Excerpts from the Book

INTRODUCTION:
Swimming in a Sea of Poop

I love the water. The fondest memories of my youth center around time spent on or in the water — swimming, sailing, SCUBA, surfing, waterskiing. I’ve always believed people have their own type of photosynthesis: give them water and sunlight and life is better.

One sunny day during college I surfed an epic swell where a local authority had “accidentally” released untreated sewage into the ocean. The waves were great, but the water was slimy and brown — Billy Joel’s “hypodermics on our shore” era. Had the swell not been so good, the beach would've been empty. But like the others, I paddled out.

My other passion was music. A band kid who landed a job in a piano and organ store, I discovered that commissioned sales paid better than anything else in the mall. What began as a “working my way through college” job became a 35‑year career — one spent, in many ways, swimming in a different kind of sea of poop.

The underlying fact of the music business is this: most people don’t play music, and most who don’t wish they could. The industry has hovered around $8 billion for more than a decade — steady, but stagnant. As Lou Holtz said, “In this world you're either growing or you're dying, so get in motion and grow.” By that measure, the industry is dying.

In my 2018 MMR article The Arrogance of Complacency, I wrote that manufacturers and distributors could dramatically improve their stability and profitability by helping dealers grow. But that requires people capable of teaching success — and our industry suffers from a talent drain. I owe my career to the professionals who mentored me.

Too many companies are satisfied harvesting the low‑hanging fruit of current demand. They compete only within the existing marketplace, playing by rules set by others, focused on the short term. That complacency is the real danger.