Very few of my clients are completely embedded in their role as a performer or as part of an ensemble. Instead, what I’ve noticed is that my most successful clients use their activity as performers to reinforce their personal brands and to create new opportunities for themselves.

Today, I’m sharing how performing has been woven into my journey as an entrepreneur, in hopes that it will spark some new ideas for you on how to package your skills and promote yourself as a multi-faceted musician.

All throughout my education, I performed mainly through the activities related to my degree programs.

Being always on a full piano scholarship, I needed to keep a very active performing career in my Universities and constantly participate in piano competitions, festivals and recitals.

After getting out of school, I learned how to create my own performance opportunities both through self-producing concerts, as well as through packaging my skills and unique characteristics into a promotional program.

The first time I did this was by creating my Piano Journey Through Latin-America, which allowed my husband and I to find performance opportunities in major international concert series such as the Oregon State University – Corvallis International Piano Series, the Sunset Music and Arts Series in San Francisco, as well as the College of Charleston International Piano Series.

I also created a virtual lecture recital called “Women as Musician-Entrepreneurs” which allowed me to package my experience in both music, piano performance, and also entrepreneurship into a virtual lecture-recital.

You can learn more about these two programs here:

The most important discovery marketing my skills as a performer was the fact that I realized the true opportunity to “charge what you are worth” from performing comes from being able to strategically link our performing side to our high-end offers in a way that complements our services, helps us build our brand and create connection with our audiences.

Yes, we can charge for our performances, and the varying ways we can do this as artists are many. Some venues may pay more and others pay less, and it is certainly not a matter of how much money we make strictly as performers.

Instead, we need to find a way to weave our performing activities INTO our high-end offers and Musician’s Profit Umbrella® so then and only then, it makes sense to pursue these creative activities. Because our businesses and business brands depend on them.

I’m curious, when was the last time you made time to practice or even to perform?

Do you feel this part of you is still very active or a little bit dormant at the moment?