There are over 15,000 production companies in London alone, so if you are starting out, how do you scale a small Production Company in the UK?
In this blog article we are going to go through the process of scaling a small production company in the UK. This article doesn’t just apply to production companies, these tips can really help in any industry. We spoke with Beast director Lawrence Jacomelli, who knows what it’s like to scale a small London production company from the ground up.
Serve Clients You Can Help
The first thing Lawrence recommends is to only serve clients you can actually help. So we don’t mean take on catering clients if you’re a London video production company, we really mean specialise in certain types of video productions. Beast London was opened in 2015, but Beast creative video agency was first started in Los Angeles and both offices are still open to this day. Perhaps up until now if you’ve been offering a wide variety of services you say yes to the every project and now all of a sudden you’re a full service video content company that you didn’t even plan to be in the beginning, just because you needed the revenue. Did you know that actually that’s going to prevent you from growth, that’s going to prevent you from building a business that runs and generates revenue consistently. It’s time to start saying no to the clients that don’t fit your skill set and instead get clients that create a standardized repeatable process that you can specialise in. And in order to do that we can only serve the clients that we can actually help get that specific outcome.
Is It Worthwhile To Get Feedback on your video productions?
Our second tip is to create feedback loops. What we mean by that is a lot of people just deliver their service. They never try to optimize it or make it better in any way shape or form. We want you to create a client experience where you have opportunities to get feedback from your clients as you’re presenting the finished video or film. The thing you need to do is create opportunities for your client to share how it’s going, you also need to create opportunities to find out if there’s something missing, or maybe if they’re being overwhelmed and something needs to be removed. The only way that you can actually deliver video production services that continue to get better each and every time you deliver it, is by measuring the success of your video productions. You need to create iterative feedback loops to get that constant information coming in so you can improve each and every day.
Start Simple
The third thing that Lawrence recommends is to start simple then get complicated later, right now the thought of maybe simplifying your business is a little bit scary because most likely you work with a bunch of different types of clients. Here’s the thing, the more different types of clients you have the more variables there are in your delivery. The more variables there are the harder it is to create a system and make it repeatable. You need to actually simplify your video production service. London is a tough marketplace for video production companies and digital marketing, so try to start simple and really narrow down what type of client you want to serve, and what problem you are going to solve and the outcome you are going to get them and get really good at doing that. Try and get at least a year of serving that same type of person under your belt. If there’s other types of marketing videos for businesses that have those same problems get traction before you go and serve the other market. For right now really narrow down and start simple.
Find Recurring Revenue
Number four on our list is to add recurring revenue on your back-end. Now if you’re a creative agency you might have retainers already, you might be like us, we had retainers out of the get-go and didn’t offer just one-off projects. After a while we moved to one-off video projects and moved recurring revenue streams onto the back end of our production company, which created a lot of predictability and stability and allowed us to keep growing our business. The larger influxes of revenue on the front end were supplemented on the back end from recurring revenue which added stability. So if you don’t have any recurring right now you want to start moving towards having some sort of recurring revenue stream coming off the back end of any front-end projects that you’re selling. Perhaps an example of a recurring revenue stream would be to work on a weekly or monthly video production that has the same pay every time. This could be social media videos which are created and edited by one person rather than a whole film crew.
Define
Lawrence says you should define and sell an outcome, say goodbye to proposals, say goodbye to one on one, say goodbye to custom projects, you need to sell your prospects and clients into a specific deliverable that you’re going to give them. That specific deliverable is going to be a specific result or an outcome, no more giving them a menu of services and letting them self-select what they want to do. Find and sell an outcome.
Do You Need To Know Your Numbers?
Our penultimate tip is to know your numbers. So many video service providers literally don’t even know if they’re profitable, or if their cash flow is dialled in correctly and a lot of this has to do with not knowing where they’re trying to go and what they really want out of their video production company. First you need to create a vision but you need to be tracking your numbers so you understand if you are profitable. Can you make these investments into growth, can you bring on the help that you actually need and is this thing working? So make sure you know your numbers
How To Design An Effortless Sales Experience?
Lawrence’s final tip is to design a sales experience that is effortless. What we mean by that is not many people like to sell, but it’s essentially that we do it every single day. We sell all the different things that we do both personally and in our production company, so we have to get comfortable with selling it. That doesn’t mean selling needs to be a hard sell or this sleazy thing. If you create a sales experience that really prepares and filters leads leading up to the call, so that they know what you do, they know how you work, they know all the things that they need to know to make a decision. The sales conversation is really more of an enrolment conversation, and really just making sure it’s a good fit if you’ve been looking for these all-star sales people and/or you’re doing it yourself you’re not an all-star sales person. If you design a sales experience that sets them up for the call it’s going to make your life a whole lot easier.