Jeffrey Madoff is the founder of Madoff Productions, based in New York City. Jeff is considered a storyteller and incisive interviewer. He has used those talents to help position major brands such as Ralph Lauren, Victoria’s Secret, Radio City Music Hall, and the Harvard School for Public Health.
Jeff began his career as a fashion designer. He was chosen one of the top 10 designers in the U.S. then switched careers to film and video production. He has since expanded his reach to include teaching, book and playwriting, and theatrical producing.
He is an adjunct professor at Parsons School for Design, teaching a course he developed called “Creativity: Making a Living with Your Ideas”. Every week Madoff has a conversation with a guest from a wide variety of fields, from artists and entrepreneurs to venture capitalists and business leaders. A book about his class, entitled “Creative Careers: Making a Living with Your Ideas”, was published.
Jeff has been a featured speaker at Wharton School, NYU Steinhardt, North Carolina State, SXSW Brazil, Google Next and many others.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with B. Jeffrey Madoff about helping people have creative careers.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– Why everything you do informs everything else you do if you’re paying attention.
– How a project can remain personal while being commercial as well.
– Why having true devotion creates great passion for what you do.
– How entrepreneurs cannot be the only people in love with their ideas.
– Why smart investors invest in people they believe can execute the idea.
Connect with Jeff:
Links Mentioned:
acreativecareer.com
madoffproductions.com
Guest Contact Info:
Instagram
@creativecareer
@madoffproductions
Facebook
facebook.com/madoffproductions
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/b-jeffrey-madoff-5baa8074
Rob Kosberg:
Welcome, everybody. Rob Kosberg here. I’m excited to be with you for another episode of our Publish. Promote. Profit. Podcast. I think you’re really going to love the guest today. We’ve already spent some time talking. Jeffrey Madoff is a great guy, founder of Madoff Productions based in New York City. They collaborate with ad agencies, public relations firms, as well as directly with clients like private equity firms, investment banks, to do commercials, and branded content, livestream events, that kind of thing. You have a really interesting background. You started as a fashion designer and was chosen as one of the top 10 designers in the United States and then switched to film and video production. I didn’t tell you that, but I have some of that in my history, in my family lineage. Even my son is involved in that out in LA, which is pretty cool. Jeff has edited and directed award-winning commercials, documentaries, web content for Ralph Lauren, Victoria’s Secret, Tiffany, Radio City, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and Harvard. You’re the best-selling author as well of a book, Creative Careers: Making a Living with Your Ideas. We’re going to be talking about that, as well as your very, very interesting career in business. Jeff, thanks so much for being on. It’s great to have you on the podcast.
Jeffrey Madoff:
Well, thank you very much, Rob. That guy you’re going to be interviewing sounds very interesting. I can’t wait to hear what he’s got to say.
Rob Kosberg:
He does. It’s going to be fun figuring out exactly what it is you’re going to be focusing on next because from working with private equity firms and Harvard to being an award-winning fashion designer, you certainly have had an incredible career already. Who knows what the next thing is? Although I didn’t even mention, you have a play that is hitting in the next few weeks. Maybe we could start there. Tell us about that. Tell us about what’s behind that. It seems to be a bit of a diversion from what your current focus is, but of course you’re in the arts and film, so it’s not that much of a diversion. Tell us a little bit about how that originated.
