Your Talent Chefs blogging about insider info and guidance, current castings and bookings (only those made public), tips on improving your booking chances and how to use your Webcomp portfolio as a virtual agent to land more work. Get yourself in the Soup!

Individual Greatness - Who's cheering for your success? Are you waiting for permission to be awesome? (thanks @kplawver !)

Wednesday July 14, 2010 by Chef

Yes, yes, your mom thinks you are the next (fill in the blank with someone you think is awesome) but really, who's cheering for you? Who stands to gain nothing from your success but supports and pushes you anyway? Anyone?

It's a hard question really. When we think of the people in our lives that are our cheerleaders, we usually separate them out based on their obligation to cheer for us. Moms and family: well, they are obligated by blood. Co-workers: perhaps they are cheering or perhaps they are masking a fear that you will succeed (and they won't). Your boss: heh, you succeed, so does she. Your pastor, or priest, or community leader: that's their job, right? They have to cheer for everyone by default (Don't stop cheering for TalentSoup Pastor Smith!).

For talent, there is a unique tension between your peers, your agency, and the marketplace as it pertains to success. Amazingly, most of the talent we are around have a huge heart for the success of others. It's really amazing to experience. There are a few agencies out there that want their entire crew, and even others, to succeed because they know how hard it is. But of course, agents don't win unless their talent does. And here's the tough part, all agents know that most of their talent won't succeed in this business.

They know that a small percentage of their talent will bring the vast majority of their revenue. This makes most agencies very focused on the few for the sake of the many. We are not blaming them after all, if they go out of business no one succeeds. But what if there was a better way?

We began to notice a couple of years ago that unexpected (by the industry definition) success is finding our talent. Talent who would normally be overlooked in the traditional sense in our industry are getting booked. We are seeing what the economists now call, the Long Tail of talent booking. This is only possible because of our technology, the size of our talent marketplace, and lots of repeat clients. The clients are finding new faces and new talent because they now have a choice of the many, instead of just seeing the few. While this is really exciting to us, we are using this knowledge to develop new tools to make our dedicated talent even more marketable, which will result in more bookings. When you have technology we have, and crazy-brilliant developers, amazingly valuable features for our talent are the only option.

When asked, "Who Is TalentSoup For?", we always respond, "We are for individual greatness". Because what we are learning, is that everyone, yes everyone, has Face Value. Everyone can realize their greatness!