Creatives Grab Coffee - Empowering Your Team and Elevating Morale | Creatives Grab Coffee 52

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

🎧 In this latest episode, we chat with Pat from Path8, a seasoned pro in the Boston video production 🎥 industry. We discuss the transition from freelancing 👨‍💻 to running a full-blown business 🏢. We dig into the financial aspects 💰, talk about the ins and outs of expanding your team 👥, and explore the merits of juggling both wedding 👰🤵 and corporate 🏢 projects. We also focus on the importance of business acumen 📈 and client relations 🤝, taking a look at the Boston video production scene 🏙️, and diving into the pros and cons of having your own studio space 🎬. JOIN OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT: https://www.patreon.com/CreativesGrabCoffee GET 2 MONTHS OF FREE HOSTING WITH KINSTA: https://kinsta.com/wordpress-hosting/?kaid=ECCBZWELRZHU🎞️ Produced by LAPSE PRODUCTIONS – https://www.lapseproductions.com🔔SUBSCRIBE and 🔗FOLLOW for more episodes! 🌐 https://www.creativesgrabcoffee.com/SPONSORS: CFE: CanadaFilmEquipment.com Audioprocess.ca Kinsta: https://kinsta.com/wordpress-hosting/?kaid=ECCBZWELRZHU

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, the podcast on the business of video production. Creatives Grab Coffee is hosted by Daria Nuri and Kirill Lazarev from Labs Productions. Our goal is to share knowledge and experiences from video production professionals around the world. Whether you're a freelancer looking to start your own business or a seasoned business owner aiming to scale your company, this is the show for you. Join us as we develop a community of like-minded creatives looking to learn and help each other grow. Welcome to the business of video production. Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee. Before we get started with the show, let's go over today's sponsors. Do you have a shoot in Toronto? Do you need crew or a strong production partner to help you with your project? Laps Productions is one of the top

production companies in Toronto and your go-to video partner. With our strong creative skills and extensive network, we can help you achieve your goal. Laps Productions is able to offer you production services, white label services, or finder fees for project handoffs. Reach out to us on our website at LAPSProductions.com to learn more. My name is Mehran. Welcome to Canada Film Equipment. We are a boutique rental house based in Toronto. We are here to help you guys out with all production sizes. Feel free to contact us to get a quote if you are a production house and you're looking for lighting, camera packages, or lighting and group band packages.

You can see our contact information in the link below. We are more than happy to help you guys out. Make sure you follow and subscribe to creativescraftcoffee.com. Thank you. Hey, what's up everybody? I'm Matt. Welcome to Audio Process. We are a boutique audio company doing location sound, sound design, post sound, ADR, Foley. We service equipment. We do all your audio needs here in Toronto. We got you covered. Come on down. Audioprocess.ca.

Don't forget to like, follow, subscribe, and all of the other internet things to creativesgrabcoffee.com. They'll be waiting for you. I'll be waiting for you. And we're all going to have a real good time. Creatives Grab Coffee is on Patreon. Help support the show by becoming a patron

via the link in the description and get exclusive access to full uncut episodes, all reels and highlights at episode release, live shows and call-ins, ability to request cities and guests, and updates plus BTS content. Join now via the link in the description to get access to all the knowledge our guests have to offer. And now, let's begin the show. So, where do we leave off in that 30-second conversation? We got real deep there, yeah.

We got real deep. So, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, amazing. You're like the first that we have on this podcast. Hold on, we might be insulting some people if they did win some Emmys and we say like we didn't, they didn't. Well, no one mentioned it, so. The first to show off. Maybe there is. The first to show off their Emmys on the podcast. Maybe they're

a little more modest and didn't work them conveniently into the background of their setup. We get it. It's for the clients. It's for the clients. So they're like, ooh, trophies. Everyone loves a trophy. All right, well, let's get this party going. Okay, so today we got Pat from Path 8 Productions, basically out of Boston. So Boston guest number two on the show. Welcome to the show, Pat. Thanks for having me. All right. So let's kind of dive into it. Pat, sorry, I was going to say your name doesn't really need much explanation as to why you chose that name for your business. But tell us a little bit about you and your business. I wonder

if his company is called Pat or Pat H8. Maybe H is part part of his last name his last name starts with it is it's henderson his last name oh is it oh okay yeah there's a reason that tripped me up there you go nice to meet you daria um so yeah so the name um i get asked that a lot and most people it's pretty obvious my name's Pat Henderson I had I've started as a freelancer Pat Henderson productions for a long time and then I got to the point where the company was getting to where I was using a lot of freelancers myself I didn't have any full-time employees at that point but it was more than just me and I wanted to come across as that more than just me on productions and with come across as that more than just me on productions

and with clients so you know they're not expecting that it's you there all the time or that's you doing every part of the process so in thinking of a name I took a while thought of thought of as many names as I could went through a lot worked with some some other people on it and everything just kind of felt forced um and then you know know, thought of, oh, my name and my first initial and my last name kind of makes a word there. And it's a word that kind of works and has like some meanings that you can intertwine into this. And where does the eight come from? Everyone asks that. Actually, recently, I realized that my last name is eight letters.

