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Ilise Benun has been
self-employed since 1988. The journey hasn’t been without
wobbles.
At the young
age of 26, after being fired from her second job out of college,
Ilise heatedly decided that she would never work for anyone else again.
She didn’t exactly set out to be self employed, but neither
was it a surprise. There was, after all, that early experience on the
playground in elementary school where she hawked wax lips
she’d bought from Don, the ice cream man and sold (marked-up,
of course) to her teeny-bopper friends.
By 1988, Ilise was living in New York and had a lot of creative
friends: actors, dancers, writers, artists. When she found herself
without a job, she looked around and saw how disorganized they were.
She jumped in to help. But during her brief stint as a
“professional organizer,” Ilise noticed that one
thing in particular was consistently being neglected at the bottom of
her clients’ 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 a bit of common
sense, Ilise set out to help her creative friends get the word out
about their work.
For the first several years, she learned a lot by trial and error,
mostly error. And she worked with people running businesses
of all shapes and sizes, 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 did it, the clearer it became that she could now teach
better than do the marketing for others. That realization coincided
with an offer to help that came in 2005 from her colleague and friend,
Peleg Top. He liked the business idea and wanted to help her grow it
into its next incarnation: Marketing Mentor.
Together Ilise and Peleg worked bi-coastally to evolve the business
into more than a consulting practice. They started giving 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 grow his own services beyond it. So over the course of
2009-2010, he began exploring other options and stepping 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 growing.
She’s been the person who didn’t even know it was
important 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.
Ilise has learned a lot about running and marketing a business, about
balancing work and life, about organizing both time and
“stuff” -- and she shares what she’s
learned in her mentoring of 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 mice, and grow their
business into successful and, yes, profitable ventures.
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