Business lessons from Billy Joel

The “Piano Man” played Pittsburgh last week.

A little older. A little less hair. And perhaps a bit slower rising from the bench since the last time he hung out with more than 40,000 folks at PNC Park.

Time waits for no one.

Nope. Not even guys like Billy Joel.

But if you operate a service business, teach in a school, or pretty much interact with people in any workplace, there are some timeless lessons we can glean from Joel’s performance: A three-step formula for how to keep your customers coming back.

Even more important, how to keep your customers singing your praises after each experience.

Joel’s process is simple, but as we encounter far too often, not everyone can pull it off. It takes skill. It takes intentionality. And it takes some humility.

While walking to the car after the show, I overheard a guy say, “I’ve seen a lot of concerts. But THAT was the best show I’ve seen in a long time.”

Billy Joel would simply call it another day at the office. And we have a tendency to forget that.

While we were singing along, holding hands with our best guy or gal, and gazing at the brilliant Super Moon hovering over the city’s skyline, Joel was hard at work.

It’s kinda weird when you think about it. Thousands of people gathered in a baseball stadium to watch some guy from the Bronx do his job. Even better, we all went home raving about his performance.

So, how could service providers and business owners take the best of Billy and make it work for their own success?

I jotted down three C’s that can help all of us:

CONSISTENCY

I’ve seen Joel perform in three different decades and he’s always the same guy. You know EXACTLY what you’re going to get when you purchase a ticket. Lots of hits. Lots of fun stories. Lots of great musicians to support him.

In a word, familiarity. We all crave it. No matter how long we’ve lived away from home, we want it to be the same when we return.

Business is no different.

You WANT the sauce to always taste the same at your favorite restaurant. If you’re on the garbage collector’s rotation of Thursday morning pickup, you DON’T want to see piles of chairs, plywood, and plastic bags still on your street at noon the next day. If the schedule says your favorite team is playing at 9pm, you don’t want to turn on the TV and see the regional cornhole championships airing.

The takeaway: We really don’t need to blow away our customers with “new,” “improved” or “enhanced.” Just deliver consistency. Being really good ALL the time is much better than being GREAT some of the time.

COMPETENCE

That said, you better be excellent at what you do. Customers can figure out a fraud pretty quickly. Billy Joel isn’t just a showman, he’s a master craftsman. With apologies to our old friends at the Yellow Pages, his fingers STILL do the talkin’ — even at age 73. The man can play the piano flawlessly without looking like he’s really trying.

Here’s what Billy Joel can teach us in this area: It takes a tremendous amount of effort to make a skill look effortless. The greatest compliment anyone can receive is for someone to remark, “You’re such a natural.”

If they only knew …

•The amount of preparation that goes into your craft

•The hours of training and practice

•The sacrifice of “good” to achieve “best”

Is Billy Joel talented? Absolutely. But that was determined by the genetic lottery. Your talent was, too. Yet our skill as leaders, performers, athletes, and business owners can be developed through training. In fact, with the right coaching and practice, we can build our skill BEYOND our talent level.

The takeaway: Talent is a gift. Building skill is a choice.

CHARACTER

Billy Joel knows who he is. Just two songs into the show, he paused to talk to the crowd. He reminded everyone that he hadn’t recorded an album since 1993.

“I don’t have anything new,” he cracked. “We’re gonna do the same old sh—t.”

And he did what he said he was going to do. For nearly two and half hours. On Thursday, he did it better than pretty much any 73-year-old in the world. And he’s been doing it better than most for more than 50 years.

On one hand, that’s incredible. On the other, it’s simply performance character. Something readily available to all of us.

If you make a claim in your advertisements, back it up — and then some.

Whatever you promise, always OVER deliver.

I love how Donald Miller phrases it in his book, “Business Made Simple.”

“Value-driven professionals see themselves as an economic product on the open market and are obsessed with giving people a great return on their investment.”

Miller continued.

“Act like a good stock and your business will grow over time. If people sense a good investment, they will double-down on the money they invest in it.”

Billy Joel made a lot of money on Thursday night in Pittsburgh because that wasn’t his primary focus. Those in the workforce can learn a valuable lesson here, too.

“The intent of a business isn’t to go out and make lots of money,” Miller writes. “It’s to go out and make OTHER people lots of money.”

PNC Park did quite well on Thursday night. So did the concession vendors. And the T-shirt merchants. And, maybe especially, the parking lot owners, who charged $40 a pop for allowing your car sit on their property for three hours.

Not a bad night for everyone who worked.

But it was an even BETTER night for all who attended.

That’s how business should operate. We smile. We shake hands. And we both walk away saying, “That was a good deal.”

And in this case, a GREAT show.

Let that be a lesson to you.

(I teach business, sports, and faith lessons through stories. Want to connect? Email me here or call me at 412.849.4775. I’d love to hear from you.)