Business Overview:

If you have a passion for the arts and a desire to help others succeed, consider learning how to start an actor workshop business. With this simple business idea you organize and run workshops to help existing or aspiring actors learn new skills or to improve upon already existing ones. Your workshops will focus upon helping your clients learn and improve in the various areas of acting and performance—improvisation, voice projection, script interpretation, stage combat, and so on. If you are already a professional in the acting world then starting this business would be a great opportunity for you to pass on your knowledge to others, and generate a great income doing so. If not, you can easily take classes that will train you how to teach actor workshop classes or, alternatively, you can hire professionals with experience in the acting world to teach classes for you. Another great advantage to starting an actor training workshop is that it’s one of those business ideas that costs very little to start up, as you can even run your workshops from your own home. As your clientele base builds you will likely have requests for one-on-one training as your clients go on casting calls. They’ll want that specialized attention to prepare for the audition—and will be willing to pay top dollar for it.

A Day in the Life of an Actor Workshop Business Owner:

As an actor workshop business owner, a typical day would start with a quick review of your calendar to check which workshops you have scheduled for the day. If you choose to teach your workshops yourself, then you would then prepare for your classes and review your workshop plans. You clients would then arrive, and throughout the day you would then deliver your workshops—which would focus on specific areas of acting such as stage combat, voice projection, improvisation and so on. During these workshops you would give exercises to your clients, observe their performance and give suggestions to help them improve. Of course, if you were to hire teachers to deliver teach workshops for you then they would plan and conduct your workshops, and you would oversee them and ensure everything runs smoothly.

About Your Customers:

Your customers will be actors who are looking to either learn new skills or to improve upon existing ones, so as to become more adept and successful in their profession.

What You Need to Start:

• A computer with a high-speed internet connection
• A company name
• A business license (if required in your area)
• A studio to conduct your workshops in—or you can conduct your workshops from home
• Marketing (posters, flyers, adverts, etc.)

The Good:

• The startup costs are very low.
• You can run this business from your own home.
• It’s a lively, exciting and high energy business.
• You can meet great people.
• It can be very rewarding as you’ll be helping actors improve and become more successful.

The Bad:

• It can take time to build up your reputation.
• You may have to work with some difficult or temperamental people.

Resources:

• Society for Theatrical Artists’ Guidance and Enhancement
• Bureau of Labor Statistics on Actors
• Wikipedia on Acting Workshops

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Business Overview:

If the idea of running an exciting, money-making business from home with no startup costs and little risk sounds alluring, consider starting a talent agency. The concept of this business idea is really quite simple: You discover new talent that you would like to represent and you seek out work for them. Usually, you get paid when your client gets paid, and you take a cut (10 percent or more) of their pay. This is what motivates a talent agent to find work for their clients. After you have successfully found work for a few entertainers, models, and actors, your reputation will grow and you will be able to start getting more talent just by word-of-mouth. Then you can consider hiring additional agents to work for you and bring in even more talent. Before that, you might need to do a bit of advertising to get your business going. Other than that, it doesn’t take much overhead to start a talent agency, and you can invest as much or as little time in your business venture as you see fit. Of course, the more you work and the more you keep yourself involved in the industry, the easier it will be to find new talent and to find your entertainers their gigs.

A day in the life of a talent agency business owner:

The usual routine of a talent agency business owner will start with a look at the calendar—you will want to see what bookings your entertainment clients have that day and perhaps give them a reminder phone call, just to check in. There may be days where you will want to be on the set to be sure that the client is receiving exactly what they wanted from your talent. Then you will want to sort through your casting calls to see what jobs look like matches for your talent and start setting up auditions. A good agent will send a postmortem message to a booking client to ensure they were happy with their talent and to thank them for the business. Meeting with your agents if you have hired a staff will be important to make sure everyone is on the same page, and keeping a close eye on your finances will also add to your business success. Finally, this business is all about contacts, so keeping your PDA and your little black book handy will be the key to a winning agency.

About Your Customers:

In this business, your customers (clients) are twofold—you will have your talent clients (actors, models, singers, etc.) and your casting directors or companies that seek talent. You will get paid from your talent, but you need to maintain solid relationships with the booking companies so that they look to you the next time they need an entertainer.

What You Need to Start:

• A phone
• A computer with a high-speed internet connection
• A company name
• A business license (if required in your area)
• Talent (actors, models, musicians, entertainers)
• Contacts in the entertainment business who will book your talent

The Good:

• You can literally run this business from your sofa.
• There is little or no startup cost.
• Your profits are earned by others’ work.
• It can be a very exciting business to be in.
• You can meet great people.

The Bad:

• There are many talent agents out there who you will be competing with to book your talent.
• Some talent you work with may be temperamental and difficult to deal with.

Resources:

• The Association of Talent Agents
• Talent Managers Association
• Wikipedia on Talent Agents

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