Dr. Abraham George
speaker
275 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Abraham George’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so there's always investment in more parking, more underground electricity, more water pipe, more storage tanks for water, all that kind of stuff. And then finally, probably one of the most important things is the marketing. I just did a talk an hour ago at, I'm at the University of Texas Macomb School of Business, and one of the students was interested in event production.
And she asked, what do people mess up the most? And I said, what they mess up the most is the marketing investment. So I'd have this benchmark of spending $2 or $3 per patron that you want. If you want to have 10,000 people spend $20,000 on marketing, and a lot of event producers underestimate the amount of marketing spend they need to do. And they don't and they miss doing it rigorously. Right.
So in my first year, 2010, I tried everything, even though I thought billboards were dumb. I'm going to try them anyway. And then I did an exit survey where I asked people, check off everything that you saw and you could add up all the check marks, divide into the spend by vehicle, by radio station, by television station, by billboard location. And you can get an ROI.
And it turns out billboards crushed. And so those are some of the key success factors in the event business.
And my biggest concern was whether it was going to take off or not. I'll never forget opening day in 2010. I had spent my marketing budget and I had no idea if 30 people were going to walk through the gate or 300 or 3000 or 10,000. I had no idea. And so I'm just sitting there sweating bullets and the cannon goes off and 3000 people walked in. I was like, okay, this is going to be all right.
So one was I spent a solid marketing budget for year one. But then what I did, and I think it's a good idea, is I stayed in the real world at big corporate jobs for the first several years of building my passion business. So I was building my theme park and I was a booze and company partner at the same time.
And then I was the CEO of a billion dollar cell phone distribution company at the same time. And what that enabled me to do is to write checks to get my passion business to scale. And so I did that for the first four years and we've been in it forever. for 15 years now, but to scale the business. And then that worked.
And now the business is at scale and it's really successful and doesn't need anything for me.
That's the exact topic of my book. The whole book is about how to deal with that kind of thing. I can step back and describe my framework where I can talk about that individual person. Which way do you want me to go?
Yeah, so you're 25 years old, you have a business degree, you're in a job that's okay, but you're not passionate about it, and you want to be a writer. I think one of the very important things this person needs to answer is, what is their need for financial security? And you can really think that through.
And in the book, there's a little tool that helps you think through that because it's things like, do you need to live in an expensive city or are you okay in a less expensive city? How many kids do you want to have? Do you expect to pay for their college? Do you have expensive taste? Do you need a new car in a few years? Do you expect to have health problems?
Right, so getting a handle on your need for financial security. And then at the same time, really testing your readiness to follow your heart. If the person wants to be a writer, they really have to test their readiness to be a writer. And I tell people when I talk about my book, especially young people, don't trust yourself when you're testing your readiness.
Ask other people because people are not very good about assessing their own capabilities. Ask people that you trust to assess your capabilities. Ask people to assess your capabilities in a way that's anonymous, right? That would be great.
And so I would say to that person, look, if you're ready from a capability point of view and your need for financial security is low, you should probably start writing commercially, go for it, follow your heart. But if your need for financial security is medium or high, I would keep working at that regular business job.
And I would try to orient that regular business job in a way that builds out your skills. See if you can take that regular business job and shift it towards doing more writing or shift it towards digital marketing skills because that will be useful for an author.
So be intentional about learning things in your regular business job that are going to help you be a writer or follow your passion later. That's what I would say to that person.
Definitely. And it's a real challenge because the kind of net margin on a book is so low, it makes it hard to spend marketing money on it. So it's a big challenge.
Definitely. I've somehow, I didn't choose to be intentional. I just was, right? So I think it's easier when it comes naturally to you. But if it doesn't come naturally to you, I think it's really important to try to figure it out. It meant everything to my career. So when I got out of college and started working,
I wanted to make partner at McKinsey and I knew that financial progression and I knew my cost of living and I had a savings goal. I wanted to have a million dollars in the bank by the time I was 36 years old or less. And I was thinking that way at 22. And so then it's like, okay, well, I need to succeed. And a lot of people wash out strategy consulting firms.
I really hunkered down and figured out what does it take to succeed here? And they have their capability matrices and they have their feedback forms, not really focused. on succeeding there. And because I was successful there, I ended up getting into Harvard Business School. And then I just kept being intentional the whole time.
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