Interview with Shelly Palmer, CEO at The Palmer Group
Shelly Palmer, described as an American television composer and personality, a "top voice" in technology, and a self proclaimed member of the "lucky DNA Club" was born to musicians and expected to take over his father's music store. His biggest #HoShiMo forever shifted his trajectory. Listen in to hear why he chose NOT to join Marty Scorsese on the west coast and how he has built his tech consulting empire. #csuitenetwork #csuiteradio
Transcript:
Julie (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Conversational. My name is Julie Roehm, and today I have a very special guest, Mr. Shelly Palmer. Shelly and I go back. We were just saying a lifetime. It's just suddenly the fingers and toes run out. I don't know any more how many years, but he has been a influence in my life professionally and personally, actually, I've got a personal story as well. A wonderful guy, but an even more impressive background. His story is crazy good so I'm excited to dive into it, but let me tell you a little bit about Shelly before I bring him in. He is LinkedIn's top voice in technology. He is the CEO of The Palmer Group, which is a strategic advisory, technology solutions and business development practice. He's got several different areas that he's prominent in.
One is on air. He covers the Tech and Business for Fox 5 New York, and he's also well-known for his work on the Emmy nominated television show, Shelly Palmer, Digital Living, and he's also regular technology commentator for CNN and CNBC. Pretty much he's an authority. You don't need me to say that. I think that says it all. He's a technologist and an inventor. He is the patented inventor of the underlying technology for Enhanced Television, which is used by programs such as ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? ESPN, Monday Night Football, and response-based advertising systems, super cool. On the creative end, he's an award-winning composer producer writer and director. He's worked with hundreds of brands, agencies, broadcasters, publishers, tech platforms on advertising marketing campaigns, such as Meow Mix, Burger King and the City of Las Vegas. Then more recently, really, which is what he's become, I think, more known for is he's a subject matter expert.
You can't see him because this is podcast, not video, but he is wearing a shirt that says #StrategyHacker, and he'll correct me if I've got that slightly wrong, but that is so him. He's a popular speaker, moderator at technology and media conferences hosted by industry organizations like CES, The National Association of Broadcasters Convention, Promax/BDA, Association of Television and Program Execs, etc. I could go on. He does stuff with Stern Grad Business School, Columbia. Literally, it's like the who's who. He's also won Emmy awards. Palmer's a past vice president of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy Award and the creator of the Advanced Media Emmy Awards held annually at international CES. Super cool.
If that's not enough, he's an author of several books, Television Disrupted. I've read that. That's a great one that I think what was his earliest one. Overcoming the Digital Divide: How to use Social Media and Digital tools to reinvent yourself and your career. Digital wisdom, he's got a few of them. Data-Driven Thinking. I'll put links to this, but he's a giver, and this is the best. He is on the board of ADL, which is a leading anti-hate organization, which God knows we need in this day and age, and he's a co-founder of the Gun Safety Alliance, as well as several other things. He's chairman of The Lon T. Palmer Music Education Fund. I will do a little bit of the story and then I'll bring him in because I've spoken enough. He's also just, because of his work, because of his connections, he's the person I think about when I'm like, I don't know, but Shelly will know.
My dad had a heart attack early in life, ended up having a quadruple bypass in what? In his 40s. Then he recently, 15, 17, 20 years later, he was having trouble again. Now, it's complicated. You can't go back into the chest the same way. You need to do something that's super specialized. I just didn't know where to turn. I knew New York probably had the best, but I didn't know where to go, and I turned to my friend Shelly, and he introduced me to this great cardiologist who in turn hooked us up with this great surgeon who did these very unconventional surgical practices that really brought my dad's quality of life back to normal. I'm forever grateful to him just as a person. I hope that says it all. Shelly, I hope I've done you justice. I don't think any words I could ever utter would do that, but I'm so thrilled to have you on the show.
Shelly (04:28):
Wow. Julie, that was above and beyond. Very humbling. Very humbling.
Julie (04:35):
Well, you deserve it all. Truly, it's as great as all of those accolades are in your professional life. It's the personal that I think you don't get enough credit for. I just wanted to make people, those who are listening to this, just to know that from me.
Shelly (04:50):
Thank you.
Julie (04:50):
Okay. Let's start, let's go back because you've got this really interesting background. I want to start as I always do with, where were you born Shelly? Where are you from? What did mom and dad do?
Shelly (05:01):
Oh, wow. I was born in Brooklyn more than half a century ago. I'll leave it there. But at a very young age, my parents moved out to Long Island. I was a couple of years old when they moved out to the suburbs. Mom and dad were music educators. My father was a band leader in the Air Force. He led the 504th Airwing Band, and that's the West of the Mississippi Band that does all of the dignitary functions. It was a big band with a full detachment of smaller combos. He actually took a demotion in order to take ... because it's a non-com job being the leader of that particular band. He was a first Lieutenant, and he had to become a lower rank in order to be the band leader of that band, but that was his passion. He met my mom at Juilliard, when he was at Juilliard. They were music educators.
