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“Do what you have to do, to do what you want to do.” –Denzel Washington

Sekou Andrews

Who: Sekou Andrews

What: Owner, SekouWorld, Poetic Voice & Stage Might

Where: Los Angeles, CA

Previous: Law student/hip-hop artist/middle school teacher

sekouworld.com

@sekouworld

"You have to be bold enough, daring enough, risk-taking enough, disruptive enough, and playful enough to believe in yourself enough to say, 'That is there for me. I'm taking it!'"

- Sekou

TL;DR SUMMARY: Sekou is the product of a strong upbringing that stressed arts, education and entrepreneurial spirit. After college he clerked in a law office and then was a substitute teacher of fifth graders in a rough part of Los Angeles all while attempting to lift his hip-hop career off the ground. Eventually he found his voice with Nike and Microsoft and reinvented himself while redefining an entire speaking category allowing him to take control of his future.

As hundreds of sales people slowly drift into an extra-large conference room at one of the largest and most expensive hotels in Atlanta, GA, it was clear that this was not an ordinary corporate sales conference. Sure, it was the last day of an annual rah-rah event staged to motivate a team of sales folks and send them out into the world with renewed energy. But somehow, this one just felt different. The set was a bit larger. The screens were bigger. The lights brighter. A quick Google search of the host company revealed a worldwide organization that wasn’t a common name to most people, but was an 800-pound gorilla in the banking industry.

I was here to chat with the speaker after his presentation, and his team offered me a front row seat to the show—literally. The “speaker” in question is Sekou Andrews. I had been reading a lot about him the past several weeks, and was super curious to hear him present. Honestly, though, I really wasn’t sure what to expect from the concept of “poetic voice.” Then the lights went down and the session started with the standard corporate sales achievement awards. There was some polite applause, followed by a few yawns and lots of bloodshot eyes checking phones for final flight arrangements. As I looked around, I began to worry a bit for Sekou. It seemed unfair to put him in this position, as last speaker of the conference when everyone wanted the gig to be done.

A standing ovation

In the end, there was never any need to be concerned for Sekou. He certainly was not the least bit fazed. And by the time 35 minutes passed and he was finished with his presentation, the entire sales group was on their feet and looked genuinely ready to go out and change the world. As he left the stage to a standing ovation, the smile he let loose was a clear indication that he enjoyed the performance as much as the audience did.

Most importantly, the people paying him to speak were thrilled. They swarmed him backstage to thank him and let him know what a great response they were already getting. It was Sekou’s ability to deliver the company’s authentic message and important content, as well as the ability to entertain the crowd with his poetic voice style, that won the audience over.

As I observed all this, it was easy to discover the true magic of Sekou Andrews and his approach to corporate speaking. His combination of rap, hip-hop and spoken-word poetry—all with the custom content of the client—was distinctive and engaging. Actually, it was a bit intoxicating. And when you combine that with a truly caring and engaging personality, you’ve got a unique speaker.

A bumpy ride

But getting to this point was not a simple or quick journey for Sekou. It was the path you might imagine it would be—bumpy, messy to navigate, and a lot longer that he first thought. In fact, the journey he thought he was taking when he first held a microphone was to be the next big hip-hop artist.

“If I think about this journey, I didn’t set out to be about poetic voice. This was not what I was planning on doing,” Sekou admits as he looks around the empty conference room. “I was going to the open mics as [a hip-hop] artist.” He laughs as he begins to tell the story of a young man fresh out of college who was writing his own music, being rejected by record labels and feeling an obligation to earn a reluctant living as a law office clerk and part-time substitute teacher.

To really appreciate the way Sekou locks onto his personal perspective, it’s important to check in to his earliest days of the journey. Growing up, his parents were an eclectic combination of art and science and instilled a pride in his skin color and heritage. While they split up early on in his life, they both spent quality time shaping his character to be responsible, embody a sense of adventure and be accountable while showing an appreciation for his gifts.

“With both Mom and Dad being educators and artists, I got to see both sides of the equation,” Sekou admits. “They stressed the arts and liberal side, but also instilled a work ethic and appreciation for formal education. If you think about my business and my work, it’s a hybrid of education, artistry, and entrepreneurship.”

The end result was an appreciation for the artistry, the entrepreneurship, the education and his heritage. “Because all that was inside my parents, it was natural that it would be nurtured in me.” It was also clear that he received a healthy dose of drive, passion and willingness to take risks. Both in high school and college there was an equal emphasis put on the arts and a more traditional education.

After high school Sekou landed at Pitzer College, a private liberal arts college in southern California. While he declared a pre-law track, he was attracted by the opportunities to act and focus on his music talents during non-class hours. “I created a play that focused on race relations that was really popular. I had this breadth of experience that really crossed through education, entrepreneurship and artistry.”

