Authors: Miki Agrawal
I wrote down a list of my top skills—the ones about which I’d received positive feedback.
Honest external feedback is critical in understanding if you’re actually
good
at something. Someone should have given Vanilla Ice some honest external feedback a long time ago and saved us all from his transgressions.
I’ve broken it down into two skill categories: personal and professional.
Personal: Sports, fitness, communicating with people, traveling with ease (because I speak multiple languages), making friends quickly, writing
Professional: Marketing, business development, writing, organizing, languages
At twenty-four years old, this was all that I knew about myself.
QUESTION 2: WHAT AM I PASSIONATE ABOUT?
Here’s where my dreams list came in. I wanted to play soccer professionally (unfortunately, I ended up crossing that one off all too expeditiously), make movies, and start a business. This was the fun part—I let my imagination go and allowed myself to dream.
I caught the movie bug early on, as my mother was a total movie buff with a special love for the older black-and-white movies with stars like James Dean and Clark Gable (dreamy!). I never really wanted to be on-screen but I really liked the idea of being behind the scenes—particularly screenwriting and production. I just loved the creative process of filmmaking.
While in college, I had spent the summers after my sophomore and junior years interning in Los Angeles. Cornell had a relationship with some film production companies in Los Angeles, and through our university career center Rads and I both scored the same internship at a film studio, where we spent two summers reading screenplays and living the dream in California. I was comfortable in the creative setting, and I worked hard to give precise and constructive feedback for each screenplay I read. The producers gave me great feedback for my work and handed me positive recommendation letters when the internship was completed.
So here I had a dream that I was passionate about—storytelling through film—and I had the positive feedback that showed me I
did
have some of the skills necessary to be an asset to this industry. Time to get on it!
Rads helped me get an interview with a film production company that worked mainly on television commercials. At this point, she was a full-fledged commercial agent for big directors like George Lucas, Robert Altman, and Zack Snyder.
During my interview at the production company for the associate producer position, I told James, the owner of the company, that I knew quite a bit about finance (I knew enough from the banking days) and so I painted a visual picture of how I could help take his company to the next level by introducing him to producers and agents I had met in Los Angeles during the two summers I was there. I also told him that my twin sister was a commercial agent and she knew a lot of people in advertising who could potentially get us more shoots to produce. I used the words
we
and
us
a lot so that he could visualize us working together. I said things like, “When we approach new clients, I think a creative way for us to do it would be . . .” Subtly, I spoke as though I were already hired.
I showed lots of passion for the film business and told him about the two college summers I spent in Los Angeles reading scripts. I made sure that he knew that I went to Cornell. I was still paying off my never-ending student loans, so I brought up my degree at every opportunity, otherwise what was even the point of getting the degree? Thankfully, he was sufficiently impressed and gave me the gig.
My associate producer job consisted mainly of project managing the various commercial and music video shoots that were happening at the production company, sometimes with big stars like Beyoncé and Mary J. Blige. I had to help hire the freelance production team to work on the shoots. Once the freelance production team was hired, they would then hire the rest of the crew, which included the key gaffer (lighting tech), the key grip (rigging tech), the DP (cinematographer), and the camera team. I also had to deal with location scouts and talent agents and help manage and pay invoices as they came in.
I really liked the project management part of the job, and I had a talent for getting things done quickly. I figured out that being efficient with my time was key. I organized the office in a way that I could pretty much reach everything I needed to within two or three feet from my desk chair. It saved so much time!
Putting out fires in the film business was super fun too. Once, James called me, frantic and stressed out because he was given a last-minute request by one of his prima donna directors for a shoot that was happening in two days’ time.
The director requested for the shoot that we have:
As I scanned the list, wondering how the hell I was going to get all of this stuff in twenty-four hours, my eyes hit the last item on the list. I’m sorry,
what
? I needed to completely close off Wall Street by tomorrow?
With no alternative, I decided the best way to handle this was to try to have fun and make it a personal challenge. Stressing wouldn’t have helped anyway.
I managed to find an animal rental company fairly quickly and rented the horse. Then I called the uniform rental company and found the police uniform, contacted the tour bus company and gave them an opportunity to showcase their bus on a commercial for free (all we had to pay for was gas, so we ended up saving a ton of money). Next, I rushed to the mayor’s office to see if I could get the permits needed to close off Wall Street for ten hours, in just one day. I sat there for the better part of the day, waiting for the permit office to see what they could do. In the meantime, I brought them all a fruit-and-cheese plate and made sure I made everyone in the office smile at least once. After many hours of waiting and smiling (my cheeks were hurting at this point), they finally managed to get us the permits (I think the fruit-and-cheese plate did a lot of the talking). Victory!
I had managed to pull all of this off, so
of
course
at the last minute, the client decided that he didn’t want to shoot on Wall Street and got another location secured on the morning of the shoot. And
of
course
the client didn’t want the horse either. Oh well. So it goes in the crazy production world. Being flexible was a fast lesson I learned that day.
