16. Create an Epic Client Experience with Superstar Pink!

If you asked me last week if I liked the performer Pink, I'd say, Uh, I want to like her. I really like her message. I like what she's all about, but she just doesn't do it for me. Something about her kind of rubs me the wrong way, and I'm just not that into her. However, I did get roped into going to a concert of hers on a girls trip down in Nashville this past weekend. And it inspired this podcast episode because within about an hour I'd say even as little as 5 minutes, I went from a casual, honestly pink avoider. I was like switching the station when pink comes on the radio, to transforming into an absolute super-fan in such a short amount of time. I found it fascinating and I kept thinking about how we could relate this to our business throughout the entire concert, which was incredible, by the way. So I broke it down into 8 lessons. Eight lessons from Pink that will help you become the highly sought, fully booked creative that you know you deserve to be.

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Transcript

If you asked me last week if I liked the performer Pink, I'd say, Uh, I want to like her. I really like her message. I like what she's all about, but she just doesn't do it for me. Something about her kind of rubs me the wrong way, and I'm just not that into her. However, I did get roped into going to a concert of hers on a girls trip down in Nashville this past weekend. And it inspired this podcast episode because within about an hour I'd say even as little as 5 minutes, I went from a casual, honestly pink avoider. I was like switching the station when pink comes on the radio, to transforming into an absolute super-fan in such a short amount of time. I found it fascinating and I kept thinking about how we could relate this to our business throughout the entire concert, which was incredible, by the way. So I broke it down into 8 lessons. Eight lessons from Pink that will help you become the highly sought, fully booked creative that you know you deserve to be.

Let's face it, most of us would rather be making art than running a successful business. But here's the thing, we can 100% do both. If you want a creative business that you and your clients adore and that supports the life of your dreams, you're in the right place. My name is Erica Ewing, and I'm here to challenge you to define your best life and then to cheer you on as you build a business that supports just that. Welcome to the Successful Creatives podcast.

It's been a really long time since I've seen live music. I'm talking like a decade. Live music, which is not really a priority for me, but my college roommates love it. They are country music fans. They're live music fans. They love jam bands and acoustics and all of that stuff. I was the hip hop dance, like techno electronic friend who loved a really epic DJ. So we planned this girls trip. It's been like a year in the making, heading down to Nashville and the thing that sparked us to do it was that pink was playing down there. My besties from college are Pink fans. So they kept saying like, the show is amazing, you’re going to love Pink, you're going to love this show. I was kind of like, Eh, I'm taking one for the team, I'm going in on this for you girls. But like, she just it's fine. I'm not I don't need to be a super fan of Pink. I'm happy to go with you and make your Nashville dreams come true. So that's basically where I was taking one for the team, for my friends. Right? Well, within an hour I went from switching the station when pink comes on to a 100% super fan. I wanted to share those beautiful lessons that I learned because there are pieces that you can take from the experience of attending one of her shows in really think about your own business through the lens of these 8 lessons that I that I learned from her show. Really how she has this magic over her fans and she creates super fans, so that you can do this in your own business because she's very unique. She's a super unique performer. I'm just going to keep saying super. I'm sorry. I don't know why. Actually. No, I'm not sorry because that brings me to lesson # 1.

Lesson # 1 is she embraces her own imperfection. Shortly after the concert started, she stopped the song. I want to say it was like song # 3, and they started the background music. Her background singers started to sing and like 5 to 10 seconds in, she literally stopped all the singers. She stopped everybody and she asked them to restart. I don't remember exactly what the reasoning was, if the timing was off or something like that, but it was just this tiny little moment where she made a joke about it and she just moved on. This was a live concert with 10’s of 1 ,000’s of people. She very openly made a mistake, took it in the most beautiful stride, acknowledged it, and just moved on, just restarted the song, and it was amazing.

The fact that she didn't try to be perfect, didn't, try to fumble embarrassingly over the fact that they made a mistake. She just owned it and was so cool about it. I just I don't know, that just really resonated with me of dropping the imperfection. The fact that she did made me like her even more. That was like song # 3. And I was like, Oh, this chick is really cool. She just handled that like, no big deal. It's fine. I just made a mistake. 10’s of 1,000’s of people are watching me. Who cares? So # 1, she embraces her own imperfection.

# 2. She shares her real life. She wrote a song about her dad. Before she sang it at the show, she like took a seat and in this really intimate way, told us a story about her dad and the origin of the song and just some sort of feelings that she had around her relationship with her dad. It felt like the way that she spoke felt very much like she was talking to a friend, like she was talking to me. She was telling me this story about herself and her dad. It was just really personal and it made me feel very connected to her. Like we were literally buddies just hanging out at this massive stadium with her 20,000 closest friends. She also invited her daughter to sing a song with her on stage.

My friends had been chatting about this before the concert of like, I hope Willow will be there. Willow is her daughter, who is not surprisingly, amazingly talented. I guess she joins Pink for some shows when she can, on occasion, she'll come out and she'll sing a little piece of a song and then she disappears again. So very similar to the story about her dad, Pink started to talk about her daughter, Willow. About this moment during the pandemic when Willow started to sing with her and she couldn't really be bothered. It was no big deal to Willow. But Pink really sees this beauty and this spark in her that she wants to share with everybody. It's just another piece of her life that she shares. And obviously her daughter is totally into it, too. She came out and did a beautiful job. I don't know how old this girl is, somewhere between the ages of maybe 10 and 12, I'm guessing. She came out with so much strength and talent and performed with her mom standing side by side with her. It was just a really, really beautiful moment. She hugged her at the end and you could tell that the moment they share, was like something that they do in their kitchen when it's just the two of them. She also shared a story about an icon that she strove, she really was striving to be like.

That's Sinéad O'Connor. And, you know, this summer, Sinead O'Connor passed away. Pink sang the song, she only sang it once. I think she sang it like on social media or something like that. So this was the first time that she sang the song Nothing Compares to U by Sinéad O'Connor in tribute during the concert. It was like this magic moment. She invited Brandi Carlile, who side note, is amazing. I had never heard of her before. You're probably thinking I'm completely uncultured if you know who these people are. But if you want a really talented, soulful, fun, beautiful singer, Brandi Carlile is amazing. Go check her out. But anyways, she invited Brandi Carlile onto the stage and the 2 of them sang this Sinead O'Connor. Like this iconic song. Through all of these things, through these personal stories and through getting to know about her family, and getting to know about who was an idol to her and people she looked up to. She just shared so much of her real own life, like a real life during the show, that I really felt like I knew her when I left. I knew her so deeply. Like on a deeper level. Lesson 2 Courtesy of Pink on how she turned a brand avoider into a super-fan was by getting personal, by really inviting us to be a part of her life, by sharing behind the scenes, by talking about her family, by just really being real and sharing personal stories.

Lesson # 3. She is so grateful. Gratitude oozes out of this woman from the start of the show to the very, very end. She thanked her fans from literally walking edge to edge of this massive stage. Leaning over the railings, looking her fans in the eyes, saying thank you, sharing compliments. She leaned over one side and said, Oh, I really love your dress. She walked to the other edge and said, that hat is fantastic. Thank you for being here. She does this really cool acrobatic piece that I'm going to talk a little bit more about. But I think part of the reason she does it is because it lets her get closer to different sections of the stadium and wave at her fans. Like wave, not at them, wave to them in gratitude to say thank you. It was like a thank you wave. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing this moment for me with me. From everything she does, she is clearly so very grateful that she gets to do the thing that she loves, that she gets to do the thing that she's called to do and that she has people who enjoy it. And so really # 3 is she's so grateful.