When they got out of the Air Force, they opened up a music studio. They were both teaching in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn in the public-school system, the New York city public school system. On a teacher salary, two teacher salaries, my mom and dad could not afford babysitting. After school, they opened up a music studio with a couple of their friends who were also music teachers to teach afterschool lessons. One of my earliest memories is being in a playpen in the middle of the lesson area. They had all these little practice rooms where people would take their lessons and hearing all of these instruments, clarinets, and pianos, and guitars, and flutes all through the doors. That's one of my very, very earliest memories.
They couldn't afford babysitting. This is why they opened up their music studio with their friends, so that they'd have a way to pay the babysitter during the day while they taught school. One thing led to another, and my mom and dad, their business expanded and we moved to the suburbs. I was incredibly young when we did that, and then I grew up in Huntington, Long Island, kind of a blue-collar neighborhood, just went to public school and was very lucky to have been blessed with an incredible music teacher in grade school, and an even more incredible music teacher in junior high school, and a prodigy of nature music teacher in high school. Unbelievable teachers in the public-school system. I was in Long Island during that time. My life was predetermined at that point, but it was [crosstalk 00:07:40].
Julie (07:40):
Well, it sounds like it was predetermined when you were sitting in that playpen.
Shelly (07:43):
Yeah.
Julie (07:45):
I might go back a little sooner. Obviously, mom and dad had the store, and I know you've shared with me that, given that obviously you had this huge propensity for music, I'm sure your parents were super proud of that, but they had this business too and so wanted you to be able to take that over, right?
Shelly (08:04):
It was interesting. Somehow when you're little and you're in a family business and all of the ... My father parked this big red truck in our driveway that they used to deliver pianos and it had the name of the store, Freeport Music, on the side of the thing. We lived on the top of this Hill on Wolf Hill Road in Huntington in the 60s. There wasn't anybody who didn't A, know where I lived and B, know what my father did. I was groomed from a very young age and the phrase, I think went something like, when you grow up, you're going to be the president of Freeport Music, as if that was something. I don't think I knew what that was, but it was a thing that I was going to be.
They really, really wanted that to be true. At a certain point in my life, it just became obvious that that was not my destiny, to me anyway. It was very tough. I worked in this store from the time I was really little, making change. I'm one of those kids who can do a lot of things with musical instruments. One of the things that, careful what they find out you can do, so I can tune a guitar pretty much very quickly without going through a lot of muss or fuss. The store in Huntington, where I was growing up as an eight-year-old, had about 200 guitars in it. My Saturday was dusting them and tuning them. It's like as an eight-year-old, and then I'd sit behind the cash register and make change.
Julie (09:32):
Yeah. It was an extension of you. Well, that makes sense to me too, by the way, that whole business acumen piece that came in there because you run a very successful consulting practice amongst other things. Obviously, the combination of the two is a wicked powerful set of skills to have.
Shelly (09:49):
One of a lot of things sitting there. I got to tell you, I learned an awful lot of lessons sitting behind the counter, watching my dad do business. It was impressive. It was a family business. I think everybody, when they're young, should have the opportunity to work in a retail store and serve customers and learn what it is to satisfy the needs of customers and to meet their expectations in order to feed yourself. I think everyone should do that for a little while. It's humbling and it's very, very instructive.
Julie (10:22):
I think it's more so today, this is about you, not me or the world of business, but at Party City now and running customer experience and marketing. We map customer journeys. All of our executive team is going out to follow customers and we go into stores every week, certainly every month. It's so important to be there and actually, not just stand and observe always, although there is some goodness in that, but actually to do, like you're saying.
Shelly (10:48):
Oh, why stand there and watch. Hold on an apron and go do something or stand behind the cash register or go to the customer service window, take returns selling something. I had a really unusual situation in that there's ... my father had a competitor who was his arch enemy in business. The company was called Sam Ash Music. They're still around today, I think. They were right next door to us. Literally, you could walk 20 steps and be in the Sam Ash store. It was a much bigger store and it was much more modern. They were better funded, I believe. People would walk back and forth to price check or to ... we had slightly different franchises, so you might want a Fender guitar, you'd get it from them. You might want to Gibson guitar, you'd get it from us.
But some of the acoustic guitars, we both carried the same or very similar brands or very similar models, and having to sell at that level of competition, what was hysterical is that the grandson, Sam Ash III, wasn't really a third, his grandfather passed away, and Richie Ash, his brother and I were great friends. Our fathers competed like cats and dogs, and Richie and I and Sam were like, yeah, we're just kids.
Julie (12:11):
Which makes sense. It's the old adage with the dueling friends, and then of course the children of them get married. There's all the love underneath, right?
Shelly (12:22):
Yeah. Look, everybody was trying to do the same thing. Basically, be involved in the music business because there wasn't enough music in the world, to tell you the truth, Julie, there really isn't, and there aren't enough people who are able to enjoy it from a performance basis because they've cut so much of it out of the school system now. When we were kids, everybody took music classes, and whether you sang it or you were a chorus or you were in band or something else or recorder quarter class, at least they were trying to communicate this idea of performance skill and what it is to accomplish that. So many great benefits come out of that. I do some volunteer teaching in the afternoon here in the city, and I got to tell you, they've cut so many important arts programs, and I understand that the budgets are tight, but this is nourishment for the soul, and it also, I think, completes you as a citizen and as a potential worker.
