We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amy Lubbesmeyer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Amy, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I grew up in a small rural town where life as a child felt easy and fun. Surrounded by rolling fields of sunkissed corn, thick forests of evergreens and wildlife, and countless lakes to swim in. Days spent riding bikes on dirt roads and nights spent catching fireflies. Parents who had an ease to them and deep love for each other that was obvious as you’d catch them stealing a kiss in the kitchen while one of them was cooking dinner. A childhood Narnia looking back.
I’ve always been very thankful for this childhood. It’s not lost on me at all how lucky I was to feel so loved and protected. To be provided the freedom to roam but the safety and stability that a good homelife offers.
It’s that ease of life, that romanticized idea of family and home that I struggled with when going into my early 20’s. Everything felt so easy for everyone around me. The colleges they chose, the major’s they picked, then the grades they got. I spent many years in my early 20’s still trying to figure out who I was when everyone around me seemed to already know. These insecurities crept in quietly in the dark spaces of my life; a constant reminder that I’m not good enough.
But I’ve always been a fighter, often to a fault. Tell me I can’t do something and I’ll likely break a bone trying to prove you wrong. I recall the Presidential Fitness awards in grade school. Where you compete (unofficially) in 5 levels of various fitness tests in order to “qualify” & receive the biggest and best award of them all… the Presidential Fitness Award. Every year, I pushed myself to be with those at the top of the class, but one year I was hellbent on beating the boys. If I could just get one more sit up or one more pullup than the top boy in my class, I’d be happy. It wasn’t because I had to be the best or really believed in these fitness goals, it was because earlier in the year a group of boys had made fun of me in gym class and there was NO WAY I was going down without a fight.
It’s that fire inside me that ignites when I’m backed into a corner, or told I can’t do something, or expected to accept someone else’s idea of what’s good enough for me. I’ve had that fire for as long as I can remember; family and friends joke that it comes from my fiery red hair.
I spent many years hearing how I wasn’t good enough across all sorts of personal and professional situations. I’ve been told to let the men speak (literally), been referred to as a “backup dancer” when introduced as a professional speaker at a media press conference by a male peer, and been told to forfeit an office for an “equally important” (but clearly not) male counterpart. I’ve been paid the same as a male direct report, had paperwork thrown in my face, and told my ideas were dumb. And each time small pieces of insecurities crept in. Building its own army to take me down; an inside job.
I chased small moments of happiness and excitement. Many of which fizzled out before they made any sort of impact but some took root, weaving tiny little bits of happiness and fulfillment around the gaps and crevices of those insecurities that had made their way in. Slowly slithering and sliding through the dark maze I had created of all the bad things, the things I believed to be true.
This space that grows, that part that is fueled by a fire, is a catalyst for pushing myself past self doubt, beyond the fears, and out of reach of the haters. Where curiosity flourishes and a passion builds. This is where resilience lives.
I often think of this line from a poem I read in my teens, “Walk with the Grace of an adult, not the grief of a child.” It’s what helps push me through the hard and even harder times… unexpectedly losing my mom when I was 26 & had just begun to find my footings or when my entire industry of live events was the first to shut down and the last to come back during covid. Between that chaos is a space of choice – either take the grief or emerge with Grace. This is resilience.
Me? When my mom died I went back to college to get my degree. She was my fuel. This quirky and misunderstood girl that had wandered through life was in pain & alone in a brand new city. It catapulted me to have the drive and passion to live my life instead of letting life happen to me. When covid hit I spent 14 months on furlough & instead of sleeping in and sitting on the couch every day, I created a business. I worked hard – many long days and anxiety ridden sleepless nights, but it was a big success in year one and only 3 years later, it’s thriving.
At times, I have to dig deep, and I won’t get it right every single time, but somewhere deep inside, among the dark crevices of insecurities, that little country girl is riding her bike barefoot to go tell all the haters she made it.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I’ve spent the last 15 years working in live events but I’ve spent my entire life around music. I have memories as a kid sitting in front of my fathers speakers while he played records. Legs folded, elbow on my knees just sitting on our brown shag carpet staring at this speaker on the floor in front of me. It felt like it towered above me as the music playing took up all the space around me. It had this little Kenwood emblem near the bottom corner that I would twirl and twirl in circles with my pointer finger as I went deeper and deeper into the music. So much so that I left a perfect little circle of scratches where the emblem rotated; sorry dad.
Music has always drummed up emotions for me – good and bad. I often refer to parts of my life by what song or artist I was listening to at the time; a soundtrack to my life. And it’s never been one genre or style, it’s whatever I’m drawn to at the time; it would be a DJ’s nightmare if it were a real playlist. haha!
I landed myself in the industry about 15 years ago after hustling to get my foot in the door at a local promoter. I am not musically talented, but I was determined to find a place for me in this space as a career, and leaning on my marketing talents was the way in.
