Everything you need to do your role on dead.dance — your job, your tools, and the exact numbers we watch. The console below mirrors your CRM cockpit, so what you read here is what you'll see there.
dead.dance has two halves that meet in the middle — the way it already works in Santa Cruz:
🌹 The Party — the free lot, the culture, the people. Kept beautiful and free, always. | 💵 The Business — tickets, venue subs, Shakedown, ads, festivals — the money, run cleanly around the party.
Roles map onto those halves: Founder (Michael) holds both → the Party is held by its Chancellors → the Business runs through the field: Ambassadors (sell), Chaperones (ground game), and Student Chaperones (the campus co-op bench). Everyone shares in the value they help create. Titles are yours to keep — this is about function.
| Level | In one line | Shares in |
|---|---|---|
| Chancellor | Steward of a chapter's culture, health, and growth. | Top-level share of the chapter's revenue. |
| Ambassador | Sells venue subs + festivals; recruits & leads the bench. Reports to Michele. | Chapter revenue + overrides on their team. |
| Chaperone | Forwards content, signs bands, gathers craft vendors, fills the lot. | Chapter revenue for what they bring. |
| Student Chaperone Undergraduate + Graduate | Campus co-op learning the ground game under a teacher + chapter leader. Each Ambassador region seats one Undergraduate and one Graduate Student Chaperone, alongside the region's Ambassador and its paid Chaperones. | Academic credit + achievement bounties & perks → promotes to paid Chaperone. |
Michele ("Queen Bee") leads the Ambassadors nationally — all Ambassadors report to her — and holds a 2% national override, moving to salary once revenue crosses a set threshold. Exact percentages and thresholds are in the Rep Agreement (in writing, counsel-reviewed) before anyone is paid.
Who invites whom: Michael invites the Chancellors; Michele invites the Ambassadors; an Ambassador nominates Chaperones and Michele approves. Student Chaperones enroll through the Campus Program — the faculty teacher + chapter leader bring a cohort, Michele approves the roster. The family, by hand.
You report to Michele. Your patch and numbers roll up to her and the Founder.
Two seats per Ambassador region: one Undergraduate Student Chaperone and one Graduate Student Chaperone — working right alongside that region's Ambassador and its paid dead.dance Chaperones.
Your job is the Chaperone job — same work, same console. You do exactly what a Chaperone does (see above), in the same Field CRM. The only difference is how you're supervised and rewarded: you do it for credit, under two people — a faculty teacher (grades your co-op) and a chapter leader (your day-to-day mentor) — and you graduate straight into a paid Chaperone seat. (The Graduate seat typically carries more scope — mentoring the undergrad, owning a bigger slice of the patch — but the role and console are the same.)
Why it's built this way: for-credit internships have to stay primarily educational. Layering commission on top can jeopardize the credit and create a school conflict — so students earn credit + bounties + perks now, and the revenue share comes with the promotion. Terms live in the Student Co-op Addendum to the Rep Agreement.
Program designer Dr. Doan Winkel designs the national campus co-op program — curriculum, credit structure, the teacher/leader model — and dead.dance builds it to his spec (platform, CRM, Academy, measurement). Doan also picks the local professor — the faculty "teacher" — at every school.
The pitch to schools: universities join the Party — for credit and perks. A campus plugs in, its students run real field operations of a live venture for academic credit, and they get the perks of the family (Miracle tickets, local-chapter headliner tickets, merch, the network). Each campus runs Student Chaperones as a cohort, UCSC first.
The unit is the Ambassador region. Every Ambassador region carries two co-op seats — one Undergraduate + one Graduate Student Chaperone — beside the Ambassador and the region's paid Chaperones. That's the standard campus placement.
| Who | Role in the program |
|---|---|
| Teacher (faculty) | The local professor Doan picks for that school. Owns the academic side — enrolls the cohort, sets learning goals, reviews the weekly reflections, assigns the grade/credit. |
| Leader (chapter) | Owns the field side — the day-to-day mentor: assigns work, unblocks students, verifies deliverables in the CRM, coaches. |
| Graduate Student Chaperone (×1 / region) | The senior co-op seat — does the Chaperone work, mentors the undergrad, owns a bigger slice of the patch, logs + reflects, ladders up. |
| Undergraduate Student Chaperone (×1 / region) | The first-rung co-op seat — does the Chaperone work, logs + reflects, learns the ground game, ladders up. |
Students appear in the CRM bench under their leader, tagged as co-op, with their bounty-eligible deliverables tracked separately from paid revenue. The teacher gets a read-only view for grading. Enrollment and rosters are approved by Michele; the Founder invites the campus.
