Just about every young creative I know got started working first for friends and family. Their trajectories often started with an unpaid favor here and there for relatives needing prom pictures or headshots, then engagement photo sessions, and before they knew it, they were booking jobs by word of mouth.
Should you build your creative career starting from a friends-and-family platform? It can be useful in portfolio-building, but many fledgling creatives eventually run into snags like awkwardness about pay or lack of boundaries. That doesn’t mean, however, that it can’t be made to work.
This summer I shared perspectives on how to make the friends-and-family client model work for you as a professional springboard: