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Have a Project to Sell

When you're pursuing a new industry or repositioning yourself in an old one, here's a useful way to navigate uncharted waters. I'll use my friend Brent's experience as a blueprint. Brent lived in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a political consultant but wanted to move to Los Angeles. He had some experience in digital media and decided to leverage that while he looked for work in L.A.

What was innovative in his search was that he wasn't just selling himself. He also had a project to talk to people about. When we first met, I was a new technologies agent at the Agency for the Performing Arts. Brent and I were introduced through a mutual friend named Linda. The way she pitched him to me was that he was moving to the west coast and had a CD-ROM tour of the U.S. Capitol for which he was trying to get representation. The focus was on the project, not on Brent.

Brent and I met, and I was impressed—not so much with the project, which I didn't think had much commercial viability outside of Washington, but with the man himself. You could say the project was the loss leader so I'd buy the guy. I did. Brent and I are friends to this day, and because I liked him and was impressed with him, I helped him get connected while he was relocating. When I embrace a colleague, my policy, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, is “mi database es su database.” In other words, I was happy to introduce Brent to anyone I thought could help him feel more at home in Los Angeles.

Nowadays, Brent—always on the cutting edge of change—has been living and working in digital media for the past three years in Beijing, China. He's the poster child for both embracing change and going where the work is.