Morgan: Hey everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. I’m excited to have with me the one and only Tom Elliott today. How are you doing, Tom?

Tom: Hey, Morgan. Yeah, good. Really well, thank you.

Morgan: You’re in a great mood, and I love your shirt. It looks like you have suspenders or fake suspenders.

Tom: It’s just a jacket. It’s nothing exciting.

Morgan: Just a jacket. But hey, you’re fully dressed up for an episode, in the right mood. Sunday best. I love it. Well, what have you got in your drink, Morgan?

Morgan: So, I have my favorite. I am not Irish. I’ve never even been to Ireland, but I’m a little bit addicted to Irish coffees.

Tom: Nice.

Morgan: The cool thing about Irish coffee is it masquerades as normal coffee, but you can be getting drunk and no one else will know, except for me. The whackier my behavior gets, the more people will realize.

Tom: Very nice. Well, I didn’t go for a coffee because it’s 9 p.m. here, so I went for my standard lemonade and lime. You’re going to have to watch me during this interview in case I get hammered, but apart from that, it’s going to be fun.

Morgan: That’s great. With the lemonade and lime in hand, I’m all ears and excited to hear about your unique, slightly off-kind-of client horror story. Let’s go.

Tom: So, I’m a corporate event host and comedy magician. I travel the country here in the UK, doing awards ceremonies, galas, and annual dinners. I have great fun doing that. I love hosting those events, and I also perform at them. When I’m hosting, I do a bit of performance as well.

But many years ago, I had a real ambition to try and do my own theater show.

Morgan: Right.

Tom: I’m full-time, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great to tour theaters doing this show? I managed to get an agent who specialized in booking shows into theaters. She was interested in what I was doing, and she was great. She got me booked into about five or six theaters.

Most of them, all but one, were small studio theaters, maybe a maximum of 100 seats. One of them only had 70 seats. I managed to network locally in these areas and find groups that would bulk-buy tickets. For the majority of them, I filled 75% of the theater or whatever, and I had a great time. It was a great show.

But there’s always a but. There’s always a but.

Let me just say that, at this stage in my career, I was excited. I was very naive, and I was dreaming big, without any barriers or limitations on that dream.

One of the theaters that came back to my agent, Yvonne, and said yes to having my show was a big 800-seat theater.

Morgan: Okay. Eight hundred seats?

Tom: Eight hundred seats. Now, let me assure you, I am not a celebrity. I am not well-known.

Yes, it’s my full-time job. I do this for a living, and I’m grateful to do so, but I’m not a celebrity.

Anyway, they said to my agent, “Oh, comedy sells really well, magic sells really well, and Tom’s stuff is clean.” We pitched it as a bit of a family thing. It’s a family show as well, so families will buy tickets. If we can just fill the stalls, which was about 400 seats, that would be great. We’d love to have Tom.

So Yvonne comes back to me and says, “Hey, a big theater in Dunstable wants to book you.”

I said, “Oh, that’d be great. That’d be great.”

I got really excited, thinking, apparently they think it will sell, so let’s do it.

Morgan: And when you signed the contract, you knew it was 800 seats. You had a sense of how big it was?

Tom: I knew it was 800 seats, and I thought it was too big. But I thought, “Hey, they believe in me. I’m going to go for it.”

Morgan: You trusted the professional.

Tom: I trusted the professional. Absolutely. The theater said comedy sells, family shows sell, and magic sells. My agent was behind it, so I thought, I’m going to go for it.

I thought this was the peak of my career. If I sell all those 800 seats, this is it. I’m off.

Anyway, I signed the contract. I didn’t really read it, to be honest. I signed it, sent it off, and off I went.

Before I go any further in the story, let me explain how an artist gets paid in a theater. There’s a percentage split on the income from ticket sales. In this scenario, it was a 70% split in my favor and 30% to the theater. Obviously, there are other things tied up in that, but generally, it’s a 70/30 split.