Lesson # 4, she gets personal with fans. So I just totally talked about this in the last 1. But watching her walk throughout the stage, so that she could see her fans. Really the waving and the saying hi connecting like it was a small show, not a massive stadium from the compliments that she was giving to people to projecting her fans on the massive screens that they had on the stage. She somehow made this gigantic stadium feel really, really intimate. I'm going to guess there were probably like 20 or 30,000 people there. Actually, that’s a shot in the dark. I literally have no idea. Somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000, I'm going to say that. Okay. I should probably look up how big that Nashville Stadium is, but there were a lot of people there. Because of the way she approaches the crowd, it felt like a small, intimate stadium. Lesson # 4, she gets personal with her fans.

Lesson # 5 from Pink, is that she stands for something. She is a brand that exudes love and acceptance and individuality. She went a step further during her concert to really use her platform to share more about what she feels like is broken in this country right now. She made a song and a film to support the song about all of the injustice that's happening in the country right now. It was really all about equality, race, equality, same sex marriages, like the ability to choose who you want to marry and love, who you want to love. It was gun control. It was anti-Trump. It was a lot of controversial stuff where in a state like Tennessee, where it's really conservative, it seems like, you know, that might have been something that someone else would have probably found pretty risky to do. But she just stands for something she and she stands so strongly in her conviction. I love that about her that she really goes beyond just acceptance to action. You know, she was there to create a movement. It was a movement of love and of acceptance because she shared what she believed in and she stood for something. I just found it incredibly powerful. There’s something to standing for, something that you believe in and inviting those people who believe to join you and then repelling the people who don't, to have that confidence to know that by sharing what you stand for, you're probably like repelling millions of people. There are people out there who probably have pink hate groups because of her beliefs, but she doesn't care. And what she's found, what you see, obviously, is that she has millions and millions of people who do love her for that. Who love her exactly for that reason. So the lesson # 5, is she stands for what she believes in.

Lesson # 6, she exceeds expectations. I mentioned that I wouldn't use the word excited when I thought about going to this to this concert. I was taking one for the team. I expected great live music. I knew that much was going to happen. But her show ended up being so much more than that. It started with before she even came out. It started with fireworks, and then she entered the room on these like, strings that had her flipping over and over and over, like a Cirque du Soleil acrobatics show. Towards the end she flew around the entire stadium. And again, I mentioned it because she was using the chance to get close to everyone to give everyone a slice of being near pink to wave, to share gratitude, to thank everybody who was there. But it was amazing. It was like Peter Pan flying around the stadium. And this woman is like 43 years old and she's doing all of this to just give everyone an epic, epic experience. She had choreographed dancers, like dozens of them on stage with her. She had surprise guest singers. I mentioned that her daughter Willow sang. She also had another band, I can't think of what their name is because I'm so not musically up to speed. Shit. The Lumineers. The Lumineers, okay. The Lumineers showed up because I guess they live in Nashville and they sang a song that they sing with her.

It's like a big hit. You probably know it, and you're probably shocked that I don't right now. But mind blown, like every step of this show was way more than a show. She just exceeded expectations. I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that the tickets were overpriced. Well, I can tell you, having seen her show, I would gladly pay double right now. I texted my sister right after the show and was like, I need to take our nieces to the show. We all need to go. The show was incredible and it's because she exceeded expectations. So that's lesson # 6, exceed expectations.

Lesson # 7, she has a blast at what she does. She showed up with 110% from the very first moment that she was going to, say stepped on to stage. But she flew out onto stage. She gave 110%, she never slowed down. There was never a lag or a drop in her energy level. She just had this infectious, I fucking love my job, energy. She danced with her dancers. She had a new piano player. It was his first time playing with her. She shared the story about what his background was. She gave him a special shout out later on in the show. She ended up going over and just hugging him. It just felt very real, very spontaneous. Right after she told him he was awesome, she gave one of the dancers a piggyback ride, like towards the end of their little dance set. She jumped from these little pedestals. She jumped from pedestal to pedestal on the suspended chord, laughing and singing with her whole heart the entire time. Seeing how much joy she had for what she was doing just made the whole experience even more fun. So # 7, is she has a blast at what she does.