Jeffrey Madoff:
Well, I have a fundamental belief, Rob, that everything you do, if you’re paying attention, informs everything else that you do. Although it may seem like some kind of a pivot or whatever, it’s really not. You mentioned Radio City. I did a film for the 75th anniversary of Radio City Music Hall in the Rockette. It was very cool. That’s such a magnificent, magnificent venue. We did it as part of the Christmas spectacular as a matter of fact. You could see my film and then the manger scene. Actually, underneath the hydraulics of the stage, which is incredible at Radio City, when I went down there, I was given the tour as we were working there, there’s camels and donkeys down there for the mangers. It’s just surreal. I shared the stage with three camels and two donkeys. You’d have to go to Tijuana to get that kind of a stage lineup, but the executive producer and I just established a really good relationship. He called me at one point after actually having left Radio City and he said, “There’s somebody I want you to meet. Have you ever heard of Lloyd Price?” I said, “Mr. Personality?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, I know his music, but I don’t know anything about him.” This is how so many things happen. They went to the same eye doctor and they met in a waiting room and struck up a conversation and became friends. It was just wild. They wanted me to make a short documentary about Lloyd because they wanted to start promoting him. Lloyd is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His first song back in 1952 was, Lawdy Miss Clawdy, which was the first song by a teenager and first Rock and Roll record that sold over a million copies. It broke down the wall that was called Race Records because nobody is prejudice against good music. It was making so much money and selling so much nobody wanted to miss out on it. When I met Lloyd and researched him and did the documentary, I was so taken by his story, his charisma, his music, and just the history that he had lived through. I said to him, “I know I can capture your voice. I want to tell your story.” I wrote the first few scenes and read them for him. He liked what I did and that started a relationship that grew into a very strong friendship. I was just watching the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Awards, the induction ceremonies on HBO and Lloyd was in there and they played Lawdy Miss Clawdy, his first song, while they showed his and a bunch of other pictures and he died this past May. So, the play, which opens in March after a year of COVID delay, aside from being a great piece of entertainment, is also telling the story of an unsung hero and establishing a legacy that a lot of people don’t know about. Lloyd, even if they’re familiar with his music, was an amazing person. From filmmaking, and writing, and teaching about creativity, to putting together a play, a lot of the same dynamics and same protocols are in place.
Rob Kosberg:
This is obviously an expression of your creativity. You express that in a lot of different ways, but is there a business angle or future business angle for you with maybe doing more of this or maybe branching more in the direction of Broadway and that sort of thing or is this just a passion project because of your friendship and relationship with Lloyd, wanting to tell the story?
Jeffrey Madoff:
All of the above. Somebody had said to me, “So, is this a commercial project or a passion project?” I said, “It’s both. I’m passionate about it.” You can’t get involved in trying to write a play and produce it, which is what I’m doing, raising money for it without loving it. It’s also an act of entrepreneurship. Otherwise, I think you’re kind of so dead because it takes so long. I’m six and a half years into this. That’s not uncommon at all for a play. I think that you constantly have to ask your yourself and define it even before you start, “Well, why do I want to do this?” I think that discovering what your motivation is, if you have a true devotion to doing something, then passion is a natural byproduct of it because you want to get it done. If you say, “I’m going to write and produce a play because I want to make a lot of money,” you’re delusional because that just doesn’t happen very often. It’s the exceptions, it’s not the rule that you end up making a lot of money from a play. It’s possible, I hope to do it. I’m ultimately in whatever I do because I’m seduced by ideas. I want to involve myself in stuff that I’m excited to talk about, that I’m excited to do, that I look forward to working with the people on, that ultimately involves risk because I don’t know if this is going to pay off or not. There has to be other reasons. I believe that in a lot of ways, it’s easier to enrich your wallet than enrich your soul. I’m looking for that kind of enrichment where I get invited on shows like yours to talk about what I’m doing because I’m excited about it. Hopefully I’ll make a good guest and some of the things I say resonates with your audience, because I want to be doing it, because I think the story is important. It’s about popular culture, it’s about race relations, it’s about music, it’s about all of these things that are important to me. Lloyd was such an amazing person that to be able to tell his story and to have gained his trust so that he wanted me to tell his story was profoundly important. I do, of course, hope that it resonates with a big audience and makes money very much so. Nobody writes a play, nobody writes a book, nobody makes a film that they don’t want seen, heard, or read. If you say, “Well, I’m just doing this for myself,” it’s bullshit. You don’t do that because it’s just for you. You do it because you somehow want to engage with an audience in what you’re doing.
