Always A New Year

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comedy, Networking, Roger Skai, Thomas J. Bellezza, top of the bottom pile

Always A New Year

January, the coldest month thus far, is becoming a tackled month. It is so cold, the walk around aspect of our journey is getting difficult. On the bright side, we have two road shows this month. And that’s important. Each new year must have upon it more growth. We’re extremely happy for these road shows. They are brought to us by our ever growing relationships. We are completely appreciative.

Though the team goes up and down with members, that membership is really a number. Our movement is more important. This year we hope to inspire others to believe in a strong unity of people. Helping one another and working as a team. We have friends outside our Top Of The Bottom Pile brand, but they are very much part of this family. To the exciting doors opening for us all.

Though we are working with Team Rise Together, and oh DEER! Productions on a web series (Dramatic), it is all a part of the growing Brand. With the radio show packed of guests, and more road shows coming up, the Top of the bottom is getting exciting for us all. Our movement is to inspire others to work together as a team. Let us hope we can enjoy opportunity together. Always in a new year.

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Performances

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Business, Chris Hamilton, Performance, Roger Skai, Thomas J. Bellezza, top of the bottom pile

Performances

We love performing. How often we perform depends on if we are on tour, working material, or walking around. Busy does as busy is. There’s a sense of interesting concern in comedy. A thought that if you are not seen performing then you are not doing anything. Is performance really progress? How aggressively should a person be performing to be considered professional? Paid/unpaid!?

If a comedian performs every Friday / Saturday, and is being paid, are they more successful then a comedian performing for free seven days a week? What about a comedian performing only three months out of the year on tour? Our feeling is performance is our reward for doing our job. The job of making a career and getting all our business in order.

We look at everyone with the same amount of respect. Working, paid, unpaid, touring, just starting out, or whatever your situation is, we love and respect the crap out of you. This is a hard business, comedy. It’s beautiful when you see people doing what they love. The idea should be to judge less, working together more, and inspire one another to be successful in both business and entertainment!

“Look to the future, because that is where you’ll spend the rest of your life.” ~ George Burns

Top of the Bottom Pile: The best of the worst, your second best choice!

Opportunities abound

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Entertainment, Projects, top of the bottom pile

Collaborating with other artists is one of our favorite parts of the game. Like minded people, out for success, who are willing to work with one another to share the opportunities is one of the core principles that Top of the Bottom Pile lives by, so the constant search for those to be creative with is abundant. Top has lined up opportunities for a documentary about what we are trying to accomplish, and also be part of a book launch for Jax Miller’s “Freedom’s Child”.

It’s a great honor to be recognized amongst peers, and we are thrilled to take part in these projects. As entertainers, artists, and creators it’s almost essential to us to be using our brains and working on something, and the ability to do it along side others trying to achieve the same goals and ideas shows that a unified effort means we all can reap the rewards. This makes us want to give back where we can as well and it’s selfless people that always get the call first in our book. We’ve said it all along; we don’t have to be in competition. We can do this together.

This will only lead to stronger relationships, more art, and a bigger pie for everyone. Along with all that Top of the Bottom Pile is already involved in we know that our plate is full. That’s how we like it, and that’s how we see it being from this point on. We are only as busy as we are willing to be, and what we do one month, we have to try to duplicate at the very least the next. Stay relevant, stay humble, stay diligent and as always…

Stay Piled.
–Top of the Bottom Pile

FaceTime

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Networking, Relationships, top of the bottom pile

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. We’ve all heard it, we’ve all been either helped or thwarted by a relationship cultivated, and it can seem frustrating at times. Take for example, someone who goes to College, puts themselves into debt, graduates only to be looked over by nepotism or the boss’ best friend. It seems unfair, but is it really? Why couldn’t you be educated and work on your relationships with people?

Here on the Pile, we not only put in our time and research, we make sure to apply what we learn to the field with the people with interact with. The practices we believe so firmly in, we institute while out and about at various spots hanging with like minded people. People who want to be successful, thrive on connection and work together toward an ultimate goal. This makes us feel fulfilled, as it gives validation to all we’ve been working so hard to learn and achieve.

So when the time comes, we know the people who can put us in the right place at the right time, and when we’re in that place, we know what to do with the opportunity offered to us. You can give a man a million dollars to improve his quality of life, but if he spends it all on sweet IROCs and 40 ounce bottles of malt liquor, he will soon regress back into disparity. We’re trying our damnedest to not be assed out once we reach the pinnacle. It’s a tough climb when you wanna bungee,and when we get to the top, we’ll let you all know just how it feels to be there and stay there. We don’t plan to jump for quite awhile.

