What Broadway Taught Me About Selling a Vision (That Business School Never Could)
When I was raising capital for The Color Purple Musical, my pitch kept failing — until I stopped selling an investment and started selling an identity. That shift changed how I think about persuasion, leadership, and reinvention entirely.
When I decided to move from performing to theatrical producing, I understood the creative side instinctively. Eleven years with Paul Taylor, then six more performing in plays and musicals regionally, on tour, and on Broadway, had given me a deep feel for what makes a performance work, how audiences respond, and what it takes to bring a complex artistic vision to life. What I didn’t understand — not yet, at least — was how to raise the money to do any of it.
Broadway is an expensive business. A major production costs $15–$20+ million to mount, and like a film, much of that money is spent before audiences see the first performance. Unlike most movies, in the commercial theater world, that money comes primarily from individual investors — people who believe in the project enough to write a check, knowing they may never see it again. My job, as a co-producer, was to find those people and convince them to say yes.
What followed was one of the most instructive and humbling educations in persuasion I’ve ever received. And it had nothing to do with the pitch I started with.
The pitch that wasn’t working
How I went from performing in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on Broadway to raising money for The Color Purple Musical is a wild story for another time. TLDR: along with my friend Adam Zotovich, I had to raise $1M towards the $14M production cost. When I set out to raise the capital, I had a clear strategic instinct: this was a story with deep roots in African American culture and history, and I wanted to bring in investors who reflected that. Not just for optics — but because I believed genuinely that Broadway needed more diverse ownership at the table, and that the right investors would bring not just capital but community.
So I made a lot of cold calls. Not to people in my immediate network, but to people like the heads of BET Networks and Radio One. Senior executives I had no prior relationship with, reached through sheer persistence and a compelling enough reason for them to take my call.
They took the calls. And then my pitch fell flat.
The problem wasn’t the show. The Color Purple was a powerful story with a proven track record — the novel, the film, and the cultural weight of it were all real assets. The problem was that nobody I spoke with understood the economics of Broadway. The return structure, the risk profile, the way a production actually generates revenue — none of it mapped to how these executives thought about investment. It was too risky. And the more I tried to explain it, the more the conversation stalled.
I was selling the wrong thing entirely.
The moment everything shifted
I don’t remember exactly when the realization landed, but I remember the feeling of it — the recognition that I was trying to win a rational argument in a conversation that was never going to be decided rationally. The economics of Broadway theater investment are genuinely difficult to defend on pure financial logic. The risk is real, and the returns are uncertain. Anyone doing the math carefully would probably walk away. (That said, the hits — like Lion King, Book of Mormon, Hamilton — print money.)
So I stopped doing the math.
Instead, I started asking investors to close their eyes. And then I took them somewhere.
I asked them to picture themselves on opening night. Dressed up in a tuxedo or a gown, taking a limo to the theater district. They arrive at the theater, and there are photographers outside — television, film, and theater stars walking the red carpet. They find their seats. The house is full. The anticipation in the room is thick and energizing. The lights begin to dim.
And in that moment — right there, in the dark, as the overture begins to swell — they know something that most of the people who will see the show after that night don’t. They’re not just here to see The Color Purple Musical. They’re part of it. They’re owners of a piece of Broadway history. They’ve joined a lineage of producers, investors, directors, writers, and performers who have spent more than a century creating the kind of evenings that people remember for the rest of their lives.
The anticipation in the theater isn’t just excitement. It’s confirmation. This is what it feels like to have said yes.
That pitch landed. Every time.
I wasn’t selling an investment anymore. I was selling an identity — a version of themselves that they wanted to inhabit. The moment I understood that distinction, everything changed.
What this taught me about selling any vision
The insight I took from those conversations has stayed with me across every career since. It’s this: when you’re selling something people don’t yet have a framework for — a new idea, an unconventional opportunity, a version of the future that doesn’t exist yet — logic is seldom the right entry point.
People don’t make decisions about things they’ve never encountered by calculating outcomes. They make decisions by asking, consciously or not, a much simpler question: is this who I am? Or more precisely: is this who I want to be?
The most effective pitch isn’t the one that best explains the opportunity. It’s the one that most vividly shows the person who they become by saying yes.
I’ve seen this pattern hold across wildly different contexts since then. When I was pitching XR technology to Broadway marketers who had never used immersive media, the breakthrough wasn’t a technical demonstration — it was helping them see themselves as the person who brought something genuinely new to an industry that rarely innovates. When I was building client relationships at Accenture, the conversations that moved fastest weren’t the ones focused on deliverables — they were the ones where a senior leader could see themselves as the architect of something that hadn’t existed before.
The currency changes. The mechanism doesn’t. You’re always, ultimately, selling someone a version of themselves.
Why this matters for career reinvention
Here’s where this connects directly to the work I do at Project Future Self — and to anyone navigating a significant career transition.
When you’re reinventing your career, you are constantly selling a vision. Not to investors, necessarily, but to employers, collaborators, clients, mentors — and most critically, to yourself. You’re asking people to see potential in a non-linear background, to value experience that doesn’t fit the conventional template, to believe in a version of you that doesn’t yet have the track record to prove itself.
The mistake most people make in that situation is leading with credentials and logic. Here’s what I’ve done. Here are my skills. Here’s why this makes sense on paper. All of that matters — eventually. But it rarely moves people first.
What moves people first is the same thing that moved those investors in those early producing conversations: a vivid, emotionally resonant picture of what saying yes actually looks like. Not your qualifications — your vision. Not your history — your trajectory. Not who you’ve been — who you’re becoming, and what it means to be part of that.
Broadway taught me that the most powerful pitch isn’t a presentation. It’s an invitation into a story that the other person genuinely wants to be part of.
Learning to extend that invitation, clearly and convincingly, is one of the most transferable skills I’ve built across five careers. And it starts with understanding that you’re never really selling what you think you’re selling.
You’re selling a future that doesn’t exist yet. Your job is to make it feel inevitable.