"Don’t wait to be perfect" with Broghanne Jessamine
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Broghanne Jessamine is an actor and the owner of Elemental Women Productions LLC. Originally from the North East of Scotland, Broghanne emigrated to the United States in 2012 to pursue her career in acting. Through her work as an actor, a need to truly explore and tell women’s stories grew. In December 2018, Elemental Women Productions was founded with the mission to amplify women’s voices and experiences through the arts.
Can you tell our readers about your background?
I grew up in the North East of Scotland with three sisters and my parents. I started performing on stage at a young age and fell in love with the storytelling aspect, and dressing up. As I got older the prospect of making the arts my career became more and more focused. When it came to my final year of school, I auditioned for a college here in NYC and was fortunately accepted. I then moved across the world to pursue my dream.
College in the US was not what I expected. I was often misunderstood and repeating myself because I had a Scottish accent. After graduating I started working and auditioning for real, balancing survival jobs, auditions, and booking acting gigs. For 2-3 years, I tried to fit into what they told us in school about how to get jobs. I worked to lose my accent and tried to get roles they told me I would be good for, rather than ones that excited me.
Eventually, I began to adapt my own methods. It was gradual at first. I became more specific in my submissions and jobs I auditioned for, as well as which ones I accepted. I was looking for stronger, more rounded, and three-dimensional roles for women. In late 2018, I decided to give producing a try and Elemental Women Productions was founded.
Elemental Women Productions is a woman-focused production company based in NYC. We produce theatre, film, and more all with the mission to empower and amplify women’s voices and experiences through the arts.
What inspired you to start your business?
I had been working in the NYC acting scene for 4 years when I decided to start producing. That desire and need began fairly gradually before picking up steam. I was tired of auditioning for the “girlfriend” or “hot suicide girl.” Needless to say, it was frustrating. I was getting auditions that once accepted, the production would inform me that the role required partial or full nudity. Also, I would not be compensated in any way for it. There were creepy directors, producers, and fellow cast members. I was working in bars, so I could handle most situations well, but I realized I didn’t need to be dealing with it at all. After the 2016 election and the #metoo movement, I started to really come to terms with the fact that what was happening should not be happening. I soon started being more specific about which projects I was submitting to, which projects I would audition for and what I would accept. This alleviated the problem but it also added some barriers.
In 2017, I started purchasing goods from women-owned businesses specifically. I saw the supportive environment that these women had, even though they were traditionally seen as competition to each other. The warmth and joy I felt from shopping from small women-owned businesses and seeing them succeed, while staying true to themselves, hit home for me.
In 2018, I did a string of projects that said they were one thing but were in fact another. I was a part of productions that used traumatic experiences as shock factors and to further the male lead’s storyline. In some cases, denying that the scene they were writing was in fact sexual violence, not creating a space to feel safe, and looking back a very oppressive and manipulative environment. It was during these productions that I decided I couldn’t sit back anymore. I wouldn’t wait for someone else to produce the work I wanted to be a part of. I’d been looking for a company that required women to be in leadership positions. A company that explored women’s stories truthfully and amplified their voices. One who did not brush them under the carpet used them for drama’s sake or to get publicity.
So, I did it. Elemental Women Productions has now been around for just over 2 years. We have produced: 4 play readings (2 virtual), 1 full production in a theatre, 1 film, the first season of a podcast, donated to 4 organizations that linked to our subject matter and are developing 2 more films, have 4 plays on deck and constantly growing, improving and being a part of the change.
Where is your business based?
We are based in NYC. I work mainly out of coffee shops and my apartment in Brooklyn unless we are working on a project, where we rent filming locations, rehearsal spaces, and performance/event spaces throughout NYC.
How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took?
Elemental Women Productions started from a concept that I had been thinking about then. Then I asked a very good friend of mine, Mikayla Orrson to work with me on it. She is a writer, so I asked her to write a play and I would figure out how to produce it.
It was fairly messy at first. I did not have a background in business. I was an actor and I worked in restaurants as a survival job. The first thing was choosing a name and then googling it to see if the domain was available, set up social media profiles, and then figure out what was next. Once I bought the domain it was a whole other ballgame. Having worked in theatre for a good number of years and working events in the restaurant industry I knew how things were supposed to happen. I knew some of the information that was needed for cast, crew, staff, and how to run the event, but I had never had to write contracts, or do casting. I had never built a website or designed a logo. All of these things came together fairly quickly as we hosted our first staged reading within 3 weeks of Elemental Women Productions’ launch.
What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business?
Word of mouth, as well as, feature interviews like this one. People talking about Elemental Women Productions and what we do. Plus, people getting to know me as a founder/business owner is huge. I was surprised when people started contacting me saying they had been introduced to us by a friend. It warmed my heart to know people wanted to share and be a part of what I was doing.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
There is a steep learning curve when you start your own business, especially when you don’t have what is considered the right background. You have to learn a lot of things quickly while leading, which can sometimes leave you feeling isolated. It is easy to feel as though you aren’t the right person for the job.
I think that isolation and feeling unworthy was and still can be the hardest thing for me. There is a massive fear of not being perfect, of not knowing exactly what you are doing. It can overtake the reason I started the businesses in the first place.