The other thing to know is that when you put on a show in a theater, the artist supplies all the promotional material. Or, if an artist has management, they would do all of that. In my case, I had to supply everything.

I paid for these beautiful posters to be designed and printed. They had several requirements. They required 1,000 A5 flyers, 50 A3 posters, and two A1 posters. I got it all printed. I probably spent about £100 for that venue just on printing, among other venues as well, and sent it all off.

So, I’ve already spent maybe £100. It was a couple of hours away, so another £50 to £100 in expenses and all of that.

Then, two days before the event, I got a report sent to me by email.

Thirty tickets had sold.

Morgan: Uh-oh.

Tom: So, you can imagine how I was feeling right now. I was deflated because I thought this was going to be my big win, with 800 people raving and screaming my name.

Morgan: And you had no clue leading up to that? Thirty was the first number you saw?

Tom: Thirty in an 800-seat theater. It was painful.

Anyway, the true entrepreneurial, dedicated, goal-setting, ambitious me decided, “Right, well, let’s not let this put me down. Let’s work on it.”

I was busy typing away, trying to contact groups and whatnot. Do you want to know how many I managed to get up to? After all my hustling and hard work, I managed to get it up to 50.

So, we got to 50, and I thought, right, I can’t do a show for 50 people in an 800-seat theater.

I rang my agent, Yvonne. She was great, and she laughed with me.

Morgan: I think it’s great that you said she laughed with you. She laughed, and you laughed. I’m clearly not a comedian because if I were in your shoes, I think I would have been crying.

Tom: Well, comedians laugh at everything.

Morgan: Absolutely.

Tom: You can’t take yourself too seriously, particularly in the arts. The arts are brutal in situations like this.

So, I rang Yvonne and said, “I can’t do it.”

And she said, “Tom, the problem is, remember that contract you signed?”

I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. The contract. Of course I remember that. I read it thoroughly, Yvonne, didn’t I? I read it thoroughly.”

Morgan: And the theater doesn’t want to cancel because that hurts their bottom line.

Tom: Exactly. Once you’re in the theater program, once the show has been advertised, theaters are very reluctant to cancel. For all they know, 800 people might turn up at the door at 7 p.m. on a Saturday night to watch Tom Elliott, the unknown comedy magician nobody’s ever heard of.

The best-kept secret in the UK!

Morgan: For all they know, it could sell.

Tom: Exactly. But it gets worse, Morgan, because Yvonne pointed out that little clause in the contract.

They put a price tag on all the different marketing they do on your behalf for the show. That price tag gets to a certain point, and then they start to fund it. But if you don’t hit that mark, you have to cover the difference.

I can’t remember the name of the clause now, but essentially, there’s a minimum amount they need to make to cover the marketing before they start splitting the money.

Morgan: I see. So, there’s a minimum amount they have to make before they can start splitting that money.

Tom: Absolutely. As per the contract, what happens if only 50 people come?

Fifty people had bought tickets. They were £14 each, which doesn’t add up to a lot of money. Fourteen pounds is relatively cheap for a theater, but there we go.

I hadn’t hit the quota for covering the marketing costs under that clause.

But first of all, I did the show. I had to do the show because I was locked into the contract.

I drove to Dunstable and performed a full two-hour show by myself to 50 people in a big, 800-seat theater.

It was the longest two hours of my life. It was painful.

Morgan: Was it this huge theater where there was one person over there and one person over there?

Tom: Yeah. It wasn’t even as if the 50 people were sitting in a nice, cuddly group in the front few rows.

They were spread out. There was a row of eight in front of me, about three rows back from the front. There was a couple over there, a couple over there, a family here, and a family there.

But this was an 800-seat theater. With that number of people, I might as well have performed in an arena because I just couldn’t see them. I couldn’t hear them.

The thing about comedy is that people laugh out loud when they’re comfortable knowing they’re not exposed and that other people are laughing around them. The psychology of comedy means you need people sitting close together. Otherwise, everybody feels exposed, and nobody laughs out loud.

