Five Towns Jewish Home - 1-14-21

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JANUARY 14, 2021 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home

Mind Y

ur Business

Steven Cohen: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

By Yitzchok Saftlas

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very Sunday evening since July 2015, Yitzchok Saftlas, CEO of Bottom Line Marketing Group, hosts 77WABC’s “Mind Your Business” show on America’s leading talk radio station. The show features Fortune 500 CEOs, CMOs, and top business leaders where they share their business knowledge and strategic insights on how to get ahead in today’s corporate world. Since Q2 2017, the 77WABC “Mind Your Business” show has remained in the coveted Nielsen “Top 10” in New York’s highly competitive AM Talk Radio market. Guests have included John Sculley, former CEO of Apple and Pepsi; Dick Schulze, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Best Buy; Beth Comstock, former vice chair of GE; and Captain Sully Sullenberger, among nearly 200 senior-level executives and business celebrities.

TJH will be featuring leading questions and takeaways from Yitzchok’s popular radio show on a bi-monthly basis.

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n a recent 77WABC “Mind Your Business” broadcast, Yitzchok Saftlas spoke with guest Steve Cohen, also known as the “Millionaire’s Magician,” the famous host of “Chamber Magic,” a popular off-Broadway show. * * * Steve, when did you decide that you’re going to make a career out of magic?

Well, you know, it’s not the kind of job that has a career path. There’s no training program. There’s no step-by-step.

I decided when I was very young that I wanted to become a magician, but my parents always said, you have to have something to fall back on. So, that’s why I went to college.

After having graduated from college, I wanted to give this magic thing a try, but I didn’t have any money yet.

So I started working in a marketing company just using some of my Jap-

anese language skills, and then was moonlighting as a magician on the side when I realized I could make a lot more money working for myself than working for someone else.

So that’s kind of when the switch flipped, and I left that company and went off on my own and had many years of being very hungry. I decided to do some work on the side in Japanese language translating, translating Japanese documents from Japanese into English for law firms, for the U.S. government. Those are all things that I was using to kind of pad the coffers while I was really trying to make my living as a magician.

And it was very slim pickings in the beginning.

That’s a very important lesson, because there are people – many people – when they embark on the journey of becoming an entrepreneur, they say, OK, I could potentially make more money going out on my own, not realizing that

it could take one, two or even three decades for their business to become viable.

I’ll tell you how long it was for me. I came to New York in 1995. It took five years before I launched my show, and I was really living a very meager lifestyle. I remember, at one point, if I had a doughnut that was a meal. So, it was a really tough five years.

Then, when I decided to launch the show, it took another two years before it actually started to break even and turn a profit. So that’s seven years.

And that’s something that people often gloss over when they look back, and they talk about their successes and whatnot. It was a seven-year period where I was really living handto-mouth.

with an off-Broadway show.

Tell us about what it was like when you were facing that challenge.

I didn’t really think of the bigger picture. I didn’t think about how I was competing against Broadway shows for the competition for people’s time and their money. All I wanted to do was: I wanted to be a magician in New York. I thought if I could do this for 20 years, then, in my mind, I’ll have been a success.

I kind of had “bubble” or tunnel vision. I just went ahead and did my own thing, not really concerning myself with the competition. What are other magicians doing? What are Broadway shows doing? What are off-Broadway shows doing? That actually helped me, because I wasn’t really swayed by anyone else.

Going back 20 years, you entered a very competitive market. The New York theater market is highly competitive, and you decided you were going

There is a famous quote, “It took 30 years to become an overnight success.”

How long did it take for you to gain traction? Can you talk