Experiences at Creative Artists Agency - CAA

As an agent, your job is to sign clients that you are passionate about, have knowledge and appreciation for their work, understand, and supersede their long and short term goals. To perform effectively, you must demonstrate strong written and verbal communication skills with industry professionals, clients and colleagues. It is integral to exhibit exceptional multi-tasking capabilities while maintaining focus and being detail oriented. In addition to working well as an individual, CAA is founded on the principle of working as a team. With the enormous number of resources at an agent's disposal, a CAA agent can only be successful by exploiting their clients' talents through leveraging them across platforms.

The best agent is one who can perform their job at a superior level by being dedicated to the company and their clients, while establishing a healthy balance with their personal life. It is imperative that an agent comes to work each day prepared, energized, organized, and refreshed to meet the enormous demands to thrive in a high pressure, fast-paced, and often hectic/stressful atmosphere. You must have the ability to operate your office exceedingly well by setting an example for your staff as a leader and mentor, as well as assigning them tasks/responsibilities that you will need to manage and sometimes supervise. Your assistant(s) needs to be assured of your confidence in their abilities. Micromanaging them could negatively impact your relationship with them as well as take time away from the immense duties that you are accountable for.

It is impressed upon CAA's agents that internally signing and servicing existing clients across the agency is as important as an agent or group of agents signing a new client. Performing exceptionally well for existing clients helps to preserve their satisfaction and happiness, ensure their retention, and provide positive word of mouth to executives, industry insiders, and their peers about their representation. In addition to sustaining contentment among current clients, a successful agent will have a number of artists whom they are tracking/following their recent and future work in order to ascertain the appropriate time to either immediately approach the potential client to convey their desire to represent them, develop a relationship with them slowly, or circle and wait for an event/string of poor career decisions/few or no job opportunities afforded to them that will elevate their career. Each agent has their own technique for signing new clients. It is central to your core job function to develop a style and system for attaining new clients that is most effectual and comfortable for you to employ.

While relationships with potential and existing clients are essential, another aspect of succeeding will draw from the relationships that you develop and maintain. With many mediums in which a client can integrate their talents, networking and establishing sound connections within the division you specialize in, as well as fostering association and familiarity with buyers/executives in other sectors of the entertainment and media industry is crucial. It is extremely beneficial to establish relationships with many professionals emanating from a variety of areas of the industry. Further, it is advantageous to educate oneself on deal-making within various forms of entertainment, and be aware of emerging trends/opportunities/threats, in order to both have a competitive edge over agents outside the agency and to maximize the long term revenue of your clients by formulating ideas strategically and analyzing existing content that can be leveraged cross-platform.

In order to preserve your career as well as your clients', you must conduct business with integrity. Retain respect, trust, and reliability to fortify your reputation in and out of the agency. Being a shrewd deal maker is requisite to being a good agent. An agent's demeanor is what will determine their success or inevitable collapse....