Rob Kosberg:
I love what you’re saying. I talk to my clients a lot because many people come to us with passion projects or they have a desire. They’re doing something successfully, but they have a desire to move in a different direction. That may be consulting, or coaching, or something where they feel like they can give back and teach. There is this sweet spot of both personal fulfillment and commercial success because what I tell them most are not coming to me independently wealthy. I’m letting them know, “Look, we have to make sure that this is commercially successful. Otherwise you’re going to have to go get a job and stop doing your passion.” If this thing is your passion and it doesn’t produce commercially, then unless you’re independently wealthy, you still have to go and take care of yourself. You raised money. You mentioned before this is an entrepreneurial venture. You had to raise money, which meant that you had to sell this idea and this concept to people even though the risks are high with any type of venture like this. How important do you think? You sat down with people to raise the money. What was it that gave them the faith, the trust to write the check? What did they see, do you think, that allowed them to believe?
Jeffrey Madoff:
Well, I actually asked that question because it’s a good learning process for me too as I was out there pitching. Now, I’ve been pitching when I was selling clothes when I was a designer. Making films, writing a book, all those things involve pitches. One of the things for the entrepreneurs in your audience that I think is really important is, you can’t be the only one in love with your idea. You need to know that there are other people that are willing to pay for the product or the service that you’re offering. It’s great to have supportive parents and friends. Well until somebody actually writes a check and actually purchases it, and it’s people that don’t know, who don’t care about you, but they like what you’re doing, then you’ve got proof of concept, then of course you try to replicate that as you grow your business and continue to sell. To start it off in the first place, you need some kind of a proof that you aren’t just swatting at the wind. So, raising money for the play, I think what people connected to, and this is what I was told when I said, “I’m just curious. Why are you investing,” because investing in a play, in terms of solid investments, is a crappy investment if you just look at the numbers. People connected to the enthusiasm that I had for the project and I do have a history of getting things done. It’s not like I’m out of nowhere. I’ve had a successful production business for 40 years. I’ve done stuff. It’s not like I’m somebody who never did anything and all of a sudden wants to do it. I’m not at all known in the theater world, but the first monies that I got were from friends who liked the idea, who gave me that initial kindling to start the fire that grew so that people were seeing the light of the project, and now I won’t carry that metaphor any further, but the enthusiasm grew as the enthusiastic group that was investing expanded and the money raise got higher. They all connected. Not that they thought, “Oh, this is a foolproof idea.” I think this is really important for people to understand your business. They felt that I could execute. Ultimately, you don’t invest in the idea, you invest in the person’s ability to execute on the promise of that idea. That’s what’s really important. I had a certain history of being able to do that. My enthusiasm and belief in the project also acted as a magnet. Then, as you get other people involved, they have friends and associates that they want to bring in on it.
Rob Kosberg:
That is gold. However brilliant it actually may be, people are ultimately writing you a check, investing with you, buying your thing because of the things you just shared. The three things were you, your ability to deliver, your energy. I tell my sales team all the time that, “Hey, every sale is a transfer of energy. You’re transferring your energy and your belief and your passion to this individual and the social proof element of once there’s belief and there’s momentum in something, somebody that maybe wouldn’t have invested with you in the early days now has a little bit more confidence because Joe and Jane came in. “Okay. I’m not going to be the only idiot here.” Joe and Jane came in. They’re pretty smart. I love that. That’s gold right there because the brilliance of the idea, you didn’t even mention that. Of course, you believe in it and of course it’s a great idea, but the brilliance of the idea, oftentimes without the elements that you just mentioned, doesn’t go anywhere. It’s just another great idea that wasn’t executed on. Thoughts on that?