So it really kind of ties into my name. Definitely a happy accident there. Honestly, the real reason is because eight's my favorite number. And there was already other Path productions. But I didn't just stop there. I Googled Path eight to see if there was anything. And there's Life Paths. It's like a Zodiac thing or whatever those are.

And the life path eight had some good meaning to it about a never-ending trying to achieve greatness, something like that. So I thought that was a nice tie-in. So the fancy answer is it's based off of these life paths, blah, blah, blah. But the real answer is... you tell the client is it my name it's my name and it's my favorite number and it and it works um so yeah we have six and a half employees now so if we get up to eight maybe i cap it there and then i make that the real reason um But yeah, that's kind of what went into that name.

I'm just wondering from your end, did you set aside a rainy day fund in case maybe work dried up at some point? Because you have quite a few people on your staff right now, right? Probably should think about doing that. No, I mean, I get to a point where I was comfortable enough with the money the business was bringing

in and knew we had a little bit put aside where if like everything stopped for a couple months, we'd be fine. But really where the assurance came from that is just the consistent work that we have from certain clients and just knowing okay you know if everything falls off these clients are at least coming in with this work consistently over the last couple years so the likelihood of all those clients just stopping all their work at the same time um is low and also you know that's just part of the risk of having a business I guess and if everything dried up like you know we'd have to adjust and we'd we'd have to figure out and probably make some tough decisions but luckily

it's not a problem that we've had and I kind of also go into everything with the mindset of that could happen at any time so i'm just always hungrily looking for new business and looking for ways to further assist our current clients and just not like resting on our laurels of we made this much this year we're definitely going to make more than that next year um i'm like crap we made this much this year like that's a lot of pressure to make that again and then hopefully we can make more just like, I think a lot of it is a mindset, um, and, and just, you know, being fortunate enough to have some amazing clients who value the work that we do and keep coming back for more. So it's all essentially about calculating, uh, the risk

tolerance that you guys have for bringing in people in the future based on how your relationships with your clients are, right? It's not a matter of we should just hire a bunch of people, but also have like a million dollars in the bank and as a reserve, just in case everything just stops. It's just a matter of having that calculated risk. Because we've talked to a lot of people on the show who've, it's been a lot of aggressive expansion with some of them. And when they were telling us about how they did it, it worked for them. But Dario and I are thinking to ourselves, like, we can't just aggressively expand like

that. Like, we can't hire three to five people in one year. But you did it very slowly, which I think lends itself to your calculating the risk tolerance of what you can afford if something happens, right? Yeah, exactly. And it's never going to be like, okay, I'm guaranteed that this person is going to fill in X amount of work and it's going to be a positive on the money side of things. And there's no chance that this could go wrong and there's no chance that um you know we're gonna need to you know something's gonna happen like there's always a risk it's i think a lot of what the way i look at business and and just kind of everything is like don't let uh like great be the enemy of good and kind of not um letting you know you need to think things through but also like don't

overthink like just kind of common sense of all right we're making this amount of money like that's enough money to sustain an employee let's try it go i went one at a time every time we hired someone got to the point where all right we're still we're we're in that person's settled we're doing comfortably we're still growing let's go we could use another person to really help us out let's add them um like for instance the person that i hired um this past june to kind of run the wedding side of the business that was a side of the business that was getting less and less of my attention as the corporate side grew where i was like a huge bottleneck there and i wasn't bringing any value. So I'm like, if I can, and this guy,

he had came to me and he was a freelancer while he was finishing college and was awesome. He did great work and I was really impressed by him. And I'm like, how is there a way to get him involved in the company? We already have a shooter editor. I don't know if we need two, but if I offset his costs with the wedding work,

then that also opens them up to do corporate work. And that's kind of bonus time there. So kind of figuring out ways to creatively handle things, I think helps. I like how you kept the wedding business as another income stream as well. Cause I got a lot of people that started in our industry. They start with weddings, uh, being a portion of like the freelance income. And then as soon as they can make the transition to a hundred percent corporate, they just leave the weddings behind. But I like that as a business,

you still kept it in like your portfolio. Right. But the difference, Dario. Yeah, exactly. The difference, Dario. Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say the difference, Dario, that you might be referring to is that a lot of those other people freelanced. No, a lot of other guests started their own company. Oh, yeah, yeah. And then as soon as they made the transition to corporate, they left it. Right, right.

