…you have to have a business mind set.
Last night I spoke at the Production Base summer party. Great crowd, nearly 200 people networking and making new contacts. I gave a talk on my ‘Top 5 Tips to Survive the Cull’ which went down well. I’ll be posting these tips up over the next few days, so keep checking back.
Anyway, back to the creative bit. I was looking for a few more producers or production managers to take part in our survey. I politely nudged my way into a group of people who were having a conversation and asked if they were in these roles. One of them replied ‘Oh, no, we’re creative. We don’t do any of the business stuff.”
Well, for me, this is where some freelancers (not necessarily the ones I was talking to) get it wrong. They think of themselves as ‘creative’ and don’t see themselves as being ‘in business’. Well, if you want to maintain and develop your career, you’ve got to have an understanding of simple marketing and business processes in order to have a strategy to sell yourself. You might not think of it in this way, but ‘finding work’ is all about advertising, marketing and selling. So to get your chance to work as a ‘creative’, you have to spend time thinking through how you sell your services with similar methodologies to how, say, L’Oreal sells shampoo or Orange sells mobile phones. They do detailed research into their market, then tweak their product accordingly, then get out there and advertise where their target market is.
Whether you’re a cameraperson, AP or director, or any other creative role, you’re in an over-saturated market. To stand out and get those jobs, you’ve got to look at how producers and production managers buy your services. You’ve got to understand where and how they go looking for crew. And then get out and target them.
cv4.tv tip: Research your market, look at the ‘products’ you sell, tweak them for your audience then get out and flog them!
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