When I returned from shopping this afternoon, I asked Robert how it felt to make cold calls using his new name Bob.
“I haven’t started yet. I still use Robert.”
“Why not? I wrote a whole blog about you. Don’t you like BOB?” I felt slightly betrayed that he had backed out.
“I guess I’m just not ready for it. I still think of myself as Robert, not Bob.”
“But I thought you liked Bob! There’s no mistake when you say Bob — you mean Bob.” I pleaded and reasoned. It’s important for cold call recipients to grasp his name the first time. They can’t question, “What? Wobert? You mean Rwobuht? Could you repeat that? Are you Danish?”
After dinner, as we sat on the balcony of our apartment, we watched the full moon resist the clouds after being eclipsed by the earth yesterday. We could not imagine being more relaxed anywhere else on earth at that moment. It’s taken us 2 months of traveling out of suitcases and staying in other people’s homes to get here.
There is a lag time to implementing your decisions. Yesterday, Robert decided to call himself Bob. Obviously one day was not enough to get used to it and do it.
There is a lead time to getting something started. Today, he received confirmation to be in Boston in early February 2011. He needs all the time between now and then to prepare for the visit and plan a solo guitar concert tour to last him until St Patrick’s Day. There are people to contact, concerts to arrange, flights to book, …. a deja vu of what we did for our 5 weeks of concert touring, except this time he will be doing it alone.
What can we learn from our 40-day concert tour from Boston to Sacramento in October and November? I will attempt to deconstruct and identify what worked and what didn’t in the forthcoming blog posts. In other words, how to plan a concert tour as classical musicians.
Concert Blog 