The Practitioner and The Producer
A model for understanding freedom, security and opportunity in entertainment.
How do you get the freedom you want and the security you need?
Most people in entertainment are trying to answer that question in one way or another.
This model grew out of noticing how different people approach it.
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Years ago, I was teaching drums in a school in Darlington.
I used to teach in this long room. The drums were at the bottom and the door was way at the top.
At break time, these absolute lads started throwing open the door, throwing in open cans of coke, and running away laughing hysterically.
It went everywhere.
This happened a few weeks in a row and I never saw who did it.
Until one week, I happened to be standing opposite the door as this kid threw it open and lobbed in this open can of coke.
Which I caught.
And I just looked at the kid and said:
Cool. What now?
And he legged it.
You can imagine his mates, the ones who’d done it the weeks before, saying:
You just open the door and throw it in.
Just.
And hidden inside that word is the whole plan:
hope you’re lucky and it works out.
Sometimes I think our plan for our entertainment careers can look a bit like that too.
Waiting to get picked.
Hoping the big opportunity arrives.
Hoping the next gig, show, tour, agent, producer, casting director, client, venue or contact changes everything.
And sometimes, of course, luck is involved.
But if waiting to get picked and hoping to be lucky isn’t quite doing it for us, now what?
Freedom and Security
In arts and entertainment, the big question is:
How do you get the security you need and the freedom you want?
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a great line. He says:
The whole reason I became a comedian was so that between 10am and 6pm I could have uninterrupted mall schmooze time.
I’m similar.
I want to be able to pop into town and sit in a park with my friend for a coffee at 11am.
The freedom is I can do it at 11am on a Monday.
The security is I can afford the coffee and the time.
And I think for a lot of us, that’s part of what attracted us to entertainment in the first place.
We loved the thing.
We loved singing.
Or dancing.
Or playing drums.
Or being backstage and making the whole thing happen.
And somewhere in there was probably also the idea of freedom.
A different kind of life.
Then at some point, usually quite early on, we suddenly become very aware of security.
Rent.
Bills.
Work drying up.
Wanting things to feel more stable.
And when we start thinking about getting the security bit, we tend to inherit all these stories about how a career in entertainment is supposed to work.
If you’re a dancer or musical theatre performer, you hear:
You’ve just got to keep auditioning.
Musicians say:
You’ve just got to network.
And the important word there is “just”.
Because when someone says “just”, often what they really mean is:
I don’t really know how this works either.
So you inherit these stories about how the big opportunity arrives.
Another Way of Looking at It
Sometimes when things are hard to see, what we need is a different way of looking at them.
My favourite example of this is from primary school.
Our headmaster, Mr Elphick, proudly wheeled in the school’s first computer to show us the paint programme.
My dad worked in IT, so we’d actually had one at home for years.
Anyway, Mr Elphick explains:
All you have to do is hold down the left mouse button and draw.
Except every time he tried it, nothing happened.
After a few attempts he started explaining that the computer was probably broken.
But from the back of the room I could see the problem immediately.
He had the mouse upside down.
So when he thought he was pressing the left button, he was actually pressing the right one.
I put my hand up and said:
Sir, the mouse is upside down. The cable has to be at the top.
And he said:
No. A mouse’s tail is at the bottom.
In his model of the world, that was just a fact.
Eventually he got me up to the front, I turned the mouse round, and suddenly everything worked.
Same intention.
Same computer.
Same effort.
Different perspective.
And that’s really all a model is.
A model is just a way of looking at something.
And sometimes if you want different results, it helps to try a different model.
The Practitioner
There are two kinds of roles that show up again and again in live entertainment.
The first is what I call the practitioner.
That's performers of any kind.
Singers, dancers, musicians, actors.
But also sound engineers, lighting engineers, stage managers, creatives and writers.
We tend to think of ourselves as all being very different from each other.
But actually, the fundamental structure of how all those careers work is remarkably similar.
Practitioners basically get paid by producers.
5 ways practitioners move towards freedom and security
More Work
When you first finish training or start in the industry, you just want some gigs.
Then you want some more gigs.
A Related Side Hustle
Teaching.
Front of house in a theatre.
Social media for production companies.
Something connected to the industry.
An Unrelated Side Hustle
Working in a café.
Working in a shop.
Whatever pays the bills and gives you some security while you pursue the thing you actually want.