It’s like when you’re watching a film at home. You don’t laugh in the same way you would if you were watching a comedian live or with your mates. You laugh differently.

Morgan: That’s actually an interesting point. I once read an article in an academic journal, a psychology journal, about 20 years ago, so I barely remember it. It argued that one of the key reasons the TV sitcom format took off in the 1950s was the addition of the laugh track.

Tom: Absolutely. They put that in because otherwise you don’t laugh in the same way.

Morgan: The laugh track has other people laughing with you, so you’re not alone laughing.

Tom: Absolutely. It gives you permission and a safety net to laugh because you feel like there are other people.

Morgan: Maybe I should have had a laugh track. Maybe I should have had the sound guy present.

Tom: It might have restored my soul a little bit because it was a painful gig. Everything I did, even my tried-and-tested material, just wasn’t getting a response. It was awkward. It was so awkward.

Morgan: Out of pure curiosity, did you make any jokes on the spot to call attention to the awkwardness of the situation?

Tom: I did. But the general rule of thumb in any sort of performance is: don’t do it. Don’t call it out. It’s a difficult balance between acknowledging it and getting a laugh from it, or pointing out the obvious and having everyone go, “Yeah, we know.”

It kind of got that reaction. People were thinking, “Yeah, I know.”

Morgan: I see.

Tom: And what makes it worse, by the way, is that about eight of these people in the third row back were people I knew personally.

Morgan: But that means 20% of the audience came to see you at the stage door. That’s an impressive statistic, if only people knew.

Tom: As long as people don’t know there were only 50 people there!

Morgan: Still, a great example of how to mislead with statistics.

Tom: Absolutely. I was in my dressing room at the end, and one of the technicians came backstage, knocked on my dressing room door, and went, “Hi, mate. There’s people at the stage door for you.”

Morgan: Normally, only celebrities get people waiting at the stage door.

Tom: Exactly. Normally, it’s a handful of people out of massive crowds. But no, no, no. Most of the audience were there.

Morgan: “Hi, Mom!”

Tom: It was people I knew, and they’d all come to say hello. We might as well have just done the show at the stage door because it would have been easier.

Anyway, I did the show. It was painful. It was horrible. I didn’t enjoy it.

I spoke to Yvonne on the phone afterward and said, “Oh, Yvonne, it was terrible. There was nothing we could do.”

As it transpired, Yvonne reminded me of that little clause in the contract.

Here’s the thing: not only did I spend about £100 on the posters, and another £100 or so getting there, but I didn’t earn any money from it because the 70% split wasn’t there.

Not only that, but because of the marketing price tag they put on, I actually owed them £350.

So, I spent maybe £500 or £600 on the worst show of my life.

Morgan: I’m glad you can laugh about it now, years later.

Tom: Well, I said to Yvonne on the phone, “Here’s my commitment to you, Yvonne. At the end of my career, I’m going to finish my career at that theater with a full, sold-out crowd. That is my end goal now. Before I retire, my final gig will be on that stage with a sold-out audience.”

Morgan: I love it. You can also do estimates. If you did it five years ago or whenever this was and got 50 people, maybe you’ll get 100 today. It could be your KPI: the number of likely fans who’ll come to see you at the Dunstable theater.

Tom: If we can get to 800 in the next… How old am I? I’m 35. So, by the time I’m 60, that’s a rate of, what, 50 people a year extra? We might get there!

Morgan: The only way to hit that is to figure out how to go viral on TikTok.

Tom: Yeah. I’m relying on you for that, Morgan. This podcast, right? Millions and millions of people might be climbing at your door to come see you in the theater.

Morgan: I hope so.

I love this story. It’s a little bit different from our normal stories, but hysterical. There are a bunch of lessons we can extract from it. I have a few that I’m already getting from this, but before I start sharing some of my lessons, tell me about some of your key learnings from this disastrous moment.

Tom: I think the first one that was really obvious to me was that it highlighted how naive I was.

