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-about-
Though she's lived coast to coast, Michele always says she’s a Texas girl at heart- she's spent about half her life in the Dallas and Austin areas with brief stints in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New York. She’s currently based in Kansas City, Missouri.
Michele found a love for the arts at a young age. She tried just about everything all throughout her childhood before finding a love for theatre in high school.
Michele has a BFA in Theatre with a minor in Mass Communication from Texas State University- San Marcos, and a Certificate in Arts Management from University of California- Irvine. She moved to New York in 2016, where she lived and worked in the heart of the theatre industry for four years. She is currently pursuing a Masters Degree in Entertainment Business from Full Sail University.
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-intention statement-
Some of my earliest memories involve the arts and entertainment.
My dad was a tour manager when I was a kid, so getting to experience first-hand how the industry works on almost every level in my formative years had me hooked: I knew this is what I wanted to do when I grow up.
In the past few years I’ve been fortunate enough to have gained experience in nearly every part of theatre and film production. Seeing a project through from concept to completion has always given me a great sense of satisfaction creatively; whether it’s an off-off-broadway premiere of a new play, an award-winning web series, or a Game of Thrones themed cabaret show at one of New York City’s premiere supper clubs, I love the feeling of other people enjoying something I helped make.
Getting all of this experience has given me the desire to run my own production company one day. In discovering this desire, I found that I still have a lot learn in terms of actually running a company.
In completing the 12-month Entertainment Business Masters program at Full Sail University, I hope to gain the skills I still need to be able to successfully run my own business in this industry. I am especially excited by the fact that I will finish this program with a complete business plan so I will be able to enter the world confident and ready to make my mark on it.
Ultimately, my biggest hope for my Journey to Mastery and beyond is that in everything I do, I get to share the overwhelmingly positive impact the arts can have on the world, and do my part to inspire the next generation of artists the same way previous generations have inspired me.
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inspiration post - [5/13/2020]
The Art of Asking - TEDTalk by Amanda Palmer | I became a fan of The Dresden Dolls when I was in high school. I loved the theatricality of their sound and the voice of the band's vocalist, Amanda Palmer. In this TEDTalk, Palmer explores her relationship with her audience as an artist, and how building that relationship made it possible for her to successfully crowdfund two of her albums. I not only found this talk very enlightening and helpful as someone who has crowdfunded for projects before, but it also helped me better understand that the relationship between artist and audience can (and should!) be mutually beneficial.
TED. (2013, March 1). The art of asking | Amanda Palmer [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMj_P_6H69g
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-let's connect on linkedin-
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inspiration post - [5/21/2020]
Quote by Rachel Chavkin, 2019 Tony Awards Acceptance Speech | Last season, the musical Hadestown swept the Tony Awards. The show's director, Rachel Chavkin, won Best Director of a Musical that night- she was also the only woman directing a musical on Broadway that season. She called this out in her acceptance speech; she also called out the underrepresentation of women and artists of color in our industry. As a woman of color who aspires to direct, I find her speech very inspiring; the more we talk about the problem, the easier it becomes to find a way to solve it.
Kilimenjiro. (2019, September 19). Rachel Chavkin Tony Speech for Best Direction (Hadestown) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0QI88q39aE
executive leadership: my leadership style - [6/17/2020]
When I think about what both Maxwell and Greene have to say about what it takes to be a good leader, it’s pretty easy to see the differences between the two. Maxwell’s servant-based leadership style is about helping others and building your team based on what you can do for them; Greene’s power-based leadership style is based on helping yourself and what others can do for you. When you consider this, to my mind the best leaders use elements of both styles to make the most of their abilities and skills. Ideally, this is the kind of leader I hope to become.
To be honest, both styles are in a way made to work together. Maxwell emphasizes the importance of developing your team and building a relationship so that they will move from following you because they have to, to following you because they want to. When you build that relationship, it becomes easier to build and exert your influence over your team. That make it easier to apply Greene’s laws to keep that influence you worked so hard to gain. When you know how your team works, you know exactly how to keep them both happy and wrapped around your finger.
The entertainment industry, especially the theatre sector that I’m in, is one of the most competitive industries out there. You not only have to work hard to become successful, you also have to work twice as hard to stay successful too; this is where using Greene’s laws come in handy. That said, if you get there by just using your power over people to move up, people might say you’re difficult to work with. This is why I think that in our industry we must be a mix of both styles if we want to be truly successful.
project and team management [ 7/30/2020]
When I first started the Project and Team Management course, I thought I had an idea of what it meant to be a project manager. After all, I’d been a stage manager before, and isn’t that at least close to the same thing? How little I knew!
