At 24 years old, after years spent building his personal music career, Alex Damashek launched his own entertainment company based in Brooklyn, NY. Five years later, Damashek’s company, Move Forward Music, which specializes in tour booking and concert promotion, is thriving and booking nationwide tours. Here, Damashek discusses the history and success of his business and how his devotion to his work has kept artists coming back.
What inspired you to start your own entertainment company? How did you get started?
Starting my own company was a way to immerse myself in projects and work that I find engaging and stimulating and to avoid spending time on things that don't interest me. I started as an artist; in my teens and early 20s I was making beats, rapping and releasing albums in an era before Twitter, or even MySpace and Facebook. I promoted my own shows, created my own street team, and held down a college radio show for three years on Boston's WERS.
After graduating college, I started working as the publicist for a renowned live music club in Soho called SOB's. It was there that I felt like I had finally arrived in the music industry in a truly professional capacity. I always wanted to live a life where I was waking up and going to bed every day thinking about music, and I was finally living that life and getting paid for it.
After two years, I felt I'd gotten everything I could from the experience, and not having much input on the shows I was working on, I grew bored. I didn't feel like I wanted to work for anybody else, so I launched my own company in 2008 at 24 years old. I figured if it didn't work out, I would be 28 or 29 with a wealth of experience from starting my own business. That's where I am now, with almost five years under my belt, and no plans other than to continue growing the brand and business of Move Forward Music.
What has been your greatest challenge transitioning from the music industry to business ownership?
[The biggest challenge] was just learning how to manage my finances and to be okay with not everyone being 100% happy with me all the time. I was really young at the outset, and I wanted to please everyone. I lost a lot of money booking artists who wanted more money than they were worth, and I spent a lot of energy trying to appease other people contrary to my own interests. I've found that a big part of success in business is striking a careful balance between being accommodating and being cutthroat, and in general, being okay with ruffling a few feathers.
How do you market your business? What do you find is most effective in attracting and keeping clients?
I work really hard for all my clients and make sure that they know I am doing everything I can for them. Most of my business growth has come through referrals or word of mouth. Doing good work and making sure that my clients know that I am willing to go to war for them is the most important thing for me.
I also have a weekly concert newsletter that promotes artists and all the events we are working on around New York City. I take my time with it to make sure that the newsletter's presentation is clean, professional and attractive, and that has become somewhat of a calling card, marketing the business itself as well as our projects.
What was the best advice in regard to managing your business that anyone ever gave you?
Don't sweat the small stuff. If you throw up your hands every time something frustrating happens in business, all you wind up with are sore arms.
If you had to choose your proudest moment in your time as a business owner, what would it be?
My proudest moment on a creative level was booking my first national tour. The artist was Black Milk; it was a 25-date trek that spanned an entire month and stretched across both coasts.
My proudest moment on a purely business level was paying off all my debt, of which I amassed a pretty significant amount in my first few years in operation, just getting the business off the ground. It took me three and a half years to get to the point where I could pay off my credit card bills in full every month, and it was a glorious feeling to watch that balance go down to zero.
What are your three keys to success?
1) Work harder than everybody else. Put in more hours, do the things your competitors are not willing to do, grind till your fingers bleed.
2) Be prepared to leave a little bit of money on the table. Especially when you're starting out, make sure your clients and business partners always profit from deals you are involved in. The best reputation you can have in business is the guy who always makes money for his associates.
3) Always be preparing for the next move. Analyze your current situation, and past triumphs and mistakes, but don't dwell on what's already history. Calculate your next step based on all the information, experiences, successes and failures that have led you to the current moment.
You cannot control the past, but you can use what you've learned from past experiences to make an informed, educated decision about how to move into the future. Whether you just received some game-changing good news or a tragic setback, the best and only productive thing you can do is move forward.
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