Particularly with people in the arts, I find that people who run an arts-based business get so wrapped up in the art that they forget the realities of business.

I spend quite a lot of time helping and coaching people in the arts to think business-wise, move forward entrepreneurially, and put some entrepreneurial skills in their toolkit to try to keep things going.

So often, you get so focused on the artistic side that you forget the realities of the business.

I always say it’s 90% business and 10% show business. It’s largely about the business.

What I learned in that season was that I was incredibly naive about the business side. I thought that if you put on a show, a comedy magic show, and believed people would come, that would be enough.

In reality, it’s a lot harder to get people to buy tickets, particularly if you’re not a celebrity or well-known. People don’t often spend their hard-earned money taking a risk on something they don’t know.

Morgan: On that first lesson, I have an insight I want to add. I agree with that lesson 100%. When I manage teams and train people, I often make the same point.

I want to share with you and everyone watching how I make that exact same point.

I often observe that almost all restaurants fail. Not just that, but almost all restaurants make no money. It’s actually one of the worst businesses to go into.

Why is that? Here’s my theory: who opens a restaurant? A chef. And what is a chef? A chef is a form of artist. A chef says, “I love cooking. I want to make this delicious food. I have this idea. I would love to make Japanese-Mexican fusion with this Filipino spice. It’s so delicious.”

That’s what artists do, including artists who manifest their artistry through cooking.

But it turns out that, just like your show business is 10% show and 90% business, in order to run a successful restaurant, the food is only a small part of what matters.

Here are things that matter much more: finding an excellent location, negotiating with a landlord so the rent doesn’t kill you, managing a staff, ensuring you have the procurement processes to get all the fresh ingredients you need, and making sure you have the right ingredients based on when people are more or less likely to come.

You also need marketing skills to get people interested in the restaurant.

There are all these deeply important skills that have nothing to do with the food. The food might be 2% of the success, but you get people who think and act like artists. They do that 2% amazingly but completely fail at the other 98%.

Tom: Absolutely. As you referenced, all of that is needed before anyone steps into the restaurant.

Morgan: A thousand percent.

Tom: Again, I tried to launch a theater show before I’d built any sort of audience or following. Not only that, but I was doing it in areas where I’d never even performed before, let alone knew anyone or had anyone who knew me.

Morgan: How far is Dunstable from where you live?

Tom: It’s a couple of hours’ drive, if not more.

Morgan: I didn’t realize that. That goes to another lesson: be especially careful when you’re going outside your target area.

Tom: Yeah, absolutely. I was going into an area where I’d never performed before. No one had seen me, I didn’t have connections, and the few connections I had resulted in about eight tickets. It wasn’t anywhere near what was needed.

Morgan: I think this is an important lesson, and not just for a physical area. Committing to going three hours away is a huge risk factor, but we can think about areas in different ways.

If you’ve spent your whole career selling socks and you’re the world expert in socks, that doesn’t mean you have the skill set to go into a different area, like running a restaurant. You want to move out of the sock industry and into the restaurant industry? Be doubly careful.

Tom: Absolutely. You’ve got to know what you’re walking into, and I had no idea.

Another key lesson for me was to be careful who you listen to.

I listened to the theater. I’m not blaming the theater here because they’re probably factually right. The people who program theaters know what they’re doing most of the time. They know that magic sells, comedy sells, and family shows sell. That’s probably true, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll sell just because I fit into those categories.

I’m trying to think of a comedian that everyone in your audience would know. Going to see a big-name comedian is why comedy sells. People are going for that brand.

Morgan: I’m so old that my favorite comedians have died, so I don’t even know who else.

Tom: Well, they don’t sell many tickets!

Morgan: I grew up obsessed with George Carlin.

Tom: Okay.

Morgan: And actually, inspired by your British accent, when I was in high school, I memorized Monty Python’s movies.

Tom: Oh, wow!

Morgan: I still remember them. I’m not sure I can quote anything on the spot, but in business meetings, I often quote the aqueduct scene from Life of Brian. Do you know that scene?

