Home is where I belong

[Del Holford]

Your story is very similar to a recent thread in Discrete Edit*ors Forum. Check it out. You might even want to repost there.

Del
fire*, smoke*, photoshopCS3
Charlotte Public Television
del_edits@wtvi.org

[Russ Stiggants]

Hey Ben…

I’ve looked at your post as I was the ‘post’ before you. (‘Selling stock footage: worth it or not?’). I’ve been in the write/shoot/edit/produce area for more years than I can remember. Maybe like you, I remember the days when video editing was done in big production houses with million-dollar machinery. Then along came Media 100, then Avid, then a lot of other really good programs – then Final Cut Pro. Now what I used to pay $600 per hour at a production house to do, I can do on my desktop.

Like a swag of people before you, you’ve learnt that if you want to make big dollars, you need to be a ‘big’ studio, with lots of employees. That means you need to make a bucket of money (to pay everything else) before you get a dime. That means you’re in business, and are no longer a ‘creative’. And no longer being a ‘creative’ (if that’s where your heart lies) means you won’t enjoy your life. Been there, done that.

You gotta make up your mind. If you want to make money in this funny business, go back to your partner. It seems he’s got a good mind-set.

If you want to stay creative, pull on the ol’blue jeans and have a ball. But the chances are, given the increasing sophistication and widespread availability of edit platforms and cameras – and the burgeoning numbers of ‘wannabees’ entering the game – you will increasingly earn less and less, unless you are exceptionally creative (or can build new creative ‘models’, but that’s another story entirely).

A young fella like you, newly married, should be looking for a secure economic future. My recommendation? Find a production company which can benefit from your expertise, maybe work for them part-time while you work on your own (paying) projects, and build a resume which will give you good options.

That means you might be able to maintain your independence and re-build your own business, but you could take a full-time job if your circumstances change.

With a new wife and the prospects of a new family, that might be the best way to go.

[Tim Kolb]

Ben…I’m not sure where you are located, but I know that Nick Griffin has a really nice arrangement.

He decided to get rid of the office and home and move to a bigger home where he has a section that is his office. The business makes a part of the mortgage/rent payment in cases like this so maybe that might be an option worth considering.

When the door between the house and office is open…boxer shorts…when it’s closed…polo shirt and closed toe shoes (and pants…pants are probably good).

As far as your body not “bouncing back” from those around-the-clock editing sessions…boy, can I relate to that. This way your bed is close and you don’t have travel time/fuel expenses for commuting…

…it’s a thought.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[13]

[RCSAUS] “Like a swag of people before you, you’ve learnt that if you want to make big dollars, you need to be a ‘big’ studio, with lots of employees.”

Like his original post said he is happier away from that. And you don’t have to have a BIG studio to make big dollars.

[RCSAUS] “You gotta make up your mind. If you want to make money in this funny business, go back to your partner. It seems he’s got a good mind-set. “

He douse not have to go back to make more money. It really sounds like from the original post that the quality and creativity of the work was suffering big time where he was at. And when the quality of work suffers clients will stop coming back, and that means less money not more.

He clearly said that they would not pay enough to get good editors, and I completely agree when he said “when you pay peanuts, you get monkeys PERIOD”

He left to be happier, and to have more time to do what he loves, he douse not like having to play the roll of the boss.

After having worked for a place that payed peanuts and that was even at a small place, it became clear that I would rather work for myself and not have any employees (I decided that I would rather have no employees then pay employees peanuts, and it can be extremely hard to pay well and offer good benefits to an employee).

So don’t go telling him that he should go crawling back.

[Nick Griffin]

Yes, Tim. I wear PANTS in the office (usually). Yet I’m almost always in flip flops.

I have no regrets about the decision years ago to sell a normal size house, stop paying rent for a downtown office and consolidate in a very large structure with a separate entrance for the office and a thick door to close between the spaces where I work and the spaces where I live.

The couple of times I’ve re-visited this decision I’ve always come back to not wanting to pay tens of thousands of dollars in rent for a “proper” office nor wanting the hassle of owning and maintaining a second location. Another consideration is being able to work when I want to because the computers containing the work and the studio with the cameras is footsteps away instead of miles away.

And just to clarify, my accountant does NOT have the business paying part of the mortgage because he says that opens up areas of tax liability which we don’t need to enter. The business does reimburse for utilities, though.

This arrangement works for me. Your mileage may vary.

[Steve Wargo]

We spent two years looking for “just the right place. When we moved from a 700 sf studio into our 3000 sf home (in Jan. 1998), we took out a $60k second to finance adding on to our place. We now have 1900 sf of house and 3000 sf of office/studio. Our corporate clients love it. We did lose a few snooty people but that was expected. Our kitchen is dual purpose. It has doors on both side so it can be part of the office or completely unaccessible.

