You may be wondering how we plan shows. We have never come up with a formal process, but basically both Darren and I have total veto power.  Historically, it works as such. In a typical month, I come up with 20 ideas and Darren vetoes 18 of them. Darren comes up with 5 ideas and I veto 3 of them.  We both end up contributing 2 ideas. (NOTE: I have done no research on these figures and they are completely made up. I will send this to Darren before posting this, so he can provide alternate figures if he wishes)

Now, part of me thinks this is a bad process that could lead to complete paralysis and nothing happening, but in actuality it has worked out pretty great. If we tried to use every idea, the show would be constantly changing and never become something solid like our Themes Show.  There is definitely a part of me that likes the idea of having a constantly changing show, but I can see how what we have now is better.  Now to be clear, I am not complaining about Darren vetoing 90% of my ideas. If anything, I think we need more vetoing.  I legitimately think it is a cool process and decided to write about it this month since I had the word veto scribbled down in my list of possible blog ideas. Recently however I have noticed two possible flaws in this process. 

This summer has been our busiest by far, and as we see our name in print more and more, I can't help but notice all the different spellings
 
The DK'ers,
The DKer's,
The DKers,
The Dkers,
The Deekairs
 (Okay, I admit it I made this last one up)
 
You may wonder which spelling is correct. I would say right off the bat that the ones with apostrophes are the worst. It is not suppose to be some kind of contraction, and the s is to make it plural not to show possession. Let's get rid of the unnecessary apostrophes. That leaves us with two options, the DKers and the Dkers.

     I recently discovered Tim Farris on the Jay Mohr podcast. I haven't read any of his books yet, but he was very interesting. Two of the things I came away with from the podcast were; the 80/20 principle and asking "what’s the worst that could happen?" The 80/20 principle is that 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions. I tried to relate this to juggling shows. In the last year, Darren has spent some time doing online advertising, and I have spent a bunch of time designing this website and our brochures. However, I would guess that 80% of our show offers come from people who have heard about us through Jesse Rothaker (thanks again Jesse). This involved almost no work on our part. We met him after a show at the Intercourse Heritage Festival, and since then he has told tons of the people he has performed for about us. NOTE: Darren disputes the 80% figure for Jesse, but agreed that most of our shows came from some sort of referral. If we really want to do more shows, that is what we should try to duplicate.

      Whenever Darren and I are trying to make a decision, one of Darren favorite reasons to give for doing something is that it would be "more professional." For some reason, that always bugs me. With this post, I am going to try and explain(figure out) why that is. I am not trying to make the argument that it would be better to be less professional, I am only explaining why saying that plan A seems more professional than plan B is not enough of a reason to choose plan A.

   It might make more sense for me to wait till January to write about what I would like to be able to do in the next year, but I think there will be some other things to write about/announce in the next couple of months. Anyway, we have a lot of ideas for new routines and even talked about making an audition tape for America’s Got Talent, but I want to talk about doing something that seems simple but is much less likely to happen then any of those goals.