Sharing a TIP from my book, #100Pitches:Mistakes I’ve Made So You Don’t Have To. I had a deep conversation about the industry and pitching when I interviewed Tracey Baker Simmons (Creator of Being Bobby Brown, The Houston’s, and Bobby Christina TV movie.)
In this TIP she talks about her biggest mistake. Which was not being prepared for success. Her entire interviews was so good! But here is a snippet below.
“You know we all hate the waiting room. We would all prefer to be on the field; we want to be out there playing. We want to be in the game. But in reality, we really should be preparing for that moment and you were so in the game that you never made time to develop more. So in the waiting room we want to be developing, so that when we do get picked and we are engulfed, we are all ready set up for the next win.
I wish someone had told me that. To be very honest, I’m probably one of the prime examples of people who didn’t know or have other options. If you think about it, Being Bobby Brown is probably 13 years old, and a lot of people who started out the gate at the same time or after me, went on to build successful companies and sold them for a lot of money. We weren’t able to flip that that way because we didn’t know. We hadn’t worked at a network. We were located in Atlanta. We weren’t a part of the system. We didn’t have the know-how to be like, “What’s our next project. Let me be pitching my next project, or developing my next project while my team is pretty big.” So we weren’t ready. When the show ended is when we went into development mode. But it was kind of too late, because by the time we had something else ready and developed, a few months had gone by, and we tried to get back into the ring, and other people were already taking off.”