[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “finish around June, get paid in September. It is happening more and more frequently. And these are relationships you want to keep. Good, client relationships. “

A good bit of my business was for US government agencies — jointly funded by NOAA, EPA, and Everglades National Park — so the budgets were small, but very, very reliable. I loved these guys.

Also reliable: zero money up front, payment 90 days after completion. I was under the impression that that was typical, but in any case, that was my world: me carrying the entire load until 100 days after completion.

They only wanted to hear project numbers, because most of their budgets were written in advance of course.

So I came up with an informal agreement on my side that said, okay, for this per-episode price, here’s how much shooting time I’ll give you, here’s when I’ll get it to you for review, here’s how much time you have to review the episode before I ship it. We can talk about what needs to happen if any of those slips.

They were educators who understood the need to stretch budgets, and had also learned the hard way what happens to educational projects whose budgets stretch too far. Our arrangement worked out so well that the following year, they added budgets for things like side projects, repurposing footage for other projects….all of which ALSO had fixed prices.

This worked so well overall that I rebuilt my business around it for all my commercial clients. I think I billed my last hourly project in 1994.

As I mentioned in another post, all but a handful of them billed their own work as projects, and appreciated the need to respect limits. None of them ever asked for a specific breakdown either. I understand that this might be different today, where clients understand more about production and post, and might own many of the same tools I would….

…but everything in my experience points to project billing as the way I’d build a new business, not hourly.

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I know there’s also a dedicated forum for this, but…this is such a lively place.”

That COW’s Business & Marketing forum has in fact largely been supplanted by this one.

That forum had also originally been started for the owner-operators and small shops who were the original constituents of the site, people like the founders themselves, Ron & Kathlyn Lindeboom, who started the community to find help that wasn’t available anywhere else on the web. (That was certainly me as well, when I joined up as a member with my own business issues in 1996.) Moving from that first community to found Creative COW, the Business & Marketing forum that Ron Lindeboom formed here was the first of its kind for our industry.

Those guys are some of the true lions of the business, and in that owner-operator realm, a peerless found of knowledge…but yeah, now, if anybody wrote me offline and asked which was the best forum to bring this up in, I’d say this one, for sure.

Not just because this forum has become more of the “village green” forum than that one once was, but also because the FCPX-ness of it steers the question away from full-range boutique post services.

Tim Wilson
Old-ish lion-ish-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Phillips] “An exec wants to live in Boca Raton. Maybe he/she is from there (actually there seem to be women on the avid.com exec page), worked there before, etc. “

The current biggest tech employer in South Florida is Citrix, and that’s exactly why it happened. An high exec had a home in Coral Gables, so let’s move the company.

It was odd, and potentially telling, that the Avid quote in the longer press release cited IBM as part of the county’s tech heritage. True. Thirty to forty years ago. They’re down to 600-ish employees last I checked, down from over 10,000 in the mid-80s.

Not to trivialize the value to Palm Beach and the state of 100 new jobs, but maybe whoever from Avid made that quote wanted to assure Palm Beach readers, “Yes, we’re well down from our peak, but don’t worry, we can still matter somehow.” LOL

[Michael Phillips] ” It is a form of RIF without calling it a RIF. A whole division moves to another state. Your job is there now – can you get up and go? No? You no longer have a job. “

That’s the only way that 100 new jobs make sense, if you’re axing MORE than 100 jobs on the way down.

It also makes more sense thinking about the move as primarily administrative, exec, financial, etc staff. Those skills are ubiquitous and commoditized, like the Visas and Deloittes of the world that Oliver mentions.

I’m still struck by the announced $2 million+ capital investment. There are surely largely vacant office parks with lovely private lagoons that could be customized for a song.

But your point about not wanting to move is very well taken. Quips about Boston sports, politics, and weather notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one on this thread that lived over a decade in each of those areas, and there’s not a chance in heaven or hell you could have gotten me to move back to FL from MA. Not a chance. I’d have gladly had my job eliminated and worked at Petsmart before moving back there.

Of course I’m 3000 miles from both of them now, and that suits me just about fine.

[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] “As for the Entenmann’s, they only had to go to NYC for that.”

My point being that, in practice, there’s no functional difference between NY and the portion of Florida from Palm Beach to Miami Beach.

Avid would certainly have been better positioned to serve the Milky Way galaxy and beyond from New York, no doubt about that.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “I’m hearing back office functions – HR, marketing, finance, etc….My guess is that software development stays in MA.”

My first reaction to the story was, “But there’s no pool of appropriately-skilled software developers in South Florida.” It made no sense.

Moving the rest is fine….but still seems a stretch. They’d already moved to New Hampshire for what I always guessed were tax reasons, and they’re spending over $2 million to make the move, with “only” a $700.000 tax rebate. How long is it going to take them to earn back another $1.3 million in savings just to cover the cost of the move?

I gotta confess that creating 100 new non-engineering jobs makes no sense to me either.

I’m not sure that many other moves pass my sniff test either.

