NICKGRAYTranscript.doc

NICKGRAYTranscript.doc

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  ARI Now Iam speaking with Nick Gray, who is the founder of museum hacks, so Nick thank you for coming out to talk to me. NICK Thanks, am glad to be here. ARI So right away, you have got a great name for your company, because museum and hacking or hack is not always something that people will associate together, so what is museum hacks? NICK Museum hacks is a company that does tours for people who don’t like museums, I don’t come from a museum background, in fact, I have never taken an art history class, but I have this amazing experience at the metropolitan museum of art here in New York City and I started to do tours for my friend for fun about three years ago, and I quit my job over a year ago, I have been doing this full time, today we have about twelve or thirteen part time employees and we lead a bunch of tours here in New York City at the best museums. ARI So now, for people who don’t like museums, how do you first of all decide how you are going to approach that group, what is so unique about museum hacks? NICK We say that we hack two things, we hack the content and we hack the experience. On the content side, we are going to show you pieces that you might not regularly see on an high let tours, our tour guards say things that you may not hear from a regular guide, that could mean that, at the met right, they will take you to the temple of Den dour, and they will tell you that it’s an Egyptian temple from 15BC, built to the God Isis, it’s an amazing temple, but then they will tell you the juicy gossip back story about how Jackie O wrangled in to be in New York City, and so amazing details about that, so that’s one, we hack the content, two, we hack the experience, we do what we called fatigue fighting exercising during the tour to keep people alive and awake, and sort of alert, because some of the space within the museum can be very boring and though. ARI So this is based in New York right?
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  NICK Yes weare based in New York City. ARI So which museums do you temporary do this at? NICK The bulk of our revenue is at Metropolitan museum of art, but we are also at the American museum of natural history right across central park and a lot of other museums around the world are contacting us to do decent training programs and volunteer workshops and things like that. ARI So this is what I find so cool about this, first of all, I grew up in the art world and people listening actually might not be aware of that, my father and mother have had a very important art gallery in Manhattan for over 40 years now dealing mostly in photo realism, but so, I grew up in the art world and I felt like I was having appreciation for art, but I too find museums very boring, what was a sort of kicker for me was, it feels like what you are describing in some ways too, it’s almost like a live podcast, because there are many collectors like the bachelor boys, it’s just amazing, you know the podcast? NICK I am not familiar with it. ARI To me, it’s the coolest in New York history podcast, it does that when you talk about this event within when you talk about the bachelor and I feel like that’s what it is, relating to it, it’s what makes it so interesting. NICK We love connecting with people on their level; can I tell you a good example? ARI Please. NICK A lot of times, guys, because the audience tends to skip towards the females, and guy will get dragged to the museum to one of our tours on a date, maybe with their girlfriends, we do this late night tours at the met, this aren’t really popular, and they all get dragged there, and we loving be
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  afraid that financebrows, so they are probably working on the investment bank they do not want to be at the museum, they have a really though week, and they are just not tuned there at all, they don’t want to be there and our guys will pack up and they will be on alert to this and this is a common thing that a lot of educators do that they will meet people where they are, and our guards are not afraid to talk about money, and how much are our costs and so they will say, let’s start the tour that the most expensive painting that the metropolitan museum of art has ever paid cash money for and so they will take them upstairs to this Duccio painting in the 1300's by this rhinoceros artist and they will say, why do the met spend 45 million dollars for this object in 2004 and people kind of pack up and say, nobody talks about money and museum tours, and we will take them to the most expensive things and stuffs like that. ARI I have never even heard of that one by the way, duccio, so as I was saying, my interest in most of the school is history, so that’s what I even heard of, it was really cool. So how did you learn this stuff, how did you figure out the context to train people to do this? NICK I first heard this experience when a woman brought me there on a romantic date, and it was our third date in the middle of I think it was December, and it was snowy outside and no one was at the museum because it was snowy and it was late at night, and it was like very dimly lit and she just walked me around, Ari she just gave me this very private tour showing me her favorite pieces, whether it was sculptures or paintings or Egyptian artifacts, or furniture and it was something about her