While there certainly are similarities between these roles, Project and Team Management has proven to be an entirely different beast. One thing I found particularly interesting about this course is how we as creative types can use PTM to our advantage. Being a stage manager involves leading a team of assistants and crew while also acting as liaison at times between all parts of the team putting on a show. We take notes, generate reports, forms, and run sheets to help make sure everybody involved in the show knows where they need to be and what they need to do to make the show run smoothly. PTMers do the same thing and more, just in different forms: where a stage manager would generate a running order, a PM would send a WBS or Gantt chart to show similar information.
I had assumed that PTM was a certain set of skills that we would hone over the course of the month. As it turns out, not only did we hone our skills, our textbook even provided us with tools to get certified to be a Project Management Professional through the Project Management Institute (Verzuh, 2016) if we wanted- things I didn’t even know existed before taking this class. I have also learned about and now have a better understanding of the various PM methodologies (of which there are many) that are out there. I look forward to using that when evaluating how best to manage any team I work with. Overall, I found this course very insightful, and it gave me a deeper understanding of a practice I thought I was familiar with.
Verzuh, E. (2016). The fast forward MBA in project management. John Wiley & Sons.
business storytelling and brand development [8/28/2020]
My original goals for this month’s course were to improve my Adobe skills, begin building and solidifying my personal brand, and to determine the most effective way to my story. In hindsight, I might not have achieved those exact goals, but I did learn a lot this month, and managed to achieve some goals I hadn’t started to work on yet but were necessary for me to achieve in order to move forward.
By far the most important of these goals was being able to begin to work on what will eventually be my business plan for the final months of this program. The idea for my business plan may have been floating around in my head for a while, but this class has given me the opportunity to hone in and focus on how I could make my idea feasible and reachable.
It was also reassuring to get feedback from others that I am on the right track with my own personal brand as well. Since I already had a personal website, I didn’t need to make one for this class, but even so I made some minor adjustments and am now even happier with my website and how it looks than I was before. That said, this class also helped me see that even though I have gained a pretty clear sense of what my goals are and how I can best present myself, I still have work to do if I am to further solidify my personal brand, both in my online presence and beyond.
ENTERTAINMENT BUSINESS FINANCE [9/25/2020]
I’ve never been the best at math. I’ll be honest, I got nervous when I saw we’d be taking a finance course during this program. That said, this class didn’t end up being nearly as math heavy as I thought; however, it still had its own set of challenges.
My original goals for this course were to improve my personal financial literacy, to gain understanding of financial structure for my industry, and to research and determine what an operating budget might be for a theatre company.
As far as personal finance is concerned, I don’t know if I would call myself more literate, though I would say this class provided insight into the finance world I definitely didn’t have before, so I wouldn’t count that as a loss or anything. I still definitely have my share of personal finance issues that I need to resolve, so we’ll see just how much I can apply what I learned in this class to solving those issues.
I also definitely know more about how financing works in our industry than I did before, though if generating our pro-forma statement is any indication, I still have a lot to learn in that department. As I researched the information I needed to complete it, I found a lot of what goes into a pro-forma is educated guesswork. Everything in it feels arbitrary to a point, because in a lot of ways it is. Especially when coming up with a new business, it’s hard to find other businesses to use a benchmark when making the assumptions necessary for our own business.
Finally, I realize I never did determine what an operating budget for a theatre company might look like. To be fair, though, when I listed these goals, operating a theatre was going to be my business plan for the end of this program. That has since changed some as I’ve moved through the program, so I can’t be too down on myself for not meeting this goal.
Overall, I found this class to be not nearly as scary as I thought a finance class would be. I know I still have a lot to learn in this area, but the foundation is there now, so it will only be easier as I progress.
digital marketing [10/21/2020]
My goals for this course were to: understand the difference between traditional and digital marketing and what works for each, research strategies for social media management, and to begin developing a marketing plan for what will end up being my final project business plan. I ended up meeting two of these goals, only missing the third because I ran out of time. I thought I didn’t know the difference between traditional and digital marketing. As we progressed through the course, I found that I actually did, I just don’t think I had seen the two laid out the way they were presented in class. Things like knowing when to use what in a marketing campaign is crucial to the campaign’s success, so I’m glad that I have a better understanding of the two than I did before. I have to say, though, by far the biggest help for me in this course was being able to research. As we worked on each assignment, I found more and more information that may have been an unspoken truth about my industry, but I now have data to back up the claims I make about the state of the industry. I believe in my business idea, and after doing the research I’ve done over this month I have a decent foundation to build on as I continue to make my case. I look forward to continuing my research (and maybe conducting some of my own) to further my aspirations. I didn’t get the chance to look into social media management tools, however we did cover them at least in passing during lecture and in our textbook, so I don’t consider that a total loss. Overall, I enjoyed this class. While I’m increasingly nervous about the future of my industry, I’m excited to use what I’ve learned and apply it no matter where I end up.
