Last Sunday night just before bedtime I found this arrangement on my bed:
 |
| Balloons, pencils, and chocolate truffles courtesy of my BYU-employed wife. |
For
anyone who hasn't heard some of the recent developments in my life,
this picture may raise some eyebrows and/or questions, such as:
- Brian is going back to school again? Doesn't he already have enough freaking degrees?
- BYU? Seriously? Hasn't Brian voiced some dislike for BYU in the past?
- So what is he studying this time around?
Yes, I'm going back to school again, and yes, I do have
way too many degrees already. Yes, it is at BYU, which I would have never imagined even six months ago. And finally, I am going back to earn an MBA (
gasp!) in marketing (
huh?). Trust me, it all makes sense.
After I graduated from Michigan in 2010, I didn't have any idea what
the next step would be. I was very proud of my accomplishments and felt
that my studies and experiences as a music student had been enriching and valuable,
but I felt like I had come to a dead end with music and I needed to find a new direction. I eventually
ended up at Yahoo!, which was a great place for me. I really loved the work I was doing and the atmosphere at a big tech company (even a flailing one - I saw two CEO changes while I was there). I discovered there that I could still feel creative and fulfilled outside of music and the arts, and the lifestyle was much more stable and predictable.
Flash forward to March of this
year - all of a sudden I found myself
leaving Oregon and Yahoo! and coming down to Provo to get married.
After I got here I learned that as the spouse of a BYU professor, I
could go to school for free if I so desired. That was a real
game-changer, so as soon as I got here I started talking to academic advisors to figure out what career path would make the most sense for me. Although I had made fun of BYU in the past, I found it refreshing to be able to speak openly about my spirituality in the context of an academic conversation (that certainly never happened at Michigan or the U of U). I had some amazing experiences with the BYU faculty that helped me get some mental clarity at a critical juncture in my life.
I had previously given some thought to studying business, but I dismissed it pretty quickly because I just couldn't see Brian as a businessman. However, a light bulb went off in my head when I met a guy in Amy's previous ward who had graduated from BYU with a degree in film. He felt that he had important stories to tell that would further the mission of the Church. However, twelve years after graduating he still had not found work in the film industry and he began to question why he had felt inspired to study film. He then completed an MBA degree at BYU and soon thereafter was hired as a producer by the Church Media Services. His degree in film had prepared him to work in the field, but he was not able to fully harness his abilities until he paired them with the solid business and management skills that a producer position demands. Hearing his story, I came to believe that an MBA would allow me to harness the skills and knowledge that I have obtained through all my previous degrees.
Upon applying for the MBA program, I had to specific a academic focus from several disciplines: human resources, supply chain management, finance, and marketing. I chose marketing because it seemed to play to my strengths most directly and it would seem to be the most valuable skill if I were to end up going back into the arts in some kind of administrative capacity. One of the biggest challenges facing arts organizations nowadays is just getting people to show up. I have already had some success in this area through my involvement with a little upstart non-profit opera company called Zero Budget Productions.
 |
| The Zero Budget Productions logo. |
I
co-founded Zero Budget Productions with my fellow student/best friend Anthony T.
Buck at the University of Utah in the early months of 2004. As our name
suggests, we started with no money, but we had a vision of independently producing
small-scale operas that would complement the large operas that were officially put on by the university. Anthony and I both wore many hats as we launched Zero Budget, but Anthony had much more theater savvy than I did at the time, including several previous stints as a stage director, so for our first production he naturally assumed many of the artistic duties of the company. That left me to handle much of the company's business-type stuff, most notably the company's marketing efforts. My first step was to recruit my sister Amy, who has a graphic design degree from BYU, to be our graphic designer. This was a partnership that lasted for the duration of my tenure at Zero Budget and yielded some very fun posters and other promotional materials:
 |
| A few of my favorite Zero Budget posters that my sister Amy designed. |
Our first show was
Amelia Goes to the Ball, a one-act comic opera in English by Gian Carlo Menotti that had seven solo roles and a small chorus. My marketing campaign consisted of strategically placing posters all over campus, doing some newspaper interviews, passing out fliers, sending out lots of email invitations, and performing some scenes from our shows in music classes to raise awareness of our company. We weren't sure how much interest we would actually attract since a student-produced opera was unprecedented at the U of U, and because it was an
opera, after all. And then there was a blizzard on the night of the performance, which we figured would keep people away from the show. We performed the show inside of a ballroom in the U of U's music building, and before the performance we thought we would be lucky to have 50 people show up, so we set out about 50 chairs in the ballroom. I was performing in the show and I had to make my first entrance from a balcony off of the ballroom (I entered by swinging on a rope made out of bedsheets - it was awesome), so I had to preset myself there a half hour before the show started. I sat out there waiting and waiting and waiting for the show to start - it seemed like over an hour. I couldn't see what was going on in the ballroom, but it was pretty noisy so I figured that we must have gotten a decent crowd.
The opera finally started and when I finally made my entrance into the ballroom 20 minutes into the opera, the balcony doors swung open and I saw the reason they had delayed the start: they had gathered every available chair from the whole building, and there were still dozens of people standing in the back - over 300 in total. It was such a startling and triumphant moment to swing in on the rope and see six times more audience members than we had imagined in our most optimistic projections. The show went spectacularly and before the end of the night we had a bunch of voice students lining up to beg Anthony and I to cast them in our next production.
Anthony and I masterminded several more shows over the next few years, and we were able to fund our productions entirely through donations. When I left for Michigan in 2007 Anthony ran the company by himself (directing and starring in a production of
The Mikado that I wish I could have seen). Anthony graduated and moved away after that, so I figured that Zero Budget would just end there, but a few of our colleagues that had participated in a few of our productions and learned the Zero Budget way of operating kept the company going for a few more years after that. The fact that Zero Budget continued after Anthony and I left gave me a tremendous amount of pride - it showed that we had not only put on a few fun shows, but we had changed the culture at the university and left a legacy of empowering students to create their own performance opportunities.
My work with Zero Budget was the most satisfying experience of my academic career, and looking back at this experience I can see that I kind of stumbled into marketing by accident. I certainly didn't know anything about marketing at the time (and I still don't know very much - I've only had one week of classes), but the tactics we came up with worked pretty well for our little company. Beyond just making and hanging up posters, the very founding of the company was built upon my analysis of the market that revealed that a need for small-scale comic operas was going unmet, and through some rudimentary market segmentation we were able to find audiences interested in our little niche product.
So as unlikely as it may seem that I am here at BYU studying marketing, I feel very blessed to be here. So many doors all opened at once to make this opportunity possible and I am looking forward to all the growing experiences that will come over the next two years.
P.S. - All of a sudden
this blog post seems pretty myopic :)