It also enriches you as a person. I'm very sad that those budgets are cut and will continue to be cut unfortunately. But not withstanding, we were in the music business then, and I went into the music business in a different way pretty much right out of college.
Julie (13:43):
Well, you went, so let's do that. You went to college, but you were still following dad's, I guess his [crosstalk 00:13:51].
Shelly (13:51):
Well, the mandate. Yes, he had to been to ... I forgot about that. Yeah. He had been to Juilliard, which is where he met my mother and, and well, he didn't think I needed a music education. He thought that I was naturally gifted enough that I was a member of the lucky DNA Club. No one would disabuse him of that. I will never call myself what other people called me, but as a musician, but I had ... I was performance skills and capabilities above my-
Julie (14:21):
You were a prodigy. There you go. [crosstalk 00:14:22].
Shelly (14:24):
I'm not going to say it. Anyway, I have a lot of musical skill that just came with my DNA. I'll just leave it that way. I had to practice relentlessly, like everybody else has to practice relentlessly. I'm not going to say I didn't. I played six, seven hours a day because I loved it, but I had some raw material that I could make into something. My father had no interest in me going to music school. He thought it was all just nonsense. He wanted me to go to business school, and he wouldn't hear of it any other way. I went to business school for the first couple of years of college. CW Post School of Professional Accountancy in Greenvale, New York. Thank you. I was an accounting major with a marketing minor.
Julie (15:03):
How did you like it?
Shelly (15:03):
The accounting was beyond boring. I liked the math because I'm a math guy, but I liked the math. There wasn't a lot of math, it was a lot of theory. The marketing stuff, I felt like I was already working in the marketing department at my dad's company, and the educational approach to marketing and the hardcore. They had a mail order catalog. My father won the very first ever catalogs of musical instruments, a mail order business, and his insight was take 30% off the list price. Back in the day, everything was sold very close to list price or maybe a 10% discount. He said, 30% off musical instruments. He made a 16-page catalog, and it wasn't much. The first one was newsprint. It was a bunch of 16 squares on a page, basically, filled with instruments that he cut out of other catalogs and pasted them with rubber cement and then sent to the printer.
It wasn't pretty, but what it was the right price. I learned an awful lot about the difference between glossy catalogs and little sheets with the right price on it and how you tag customers and cluster and classify them, and what a lifetime value of a customer was. I was already deep in that the way you could be without computers in the '70s, and I was in school with marketing, is late '70s, I was in school with marketing guys who I didn't think really were clued in to the hardcore reality of what it is to get people to separate from their money for value and what it meant to compete. It was very theoretical. It was college. I don't know that they had the best people at CW Post, to tell you the truth, so I'm one big fan.
Julie (16:39):
The irony in here is just so ... it's just dripping because of your Martech. I'm sure you were probably just way ahead of them even then without actually knowing it.
Shelly (16:48):
That's kind. Maybe, I don't know.
Julie (16:50):
[inaudible 00:16:50], I'm sure. Plus, you had the practical experience that I'm sure most didn't have about working in the store, which you're going to pick up on it just because you're retail. To your point, you did it, you didn't love it, and you said that there was, what was it? I would term it as holy shit moment, where you had to come to grips with the fact that this just wasn't your destiny and you were going to have, to have a hard conversation with your dad.
Shelly (17:14):
Oh, Julie, let me tell you. My father has passed away 12 years. There's not a day that goes by that I don't miss him. He was my very best friend in the world, and he was my number one fan. He really was amazed, always, at the level that I would take my music and the technology around the music and the things I would do with it. I made more money as a teenager writing music and producing music than my father made owning a music store and mail order company. To tell you the truth, it was a really tough conversation, because he didn't really understand what I wanted to do, because in his mind, a working musician played club dates and weddings and bar mitzvahs.
I had opportunities to write commercials and to do some work for some film companies and some advertising agencies that had all come through my high school sweetheart's father's lawyer. I had to sit down with my father and tell him that I was not going to be president of Freeport Music. I want to tell you, I've never had a harder conversation before or since. He was oddly supportive of it, but he wasn't. What I mean by that is he was very supportive of my decision and did not push back at all. But in hindsight, I know that it devastated him because it was something he really wanted, and that's what hurt. It wasn't that I wasn't going to do it, and it wasn't that he didn't ultimately ... and by the way, the flip side of that is, when he semi-retired, he came to work for me, and he was COO and then CFO for like 10 years before he got ill and had to really retire.
But in practice, it was hurting him that bothered me. His reaction was, go and get help, get it done. I'm behind you, but you could see like he was crestfallen because my brother was into another thing. My brother went to accounting school and became a CPA. I was the help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope. It was me or it was nobody. He had felt like ... you could see he worked his whole life and he didn't want to sell the business. In fact, we didn't sell the business until two weeks before his death. We didn't sell the business.
Julie (19:58):
Oh my. That's amazing. I know your dad, you said he understood, but there was a moment there, wast there? Where he understood and he supported you emotionally, perhaps, but he wasn't going to support you financially [crosstalk 00:20:18].
Shelly (20:17):
Yeah. Well, there was that. He was like, I'm not paying for school if you're going to go to music school. I ended up rebelling. You can-
Julie (20:25):
Because you're 20 or whatever, right? Of course.