negotiation and deal-making [11/10/2020]
My three main goals for this class were to gain basic negotiation skills and tactics, apply those skills to my deal-making strategy, and, as a bonus, understand the difference between a deal memo and a contract. I’d say overall that I met two out of three goals. My three main goals for this class were to gain basic negotiation skills and tactics, apply those skills to my deal-making strategy, and, as a bonus, understand the difference between a deal memo and a contract. I’d say overall that I met two out of three goals. I thought I had at least a minimal understanding of negotiation, but I quickly realized that there is more to negotiation than just compromising to find a solution. Once I had a better understanding of things like how important underlying interests are to a negotiation, I was able to take my skills to the next level. I particularly enjoyed being able to participate in a simulation where I was able to put those newly acquired skills to the test. This activity let me treat negotiation like a game (because, in this case, it was), and I was able to keep running the simulation until I got the “right” answer in the form of an “ultimate deal”. In doing this, I was able to see how asking the right questions can lead not only to better connections with the other side of the table, but it leaves room to develop more creative solutions that we may not have come up with otherwise. I didn’t get to meet my final goal (understanding the difference between a contract and a deal memo), but in thinking about it more, I realize that topic is more likely to be covered in our Entertainment Law class in a couple of months. I enjoyed this class overall. I was surprised at how much I learned (and still had to learn) this month, and I’m excited to learn even more as the month continues. Like many parts of the entertainment industry, a core part of my final business plan for this program involves negotiation for things like distribution rights. Being able to hone my skill in this way will only help my hopeful success in such a competitive industry.
product and artist management [12/15/2020]
My goals for this course were so wildly different from what I actually got out of this course that they almost aren’t even worth listing. Honestly, I don’t fully know what I was hoping to get out of this course, but that just made it easier for me to understand and take in everything the course actually offered. This course has actually made me reconsider the possibility of making a career out of being an artist manager. I enjoy sharing my passion for things with others, and to make sure your artist is successful, you have to have a lot of that passion. With that kind of energy, it becomes easy to fully rally around your artist and do everything you can to get them out there and ensure their success. I have to admit, I wasn’t sure what was meant by “product management” when we started this course. However, what really unlocked this side of the industry for me was seeing how artist management fit within the broader context of product management. It hadn’t occurred to me that the artist’s manager would need to be in charge of managing products sold by the artist (other than the movie/album/etc. the artist is working on at the moment). However, it was easy to see the connection once I understood that you can (and to some degree, should) look at the artist themselves as a product. Understanding all that made it easier to apply the marketing tools we learned in Digital Marketing to make sure we know how best to get our audience to rally around our artist/product the way we do as a manager. I actually really liked this course overall. While the content was presented almost exclusively from a music industry perspective, it was still easy to wrap my head around. I have no doubt that the skills I learned here can carry me as I develop my business and my career in the entertainment industry.
advanced entertainment law [1/29/2021]
I actually really enjoyed this class. I’ve always thought that if I wasn’t in the more hands-on/creative part of the industry, I might want to be an entertainment lawyer focusing on copyright/IP law. As a creator I’ve felt that there are a lot of misconceptions and misinformation regarding copyright/IP, and I’d want to help folks navigate those often murky and dangerous waters. My goals for this course were to: learn the basics of contract law, understand the basics of IP law, and understand deal structures for various licensing institutions. I would say I do have a better understanding of IP law, though I do wish we’d gotten to delve a little deeper into contract law and licensing deals. The business I want to run revolves around getting copyright clearances, hiring (likely generally freelance) crew, dealing with union crew members and their contracts, as well as distribution deals. I’m glad we spent a whole week on copyright/IP; I think it gave me a better sense of what I’ll have to deal with when approaching different productions to film their shows. I think I also have a better sense of what to look out for when dealing with the legal world as a whole, which is always helpful. That said, even though I did learn a lot, the biggest challenge for me in this course was the case research we had to do. The actual act of researching was easy enough. However, trying to find cases that related to my corner of the industry that didn’t have to do with copyright law was somewhat difficult. The theatre industry is either not particularly litigious, or such disputes were settled out of court and so there is no official record of the final result. Overall, I’m glad I took this class. It even got me to reconsider whether I might still want to be an entertainment lawyer. Whether I ultimately go down that path or not, I definitely enjoyed the topics we covered more than I thought I would, and I’m definitely more prepared to handle the legal world than I was before this class.
