By Michael Collins, Managing Principal, EquiNova
A friend of mine is an avid fan of Phish, a jam band from Vermont with a playing style and fan following that rivals The Grateful Dead. Phish’s live shows are among the highest-grossing in the world; it once played 13 sellout concerts at Madison Square Garden on consecutive nights.
What fans love most is how the songs routinely last more than 20 minutes and travel across a sonic landscape. They might sound improvisational, but those long Phish songs actually are quite planned. As a profile in The New Yorker noted recently, a jam typically is divided into multiple parts, with each part getting assigned a key, a mental image (“Shape shifting trees” is an example), and an energy level between one and ten.
Why would the band box itself in? As guitarist and lead singer Trey Anastasio explained to the magazine:
“The theory is, art lives by limitation. You develop the theme, you can go backward, forward, stretch it out. But don’t keep bringing in more material. … It’s like hang gliding, in the sense that you do all kinds of preparation to make sure you’re safe–you check your gear, you tighten the knots. But you still have to jump off a cliff.”
Phish has found liberation in setting limits because those limits force it to search harder for what works in that moment. As with that hang-gliding analogy, it takes tons of preparation; all four members of the band are super talented, and thus have the skills to lay down a beat and change it as needed. The band members also are great listeners, drawing cues from each other as well as from their pre-show plans. Perhaps above all, as Anastasio put it, “You’re never gonna find four people who are happier diving off a cliff than the four guys in Phish.”
As with this band, there’s a lot of improvisation in construction supply. And, again as with Phish, dealers face a lot of limitations, particularly in these times of economic uncertainty. The trick is to reject the idea that those limits can only be ruinous. Rather, they can also inspire.
Think back to when COVID was raging and customers didn’t want to walk into stores. Almost overnight, dealers responded by ramping up BOPIS–Buy Online, Pick up In Store–as well as improving their e-commerce systems. Some even bought lockers for touch-free interfaces. Limits led to opportunities.
It takes a lot of training and a special culture to develop a team that welcomes challenges. Once you get that ball rolling, you’ll have a company that’s far more likely to outperform its peers, and be far more attractive to a potential buyer. The journey will be a lot more fun, too.
