Staffing my startup

[Richard Herd]

[Steve Martin] “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”

Unless…he has a lot of capital for a gigantic scale. For example, remax or century 21. These are giant real estate sales corporations in the US. In that case, I believe you’d want to buy equipment and hire employees and fly them around the country to shoot.

I participated on an extremely small scale in a similar business model but it was for a cook book. (I brought them lunch 🙂 The shooters gained massive efficiency having done the same basic task for 3 months. Hiring a pile of locals every time is a bit wasteful from an efficiency point of view.

[D. Tann]

Thanks very much for the replies everyone.

– GV stands for ‘General Video’, its a term used in the UK TV industry, i didnt know it by any other name. Its footage that doesn’t have people in it basically, just inanimate objects including buildings.

– I havn’t told you the service Im offering in its entirety; there is a completely separate aspect to the service and its not something that video production companies offer. You’d be right to have reservations about its success based simply on treating what i have written as the service in its entirety. But its not the whole picture.

This middleman issue is no different than the worry a business owner feels about the client and freelancer getting too close, any service business is worried about this. Im sure those business owners reading this know what im talking about. I dont think this can happen to me because the business and the service it offers is multifaceted, and i think that element is crucial. The client cant run away with the freelancer or production company because the other aspect would be completely missing. There are elements from different industries that are required for my service to work properly. Like any business theres risk and it might not work, and im prepared for that, but my business is not a middleman and it certainly wont be the reason for its failure if it does fail.

All i was wondering was about the subcontracting of video production companies in the UK, their cost of services and to see the type and the circumstance of the businesses who subcontract to video production companies to see if my business is similar to theirs. They would subcontract not as a finished product but as a means to their finished product. (I hope this makes sense, as i can foresee confusion about whos using who for what)

But thanks for the reality check, its always to healthy for people test you, but ofcourse if it is a proper business than it will be able to stand up to such possible dangers, and i think mine will.

PS:

-I dont how to quote on these forums but i really do like the phrase “Your ‘start-up’ is a solution looking for a problem.” There are alot of “entrepreneurs” that create these sorts of businesses and Im weary of making such a mistake, so hopefully i wont become

-Also on a minor note, in creativecow you cant reply to a thread in general you can only reply to an individual post??

[Juris Eksts]

May I disagree strongly on the B-roll – GV debate.
I think that General View is a far far better description than B-roll which actually gives no information at all about what it is.
Maybe the other term we use, CA’s or Cut Aways is an even better description.
Nothing to do with the OP though.

[Mark Suszko]

General View means nothing to me. View of what? Generals? And we never abbreviate Cutaway or Cut-Away as “CA”. Back in the day, we all had more nearly identical nomenclature for everything because we learned it in school out of textbooks. My sense of things is that these days too many people are casual about terminology and prefer to make stuff up or use terms without looking them up first. I see people calling a lens a “lense”, but worse, I often hear people say: “pan that down”, when they mean tilt, “Pan it in”, when they mean a dolly, hell, everything is a pan now, I guess:-P

Now where did I put that belt onion?

[Juris Eksts]

I completely agree about the very loose terminology in use, particularly things like L.S, MS CU etc., but GV and CAs has been in use on this side of the pond for a very long time, and it was definitely taught that way in film schools over here.
But this is a case of . . . divided by a common language.

[Andrew Rendell]

On the terminology front, lots of us in the UK are influenced by the BBC (mainly by being trained there). The BBC is in many ways a “law unto itself” and in general it doesn’t feel the need to conform to anyone else’s practices (except for things like the EBU and ITU broadcasting standards, which the BBC has frequently contributed to) so the BBC has often made up it’s own descriptions for things which have different words everywhere else. One of the most distinctive things is that for the BBC everything is an abbreviation, e.g., GV for general view, blue- or green-screen is CSO (for colour separation overlay, although I’ve never heard anyone outside the BBC using that one), etc, so the UK tv business does tend to use a few terms that are different to the rest of the world for that reason. In fact, making up your own TLAs is still quite popular in London!

BTW, I thought a “joiner” was the technician who cut and spliced the neg (making cement joins) to match the edit for making the release prints of a film. I’ve never heard joining used to refer to editing (an editor has also been referred to as a “cutter” in the UK for at least the last thirty years). As a general rule I’d expect any UK specific term to be an acronym rather than a different descriptive word.

[TLA = three letter abbreviation.]

[Tom Sefton]

I notice it’s kind of a British quirk to shorten names of things that are already comfortably short

Mr Pot, Mr Kettle called for you and left a message….