, the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Opera in the Neighborhoods program, and through the Chicago Symphony’s Kraft Family Series.

Serving children, the elderly, poor or imprisoned is an experience I certainly wish I had been challenged to pursue during school as they do at Longy. How vivid of a memory and how empowering would it be for the students to create, promote and perform a concert at a jail in Boston? Look out Johnny Cash! That is not to mention the actual, tangible impact that these concerts will make in enriching the Cambridge and greater-Boston communities.

I am trilled to be working with singers and non-singers at Longy this March through the EEP courses! I definitely think I can contribute and am excited for the opportunity to expand my game.

I will tailor the material to address the needs of the project team (rather than the individual singer) while each team is in the midst of executing their projects. Teams will have made some strides in planning and researching, but potentially not quite solidified anything tangible and deliverable.

We will focus the session on project management: techniques, tools and skills. We will extract lessons learned from the first half of their EEP project, give them some time for a “reality check” and help them plan what they would like to do differently going forward. It would be a shot in the arm, to help get the teams re-energized and focused.

I will customize my new e-workbook to cover some of these principles:

  • Entrepreneurship strengths / weaknesses checklist
  • Visualization / discussion of the ideal project workflow
  • Reality check and personal tendencies
  • Project risks assessment
  • Project priorities
  • Project goals
  • Project action items
  • Project accountability

I am thrilled to help support these many worthwhile and service-oriented projects. See you in Boston!

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Video Action Items at MSM

Friday, January 21st, 2011

“Bill Bennett led a wonderful session to help MSM vocalists identify their goals and map a course toward achieving them. Velvet Singer is an impressive, powerful tool to organize time efficiently and to prepare for career success.”

– Edward Klorman, director of Manhattan School of Music’s Center for Music Entrepreneurship

I stepped up the intensity of the “action item” proclamations at my recent seminar at MSM. This was the first seminar at which I recorded video, rather than audio as in previous seminars.

The result: video definitely fires up a new part of the brain! I am definitely going to use this again.

These performers at MSM certainly rose to the challenge. At the culmination of the seminar, I asked if any students would like to volunteer to do a short video recording. They got a bit nervous, but everyone in the group stepped forward to participate.

Most everyone included a touch of humor or levity to their delivery. Some made the entire room, myself included, erupt into laughter. This was different than the audio action items at previous seminars which tended to come out a bit dry.

My strategy is to do anything possible to make a memory out of the experience. Performing in front of their peers and in front of the camera seemed to do just that. It is difficult to make a seminar on the business of singing anything other than dry, so I was delighted to close the workshop with some laughs and some firm commitments.

The videos came out great! I used my new iPhone 4 and a really slick iPhone-to-tripod attachment called The Glif.

Because The Glif was back-ordered, I picked up the attachment from the designer’s studio in Greenwich Village. I was able to meet with Tom Gerhardt and learn a bit about their fantastic entrepreneurial project. Tom and his partner used Kickstarter to raise the funds to launch this amazing product to the mainstream. According to theglif.com:

… We decided to put the Glif’s fate into the hands of the masses and begin a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money required to make it a reality. Kickstarter is a platform that connects creators with people who are interested in helping them out. Our contributors on Kickstarter pledged money towards our goal with no guarantee that we would ever be successful. They took a leap of faith, backed our project, and $137,417 and 5273 backers later here we are. The Glif is a full-fledged crowd-funded product.

If you need to do any video recording for applications, you can certainly get by with the iPhone, The Glif, a tripod, and a good digital voice recorder. The audio on the iPhone won’t be good enough quality for an application, so you will have to dub in your own audio track.

I let these participants know that I will be emailing each of them their individual video clips two weeks, one month, two months, six months and one year from the date of the seminar. My hope is that they will remember the fun they had in making the video and then feel a good positive sense of accountability to the group.

Ultimately, my job is to help inspire an entrepreneurial attitude. The granular skills they pick up and my specific approach (working from priorities -> goals -> action items) may fade or become less relevant over time. But helping to shape attitudes has staying power.

I greatly enjoyed working with these positive and intelligent singers at MSM and I look forward to following up with them.

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Seminar A: Business Plan

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

How to Sustain a Well-Tuned Business Plan

We are excited to launch a new seminar geared toward the needs of advanced young artists and emerging professional singers. During the seminar, each singer will create a career “business plan” and commit to a schedule to revise and refine. The session is designed to take an intimidating and often stressful process and make it practical and accessible to even the busiest of emerging professional singers.

This seminar has been a work in progress for some time, and we have gathered the input and feedback of so many educators and professionals. A special thank you goes out to educator Dr. Dana Brown, mezzo-soprano and career consultant Dorothy Byrne, and consultant Mislav Kos.

The Details:

Target: For advanced young artists and emerging professionals.

Honorarium: Please email info@velvetsinger.com for pricing.

Duration: The seminar is designed to last two and a half (2.5) hours.

Workbook: The seminar uses a customized workbook, which provides an efficient and practical platform for rich discussion. Please Download the Workbook completed with example answers.

Objective: The seminar helps singers create a career business plan and adopt a continual process for refining their plans going forward.

Impact: Singers will leave the session with a dramatically improved sense of self-awareness and empowerment over their path. The seminar begins by discussing the relevant issues a well-crafted plan is designed to help solve.

Integration: Some singers may have previously drafted a business plan through school or privately. We will build off of those experiences and integrate our work into one process.

Singers will:

  • Assess strengths / weaknesses
  • Identify / mitigate risks
  • Analyze priorities
  • Define and rank goals
  • Create a marketing strategy
  • Articulate core values
  • Compose a career vision and mission statement
  • Create a schedule to revisit / refine

Workbook with Example Answers

Click on any page to pop open a larger view.

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