The more I’ve been thinking about these circus lessons I wrote down in 1997, the more I’ve realized something.
The circus wasn’t a show.
It was a system for creating a show.
Think about that.
The audience saw elephants.
Trapeze artists.
Clowns.
Costumes.
Music.
The big top.
The Greatest Show on Earth.
It looked like spectacle.
It felt like magic.
But behind all that magic was an incredibly sophisticated machine.
The circus had to arrive in a new city.
Unload everything.
Build an entire temporary world.
Feed and care for the animals.
Prepare the performers.
Sell tickets.
Put thousands of people into seats.
Start the show on time.
Deliver something extraordinary.
Take the whole thing down.
Load it onto trains.
Move to another city.
And do it again.
Different city. Different audience. Different night. Same promise.
That’s remarkable.
The circus couldn’t rely on extraordinary effort every night to create an extraordinary experience.
Extraordinary effort isn’t reliable.
Eventually somebody gets tired.
Somebody forgets something.
Something breaks.
Larry gets the flu.
So they built systems behind the spectacle.
That’s a really useful model for any business.
Sometimes entrepreneurs resist systems because they think systems will make things boring.
Mechanical…corporate…less creative.
But I think that’s backwards.
The system isn’t the show.
The system is what allows the show to happen reliably.
Your customers don’t need to see your checklists.
They don’t need to know your processes.
They don’t need to understand the logistics.
The audience doesn’t need to know how the elephants got there.
They just need to be amazed when the elephants arrive.
That’s the opportunity.
Can you create something extraordinary without requiring extraordinary effort every single time?
Can you make the magic repeatable?
That’s what a great system does.
It doesn’t replace creativity.
It protects it.
It doesn’t eliminate the magic.
It makes the magic reliable.
And maybe that’s the real goal of building a business.
Not creating one great show.
Building the circus that can put on the great show…
again and again and again.
And somewhere backstage, somebody besides Larry knows how everything works.
Dean