Tom: It’s been a long time. Remind me.

Morgan: It basically takes place in ancient Judea, in the time of Jesus. There’s a group of Jewish rebels complaining about the Romans and organizing rebellions against Roman rule.

There’s a scene where the rebels are planning against the Romans, and the leader says to everyone, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

One guy says, “They built the aqueduct.”

The leader says, “Okay, the Romans built the aqueduct, but other than the aqueduct, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Then someone else says, “They supply us with food.”

“Okay, other than food and the aqueduct, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Someone else says they’ve given them healthcare. And they just keep going down this long list until it turns out the Romans have done everything.

It’s a brilliant moment from Monty Python, but it’s also such a good piece of business and life advice. There are people who complain, complain, complain about everything, but when you look at it from the other side, the people they’re complaining about are doing a huge amount of important, hard work that they never see.

Tom: Yeah, absolutely. There’s just so much to learn, I think.

Where did we get to? Being careful who you listen to and bearing in mind the context.

People go to a comedy night because they’re not taking a risk. There are multiple comedians, and they know what they’re buying. They’re buying a ticket to see me, and they’re taking a huge risk. I’m charging them £14 for that risk.

The reality of that set in pretty quickly.

Morgan: I love those lessons. I have a few more lessons I’d like to add to yours, which are really important.

As a third lesson: read the fine print of the contracts!

Tom: Very true. Very good point.

I don’t know if you’ve picked this up yet, Morgan, but I’m a bit of an optimist and a positive kind of guy. I don’t think I really read the contract. But even if I did, I probably went, “Oh, it’s fine. We’ll do that. No problem.”

Again, there’s a reality check here, isn’t there? Read the small print. Read the contract.

I remember Yvonne distinctly pointing that bit of the contract out because it was a big theater. That clause didn’t come up in any of the others.

Morgan: Did she point out that clause before you even signed the contract?

Tom: Yeah, but my positivity and my attitude of “This is going to be amazing” meant I went, “That’s fine. We’ll do that.”

I didn’t realize quite how much of a commitment I was entering into.

Morgan: There’s a phrase economists often use, often attributed to Alan Greenspan, who would say he was cautiously optimistic. I think that’s a healthy balance. You want to be optimistic but not crazily, unrealistically optimistic.

Tom: Yeah. Even now, my wife often says, “Tom…” My wife counterbalances me. She’s almost the opposite, and that’s not to say she’s negative, just before I say that!

She’s not negative, but she looks at things very differently. Quite often, when I’m in my super-positive mode, she brings that caution. That’s been really helpful in shaping my business approach since then.

You do need someone who can ask those difficult questions and bring about that difficult reality from time to time. I wish I’d had that when I was reading the contract.

Morgan: In my experience, high-performing companies tend to be led by two people: the CEO and the COO working together.

There’s often a personal breakdown where the CEO, the chief executive officer, tends to be wildly optimistic. “Yeah, we can do this big deal. Go here. Go build a million there.” They’re the big-vision person pushing things forward.

Meanwhile, the COO, the chief operating officer, tends to be the realistic one on the other side. “Okay, how are you actually going to make that happen?”

You need that push and pull between both sides.

Tom: Yeah, absolutely. I wish I’d had that because it might have been a better experience, or at least we could have canceled the whole thing much earlier and managed to get out of the contract.

Morgan: What a lesson. You learn these things in hindsight, don’t you? Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.

There’s another possible lesson I want to draw out here. Let’s talk about Yvonne. It’s surprising to me that she said, “Hey, do you want to sign this contract? They have this provision.” I would have thought a manager would have recommended, “Dude, realistically, there’s no way.”

In that CEO-optimistic, COO-realistic dynamic, I would have predicted that the manager or agent would be the down-to-earth person who says, “What can we achieve? What can we not?”

Tom: Yvonne wasn’t a manager. I think she refers to herself as a theater promoter.