Jeffrey Madoff:
You are correct. Well, that’s why that old bromide, which is still around, which is ideas are a dime dozen, is really true. Because again, smart investors invest in people they believe can execute on the idea. It’s not just that they have a good idea. It’s really important to realize that. The first day of class, every semester I’ll say to my students and they’re all in creative fields, I’ll say to them, “How many of you have been to a museum or a gallery and you’ve seen things and said, “Oh, I could have done that.” Almost all of them raised their hands and I said, “So what’s the difference between you and them?” At first, they’re silent and then I’ll see somebody sort of wake up and then say they actually did it. I said, “That’s right.” That’s the difference. They actually did it. Until you execute on your ideas, until you can show that you can take it from here and put it out there in some way, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just another unrealized idea. If you are independently wealthy or you have a family that’ll fund anything you do or a friend that will fund, that’s different. In the real world where most of us live and don’t have that kind of finance head start so to speak, which by the way, they still lose lots of money. Those businesses won’t sustain, but in that real world, that ability to execute and commit yourself to it and also to tell a story about it. I’ve been telling you a story about this play. I’ve been telling you why I want to tell you that story because it’s about race, it’s about the birth of Rock and Roll, it’s about the beginning of the youth movement, it’s about a guy who was in a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Well, if I said to you, “This is a play that it’s going to cost this much to produce.” What do you care? But, if I am telling you a story and you connect to that story and you want to know more, then I’ve got you because what I’ve got then is that once upon a time story aspect that engages the listener. At least I’ll get a hearing. It doesn’t mean they’re going to invest, but let’s take this to another business altogether. When you see a commercial for an iPhone, you’re not told how many gigabytes of storage, you’re not hearing about how fast the processor is, you’re not hearing about the megapixels of the camera, you’re not hearing any of that with Apple. What they do is they show you a happy user and they sell that experience, that user experienced. They don’t talk about the technology. I would argue that apple is more of a marketing company than anything else. That’s another day to day example that maybe your listeners can do because they’ll realize they don’t talk about any of that stuff. When you’re looking at the ultimate driving machine winding through the mountains, by the way, a trip almost nobody ever takes, but you’re hearing about that and you see this story, you might attach to the aspiration of that even though you’ll never live that moment, but they don’t tell you how many horsepower it is, how many miles to the gallon you’re going to get, none of that because people don’t retain facts, but they do remember how the experience makes them feel. When I got people circling back to the play, when I got people to come to the workshop that we did and they saw it, and they heard, and felt the music, and the emotion, and people in the audience laughing, and applauding, and all of this kind of thing, that’s when they wanted to invest. You’re absolutely right by the way that investing in a startup and a play as a startup, it’s also a momentum business. That when you start getting people, you can also then sell from the fact that you’ve gotten other people and you sort of build like that. That’s another aspect to entrepreneurship, whether you’re doing a play, creating a new app, or some new service, or whatever.
Rob Kosberg:
The first couple are the hardest. Maybe the first one is the hardest. It is all you and your energy. I’m sure because we’ve all started things, there’s that doubt, there’s that, “I’ve got to get this going. I’ve got to get this giant boulder moving.” Once it begins moving, it becomes easier and easier, never easy perhaps, but certainly easier and easier to do it.
Jeffrey Madoff:
Well, I would say though, there is a gap and that gap is initially if you are, as they call, the friends and family around. If those people help you out financially to get going, there’s still a pretty good gap to bridge from people who don’t know you, who don’t care anything about you, but you want their money to invest in your venture. You’ve got to attract them another way because any savvy investor knows who those initial investors are in most cases. You do have to put across a more compelling story to them. I would also say that it’s really smart to practice that pitch so that when you’re going to people, as you sort of move up in terms of the financial capabilities and resources that people have, you don’t want to go into your first pitch meeting at the person who could write that check and do the whole thing. You have rehearsed your act. You want to be prepared to speak about it in a way that’s compelling, not fumbling your way through it, which you can do with friends and family, which you can’t do with those others.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s interesting. We’re applying this idea to raising money for a startup. In this case, the venture, the Broadway venture, the play, but anytime somebody is selling something, a higher ticket item, there has to be a process. What I talk to my clients, you either have a process for people to buy, which includes a system of getting the best people through the funnel. The people that have the ability to pay, the people that have the desire to pay, but also there has to be a system for them to purchase or you are going to follow that person’s system of purchasing. In other words, the pitch. It’s consultative selling. It’s positioning yourself as the authority in the space using your book and helping people via asking questions like a doctor would, bringing them through this process. If you don’t have that, then you are going to be at the mercy of however they typically will buy, which means most won’t. I love that. That’s practicing your pitch in essence.
