by Sean Oliver
“I’ll call you later.” I hung up with the mark and went back to my sushi. I texted Anthony that this guy was offended and Mickie was probably a little prudish and we may want to reconsider. I put my phone away for the duration of the meal.
When I later decided I should get back to business, I awakened my phone and was met with a rather graphic porno picture in my texts.
“Her?” Anthony had texted, below an image of what appeared to be Mickie James shoving her spread vagina out of my screen. Couldn’t say for sure, but it sure looked like her. A quick Internet search showed me that it was widely reported she was, in fact, an adult model for the fine publication Leg Show. How about that? No judgment toward her, but imagine this shithead promoter going pious on me and talking to me like I was Larry fucking Flynt.
I sent him a text. With a photo.
“I apologize for not producing something more classy like this. I rescind my offer and will reach out when I decide to produce full-out porno. If you’ve spoken to Mickie already you can tell her your stupidity cost her a legitimate payday. Lose my number.”
Walking away with such conviction, whether due to shoe size or shoe-bomb, requires you to frame the decision properly. If you’re the type who will constantly question a decision and do the “what if” thing, then you’ll need to work on losing that. If you frame it in the context of doing what’s best for your feet, and accept that as an unwavering truth, you have the prerequisite skills.
14. Assessments
CONTENT IS KING, but data is your guide. You’ll need that cold stuff to let you know if you’re headed off the highway. Doesn’t matter what you’re driving if you run out of road.
Many times you’ll be able to predict what most of your data will say. Because you’re in the thick of your business every day, you’ll know what’s selling and what’s having a harder time getting off the ground. For us, it comes as no surprise when we see our sales figures for a new Jim Cornette show. We know it’s going to be a hit. Same for a show that stars Kevin Nash or, sorry guys, Vince Russo.
What was rather unpredictable for us was the incredible, early success of an investigative special we released called Kevin Sullivan and the End of WCW. The show was a real outlier and we contemplated the reasons for its success on dozens of occasions. The show is ten years old and I still don’t know.
From a programming standpoint it had a lot of strikes against it. Firstly, it was not part of a branded series. When that special was released we had Guest Booker, YouShoot, and the short-lived series My Side of the Story up and running. As you know from being a viewer of your own favorite TV shows, you become invested in a series—the attitude, the writers, subject matter. You’ll check out every episode. That’s one of the things that building a series-based production company brought us—fan investment in our individual product lines.
But Kevin Sullivan and the End of WCW was not an episode of any of those. We’d only released one other investigative special, Rebuilding the Sheik, and it did slow sales. It wasn’t a flop, but it was not expected to be a smash. It profiled Sheiky and his agent Eric Simms as they recounted Sheik’s resurgence in popularity via his appearances on Howard Stern as well as viral videos of him going bonkers. Simms asked me about its sales almost weekly and beyond a couple of stoners who fell asleep on their keyboard and hit the “buy” button and Eric’s mom, I think we sold some.
We’d just decided to film investigative specials—one-offs that are not part of a series and instead focus on a singular aspect of the wrestling business for each edition. We didn’t expect a hit in that category—just a fun show about Sullivan booking as WCW faded.
I am a “Kevin Sullivan guy” for sure, but I didn’t have unrealistic expectations regarding his drawing power. He’d launched the Guest Booker brand by being the inaugural guest on our first series. Come to think of it, he launched the damn company. But this was a weird format—a week-by-week analysis of the final months of WCW when Kevin was on the creative team. Kevin had been off TV for years and was not a shoot interview darling like Cornette.
Was it this inventive format—the week-by-week gimmick? Sullivan was quite entertaining and very much willing to tell tales out of school. That made for entertaining trailers. I was quite proud of my cover design, which then adorned all the web banner ads. It was very filmic, a dramatically lit close-up of Sullivan’s face.
Was it all of that stuff together? Any of it alone? Who knows? My best guess is that it was a perfect storm of elements that resonated with viewers and then delivered on its promise, generating lots of word of mouth sales.
For whatever reason the show was working. The sales data on this show indicated something interesting. It wasn’t explosive out of the gate, making us scramble to keep up with orders in its first weeks. It was more of a slow burn, selling steadily for years after its release. If we weren’t as diligent with our data, poring over it all every quarter at our meetings, we wouldn’t have noticed it was slowly accruing revenue quarter over quarter. It was becoming a top seller in our earliest years until we had bona fide smashes like Guest Booker with Jim Cornette that did numbers like we’d never expected.
The data didn’t lie and it opened our eyes to elements we may have overlooked. It’s no wonder we were so comfortable devoting an entire series to a week-by-week analysis of a federation when we launched Timeline: The History of WWE years later. Anthony always liked the concept of chronological exploration, and this show proved its value. When I had the idea for Timeline later, this format was a natural fit. It was the assessment of the data that lit the way, back in 2008.
