We kicked off our fall seminar season on a beautiful fall evening in Urbana-Champaign, at the University of Illinois School of Music. Professor Julie Jordan Gunn gave a warm welcome and helped set the tone for a very productive session.

We were welcomed by many energetic singers as they prepare for their school year. Opera auditions were the following week so there was certainly a buzz in the air. They will perform three productions this year which present quite a wide range of styles: Rigoletto, Man of La Mancha and La Calisto (Cavalli). There should be something for every voice to have a good opportunity to participate. Click Here for more information.

Fantastic dramatic mezzo soprano Danielle Wright was able to join us for this session and immediately contributed to this discussion, lending her expertise, encouragement and unique perspective. She joined the Velvet Singer team this fall and is helping with seminars, technical training and repertoire research. We are very lucky to have her help and look forward to involving her more and more!

Danielle and I rolled out several new sections to the seminar workbook including the priorities vs. time management section, goals t-shirt sizing and marketing brainstorming sections.

Priorities vs. Time Management

This new section is the first step in the process of drilling down to three simple action items. We first take a look at our priorities and how we spend out time, then we create a ranked goals list, and lastly derive action items from our goals.

Participants prioritize core business practices such as these:

• Product Refinement
• Differentiation
• Marketing & Growth Strategy

Next we analyze how we spend our time. Which activities do you do most often in a typical week? For example, the list of activities includes:

• Refining core skills of singing, acting
• Developing concerts, artistic experimentation
• Research, publicity, brainstorming, strategy

Lastly, we compare the priority list with the time management exercise. The key is to identify any areas where priority value is high but the time commitment is low.

Goals T-Shirt Sizing

This exercise builds directly out of the Priorities & Time Management exercise. After identifying the highest priority items, we dig into one business practice area to establish a goals list.

While working at Soliant Consulting we used a process called “t-shirt sizing” to prioritize features and specifications. With fixed time, money and resources, it is imperative that singers do the same — we should not only create goals lists, but “t-shirt size” them as small, medium and large.

What benefit do you expect to incur and how difficult will it be? Start with the “low hanging fruit”, that is the easiest effor items with the biggest expected benefit. From there, you are ready to create action items.

Marketing Brainstorm

I have hit this material in other ways in the past, drawing the analogy between our singing businesses and running a small ice cream shop: we both have customers, product lines, stakeholders, margins, metrics and feedback. The similarities abound.

In the new workbook, we focus on brainstorming new customers, products and “pull-marketing” ideas. This new approach still drives home the central point that “it’s a business”, while challenging each attendee to get very specific and write down three new ideas that they would like to investigate after the session. We came up with some solid ideas and I was able to add to that list using the appendix sections from David Cutler’s fantastic, The Savvy Musician.

For example, we spoke about cultivating new out-of-the-box customers such as:

• Collaboration with ballet companies, theater companies, other
• Singing with early music, contemporary or jazz ensembles
• Writing for a music journal or newspaper
• Recording studio jingles and voice overs or working as a radio DJ

This exercise really seems to help remove the blinders and open up profound new optimism for the possibilities of finding employment and fulfillment related to our passions.