Stay piled.
–Top of the Bottom Pile

Got something for your face

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Entertainment, Networking, top of the bottom pile

An object in motion stays in motion and we here on the Pile are objective to not making moves. We’re out there, shaking hands and creating the opportunities instead of waiting for them to fall in our laps. There is no waiting for breaks around here, we’re out to make breaks by breaking out into the things. You can break a leg by chance, but is it a clean break or something that will linger for the rest of your life? In this case, we want the hard work and pain associated with the risk of failing. You must fail to succeed.

Your time is valuable, so if it’s not spent furthering your happiness, are you managing the clock or is it managing you? We don’t believe in counting the clock until punch out because we’re always ticking. If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean and we remember that whenever we find ourselves in a mess. Relationships to sustain and grow, presentation to tighten up, and always learning. That’s how success stays prevalent.

There’s luck and then there’s hard work, and we choose the latter in this instance. Luck is chance, and chances are fleeting. You have this moment now guaranteed to you. And after reading that sentence, you now have this one. It’s impossible to move forward walking toward the past and sometimes you can find yourself mired in the present. The time isn’t found on a clock, the time is now. Find happy, find good enough, be proactive.

Stay Piled.
–Top of the Bottom Pile Tour

Building While Building…

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Networking, top of the bottom pile

So many times you hear that there is a specific way to do things. An order to it which has to be followed in order to obtain the success and goal you have set for yourself. If you don’t do it a certain way you will never make progress. This would make it seem that there is no room for error or improvisation, which truthfully if you think about it, goes almost against human nature. We are a variable species, with a ton of curve balls thrown our way every day. It’d be nice if everything was a 90mph pitch down the middle, but that’s not how it goes so why does your success have to follow a single trajectory?

Pioneers. Trail blazers. The purple dot in a sea of red. The ones who don’t follow the beaten path and create roads of their own often find themselves in the at the finish line with the rest of the pack and often find themselves there before the crowd. Why? They looked at their goal from all sides.

To the Pile, this is the Comedy life for us. So many people say you have to do it a certain way, you have to follow these avenues to get to the end all the while they are neglecting other important parts that they claim you need to do after you’ve mastered a certain aspect of your career. The prime example being they feel they have to be totally funny, the best they can be, killing crowds every single night effortlessly before they begin to work on the brand and relationship side of things.

Our question: Why can’t you do things at the same time?

While we perfect our acts, we’re cultivating relationships, building our brand and increasing our presence both in the community and online. This way, when the time comes and we start getting noticed, we have legs to stand on. Imagine being so funny, or so good at your job, and then when it gets the recognition, you get turned away because no one knows your work. There’s no audience or support to your terrific talent, so you get passed up again until you can draw. Build while you build.

Stay piled, friends.
–Top of the Bottom Pile

Why Our Brand Building is so Important

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Business, Entertainment, Networking

So many Comics get wrapped up in the idea of “I have to be brilliant before I can be a brand. I have to get so good at my craft that everyone loves me right off the bat and I become this huge success and get to live my dream.” We are doing both. People love the journey, so just posting pictures of ourselves at an Open Mic or hanging out with like minded people can do almost just as much for us as slaying a crowd.

People may find you funny but once you’re off stage, that set ends and what you shared stays there. They want to be able to connect with you to create conversation beyond the stage and they do this because they buy into you as a brand. They are interested in what you have to offer and little things like an Instagram, Twitter, or blog can keep the interaction going long after the performance.

Getting people interested and talking about you is a way to the top. Let people buy into you as you’re getting better and those people will stick to you throughout your career because that’s what it’s all about; getting people to buy into your brand — what you’re selling. Those will be the people, when your craft is perfected, saying “Well we were there since the beginning. We’ve watched you grow as an artist, we watched the foundation get built and now see what is built on top of it” and they’ll be just as valuable as the people you pick up when it’s all nice and neat and in a little bow.

Our website is our social hub for people to find out who we are, what we’re up to and if they’d like to talk with us, here’s how you can do it and meanwhile we haven’t said a thing about performing. It may sound cliche, but if it’s already built when they come, you’re seemingly one leg up on the foundation already. Lay the groundwork, and reap the benefits as you learn. You’re going to have to do it all anyway, why put a time frame on “getting perfect” first, if you can just do it all little but little as you go?

Stay piled, friends.

From,

The Direction for Your Conversation

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Convesation, Networking, top of the bottom pile

Last week we touched upon what it meant to give your conversation direction so you don’t wind up mired in a talk that is going nowhere. When we initiate a conversation with someone, we for the most part have an idea of why we are having it, or where we want it to go. In the social examples we’ve provided, it’s a bar setting and you’re trying to get someone you’ve fancied your eye on to see value or interest in you.