Jeffrey Madoff:
If you had a part in a play or if you were a player on a football team, it’s all the same in the sense that you sort of run the plays, you run the lines. You do your practice before you go in front of an audience. That can make a difference because there is no excuse for lack of preparedness. You know that you’re going to be pitching that to person. Get your information down, get your pitch down, practice it, say it out loud, go in there like you know what you’re talking about and I think that is so important. Anybody who thinks they can wing it is kidding themselves because again, once you get to that realm of savvy investors, they know immediately. It’s really important to do the preparation. There is no escaping the fact that hard work is what it takes to get anything done. Maybe there’s some rare, rare exceptions to that rule, but they’re incredibly rare. You’re an entrepreneur. It’s not easy.
Rob Kosberg:
You’re always fighting, you’re always battling, you always have challenges. If you build it right, your business serves you. I certainly sense that’s the case with you. I’m thankful that it’s the case with me. It doesn’t mean that all things are always perfect, but when it’s built right, you don’t have to be a slave, nor should you be a slave to your creation. It should be certainly the other way around. I want to shift gears and talk about your book a little bit, because you made it clear in the beginning, all of these things work together. Your book would also seem to be a divergent path, Creative Careers: Making a Living with Your Ideas. You can get it on Amazon. It’s a best seller there. It’s got 100 plus five-star reviews, which it’s done very, very well. Congratulations for that. Tell me, how does that fit in with everything else that you’re doing? How does that fit in with Madoff Productions, how does it fit in with the play? Does it or is it an expression of your creativity and service? What does that look like?
Jeffrey Madoff:
Well, I’ve been teaching a course at Parsons School of Design in New York, called Creative Careers: Making a Living with Your Ideas. I’ll tell you a funny story about that. I’ll get to that in just a moment. The thing about the class is, I bring in people every week. I have an incredible array of guests. It might be Michael Arad who designed the 9/11 Memorial. The next week it might be Roy Wood Jr., the senior black correspondent for the Daily Show. Then I might have a bestselling author, a cognitive neuroscientist, Zaria Forman, a wonderful painter. All on the surface, very, very different fields, but the unifying thread is that they make a living with their ideas. I love teaching the class because teaching is a great way to learn and I love it. I research my guests thoroughly before I have them on. I just love it. I love bringing that to the students. Many, many people said to me, “Oh, you ought to do a book.” I had never really thought about it, but what I did have the foresight to do is record all of my classes. So, I thought, “Well, I’m about the spread of ideas.” I don’t think that there’s any ideas that should be secrets. I think that the world is a better place when good ideas are shared. I think the sharing of those ideas elevates all of us because then you can build on top of something instead of everybody thinking they have to start from ground zero so to speak. So, the first motivation was to basically spread the ideas and get more traction potentially the book can. I know it has, in cases, really helped people just get a sense of direction or make them think about things they hadn’t thought about. I’ve had surprising reactions from people in terms of at the end of each chapter, there’s questions that you have to reflect on what you’ve read, and what you’ve heard some of my guests say, and what resonates with you or what doesn’t. People have ended up with their own separate journal from those answers because they found there wasn’t room on the page to write it right. They started accumulating a journal, which I never thought that was going to happen, and I was so thrilled that it had. The primary goal was to get the ideas out there and spread good ideas, provoke thinking, critical thinking, which I think we have woefully too little of in our world at this point and to get an idea exchange going on and get people, whether they are embarking on a career, thinking of starting a business, or stop and trying to figure out they want to do something else because it’s interesting. If you’re going to become a doctor, or a dentist, or an accountant, or something nobody says to you, “Well, what’s your fallback position?” If you’re going to write a play, become an actor, do a painting, whatever, people will say, “Well, what’s your fallback position?” If I don’t make it as an actor, I’m going to be a dentist. So, I think that your fallback position is always your own savvy, your own survival skills, your own ability to adapt and pivot and all of those things. I think the book helps people do those kinds of things. I feel it’s important for me to draw this distinction. It is not a prescriptive book. I don’t believe in those. I don’t believe that there’s the seven highly effective steps you can take. That’s what I call the myth of replication. You can’t replicate anybody else’s circumstances, anybody else’s context, anybody else’s knowledge, you can do best practices which is be prepared, work hard, show up, all those things, but everybody is dealing with different things from a different knowledge base and everything else. There’s a benefit that it probably ties into you do is as a result of the book, it generates speaking engagements. I hope it generates another book, but I didn’t do that to notarize myself as an expert. If people, as a result of reading it, find what I have to say attractive and would like me to speak at conference or whatever the hell, that’s cool and that’s happened, but that wasn’t my primary goal. My primary goal is what we’ve been doing, discussing ideas, and how you do stuff, and all of that.
