I’ve just spent three days at Country Fest in Cadott, WI. It’s one of the oldest outdoor music festivals in the country. It’s just 14 miles from my house to the front gate.
My oldest daughter Sydney enjoys it so my wife and I take her each year.
On day one Sawyer Brown was playing and one of the comments by Mark Miller (their lead singer) stuck with me.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Sawyer Brown, they are an experienced band (Older) who’ve been recording, traveling, and playing live for over 37 years.
They have an impressive number of top 10 hits as well as an impressive number of #1 hits.
What they do best is perform live. They have a high energy show that feeds the crowd and they seem to live for live shows.
They’ve done over 4,500 shows over the last 37 years, and if you do the math that is more than 120 shows a year. For the first decade, they toured they played 275 to 300 shows a year. As you can see, Sawyer Brown is good at what they do and they have the results to prove it.
I’m telling you all this to put Mark’s comment in perspective.
As Mark tells it, Alabama (another big country band) called them and asked them to sing one of Alabama’s songs when Alabama was being inducted into the Country Music Hall Of Fame.
Sawyer Brown said they would be honored, and then to get ready, they practiced one hour a day for 2 months straight.
This was 2 months of practice for one song that the band was already familiar with. You’d think from watching them that they could just go out and play the song after only running through it a few times.
While I’m listening to Sawyer Brown sing the Alabama song during the show, I’m thinking, “That’s what makes the difference from people who want to be great and those that are, preparation and practice”.
I started comparing how much preparation I do for presentations. I do spend what I consider a fair amount of time preparing, but do I put this much effort into what I do?
Then the thought came into my head, “For a music group to do the same songs month after month, year after year is one thing, but what about a business presentation”. I don’t see myself doing the same presentation over and over.
Also, we don’t have radio or downloads to measure how well our presentation is going. The more radio time a music act gets, the more downloads they get, and the more their music is streamed; the more in demand the group will be for live shows.
After some pondering, I decided that if we practice everything we do for 60 days before we put it out into the world, we won’t be doing much.
As one of my mentors, Dan Kennedy says: “Good enough is good enough”. As long as the information is valuable to YOUR core audience, they won’t mind a few errors.
If you wait for perfection you’ll never put anything out into the world and as a result, you will never get to see if people like your offer or not.
My takeaway: create content that your audience will like, polish it up a bit, and then put it out into the world. If people respond, polish it up some more. If they don’t respond, create something else and put it out until you find what your audience responds to, then perfect it.
After all, isn’t this what musical acts do? Often in their shows, they play songs they’re considering for their next album. While I don’t know for sure, my guess is that if a new song doesn’t get a good response after playing it to several audiences, it won’t make it on the album.
If this process is good enough for major musical acts, then it’s good enough for me.
If you haven’t checked out my “good enough” Masterclass yet, check it out today. It will give you an in-depth look at a complete Facebook marketing system. Sign up for my FREE Masterclass on Facebook marketing. This Free class is a 5-day video course with a video each day, which goes into detail about each of the five steps for creating a profitable Facebook marketing machine.
Brian (Your fun in the sun Country Music Fan)