Ultimately, the ball was in my court. She didn’t have any contractual responsibility. She was basically the middle person. If I’d had a manager, Yvonne would have dealt with my manager.

Morgan: That makes sense. She was the middle person.

Tom: At the same time, I think she did try to coach me on it. But my attitude overrode that. She was pleased she’d got me this gig, and I was saying, “No, no, let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!”

She was very gracious about it because she didn’t really need to be. She could have just said no and not bothered, but there was a sense that this was the beginning of something, so we had to push through some of the challenges.

I think I had that attitude, too. I thought, “This is the beginning of a journey. It’s not going to be the best, but it’s setting in motion what I want in the years to come.”

I’ve changed direction a little bit. I’ve gone down the corporate route, and that’s great. I love it, and it’s much more financially viable than selling 50 tickets!

But I think there’s a sense in the early stages of pushing through challenges and reaping the rewards later.

The thing to note is that I think that blinded us to the reality of the moment. I could have made wiser decisions if I’d really thought about it.

Morgan: These are all excellent lessons and wise advice. I’m still cringing thinking about you in that theater. Do you happen to have any photos of yourself at that show? I kind of wanted to see that.

Tom: Do you know what? I’m going to have to find it, and you can slot it in. I did take an audience selfie.

Morgan: Oh, no! You took an audience selfie?

Tom: Well, do you know, I would never normally do it, right? I would never normally do it in that scenario because there was barely anyone there. I say “audience selfie,” but it was really a row-of-seats selfie. There was no one there!

Morgan: That’s amazing.

Tom: I was contracted to do two 45-minute sets.

Initially, when we booked it in, my plan was to have another guy do a bit of a warm-up act in the first half, and I would do maybe an hour and 20 minutes in total.

Again, I presumed that was fine. Thankfully, I didn’t do that because imagine having someone else to pay when I wasn’t even earning anything. That would have been another £300 or £400.

But I didn’t realize until the last minute that Yvonne had said, “You can’t just slot in a warm-up act because theaters get nervous about people complaining that they paid to see you and the whole time was spent with the warm-up act. You have to promote the warm-up act on the poster; otherwise, they won’t let you do it.”

Morgan: By the way, I never knew that. I’ve always seen opening acts on posters, and I’ve wondered why they even promote the opening act. Who cares? But actually, it’s to prevent people from complaining.

Tom: Yeah. It’s so that if people complain, the theater has a legitimate response: “Well, the warm-up act was on the poster. You might have come to see the main act, but part of the deal when you bought the ticket was that there would be a warm-up act.”

They make you state it, and I hadn’t stated it.

So, I couldn’t have a warm-up act. Therefore, I started to panic that I was going to run short of the 45 minutes in each half.

I knew the first half would be okay. I had a strong 45 minutes, but I wasn’t too sure about the second half. I thought, if this goes quickly, I could fall short by 10 or 15 minutes.

To fill the time, and it’s awful to say this because a professional artist performing in a theater shouldn’t be filling time. It should be a polished, delivered show that you’ve worked on and know how to perform professionally.

But I was stupid, basically. I was trying to fill time, and I thought, “Oh, I’m just going to have to do an audience selfie.”

Of course, little did I know there would be 50 people in the audience!

If I can find the selfie, Morgan, I’ll send it over. It’s something else. I never posted it. I said I was going to post it on social media, but of course I never did because I didn’t want to go public with my big failure at that moment.

But I’m happy to do it now. I’m over it. I’ve had therapy and everything since.

Morgan: So, this one incident led to eight years of therapy!

Tom: So, yes, I will send you the photo. But I purely did the selfie because I needed to fill time and avoid running short.

Morgan: It’s a cliché, but I believe it: that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It seems like you emerged from that after the therapy, able to laugh about it and deal with it, prepared for the worst. It’s an amazing attitude.

Tom: Yeah, absolutely. To be honest, I look back now, and any bad gig I have these days is nowhere near as bad as that. It’s not going to be as bad. It’s all relative.