Shelly (20:28):
Yeah, you could be a jerk when you're young. I'm still a jerk, but you could be a real jerk when you're young. I desperately wanted an education that was formal. I wasn't self-taught. I don't want anyone to think that. My mother and father were bonafide, no kidding music teachers, and I had a bunch of other music teachers on top of that. They kept me pretty well-educated. It wasn't like I didn't have a really complete and rigorous both classical Broadway on pop training. I had all of that, but I wanted to go to school for it. I knew there were other levels. Michael Brecker was a few years older than me. He's passed away. David Sanborn, these guys were playing saxophone in ways that I only dreamed about playing saxophone, and they had musical conception that was really interesting, and the chromatic harmony was interesting.
In Berkeley, in Boston, this music school was happening. North Texas State University had the One O'Clock Lab Band, and it was like the greatest band ever. It was incredible jazz. You could go and play and learn about ... I just wanted to go be part of ... I wanted to hang out with those musicians and I wanted to be part of that. I was young. That was the cutting edge of harmonic exploration, that was the cutting edge of technique, that was the cutting edge of everything musically, and I wanted to go there, and he was having none of it, so I rebelled.
Julie (21:53):
You rebel by ...
Shelly (21:55):
I went Marine Biology School for a summer. I decided I'm going to go scuba dive. I'm done. I'm not playing music. I'm not doing anything. I'll play some weekends and I'm going to go become a marine biologist.
Julie (22:05):
Yeah. [inaudible 00:22:06].
Shelly (22:07):
By the way, I love dolphins and I'm a big fan of scuba diving and I'd been certified. I think I'm a certified dive master. I'd been scuba diving since the age of, whatever they'd let you, 12 years old, 14 years old, whatever it was back then. But it was really a healthy hearty up yours from me. In hindsight, it was really stupid, to tell you the truth.
Julie (22:30):
Oh, but you got it out of your system, right?
Shelly (22:33):
I did. I definitely did.
Julie (22:35):
You went to NYU, didn't you?
Shelly (22:37):
Yeah, right after that. Basically, I thought I would go work on the transatlantic cable as a scuba diver, as a hard hat diver. I walked in, and the first thing the guy says to me is, "What are you going to do on disability?" I'm like, "Hey, man, I just got here. What do you mean disability?" He goes, "Well, 80% of the people in this program leave within six months on disability." I said, "Well, what are the maladies that happened? You don't get the bands, you decompress." He goes, "Yeah. It's not that. Punctured eardrum is number one." I'm like, "Sorry, I'm done."
Julie (23:03):
Oh my God.
Shelly (23:05):
I'm done. He's like, okay. A friend of mine had told me that TV school at NYU was the best in the country if I didn't want to go to the West Coast, maybe to UCLA or USC or one of the California schools. We're Syracuse, so if I wanted to be in the city, NYU was like an amazing film school, and this guy, Haig Manoogian was incredible instructor, filmmaker was the head of that program, and you had to audition. You're fearless when you're a kid. I'd taken one semester of television in high school at that point, one semester, and I liked it. So, I thought, TV school that's for me, and off I went.
Julie (23:48):
Again, it's the luxury we have when we're young. Right? That's my kids in college, I'm like, "Do whatever you want. This is your chance." You graduated there and you met Don Elliott, famous jazz musician. That changed your life. No?
Shelly (24:02):
It was a total transformation of my world. I was really into electronic music. I got my first synthesizer, a Moog system 2 serial number 002 in 1972. The first thing I did to it was I build a way to store the data from the analog controls digitally, and be able to replicate those by replacing some of the components with digital components in my analog synthesizer, I was so into electronics and electronic music and recording and multi-track. Homemade track systems were really just coming to the fore. People were just starting to build project studios and home studios, and I was committed, committed, committed to this. I started in '78. I was still in school. I went to the bank to take a $5,000 loan to buy gear, and they wanted me to have $5,000 to put into the $10,000 worth of equipment I wanted to buy.
I thought I would go figure out how to earn that. My grandmother wrote me that check for $5,000 with a big kiss, and she said, "Look, go get it done." I had built this incredible home studio, really cutting edge for its day. When I was still in school, I was looking for some additional equipment, and there was an ad in the paper for this gear. 80 West 40th street was where the studio and that was a vaguely familiar address to me because I'd been playing around town. I get there and it's Don Elliott studio, and there was this ARP Odyssey sitting next to a Roland SH-1000, and I want the Odyssey, and he's got it on the paper for 400 bucks, and it was like a $1,200 synthesizer, and it looked like it was brand new. It looked like never been touched. I said, "Look, I brought the cash with me." I said, "You don't mind if I try it out."
I sat down and I just ran it through its paces to make sure that it was okay, because why is it 400 bucks? It's $1,200 bucks. I got to give him the money. He said, "Why do you want this one? It doesn't do this, it doesn't do that." I'm like, "It does all of that." I showed him why it did. I said, this box to the left, this little SH-1000 is a toy. This is the real deal. Even this is a toy compared to ... it's pre-wired. Even this is a toy compared to what I would normally use. I just like this because it's really fast. I handed him the 400 bucks, he goes, "It's not for sale." And I'm like, "What do you mean it's not for sale?" He was like, "You're coming to work for me." I said, "How does that work?" He goes, "Well, A, I'm giving this to you. B, you're making a hundred bucks a week. As a writer rep, you're going to make a hundred phone calls a day, and anything you bring in, you can write a demo for and you're starting now."