showing me that, maybe it was just having an attractive woman talk to me about things she was excited about, but something for me that night unlocked the sense of curiosity that I never knew that I had about art, and I started to go back to the math, and I did the audio tours on research and Wikipedia, by the books, I could do anything I could to learn about this objects, I will self-talk. ARI I think that’s really incredible, and in general, not anyone picks up in this kind of thing, but I feel like, even if you are not interested in the content of the subject and if somebody is really genuinely sharing a passion with somebody, that should come through a lot of time, I think that really heads home. NICK I am so glad you mentioned that, because that is how we hire our tour guards, that’s what people say, whenever we post for hiring tour guards, we have at least a hundred people, one time we had three hundred and eighty people apply for one tour guard slot, and which is actually the tool that I want to talk about that I use, so I will come back to that, hiring tour guards, is simply based on
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  passion and howgood the story teller they are, and we think that the art history is secondary, its important, but that part can be thought, but you can’t teach someone how to connect with people, and I will tell you the hundred per cent truth, more than 50 per cent of the job of being a tour guard with museum hack has to do with making someone feeling comfortable and welcome in the space, because it’s kind of like we are like museum ferry pests, you know most people have had a bad experience in the museum and we have to get them be accustomed to have fun and in the space. ARI Absolutely, so are there any pretty cool questions that you ask in interviews that you think that are real eye openers for you in terms of, am thinking this as an optimum way of getting right to a point where somebody to a way, is there any? NICK I think we have an interesting way of interviewing people, we do live interviews and so we actually do a kind of a casting call, and we bring everybody to the museum, usually groups of ten or twelve, and they meet us at the museum and we say you guys are welcome, you are going to do a live interview, you have ten minutes to go find a piece of art that you like in this room build a story around it, and we are all going to meet up and we are going to share the group and right on the spot, we can see how quickly they can tell a story in more crowds and we in the group start from there. ARI That’s great, so now let’s talk with you, this is a bootstrap company, and you have done pretty cool stuffs in terms of outsourcing and automation outsource, let’s hear it. NICK I guess first since we were thinking about recruiting, I used a service called the resonator, are you familiar with that? ARI Vaguely, I don’t do much hiring, so, I have heard of the piece, so please tell us about it? NICK The resonator I think they are based in Pittsburg, great company, the day I started up, I used my former employer recommended them and many friends, I believe they have a free plan instead of
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  posting job onchestier and telling people to email you here, you send them to the resonator, which is what is called an application tracking system, and it lets all your resume fall unto a dash board, where you can easily rate people so you can star them from one to five stars, you can give them statuses and comments of your sharing them with colleagues or just simply for yourself, so if you ever try to hire something, and you can email box full of PDF files in word docs, this has completely changed the way that I group and I highly recommend the resonator. ARI And so what else though, how are your systems and processes grown with you? NICK Okay terms and processes, let’s just talk about how we handle our employees, and our payroll for example, when we started, we used a lot of independent contractors and into manage all those 1099 forms; we used a system called just works. Just works is based here in New York City, and they handled all of our independent contractors and all the 1099 finance, and then when we were ready to transfer them to part time employees, which they are now, that was a pretty seamless process, they handled all of our WU tools and our taxes and all that stuffs, so I used just works instead of having to you know basically like I have a human resource to deal with all the payroll things. ARI How do people pay you? NICK So our ticketing system is also by a New York City company that’s called the Zerve. Zerve is a really fascinating business, there are many places out there like event bred, which I will talk later, it’s a powerful tool, they are great, but they are not like a full service ticketing company and the brain of any tour business is one later rivals and two refunds and exchanges. Because this things don’t just fit into a process, that is if we do anyhow, Zerve handles all our ticketing and prepare the percentage of our sales, thy have a live phone support that we can probably call right now and they will answer the phone, how can I help you, book a museum hack activity and they will do that. ARI Wow that’s usually on the rush from a company like that, and then as far as you tell me that you don’t seem to outsource or something like that, like what do you mainly use in outsourcing divisions for?
