Good news can wait. Good news will always be good news and it doesn’t concern when it is told.

Not the case with the bad news. Bad news has a way of turning as the time passes. You have to bring bad news as swiftly as possible to avoid further complications.

This is one of the things I learned in a trial-and-error-style. Not a very fun way to learn but it always drives the message home. Hard.  Sometimes I’d double booked a date by mistake. Sometimes, I promised artists certain amount of money and yet things happened that made it impossible to make good on the promises. Shit happens. It is unavoidable. What can be avoided is making the situations worse than they already are. Once you realize that there is a bad news to be delivered, you have to deliver it immediately and deal with the situation courageously. You gotta own the mistakes without making excuses.

There was a time I dragged my feet in delivering the bad news. I so wanted to avoid the uncomfortable conversations and I let it go on way too long to the point that there was no time to correct the mistakes or come up with solutions or cancel whatever it was entirely. Should I have delivered the bad new right away, there would have been a time to digest the news and come up with the solutions. If I had to cancel the gig, it would have been better to do it a month before rather than 2 days before. If I had to reschedule something, it is better to have an ample time to do it. And I didn’t have to come up with excuses as to why I waited so long to deliver the news.