Julie (26:56):
Wow.
Shelly (26:59):
He had me playing a recording session with that particular piece of equipment a day later for Mercedes-Benz. I'll never forget, is my first super pro you know, where every musician in the room was someone I'd heard of from the radio. It's amazing. That was, plus, maybe is the beginning of my senior year, somewhere in that area. By the end of my senior year, I was working for him and I had a choice, go off to AFI. Marty Brest and Marty Scorsese were my sponsors in California, or go work for Don, and I was making real money working for Don. I thought, do I want to stay in school and learn to make movies, or do I want to go play music every day for this guy who seems to have an unending amount of work that ... and I learned more when this guy just picked up his horn to play or sat down to write an arrangement. That was the master's degree that I wanted in music right there. I couldn't resist it. It was the greatest job ever.
Julie (28:03):
It's funny because if somebody like, say would be like, "Well, do you want to go for something that Martin Scorsese is sponsoring, or do you want to go ..." many people be like, oh, but this was without that Don Elliott experience, and I want you to tell the story of sort of the turning point that you had with Don a little bit later and how that pivoted you to where you are, but it's fascinating that you were able to have the foresight of like, and I don't know how popular was Scorsese [crosstalk 00:28:32].
Shelly (28:32):
He was giant fan. This is one of the most famous students. We had him, Woody Allen, Marty Brest, Chris Columbus, that's Haig's progeny. Those guys are ... If you have talent, and they did, Haig had a way to just make you better at everything you did. The lessons from Haig Manoogian were amazing. Mark Charnock, another TV teacher there was incredible. David Sirota, main incredible staff at NYU. You know what's funny, Julie? I always think about that decision. When people say, do you have any regrets or do you ever think back on your life, what you would have changed, that was a really pivotal decision. I didn't know it at the time, then I met Don, but when I had to make the decision, go out to the West Coast in 1979, or go to work full-time for Don in New York City in Westport, it was very clearly going to shape the rest of my life. Very clearly.
And I made the decision in a funny way. No one could counsel me on it because no one really knew what I knew about myself. I didn't know much about myself at the time. I thought, I don't know if I make good television or good movies. I'm learning to make, to tell good stories. I'm learning to tell them with pictures. Clearly, I'm top of my class, but that doesn't mean anything. These are talented kids, but that's not the real world. I don't know if I have an innate gift to be a great director, but I know if I'm sitting home by myself, or I'm just walking around, I'll come up with an original piece of music, and I can store that little song fragment, or that tone poem, and I can then turn it into real cash.
I have no problem originally thinking up billions of melodies, different orchestrations, different ways to create interesting sounds. I'm obviously a natural musician. I don't know if I'm natural filmmaker. Maybe I should give myself the best chance of success by sticking around and working with this guy who basically I thought was a genius in every way. Don was just a genius. It was amazing to watch him work. Literally, the guy oozed musical thought. One of his best friends was Quincy Jones, and not to drop crazy names ...
Julie (30:48):
Oh, but it's so fun. [crosstalk 00:30:50].
Shelly (30:50):
You'd be up at Dawn's house in Westport and there'd be a knock at the door, and Quincy would be there with his trumpet. The two of these guys would sit down and be playing piano, and these two guys were playing trumpet and that's what we do for a night. How do you get that? How do you get that anywhere? I don't know if you get that in school, but that's what I got working with Don. It was kind of a crazy choice, and I just made it. I've never regretted it, but I've often thought how different my life would be if I went to Los Angeles, took two years of AFI. AFI, at the time, was a year of television production and a year of film production. You needed to be sponsored, you needed to audition. I'd covered all that. That was easy.
The hard part was going to be, is that how you want to spend your life? Is that what you want to do? I had relatives living in Los Angeles. It wouldn't have been a hardship to move out there. I could have gone and done it. It would have been a very different world for me. I'm not unhappy in any way, and I've got absolutely not one thing in the universe to regret, but that was ... when you talk about your holy shit moments, very often you don't know when you're having one, this one, I was quite well aware that this was a, hmm, whatever decision you make now is going to have a pretty substantial impact on your worldview.
Julie (32:05):
Well, I think all of us are glad that you chose that. I don't know where you'd be, but I know our lives are richer for having your choice. Tell the story about being with Don and what you learned, and what that ... because I don't want to ruin the surprise, but that experience and how it ended and what [crosstalk 00:32:26].
Shelly (32:25):
Well, the experience itself was fantastic, in that I learned things about myself and I learned things about my ... he knew more about what I was capable of than I did. I've always thought that that was an amazing managerial skill. It had a big impact on me when I've managed teams and I've managed my own staff, being able to really deeply understand and believe in your team and have them stretch really far and get a little out of their comfort zone, and then rejoice in them, either succeeding or learning from the mistake and structuring an environment where that is encouraged. It seems to grow people better and it seems to get better outcomes. At the end of my Don Elliott story, it doesn't end as nicely as I wanted it to. Don went on vacation with his family, and I was left alone with his office manager to run the company for a week or so.
