Sleeping on people’s floors is bad for your back, good for your business

For part 2 of my blog series I decided to speak about my experiences travelling around the world for business and how sleeping on people’s floors instead of hotels has lead to making some life long friends and great business opportunities.

Now first of all I must preface that probably 99% of these stories sleeping on people’s floors wasn’t a choice but instead a necessity due to lack of funds. The first notable trip of staying on floors was my very first time to the US in 2003, it was our first overseas trip for Below Par Records, we were 18 years old and we could barely cover our flights through the business (Thank you Nescafe Big Break!). We had teed up meetings with a bunch of labels that we were fans of including Drive Thru Records, The Militia Group, Lobster Records, Triple Crown and also some majors like Capitol, MCA and Universal Republic. I’m not really sure how or why these people agreed to meet with us seeing as we had no relationships with them prior, but being the naive teenagers that we were not only did we hustle to set up meetings we also asked if we could stay on some of their floors.

The first floor we stayed on was with Rory Felton from The Militia Group, his office was down in Huntington Beach and they were riding the success of bands like Rufio, The Beautiful Mistake and Noise Ratchet. We hadn’t met Rory, or even spoken to him on the phone but he agreed to let us stay in his apartment for our first night in the US because he also spent some time in Australia growing up. It was great because we got to goto dinner with him and his staff, talk about records, drink some beers (underage) and hang out with some like minded people with the same drive and passion that we had for the music we were putting out. Through the years we ended up having a lot of The Militia Group’s Artists on our Caddy Of The Year compilationsand even distributed their label in Australia through BPD. Rory is still a great friend today who works at a really cool start up called Chirpify in Portland and I regularly catch up with him whether he’s in Australia or I’m over in the US.

Another lifelong friend was born out of crashing on floors. It was 2005 and I was over in Austin for my first SXSW before heading to Seattle to meet up with Kisschasy to mix their first album ‘United Paper People’. I was trying to sign a band on Doghouse Records called Say Anything for Australia and through Doghouse, they introduced me to the bands management company that also looked after Coldplay and Rilo Kiley. The management company then set me up to meet with Say Anything’s day to day manager Adrian Amodeo who was going to be in Austin the same time as me. At first I thought he had a weird name like me but pretty much as soon as met we instantly hit it off, within 10 minutes we were drunk at a Red Bull party and within the hour he told me that if I ever needed a place to stay in LA I was more than welcome to crash at his place in Hollywood.

So fast forward a couple of weeks after SXSW and mixing the record in Seattle I’m heading to LA with Kisschasy. The band didn’t even have enough money for two rooms in a no-tell-motel, and everyone was going to be sharing beds. I remembered Adrian’s offer so without really thinking twice about it showed up on his door step with Darren and Sean from Kisschasy, he took us in with open arms and we ended up staying with him for about a month. Adrian lived with 3 other dudes who were all legends and it was pretty much a frat house, we were introduced to Tivo, had parties where the kid from Terminator 2 attended and went to a bunch of great shows together. I didn’t end up signing Say Anything for Australia but a few years later Kisschasy took a band Adrian managed called Limbeck on tour and when I moved to LA he gave me a key to his house so I could use his washer and dryer. Today Adrian is one of my best friends and he currently works in Sports & Video Game marketing at Interscope Records and manages the band Active Child. I still sleep on his floor to this day.

My third and final floor experience (well for the purpose of this blog anyway) was when we were shooting the punk rock documentary One Nine Nine Four. We had a budget that basically allowed us to rent a 3 bedroom house for 6 weeks, where two of us had to share a bed the entire time. As the story goes we didn’t really have many interviews set up before we left Australia but once we goto LA we started to pull some stuff together. Early on in the trip Tim Armstrong called me out of the blue to ask why I was making a film on 90′s punk rock and wasn’t speaking with him about Operation Ivy & Rancid. I told him I would obviously love to speak to him but didn’t know how to get in contact with him. Anyway after we sorted this issue out we end up having lunch with him at this awesome vietnamese place across the road from Epitaph in Silverlake, he tells us that if we need a place to stay he has a spare room at his place not far from there. Well funnily enough, the 6 weeks in our rented house are up, we haven’t even nearly completed shooting all the interviews, we’ve run out of money so our crew needs to leave us and Matt and I have nowhere to stay.

I call Tim and say “Hey Man remember when we first had lunch that day you said if we needed a place to stay…” and before I could finish he was like “Of course, here’s my address see you soon”. Now we get to Tim’s house, which is awesome by the way, and I’m thinking this is ridiculous. Here we are two 23 year old kids from Australia that love 90′s punk rock and we have been invited to stay with the legendary Tim Armstrong for a couple of weeks. Not only did we get a roof over our heads and become buddies with Tim Armstrong(!) but we ate meals together, went to some shows, watched some Tivo and got to hear all these incredible stories first hand. He also became an invaluable resource for us and our film because without him we wouldn’t have finished shooting the interviews, he introduced us to his friends in bands we didn’t have contacts with like when he basically marched us in to Brett Gurewitz (Bad Religion / Epitaph Founder) office and told him he should really be part of our film or when he got Lars and Matt to do interviews with us aswell. The association we had with Tim really helped us open doors that we wouldn’t have been able to open otherwise and we learnt a lot from him.

