Friday, April 1st was a big day for us at Just For Laughs. For three reasons.
1) Believing that we should "own" April Fools Day, we twisted the concept and came up with April Serious Day, a new "national holiday." (Read the earth-shattering concept here.)
To launch and celebrate it, we offered 1569 tickets to some of our biggest shows for the insane price of "pay what you want." We also topped it of by selling $10-bills for five bucks.
Why? Because we can, because we wanted to offer a gift to our fans, and create, for lack of a better term, a "happening."
The result was a mofo smashing success. Over 1,000 people lined up for a full city block for over four hours. We had a live radio broadcast, live TV coverage and the implication of seven of our biggest stars. We had shout-out Tweets of gratitude like:
"A huge thank you for this incredible initiative! I don't have the financial means to buy show tickets and I adore Stephane Rousseau (one of our stars) . Thanks to you, I can now see him live!"
But most importantly, the event galvanized our staff. What started out as a small idea blossomed into a huge operation, led by newbies like Vivien Gaumand and Sylvia DeFrietas, and carried through from start (laying down 200 huge stickers in a public passageway) to finish (cleaning up the remnants of 2,000 green balloons) by volunteer members of the JFL staff.
2) We launched our third annual Chicago Festival. And with a huge bang. About 5,000 tickets sold in less than a day. Robbie Praw and Christine Melko-Ross delivered a phenomenal programming line-up that has put us WAY ahead of schedule sales-wise.
3) And perhaps most importantly, we launched our new website at hahaha.com. This project, while the masterful handiwork of teams from TwistImage and Favequest, was led by 26-year-old Parisa Foster, who worked with me back in the Airborne Mobile days.
Parisa joined Just For Laughs on November 1. Five months later, basically starting from scratch, she delivered a massive overhaul on what was a much-maligned company web presence. The difference in operation, spirit and look-and-feel is staggering.
Quite the day, wouldn't you say?
All these projects were led by people overflowing with passion...almost desperate passion.
- Sylvia came from our ticketing department and has been in her new job for just a couple of months.
- Vivien is from France and on contract.
- Christine and Robbie, while industry vets, breathed new life into something that could've teetered the other way.
- And the sum total of all websites delivered by Parisa, before the much-needed and crucial makeover of hahaha.com, was the round number of zero.
So what's the learn here? When looking to hire, when looking for leaders, when looking for people to depend on, I've always believed and said loudly:
Give me the heart; the head will follow.
Experience is a crutch, and sometimes a false hope. What you've done in the past is less important than what you're gonna do now. So taken one step further, this is the big lesson of the week, font-size increased for emphasis and emblazonment on your brain:
You can teach people to do things...
but you can't teach them to want to do things.
The "want to" has to come from them.
All I can do is give them the opportunity.
And after a day of three big wins, I'm sure happy I did.