"My drug of choice is creating things."
Interview w/ Harley Yanoff, serial entrepreneur & Founder of Broadway From Home
Want to start a podcast? Here’s why you should do it even if “everyone has a podcast now.”
In this issue, you’ll find an interview with Harley Yanoff, serial entrepreneur and Founder of Broadway From Home.
I also included some interesting stories I came across this week.
Thanks for reading Exponomy!
"My drug of choice is creating things."
Harley is an actor and entrepreneur in various industries, including arts and entertainment, catering, and real estate. He launched his first venture when he was still in college: a theater summer camp for kids, which has been running for over thirteen years. When in-person events got canceled, Harley decided to offer a version of the theater camp online... That's how he started Broadway From Home.
Harley: I was a theater art major in college, and I wanted to explore business opportunities around theater camps for kids. Every summer, I would go to one of those, and when I got old enough to become one of the camp's counselors, I started doing that as a summer job. I loved it. While in college, I started researching to maybe someday create my own summer theater camp. I ended up doing an honors thesis on the topic and spent the entire year working on it, making the business from A to Z and validating the idea. I had to do marketing and find a location, which was back in 2008, so the Internet wasn't as great as it is now! I reached out to local schools, met with their theater teachers, and gave surveys to the kids' parents asking what they wanted in a theater camp. By the spring, I had quite a bit of data.
And sure enough, I was cast in a movie at the time. I had a very tiny part in it, but it ended up getting a little bit of coverage. I think the local paper did a story about me because there's a photo of me with Dane Cook. And as part of this article, they had asked me what my plans were for senior year and after college, and I mentioned the theater camp.
Suddenly, I started getting emails from people who had read the article, asking for more information about this camp and how to sign up. Even if, at the time, it was just an idea, I think that's really when my entrepreneurial spirit started. I said, "Alright, let's just try it." So I spent $250 on an elementary website and replied to these people that they could sign up through that. I put together some materials, wrote some things out, and ended up getting about 13-14 kids for that first session.
I found some local people who wanted to teach with me and ended up making $8,000 that first summer, not bad for a 22-year-old kid! It opened two weeks after graduating college, and it was more money than I'd ever seen in my life. After that success, I created a fall program, and I moved to New York, where I would act throughout the year, and then come back to Boston, where I'd run the camp. That was 13 years ago, and to this date, we've had the program every summer.
In addition to that, I own a large catering and staffing company in New York City, a virtual event company, a real estate business, and Broadway From Home, a theatre arts virtual program that connects Broadway actors with kids from all over the world.
Pivoting during the pandemic
The majority of my business was catering and staffing, and I had this summer camp as well. When events got canceled, I was like, "Alright, I got to figure out something that can be done online."
I emailed some of the families that were regular customers of my in-person summer camp and asked them if they had any interest in doing a virtual program. All of the sudden, 30 people signed up. I called a friend of mine who's a Broadway performer, and she agreed to help me teach this program. Then we brought in a few other people to help with the content. It was definitely a group effort.
Besides, hiring a PR company was the best money I ever spent. Broadway From Home was a very timely company to start, so getting coverage was really easy. A significant amount of the success of BFM is due to that PR company who really got my face on a lot of news. That's the first time in my professional life that I ever paid for marketing!
What’s the biggest challenge you faced?
The first one was to understand video conferencing and convincing people that theater could work on it. You try to educate your consumer rather than show them that you can do something better than something already exists. It's much harder to educate when you've got nothing to base it on, and people are skeptical. We're asking them to pay money for a thing where their kid sits in front of a computer screen. You know, if you had said that to somebody a year ago, they'd think it was crazy, and nobody would do it. And then, you know, Zoom fatigue is real, both for the kids and the staff. It's tough to be in front of the screen, doing the same thing over and over again, but also engaging with kids and making sure that everybody feels special.
How do you see Broadway From Home evolving in the future?
We're focusing on full productions right now, where 10-11 kids from across the country put on a performance together. We have Broadway coaches help out with that. I think we will embrace the hybrid model in the future. Once it's safe to travel, we'll probably try to set up trips where these fans of ours, who are from all over the world, can maybe come in person and see a Broadway show or take an actual class in New York City. I think that's where this is going. But it'll probably expand to more of a one on one coaching environment where we'll be providing coaches for college auditions, for example. There's no concrete business plan for now, but it would probably be something like that if I was to predict where it would go.
How do you build a great team?
You need people that are passionate about what they're doing. People who are kind, understand business, solve problems quickly and work well with others. In terms of cultivating the team, the most critical factor is getting people with different skill sets that complement each other. For instance, if you have somebody who's really good at creating content and updating the website, it's great to have another person organizing and making sure that everything gets done.
How do you manage several projects at a time?
My drug of choice is creating things. It may sound strange, but I really love the idea of making money from nothing. Starting a business, a concept, something that people enjoy and use. Obviously, it's not all about money, but money is a big part of it. It has always been so much more enjoyable for me to create opportunities for myself and others than to slide into an existing role. And I think that's where I get my energy from.
In terms of organizing, I think delegating is essential. While I may have started a lot of these companies myself, I certainly don't run them all alone. I am very good at finding the right people and creating teams and people to assist with things. I'm not going to sit here and say that I am the best theatre teacher, the best actor in the world, or the best whatever. But what I am really good at is finding those people that are amazing at what they do and cultivating a team. In each company that I have, there's a point person, somebody who's running the day-to-day for the most part, and I'm able to check in with them, so I know everything's going on at all times.
But I think delegating and being able to not micromanage has been a really big part of the success. When you're starting a business, right at the very beginning, it's challenging to delegate if you're running it by yourself. When I start something new, like when I started Broadway From Home, I probably spent three or four months sleeping no more than four hours at night, because I needed to learn every single element of the business before I could delegate and pass it off to somebody else.
Having that point person is part of keeping it organized, but I'm also a big fan of pen and paper. I have a new piece of paper each day, and for each company, there's a list of specific things to do. Currently, eight different companies and projects are going on. This system allows me to have a clear vision of what I have to accomplish on any given day.
Your advice for aspiring entrepreneurs
To really start a business or any other project, I think you have to just do it and learn along the way without worrying so much about making sure everything is perfect. Many people will get burnt out overthinking and trying to validate their idea instead of actually doing it. Let's say you want to sell cookies. To do that, you have to make your cookie, go outside and start showing it to people rather than saying, "Alright, I've got to start a website, register this business, get this insurance, etc." By the time you do all that, you will either run out of money or be so exhausted by your own concept that you're not going to be excited about it anymore. I think being a little bit messy is good. You can still backtrack and clean everything up later down the road.
Connect with Harley on LinkedIn.
Reading List
❤️ An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Creating a Culture That People Love - Start it Up
💬 I Boosted My Twitter Profile by Using Famous Quotes as Tweets - Start it Up
🔍 Research: How to Get Better at Killing Bad Projects - Harvard Business Review
🤯 Could NFTs help the media, or are they just a sideshow? - Columbia Journalism Review