One of the great things about small business in the modern age is the availability of very specified information. It’s this information, the cold part of your business, that you will use to constantly monitor the health and well being of your company. And it’s these tools and assessments that will indicate the more subtle need for adjustments. These indicators will guide your business by showing you the needs for change that The Blood does not see. The insight that your passion provides will not really help you much here. Fortunately, the cold part of business is learnable.
Our first big adjustment at KC was our transition from an mp3-based business to production of full-length videos. After we identified the need to change our entire product line, the line on which the company was originally founded (no small feat), we did have a distinct advantage. As participants and fans in the market, we were privy to the fact that a commitment to production values and unique formatting of subject matter would ensure differentiation. We knew we had to make the change, and The Blood told us how to change. We began producing shows we’d love to have seen, done the way we wished they had been done before.
We’ve had to make plenty of adjustments based solely on cold data, with no room for more divine guidance from The Blood. One of the earliest lessons we had to learn was about online shoppers’ behavior.
There are several analytics websites that allow you to drop some html code on your website, and in return their service will feed you data on the behavior of those that visit your site. It’s a remarkable study, and a real advantage to business owners. Imagine opening a brick and mortar store and having the ability to get a detailed report about which shelves shoppers spent the most time at. Or where they’d just come from. Or in which order they visit the individual displays and shelves. That data would be nearly impossible in a store. Online, it’s as easy as a bunch of code and your investment of time studying the results. You can see what was clicked, in what order, and even how much time each surfer stayed on each page.
Studying that data was so revealing. A good analytics site will show you all of the above and so much more. You’ll see what country your visitors were in, their operating system, and browser. Some of it may seem trivial but looking at the right data is crucial in maximizing the shopper’s experience when visiting your site.
This is simply the online version of watching all of your shoppers navigate your store, which ma
y be a commentary on how well or how poorly your displays are designed, and their location. Do you need to move those racks closer to the display window? Do it. Did your foot traffic increase? Digital translation: Move that link a little higher up on the page. Did the link get more hits? Ah, then it’s better positioned now.
Online analytics will show you all that and more. I can unequivocally state that studying customer patterns and trends on our site was one of the most valuable contributions to our early success. Each site is different, so there’s no way to learn this other than watching customers enter, browse, and exit your store, whether virtual or concrete. Is a part of your site or store hanging up your traffic? You’re looking for obstacles to purchases, and you’ll change them into paths to purchases. Get rid of obstacles. If you’re frustrating your customers because they can’t find what they want easily, then you’re doing everyone a disservice.
Analytics will tell you a lot about the navigation of your site. If a customer needs more than just a couple of clicks to find their item and its “buy” button, you have too many obstacles and distractions. Your more desirable items should be one click away from the customer’s doorstep.
The Internet created Generation Now, whether you like it or not. The public wants their desires met instantly. So study those cold analytics and get it to them now. In studying the site data, you may initially be horrified to see how narrow your engagement time is with most of your customers. If you can keep someone on a particular page in your site for more than 5 seconds, you’re doing remarkably well. What does that say about the importance of a well-streamlined site?
Assessments of your customer’s profiles can be very helpful. A typical analytics service won’t tell you the age range of your shoppers, or their gender. YouTube analytics do provide that, so if streaming videos are a big part of your business, then you’ll be able see all that and more. But if you want to build an email list or just get general information about your fans, you’ll have to go an extra step for that in the form of a survey of some kind.
It’s a little more intrusive because it isn’t transparent to your shoppers. I’m all about maximizing the shopping experience, and that includes speed, anonymity, and ease of use. If you hang someone up with a pop-up survey, I consider that to be risky to the process. Yet the information a customer can provide you in such a survey would be valuable to both you and them. You should work to find a way to make it as comfortable for the shopper as possible, yet still get enough data to validate the survey.
At KC, we waited until we were in business for a couple of years and had built a large and trustworthy fan base. We provided the customers on our opt-in email list a link to a short survey, I think it was five or six questions. We wanted to know ages, and some shopping preferences. They had the link in the same email newsletter that also provided all the usual new release information that we always included. When they had some time, if they wanted to answer the short survey, they could. It was simple and un-intrusive, sent to our reliable customers.
If your site is a registration-required site, you’ve already collected the customer’s vitals, but their preferences and suggestions won’t appear anywhere, so you’ll still want to consider a survey geared toward those types of data.
The data that comes back will help you in product development and also in the design of your store, your site. If you’re getting 75% of your traffic from males between 25-35, you’ll want to change that pink splash page, killer. If that demographic is your target, then your marketing is spot-on. But your process needs some tweaking. Get some blacks and blues on that site. The aforementioned demographic is pretty close to a pro wrestling oriented site like ours, so we’re right where we need to be. We’re actually around 90% male. But if you sell a product for a mass audience, you’ll definitely need to assess your marketing decisions if the demo that’s being returned is that heavily young, male group. You’ve got to get some traffic from the opposite direction. Ask your wife why her friends would think your company sucks. Then make changes.
Your assessments will either confirm your decisions or indicate problems. They’re the most honest indicator of your effectiveness so don’t fiddle with the results. Let them be unabashedly brutal. In return, be equally vigilant about your corrective measures. Make the decisions that get you back “in the zone.”