At this point in my journey, I was only a couple of years out of college, and this situation was a wonderful reminder of two things:
1. Anything is possible if you set your mind to it.
2. Freaking out never helps.
Once things settled down a bit, I started studying the invoices that were being paid to the various departments and discovered that freelancers got paid much more per day than I (and the other full-timers) did. Not only did they make much more per day, but they also didn’t work every day (only when they were hired for shoots), meaning they had time to pursue other interests for the rest of the month if they wanted to. This was definitely appealing to me.
OK, yes, I also understood the big downside: freelancers never knew when their next job would come. I could get ten days of guaranteed work, followed by twenty days’ worrying about where the next paycheck would come from.
I was surprisingly OK with that uncertainty. I knew that if I kicked ass on shoots as a freelance producer, I would be hired again. I just had to do a killer job.
This was going to be my first taste of entrepreneurship. It meant that I had to hunt for gigs and offer a service that people wanted. And I had to be better than everyone else in order to be hired again.
I made the decision and quit working in-house and went freelance as soon as one producer agreed to hire me as a production assistant on the set of his next commercial. It was a step down on the professional ladder, but it was the only way to be on my own in the business. The production assistant did everything from renting vans to picking up props, driving around directors and clients, getting coffee for people, doing all the menial work on set like picking up trash, and anything that the production team needed.
You can imagine the call I had to make to my parents. Not only did I quit my cushy banking job, but I was quitting a job with security and
choosing
one where I pick up trash and get people coffee. My mother would have had a heart attack, so of course that’s not how I explained it to them. I told them that I had an incredible opportunity to work on set and move up the ranks with an eye toward becoming a producer who makes $1,000 per day. It usually took about three to four years to get to producer status from production assistant, but I told my parents I was on a six-month fast track (a self-imposed track of course). It was the only way to get the blessing from my much more conservative-career-track-loving parents. With furrowed eyebrows, they gave their good wishes.
Once I got on set, I did everything I could to garner the attention of the producers and production managers while I was running around. My goal was to move up the ranks quickly and get a job as an office production assistant, which was one step up from set production assistant—this meant that I didn’t have to pick up trash anymore and I would be only one producer’s bitch instead of a whole group’s (
woohoo!
). It meant that I would make copies, put production books together, and help hire the rest of the freelancers.
I knew that once I got into the production office as a freelancer, I’d be able to work my way up faster. I told the producer that I went to Cornell and that I was a former investment banker. This time, that didn’t impress them
at all
. They looked at me with squinted eyes that clearly read “Who gives a shit?” What did impress them was getting shit done. And getting shit done right. And getting shit done fast. I learned this very quickly and just put my head down and worked my tail off. What I really liked about this kind of work was that it was never boring. Every day was different, every shoot was different, and every project had its own set of unique challenges. Very often I would ask myself the old “What would MacGyver do?” question, which on so many occasions would take me outside the pressure of the situation to come up with unique solutions—like the time I found a shoot location in the eleventh hour by convincing a perfect stranger to let us shoot in his home. It was those unique solutions that got the attention of the producers.
Thankfully, I moved up the ranks quickly, according to my plan. Within three months, I was production coordinating, and within six months, I was producing shoots. They were smaller shoots but it didn’t take me long (the standard three years or so) to get to become a full producer.
When work was slow to come in, I spent my time building my Rolodex of potential clients. I stopped by all the local production companies and I figured out whom to talk to (usually the in-house producer), took them to lunch, and asked to be given the chance. I asked them to think about what it was like when they first got their big break. A little nostalgia goes a long way. I usually got the jobs when nobody else was available and they had exhausted all of their contacts (totally fine with me!). At least I was on their radar. This business is all about relationships, and I think they felt safer knowing that they had at least
met
me once, rather than picking a name out of the production guidebook at random.
Banging down doors of the production companies was a tremendous way of preparing myself for entrepreneurship—it gave me thick skin and along the way taught me how to mentally deal with rejection (something that felt like multiple punches to the kidneys at first). It also helped me think quickly on my feet if I was met with an angry secretary or gatekeeper. As you’ve seen in previous chapters, it turns out that bringing people free food is almost always a golden entry ticket. (At the core, we’re all just animals aren’t we?)
As I was producing commercials, I gained more and more understanding of this business and about project management.
Then something happened to me that changed the course of my life.
My true entrepreneurial journey was about to begin.
Do Cool Shit Exercise
These questions below may seem obvious to you but many people have a hard time being honest with themselves. This is another kick in the ass for you to actually do it properly.
What am I
really
good at?
You must be able to articulate in words why you are great. You must show external proof that others have said the same thing about you. There is no fooling yourself.
Within “What am I really good at?” answer the following:
(A) What are the biggest problems I’ve solved?
(B) What do I have to contribute to a team/workplace?