Managing A Business

Being Jason Sechrest is a job that requires me to wear many hats and play many different roles on a daily basis: Blogger, Webmaster, Manager, PR Rep, Host. (Those are not, by the way, in order of importance. Clients, step away from the phone!) There are in fact many more even but these are the main branches that make up the bread and butter of yours truly.

In the past, I've had one of these branches at all time high while others were in a slump. This is the first time in over 12 years of working in adult entertainment that all of those branches are more successful than they've ever been. Because of this incredible blessing, in late 2009, I had to learn to put on yet another new hat in my day to day activities: Being my own business manager.

I'm a bit of a control freak so I'm not good at delegating responsibility. I've never had an assistant. I've never had an agent. I've never had a manager. I've never had a business partner. (I've rarely had partners of any kind for that matter and I've never had a problem with that.) With the exception of the technical side of my web site, I'm pretty much a one-man show! I know what I want and I know how to get it done. What I have not known how to do in the past is prioritize these different subsidiaries of my work based on a scale of both how much needs to be done and how much money they are bringing in.

I know it seems strange, but it's like the second I hit 30, I really did become an adult. I don't know where it came from within me because it's very unlike me, but I was suddenly all about budgeting everything! I'm obsessed with it, even. My time, my work, my play, it's all somewhere on my laptop in charts and graphs! I now get done all of the work I need done in a day and still have time for a social life, something I was never able to do in my early 20's. It was one or the other. I've always been an extremist in every area of my life up until just a few months ago.

When I learned this regime of how to budget my time properly, it led to me learning to budget my money properly too. These are all things people probably learned in high school or college but I was too busy skipping school to go home and write my columns for Femme Fatales and Entertainment Weekly, as I started my full-time career in print journalism at 15 years old. And while I've been fueled creatively from as far back as I can recall, I have never known one thing about business. (Hence the ridiculous wait for my directorial debut, "Bully." I knew how to make one incredible movie, but had no interest in the business aspect of selling the thing once it was done!)

I've also learned a great deal from past mistakes. My last peak was in about 2003-2004. When the money came rolling in, I slacked off work, blew through it all and became bored (even resentful) of the industry instead of embracing and expanding despite the fact that it wasn't an industry where I'd intended to be. That's a mistake I won't make again. I will never, ever, take this amazing career I've been given and the family of friends of made and the legion of readers and followers I have in adult entertainment for granted. When one stops valuing something so special in their life, it quickly goes away. That's a rule of thumb for pretty much anything in your life, I can guarantee you.

Learning to budget my time and the many faces of Jason Sechrest was the first step in me creating a better business for myself and in becoming a full fledged adult.

If you're someone who is a workaholic and has several different jobs to do in a day, take it from me: Learn to be your own business manager. It's the greatest gift you can give yourself.