An awesome untold story from my past

I want to tell you a story about a Big Shift I had to make that changed my life forever.

This is a personal story from when I was in the music industry. I owned a record label. And the function of a record label is to find great talent, help them record great music, find the best ways to promote the music and then use effective distribution channels to get the music into the hands of the people who love it and are meant to experience it.

And in the 90s, that’s when I was in the music business, this was a very difficult, complicated and labor intensive process. The odds of being successful were extremely slim. But I loved music, I loved discovering new talent and being at the forefront of creating musical trends that despite my paren’t’s disapproval and all odds against me, I was able to achieve relative success.

I got my company to about a $1 million in sales in 1996.

Yet I felt stuck and I wasn’t sure what to do next.

I wasn’t able to break through that invisible ceiling and I wasn’t able to create the kind of exposure for my groups I really wanted for them.

I knew I had to shift, I knew I had to play a bigger game, but I wasn’t sure what to do and I was scared to try anything different. At this point, my label was beginning to get a pretty good reputation and I didn’t want ruin a good thing.

I looked like a winner to the outside world, but I felt very stuck.

So I was in the running to sign two very respected hip hop artists, Kool Keith, who was big in the underground circles and Ice T, who already had major success and just signed on to star LA Law, a very popular TV show.

It was scary because the kind of money they were asking for to sign them was so much more than I was used to paying.

I was terrified to risk everything I worked for on a big, high-profile project.

I knew I had to take that next big step.

After much negotiations, I was able to sign the duo to do album together. I created a marketing plan that was bigger than anything I had ever experienced. I promoted that record more than any I had previously. We got it into what seemed like every record store in the country. We got the album onto the Billboard charts. We got reviews in every major music magazine. We were prominently featured on MTV news.

All of that happened because I made a decision to make my next Big Shift.

It all worked out in the end, but it was going through making the big shift to really going for it and to do something different and bigger, that’s what made the big difference for me. From then on, all the albums I wound up releasing got that same kind of treatment. After I made the shift, there was no going back to doing it the old way.

That experience propelled my label to increase its revenue to nearly $5 million just two years later. It was an amazing process, I learned so much from it – I was able to increase my earning, skyrocket my reach and put my label and all of my artists on the map because the decision I made to play a bigger game.

It all started with deciding to make the shift to sign high profile artists, but what I got out of it was so much more. It was not easy and it was really scary, but going through that was one of the greatest experiences ever.

And it shifted how I approached my business and it shifted who I was, too.

That’s the power of committing to big shifts rather than incremental small changes – to really go for it despite the fear. I have been a true believer of the Big Shift ever since and it has served me well in my current business.

I have literally become a student and now a teacher of Big Shifts. I understand what it takes to accelerate the shifts and I now know what it takes to make them more effortless and doable and not as scary.

Stay tuned to some major announcements in my world that will shift your world.

Warmly,

~Bill

What Big Shifts do you want to make in your business?
Please leave your comments below.