MEDIA personality and content creator Yendi Phillipps says the arts or content creation can be transformed into a business. The beauty icon was speaking at Flow’s virtual InKnowvation Small Business Fridays in a lively fireside chat with artiste manager Romeich.

“As a practitioner of the arts, I find that often the conversation does not happen around taking the arts seriously as a business,” she explained.

She said people consume content every day whether it is listening to music, watching their favourite shows on television, or reading articles in the newspaper, among other things.

The former Miss Jamaica World recently added content creator as one of her titles with her show Odyssey with Yendi. She outlined that manifestation is key to achieving goals.

“What you put out there, what you think, manifest, pray about, treat it with how you feel. So as young as I was, I always said I wanted to be a morning show host, I wanted to be on TV and that came to pass then I wanted to have my own show,” she explained.

She recounted a challenging journey leading up to the start of her show. When the pandemic hit her world “stopped”. At that time there were no corporate events so as a media personality she was not active in the space. This led to the start of her show despite the challenges.

“This was the beginning of the pandemic and my industry was shut down so I don’t know when my next job was going to come from, so I said let me go into my account and go into my budget and spend some money… and I didn’t know what the return on investment would be, it’s tricky. But if you’re not going to bet on yourself, gamble on yourself, who is gonna gamble on you? My biggest lesson in that time was that content is king. Because regardless of what the world is doing or what is happening, people consume content, people consume the arts, content is king.”

In this content-driven era, where content is king, there are many strategies that people use to go viral. However, Phillipps cited the importance of networking as a tool that contributed to the virality of one of her episodes with Romeich.

“When I said to you, Romeich, the episode is coming out you, he said watch me I’m going to blow it up for you and so said so done. It’s no longer about sharing business cards. But there is a way to network and connect in an innovative space in the tech space which is mind-blowing because my feed blew up and it went viral.”

To sell any product to any investor, they would need to know the return on investment. She shared that knowing and leveraging your value from hard numbers can help you to land corporate deals.

“After my first season I had hard numbers so I could then say to sponsors and corporate partners that these are the amount of people that engage with the platform. I could say to this partner, I have 10 million people who come on my platform in a month, this is the value that I can give you for your money. Because corporate partners want to know their return on investment,” she said.

In her final remarks to women entrepreneurs who face challenges because of gender, the talk show host encouraged them to “be authentically you”.

“Know who you are be very sure in who you are and be very firm in that and not be afraid to take up space,” she said. She encouraged mothers to “strike a balance” between family time and business, as “work should never be to the detriment of the people you love and your family”.

She also revealed that her next move promises to be an exciting one as her show Odyssey with Yendi will be going global for the next season by featuring international guest appearances.