Lesson # 8, this is the last one, it's a big one. # 8 is she makes everyone feel special and feel valued. She introduced every single one of her musicians early on and she shared who they were and why they were awesome. She let each of them get their own little, like slice of cheering, right! They each got their moment. It was clearly not just Pink's concert, it was all of them, they were definitely a team. She had dozens, probably 2 dozen dancers on stage with her at different points of the show, and she introduced every single one of them. I feel like people are always like, these are my dancers, they’re amazing. She went through each of those people 1 by 1 saying their name. Their name went up on the big screen.

They got this little section where they could like, freestyle dance. And I just feel like she made everybody feel so important. You could tell the way they were dancing with her and showing up with her, that she was just one of them like she did. She doesn't have herself on a pedestal, she’s super humble. She takes the time to make everyone feel valued. It's how she made all of us feel super close with her and appreciated by her and just really special. There is no doubt to me that she values her crew, that she values her fans. You know that she's so grateful for what she does, that she loves what she does. So # 8 is, she makes everyone feel valued and special.

So if you're listening to this episode, I hope that you've been thinking about your own business, because I think with all things, we can always use every experience that we have in life. Whether it be business related or not, to sort of run a check on our own business and think about how we could do things better. So it's self-assessment time. Would your clients give you a 10 out of 10 rating right now? Super simple question, but probably kind of hard to answer. Would your clients give you a 10 out of 10 rating right now? How is your client experience if you. Have clients who send you the happiest emails after they get their pictures or whatever creation that you've made for them.

If you get glowing feedback and they're so excited and they're taking the time out of their day to let you know. If you have clients who are lining up to refer you in your business is built mostly on referrals. If you have clients who are raving about you online without ever being asked, then you probably have a 10 out of 10 client experience right now. If you're not there yet, that is okay. Use these 8 lessons as a way to really up-level your client experience. This is like these 8 lessons are basically like a guidebook to client experience. So prioritize that. The more you can focus on turning your clients purchase with you into an experience, the more you're going to see just appreciation go up. See people be wowed by what you're doing, and these 8 lessons will really help you get there. Save this episode. I also have a checklist that you can download that will go over in more detail. Like these 8 lessons kind of give you a breakdown. My suggestion choose 1 of these a month and just start incorporating them into your business. Think about how you can take a lesson like making your clients in everyone that you work with really feel valued and special. Make a plan around that. How can you instill that into your business and and then move on to the next one? How can you exceed expectations? What do you stand for? What are the stories that you can share with your clients that you can share on social media that really let people in, that let people get to know who you are? This is going to go so far with your clients and with attracting the people that you want to work with.

Your clients will love you to the moon for it, and you're going to find that you are all of a sudden really becoming irresistible to those ideal clients that you want to be working with and have so much fun with this. Whenever you take a look, when you step back and take a look at your business and you see the things that you're doing in your business, that might not be the best, that's okay. Embrace lesson # 1. Don't try to be perfect like we are all human. Every single time that we see that there's something that we could be doing better, I want you to lean into that. Really get excited for that instead of giving yourself a hard time for not being there yet. Get excited about the journey to get there because each and every one of these steps, every lesson that you implement into your business is going to only make things better for your clients and then in turn make them better for you. Every day has an opportunity to be better than the one before it.

So have so much fun with this and turn on Pink on Spotify if you want some inspiration. Hey, are you in the wedding industry, but you feel like you have no idea what you should be doing to market your business and really attract the clients and weddings that you want? Well, I’m working on something for you. It's the magnetic marketing mastery, and it's all about consistent action to build your business through steps that are not hard. Okay, building a business filled with the clients that you love and who love your business back does not have to be hard. That's what this mastery is all about. Head over to magneticweddingpro.com, so that you'll be the 1st to know when doors open. I'll also be sharing some juicy bonuses with you along the way so that you can really get started to create a business that attracts the weddings and clients you want on autopilot without a complex marketing strategy or spending hours on Instagram, TikTok, or trying to figure out what trends is all about.