Post by Alan McKee

My buddy Chuck called me in the fall of 1978 with the kind of urgency most people reserve for actual emergencies. "You need to come over. Right now. You have to hear these guys." He'd just picked up Van Halen's debut album. I drove over. Walked into the room with his Pioneer stereo. Speakers the size of small refrigerators. He put the record on. Thirty seconds into "Runnin' With the Devil," I knew something was different. Not a little different. Categorically, in-a-completely-different-ZIP-code different. And then Eddie Van Halen started playing guitar. Whatever the standard was for rock guitar before that album, it became irrelevant the moment enough people heard "Eruption." It didn't raise the bar. It relocated it. Neither Boston nor Van Halen competed with disco. They didn't need to. They just showed up so fully, so unmistakably themselves, that the market stopped and paid attention. The audience was already out there. Huge. Hungry. Just hadn't been served yet. If you're building something after a long corporate run, you already know the gap. That specific mix of frustration and clarity, knowing exactly what's broken and what it would take to fix it? That's not just experience. That's your competitive edge. 🎸 The new article below walks you through that process. #AmplifiedEntrepreneur #Over50Entrepreneur #Entrepreneurship #EncoreCareer #AmpMyBiz #ClassicRock #VanHalen #Boston