There are days when I truly believe that we need to expand and hire 10 employees, but then, the drugs wear off and I snap back into reality. Our CPA set us up so that the business pays for 60% of the mortgage as well as 60% of the utilities. Our video company rents from our land investment LLC. Our office and studio have their own entrances and air conditioning.

We have an 18 x 18 office, a 17 x 14 edit suite, a 24 x 24 edit suite / machine room, 24 x 9 store room and an 1100 sf shooting studio with 12 foot ceilings, a 5 ton a/c unit and a complete lighting grid with dimmers.

We’ve spent $90,000 on tenant improvements and have saved about $800,000 in rental costs. Any way you look at it, we’re 700 grand ahead. If we would have had the monthly debt, we probably would never have survived Sept. 11, 2001, when business took a nose dive.

So why am I always broke?

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
Sony EX-1 on the way.

[Russ Stiggants]

Hey zrbo!

Read between the lines!

Ben acknowledges that his business with his partner was doing fine:

Ben Choo: we were still making good money!

Ben also acknowledges that he sucks at the

[Randall Raymond]

[Steve Wargo] “So why am I always broke?”

Because you haven’t produced a Shanaladingdong brain-dead blockbuster?

[Todd Terry]

Working out of a home office or an in-home suite can certainly have its advantages…. but it can of course have its pitfalls, too.

My little company has been around for ten years now, and for the first year of that I was a one-man-band company working out of the house. I thought it was great (and it was, at first). It was cheap (obviously), and it was so super convenient that I could literally roll out of bed and go to work. The best advice I received about that setup was from a buddy who also had a home office… who told me that you must still treat it as “going to the office”… i.e., get up at a regular time, shower, shave, put on your “work clothes,” and go to work. I managed to do that for about nine days, and after that the FedEx guy started catching me in my boxer shorts on a fairly regular basis.

Starting the company at home was a bit of a challenge on the legal side. My house is zoned “residential only,” plus on top of that it is downtown in one of my city’s three historic districts and the historical commision (or hysterical commission, as we call them) is very picky about what they allow. But after begging and pleading and assuring them my business would be completely invisible to the neighborhood, they allowed it.

I quickly found that it was just TOO easy to go to work… ergo, I was working all the time, even when I didn’t need to be. I can’t count the times I would go in to the suite around bedtime “just for a second” and the next thing I knew the sun was coming up. Plus I didn’t really like having clients in my house, even confined to the edit suite.

I finally moved out to outside studio space about about a year… and it was great. Finally we had a “real” space, attractive and comfy for clients, and a cool place leave the house for. The biggest plus was that office was about two minutes from my house. More clients, expansion, and employees necessitated a move to a bigger place a couple of years later, but it’s still only about four minutes from home, which works well.

We don’t have a huge space now, but it works well. Finally we have a real lobby, soundstage space, three small edit suites, conference, accounting, greenroom, makeup, etc. I have found though that you physically expand to slightly bigger than the space you have, so you always need a little more. When we first moved in here we thought the space, about 3600 square feet, was more that we would ever need… we even rented out a couple of the offices to an advertising agency client of ours. But now, we’ve filled it all up… and even have to rent external storage for set pieces, props, wardrobe, and general crap that we don’t want to throw away.

I am way too old for the temptation of working around the clock any more, therefore, I will never have a home office again (knock on wood). I still, however, never put on a suit for work (when I left the corporate world I gave away a rack full of Brooks Brothers straightjackets, vowing never to return to them). All clients get me in my usual uniform: cargo shorts, Hawaiian shirt, sandals, and baseball cap… no matter how much of a bigshot they are.

This long diatribe was my way of saying that while home offices work well for some people (and I’m glad they do), they sure didn’t work for me. Be careful, or you will find yourself at work all the time… and life is waaaay too short for that. You gotta do what makes you happy.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Nick Griffin]

[Todd at Fantastic Plastic] “Be careful, or you will find yourself at work all the time”

Oh! So THAT’S why I’m always working!

Zoning is certainly an issue and one with which I don’t trifle. I’m fortunate in that there’s just two of us full time and we both have home offices and, while he may be a fairly frequent visitor in my offices, my junior partner is a visitor rather than someone with a dedicated desk and an office. The various writers and art directors we work with also have their own home offices.

Another company I know in this area which did have zoning and neighbor problems got pinched because he had messengers, FedEx and other couriers constantly coming and going. If your business needs that kind of constant flow of physical materials you’re better off in an office.

If you need multiple employees, you’re better off in an office. A home-based business buzzing with people who are always there will only become a zoning violation waiting to get caught.

The nature of what we do and the widespread geography of our clients means that only a few clients come visit us each year. (Most of our contacts are in their offices — and NOW through MediaBatch.) I can easily understand how if we were hired out as edit suites or worked as a production company for other producers having clients constantly coming to me would be untenable. I consider myself lucky to have a business model that works for me. But, like I said, your mileage may vary.