After well over a decade of managing concert and brand marketing at independent promoters, multiple venues, and national promoters like Live Nation, I made the scary but exciting decision to start my own event and concert marketing company, Lanai Marketing. We specialize in comprehensive marketing strategies and executions for anyone in the live event space – Artists, Tours, Promoters,Venues & Special Events. I’ve marketed thousands of shows & events across the country, been on tour with Artists handling day to day marketing and media needs, built VIP Experiences, and supported Album Launches. The industry is fast-paced, which everyone says, but I don’t think you quite understand until you live and breathe ‘Rock and Roll’. I’m wired for chaos and anyone in the industry knows that’s the theme for most days.
It’s not for everyone and being a woman in this industry can be difficult. I’ve certainly experienced many things along the way that weren’t ideal and I’ve grown to learn those boundaries and position myself and my company to be built on integrity with a heavy dose of fun and creativity. At the end of the day, we’re producing concerts and helping our clients sell every single ticket possible for maximum success from Agent & Artist to Promoter, Venue and Fan. It’s a wild ecosystem and it’s often a moving target but Lanai Marketing has aligned with great clients and peers and has a proven track record of increasing sales and visibility.
Just last year, a Lanai Marketing client increased ticket sales by over a staggering 400% and grew their organic social media reach by 80%. This was over the course of 14 months of strategizing and building a solid relationship.
I am no longer sitting on shag carpet spinning scratches into my dads speakers, but I am still consumed by music and all the emotions and colors it brings – from Artist to Fan.
Find us at lanaimarketing.com or go give us a follow @lanaimarketing on socials, we’d love to connect!
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Lesson One: Take the time on the frontend
Put the time and attention to carefully craft your message, or put your document together, or enter information into a project management tool. Take the time now, so that you and others don’t waste time in the long run. To me, not only does it save you time but it saves your team or your clients time as well, which is one of the best ways you can show respect to your relationships. Every single person is busy these days and it’s no one else’s job to effectively communicate for you.
Lesson Two: Enforce Boundaries
I struggle with this one still myself sometimes. I am available to my clients, team & peers at any given moment which can breed some bad habits that lead to ineffective communication and inefficiencies. They are hard to come back from once you let them go on for far too long. So have the hard conversations before it’s too late and have a clearly defined scope of work that you can refer back to if needed. Boundaries aren’t meant necessarily to do less work or be unavailable, but rather to help keep efficiencies and reinforce deliverables. Setting boundaries has a positive impact on things like maintaining the quality and integrity of the work being produced, promoting accountability within workgroups, managing expectations, and preserving resources which all have a positive impact on you, the company, the project and/or the client.
Lesson Three: Just eat the damn cake
Take the risk, lean into the fear and what will be will be. No one is going to make the hard decisions for you. You are your biggest champion & also your biggest roadblock. Approach your communication, your business, your relationships with the attention and care that they deserve. Embrace the losses and celebrate the wins. Eat the cake.
All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?
It would be better if there were 2 of me. haha My time is not a renewable resource & it’s one of the biggest challenges I have right now as I experience some growing pains. The live events industry truly changes constantly. All advertising is hinged on ticket sales; you can only plan for so much. If a show or event sells well directly out of the gate, you shouldn’t have much to do for the entire lifecycle of a show, but that ‘best case scenario’ isn’t realistic for many shows. There are many factors that go into why someone purchases a ticket, including things like if the venue has parking, what the weather is like, pricing, sentiment of brand, relevancy of artist, ticket fees, neighborhood of the venue and many many other things that are often out of your control. Ticket sales are never guaranteed and venues and promoters are taking a huge risk when they purchase the show. It’s my job to roll up my sleeves and find that audience to sell every ticket that I possibly can so that come show day, we know that no stone was left unturned. Especially in a marketing landscape that can be a vast black hole. There are more and more ways to communicate with an audience but that also brings oversaturation. It gets harder and harder to break through all the noise and be heard. First you have to reach your audience and next you have to convince them to buy the ticket.
Outside of needing to clone myself I’ve had to learn to be exceptionally efficient. Set standards and practices that help bring general repetitive tasks to a more digestible approach. I also rely on some technology and automations (aka I’m OBSESSED with Airtable) that help me with organization, reminders, and automations. Setting some boundaries with Clients has also helped here, as it’s really easy to just help out extra this one time, or provide this extra report here and there, but it all adds up. It’s time taken away from the actual work, from other Clients and from my personal time. Lanai Marketing has also recently hired a new Marketing Coordinator which is super exciting. It’s funny to look back at how difficult I felt that decision was to break off a budget to hire another person, but the benefits greatly outweigh that stress. I should have done that much much sooner; you know…”eaten the damn cake.”
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lanaimarketing.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lanaimarketing/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lanaimarketing
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amylubbesmeyer/