Morgan: There’s a line from the early twentieth-century German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer. He recommended waking up every morning imagining and preparing yourself to eat a live frog that day.

His argument is this: if you wake up and prepare yourself to eat the live frog, you think, “Today is the day I’m going to do it.”

What’s going to happen? On almost every day of your life, you’re not going to have to eat a live frog or anything worse. So, you’ve already had a great day.

The day ends, and you go to sleep thinking, “It’s so much better than I expected. I thought I was going to have to eat this frog alive, but I didn’t. My day is great because I didn’t have to do this horrible, terrible thing.”

And then, on the one-in-a-million chance that something truly terrible happens, it’s not as terrible because you’re prepared for it. The worst things are the ones that take you by surprise. But when you’re already prepared, when you’ve spent years preparing for something terrible, it’s just what you do.

Even on the downside, it’s not as bad.

Tom: I like that. It makes me think of a comedian in the UK called Sarah Millican. I think she’s known worldwide, actually. She’s done a bit of worldwide touring.

She’s got a statement called “Millican’s Law.” It’s the simple idea that every comedian has great gigs and awful gigs. Whether you have a good gig or a bad gig, you have to be over it by 11 the next morning.

You can drive home, wallow in your sorrows, or celebrate your success. But by 11 the next morning, get over it, because the following night you can go out and do exactly the same material in exactly the same way and get the opposite response.

You can have a great gig one night, do the same thing the next night, and get a terrible response. Equally, you can have a terrible gig tonight, go out tomorrow, and be seen as the funniest guy on the planet.

Similar to the live-frog idea, if you get over whatever happened last night by 11 a.m., tonight or tomorrow night doesn’t seem as bad or as good. It’s all relative and in balance.

Morgan: Yeah, I love it. I thought of Schopenhauer’s line because it reminded me of that moment when you were effectively in a theater that was 800% empty. It was basically you eating the live frog.

Tom: Yeah, absolutely.

Morgan: Because you had that live frog, that terrible experience, you’re prepared for it now.

Tom: Absolutely. Unless I do a gig where there are 49 people or fewer, I’m prepared for it in such a huge space!

Morgan: If there are 49 people in a space designed for 30, you’re doing well.

Tom: Absolutely. It’s all context, isn’t it?

Morgan: If those 50 people came to my house, we’d be squashed and packed. If I were to open a restaurant, I’d rather open one in a tiny place than a huge space.

With all your marketing and everything you do, you’ll lose a certain number of people. If you get 20 people a night in a place designed for eight, it’s packed, it looks packed, and it’s great marketing. Those same 20 people in a space designed for 800 make it look empty.

Tom: I give exactly the same advice when people book me to do a show for their group and ask what sort of venue they should book.

I always say, book a venue you know you can fill. Just like you’ve said, even with low ticket sales, you want a venue that feels full. If it feels full, there’s an atmosphere, a vibe. You can hear people chatting, laughing, and engaging.

If you have 20 people in a place designed for 800, it’s going to feel cold. There’s no atmosphere, and it’s lacking any sort of energy.

Morgan: Excellent advice. We’ve covered a lot of ground and a lot of different advice on comedy. I didn’t know Millican’s Law, and I’m still cringing thinking about the story. We’ve gotten some great lessons, but above that, we’ve gotten a bunch of laughs as well.

One of my big takeaways is that this is one of the funnier, most enjoyable podcasts. I meant it when I said that if I were in your position, I’d have been crying or cringing. The fact that you were laughing about it, even when you knew there were only 30 people signed up before it happened, is amazing. I’d have been in full freak-out mode.

I think this is something I can learn from you. So, thank you for your advice, the comedy, and everything.

Tom: Well, it was painful at the time, but it makes a good story now, doesn’t it?

Morgan: Exactly. And to everyone who’s been watching this episode, thank you for staying around. We hope you learned a lot and were laughing along with us as well. Until next time.

Tom: Thanks, Morgan.