WHY YOU NEED A MANAGER
Dear Creative
You are the reason I became a full-time manager. You can call it chance or destiny, but as I saw the need for creatives to be guided in building revenue streams and sustainable careers, I decided to start this journey. I didn't start out knowing everything but as the scope of my duties began to broaden I evolved into different roles to meet the needs of creatives.
I hope to help you understand the benefit of why you will need someone like me to aid your growth as you journey towards greatness. I would have to break it down to different parts, to enable you to fully grasp why you need a manager and the immense value you will get from having one.
Firstly, I must answer a pressing question
Who can have a manager?
There’s no checklist to fill for this. As long as you are interested in building a creative career you can have a manager. If you have the potential to grow into an influencer with the skills that you have, be it cooking, yoga or whatever, You can hire a manager. We have time and time again, seen individuals build careers out of what wasn’t considered a creative ability. Kim kardashian is a prime example of that. Do you have the potential for star power? Do you have the potential or currently have large followership on social media? or do you have a strong personal image capable of pulling your audience for brands? You don’t have to be a creative. Anyone can have a manager.
There are different managers with distinctive roles they play in the life of a creative, ensuring a creative or influencer achieves their goal. You can have a Personal manager, Business Manager, PR or a tour manager. All these roles are mostly merged into one person for lesser-known creatives/influencers but for superstars, they have individuals filling these roles.
You will have certain needs at different stages of your career, whichever stage you are, there are problems associated with each stage that begs the need for a manager. Needs such as Negotiation, Marketing, Managing people/finance, Contracts, short/long-term Strategy, Planning and Execution. You may be at the stage where these things aren’t a problem but if you intend to build a career out of your talent, creativity or influence you will need an individual to help manage these problems. If you don’t, you will lose time, money and the ability to create. The weight of managing these numerous problems may crush you. This is not a journey you want to venture alone.
A GOOD MANAGER CAN PROPEL YOU TO SUCCESS, WHILE A BAD MANAGER CAN ROCKET YOU TO OBLIVION — Donald Passman
In this article, I’ll be focusing on the Personal Manager, because A personal manager is the single most important person a creative can have in their professional life. That decision can project you to stardom and sustainability while not having one can rocket you into oblivion. A personal Manager wears many hats, by being the cheerleader, psychiatrist, advisor, guide, PROBLEM SOLVER and my personal favorite babysitter. If you intend to build a sustainable career you will have major needs and this is how a manager meets them:
1. Career Guidance — A major gift/curse for creative’s is the ability to focus on the present but the danger may just be losing sight of the big picture. How can you effectively create in the present and properly guide yourself to your future goal, without sabotaging yourself? A manager’s first role is to guide your career, from the day to day activities and long term plans. What moves you make, how/when to make them, and how to sustain your growth. You have a 24/7 guide. By helping with major business decisions and the creation of revenue streams. A manager helps develop strategies to execute in the present and how it plays into the long-term success of your life.
2. Creative Support — Most creative love to create alone. Creating is vulnerability. You may have big dreams and sometimes may not see the challenges in achieving them. The manager’s job is to help navigate those challenges to help you achieve your goals, by hiring the best people to propel the creative’s career, by making partnerships that aid the process and execution of the ideas. Running ideas by a knowledgeable manager prior to making decisions often allows for good ideas to become better. You will need a manager to get you out of your own way more times than you can imagine.
3. Prestige/Promotion — How people perceive you will affect how much they are willing to pay for your skills and presence. The logic is that if you are good enough to attract management, there must be something of value present. Your market value basically rises, as there is more respect for you and your career. The manager also promotes you to everyone that needs to know about you. A good manager is able to do this by properly understanding who and what the creative is, and selling that narrative to grow the creative’s career. Basically, a manager raises your market value.
4. Buffer — The bigger you get, everyone will want a piece of you. The chances of people taking advantage of you multiply, if you don’t have the skills to handle the attention, This will swarm you and get the best of you. A manager can act as an effective screening buffer between you and people that want to do business with you, such as inquiries for commercial endorsements, personal appearances, charitable requests, it is the manager’s job to screen all these. There are no scarier words to a scam artist than “please talk to my manager”. This enables you to get full value for their time. By getting someone to handle these issues on your behalf, you increase your revenue, get peace of mind, buy more time to focus on your craft and consistently look good, because you don’t have to fight with anyone. Your manager does that.
5. Accountability/Problem-solving — We have heard several stories of brands, individuals, or third parties who engage the services of creative’s, then default or delay payments for one reason or another. it may be difficult for the creative to follow up consistently, The Manager holds them accountable by ensuring they hold the end of the bargain. The manager holds you accountable also, by ensuring you consistently show up to work daily to achieve your goals. Problems are endless really, that’s why you have a manager. To solve problems and ensure you are creating at a high level.
By no means is this list of needs exhaustive, as I have dealt with more and continue to give value in more ways than 5 points will allow me to explain. In my role as a manager, I daily work in all roles, as a personal Manager, business manager, PR manager and logistics/events manager. I do everything to ensure my clients get to achieve their goals. The immense value of having a manager cannot be overstated for a creative. In essence, the primary duty of a manager is — to create opportunities. It’s their task to devise and execute a strategy, to facilitate the artist to excel artistically and solve problems.
In the next article, I’ll explain how you can build your team, hire a manager (and team), what to look out for, traits and skills needed to ensure you don't get the wrong people on board.
Cheers
