10 minute read
Mind You Business
Mind Y ur Business
Steven Cohen: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act
By Yitzchok Saftlas
Every Sunday evening since July 2015, Yitzchok Saftlas, CEO of Bottom Line Marketing Group, hosts 77WABC’s “Mind Your Business” show on America’s leading talk radio station. The show features Fortune 500 CEOs, CMOs, and top business leaders where they share their business knowledge and strategic insights on how to get ahead in today’s corporate world. Since Q2 2017, the 77WABC “Mind Your Business” show has remained in the coveted Nielsen “Top 10” in New York’s highly competitive AM Talk Radio market. Guests have included John Sculley, former CEO of Apple and Pepsi; Dick Schulze, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Best Buy; Beth Comstock, former vice chair of GE; and Captain Sully Sullenberger, among nearly 200 senior-level executives and business celebrities.
TJH will be featuring leading questions and takeaways from Yitzchok’s popular radio show on a bi-monthly basis.
On a recent 77WABC “Mind Your Business” broadcast, Yitzchok Saftlas spoke with guest Steve Cohen, also known as the “Millionaire’s Magician,” the famous host of “Chamber Magic,” a popular off-Broadway show.
Steve, when did you decide that you’re going to make a career out of magic?
Well, you know, it’s not the kind of job that has a career path. There’s no training program. There’s no step-by-step.
I decided when I was very young that I wanted to become a magician, but my parents always said, you have to have something to fall back on. So, that’s why I went to college. After having graduated from college, I wanted to give this magic thing a try, but I didn’t have any money yet. So I started working in a marketing company just using some of my Japanese language skills, and then was moonlighting as a magician on the side when I realized I could make a lot more money working for myself than working for someone else. So that’s kind of when the switch flipped, and I left that company and went off on my own and had many years of being very hungry. I decided to do some work on the side in Japanese language translating, translating Japanese documents from Japanese into English for law firms, for the U.S. government. Those are all things that I was using to kind of pad the coffers while I was really trying to make my living as a magician. And it was very slim pickings in the beginning.
That’s a very important lesson, because there are people – many people – when they embark on the journey of becoming an entrepreneur, they say, OK, I could potentially make more money going out on my own, not realizing that it could take one, two or even three decades for their business to become viable.
I’ll tell you how long it was for me. I came to New York in 1995. It took five years before I launched my show, and I was really living a very meager lifestyle. I remember, at one point, if I had a doughnut that was a meal. So, it was a really tough five years.
Then, when I decided to launch the show, it took another two years before it actually started to break even and turn a profit. So that’s seven years.
And that’s something that people often gloss over when they look back, and they talk about their successes and whatnot. It was a seven-year period where I was really living handto-mouth.
Going back 20 years, you entered a very competitive market. The New York theater market is highly competitive, and you decided you were going with an off-Broadway show. Tell us about what it was like when you were facing that challenge.
I didn’t really think of the bigger picture. I didn’t think about how I was competing against Broadway shows for the competition for people’s time and their money. All I wanted to do was: I wanted to be a magician in New York. I thought if I could do this for 20 years, then, in my mind, I’ll have been a success. I kind of had “bubble” or tunnel vision. I just went ahead and did my own thing, not really concerning myself with the competition. What are other magicians doing? What are Broadway shows doing? What are off-Broadway shows doing? That actually helped me, because I wasn’t really swayed by anyone else.
There is a famous quote, “It took 30 years to become an overnight success.”
How long did it take for you to gain traction? Can you talk
about the patience that an entrepreneur needs in order to be successful?
When I began the show, in my head I thought, I’m going to run this for 20 years. So, I had patience built into the whole project. And every time that I did a show, if it was a good show, then great, I was one step closer to my 20-year mark. If I did a bad show and I got a terrible reaction, that was also one step closer to my mark. And I learned from that. Of course, I had hopefully more good shows than bad shows. But along the way I also got very fortunate.