Better Work
Not just more gigs.
Better gigs.
Better clients.
Better contracts.
Better fees.
Better environments.
Become a Producer
Start creating opportunities instead of only waiting for them.
What's interesting about these five categories is this:
Pretty much everything you do for your career either contributes to one of these, or it doesn't.
And if it doesn't, it might still be enjoyable.
It might still matter to you.
It might still be helping you grow as a person.
But it might not actually be contributing to more freedom and security.
That's where things start getting really interesting.
Because a lot of people are working incredibly hard.
But they're not always clear on which game they're actually playing.
The Producer
Producer means something very specific in this model.
A producer is just someone who creates an opportunity where one or more practitioners can get paid.
That could be:
- a theatre show
- a pub gig
- a dance class
- a workshop
- a tour
- a choir
- a recording project
And importantly, you can be both a Practitioner and a Producer.
If you're a Rod Stewart tribute act and you hire a village hall, sell tickets, and perform the show yourself, you are both the producer and the practitioner.
You created the opportunity.
And then you worked inside it.
Now this distinction matters because practitioners and producers have different ways of getting more of what they want.
And remember, what most of us want, broadly speaking, is still some combination of freedom and security.
5 resources producers need
Content
Concept / IP
What is the thing?
The songs.
The choreography.
The arrangements.
The script.
The experience the audience is actually having.
Platform
Where does the audience experience the thing?
A theatre.
A pub.
A cruise ship.
Online.
A village hall.
A rehearsal room.
Payment
There has to be a mechanism where everybody gets paid.
Ticket sales.
A client.
A contract.
Something.
Practitioners
Somebody has to actually do the thing.
And that practitioner might be you.
Audience
People to experience the work.
Or in some cases, a client.
Success as a producer is largely about getting closer and closer to these resources.
Building them.
Owning them.
Strengthening your access to them.
Taking Responsibility
A lot of people struggle when they first become producers because most producers originally trained as practitioners.
Which means all their training was largely about:
pick me
pick me
pick me
Audition.
Go to class.
Work on your skills.
Be a good person.
Maybe network a bit.
Hope you get picked.
As a practitioner, somebody else largely decides what to do.
And if you do that thing successfully, you get paid.
Whether or not the whole project works.
But as a producer, you have to decide what to do.
And then you have to get yourself to actually do it.
And becoming a producer is really just taking the highest level of responsibility.
Which is also why it has the highest potential payoff.
Many entertainment professionals spend years developing practitioner capability while wanting outcomes that often come from producer capability.
And really, moving forwards in either category comes down to taking responsibility.
And taking responsibility comes down to pushing your own buttons.
As you think about those two categories, practitioner or producer, you probably already have a pretty good idea which one you're in.
And you might even have a different idea about which one you want to be in in the future.
As you look at the different options within whichever category you're in, you probably already know some things you could do to move yourself forwards.
I think that's why a lot of people already know more than they think they do.
You already know at least one thing you could do to move yourself forwards.
You already know someone you could contact.
You already know a conversation you could have.
You already know a thing you've been avoiding
A friend of mine and I have a running gag whenever one of us is talking about a really good idea neither of us are currently actually doing.
We say to each other:
Of course. It's nothing we don't already know.
And I think that's often the frustrating bit.
It's not usually that people don't know enough.
It's that they haven't learnt how to push their own buttons consistently enough to actually do the things they already know would probably help.
If You'd Like to Look at This Together
If you'd like some help figuring some of that out for yourself, I'd be very happy to have a conversation with you.
Usually what we do in that conversation is figure out:
• what you currently want
• what game you're currently playing
• whether your current plan is likely to get you there
Because sometimes it's surprisingly difficult to see your own situation clearly from inside it.
Especially in entertainment, where a lot of the culture is:
just keep going
just audition more
just network
And sometimes what helps is another perspective.
Want another perspective?
If this has helped you see your work differently, it may be useful to talk about where you are now, what you’re trying to build, and whether your current approach is likely to get you there.
If you’d like another perspective on your situation, I’d be happy to have a conversation.
Where are you on the map?
- What are you hoping will eventually change?
- What is your current plan for making that happen?
- Which parts of that plan are under your control?
- Which parts depend on somebody else saying yes?
- If nothing changed, where would your current approach be likely to take you?
- What opportunities are you actively creating for yourself?