Welcome To The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life, Right...

The entertainment industry is a business. Whether you signed up to be in a business or not, welcome to it. You just happen to have a creative job or specialized skill set, which in order to work at, you have to run a successful business. To do that, there are fundamental principles that must be practiced throughout your career.

These are:

1. Building and maintaining relationships. This includes obtaining mentors, consistently meeting new people, and maintaining relationships with the people you already know. It also includes networking either at events, on set, at the studio, at a party, and anywhere you can find like-minded people.

2. Marketing. This includes promoting yourself, effective follow up, creating marketing campaigns for generating work as well as promoting work and projects, maintaining a presence in social media.

3. Planning. This includes having 10 year, 5 year and 1 year projections, a yearly business plan, monthly action plans, weekly and daily tasks. It also includes goal setting and visualization. Did you know that many pro athletes not only physically practice, they also go through the drills in their mind and scientists have shown that the body physically reacts as if it were actually happening?

4. Defining your brand. This includes deciding your brand and “living into it.” Michael Jordan wasn’t always “the best basketball player of all times” but he knew he wanted to be. Once he made that decision, every action he took got him closer to establishing that brand. He then took it further by joining Nike to create the brand “Air Jordon.”

5. Mastering business “drills”. This includes interviewing skills, networking techniques, building successful mindsets, maintaining financial, creative, and emotional stability, learning how to use practical business tools and implementing effective strategies.

And Action!

1. Review the 5 foundations in this article, and determine which areas you have not yet solidified.

2. Once you feel your foundation is solid, be “Like Mike” and dream up ways to make your business actions spectacular.

There’s a reason why kids aspired to be “Like Mike” and the beauty of his work ethic is that it transcends all businesses including ours.