Carr Hagerman
Ontend Creative Partners
888.544.9164
www.topperformer.com
Street performers
have lessons to
teach entrepreneurs
SHAKESPEARE DIDN’T WRITE CLICHS But the line “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players” has nearly become one. It is too often used to suggest that everyone in business, and those who serve others, is always on stage in a performance for the customer.
It may be more useful to focus less on the stage and more on the idea of the performer.
First, I’ll offer a simple confession. I’m a working street performer. I have more than 30 years of performance experience at Renaissance festivals, fairs and street shows. In 1975 I created the Rat Catcher, a wandering street character at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival in Shakopee.
The Rat Catcher is a comically dark medieval clown, marked by ragged clothes, dirt-covered face and grumpy demeanor. Over these many years I’ve become a student of the audience and of some of the best street performers around the world. I’ve also owned and operated a retail store, a successful live event production company as well as consulting to businesses for the past 15 years.
The street performer is a provocative metaphor for the American entrepreneur, often a business of one. The performer works without a guarantee of financial return, setting up and performing in parks, sidewalks and lanes. They aren’t protected by a stage, a desk or curtain that can close.
To make a living they must plunge into the crowd, a vulnerable position that thrusts them into the center of the action where nearly anything can happen. It is from this middle that we can best understand how a top performer manages to create such memorable and compelling performances, and to see how any business might harness the same energy.
In it together
Successful business owners and top street performers share qualities that set them apart from their average-performing competitors. The most important of these qualities is the ability to release the natural energy embedded in their audience or customer.
This natural energy isn’t some new age tonic, but the real and measurable energy or enthusiasm that is unbarred when top performers connect authentically with another human being. The top street performers don’t play to an audience but invite the audience to play with them, and as a result the performer and the audience have a stake in the outcome and are in it together.
Successful companies have always been those that reach their customers in an inherently interesting and real way. Customers can sense what is real and what is convention, and what is scripted. Companies who cultivate service encounters that celebrate connection, and allow their people a modicum of freedom to be themselves, are among the most admired around the world.
Southwest Airlines, Apple Computer Stores, Nordstrom’s, Von Maur and Whole Foods Markets are but a few of the big companies that have adopted a top performer style culture, and where a customer is consistently entertained and delighted.
The local Starbucks employee, as an example, always seems to include me in lively and unscripted banter while I’m standing amidst the chattering caffeine-induced conversations happening at tables and couches around me. It’s real and inclusive and though I expect it now, it always makes me feel part of something cool and alive and I want to go back again.
Some companies prefer the predictability of scripts, policies and procedures that give employees little room to perform. They cultivate intolerance to variety and employee interpretation. It doesn’t surprise me, for instance, that many call centers have replaced a live human being with computer recorded message encounters; after all, there is little difference in the experience to the customer.
This all may seem a good decision when it comes to reviewing the ledger, but what is sacrificed is the experience of human-to-human connection that can build lifelong devotion to a brand.
Embrace disruptions
It’s not just the way these top performers engage the audience that makes them unique. It is also the way they embrace the disruptions, obstacles and distractions that bombard them when there are performing.
Top performers don’t see these disruptions as problems; they seem them as a gift. They’ve learned to see jams and breakdowns as opportunities to really show off. Sometimes how we handle a problem will define who we are in the customer’s mind more than anything else we do.
One term I created when working with clients is ‘juice the jam’, a strange-sounding phrase that describes what the best street performers do when something breaks down or they get into a jam. Juicing the jam means making positive use of disruptions and breakdowns that happen in every business.
The average performers can become distracted and annoyed at the disruption because it pulls them off script; they’ll try to push it away, ignore it, maybe complain and blame. But top performers know that the juice inside this jam – if handled with levity, commitment and competency – is indeed sweet for everyone involved.
As a street performer I have learned that wherever I perform and no matter how big the audience may be, the most important element of all isn’t my show or product, but the way in which I connect to my audience. I carry no props and have no script, preferring to find my material in the connection I make with the audience. Without them, I’m a solo act with nothing to work with.
Building a show or product may be the easiest part of the work. When we engage others in a real and authentic way we unleash new energy. Though it can be challenging because it is not conscripted, forced, demanded, rolled out or coerced, it is the key to unlocking the energy in our customers, in our employees and in you. It is the natural energy coming from the deeply human wellspring of energy inside each of us.
Perhaps Shakespeare, though poetic, was wrong after all. We are more than just players; we are human beings who want our voices to be heard above the din of processes, scripts and measurements. We long for connection and to be fully engaged.
And the world is more than just a stage; it is a big beautiful ball, ripe with possibilities and full of energy waiting to be tapped.
