Being on a board of directors for an established brand is a great way to enhance your CV. The thing about building a resume is you need to have interesting accomplishments in order for the line items to be noteworthy. They need to clearly showcase how you generated value. Also it’s a good idea to get ChatGPT to identify keywords in job postings and plug them into your CV so you get past AI filtering.
One of the mistakes I had made with past iterations of my resume was listing the cool stuff I did without mentioning the impact it had. In some cases I did put the results, because it was easy to measure. I worked on a knowledge base and that generated X amount of assisted revenue and deflected X amount of clients from contacting the company (every case has a cost). My value was demonstrated more by showing I can measure success than stating I did a thing.
Keep in mind as I express my thoughts, I’m 36 and playing in the middle management life. I’ve managed teams of people, created policies and been responsible for evaluating success. Doing that means you need to understand how to create meaning behind the work you do. People will do any level of boring work if they know it will clearly impact the greater good.
That being said, I wanted to focus on a project I manifested on a whim last week.
We’re launching an artist skill share program
A lot of the time the only thing stopping you from bringing your great idea to life is a lack of knowledge. At this phase of my life I’ve learned enough things in enough areas that when I thought of a music skill share program as a way to fundraise for Notre Dame Des Arts, it just clicked.
The quick idea is people can come pay money to learn from a musician sharing knowledge. We discovered there is a grant that focuses on solving systemic issues with language minorities. It turns out, being English makes you entitled to a bunch of specialized grants in Quebec. This one wasn’t for shows, it is designed for anything else you can think of that can help artists grow.
Simultaneously our little group is struggling to pay rent on the office. I realized that by leveraging my artist network, I can find a few volunteers. Like Merker Miyagi who will be doing the first one on April 17th at 7:00 PM, pull up if you want the basics in beat making. There is a bit of project planning ahead of me to make sure this stays alive and becomes ongoing, however with one conversation it came to life.
Merker, and other artists who get involved, will be responsible for creating a 2-3 hour presentation. My role is to facilitate and coordinate. Make sure the public is aware of the project and to make sure people want to come.
Once we have the first one done, there is a proof of concept. We can leverage that to get more people involved. Then as more people get involved we will be able to define the project a lot more. Then we get to the fun part, asking for grants and additional funding. With that, all those artists who volunteered get invited back to get themselves a grant paycheck.
Framing this so it looks good in a pitch or on a CV
This project has the goal of teaching beginners, leveraging the available skills of professionals. In an ideal world the people we bring on to teach can prove they generate at least some money from their art. The reason this matters is because we want to instil in our budding artists a sense of business. We don’t want them to get slapped by reality down the line and quit. If they can sell their art, they will make better art than if they can’t.
Don’t let your starving artist friends tell you they make better art. Think of what you would pay for, that is probably better art to you.
The population we are targeting for students is vast. There is no age limit and we are opening the doors to people interested in that particular lesson. I’m sure we’ll get more strategic as time goes on. Since we have an office space, we can turn the NDA office into a real hub for artistic growth. While we won’t reject anyone who wants to come and give us money to learn, we are focusing on the NDG community.
When it comes to the art genre, we are going to start with music because I’m more connected to music. The day a visual artist wants a slot, we will also bring them on board. I do believe this type of endeavour needs a bit of focus at first. We are going to aim to do this once a month to start. It’d be cool to make it a weekly.
Now all that is lovely and I can list out a bunch of tasks that will show I worked real hard. What the money people want to see is how much revenue was generated and how many people participated. If I can also add that we captured X amount of emails leading to a conversion rate of X donations a month, that would be lovely icing on the cake.
While not for profits don’t exist for profit, they also can go bankrupt and die. There needs to be some plan to showcase how an investment will be flipped. Proving that with nothing we can generate some money and sustainability, with the right metrics to prove it will be the path to longevity.
It really will come down to numbers.
Manifesting money is often a conversation of numbers
I see a lot of people rah rah about numbers. They believe there is a vanity to numbers and in truth there are vain metrics. No one in the know believes something like virality is inherently worth money anymore. We understand how to read the stats and see things that matter. Or at least you can find a bunch of people writing articles at stuff like Business Insider and Behind That Suit that will tell you. In a lot of cases it’s about signals.
If you get 100’000 views and no one comments. That’s a really bad sign. If you throw 10 events but lose 1000$ each time, it’s also a really bad sign. If you get 1000 views regularly with 100 comments on a post, that is an engaged little following you have.
When crafting a CV or business pitch you are going to want to use numbers to make your case. Maybe losing that 1000$ at the show generates 25’000$ down the line off of capitlizing on reputation. If you can show a clear and concise business case, with real metrics to back it, you may just get funded.
When it comes to presenting your project you need to be able to measure its success. You will need to find a few stats that do a great job of showing clearly if your project accomplished its goals. It should be binary, you either got 15 people to show up each time, or you did not.
Maybe the project doesn’t succeed but as far as your CV and future proposals are concerned, you should be able to explain why you won or lost. If you ever need help taking your project from concept to something with structured stats to measure success, let me know. While revenue is a good stat, there are a lot of other stats that can signal to investors they should invest in you.
Project planning is going to be the key to your success.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone