Every year, a wave of talented people head to Los Angeles chasing the dream.
They’ve paid thousands to agents, secured their visas, and uprooted their lives with genuine belief that this is their moment. They land full of energy and optimism. And then they sit. They wait. They wonder when the phone is going to ring.
For far too many, it never does.
I’ve witnessed this play out for over a decade. Not from the outside looking in, from inside the rooms, behind the cameras, on the stages, and in the meetings most people never see. Through my work across media, PR, partnerships, photography, and entertainment, moving between Los Angeles and Australia, I’ve known hundreds of creatives, actors, entertainers, artists, many of them sent over by their own agents, full of promise, who came back with nothing but a story about why it didn’t work out.
They weren’t lazy. They weren’t untalented. They were unprepared for a reality nobody warned them about.
The myth agents sell, and what they don’t teach you
The system is built around a belief that someone else will create your break. Agents are positioned as the key that unlocks everything. Sign with the right one, follow their lead, and the opportunities will come.
Here’s what most agents don’t do: they don’t teach you how the business actually works. They don’t show you how to network at the level that matters. They don’t explain how to get in the right rooms, what to say when you get there, or how to build the kind of relationships that generate real, sustained momentum.
They manage. They don’t develop. And for a creative who doesn’t yet understand the ecosystem they’ve walked into, that gap is career-ending.
I’ve had countless actors and creatives reach out over the years asking the same questions. How do I get into these events? How do you build the relationships you have? How do you make things move so quickly when you’re in LA?
The answer is always the same. I paid attention to the business, not just the craft. I studied the mechanics, the psychology, and the strategy operating beneath the surface of an industry most people only see from the outside. Most creatives are taught to perfect their performance. Very few are taught how to navigate what surrounds it.
What actually separates those who break through
It’s not talent. LA has an almost unlimited supply of talented people. Talent is the entry requirement, not the differentiator.
What separates the ones who build lasting careers from those who burn out and go home is their understanding of the industry as a business, and their ability to operate within it strategically.
Real visibility in this industry isn’t about being seen by everyone. It’s about being seen by the right people, in the right context, at the right moment. That requires knowing who those people are, how to access them, and how to show up in a way that creates genuine connection rather than a forgettable interaction.
The actors and entertainers I work with, many of them navigating LA from outside the US, building careers without the natural advantages of being local, understand this. They stop showing up as people hoping to be discovered and start showing up as professionals who understand their value and know how to communicate it. That shift alone changes everything about how they’re perceived and what opportunities come their way.
The part no one wants to hear
No one is coming to save you.
Not your agent. Not your manager. Not the contact you met at that industry event who said they’d be in touch.
I’ve watched people make three, four, five trips to LA. Each time with more preparation, a better reel, a sharper pitch. Each time coming home with the same result and a different excuse for why it didn’t happen yet.
The problem was never the preparation. It was never the reel.
It was that they still didn’t understand how the rooms they needed to be in actually worked. Who controlled access to them. What it actually took to be seen as someone worth knowing rather than another talented person asking for a favour.
That knowledge doesn’t come from trying harder. It doesn’t come from another acting class or another agent meeting or another year of posting on Instagram hoping the right person notices.
It comes from being inside the industry’s real ecosystem, understanding its unwritten rules, its actual power structures, the way relationships are built at the level that produces real outcomes.
Most creatives never get there. Not because they couldn’t, because nobody ever showed them where to look.
And that’s the most expensive gap in this industry. Not the flights. Not the visa. Not the accommodation.
The gap between what you know and what you don’t know you don’t know.
