David Greenberg shares tips from his experience as Director of Marketing for Ted Kurland Associates, a boutique booking and management agency where Berklee interns gain insight into a successful career in music and business.

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As a kid, I had always wanted to sell enough stuff to absolute strangers in order to get those amazing prizes as advertised lavishly in comic books. You know, sell an inordinate amount of Peony seeds, or magazine subscriptions, or wrapping paper, and obtain a shiny new Schwinn Stingray Bike with a banana seat. Unfortunately for both the seed company and my parents, I couldn’t walk up to strangers and sell them junk they didn’t need, even when I was desperate to have that very thing that would make me cooler than my younger brother. I had the dream but not the wherewithal, so I needed my folks to spend real money in order to get the bike.

I’m not a great salesman for even my own creativity. It feels weird to me to proudly show off my wares, my talents, my ability to do just about anything — or at my ability to at least figure out how to do anything. I can write about that here, but one-on-one with someone gets me all goosebumply and my mind trips on the order of the pre-scripted-in-my-mind presentation. I was able to convince Arish Fyzee of Berkshire Motion Pictures to hire me as the Purchasing Agent for the most expensive film I ever worked on, Back To The Future, The Ride, that ran about 10 million dollars a minute and was chock-full of special effects, stop motion animation, and the like produced out of a studio BMP built in a mill in Housatonic, MA.

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David Greenberg shares tips from his experience as Director of Marketing for Ted Kurland Associates, a boutique booking and management agency where Berklee interns gain insight into a successful career in music and business.

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As you may have caught from last week’s bloggette, I’m not one for resumes. For myself, that is. Since I don’t do the hiring here at TKA, i’m not an aficionado of the form, which I find cold, uninspiring, and extremely hard to finagle a good portrait of anyone on that one page. Trying to do that kind of distillation really depresses me, but it does fill a need when trying to whittle down a stack of potentials into an afternoon’s worth of interviews—which is when I get a better feel for the student and their ability to learn, as well as their enthusiasm, attitude, intelligence, and effort. (You might remember those qualities from last weeks bloggette, as cribbed by me from Mitchell Corton, Director of Sales for Compuware/Gomez).

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David Greenberg shares tips from his experience as Director of Marketing for Ted Kurland Associates, a boutique booking and management agency where Berklee interns gain insight into a successful career in music and business.

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Well, of course you do, but aim to have a boatload of material so you don’t just have your resume to show people. And then, during your first job, find time to do your own thing, by any means necessary, so that you don’t really need that resume after that. I landed my second job of my career with the film production house, Second Story Television without any resume at all. That was because I started that company with a few friends after gleaning enough experience and connections from working at a small film production company/ad agency based on the famed Madison Avenue in NYC. And jobs after SST were mostly pulled in from my network of friends. That’s the key and the underlying thought behind this bloggette: building your career, yourself.

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