does matter because time is money and
if you can find out something is not
going to work in a month instead of a
year, you haven’t wasted a year.
CMT: So, for the type of retailers who
would be at the RPMDA convention,
what does this look like for them?
Friedman: It’s the real concrete
methodologies to saying, “I want to do
something, so what are the risks involved
and how do I identify those risks? What’s
the chief risk?” For example, if you
said, “Okay, we’ve never sold to middle
schools and we’re going to try selling
band instruments to middle schools.”
What if there are no middle schools who
are buying band instruments? Then sell-
ing band instruments to middle schools
is a terrible idea. You could probably
answer that questions with five phone
calls instead of building a whole plan
around it.
A key mindset in this is, how do
I identify a risk and test that risk as
quickly and cheaply as possible? The
way I see it is, do something, see what
happens, and then figure out what to do
next based on that. That sounds really
obvious and yet people don’t do it all the
time. We’re biased and think we know
better. I’ve said to people who work here:
“This thing will never sell,” and then
24 hours later, it’s off the shelf and we
can’t keep it stocked. So, as much as you
know about your business, you don’t
know anything.
So, I think the key is to say to every-
body in the organization, from president
down: “What have you observed in the
store and business recently? And based
on that, what can we try to do that
improves something?”
I know that is abstract, but one ques-
tion I’ve often had, for example, when
I walk into music stores is, “Okay, they
have saxophones on the wall over there
on the first floor, and then they have a
print department with saxophone music
and it’s upstairs in its own little room.
So, what if you put the saxophone music
with the saxophone stuff?” This is not
wild, but it’s about training everybody to
be asking those questions.
Then you say, “Okay, could we test
that? Could we measure the results?”
Well, you know how much saxophone
music you sell and how many reeds you
sell, so do you start to see people buying
both reeds and music at a rate that’s
higher? That should be pretty easy to
go through receipts and figure out. You
don’t need a super computer to solve this
problem. Test it for a month and then
see, does it actually improve sales?
So, the pieces of this that I think
I’ve observed are missing in most small
businesses are really emphasising to
all employees that they need to think
about these things and then empowering
them to actually try it. But then on the
backside, actually measuring the results.
Not “I feel like it worked,” but saying,
“Okay, we sold exactly $800 of reeds
that had no music on the same order.
Then the next months after we’d put the
music next to the reeds, we sold $1,400
of orders that had reeds and music. So,
therefore, that’s good.”
CMT: It seems a key is to not be too
married to an idea, but to act accord-
ing to the results once you’ve tried it?
Friedman: Right, and the beauty is —
and this runs counter to everything,
from school to life — the goal is not
to be right; the goal is to get the right
answer…
I can give you a really concrete
example of this that I probably shouldn’t
[laughs]. So, when Ficks Music started,
I had gotten back into playing and I
found all these amazing out-of-print
pieces of music on IMSLP. They’re all
out of copy, so I thought to myself, “I
wonder if there’s a way we could re-type-
set and print on-demand and there
would be enough interest in them that
people would actually buy them?” You
know, it doesn’t work for a traditional
publishing model, but maybe for a print-
on-demand model.
So, I think that the traditional way
of doing this would be to start typeset-
ting them, find a printer, figure out how
to do it, and go through the process of
building the business. Instead of doing
that, I said, let me pick 500 titles based
on a variety of data that I think would
potentially be appealing to people, and
put up a website called Ficksmusic.com
that has about 500 titles right now. It
was all piano music, so I had limited the
audience and had absolutely none of
them typeset, but I had prices on them,
and then I reached out to a number
of people. I didn’t know [if this would
work], and the stuff is out of print, so
maybe nobody wants it. So, why would
I go through all the effort of solving how
to produce and deliver it if I don’t know
if anybody wants it? The biggest risk for
me was that. And so, I was able to run a
very fast test by kind of fake generating
all these books and putting them up on a
website, which was like $25 on Shopify.
The overwhelming response to my
outreach about “you can now get all this
amazing music that you’ve been dying
to get and couldn’t get before” was,
“meh, don’t care.” So that answered the
question really fast, and I hadn’t wasted a
year and a ton of money printing books
and having them ready to ship.
The surprising side effect of that was
a bunch of people did write back and
ask for things that I thought they could
get and that is kind of what really started
the business. I was like, “Oh, well if you
want to buy that, I’ll sell you that, too.
I just need to figure out how to get it.”
So, to your point, it’s about following
the data. The data said, “No, they don’t
want the stuff that’s out of print, they
want the XYZ publisher’s stuff.”
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