Weighing my Options

What would I need to sacrifice in return for the perceived security of having a job for the next 12 months?

[Thanks to everyone who replied to yesterday’s email with messages of support. I’m grateful for your encouragement.]

When I was offered a position on the music team of a musical at the end of last year, I did some soul searching before saying yes.

I’d just spent the better part of a year creating Audience by Design and I’d run a few sessions of the workshop. I believed in what I had created, as did the artists who had participated in the course.

Building a business is not easy. It can feel lonely and peppered with uncertainty as you develop your services, your clientele and your income stream.

The immediate benefits of working for someone else were obvious. I’d be stepping into a position as Assistant Musical Director where I’d proven myself on previous shows. My performance career had been on a pandemic hiatus, playing only 2 nights since March 2020. Here was the offer of stable work and the salary to match.

But what would I need to sacrifice in return for the perceived security of having a job for the next 12 months?

With Audience by Design and my private creative coaching, I was looking to build a business that would last. Rather than a get rich quick scheme, I hoped that the resources and reputation I developed would be an investment that compounded in value over time.

I have a vision of making a significant impact across our creative community, helping people around the world design careers that sustain them financially, psychologically and creatively. I want you to lead a creative life you can be proud of by making work that matters to you and people you care about.

By helping clients generate more value in their work I believe my business can grow and support people in other ways: employing a team to scale the audience design work and working with clients to produce work that reaches wider audiences (ie. live on stage, published books, audio recordings and video productions).

By connecting artists and showing them how to build an audience alongside others rather than be siloed and doing it alone, I believe we can grow the overall audience for the art our community makes.

There are members of the audience that I am nurturing who would love to support the creative work you do, if only they knew about it...and vice versa. When any of us is building an engaged audience, there is a flow on benefit to us all.

I don’t plan to shutter the work I am doing just because I am playing 8 shows a week. The opposite. I plan to expand upon it.

This will involve me being able to switch hats and it might lead to expanding the Audience by Design team sooner than I’d planned, but this work is too important to me to cast it aside.

I took a little while to get myself set up at the new job, but now it’s time to pick up where I left off here and plan how I can best serve you and this community in 2022.