Teaching himself to survive

With his college diploma in hand, Sekou put on a shirt and tie and began clerking at a law firm by day while continuing to write songs and look to be “discovered” by night. “I was just sort of testing out the law thing while I was really focusing on my music. The only reason I was working at the law firm was because I thought I needed a “real job.” I kept reading these articles about starving artists striking it big after living on their friend’s couch for a year, and I began to think I was screwing myself by having a job.”

His tough mentality and fend-for-yourself upbringing would not allow him to just quit his job. “For me, it was very much about being a grown man. I wanted to pay my bills, to be responsible. I did not want to go begging and be so desperate. But I was afraid of being seduced by the comfort, and the complacency, of a full-time job.”

Still, the law firm job was not working out so well. Filing papers all day and seeing the practice of law was depressing. Luckily, his family’s love of teaching kicked in. With a mother, father and aunt all in the education profession, he saw teaching as something more noble and much more palatable. Within a few days of looking, he was offered an opportunity to substitute teach and immediately knew it was a lot better for him than filing motions in a law office.

The risk he saw was the possibility that teaching could easily derail him from his dream of becoming a recording artist. “I remember the very first day I started substitute teaching, and I made a vow to myself that I would not allow myself to become a full-time teacher.”

As much as he promised himself that it wouldn’t happen, it was only six months before he was offered a job as a “long-term replacement.” He tried to rationalize that it was still temporary, but after six months that job description changed to permanent teacher. A job he was still working four years later.

Hip-hop convergence

For those years, he attempted to work days at the school and write his music and get gigs in the evening. Several events happened during those years that triggered a convergence of sorts. First, record labels were routinely rejecting his submissions as quickly as he could turn them in. But they were very nice about it. “All of the label executives were encouraging my unique style, saying they loved my lyrics and that it moved them, but it wasn’t something they could sell. It wasn’t angry enough,” he says with a laugh.

The second key event happened by fate one night at an open mic night. Sekou, on the spur of the moment, decided to deliver his lyrics without music and without the typical hip-hop beat. He took a risk and delivered it spoken-word style, mostly out of frustration.

I decided to free myself

“The tragedy of what was being done at the time is that I was putting all this time into crafting these words. I was being told the words were awesome, but people couldn’t catch ‘em because I was so focused on the cadence. I just decided to free myself from the beat. Free myself from the cadence. When you have the beat, you gotta stay locked in. That’s hip-hop. But now I didn’t have a beat, I just freed the words and delivered them more like a poem.”

His new approach caught on very quickly. “I liked not having to worry about the beat and the hook, and the remix, and the music politics, and I was just talking about something that resonated with folks. And people just started coming up to me saying the same thing these record labels execs were saying—that they loved the words and the message.”

Sekou began rising in the LA scene, but was still holding on to the safety net of his teaching job and the salary it provided. “I was really struggling internally, because I knew that I just couldn’t be a career teacher. But I also felt that these kids needed my 110% and I felt like I was a good teacher, and I was making a difference.” But he was adamant that he would not become one of those tenured teachers who were robotically handing out worksheets, grading papers and talking on the phone all day. “I had both factors colliding at this point and I kept looking in the mirror asking myself, ‘What’s stopping you?’”

“I knew when the voice inside me kept yelling, ‘What are you waiting for?’,” Sekou told himself, “either you’re gonna jump off or you’re not. So, I put on the blindfolds, strapped on my wings and said, ‘Let’s go.’” He formed his own record label called Blind Faith Records, and mustered up the courage to quit his teaching job.

The next steps were quick ones. After quitting his teaching job, he took his tax return check and what little savings he had, and upgraded a home recording studio so he could record and cut his first CD. “You reach that point that you’re just out of excuses. You have to operate off of pure faith. I just began saying, ‘I’m gonna make it. I’m done talking. I’m fresh. I’m good. It’s all or nothing.’”

Ahhhhh… freak out!

His master plan was to stage a big show of his new material, and after the show sell the newly minted CDs that he’d invested his life savings in pressing. The only problem was that the CDs did not show up on the morning of the show. “I’m freaking out. It was the day of the show, and they still don’t have them done. I was literally watching my whole dream go up in that moment.” Luckily, he got a call in the early afternoon that they were ready, but he’d have to drive an hour to pick them up and an hour back to the show. And like a Hollywood script, he arrived just in time to go on stage, for the annual big event called “Fly-Poet Showcase.”

