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Staffing my startup
I hear that the two things that drain profits in a company are overheads and staff. I have reduced these in every aspect of the business but what i cant cheat or fake is the shooting of footage and the editing of footage. I need some advice in the hiring in these areas.
My startup will be serving the corporate sector, and we will be shooting and editing the GVs of a house and other properties. Thats it. Adding to the complexity is the ability to serve on a national basis. In the immediate area where i am based i may have to hire people myself but when dealing with clients all over the country it becomes unfeasible.
Consolidating these too areas naturally leads to hiring Preditors, which could be the best way of keeping costs down rather than hiring a sperate film crew and then seperate editors to edit it. However hiring fulltime staff would be too expensive, so the natural route is to hire freelancers, but dealing with freelancers who drop in and out of the radar as they pick-up work elsewhere would make hiring temperamental, plus there is the issuing of filming the properties according to certain specifications will be difficult having to educate each one on what to do every time will be time consuming (though not impossible). So perhaps the best thing to do I will have to outsource and subcontract to local video production companies where they deal with hiring freelancers and educating about what and how they need to shoot, plus the issue of travel expenses etc.
Is this the best method for a startup?
How much would I be expected to pay for them to film GVs of a property?? This is important as the costs may run up making the price prohibitively expensive for the client at which point there is no point in the venture.
I realise that I have just outsourced an almighty section of the business. Even with commissioning video production companies to do the work, and therefore transferring the cost onto the client by increasing the price, depending on the cost to commission a video production company, it is still viable as the price might not be too high to make it economically viable for my clients.
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17 Replies
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Your business model is flawed, I think, and you’re opening yourself up to get every client poached from you. Especially when they figure out you’re essentially just a middle-man, marking-up another man’s product. No offense meant, but that’s what it looks like from here. You don’t mention any “added value” you bring to the party except for locating the clients. In this era, I can’t imagine such a model as viable. There’s already plenty of services out there for booking crews and freelancers on a per-project basis.
Your ‘start-up’ is a solution looking for a problem.
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[D. Tann] “to film GVs of a property”
What is a “GVs of a property”?
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D. Tann,
I think I agree with Mark. But perhaps it’s because I don’t know what you mean by a “GVs of a property.” I’ve never heard that term.
Regardless, I think that unless you’re bringing something very valuable to the table (spectacular marketing, super efficient production process, brilliant content, etc…) it seems unlikely that you’ll be able to charge enough of a premium to offset the cost of outsourcing everything and protect your margins for the long term. And the idea of policing a nationwide network of freelancers from stealing your clients sounds like a time consuming and perhaps futile effort.
There might be something I’m missing and I hate to be negative, but I just don’t see it. But I’ve been wrong before.. many times! Best of luck to you!
Production is fun – but lets not forget: Nobody ever died on the video table!
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I’m glad someone else chimed in and didn’t know what a “GV” is either… I was having one of those “Everyone knows something that I don’t know” moments.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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General Views?
But also to chime in – you aren’t selling anything, you are marking up the creative output of someone else. Once your clients find out who is shooting and editing their footage, you can kiss them goodbye. In challenging times, design agencies lose clients to production firms for producing content because they don’t like seeing a 40% markup for answering a phone and booking a job.
Also – property videos pay terribly and disappear like a fart in the wind. Make sure you get paid up front before your (sub contracted)cameraman arrives to film something.
Edited to add – we were once offered £150 to drive a 170 mile round trip and film some property. The estate agency thought that it would only take 1hr and why should they pay for travel. I laughed. They didn’t.
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[Todd Terry] “I’m glad someone else chimed in and didn’t know what a “GV” is either… I was having one of those “Everyone knows something that I don’t know” moments.”
GVs are what us UK peeps call B-roll.
Alex Elkins
Twitter: @postbluetv
http://www.postblue.tv
Post Blue showreel
Latest work: Greyhounds in Motion at 500fps
My Vimeo Pro page -
I notice it’s kind of a British quirk to shorten names of thigs that are already comfortably short, like changing football to “footy”, etc. and it makes me smile and shrug because most of the time the contraction makes things more obscure, not less, and it feels, to me anyway, like someone trying too hard to act casual and knowledgeable about something.
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I must say that I think the US term ‘B-roll’ is a far better description than GV [General View].
I have no idea why we use different terminology within cinema/filmmaking. Perhaps the french term for ‘B-roll’ is closer to ‘general view’. It’s the British way to adopt the foreign term, whereas the US style would generally be to rename it to something more descriptive and logical.
We also call dailies ‘rushes’. Again, dailies is probably a better description. I think ‘rushes’ comes from the idea of ‘rushing’ exposed film to the lab after shooting.
Alex Elkins
Twitter: @postbluetv
http://www.postblue.tv
Post Blue showreel
Latest work: Greyhounds in Motion at 500fps
My Vimeo Pro page -
Well, we call it a switcher here and you call it a “vision mixer” there. We call Editing “cutting”, a subtractive process, while you (at least used to) call it “Joining”, an additive process.
I think we still both call it a bad deal when we see a bad deal, though:-)
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[Mark Suszko] “you (at least used to) call it “Joining””
I never knew that. You learn something new every day!
Anyway, apologies to the O.P. for hijacking the thread!
FWIW, I tend to agree with the others regarding the sight flaw in the business model. However, I personally know someone using this sort of model for wedding videos and it works quite well. Turnover is high, but so are the expenses in paying freelancers. The trick, as has been pointed out, is not only to generate the clients, but to make sure you do something unique enough that you as the agency can’t be replaced. Maybe a deal with a big property website giving you exclusive video rights in exchange for a share of your profit?? That gives you something your freelancers and other production companies don’t have…
Alex Elkins
Twitter: @postbluetv
http://www.postblue.tv
Post Blue showreel
Latest work: Greyhounds in Motion at 500fps
My Vimeo Pro page
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