For us, it’s a more business sided reasoning. We want to alert people to our brand, to get them interested in what we’re doing in Comedy without us telling them we are Comedians. They figure out for themselves through conversation with direction, rather than “selling” it to them. This works effectively because it gives the person the illusion that they’ve discovered the information themselves, which to the human psyche/ego is more important than being bombarded with what we’re trying to do.

We may start a conversation off in public with something as simple as the weather, but soon, through asking and answering various questions, we’re directing that conversation ultimately toward us being Comedians. This is achieved by short, concise answers which slowly but surely creep toward, “Well I’m a Comedian”. The weather turns into the weather in New York, since we were in Manhattan this weekend.

Example:
“Yeah, it was brutally cold in the Manhattan this weekend.”

“What were you doing in Manhattan?”

“I had a gig.”

“Oh? You’re a performer?”

“Yes, I’m a Comedian.”

“That’s so interesting! I love Comedy, where can I see you?”

“Well, you can take my card and check my website to see all my dates.”

Instead of just beating around the bush with various, dull conversation for a huge chunk of time, or even worse, telling that person that I am a Comedian and they should come out to my show, I let them discover the information for themselves, thus seeming they are making a choice to come see me, as opposed to being sold on coming to one of the Top of the Bottom Pile shows. This demonstrates your value to that person through listening, and responding as well as achieving your objective of brand awareness.

Giving Conversation Direction…

Tags

Entertainment, top of the bottom pile

Continuation posts aren’t really our motive here on the Top of the Bottom Pile, however, a very good comment on last week’s installment of the blog Activity Breaking posed the question, “what about the conversation after you’ve engaged someone?”. Outside of business and relationship building, I’d say the average person encounters this hurdle the most. What to do after you’ve obtained the attention you are looking for.

Aside from just trying to kill time, every conversation you find yourself engaged in was started with the purpose of obtaining results. Last week, we used the example of approaching a person at the bar you find attractive. You want to know more about them, and maybe even ultimately take them home for some alone time. We here at the Pile don’t condone pre-marital relations unless the other person is ridiculously hot in both body and mind, but we understand this happens.

After you’ve approached this person, you’ve broken their activity using our method, you now have to keep that person engaged long enough to obtain the goal, which in this case, is dirty dumpster sex in the alley behind the bar. We’ve all encountered the scenario where we decide, possibly against our better judgment, to give someone our ear and a shot to “wow” us into buying into them as a person. They either succeed, or they crash in flames in their own awkward pauses, comments, and silences.

Always have a plan. Always approach the conversation with a clear path to the information you are looking for. First, listen. Gather up as much about the person as you can. Make the first few minutes of your exchange all about them. Their interests, what they do for a living and then wait for them to take the interest in you. When the conversation turns itself your way, which it will as you’ve given them reason to value you, answer with short “jury talk” answers. Instead of giving them all the information at once, spread it out. Not only does it give depth and bulk to the conversation, it lets your listener feel as if they are finding out the information for themselves, as opposed of having it “lectured” to them.

On top of giving the illusion that they are in control of the conversation, it’ll also ward off any negative stigmas such as bragging as they asked you, as opposed to you just giving them the information. More on this next week, folks.

Till then, Stay Piled.

Happy (Re)New Year!

Tags

Networking, top of the bottom pile, Website

Time makes you bolder, websites get older. I’m getting older too. That’s how the lyrics go, right? Fleetwood Mac was singing about their website lapsing, I’m pretty sure. You never want to let your website expire; you spent so much time driving traffic to it and establishing your brand in this space, that it would be silly to not budget accordingly to have the fees for renewal. We had to renew topofthebottompile.com this month after it’s first year.

Which really put it into perspective for us; we’ve been climbing further to the top of the bottom pile for over a year. The website is an intricate part of looking professional. A website is a nice little niche you carve out for yourself on the internet. Sure, you can have a Facebook, but that’s a brand created for yourself within the brand of Facebook. Having your own website really makes your product stand out. It’s the go to place for all things you and one would be shocked how many times people who consider themselves professionals don’t have one.

With a website, it says to someone “Hey! This is to be taken seriously. Someone invested hard earned money to promote something they believe in, and it is worthy of our time.” A website, business cards, postcards, they are all things you can do for yourself to make your brand get a leg up on the competition. New and old fans alike will have one stop on your journey to find a hub of everything going on with you. This will only help you reach that target audience your are out to acquire.

Stay piled, friends.

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