https://youtu.be/gqioLkGV8B8
Natasha Miller is the Founder and Chief Experience Designer of Entire Productions, an Inc 5000 corporate event planning and entertainment management company. She is also the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book Relentless: Homeless Teen to Achieving the Entrepreneur Dream. We talk about the power of delegation in business, why musicians make great entrepreneurs, and how to become a relentless entrepreneur.
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Automate Your Workflows with Natasha Miller
Our guest is Natasha Miller, the founder and chief experience designer of Entire Productions and Inc. 5000, Corporate Event, Entertainment, Production, and Marketing Agency. Natasha is the voice feature best-selling author of Relentless, and she's a classical violinist and jazz vocalist. Welcome to the show, Natasha.
Thank you, Steve. It's good to be here.
I think you're the first musician or former musician who has been on the show, so that's definitely a first. So, very interesting origin story. You already referenced a couple of things. So, how did you get here? What turned you into a business owner and leader, Natasha?
I think music got me to where I'm at today, period, end of story, but also my relentless tenacity, which someone recently said to me, which was pretty funny. But I studied violin at a young age, not as young as the Suzuki Method kids starting at four years old. I started in fourth grade, and it was able to get me a full-ride scholarship to three different universities. Even though I didn't graduate with a degree, which I didn't need, it really did propel me into a professional world. At a very young age, I was playing professionally at 15 years old.
I went, looked at your book, and I found a link, and I went to your website, and I saw this letter that you wrote in a class, I guess it was, about how you made $50 with a fellow musician at the Christmas concert.
That was a lot of money back then.
I bet it was. So it was that your first step towards entrepreneurship. And if it was, or one of the first was, how did that lead to you starting a company? Was it kind of a stop and go or it was an organic development?
My first paid performance was when I was 15 playing for the inauguration of our governor. And when you get paid at that age to do something that isn't raking leaves or mowing lawns or waiting tables, you get paid to do something that you're really good at and that you're passionate about. It sets off a little trigger, I think, in your neurons, and it was a little bit intoxicating. So I loved the idea that I could make money by doing what I love to do and that I was good at doing.
And so I think my entrepreneurial spirit ignited then. But then my entrepreneurial need, when I was 16, when I was dropped off at a homeless shelter on Christmas day by my parents, which is all in the book. Then it became a necessity. I had to make money. I had to monetize anything that I knew how to do and that was fairly good at. And ultimately, years later, 21 years ago, I started my formal business, Entire Productions, which is an entertainment and event production company.
So instead of my performing for these corporate and social events, either solo or with my jazz ensemble or with my string quartet, I'm sending out other musicians and other artists and making money while I'm sleeping, basically. I mean, I have to work during the day a little bit, but my team does the rest and then the artists do the rest. So it's a pretty miraculous situation. And it wasn't in fits and starts, but I would say the first 10 to 12 years, it was a lifestyle business that supported my performing career.
That's great, because it's not easy to make a living as a performer. It can be an extremely tough life. Tell me a little bit about, I mean, you talked earlier about your framework being, I think we called it the entire production project management system. Tell me about this framework and how does it allow you to put up so many events with a small staff?
It's so amazing. I'm so proud of it. And I didn't create the system in order to scale and grow my company in revenue or profit or headcount or locations. I did it out of necessity of being efficient and not wasting time or not wasting like double, triple, quadruple entry. So in 2013, I got a Salesforce license and I started programming within Salesforce everything that we did in our company. So if you were going to book us to provide music for your daughter's wedding. I don't know if you have a daughter and I don't know if she's getting married, but let's just say you are. Okay. It's going to happen if it hasn't yet.
Everything that we do for you from the moment you come into our realm is housed in Salesforce and it's reflective. So if you're giving us data, you're typing it in, you're not just typing it into an email, you're actually putting it right into the system so it's capturing it. So what has that done? It has eliminated the need for me or my team to take what you just said and re-enter it into our system. Long story short, everything that is low touch or repeatable on a regular cadence, we have automated.
And as I mentioned to you when I first met you, that enabled us to produce 777 events in one calendar year with two people in operations. And when I use the term operations, I mean they're doing all the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed. And all of the information that goes out to our clients and to our vendors, which in our industry we call it advancing, advancing the event. So for instance, 10 days before the event, you're going to get an email with all the data, all the details about your event, and there are a lot of them, because sometimes events have up to 65 vendors with their own timelines and their own opportunity to drop the ball and make a mistake, right? So none of this, this email that you get with the advancing data, no one has to push send.
It's coming to you 10 days before your event, whether you're ready for it or not, or whether we remembered or not. And then after that, after you approve that four days before the event, an email goes to each vendor with their specific details, load in instructions. And again, it's going out whether we remember to send it or not. So it's amazing, I've been asked to replicate it, to create a SaaS company, to license it. And that's something that I will consider doing in the future because no one in my industry has such a robust system like this.
So how does it work? Because organizing event, it can be very complex and also it can be labor intensive things because some people on the premises, they have to build it out and they have to ensure that all the vendors know where to go and the audience goes. So, you're kind of the back office for the event and then the company, Google or Apple, whoever, you do this, their staff is running the events based on your choreography?
Sometimes we are working with their internal planners. Sometimes we're planning the event for them completely because their internal team is too busy. Sometimes we're just placing entertainment musicians into somebody else's event, but still we use this system for both things. Every time someone in my company comes up with a, why can't we do this or I keep finding myself doing this over and over and again in the application and we will better the system. We won't just go, oh, this is how we always have to do it. You have to write it down. Like never, that is so, that is against our laws to not improve our system when we think of something that can be improved.
So, all the changes become automatic from the get-go rather than a piece of paper. And at some point, we'll update the system when we have time.
However, I will say, I do take a look at the request for changing our system and improving it, and I weigh the outcome with the cost and the time and, you know, is this a one-off situation or is this a repeating situation, and then I will make that decision.
So, just to really simplify it for my sake, so is it like a supercharged CRM, a Salesforce CRM which communicates and schedules all the vendors, the audience, the staff members, everything, who has to do what at what time? It's basically a basic task management, ERP, whatever you want to call it, system that essentially orchestrates the whole event and people just execute whatever is dictated by the system?
It's a very robust project management tool that I built in the confines of a CRM. And Salesforce themselves say, this is more sophisticated than we even use it internally. They say, you're using it in a way that we didn't mean for it to be used, and you're going to break the system. And I never have broken their system. So, you know, I could take it outside of Salesforce and build my own platform with developers and such, which I may do someday, because there has been a request for this in various, you know, from caterers, from decor rental companies, from planners. And so that is on the horizon in the future?
Yeah, I remember about maybe 10, 12 years ago, I was looking to use Salesforce for CRM. And I think the basic subscription was $25 a month. And there was this other company that designed, basically customized the CRM for specifically the type of company I had, which is an investment banking firm. And they charge $250 a seat per month. So just by customizing the 10 times the value of the application, which was really mind-boggling to me, and they were a very successful company growing fast.
Obviously, it was a very popular solution. So I'd like to switch gears, but stay with the topic because one of the things that I'm very curious about is automating processes. So obviously, we've been talking about systemizing, systematizing companies by defining the processes and ingraining it and simplifying, optimizing. But the ultimate step is when you automate it and you make it completely touchless. So in your experience, Natasha,