I brought in a job and I did the work, and there was a lot to it. You had to go sell it, and then you had to write the demo, then you had to do the demo, then you had to present it to the client, and the client had to say yes or no and get the ... All this was very compressed because this one particular commercial had to be done very quickly. Don gets back on the very day of the session, not two weeks after this process. He comes in and he sings in the background, which got him paid, because background singing back in the day was a pretty lucrative thing to do on a jingle. Solo singing was really lucrative, but background singing pay your rent for quite a while, even on one spot that was going to run nationally, and I got a check for $1,042 and change, I think 18 cents on a much, much, much, much, much, much bigger budget.
I asked where the rest of the money was. Was this my session fee, was this ... because I had brought the job in, arranged it produced it, played on it, sang on it. I did everything. He basically walked in, sight read a part of the background thing. Anyway, he said to me at that time, that's your fee, that's your pay. I protested. Julie, you've been very kind to me on this call, but you and I both know that I'm not known to be bashful or shy, I'll put it that way, and I do speak my mind. You probably cannot imagine the ego and arrogance of a 20 some odd year old Shelly Palmer. It's hard to describe what a total asshole I was as a kid. It really is. It was all based in the fact that I suffered no fools. I didn't understand why people couldn't do certain things.
I always projected my own skills on others. Assuming, man, you can't do this? What are you telling me it's going to take you an hour. This is a five minute thing. What are you doing? I was that kind of person. I'm not proud of it. It's just who I was. I ripped up the check. I handed it to Don. I said, you're going to need this more than I will and I walked out.
Julie (35:33):
Yep. What happened then?
Shelly (35:36):
Well, the next day, Shelly Palmer productions went live. The biggest mistake of my life. Oh my God, was that a lesson that I would ... I took my demo reel, the stuff I'd written, and I had a fairly decent body of work at that point, and I started going out to people who I knew in the business that I had played reels for. A guy named Bill [Ardipe 00:36:05] at WB Doner in Baltimore, that agency pretty much set me straight. I go down to Baltimore from New York, take the train and I go to his office and I play on the tape, and I show him what I'm doing. I said, "Look, I'm not working with Don anymore. I've struck out on my own." I was proud. This is maybe a week or so after the separation. Bill says to me, "Man, I got to tell you. You're you're not getting hired here."
I said, "I understand you have allegiance to Don." He goes, "I'm not allegiance to Don or anybody else. You're not getting hired here." "Why?" He says, "If this song that you're going to write for me, this original song, there's so many variables in my life. I'm about to spend $30 million airing this commercial. If anything goes wrong, I need to say I had [inaudible 00:36:52] shoot the video, I had Don Elliott do the audio. It's like, everything was set up to succeed. Steven Spielberg himself did the production design. I'm not getting fired. But if one thing is out of whack, some kid no one's ever heard of and has no real credits, like I used you to do this, I'm going to get my ass fired, and you know what? I don't like you that much."
He was so honest with me that it was really one of the best, worst meetings of my life. It was that classic. Well, you need experience to get experience. You have to get experience. It was that terrible cycle where no one's hiring you, but you need to be hired to get hired. I did what any normal human being would do when faced with a level of adversity that you just can't imagine. At the time, a demo was a $500 bill to the ad agency. You would charge them 500 bucks for a demo. It was standardized. Everybody did it. Nobody worked for free. Everybody worked for $500, and no one was hiring me. What I did was I made my demo fee $2,500. Now, this was ridiculous. This was insane. It was five times the industry best practice, and it was the kind of money you'd pay if you were going to have a band come in commissioned to do something that was like the next level up before you did the final.
This was crazy. I would make a point of saying to everyone, we charge $2,500 for our demos, and everyone would stop and go, "What, wait a minute. I thought you were kidding. We only pay 500. That's what the industry ..." "Yeah. I'm really the best in the world at what I do, and I'm not going to work for 500 bucks. If you want it, with $2,500." This became such a scandalous thing to say. About three months go by, and I'm thinking to myself, maybe this strategy is not so good, and an agency calls up. Their client is IBM Tri-State Employees Federal Credit Union, and their tagline is, where you belong. I was like, wow. Okay, and they said, "Well, we've got your $2,500." I thought they were kidding. I lit, Julie, I swear to God, I thought they were kidding.
Then at the end of the phone call, when they commissioned the job, the woman says to me, "And Shelly, this $2,500, it's very irregular. This better be," and sh and this is in quotes, Julie, "this is going to be fucking great."
Julie (39:21):
I'm sure you [inaudible 00:39:24].
Shelly (39:25):
When you think about it, it is just one of the funnier moments in my life. After that, after that went on the air and a couple of things all hit, then we were in business, but wow, that first six to eight months when you could not get arrested with my resume, which was a decent resume, but it was very obvious. I'm a little kid working out of his spare bedroom, and it wasn't a time in the world where little kids working out of the spare bedrooms were well-respected. Today, you can have a start-up, the classic three kids in a garage, be a startup, and everyone's going, you could be a unicorn. Back then, you were a little kid working out of your spare bedroom.