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  NICK Yeah, Iam big on the outsourcing, I have a full time gentleman who is based in Manila Philippines, who works with us, he’s been working with us for about six or seven months now, and he handles a lot of our pre and post tour communications with the customers system and reminder messages, he helps us co-ordinate all bookings across the various party events that we sell our tickets, he post photos of our tours to our Facebook account, he posts them to News blog and Tumbler and some other channels. ARI Have you had those processes written out or like how is that done? NICK I have to tell you, I have them very thoroughly documented, and I do screen shots on my documentation, I will say that I love to write documents for this, standard operating procedures, I love to write this and our team is really good at using this. ARI This is something, I talk about this in the podcast, but basically, if you create this processes, then it makes it so that you can scale that somebody is sick and somebody is helping in, you know full process is very clearly figured out, so that’s great, that’s something you don’t see a lot actually, and it is a lot of reasons why some companies don’t do the bootstrap thing very well. NICK Think about my business, this is the messiest business in the world, it is high touch low tech, it is live tour guards at a museum, it’s like a nightmare, you have a later rivals, I will give you an example, we had a tour today, one senior citizen in a wheelchair, three little kids and two foreigners who don’t speak English, like the booking process, to manage them and to do with later rivals, and reminders is something that demands, like a standard procedure and our tour guards, we have to give credit to our tour guards, because they deal with all of this situations on daily basis. ARI This is funny, when I actually used to teach my less doing class, live in the city, I was doing it a free show, and there was one time, these three people showed up and they didn’t speak a word of English, they just heard about it and they thought this is a cool thing to do and I was like it’s a two hours of English and I don’t know what to tell you am sorry, but they enjoyed it, I don’t know what they got out of it, or if they even knew what I was talking about. That is something I obviously had to deal with.
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  NICK I lovethe skill share class, that’s where I first found out about you by the way. ARI That’s absolutely right. So, what are you personally, what’s your kind of political activity look like, how do you, you know I just had a conversation with you, you seem very calm and cool and collected, and that’s a good thing, because a lot of time when you are dealing with people who talk about how they bootstrap they really have their eye strong, it’s like yeah it’s all bootstrap, so we got this figured out that they run on caffeine, so you obviously have to be very personal because you are dealing with the tours and everything, what’s do your days look like, how many tours are you doing and how do you work past, you know, what’s that like? NICK I do not want to misrepresent myself, I am addicted to bullet proof coffee, and I have been like that for the last 9 months or so, I start every morning with a little bit of bullet proof coffee made within my aero press and I add butter and coconut oil and one or two raw eggs, and that’s how I start my morning. ARI You do eggs in the coffee too? NICK Yes, is that good or bad, should I not do that? ARI No, that’s totally fine, that’s a little more of the MacPherson daily apple kind of egg coffee, I mean it’s the same purpose, you know both the coffee is about getting fat and caffeine basically into your brain as quickly as possible, so that’s pretty cool, I have never done it with two raw eggs, that’s cool. NICK That’s great, you know my body craves it, today was an interesting day, I was at the museum for the maturity of the day, it’s a Sunday by the way, it’s a pro tech if you ever want to go to metropolitan museum of art, you can go on a Sunday, but do not go after 1pm, it’s the worst place in New York City, it is so crowded, okay, it’s not the worst place in New York City, but I am willing to bet, it’s the most crowded time of the market on Sunday afternoon after 1pm, but today, I was at the museum for the whole day, we were doing final exams for two new tour guards and we were testing and we were scavenger hunt and we did staff meetings afterwards.
