BE ORGANIZED FOR YOUR GIGS

If you noticed by now I try to organize many aspects of my life. When I land shows for my talent this type of organization does not stop. Many of you don’t have a manager or an agent to do this for you so let me get into what I provide for my artists for a gig so you can duplicate the process and I’ll also drop in some technical gems in there to help it all along.

So from the start on my to do list and on my calendar I note in detail on what date range we are seeking for a given artist and I keep track on every single person we reached out to for that artist. (To Do List: Penultimate // Calendar: Booking Agency Software and / or Google Calendar) Once we capture a date and an offer we work out the contracts and invoicing in our booking agency software (both are automated…saving of 30mins per booking)…before 2013 I did this all with word documents on an external hard drive (never trust an operating system and back your stuff up). When deposits are paid this all gets captured in our software (for tours we still use an excel spreadsheet to collect this data as well) and we then go ahead and confirm the show and book the travel.

All of our artists have eyes to their information in our software so they can keep track of all of this as well. For self managed artists this type of thing might not be necessary but it comes down to simple Bookkeeping…use google drive and create a spreadsheet. Simple formulas will save tons of time for you. (There are also other applications for this, Quickbooks, FreshBooks, etc etc). For smaller agencies or management companies Google drive and its sharing function should work out fine and if you get into those other applications there are sharing functions as well.

So financials are organized so far so everyone knows what is captured and what is needed to be picked up at the show or send prior to the show depending on the arrangement.

For travel…I handle all of the flight bookings and at times even the hotel bookings. (these things can be canceled by anyone with a confirmation number and a full name so do not trust anyone else to do this for you) After they are booked I send the confirmation pages to the artists and also send them into my TripPro account which organizes all of my bookings for me and sends push notifications for any changes, delays etc. (Another site I use is Yapta.com – this keeps track of the price you purchased the flight for and if the price drops enough to hit the airlines policy you can get money back) I also enter this into my software as well so this can all be there in the final step when I get to that.

So during the time the show is being promoted I will capture the event pages, ticket sites and place them in the notes section of the show within my software. With this we can help promote if we feel we can make a difference but we definitely encourage the artist to post videos and things on these pages to help with engagement and ticket sales. Having this information is also good to archive for capturing future shows with that promoter.

Ok so fast forward to two weeks before the event…I will ask the promoter for the rest of the details of the show if I don’t have them already such as the time for sound check, set times, hotel name and confirmations if they took care of it, who will pay the balance to our artist, who is picking them up, etc… I then take all of this information and I put it in order and create an itinerary that has all the information on one sheet so the promoter and the artist are on the same page. The artist also will also have access to this information via their smart phone so they don’t have to juggle papers when traveling.

Another important piece of paper that the artist has access to via their smart phone is the contract for the show. This can be useful when the promoter decides he wants to make up his own rules and you can remind them with these documents that has their signature on them so there really isn’t much wiggle room for amnesia.

So there you have it – a stress free gig since everything is in order…In the past I would struggle with keeping up on all of these things since I was in the mind set of doing way to much at once and jumping between different tasks…the saving grace now of days has been slowing down and making sure I do tasks to their completion especially when it comes to important information such as the things listed above. I would be lying if I didn’t book the same flight twice before since I forgot to write it down and that becomes a quick lesson learned, one that hits you right in the pants.