I still do not know everything I need to know. I remind myself that I belong in what I am doing, not to give up. What always helps me is knowing that if I get something wrong, I can always do it better next time. This is why asking for feedback from audience members, casts, crews, our long-term supporters is especially important. All those people that want to be a part of what you are doing but will absolutely have an opinion and view on how you handled something. I had to teach myself not to be scared of feedback, not to take it as a personal attack, or that I wasn’t good enough. I did a lot of that learning through acting but I still have to recenter myself sometimes. I specifically ask people what could be improved, not what they liked. I like the compliments, but I really want to make sure I am doing the best I can. Then you take all that feedback, you make note of the things that you can do right now, and then put the things that are not quite possible to the side for later.
How do you stay focused?
I have found I can only do so many things in a day. I only schedule 3 things each day and I aim for 5 “to do” items total. That can look like: a meeting with a director, updating the website, catching up on some emails, making dinner and a rehearsal, or it can be, read a play/book, call home, watch an episode of a show, write a blog post and eat.
When it comes to Elemental Women Productions and company decisions, I always focus by asking if it matches or furthers the company mission. For projects I start with a massive to-do list with everything I can possibly think of that needs to be done written down. That way I can see it and start crossing them off as I go through.
I have found that to stay focused and not burn myself out I need time away from it all, doing new things or seeing something I haven’t seen before. That physical escape from where I was working makes it so much easier to focus when I get back.
How do you differentiate your business from the competition?
The entertainment industry is a saturated market. What has always been the center of Elemental Women Productions is the mission; to empower and amplify women’s voices and experiences through the arts. There are a core set of values and requirements that are non-negotiable to me. We require all projects to be led by women, that at least 75% of cast, crew, creative, and leadership teams are women artists, at least 20% of profits from ticketed events are donated to organizations that link to the subject matter we are producing, and our production needs are sourced from women-owned/run businesses.
Our mission is not something that we have and never think about. It is linked to every choice we make, and I think that is something that can make a big difference between us and some other companies.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
We focus on social media for most of our marketing. We interact with our main audience there and concentrate on our marketing specifically when we are producing work. However, we have a lot of success in word of mouth. People who know us, have worked with us and so on share who we are and what we do and that builds our audience and our hiring network.
What's your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Don’t wait to be perfect. Put yourself out there, be true to yourself and your mission. Then you can always look back and be proud of yourself and what you have done.
What's your favorite app, blog, and book? Why?
I am an avid reader so choosing a favorite is difficult for me. However, I always reference ‘Furiously Happy’ by Jenny Lawson. It is a memoir where she shares her story in regard to her mental health and truly helped me develop a language to talk about my own. I recommend it to everyone. It is also unbelievably funny; I would read it on the subway and could not hold in the laughter.
My favorite app is Google Calendar. I am, and was, always running around and it is extremely helpful to have it all in one spot. Syncing other calendars, like my husband’s, it also helped with being able to schedule and know what we were both up to.
What's your favorite business tool or resource? Why?
My community. I am lucky to be a part of an amazing friend group and business groups that are happy to support and encourage in many ways. I know I can go to them and ask a question- if they don’t know the answer, they can often point me to someone who does- or helping talk out an idea or something I am stuck on. I highly encourage people to find a group/network of people who support you and you can go to. It can be hard at first but when you start to build that it helps more than you think.
Who is your business role model? Why?
Lisa Rosado, the founder of We Are Women Owned (WAWO) is a massive business model for me. How she has grown an amazing community of women founders and the way WAWO is a go-to resource for finding women-owned businesses is huge. She is also one of the nicest people, very supportive and open about her journey. How she is with WAWO is something I would love to be for women in the arts.
Other than Lisa, I have so many friends who are business role models in different ways, from the ways they adapt and grow their businesses to their support of each other. There is something to admire in them all.
How do you balance work and life?
This is something I actively am working on. I have a hard time reminding myself to take a break and rest Because I work in the arts, I am used to not having a consistent schedule. When it is your own business it can be hard to have that separation and especially if you are working from home. In the arts, we don’t work the same 9-5 timetable many people do. A way I found that has really helped me is only scheduling 3 things to do in a day. If I don’t have anything scheduled then I make a list of 5 things to do. Limiting the number of things I can do each day really helped me create and maintain boundaries between work and life. Also, having a designated day off where I cannot schedule anything each week has made a huge difference.
What’s your favorite way to decompress?
My absolute favorite way to decompress is travelling. I love being able to get away from it all and go somewhere to experience something different. Near or far, old or new I love it.
Outside of that, I read novels and when able go to the theatre.
What do you have planned for the next six months?
So many things! The next six months are big for us, we are somewhat limited as of right now (December 2020) with the ongoing pandemic so we have a lot of half plans that will depend on what the world will look like.
Within the first quarter of 2021, we are planning a virtual play reading and panel which we are hoping to announce in January 2021. We have the second season of our podcast, “Unusual Women,” in development. The podcast highlights women in history and their accomplishments. We are developing a web series that speaks to mental health and the day to day living with a diagnosis.
We are also developing our first feature film, “Partial Program,” which will be following a young woman as she enters an eating disorder recovery program for the first time. We will be launching a fundraising campaign for that particular project in the second quarter of 2021.
How can our readers connect with you?
You can connect and find out more about us on our website (www.elementalwomenproductions.com), sign up for our newsletter.
Follow us on Instagram (@elementalwomenproductions), Facebook or Twitter (@elemental_women) or on Clubhouse (@broghannej).
And you can also become a long-term patron and help us on our mission through Patreon.