About three years in, I got a great opportunity on CBS Sunday morning. They did a seven-minute interview that aired nationwide. That interview then brought in over a million dollars of ticket sales in about three days. My mind was completely blown. Those shows were sold out. So, what do you do? If you’re an entrepreneur, you have to produce more supply. So, I added more shows. That basically brings me to today where I kind of had these inflection points where suddenly there was traction, but I just had to wait. I had to be patient. There’s going to be many times where you get a media hit. Maybe you get featured in a newspaper or you get featured in a magazine or a blog. As an entrepreneur, you get very excited – like this is going to make me, this is going to be it. I remember the first time I got featured in The New York Post. It was a half a page article. I thought, This is going to make my career. And it was a minor blip, a miniscule blip. It sold maybe three tickets. But it was an opportunity to be seen by a great amount of people. So, when you have these media hits, you may often think that it is going to change everything. There’ll be an avalanche of orders, or business, or tickets sold, or whatever you’re selling. But the fact is, you can’t assume that. You just have to take it in stride, almost assume that it’s not even there.
How do you harness the talent of very, very talented people?
What I found is you obviously must always be acting in a professional way, but also, I like to make sure that my sense of humor loosens the person up so they realize that I’m not pretentious. Now, I can come across as pretentious from time to time if I’m really focused on my work. But being able to break down that barrier by having some shared joke or some common little comical interchange – I’ve found that to work really well.
There are times when the pressure is really on. Let’s say, a cast member isn’t feeling well, called in sick at the last minute, or you know of something that may or may not happen during the show, like a power outage. How do you train for these types of situations, and what are your tips on how to deal with pressure that you can cut with a knife?
I learned this from a friend of mine who’s a pilot. He called it the OODA Loop. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this. If you’re a fighter pilot, you automatically know what this is. It’s part of being situationally aware. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
You’re always observing what’s going on, right? There might be something that went wrong that the audience hasn’t become aware of yet. Then you have to orient yourself so that you know what to do. Then you decide what to do, and then you act on it. Then you loop back to the original O, which is observe again. You’re always looping back. You’ve probably heard the expression, keep me in the loop. That comes from this expression.
What I try to do is have situational awareness, keeping awareness of myself in three-dimensional space, plus also in the fourth dimension of time. I’m thinking ahead before you even know what’s going to happen, I’m aware of what could potentially happen only because I’ve done this show literally thousands and thou-
sands of times. That’s where the practice and the rehearsals really come into play because you start to see what could potentially go wrong, and then you’re able to have a plan B and C and D ready for those eventualities.
Perhaps you can share with us a tip about practice and rehearsals. Now, of course, when you’ve been doing the show for so many years, each show is a practice and rehearsal for fu-
ture shows. But from the early
days, how many times would you rehearse? What was the schedule that you would put in, to practice and practice and practice in order to make sure that it would be flawless?
I practice constantly, and I practice with great dedication. There are some sleight of hand maneuvers that I’ll be performing from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. Some of these are mental tricks that I have to perhaps run through a series of memorized steps. Other things are physical, where I have to practice with my fingers to be able to make sure that the dexterity stays intact. The idea is that the muscle memory is so intact that I can be placing my attention on the audience. And this is almost having two minds. You may have seen some great jazz pianists or classical pianists who can be playing a run on their left hand and a melody on their right hand. And it’s almost as if it’s two different people playing the same instrument. That’s what I’m doing. The technique is one hand, and the presentational skills are the other hand.
You’ve shared so many great takeaways for anyone in business as it applies to magic and as it applies to the world at large for entrepreneurs. Perhaps you could share a tip or two for all the small- to medium-sized business owners out there.
The best advice that I have is something that my mentor gave me when I was starting the show. Her name is Holly Pepin. She’s a poetry professor, but she also happens to be a great supporter of magic. She said to me, “Always think in real time. Don’t push the river. You must let it flow.”
I think that’s a very poetic and a beautiful way of approaching business. Think of things in real time. You want it to happen now, you put in all this investment and time and you want to see results right away. That’s what everyone wants; we want instant satisfaction and results. But if you think in real time, then you understand that it’s not going to happen right away, most likely.
That’s why, when I made that 20year goal, she said, “Oh, you’re on the right track. You made a 20-year goal. That’s good thinking.”
The other part of the of the statement is: “Don’t push the river. You must let it flow.” That’s apparently a saying from an African folk story. The river is always going to be moving, and you can’t control it. The moment that you accept that you can’t control everything, you let things happen and respond and keep moving forward in your own way, that will probably steer you into the right direction.