Rob Kosberg:
Whether it was your primary goal or not, it’s almost impossible to write a good book and that not happen. If you have great ideas and you really are an expert in your field and you clearly are and have expressed in a number of different ways, as an instructor, as a doer of the thing, and you write about your knowledge base and you publish it, now obviously you keep it secret not tell anybody about it, but if you publish it and get it into the world, it’s impossible not to be seen as anything but an expert. You can grow it from there. If you want to do another book certainly, why wouldn’t we want to hear more of an expert’s idea? I’m so glad. Tell me about some of the speaking engagements. Obviously, you do a lot of speaking because you teach every single week, but what kind of surprising engagements have you gotten from the book. Maybe they’re not surprising, maybe they’re expected, but I’d love to hear about that.
Jeffrey Madoff:
I never know what to expect. You never know who, like in this case, who’s listening to this podcast. There are people that listen to the podcast like this happened where they wanted me to give a speech on entrepreneurship and with the Dean of the school of entrepreneurism at Tampa State, Florida. It was neat. Then somebody else who actually read the book was on the board of a foundation and I got a grant for the book and the grant ended up getting 1,000 copies of the book in the hands of racially and gender diverse audiences who belonged to entrepreneurship groups. That was in California, Illinois, and New York, and Texas. I could have never even anticipated that.
Rob Kosberg:
Well done. Jeff, I love it. I love what you do. Very, very intriguing. I am now vested in this play. I need to know in the future how it does and what happens. I’m going to be following along with it. Tell us, where can people learn a little bit more? Where is the best place to send them? Obviously, they can get your book on Amazon and various places, but where can they learn more about you or where can we send them?
Jeffrey Madoff:
Well, they can go to LinkedIn. Look me up and they will see three times a week, there are clips of the various guests that I have in my class. You get these little knowledge bites, things that might entertain, provoke, bring about new ideas, tactics, whatever. They can go to my Instagram account for creative careers, it’s @acreativecareer, which also has quotes from my guesting class, or they can go to acreativecareer.com. That’s got longer clips for the guests and things like that. I have to redo that website by the way. madoffproductions.com where they can see my video work and that sort of the thing. I’d say any of those areas are good places to see what and to connect with what I’m doing. Probably LinkedIn would be the best for that. We start performances at March second at People’s Light theater in Malvern, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. We run through the 27th. That’s just really exciting. I’m going to be moving to Malvern for five weeks. I have been away from home five weeks straight and I don’t even remember. So that’ll either strengthen or ruin my marriage. We’ll see what happens with that.
Rob Kosberg:
You guys may do better than ever.
Jeffrey Madoff:
Well, they say absence makes the heart grow fonder. Until we open, I won’t be there as often after we open. By the way, I think it is always important to have things to look forward to. Looking forward to the play opening and looking forward to the possibility of another book, looking forward to the next semester, looking forward, like I was today, to doing your podcast. That’s fun to just have things to be excited about and looking forward to.
Rob Kosberg:
Great life advice. I was given that probably 30 years ago, almost word for word. Always try to have something in your day that you’re excited about and looking forward to. I’ve always thought about that. That’s a great way to end, that’s a good bit of life, and career advice to give of there. So, Jeff, wow, really fun to have you on, really intriguing. I learned a lot and thanks for being part of the podcast.
Jeffrey Madoff:
Well, thank you, Rob. I really enjoyed being on and enjoyed the conversation. I didn’t feel like I was being interviewed. I felt like I was talking to a friend. So, thank you very much.