You are not selling a band. You're selling the network. A venue used to chase fifty acts to fill a calendar. We hand them one relationship — the whole catalog — and the audience to go with it.
| Old way (selling a band) | Our way (selling the network) |
|---|---|
| "Book this one Dead tribute on Saturday." | "Subscribe, and fill every night — Dead & Phish tributes, originals, a comedian for a quiet Tuesday, a DJ for Friday." |
| One date, one check. | A recurring subscription + a booking every time an act plays. |
| The venue takes all the risk on the draw. | Our audience is already in their market and gets told about the show. |
The whole pitch in one line: "Never have a dark night again." Every new act that joins makes your network more valuable to sell. Use the 📡 Sell the network draft in the CRM Talent tab.
Booking acts of any genre is pure business — it lives off the Grateful Dead community feed. The Party stays the Party.
The single most valuable sales move in this house — learn it, then run it every time you're stuck. When the person who should say yes won't — a venue GM who won't return your calls, a talent buyer who ghosts, a chain that "already has a system" — you don't quit, and you don't beg the wall. You go to the one person high enough to actually decide.
The founder closed his biggest deals this way — MBNA, SAP, Delaware Group, Comcast, Meridian, AMP, and a hundred more. Same move every time. It's not a trick; it's how we sell.
| Step | What you do |
|---|---|
| 1. Go up | The door's stuck at the working level? Don't lose the account — find the one person high enough to say yes (owner, GM, regional head). |
| 2. One honest page | Not a pitch deck. One page. Name the true asymmetry — their contradiction or their opportunity — stated plainly. Leverage is a fact; say it out loud. |
| 3. The harder truth | Tell the truth even when the comfortable version would close faster. "I won't oversell it — here's the real number." Being the one who told the truth is what makes it land. |
| 4. Let the logic carry it | No begging, no hype. State what's true and let the decider see what they can't un-see. Then stop talking. |
Field example. A GM won't sign the subscription and won't return calls. Don't chase the GM. Write the owner one page: "Your rooms went dark 9 Tuesdays last quarter. We fill dark nights with an audience already in your market. Your competitor two towns over just subscribed. I'd rather it were you." That's the move.
Full doctrine: THE_CRAIG_BENSON_MOVE_top_down_doctrine.md. Prove it once on one hard account, then duplicate it on every account that "can't be cracked."
The whole flywheel: the family forwards, we curate, a human radiates. Steps 1–2 are the daily habit — the heart of the Chaperone & Student roles.
Open /sales_crm.html — your patch in one screen, organized by chapter and rolled up through the tiers.
Every draft is copy-only — the CRM writes it, you send it (FTC-clean, human-click). Your closes are attributed to you and roll up the tiers.
The part the bands love — our promise is simple: we give the musicians whatever they want, always.
When the Daily Synthesis is good, HyperPost it out — native post in the feed, the tracked link in the first comment (beats the Facebook link penalty). 🌹 Invite the family opens your phone's share sheet — you pick who, it never touches Facebook's API. Every post and invite carries a link that brings people home and credits the right chapter.
| Role | Top numbers we watch |
|---|---|
| Chancellor | Chapter revenue + growth · retention · content quality · bench health |
| Ambassador | Venue subs (MRR) · festivals landed · active team · attributed chapter revenue |
| Chaperone | Content forwarded · bands signed · craft vendors · tables filled · new members |
| Student Chaperone | Weekly forwards · bands signed · vendors · events staffed · reflection + teacher sign-off |
It's all visible in the CRM rollup and the app's activity — no mystery, no politics. Do the work, the numbers show it, you share in what you build.
Activity is logged & reviewed (and you agreed to it). dead.dance keeps an append-only record of your tool activity — meetings booked/kept/cancelled, no-shows, shows & events made or missed, outreach and shares — and it rolls up to your manager and the Founder for coaching and your scorecard. Trust, but verify. It's in your Rep Agreement (§6.5) — no surprises. We hold the standard both ways.
#dead.dance partner) — it's the law (FTC) and it's in your agreement.