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Ilise Benun has been
self-employed since 1988. The journey hasn’t been without
wobbles.
At the promising
age of 26, after being fired from her second job out of college,
Ilise heatedly decided that she would never work for another boss again.
She didn’t set out intending to be self employed, but the
opportunity was not a surprise. There was, after all, that early
experience on the playground in elementary school where she hawked
candy wax lips she’d bought from Don, the ice-cream man and sold
(at a mark-up, of course) to her fashion-hungry teeny-bopper friends.
By 1988, Ilise was living in New York and had a lot of creative
friends: actors, dancers, writers, artists. They were talented and
ambitious but disorganized. When Ilise found herself without a job, she
jumped in to help them as a “professional organizer.” She
noticed that one thing in particular her clients consistently neglected
at the bottom of their to-do piles: self promotion and marketing.
That’s when she started her first consulting practice, The Art of
Self Promotion. With a lot of chutzpah and common sense, Ilise set out
to help her creative friends get the word out about their creative
work.
For the first several years, like all new business owners, she learned
a lot by trial and error. And she worked with people running
businesses of all shapes, sizes, and purposes including:
- A color forecaster (it’s going to
be… purple!)
- A dental implant surgeon (ouch)
- An actuary (she still isn’t sure what
this person did)
- A pest control guy (she’s an animal
lover… yes, even mice)
- A psychiatrist (she did his bookkeeping)
- A lawyer turned mayoral candidate (he
lost… oops)
- And one guy who made a gadget that stopped
tables from wobbling (great invention, but…)
Little by little, she learned from these experiences, and began to
narrow her focus on the people she was best at helping, creative people who loved their
work but didn’t exactly love getting the word out about it.
The more she worked with people, the clearer it became that she could
now teach marketing more effectively than market each business for her
clients. That realization coincided with an offer in 2005 from her
colleague and friend, Peleg Top. He liked the idea of teaching
marketing and wanted to help her expand the business into its next
incarnation: Marketing Mentor.
Together Ilise and Peleg worked bi-coastally to evolve the business
into more than a consulting practice. They gave workshops
together, wrote a book, The Designer's
Guide to Marketing &
Pricing, ventured into ecommerce with an
online
store, the Marketing
Mentor Toolbox, and in
2008, pitched the idea for the Creative Freelancer Conference
to their friends at HOW Magazine (and F&W Media).
For the first two years Peleg was intimately involved with CFC, but
soon wanted to expand his own services. So over the course of
2009-2010, he stepped out of the day
to day with CFC and Marketing Mentor. ( More
about him here.)
More than 20
years after hearing “You’re
fired!”…
Ilise has come a long way and is still learning, discovering, and growing.
She’s been the person who didn’t know how important it
was to pinpoint her market. She’s been the business
owner who wasn’t sure what she wanted her business to be.
She’s been the writer waiting for the book deal to come to
her, the speaker waiting for speaking gigs… until her own
mentor said, “Why don’t you ask for it?”
And she did. She asked for all of it and it worked.
Ilise has learned a lot about running and marketing a business, about
balancing work and life, about organizing both time and
“stuff” -- and she will share with you what she’s
learned from mentoring creative professionals. (Sign
up for
her free 30-minute mentoring session
.)
Which brings
us to today
Marketing Mentor guides creative solopreneurs
and small
business owners
– and we’ve
helped hundreds of people stay on
track, fast-forward through the wobbles and the mice, and grow their
business into successful and, yes, profitable ventures.
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