I got an interesting e-mail last month. Took me a while to answer. Came from a kid in a to-remain-unnamed European country working to make a rep for himself as a live audio engineer and service provider. Nice kid. We have corresponded a few times over several years. (All via ProAudioSpace, BTW. If you are still not on it, you are very much missing out on some good stuff.)
Anyway, he came to me with a conundrum and for some reason thought my advice would be worth listening to (his first mistake…). He had been working for an established mid-sized company for a couple of years and had worked up from the new-kid to the go-to-guy. Important to note here that he is a freelancer – does almost all of his work for one company but is not an actual employee. Which, I'm sure, sounds familiar to many reading this. As he got closer to the owner, he started to relay ideas for ways to increase business over the long haul and make the company stronger. And he was listened to. Sort of.
The problem he was relaying to me was that the owner – who has been in the biz for a very long time – would take the ideas but strip them down to the ways in which he thought he could make the greatest short-term return and discard the long-term parts. The resulting changes actually weakened the company. They made a bunch more money for a little while, but are now losing gigs to other providers. The owner is not concerned, because all he is looking for is an exit strategy, anyway.
So the kid now worries that his rep is being negatively impacted by his association with this specific company and their biz decisions based on short-term bucks over long-term client retention. Further, he has clients asking for things and has ideas on how to provide them, but is at a point where he does not trust the provider he is working with to implement the ideas.
And there we get to the nut of it. Trust.
In the past month I have seen a bunch of instances where it all boils down to that all-too-rare quality. In the FOH Interview in this issue with Tom Abraham, I asked him about changing out vocal mics with Alice In Chains and how he walked that particular tightrope. Answer: They trust him.
Got to see one of the last truly great rock bands on the road when the Black Crowes came through town and, talking with Drew and Scoobie, that word came up over and over.
About a week after that, went and saw a big new Vegas show at the Wynn. Big dance show with a live big band and original recorded tracks of Sinatra. Very cool stuff. Even though they had world-class sound designers and a great system and the show had already played Broadway, Steve Wynn and Nancy Sinatra insisted on bringing Tom Young in for the final rehearsal and first week of shows. Why? Tom had mixed Frank for the last decade of his career, and Steve knew his work going back to when he owned the Golden Nugget. And they both trusted him to make sure it was right. And it sounded great.
Oh, the kid? I told him to remember he was a freelancer and to work to earn the trust of the client. That if the client trusted him, it would not matter a lot what provider he was working for, and that if he ever made the jump to starting his own deal, that trust would be a big factor in his success. Hopefully it was decent advice.
Trust. It is huge and hard to really define, harder to earn and very easy to lose. I have people I know and have worked with who I don't really like much, but who I trust. And on the other side of the coin, some folks I like a lot and trust not at all. It is probably the quality I put the most work into earning every day. I would rather hear "I trust him" than "he is really good at what he does" any day of the week. Of course, hearing both is nice, but if I had to choose…
