The Answer: “You Don’t”

Early in my career, I represented a small artist management company owned by two guys. Their flagship client was a Florida rock band that had already done everything a band dreams of doing — platinum albums, world tours, songs in movies. The kind of success most musicians never see.

My clients were smart. The band was established, successful by all accounts.   The question wasn’t how to maintain or recapture a peak. The question was how to extend the ride down the back of the mountain; continuing that success.

So they had an idea.

Charter a cruise ship. Put the band — and several of the other acts they managed — on board as the entertainment. Skip the cruise line’s standard entertainment entirely. Then sell the cabins directly to the bands’ fan clubs.

At the time, nobody had done this. There was no template, no playbook, no one to call who had figured it out before. We built it from scratch. We formed an LLC, entered a charter agreement with the cruise line, arranged financing that was — let’s say — enthusiastically priced, created a ticketing structure that sat on top of the cruise line’s existing ticketing system, hired additional security, sorted out stevedoring to get the gear loaded, and placed liability insurance on top of everything else.

The day came. The ship sailed. The bands got paid. The financiers got repaid with their interest. My clients didn’t make money — but they didn’t lose money, and no one died.

So they did it again. Then again.

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A few years in, they called and asked me to lunch. We met at a funky Cajun-influenced restaurant across from one of Atlanta’s historic cemeteries — the kind of place with mismatched furniture and good food and the energy of a neighborhood that hasn’t been discovered yet. They were already in the booth when I arrived, and they were visibly excited. Vibrating, almost.

They got right to it.

A major act — one of the biggest bands in the world at that moment — had called them. The band wanted to talk about doing a cruise. My clients wanted to know how to leverage what they’d built to add this new act to their existing enterprise.

I was stunned. And impressed. They had worked hard to get to this moment, and here it was, sitting across the table from them.

And then I said: “You don’t.”

They looked at me the way people look at you when they think they may have misheard.

I kept going.

“What you’ve built has its own identity. Its own look and feel. Its own audience. That’s real value, and you don’t dilute it by attaching a different act with a different fan base to the same name. Those worlds don’t necessarily overlap.”

I paused.

“But here’s what you actually have. The name of your company is not the band’s name. It’s yours. And it’s a great name. That is what you leverage. You create a new event under your company’s brand — the way Intel put its name on the outside of computer boxes so buyers knew the internal works could be trusted. You call it ‘another [your company] experience’ and the public starts to associate quality and a certain kind of event with you. Not with any one act. With your brand.”

I watched it land. There’s a particular look that happens when a good idea clicks into place for someone — not agreement exactly, more like recognition. Like they’re seeing something they already knew but hadn’t found words for. I saw it cross both of their faces at the same time.

By the end of the week, they had resigned as the band’s managers. They were out of the artist management business entirely. They pivoted, fully and without hesitation, into what I can only describe as the affinity travel business — the business of creating extraordinary experiences for passionate fan communities.

Over the next decade, we built it together. New acts. New events. Some that worked brilliantly. Some that didn’t. Eventually they were running more than a dozen events a year. They sold the company to an international cruise line. It still operates today. The founders have moved on to new things, with the kind of outcome that lets you move on to whatever you want.

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I’ve thought a lot about why that lunch is my favorite moment in twenty-six years of practice.

It wasn’t the most complex deal. It wasn’t the largest transaction. There are matters I’ve handled that were bigger by every measurable standard.

But it’s my favorite because of what it wasn’t.

It wasn’t legal advice. No one asked me a legal question. No one needed a contract reviewed or a risk assessed. They came to lunch with a business question, and I happened to have a perspective they hadn’t considered — not because I’m a branding expert, but because I had been close enough to their business, for long enough, to see something they couldn’t see from inside it.

That only happens in a certain kind of relationship. It doesn’t happen when a client calls you once a year when something goes wrong. It doesn’t happen when the meter running is a constant presence in every conversation. It happens when a lawyer has been trusted enough, and present enough, to understand what a client is actually building — not just the legal pieces of it, but the whole thing.

The best outside counsel isn’t waiting to be asked. They’re paying attention.

That’s what I was doing at lunch that day. And “you don’t” was the most valuable thing I said in the whole meal — two words that cost nothing and changed everything.

If that’s the kind of relationship you’re looking for, I’m always happy to talk — no meter running.

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Jeff Cunningham is a corporate and business attorney with over 26 years of experience advising entrepreneurs and privately held businesses on entity formation, capital raises, M&A, and outside general counsel services.