Misinterpreting Value

When I used to work as a producer, there was a phrase that many of my producing colleagues would use whether commenting on whether a show was a success or a flop:

Nobody Knows Anything. 

The idea of that statement is that in entertainment you could be sure that you had the best show in the world and it could absolutely tank and you could laugh at the prospect of producing a show and a few months later be crying as it wins a TONY.

You could certainly make educated guesses as to which shows would be successful based on prior performance or the producing team, but you could never fully accurately predict how well a show would do once it got in front of an audience.

I was reminded of this the other day when I was having a conversation with another entrepreneur about one of his offers.

He spent about 15 minutes explaining to me his strategy and his process and even offered up software that he was using that he thought clients would really go for and by the end of the presentation I had no idea what the value of the offer actually was for the client.

When he was through with his pitch he started to talk to me about some of the things he had learned about the Tube of You’s and how you could structure your videos in a way that would increase viewership.

Take a guess which thing got my attention.

We started the conversation anew and discussed the fact that he needed to drop the generic strategy conversation and focus on the idea of video, especially because it was such a popular thing and we went from a very muddy offer to one that was crystal clear.

But here’s the thing.

That wouldn’t have happened without having a discussion about what the value actually was.

All too often, much like the Broadway producers, we make an assumption of what is going to be valuable to our audience and in many cases, we’re wrong because we’re so close to the idea.

It’s easy to misinterpret value when it comes to business.

We can think that people are buying for one reason and find out later that they are buying for a completely different one.

And this is the reason it is so important to have others look at your work. They will always see the things that you don’t see.

Excelsior!