Julie (39:59):
No glamor around it.
Shelly (40:01):
It wasn't. It wasn't anywhere near as glamorous as it is today. But yeah, and look, I did reconnect with Don just before he passed away, and we had a kind of a beautiful moment. He and I spoke very, very frankly about our feelings for one another. It was really quite lovely. I miss him a lot. We didn't talk for a while after that because I was an idiot. I don't know, but we did reconnect just before he passed away. I was very happy to have that closure. I can't say enough good things about him. I really can't even. Even the way we split was a good education for me, and my reaction to leaving there taught me more about what I was going to have to do every day, the rest of my life, which is get up every morning, and no matter how many nos you hear, one of them is going to be a yes. Just 10 nos equal a yes, 20 knows equal a yes, 50 nos equal a yes.
Somewhere in there, just get out of bed and just go hit it. You have no choice. I think that was pretty formative for me back then. That's 79 80, but boy, I'll tell you what, it feels like it was yesterday.
Julie (41:13):
That it does. Well, you had said too, you told the ... In that touching story with Don, and as he was on those last few days, as he was being used to coming to pancreatic cancer, I think you had said, and when he had said that, he'd kind of ... When he'd taken you aside and he'd said, "Look, take it or leave it. I got a whole bunch of [crosstalk 00:41:32]. I got 26 people lined up behind you where you came from, no big deal, and you ripped up the check is that it was ... He was bluffing, right?
Shelly (41:42):
Yeah. He was. He said as much, and I am embarrassed to say it, but like I said, it was a very personal, beautiful moment. But he basically said to me, "Look, Shelly, I was bluffing there. You're a unique talent, and I was an idiot to let you out of here, and I should have called you up and told you that a long time ago." It was very tearful. It was. I don't think of myself as particularly more talented or less talented than anybody else, because no matter how talented you are, Julia, it's only a part of the puzzle. Luck is really important, and working your ass off to make some luck is even more important. I think to be the greatest, most talented human being in the world, you sitting in your house playing music, it's not going to help you or anybody else. Learning to hustle or being forced in that ... Also, when you were a little bit lucky in the lucky DNA club, you don't have the same kind of failures that others have.
You have different failures. They're no less profound. In fact, in many ways, they're equally or more profound, but you do have different failures. I don't ever doubt my ability to do something that's inside my skillset, but I will often doubt the process around presenting those skills. It's like, there's so many ways you can screw up. If you just rely on your talent, there are some people who are even more talented and they're able to do that. You can name them. They're superstars, narcissistic, crazy people who are just famous for doing one thing brilliantly, and everybody loves that thing. But these people are one in a million, or one in 10 million. You can name them. They're stars. Read People Magazine, they're in that magazine. Read Us Weekly, they're there. The rest of us, poor stiffs, who are not in that league, so you get some good musical skills and some ability to do some mathematics and you get a decent business acumen. Okay, that's a pretty good hand. That's what I've been dealt. What are you gonna do with it? What are you going to do with it?
Julie (43:58):
I know, look, what I love about you is that you're so raw and honest. You know you have a talent. I think some people don't ... some people, yes, have no problem proclaiming their talent, but you don't have any problems saying like, yes, I'm really good at these things. But if you listen to your story, people tried to pull you off and dissuade you every step of the way. Not necessarily in a malicious way. Your dad first, out of love and concern and really believing it was the best thing for you, but you had to push yourself there the entire way through school, all your stories there, even with Don and choosing to go on your own and the thousands of nos you got before you got a yes. Yours is a story of dedication and perseverance, and the holy shit moments were there. This is exactly why I do this. You're the perfect example of not dissuading you, but making you just reinvest and reinforced that you're not going to let those things stand in your way.
Shelly (45:04):
Well, Julie, I got to tell you, I never thought about it that way until COVID, because this is the fourth reinvention of my career. None of them have been by choice. They just haven't been. At a certain point, you say to yourself, the skill isn't any of the ones you think you have, the skill is an open enough mind to adapt. You have to be able to adapt to the stimulus. You have to be able to see the field for, as it is and just try to take some bets and be willing to be wrong and not beat yourself up about it. Because you're going to be wrong. It's part of this. Being wrong more than you're right, if you're honest with yourself, everybody likes to put their best foot forward and say, look at me, I'm a super success, and it's like really? How many times did you screw that up before you got it right?
If they say it was, they got it right on the first time, then it could happen. That's fantastic. God bless. Congrats. But I rarely meet people who are super successful, or even moderately successful, who haven't just adapted and adapted and persevered, and just kept doing it every day. Just keep doing it. Yeah, this is, like I said, I don't think I appreciated resiliency and adaptability quite as much prior to this. This has been tough. Fantastic.
Julie (46:40):
But tough.
Shelly (46:41):
But tough, and fascinating, because if I'm honest with myself, I'm back in the business I started in. Not the music part, the creative services part. Literally, what I did when I opened up my production company. We're back doing that combined with strategy and we've evolved with the tools as the tools have evolved over time, and I'm really quite thankful for that, because it's that arsenal of weapons that we have right now that are making this an embarrassingly good time for us, even though it's tragic for so many of our friends and tragic for the world and America and everything else. We are doing really well right now.