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  The time thatare most productive is in the mornings and I find that as soon as I wake up, that’s when I can really get work done and after about one or two, I like to schedule all my meetings and things like that. ARI And what are those meetings really, I mean what is next for the company, where are you growing and what are you working on? NICK The big thing that I like to say about his is that I want to help other museums change the way that they do the adult museum tour, you know, a lot of museums do children's programming very well and they don’t need a lot of help with that, but what we have said is museum hack is we are going after those people who don’t like museums, who would never think about going to a museum on a Friday or Saturday or Sunday, who maybe only go once or twice a year just to have obligation or for a special exhibit. So I am interested in that, we are talking to fairly high profile museums around the world that have reached out to us, but does have very long reach terms, and I spent the last one year removing myself from the tours, because for the last three years, I have been the one leading all the tours and I quit my job like a year ago, and I have now built a network of an amazing incredible tour guards and now they lead all the tours and we have a great system set up here in New York City that continues to grow, and evolve, now I just want to help some other museums. ARI I mean you feel, do you ever get bored of it, or you feel like you are just venturing yourself with more information and new staffs? NICK I really geek out more about the business stuff, so I have gotten like we have been experimenting our twitter advertising over the last couple of weeks and like what you can do about the twitter cards, am pretty British on twitter right now, because there are certain market segments that nobody is going after on twitter and we have had really good results with those. ARI Like museum tours? NICK Well actually more like museum professionals, I think museum tours never can vouch for us because the price of the sale is very low, that the cost of conversion is like a wash, but we have had success for example for our business, a significant portion of our revenue comes from
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  Corporate team building,so companies like Google, PayPal, adobe send their employees to us to go do an awesome adventure at the metropolitan museum of art and we have had a lot of luck with that. ARI Okay, that’s another aspect, I actually haven’t noticed, is it anything more than those group coming together to do a tour or you building some, is it different when you are working for a team like that from a company? NICK Good question, I think what you are asking is, do we just mark the price up when the Google comes. The answer to that is no, some groups do come to us and they say, look we just want a regular tour, we don’t want our team in this building, fine we can give that to you, although the groups are giving example, am not going to say the name of the company, but they came to us and they said, we have twelve that are going to come to you, and six of them are sales executives on the west coast 6ers here in New York City, we want them to do a story telling on exercise, so they brought us twelve people, we brought them three Broadway sort of act of story tellers, and three musicians and we paired them up and we thought them how to be tour guards, and so after they have done the tour with us, we brought in this casting and they walked with them to find their favorite piece to develop a story and they told their story to their co-workers and it was cool, we took over the musical instruments when we had so much fun in there, everyone was laughing, it was great. ARI That’s sort of making me laugh, you took over the musical instruments, it sounds like you being more badass. NICK It was totally badass, this is the most badass museum tours and in short all the instruments are behind glass casings but still. ARI I think it sounds awesome, actually I was at the museum national history today with my wife and my three very young children, the first time in years, it felt good to be in a museum, I live at the Illinois and we don’t really have museums like that, after moving back to New York in the spring, but it was a nice reminder, I think if there is any way you can make people relate to this information, and appreciate the understanding, it’s a wonderful thing. So the last question that I like to ask on the podcast is, what are your top three personal tips for being more effective and
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  you can’t usebulletproof coffee now because you already gave that one, what are your top three things that just make you more effective every day? NICK Number one that I will say is that I talked to my dad about this before the podcast and I got some advice from him and she reminded me, she said number one advice, just do it, don’t wait for somebody else's approval, I started doing this museum tours without the meth's approval, without trying to take out history class, because I just started doing them for free for my friends because I loved it and so my first thing to be effective in the starting of business or whatever it is you want to do, number one is just to start doing it to be more effective, I think am a big fan of fancy helms and everybody says that, but I realize it’s not for everybody especially if you don’t know how to delegate and so the next thing that I will say is if fancy helms doesn’t work for you and you are not ready to try it yet, commit yourself to spending 25 dollars tonight, get on the fiverr and purchase fiverr projects, burn that 25 dollars and just see what it’s like to delegate to somebody else, spend it all tonight and see the results and you will get better. Delegation is a skill that doesn’t get better unless you practice it. And then the third which is a quick test, that’s a very little thing that the service call user testing recently launched a service called PEEK and if you have a website, PEEK is a quick free five minute user clicking through your website, there is no charge for it, I don’t have any affiliation with them, but I took a couple of my websites in it and I got some really fascinating feedback just watching somebody clicking through my company's website and my own website, it was really neat and it was free and fast. ARI Okay apart of other users, this one is free, share us some knowledge, I have not even heard of it, I like it. NICK Thank you, Major compliment. ARI Am actually going to push back on you now, because I want one more, not something that’s more amazing or effective, just something that you think is awesome and you use, honestly you have mentioned things that I haven’t heard of. NICK My mother told me this one, she said whenever you make a doctor's appointment, everybody tries to get the first slot in the morning but she gets the first slot after lunch, because then you are never late.
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  ARI I likethat, okay so Nick thank you so much for taking time to talk to me, I employ everybody to get on to museum hack tour, because they are awesome and you will want to learn something no matter who you are and we are going to put links in everything you have shown us. So Nick, thank you NICK Awesome thank you very much, less doing rocks, Thank you guys.