E6: Tina Harris – Lah Lah Productions

Tina Harris is the CEO for Business On Demand and Lah Lah Productions.

“I was in the interesting kind of position where Lala was a brand that was, was becoming a household name. We’ve now got three TV shows on different networks across Australia and also internationally. And I think because I’m a mum and I’ve always spent a lot of time in business groups, I found a lot of women in business were drawn to me and, and I would get phone calls or emails every week with women asking questions about whether I’d have a look at their strategies, their business, if I had advice for what they were doing.”

I actually found that I was doing it more and more and a more regular kind of basis. And so I said to my husband, I said, look, I think maybe I actually need to seriously spend a bit of time doing this. And it’s kind of business on demand. Just kind of grew out of that. I did a presentation at a conference and I had many beautiful ladies sign up with me straight away. And that was about 18 months ago. It’s been a real blessing because with COVID hitting our live show, touring basically went straight into hibernation.

We just launched a national tour. I think we’d been on sale for three weeks. So we’d spent on marketing money and were really heavily committed to the tour. And then we’re in a position where we were refund in tickets or, you know, crediting tickets forward or, or trying to find how we were going to look at cash flowing. What has become quite a big machine and a hungry machine, which is La La, and then how to project forward for 12 months. Thats been an interesting thing because you know, the banks and, you know, landlords and, and, and people that you’ve got a financial relationship with, they really do want those projections for what’s going to be happening in the next 12 to 18 months.

What has come up in my conversations with ladies in particular is that they often feel very uncomfortable about talking in front of camera. The things that kind of hit them, it’s about what do I say in front of the camera? How am I going to look, you know, and what I do about all the tech, the lighting and the video and the editing of the lines of things. So we’re now in the process of making some short courses that we’re going to be providing, and then, you know, doing more development in with working in front of camera and video mentoring and doing kind of video orders on people’s businesses and helping them grow in this crazy time.

Nichola Burton: Little children feel like they’re part of the show. Then of course, there’s that tactile connection with the musical instruments? How on earth are you going to be dealing with the logistics in a post COVID world for those shows with little people who can’t follow instructions?

Tina Harris: Well, I mean, look, that is a very, very good question. And I guess the, the, the short answer is at the moment we don’t know. And that’s one of the reasons that we’re not touring currently. I mean, this, this week was meant to be the second week about biggest kind of run in new South Wales. So last week we were meant to be in Victoria and this week we’re meant to be in new South Wales. And I know thinking back to the two, I think we had like 25 shows, booked, wow, we were self producing ourselves. So every time we go into the live show to her, I kind of bite my nails and I pull my hair out and hope that it’s going to be such a massive gamble because it’s still a little family kind of, you know, running this whole thing.

I think, I think life post COVID will be different. And what I’m still trying to find a solution to is the kind of venues that we like to go to. So one of the, one of the things we like to do is to have what we kind of fondly call a baby Marsh and our baby mosh pit room at the front of the stage where children afraid to dance and explore and express themselves. And mom and dad and grandma can kind of just relax and be in a, a likeminded community of people who have got little ones. And they understand that kids aren’t going to sit down and they need to move and they get potentially going to eight and this, that kind of freedom.

So the question is, can we perform at those venues? So that’s my first one, or do we need to actually go to fix seating in, in kind of theater style, TV venues. And we’re just where we’re kind of waiting to see what happens over the next few months. And, and like, like you said, the other thing is the meet and greets, which is our, you know, has been our, our major point of difference that for many, many years, the band would often go out into the audience and they’d spend as long in, in the meet and greet as we would in the actual shot. The problem with that, we sometimes couldn’t do a second show because we were clear long during the main grade.

I don’t know at the moment what we’re doing is we’re being approached by a number of councils, a number of charities. Well, one in particular age is a charity that we work with in Melbourne, and they booking us to do live stream concepts through their Facebook groups and also through the cheer pages. So Mark’s been incredibly clever and he’s worked out the text. So he can now broadcast from the studio and do multiple streams into all these different, like Facebook pages and incredible. So that’s been, that’s been a great learning curve, but it is, it’s definitely something that we discuss often around the dinner table.