entertainment media publishing and distribution [ 2/19/21]
I don’t think I really met any of the goals I originally set for this course. That said, I did enjoy it and thought this class was very helpful and insightful. The first goal I set was to understand how legislation impacts my ability to publish and distribute my work; in hindsight, I think this goal would have been better suited for last month’s law class. My next goal was to develop strategies to protect my IP. I didn’t exactly do this either, however we did cover different ways you can own and license your work, so I wouldn’t count that as a total loss. My final goal was to navigate the differences between publishing and distribution. I’ll admit that I thought they were essentially the same. While they are the same in a lot of ways, this course helped me see that publishing is more common when releasing your content yourself, and distribution is a more appropriate term when using a third party. Though it may sound like I didn’t get much out of this class, that actually couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, this class allowed me to re-open a project I had all but abandoned nearly two years ago. The work I was able to do on this project has given me something I can be proud of, and a course of action I can take to get it out there. I look forward to being able to query agents and contacting developers after I graduate and polish this project a little bit more. Overall, this was a really great class, and I’m glad it’s a part of our program. Even though I may not have met the goals I originally set, I still ended up learning a lot more than I anticipated.
business plan development [3/22/21]
I’m not sure I met the goals I originally set for this class, but I feel like I ended up getting a lot more out of it than I thought. My first goal was to finalize my business direction. I hardly count this as a goal anymore, as I have had a clear vision of what I wanted my business to be essentially from the beginning. My next goal was to figure out my financial structure by looking at financial statements of businesses similar to what I want to do. Unfortunately, I didn’t really meet this goal either, as I quickly realized that the businesses I want to emulate are privately held and therefore vey opaque when it comes to company data. My final goal was to develop strategies to ensure the longevity of my business. While I didn’t necessarily do that in this course, I do have at least one solid idea that I can introduce after my business is fully established to give us more to do. All that said, even though I didn’t exactly meet those goals, I do feel much more confident in starting my business than I did before taking this class. Having a tangible version of my idea as the beginnings of a formal business plan makes it easier for me to see that my business might just be possible. So much so, that I hope to establish my business by the end of next month when I graduate. The idea of being a businessowner has always been scary to me, at least to some degree, and I’ve always known that it would not be an easy road. However, having the foundation of a business plan that will be finalized in next month’s class helps me breathe just a little bit easier. I believe in my idea, and now I have a tool in my arsenal that shows people my passion in a professional context, which will prove crucial as I enter the professional/business world.
Final Project: Business Plan [4/26/2021]
What a year it’s been. I’ll admit, I hadn’t necessarily planned on going to grad school when the pandemic hit. That said, as we approach graduation, I’m so glad I did. Going through this program taught me essential tools I will need, as well as the confidence that I can become a successful entrepreneur when the industry returns to some level of normal. Month one answered the question I hasn’t thought to ask as we began the program: what even is “mastery”? It was helpful to get the opportunity to reflect and determine what mastery is not just in a broad sense, but on a personal level as well. I thought I had a basic understanding of good leadership skills, but Executive Leadership taught me how best to adapt to use the best style of leadership for whatever situation I find myself in. PTM helped me form a new creative project that I can hopefully try and get off the ground soon. From Gantt charts to creating a full project plan that’s ready to go, I now feel better equipped to take on any project, no matter the scale. BSBD helped me start thinking seriously about what I want my business to be, and what I want my business to represent. Math was never my best subject in school, and the thought of a finance class was intimidating to say the least. But even if staring at numbers still turns my brain to mush, Entertainment Business Finance helped me see that the money side of owning a business doesn’t have to be scary like I thought it was. I thoroughly enjoyed Digital Marketing; a portion of the internship I had in undergrad involved marketing/social media. I enjoyed learning about the differences between traditional and digital marketing, and that traditional marketing is still very much useful today. Negotiation and Deal-Making helped me sharpen my communication skills, particularly with the simulation we ran as an assignment, to make sure everyone involved in a deal leaves satisfied. I don’t exactly know what I was expecting out of Product and Artist Management, however that just helped me better absorb the lessons. Seeing how artist management is itself a form of product management to a degree really helped me see the bigger picture of the industry and how we’re all moving parts that make it work. I’ve always been interested in Entertainment Law- I’ve often thought that if I wasn’t in the creative part of the industry, I might enjoy being a copyright/IP lawyer. This class helped me get a taste of what that might be like, from case research to understanding court decisions, and it was really eye-opening; I thoroughly enjoyed it. Learning how to protect our IP in Publishing and Distribution gave me a chance to revisit a project I had let fall to the wayside a few years ago. While I’m still not quite ready to take the next steps with it, I have an action plan when the time comes. The last two classes were what it all comes down to: the business plan. Doing the work and researching to build the different components of my business plan in BPD helped me evaluate its feasibility and fueled my passion behind my idea. This month, we wrapped it all up by putting finishing touches on our business plan and practicing our presentation skills so we can be confident when we start shopping our plan around. It’s been an intense year, but as I come out the other side of this program, I am ready to get started, and excited to apply everything I’ve learned to all of my future endeavors.