Not so common-sense
Let your word be your bond. Underpromise and overdeliver.
Don’t be a party to fraud and be the cause of an emergency airlift.
Some learn the hard way
Some lessons in business were ingrained in us since we were little, and seem fairly obvious, even to the point of being trite. However, for the founders of the Fyre Festival, perhaps the reality check hasn’t quite sunk in: quit while you’re behind.
We’re all familiar by now with the abject failure that the inaugural Fyre Festival turned out to be; an elite concert and festival experience heavily promoted in Instagram (in posts that weren’t clearly labelled as sponsored) by Ja Rule, with tickets ranging from $1,500 to $250,000 each, for what was described as “an immersive music festival” on a “remote and private island.”
Festival-goers would be immersed in “the best in food, art, music, and adventure,” while sleeping in eco-friendly geodesic domes or even villas!
The first images that came from the Fyre Festival via Twitter were so starkly at odds with what was promised that they seemed more parody than reality.
Firestorm that was Fyre Festival
But real they were: for some flights were abruptly cancelled, leaving them stranded with no way to get to the island.
Those were the lucky ones.
For those who did make it, luggage was lost, the geodesic domes were survival tents, and the world class food was scarce and limited to cheese sandwiches. Reports of festivalgoers being locked in rooms, with attendant gunfire outside forced the Bahamian government to step in, and, with the aid of the United States Embassy, launch rescue efforts.
At least the promised musical acts were there to try to give the people some semblance of a good time, right? Nope. They were all no shows, with Blink-182 going so far as to issue a statement on the eve of the festival, saying that “[r]egrettably, and after much careful and difficult consideration, we want to let you know that we won’t be performing at Fyre Fest in the Bahamas this weekend and next weekend. We’re not confident that we would have what we need to give you the quality of performances we always give fans.”
Even Ja Rule, the 90’s rapper, who was a co-creator of the festival, was nowhere to be seen.
Help me, Ja. With backlash quickly mounting via social media, and the threat of lawsuits imminent, Ja Rule issued a statement to Rolling Stone, telling the magazine that refunds were going to be issued and that the festival “was not a scam.”
“We are working right now on getting everyone off the island safely; that is my immediate concern,” Ja Rule said, “I truly apologize as this is NOT MY FAULT … but I’m taking responsibility I’m deeply sorry to everyone who was inconvenienced by this.”
From the ground up
The problem, at least according to Fyre, was that despite their best efforts, planning and executing the logistics involved in creating a luxury experience in a remote setting was hard!
“Due to circumstances out of our control, the physical infrastructure was not in place on time and we are unable to fulfill on that vision safely and enjoyably for our guests,” Fyre initially posted on their website.
Since everyone has now gotten home safely, they have expanded on what those limitations to physical infrastructure were:
“As amazing as the islands are, the infrastructure for a festival of this magnitude needed to be built from the ground up,” Fyre wrote.
“So we decided to literally attempt to build a city. We set up water and waste management, brought an ambulance from New York, and chartered 737 planes to shuttle our guests via 12 flights a day from Miami. We thought we were ready, but then everyone arrived.”
“We thought we were ready, but then everyone arrived.”
It’s an old maxim that no good tactical plan survives the first seconds of combat without the need for being adapted, but this is a failure of even more epic proportions. It would be a great thing, dear reader, if we could spend the next few paragraphs discussing the need for not only tabletop planning down to the most miniscule details over and over, but also the need to be able to admit that you don’t know what you don’t know, and the need to align yourself with experts in those fields, even when they are giving you advice that you’d rather not hear.
But we can’t. We can’t for the simple reason that the failure of Fyre doesn’t stop there, but extends itself to their plans to make large charitable donations to the Bahamian Red Cross and—steady yourself now—start planning for Fyre Festival 2018.
Fyre 2018
“Venues, bands, and people started contacting us and said they’d do anything to make this festival a reality and how they wanted to help,” they posted on their website. “The support from the musical community has been overwhelming and we couldn’t be more humbled or inspired by this experience…People were rooting for us after the worst day we’ve ever had as a company. After speaking with our potential partners, we have decided to add more seasoned event experts to the 2018 Fyre Festival, which will take place at a United States beach venue.”
While there is a certain nobility rooted in failure, epic in scale though it may be, there is none in callously failing to plan, and then your failure to plan being the cause of emergency preparations needing to be taken.
Sometimes you have to know your limitations, and sometimes those limitations mean that you’re just not capable of doing what you set out to do.
There are all sorts of practical reasons why they feel the need to continue Fyre; well, at least hold a festival, anyway, beyond the visionary. With full refunds slated to go out, and a sizeable contribution going to charity, funds have to be raised to settle the lawsuits that have already been filed, with more surely to follow. Stopping now eliminates any hope of ever turning a profit, but that logic steadfastly fails.
We tried, we failed
While we’re hoping that they are going to benefit from the event experts that ostensibly know what the hell they’re doing, and have a greater pre-existing infrastructure in place by holding it in the continental United States, sometimes you have to be honest with yourself and your customer that you’re simply not capable of getting the job done.
As Ja Rule himself put it in “Strange Days”: “No me, no you, no us/ We tried, we failed…”
#Fyre
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