— Boston is closer to Europe than Florida. Having flown to Europe from both, I can testify that the difference in travel time and expense weighs against FL.

— Sales may be moving to Boca as well…but if the argument is “better service to Caribbean and SA,” this too makes no sense.

I don’t KNOW that this is still the case, but I’d think that Hollywood is still Avid’s key market, yes? Hollywood is being held down by a small Avid office plus a world-class VAR (Mike Cavanagh’s Key Code in Burbank), plus a wide variety of razor-sharp rental and support companies. Incredibly little expense to Avid.

Latin America should be working the same way, right? Even if Miami were the hub of it (Telemundo and Univision are both based in Miami for example), you don’t need the whole non-dev company there for that. South America and the Caribbean really are incredibly accessible, even the western edge of the SA continent. Only 3 hours to Quito Ecuador, which is in the US Central time zone!

But again, this is something for a small sales team to handle. Not the rest of the company in a way that’s also adding 100 new jobs.

[Scott Witthaus] “Interesting less than a month after this article (which has a LOT of subjectivity in it)”

Any stock analyst who claims objectivity is a cynical charlatan at best, if not an actual thief preying on the gullible and witless. In any case, absolutely and unequivocally sinister. Certainly someone to be avoided at all costs. The fact that they’re not trying to hoodwink anyone on this count is salutatory. Full marks.

I can’t comment on the accounting issues, although I find some of the commenters more persuasive. I was struck by “we normally don’t pay attention to ex-employee lawsuits, except this time where it’s super-important,” and was surprised that they didn’t even try to justify breaking their own rule. They didn’t try to persuade me, and I was indeed unpersuaded.

I CAN comment on their grasp of the industry, which is almost dizzying in its cluelessness. They cite among the pressures on Avid the entry of SONY into the professional editing scene? Sony’s Avid-targeted NLE is long gone, and as underrated as Vegas is, how many sales has Sony Vegas been taking from Media Composer?

The author also fails to account for Avid’s major sources of revenue in storage and Pro Tools, where (with ALL the respect in the world to those companies) neither Apple or Adobe is drawing major blood, nor has this been part of their model.

And as has ALWAYS been the case, Avid’s play was never OVERALL marketshare, but service to its core customers. As Andrew Kimery and others have pointed out, Avid’s position on the ground in core Hollywood production may be firmer than ever, certainly firmer than the recent past. We can debate that (hell, we can debate EVERYTHING), but this seems another serious lapse in analysis.

Again noting that I don’t have the skills to address the accounting analysis, I think the author underrepresents the role that the SEC and Justice Department had in checking Avid’s math before recertification. Not that one should overstate that either, but the author acts like it never happened.

Still, what it lacked in rigor it more than made up for in vigor. LOL I like that. I’ll be reading more of their stuff, but until I know that they understand other markets better than ours, I won’t be using them to guide my investment. I’m really glad to read it though!

[Scott Witthaus] ” Poor Marianna. Now the suits are just across the state! ;-)”

I note your wink, and return it with a smile. 🙂

I had first gotten to know Marianna when I was a Media 100 customer, but one of my great pleasures after I became a full-time corporate weasel at Avid was when she joined the company a year after I did.

(I should note that I have no dog in the Avid stock debate. I sold my stock years ago at a huge loss, just because I was tired of thinking about it. LOL No bitterness. I love the people I worked with, including Marianna, and think that they’re some of the sharpest in the business….but I wasn’t shy about expressing my reservations when I worked there, just as I am now.)

On the customer side, Marianna is obviously a peerless gem. But within Avid, her primary role was supervising release engineering. Customers really don’t get to see just how skilled she is at this, and can’t imagine how closely involved she is in every part of the technical side of the company: engineering, QA, documentation, manufacturing, support — she was functionally the COO for anything release-related.

Which means that she’ll be going to Boston exactly as often as she has been. It may just be providing more of an escape than it used to. LOL

[Shane Ross] “I’m surprised that anyone is moving to Florida on purpose…”

There’s that. More than anything else. smh

That’s why I can ONLY assume that it’s to be closer to Bob where they can hear his pounding hooves and feel his hot breath on their neck as they duck at the last minute to avoid his baseball bat.

Plus free-flowing access to Entenmann’s crumb cake. Anyone who has eaten Entenmann’s crumb cake knows that I am not joking about that.

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Gissing] “‘Administrative’ headquarters sounds like satisfying a state based tax break.”

In the second article linked, the tax break appears to be tied to the new jobs.

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Pat,

Thanks for coming to the site and diving right in today! I confess to running a bit behind, but I’ll get to all of your posts as quickly as I can.

(And thanks for the kind words to me too!)

Here’s the thing. As you can see by the ads around these pages, Creative COW is built by and for folks who are already working in TV, film, and corporate video in particular.

