After the Austin incident, I sat down with Wayne. “You’re no goddamn security guard, Wayne. You’re a good guy, but you’re not the protector. You can’t be security no more.”
“Thank you, brother. I’m tired of standing in the corner while y’all are having fun. I’m gonna figure out some better shit I can do for you.”
He thought about it for a moment and then said: “I’m more of a guy who can help with business. After some of these shows, what if we did after-parties? I’ll find a club, broker the deal, and set everything up.”
From that day forward, Wayne and Nate started arranging events at nightclubs after the shows, and we’d work to bring over as much of the audience as possible. The clubs kicked us a commission off the cover charge, and I divided the money among the guys.
With the picture business, the CD and DVD business, and now the after-parties and T-shirts (which we could finally afford to get made), the money I made from incidentals was starting to match the money I got for performing.
Wayne soon took over on the promotions front. MySpace was dying, but Twitter and Facebook were coming up, so we started doing guerrilla marketing on those networks. Wayne and I would sit there with our laptops open—copying and pasting messages to random comedy fans in each city on our itinerary, introducing myself and letting them know I’d be in town. Out of a hundred people, ten would reply and say: “Sure, I’ll come down and check you out.” And that was ten more people than we’d had before.
Wayne helped improve the flyering process as well. By the time we arrived in each city, he had identified every mall within a twenty-mile radius of the club. We’d drop our bags at the hotel, he’d hand us each a hundred flyers, and we’d fan out. The rule was, don’t come back until all your flyers are gone.
We’d make sure to tell anyone we gave them to our name and say, “Let the person at the box office know that I sent you.” At first, it was just to see which one of us had the most charm. But soon it became a way to find out someone’s area of strength. Then we could say, “Hey, you gotta go talk to those girls, cause you been doing well with them. You’re great with the guys, so go to the barbershop. And you . . . I don’t know . . . you should go to the dog park or something.”
At one point, I came up with the idea of giving people five dollars off their ticket if they came to the club with the flyer. I figured the club could take that amount out of my share. However, I forgot to pass this information on to the venue. So dozens of people showed up that night with flyers and started arguing when the person at the box office wouldn’t give them a discount. The manager ended up honoring the agreement, but he was pissed at Nate and me.
This incident taught me one of the most important business lessons there is: Communication is the key that unlocks a plan. Everyone should know your intentions at all times, as well as any changes to them. A good idea with bad communication is as useful as a phone with a dead battery.
In each city, we were able to see the results of our work. The first time we’d perform there, we’d sell out Fridays and Saturdays, but Thursdays and Sundays were light. The next time, Thursday would be sold out too, but Sunday was still light. By the third visit, every night would be sold out.
Online, our work was also paying off. I’ll never forget being in Cincinnati when I first hit ten thousand followers on Twitter. It felt like such a huge achievement. I was walking on air all day.
As our reputation grew with the clubs, Wayne got the comedy promoters to find a street team for us. We’d send them five hundred flyers in advance, and they’d plaster the city with them. It cost us a few hundred dollars, but it saved us a lot of time that we then used to promote the shows online.
It was on these tours that the entrepreneur in me was born. When I was on my own, I knew that whatever ups and downs occurred, I’d survive. But now that I had people whose salary I was paying, I had to think differently. I couldn’t fuck around with their rent and car payments. I had to learn the crafts of business, entrepreneurship, and brand building as well as comedy. Figuring all this out early in the age of social media, before people started brand building on the day their parents gave them their first phone, gave me a huge advantage over other comedians.
There was another lesson too: When I increased my overhead by hiring all these guys whose expenses I couldn’t afford, everyone said I was being stupid and wasteful. But as an unexpected consequence, this expansion ended up increasing my personal profit. Because now it wasn’t just me working to survive, it was a whole team working to survive. They believed that I could grow—and knew that as I did, they would grow too. A team is going to survive better than an individual, just as a team is always going to beat an individual in a sport—that is, in a team sport. I’m not sure how that would work in an individual sport. In fact, forget I mentioned it. My point is: It’s all about community, people. We are stronger together.
The seven of us must have gone to every comedy club in the country. It didn’t matter if it was good, bad, or sketchy. When we got to the last club, Nate or Berkowitz would call the first ones we’d gone to and book them all over again. We did that four times in a row, until we’d built up a fan base so large that the clubs couldn’t hold them anymore.
The long road, it turned out, was tens of thousands of miles: four times around the country. What finally ended up launching my career, though, was something that I never would have predicted. In fact, it was something I didn’t even want to do.
79
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SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO SAY YES TO THE THINGS YOU WANT TO SAY NO TO SO YOU CAN RAISE YOURSELF TO A PLACE WHERE YOU GET TO SAY NO TO MORE THINGS
In this period, I was invited to perform a fifteen-minute set for a comedy event Shaquille O’Neal was putting together in Phoenix during the NBA All-Star Game.
The night was being filmed for Showtime, which normally would have been a good thing, but I was still building my next special, Seriously Funny. If my new material was on Shaq’s All-Star Comedy Jam special and DVD, then I wouldn’t be able to use it for my special and DVD.
“I might just pass on it,” I told Dave. He thought that was fine. I’d done a few other stand-up comedy showcases on TV, Comic View and One Mic Stand. They hadn’t done much for me, so we figured this show probably wouldn’t either.
But the producers kept coming back to us, eventually offering me the headlining slot. I folded and agreed to participate. “I don’t wanna do it, so can you come with?” I asked Harry. “Maybe we can find a way to make something good out of it, get some new material or something.”