Julie (47:28):
Yeah. Well, and I think, but that's not ... I mean, that's not by accident either. Look, I could have four episodes with you on this, because we haven't even gotten to all the how you built your current company, and now it's a family company. Your kids are also prodigies, at least for Jared and ... that I'm [crosstalk 00:47:53].
Shelly (47:53):
I'm very lucky there. Very, very blessed.
Julie (47:57):
But I don't know that it's all lucky. Look, they're lucky to have been born to you, but I'm sure they work equally as hard. Because [crosstalk 00:48:06].
Shelly (47:57):
They're hardworking kids.
Julie (48:07):
They're smart. I'm super impressed by them, but when you talk about all these different reinventions, I'm sure there's a ton of holy shit moments, but why do you think, just as we end, what do you think ... when you're saying you guys are really successful, again, I don't think it's by luck, I think it's purpose, because you have what people need, and I think that that's what's interesting about you, is you are always on the forefront. Even digitally, like the music that you talked about, you were always a little bit ahead, or a lot ahead, I guess, in many cases, but do you think that that's what's happening now? What do you attribute this success you're having to?
Shelly (48:48):
A little bit of blood of sweat and tears in that understanding ... empathy, I think is the key to what's happening now, being empathetic to the things people are feeling, and they're needing, and you said it's a family business. My daughter, Alexis, runs the company. She has a very high EQ, way higher than mine, and I think having her as a young mom of two and seeing her balance the world and seeing how she interacts and how she teaches her daughters and what ... well, just being part of that over the last ... my oldest granddaughter is 12. The last 12 years I've watched this very, very carefully and been a big part of it, and it is a family business. We're very proud of that. That level of empathy, understanding where people are in pain and how you can help, that's part of it. The other part is my definition of success, Julie, has changed.
I would never self identify as a business person. I haven't for years. Someone says, what do you do for a living? I almost always say I'm a father and a grandfather. Those are my first most important jobs. I am a completely inadequate husband, but that would be my third job. Then the rest of this is I do in order to help feed my family by solving problems that other people have. In order to solve those problems, to be successful with solving problems, you need to be quite empathetic to what those problems are, and then come in with real solutions that are trustable now, because trust is such an issue. I think empathy and reputation, understanding what the issues are that we're trying to solve for, and then offering real solutions as opposed to lip service solutions.
The reason that we're able to do that now, and the reason I'm very pleased with where we are, and not at all, really not at all embarrassed by what I would consider a fairly successful 2020, is that we use the tools and the equipment and the methods and the workflows and the processes that we teach and/or sell in our practice. There's no book learning here. There's just a lot of experience. It's that, that makes this work. It's like, nobody is talking to you, hypothetically, or pedantically, or demagogue ... there's no, hey, I read this in a book. This might work for you. [inaudible 00:51:53] read this in a book, we've done this. This is when it works. This is when it doesn't. This problem you have, it looks like this one. This is a pretty decent approach. Here's some tools, here's some workflow, here's some process. We think we can help you solve this issue.
That has been really, really good for us. The other thing is we try to use all of the technology we've ever accumulated and apply it to the current issue that everyone's having in business. How do you meet? How do you have serendipity? How do you get together? How do you communicate? How do you not get Zoom fatigue? How do you build a world where travel budgets may be reduced forever by 25%, 30% or 40%? What does it mean to sit at your desk and go meeting after meeting, and what kind of workflows have to happen? How can you be super productive? How could you be on brand? How could you not go out of your mind while you're doing it? That's the kind of stuff where there are technologies that can be applied, and knock on wood, we will handle on a lot of it. A great team, unbelievable people work in here.
This is what we've been working on, so it's like us meeting history. Again, my definition of success has changed. It's not financial success only. It's how much good can you actually do in the universe and get the good karma going. That's success. The rest of it takes care of itself.
Julie (53:19):
I agree. I agree. I think, and I feel the same about defining success, and I think that that just comes with age and wisdom hopefully from having maybe pursued the false gods, as they say.
Shelly (53:33):
Yeah, I don't disagree.
Julie (53:37):
But I think it's great, and I do think that's something about this COVID era allows us to maybe appreciate that more, because the distractions of have somewhat gone away and we've had to really live with ourselves. I hope that there's some good that comes out of this.
Shelly (53:52):
Look, Julie, I miss people. We all do. I miss the way we used to live, and this is not forever, but it's going to be for a while. Everybody, I think, is just trying to find a way to have something that feels normal or whatever, to find the new normal. I think we're all in the same boat. Whether you believe in ... you can't ... look, the politics of this are insane, so I'm not going to even try to explain any of that. But at the end of the day, no matter how you feel about this, the world has changed, and not for the good, I might add.
Julie (54:28):
Yup. Not necessarily so. Right, agreed. Yeah. All right, my friend, I have taken it so much of your time, but this has been such a great session. I know people are gonna love it. I know you and I still love it. I can't get enough, so thank you for sharing so much of your story with us. I know people will really be inspired by it.
Shelly (54:48):
Well, I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you, Julie. Always, you're a very special human being and you are brilliant in every way. I was humbled to be asked and I was happy to be able to spend some time with you today.
Julie (55:00):
Thank you so much.