We certainly also have a meaningful contingent of other folks, including owner-operators and hopefuls like yourself. I think we do a really good job at not distinguishing between those, too. Everybody has questions, everybody has answers. The tools humble us all in the end. LOL

But speaking perfectly honestly, we really don’t have much to offer on the breadth of questions you have. Absolutely no disrespect intended!!! I love the sound of what you’re trying to do. We also have a TON of people who are doing EXACTLY what you’re talking about with oral history — they just tend to be doing it in the context of careers in television or documentary filmmaking, rather than trying to make THAT the business. Make sense?

So, the more specific the questions you have, the more likely you are to find answers here, but I have to confess that we may not be your best fit. The folks at Videomaker.com, for example, are dear friends and colleagues. No shortage of technical knowledge or creativity there for sure, but their business and career (or post-career) orientations may be of more use to you.

As you poke around the web, a phrase to keep your eye peeled for is “event videography.” The titular “events” are primarily family oriented — weddings, bat mitzvahs, etc, but I also knew a number of people specializing in memorial videos, sort of a mini-documentary on the recently passed loved one that includes lots of family reminiscences. As a result, the event videography field focuses discussion on professional and personal skills for human contact (rather than primarily technical operation), and on building a self-owned or family-owned business (rather than operating within an established one) are core values.

I don’t visit as many event videography groups as I used to, but I was always intrigued that they were largely family-run, quite often with dad in his second or “retirement” career, with mom and a grown child or two taking part as well. I love that! In any case, certainly very entrepreneurial, and very sensitive to sliding-scale business models.

I want to underscore that I don’t think your work is at all “beneath” us, or that newbies aren’t welcome at Creative COW. I’m only speaking about aligning priorities, in order to suggest the shortest possible distance for you between your questions and the best answers.

So, if you see a place to ask a specific question here, by all means do. But do consider communities like Videomaker.com and event videography communities that are more specifically focused on the questions you have.

And by all means, feel free to follow up here, and I’ll do my best to help you. As long as it’s nothing too specific! LOL I’ve been out of the game for a while, and am really mostly just doing forum stuff these days.

All the best,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “A lot of the really large design firms and agencies we work with a now charging and billing, hard core, by the hour. “

That’s it for me, right there. I charge the same way the client charges. The object of the game is to avoid being seen as “the help.” Even $500/hr lawyers can be “the help.”

And indeed, lawyers, retailers, and companies providing labor were the people I charged labor for. Hotels, restaurants, medical offices, architects/design firms (in my neck of the woods anyway) — those all charge by the job, and they pay employees by the hour.

So do you want to charge like a peer, or do you want to get paid like an employee?

And sure, if all your clients bill THEIR clients by the hour, then the more familiar your invoice looks, the better. Hourly, without blinking. I preferred project billing, but the object of the game is ALWAYS to stay out of the way between their wallet and your pocket.

Of course, all of the “by the job” folks I worked for understood that there’s a behind-the-curtain calculation that includes an hourly rate. They did the same, so I never found it at all difficult to say, “Let’s talk about our next steps,” and never found the client hesitant to engage.

Actually, you know who REALLY got this, was realtors. I think if they’d calculated their income hourly, they’d have killed themselves. They worked such long hours, with everything a gamble, and they wanted a price. Gimme the bottom line. What’s it going to take to get this done? Which is of course how they got paid. For the job.

And the people they paid hourly were the guys who planted signs in the ground for them.

I also preferred project jobs because I could typically get away with charging more, to be honest. Some of it was because I always built in a 20% overrun, but if I could pitch a 50% overrun from my “real” estimate I would. More often than not, I pocketed a meaningful premium above my hourly rate.

Answering the original question, though, in charging the way my clients did: none of them billed separately for tools. Very simple math for me.

But then I was never a straight freelancer for whom working with anyone’s gear but my own was ever realistic.

That was my plan though. My billing was absolutely part of my marketing, much more important as part of my branding than as a fixed financial model that everyone had to fit into because it worked best for ME.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Funny. I’ve done a lot of 1/4″ audio splicing and really enjoyed it.”

Quarter-inch tape and razor blades is what I think of most fondly, and most quintessentially “editing,” even more than when I cut film.

You kids are welcome on my lawn, btw. Just don’t try to talk to me about what you call editing. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] ” It really started with Avid before even FCP as equipment shifted from linear bays to Avids.”

Exactly. Avid used to be the cheap disruptor. “You Avid guys are charging so little, we’re all going to go out of business.”

Then in the mid-90s, guys like me with their “cheap” $30,000 Media 100 cards and “cheap” $10,000 Betacams with “cheap” $12,000 lenses. “Your cheap $1500 day rates killing this industry!”

Lather, rinse, repeat. I had to take a second mortgage to buy my “cheap” system, but at least I had a house. I have no idea how some of you kids are pulling this off…

…but indeed, this process has been underway since the very beginning of nonlinear editing. I think self-cannibalization is built into the DNA of this business more than most others.

In any case, the old guys in this forum like me were driving prices into the ground while some of you were toddlers. Yet another part of the economy that boomers torched before millenials arrived. You’re welcome. LOL