Another fun part of this story is 2 years later I was in LA for KROQ Weenie Roast and Rancid were headlining, Mark C and I were hanging on the side of the stage when Tim and Lars approached us. I told Tim that it was my Birthday that day, he wished me happy birthday and about 2 hours later in front of 18,000 people he dedicated Olympia WA to me.

“This song goes out to my friend Jai it’s his Birthday, it’s called Olympia Washington”

I have many many more sleeping on floor stories but these few are quite memorable for me because what started off as just needing a roof over my head turned these trips into life changing experiences. It’s now been 10 years since I took my first overseas trip for business and all of my greatest times have been when I haven’t had enough money for a hotel and some very kind people have opened their homes to me, I wouldn’t change it for the world. To finish off this post I thought I’d give some tips on how to be a good floor guest.

1. Always buy your host the first and last meal of your stay, it goes along way to show your appreciation

2. Don’t run around the host’s house after 10pm yahoo-ing because you found out you’re no longer getting evicted in Australia, otherwise you’ll wake up Tim and he’ll get angry

3. Don’t do a Matt Hawkes and walk on someone’s back just because they offer you a T-Shirt from a pop punk band… It’s just not worth it

Jai Al-Attas

@jaialattas

I’ve been meaning to get this blog started for quite awhile now but something has been holding me back from diverging stories and information in this form. I’ve been using social media since 2004 when Friendster came along and I thought what a great free tool to market my bands, so it wasn’t that diverging myself online was new to me but I wasn’t sure if my learnings from previous experiences would be of any benefit to anyone.

At the very least I thought some of my stories may be mildy entertaining but then I came to the realisation that I’ve never been formally taught anything I’ve achieved, nobody knows anything and inspiration can come from the strangest places. This blog is set out to talk about 12 real life experiences of failure, success and a lot of things in between my schizophrenic like “career” from indie label owner to film director to digital & social media strategist all before my 30th birthday (May 2014 for those of you checking).

I’m using the first post to co-incide with the launch of the new direction and branding for my social marketing company ONE. I thought I could give some insight into how and why I started what was initially a creative agency without a marketing or communications degree, an internship or previous job at an established agency or any interest in advertising outside of watching Mad Men religiously.

My first thought was this hadn’t stopped me before. When I started Below Par Records at 16, what prior music industry experience was I meant to have? Did I goto film school before I shot Kisschasy: The Movie or One Nine Nine Four? No of course not. So what gave me the audacity to think that I could start and compete with people that had dedicated their whole lives to these respective fields? I worked out early on that people are lazy.

Not only are people lazy, but they’re scared of failing. For some weird reason this by passed me and although not the most talented in anything I do, I worked out I didn’t need to be because I was just going to be doing “it”.

So the idea of starting a creative agency with no experience didn’t phase me in the slightest, I’d been using social media for my bands and film for years and had a good understanding of the power of these platforms. The one thing that I didn’t have any idea about is what I would actually offer as services? Well that was soon worked out when a then re-launching Myspace contacted me to put together a creative thinktank of tastemakers to test out and become ambassadors for their new platform. I rushed out the next day to open a bank account so that they could pay me and we were off to the races.

Ok so problem of what service I’m going to offer solved, I was going to be offering creative thinktanks to corporate brands from now on. Then in 2010 V8 Supercars contact me looking for a social media marketing campaign for a huge event in Sydney featuring Guns N Roses and Tony Hawk – they were especially interested in a Facebook app. Had I made a Facebook app yet? Of course not, did I take on the work? Of course I did. To make it even more fun, I suggested a video game to them with a real time leader board that allowed friends to compete against each other on Facebook. So not only was I commissioned to create a Facebook app, something I had never ever done before but I also had to make it a video game… again, something I had no experience in. However, I pulled together the perfect team and we made a pretty awesome 8-bit skateboarding game called “V8 Supersk8″ which turned out to be very successful.

As time went on, more Clients would come to us with specific problems they needed help with and we’d work with them slowly adding more services & skills to our repertoire. It was only in this real time environment of “doing” that I worked out exactly what our strengths were and what our company stood for.

As we relaunch our brand today, we’re a social marketing company that really has little in common with the agency model that I thought was kind of cool from only a few years ago. We now see ourselves as a utility that other agencies can use if they wish but we know that we are specialists in entertainment, sports and lifestyle brands. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved to date, working with Clients from the Australian Government to Coles to skateboarding brands like KR3W and Element or bands from Icehouse to The Presets.

And to be honest I have no idea what this company will look like in another 3 years but the one thing that I do know for sure is that we wouldn’t be where we are today without having just jumped in and done it, experience or no experience. We learn from doing, we learn from mistakes, we learn from failure and we learn from correcting those the next time around.

So my advice: If you’re thinking of starting something just do it! You’ll learn way more and make more in roads from jumping in the deep end and working the rest out later. I actually think naivety is one of the key factors to success because it doesn’t hold us hostage to the certain “correct” ways of thinking. Embrace your naivety, embrace the fact you don’t know what you’re doing and embrace the fact that people are lazy and you’ll soon be one step closer to doing it – whatever “it” may be.

Jai Al-Attas
@jaialattas

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