Bill Withers’ music career offers business lessons to lean on in difficult times

When songwriter and musician Bill Withers died on April 32020 caused a wave of respect and admiration. And no wonder. Withers’ musical legacy features a string of hits which have resonated across generations, races, religions, genres and geographic boundaries, including 1972’s “Lean On Me,” whose director Tyler Perry and others clearly called out those difficult, socially distanced days .

Much less known than Withers’ beautiful music is the story of his career, which provided him with lifelong financial freedom and the flexibility to live on his own terms until his death on the age of 81.

Songs like “Lovely Day” and “Just the Two of Us” helped put Withers in the Rock and Roll Songwriters Hall of Fame. But the lessons learned from his music career are as timeless and relevant today as ever.

Luck favors exertions, the self-employed and the self-taught

You haven’t got to have access or the most effective education to get ahead. You have to be hungry and willing to work hard. Withers never had any formal musical training; he had a natural talent, a real passion, and a desire to learn whatever he could, in any way he could.

He grew up because the youngest of six children in Slab Fork, West Virginia, a poor mining town marked by Jim Crow racism and native music, mainly country and gospel. He was born with a stutter, which he fastidiously managed to eliminate while serving in the Navy. While working in a California aircraft parts factory, after getting back from the Vietnam War, Withers bought a used guitar at a pawn shop and taught himself how to play. He began writing songs between shifts on the factory. The goal wasn’t fame, he told journalist Andy Greene in a 2015 profile in . “It was about survival.”

Rejection is a component of the method. Just keep going.

By 1970, Withers had scraped together enough of his hourly wage to self-finance a crude demo and sell it to major labels without success. But meeting Clarence Avant, now generally known as the Black Godfather, modified the whole lot. Avant signed Withers to his newly formed independent label Sussex, teamed up with producer Booker T. Jones, and in just a couple of days they accomplished his 1971 debut album. They included two hits which have survived to at the present time – “Grandma’s Hands” and “Ain’t No Sunshine” performed by artists starting from Michael Jackson to Ladysmith Black Mambazo and heavy metal band Black Label Society. The song even has its own Wikipedia page. “There aren’t a few songs I’ve written in my short career, and there isn’t a genre in which someone hasn’t recorded them,” he said. “I’m not a virtuoso, but I managed to write songs that people could identify with.”

Stay humble. And keep your day job.

The photo for Withers’ first album cover was taken during his lunch break at work at Weber Aircraft. “Because I didn’t want to take time off,” he explained in an interview on CBS This Morning in 2015. “So I’m standing in the doorway with my real lunch box!” Withers never quit the job. He was fired just before the album’s release, and when the corporate tried to rehire him, he was also invited to perform.

Reinvest in your business and long-term financial stability.

Withers took a few of his earnings and purchased a piano. While he was learning to play a brand new instrument again, sooner or later he began tinkering with some easy chord progressions. The result was the hit “Lean on Me,” which became the centerpiece of his second album and stays a beloved anthem of friendship and unity in times of world crisis.

Stay true to yourself!

In the start, Withers all the time did his own thing and his own way. He never hired a manager, produced his own songs (music and lyrics), wrote his own notes and designed his own album covers. At Sussex he had full creative control over his music, but after Avant went bankrupt in 1975, Withers signed a five-album contract with Columbia, and the experience ruined him in business.

“I met my A&R guy, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘I don’t like your music or any black music, period,’” Withers recalled in a 2015 article. “I’m proud of myself for not hitting him.” When he fulfilled his obligations to Columbia in 1985, he left the corporate. And he could have, because he would go on to earn about half of each dollar he produced from his songs for the remaining of his life.

Never stop growing – or knowing who to trust.

Withers’ first marriage to Denise Nicholas was notoriously unhappy and rumored to be abusive, but Withers went on to marry Marcia Johnson, whom he met in 1976 at a Gil Scott Heron concert. Marcia Withers, married for 44 years until her death, managed her husband’s publishing for years and was instrumental in the lucrative placement of his songs in countless movies, television shows and other media. “We are a mom and pop store,” he said. “She is my only overseer. I’m lucky I married a woman with an MBA.”