“It’s the best spoken-word and music showcase in LA. Actually, it’s one of the best in the country,” Sekou explained. “So, I drive up, jump out of my car, run in. The guy is like, ‘Where the hell have you been? You’re on in 15 minutes. You’ve been freaking me out.’”

Sekou went on to wow the crowd and, after the show, sell out of his CDs to fans on the street. “I’ll never forget when the crowd dispersed. I was just standing there in the darkness, looking up in the sky, and I just thought, ‘Wow, I can do this.’”

In the coming months Sekou embarked on a national tour called “The Underground Poet’s Railroad” and was named one of the top poets in the country. “I did a national tour where we registered a million people to vote. It really felt like God was saying, ‘What took you so long? I’ve been holding your blessings. My arms have been getting heavy and tired, waiting for you to come and get your stuff. Here, take it.’ I think that’s the point. You have to be bold enough, daring enough, risk-taking enough, disruptive enough and playful enough to believe in yourself enough to say, ‘That is there. That is there for me. And maybe this wasn’t the perfect route to take, or maybe I hit this doorway and I got blocked and I ran into a detour.’ So just recalculate your route. You gotta ‘Waze’ it.”

But there was more in store for Sekou. He was certain he hadn’t yet reached his full potential and believed in his heart that there was more runway to explore. And he had to have another difficult conversation with himself. He had to be sure he was willing to make the necessary sacrifices that lie ahead.

“I call it my joyful challenge. Because being an entrepreneur is always a joy and it’s always a challenge. The joy is what gets me to the challenge and the conquering of the challenge is what brings the joy. So the big question I had to ask myself was if I was willing to make my art my commodity.”

Sekou understood that by being paid to perform and entertain he was expressing himself. And people were enjoying that expression. But what if he was being paid by a client to express their point of view? Could he make that happen?

Just do it

It didn’t take long for him to find out. And he didn’t start with a local chamber of commerce client. Nope, he started with one of the most well-known global brands—Nike. In 2005, the shoe giant was introducing a line of clothing called “Battlegrounds.” The launch was going to be massive, with a feature film release and partnership with MTV. And Nike was looking for someone to create an impactful spoken message for this big reveal.

“I submitted this poem that was kind of a ‘Braveheart’ meets the street speech, and I was thrilled to be chosen for it!” Sekou says, laughing. “So, they paid me to write 12 or 13 poems and I ended up narrating all of the poems as part of the film.” Following the success of that work, Nike asked Sekou to narrate for a TV commercial that Nike ran for the film and was then invited to present his work in person to the leadership team at Nike world HQ in Portland.

As Sekou begins to retell this story, you can literally feel his energy rise. His eyes light up and his hands are more animated while his voice takes on a much deeper timber. “Nike brought me to the campus to deliver a special piece I had written. They put me in a room with a bunch of Nike executives...and when my turn comes up and I jump up from backstage, I’m screaming, ‘I want soldiers!’ I go into this whole piece and everybody was like, ‘What the hell is happening?!’” Sekou explained with a big smile on his face.

“I made the Battleground team look great and they loved it, the executives loved it, the client loved it, and the light bulb went off. I loved doing this and I was having fun.”

Turning point—define his space

This was also the moment when he began to reevaluate his value to the clients and also stand up for himself. “I saw that I was able to bring a greater value. If I can capture the whole essence of a three-day meeting in these five to ten minutes—then I could bring more value and should be compensated for that.

“There was a disconnect, because I was being paid like an afterthought. I realized, ‘I gotta own this myself.’ There’s a perception of spoken-word poetry, but there’s a differentiation between that and what I was delivering.” This gave Sekou the confidence to redefine his artistry as a unique category called “poetic voice” and he began to tear down the walls of separation that existed between his artist world and business world. “I wanted to tell the world that ‘poetic voice’ is what I’m doing and I want you all to meet each other. To bring the fans of my poetry, and the clients of my business work together. Here’s who I am: Come holler at me.”

Sekou set out to demonstrate that difference for his audience. He understood that spoken-word poetry was his biggest asset as well as his biggest stumbling block. People had preconceived notions about poetry, and he was finding it wasn’t always positive. “I realized I needed to change that paradigm. I needed to create a new language and new brand elements, and original marketing. I needed to put a new language and a new perceived value in the world’s mouth and in their mind.”

Today, Sekou feels like he has absolutely arrived. He’s been a full-time poet for 15 years and hasn’t looked back. “I have been able to pay my dues and pay for my own apartment and cover my bills. And then ultimately as I began to build my business, and my company and my revenue, you know, I paid for my first home through poetry. I proposed to my wife and bought her a ring with poetry. You know, I’m going to raise my kids on poetry.”

The two personas that Sekou found most impactful on his journey are: