Advice from a small agency trying to do big things.
We stood, surrounded by towering palm trees in a Victorian glass house. Outside, autumn’s grip was tightening. Piles of orange leaves lay beneath their trees, the branches, naked. Inside, our studio lights beamed to create a false sunset. Our models sat on a small round metal table as we shot the final sequence of ‘the date scene’. With every inch that the sun dropped, our lights needed adjusting. The more it dropped, the easier it was to tell there were lights in the room. The sun dropped more. We tinkered the lights. “Rolling” the DOP announced to the room full of art directors, stylists, hair and makeup artists, gaffers, sparkies and producers. We stayed quiet. The models did their thing and then paused. We all looked up to the DOP who was poised on a small wooden box staring down his monitor “That’s a wrap”.
If you were to have asked us if we’d have imagined we’d be delivering FatFace’s Spring 2024 campaign 3 years ago. Or even that this was the second year in a row that we’d been doing it, I’d have never believed you. Now, I could sit here and write an essay on our ingenious plan to ‘make it’ in the creative industry, or I could write about the truth. The truth is that our video production company had no master plan, not 10 steps to success. We had A plan and sure these are super important, but most of the biggest wins we’ve had have been from the places we’d never had imagined. I want to share with you, my dear reader, what I see as the most important things that happened that led to us getting our first job with FatFace and… warts and all.
Do Free Work
Even to this day we still do free work! “Yuk” I hear you cry! “Don’t devalue your skills” I hear someone else shout. Yes, I get you, these are all totally valid things to say but the creative industry is a two way street. It’s really easy to get wrapped up in the idea of ‘your inherent value’ but you don’t see this type of complaint in any other industry. If you were looking for a builder, you wouldn’t just pick anyone because they are inherently valued, you pay for their skills because you’ve seen a house they’ve made and you think it looks great. There are hundreds of builders, it’s about finding the best one for you. The same is true of the creative industry. If there is a type of work you want to be doing, you have to start by doing it, not by hoping that it lands on your lap.
Me and my business partner had a full time job for a year whilst we were setting up Here Now Films. We had to borrow money from our families to be able to afford our first camera (we’re still paying this back 4 years later). Over that period of time Ollie would go out and film anything he could. A simple beach fire evening would become a sponsored beer advert. A local charity would become our NGO film. We’d reach out to anyone and everyone to collect stories that resonated with us.
Quick tip: It can be really hard getting free work! People often look at offers for free work as a request for their time instead of a gift. They think “why do they need us so much”. We found the very best way to offer free work is to contextualize the offer and instead of being vague put it into a format. For example, “Hey company x, we’re filming a mini series on London’s most sustainable startups and wanted to include you in the list. It would involve a day of film work with you and the team and capturing some of your work behind the scenes. We’re locking in companies by the end of next week, let us know if you’d be interested in featuring… oh, and it’s completely free”. By offering a place in a list and having a deadline it feels like a moving train that they can either jump on or get left behind. It works every time.
Anyway, over the first couple of years we delivered a number of free projects about people in the conservation and environmental field. It paid dividends in that people started to approach us for more and more of this type of work, we even began to get paid.
Find a vertical
We’ve all been there, you see another creative team delivering mediocre work for a client you’d love to have and you think to yourself “how the hell are they getting this?”. It’s painful but the truth is, people are fickle things. We buy from brands we trust. This is taken a step further in the creative industry, our clients will often ask us to give them an exact example of the film they want to make, no matter how niche “hey have you ever done a testimonial film… about a tech company… that works in medicare… for the elderly”. We’ve actually lost out on jobs because of not being able to show an exact reference. This is where a vertical comes in. A vertical is a term used to describe your method from getting from the bottom to the top. It can be a process, a branding exercise, a physical product, but whatever medium it is, it has one resolute rule… a niche.
Verticals explained
If you are a filmmaker you make films about people, places, products, events, processes, ideas you name it. But how are you going to get seen or stand out from the crowd? In film, focus on becoming known for a type of film. Maybe that’s a broad niche “we make great films really cheap”, or maybe it’s more specific, “we are THE music video people in Bristol”. This may sound like a strange move as you feel like you’re turning away a huge part of your market but what it actually means is you’re almost 100% guaranteed to get the work when people are looking for what you deliver. Getting almost all the work from a niche segment is way better than getting none of all the available work. It also has the added benefit of sharpening your skills and letting you charge more. Once you’ve climbed your vertical as high as you want to, you can umbrella out to other lines of work.
Distribution: Don’t be ok at a few things, be great at just one.
As the old saying goes, “build it and they will come”. This may have worked for Noah and the ark but in the real world this just isn’t the case. You may think that making a lovely short film about a local artist is going to mean that The Tate modern will come knocking on your door but the truth is… as we’ve already discussed, there are hundreds of us, and we’re all pretty similar. So, now you’ve made your films, how are you going to get in front of your audience? I see so many people spreading themselves thin across every marketing medium they can: a bit of socials, a bit of web, a bit of emails, some paid articles. STOP IT! Doing a little bit across a lot means you are never first in any of them. We spent 2 years faffing around with this technique before realizing that we were beaten in every channel by bigger and better companies. The only way to break the mold is by finding a single marketing vertical and hammering it.
Let me take you through some examples. One of our biggest competitors (in a friendly way) find almost all of their work from going to networking events. They visit them, they host them, they comment on them, you name it, they’re really good at this line of distribution. This is a seriously good talent to have. But that’s how they operate. They know all of the faces that go to the same event and become THE trusted video people in that circle. Would that be the same if they went to 20% of the events and spent their time doing web, seo, paid marketing… absolutely not. We on the other hand focus on web search and delivering a great experience for our clients. The end result is that 40% of our new work comes from simply being 1st place in google, 30% is repeat work and 30% is referral. We get 0 work from socials, 0 work from networking, 0 work from anywhere else.
Why am I telling you this? Because it was only because of this technique that we managed to land our first job with AirBnB. More of that next.
Small fish… big pond
It’s the golden question, is it better to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond. The answer in the creative industry is simple. As a studio, you want your clients to feel like they are getting a great deal. For a client this means they need to think that you are brilliant (big fish) and they are getting you for a great price (small pond). But as a creative person, it’s a completely different story. You always want to feel like you’re learning from the best. On every shoot we tra and get the best team we can (big pond) and learn as much as we can (small fish).
When we landed AirBnB it was our biggest job to date. It was like a surreal dream. It literally just popped into our inbox, “Enquiry: AirBnB short film series”. Now this doesn’t happen everyday but we’d spent the last 2 years developing our character profiles and branded documentary portfolio (this was our vertical), and we’d spent a year trying to rank well on google through blogs, great content and making our website friendly (this was our distribution). Anyway, this was a huge job and to be honest we felt totally under prepared. They wanted an agency to deliver the video work and photo assets for their cornwall campaign and wanted people to pitch for the work. We had a dilemma. Our photographers we’d built up over the years had become our friends but we knew we needed to punch above our weight to get this as a job. We needed
to be a small fish. We had an honest conversation with our long standing photographer and approached someone who is considered to be the very best photographer in Cornwall, John Hurssey. We gave him the pitch and he was in.
We ended up getting selected for the contract not because of the films, but because of the great collective body of work we put forward from the photographs to the films. I can hand on heart say I don’t think we’d have landed this job if it wasn’t for John coming on board. He was the big fish, we were the small pond. To cut a long story short, we nailed the job and paid John properly for his time. Most importantly, we gained John as a great friend and creative mentor.
Landing FatFace
Cut forward 6 months after AirBnB and I get a phone call from John. He was stoked, there was a big client on the line and he’d been selected as the photographer. The client wanted a video team alongside him and they were asking him for recommendations… he’d put us forward. This was huge! Out of everyone John knew, he chose to get back in touch with us when an opportunity came his way. As a friend we owe him a lot for this but to break this down as a business learning you can see that by working with people much better than you, you get these rare opportunities to piggyback on their success. You have to deliver and boy don’t take it for granted. Would you get the same opportunities by stocking in your lane and working with people ‘on your level’, maybe… but I think it’s less likely.
We’re proud to now call FatFace one of our repeating clients. We’ve just delivered our second Spring campaign with them and are looking at working with them on their Summer campaign as well. We never get comfortable, we stay humble and everytime we work with them we treat it as if it’s the first.
Conclusion
Today, we try to always be the smallest fish in the pond. We’ve just launched a film crew for hire branch of our business that exclusively targets overseas productions needing help in the UK. Instead of doing this ourselves we’ve partnered with one of the UK’s best connected creatives, sure we get less money, but that’s not the point. We learn and our product will always be improving.
I hope the above helps guide your thinking on building your creative business and becoming a better creative business owner. It’s a challenge and there will be ups and downs, that’s for sure. It’s worth it though, for every down there is a big step forward and an opportunity for learning.
If you want to learn more about setting up a creative agency feel free to get in touch, my email is below and I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.
Photos Credits: John Hursey Studio & Tin & Copper