I created a tool at Kayfabe Commentaries that helps us stay in the zone. It’s called the P-G-I Triad and it took four years of trial and error before it crystallized for me. I wrote about it and presented it at a quarterly meeting. It cited our company’s successes and failures, all presented in terms of the triad. Sometimes my intensity and focus on these things gets a chuckle from the KC employees. I don’t give as shit. You don’t get anywhere by accident.
The P-G-I stands for profitability, growth, and innovation. These three components were the core of our early success. Your company may require a focus on different elements, that’s up to you to identify. But for us, there’s a test of profitability, growth, and innovation that our decisions must first pass. If I plugged one of our less successful projects into that triad, we’d immediately see which of these elements the show had failed, in retrospect. It’s a decoder of sorts. Remember those old board games where a card with a printed answer was obscured by a jumble of red patterns and type? When you slid a transparent, red cellophane decoder over it, the red was cancelled out and you’d be able to see the answer. Our triad has a similar effect.
If I drop a less-successful show of ours into the P-G-I Triad, I might see that while the show contributed to the growth and innovation aspects of our goals, the show’s exceedingly high production costs made for too difficult a breakeven point, so the profitability portion of the triad has been failed. It’s called a “bad decision,” in plain English.
If the biggest wrestling star in the world was available and willing to do a show with us, and we had developed the most ingenious concept ever, that would certainly satisfy the growth and innovation part of our P-G-I. But if we had to pay, say, $10 to this star for the interview, and based on our market experience we knew that we could expect to make only $9 or $10 in total sales for the resulting show, then this is usually a bad decision.
I say usually because, truth be told, there are sometimes ancillary reasons for green-lighting a bad decision, which would make it a far less bad decision. Could you consider the project a loss leader? Is the -10% sacrifice going to be a +25% gain in another way? Will that investment of 10% in the form of a loss on this project have intangible assets like heavy press coverage, exposure of your product line to new fans, or laying a foundation for future projects? Maybe it’s something to consider then. But if this tanks in a big way, remember one thing—your P-G-I showed you the reality. You chose to ignore the warning and press on to pursue secondary gains, knowing short-term profitability was at stake. No “I told you so.” It was a known risk.
Just as our P-G-I can assess individual products, it also serves as a credo on a larger scale, for our whole company philosophy. Our broad decisions should satisfy the P-G-I as well. Try it for your company—maybe this metric works for you. If you can say you’re achieving consistent profitability, growth, and innovation in your industry, you’re an undisputed success.
15. Collaboration
I’M A HUGE believer in the “sum of the parts” theory. The strengths of each gear in the machine compliment the function of another’s. Your business is multifaceted and has very unique strengths and advantages. It may also have voids in certain areas. If used properly, your company’s strengths can barter to fill the voids. A great way to do this is through collaboration with other companies.
At Kayfabe Commentaries I was always looking for good companies with whom we could do business. I’m also keenly aware of options we can add to maximize the experience at KC. The process is simply finding an element of our company that we can lend to another company, who will in turn lend us a strength of theirs. Those partnerships, if well thought out and
designed cost-effectively, can be so valuable with minimal expenditure on either party’s part.
Next time you are in a fast food burger joint, pay attention to the packaging of kid meals. There is a fine example of an exchange—the movie studio has a film for which they need to reach the children’s audience. BugerPlace serves kiddie meals in specialized containers. In exchange for driving kids to the fast food place to get that cool new toy (there’s some big bucks in that exchange too), the burger restaurant will further advertise the new film to the kiddie market by putting it all over the packaging of the kiddie meals, plastic cups, and also throwing in a .10 cent toy.
Be sure that you are aligning yourself with a company consistent with your brand. Your end result gain will actually be a long-term loss if your brand image is diluted.
Let’s revisit our fisherman for a moment. His store will now be offering boating classes. As his students file in for class every Tuesday evening, Mr. Fisher will present a slideshow, videos, and some diagrams he made about fishing boats that are good for the local waters. It’s an area of expertise for Mr. Fisher, so he can conduct an informative class. The pictures of the boats and the discussion will keep attendees engaged. He charges $25 for the four-week course that meets once a week for 2 hours each session. Ten die-hard fishing enthusiasts sign up to talk about boats and swap boating advice and anecdotes. Mr. Fisher will add $250 to his company’s bottom line for sharing his time and knowledge.
Across town sits Billy’s Big Ass Boats, a local company operating on the wharf. If Billy (of Billy’s Big Ass Boats fame) were smart, he would have sought out Mr. Fisher when he first opened, and visa versa. If you’re seeing a great opportunity for collaboration here, you’re right on.
Billy can lease one of his boats out every Tuesday evening for four weeks. He’ll even drive it while Fisher conducts the class at the back of the boat. Each week, Billy takes the class out on the waters on a different type of boat, each with different features and characteristics. Now, students not only get Fisher’s knowledge and advice, they will get an on-the-water experience each and every week.