I like how he still kept it as another source of income. Because even though he was becoming too busy with stuff, he just put someone else in charge charge of it he's still getting that stream and he's focusing on the corporate and it's good because it's offsetting your i mean you're essentially using some of the same team members that would be shooting on the wedding or working on the wedding side to help support on the corporate side and vice versa so if one business is like a little bit slower a few months, the other one can kind of help supplement it a little bit as well. So that's, that's very smart. Thanks. Um, yeah, with the weddings, pumping my tires over here. Um, so I feel like what you were saying, Dario, that's like what everyone does, right? You start with weddings because it's really low barrier to entry. Um, you get your feet

wet you kind of get to operate a business a little bit um and then once you get busy enough with the corporate you don't want to work on weekends and you leave weddings um but the way that we that i was able to kind of build up the wedding business i was shooting and editing everything myself um you know that was a lot i was working a full-time job working my freelance stuff on the side and then also working wedding so i was just always working um missed a lot of summer weekends um my wife wasn't loving that time of our lives probably did a lot of stuff alone but um and able to build that up and then you know eventually i was like okay i i think if i treat somebody the edit side of how we do things i can hand off the editing um then got comfortable with that handed

off all the editing then i'm like all right i can't film like i was filming i don't know 20 weddings a year it's like i can't film 40 weddings a year i mean i physically could but i don't know so i can but i can't found some other people yeah if I want to still have a wife but yeah so found some people who I was comfortable with brought them in and on and then kind of you know kept it to where we're at now where we do around 30 to 40 a year and my I think the most useful part about the weddings business other than that I think that we do provide a great service for the clients that we we work with and we love working with those couples but it doesn't take much of my

time at all I do like the sales calls with the club with the couple I just I generally kind of oversee things make sure all the edits are looking good and everything like that um but what it really is like i say and supporting that that salary it's also a great way um to build up your freelance crew um you can test people out in the wedding grounds and i if somebody can film a wedding they can definitely film an event and they can probably film anything else because it's a really difficult shoot like if you think you're out there you're covering a whole day's event that has 200 people there super important moments that can never get redone and you're out there and you're getting good stuff

and making it happen like you can transition to the corporate side of things so much easier. And, you know, it's a great way to kind of vet people. And I've gotten some of our best freelancers that we use on the corporate side from going through the wedding side. Yeah, because even when they're when they're freelancing for when when you get a freelancer at those weddings, like they need to have that like social skill of dealing with so many different people throughout the day and that transitions really well into like corporate because you're dealing

with someone else's clients and you got to be like on your best behavior and like be able to break the ice and also about like thinking on the spot improvising really quickly uh the only thing that they uh they they'll always lack is just lighting skills with actual lights. Natural light will be easy because you just figure it out. But with actual lights, that's the part that you still need to have that corporate experience to figure out for like interview setups and whatnot. But as a starting point, it's good. It's a great starting point. It's a great starting point.

Essentially, if you're getting, like you said, if you can get people with all those natural skills, just kind of the drive and dedication to do work, knowing how to problem solve, which is huge in our industry. And weddings are a great way to teach that to you very quickly because you're probably doing like 10 problems that you're solving every single wedding that you're doing, at the very least. So all the technical stuff can be taught later you know like i'd rather get someone

who has a lot of those good like social uh skills problem solving skills rather than someone who's like super technically proficient rather than the opposite someone who's very proficient but can't talk to clients can't uh you know it just has like low energy on set you know it's it that's that's the thing you can't teach right and it's just a matter of trying to find the right type of people to work with right that's that's the most important thing i couldn't agree more i think that that's something that i'm always saying um is you need to have the people who have the right attitude, right personality, you know, just to come off the wedding thing.

But you're working like long days on weekends, filming, problem solving, dealing with like you're in people's homes on a really important day of their life. If you can deal with that, corporate stuff is going to be easy. And yes, like there's stuff like lighting and different types of audio and even the shots and whatnot that you get are going to be different on the corporate side. But it's way easier to teach somebody the technical skills or to improve upon their technical skills or convert them over to the corporate than it is to teach somebody drive and motivation and personality and dealing with clients that that

is also to me the most important part there's so many like you guys interview video production companies all the time there's so many video production companies out there there's so many that can do the work that we do um there's there's just a lot so where do where do we kind of stand out it's the experience on a shoot the the experience of working with our team our processes just making sure everything from this time that we first talked to the client to when we deliver the final videos and then beyond into working on further videos that that process is super smooth and enjoyable because it's it's like up for our clients that video is one thing they need to do in their day

out of plenty other tasks, and we wanna make that piece enjoyable, easy, and not something that's a headache for them, which it could easily be in the wrong hands. Hey, what's up everybody? I'm Matt, welcome to Audio Process. We are a boutique audio company doing location sound, sound design, post sound, ADR, Foley. We are a boutique audio company doing location sound, sound design, post sound,

ADR, Foley. We service equipment. We do all your audio needs here in Toronto. We got you covered. Come on down. Audioprocess.ca. Don't forget to like, follow, subscribe, and all of the other internet things to creativesgrabcoffee.com. They'll be waiting for you. I'll be waiting for you. And we're all going to have a real good time. They'll be waiting for you, I'll be waiting for you, and we're all gonna have a real good time. My name is Mehran, welcome to Canada Film Equipment. We are a boutique rental house based in Toronto. We are here to help you guys out with all production sizes.

Feel free to contact us to get a quote if you are a production house and you're looking for lighting, camera packages, or lighting and group plan packages. You can see our contact information in the link below. We are more than happy to help you guys out. Make sure you follow and subscribe to creativescrapcoffee.com. Thank you. Pat, I have a quick question regarding like now you have a sizable team. I'm just wondering, what do you do to keep up like a team spirit?

Like, do you do any group activities or like what do you like? How do you kind of elevate it above just a clock in clock out type of job? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question and something that i'm always working at especially in what we do we all work remote like we don't have a central office we see each other on shoots um but some of some of the team never really sees each other because you know an animator or animator doesn't really go on shoots or our content producer, um, and operations guy, he's in, he's at home. He doesn't come up. We have another person, the full time, part-time producer who's down in Atlanta. So, you know, we don't really get together other than on

shoots. Um, but so what, what we've done is we do, um, we see everybody on the team meeting every week. Um, we do a monthly lunch where we all get together at least the local crew gets together and we just hang out have go somewhere for lunch have a good time with that I every summer summer fall I do a cookout at my house where I have our team all of our freelancers you know anybody, anybody who's kind of around. So I have that actually on this Sunday, there's like 35 people coming. It's always an awesome time. And just and we do a Christmas party as well, where we, you know, go to go to some fun place and get everybody there. And I think that those times are super valuable, whether it's the lunches the the parties it's just like getting everyone

together off off of a shoot where you don't have to be so buttoned up and you can kind of just hang and we like the only people that we continue to work with are like really good people to hang out with back to what we were talking about as far as dealing with clients so when you get all those people together and they might've like seen somebody on a shoot like three months before, or they've been like, I hear everybody talking about you. I've never met you.

Just kind of getting everyone together and letting them kind of meet each other and hang out. It's always just like the best time and definitely one of my favorite things. That's a good thing to strive for, to find people to work with that you would grab a beer with essentially, right? You know, someone that you would get together socially. I mean, it's not easy to find, you know, I, sometimes you have to make sacrifices. If you

want to get someone who's really good at what they do, like maybe you'll hang out with them here and there, but it's not like he's your best friend or anything like that. But, um, yeah, like I think that's, that's definitely key. And throwing these like a social parties, you know, for the listeners, it's not like just a classic pizza party like a lot of companies do. You know, it's something a little bit more involved. And I'm sure you have like a process for that as well, where, you know, just everyone kind of gets together and just enjoys themselves. Right. It's not like it's not like a dry thing. Right. Yes, yes, for sure. it's not like a dry thing right yes yes for sure like last year our christmas party was at a flight club which is like a darts place um downtown boston um we usually do something

fun like that like we have the cookout coming up on sunday um there'll be plenty of good food and drinks and everything so it's it's a good time games to play um everyone has fun nice so your whole team's remote, eh? Yeah. So everyone works from their house, except when we're on shoots, we do that. We looked into getting an office, especially I think 2021 was the most I looked into it because coming off the pandemic, like leases for commercial spaces were really affordable. for commercial spaces were really affordable. But the two issues we ran into are,

one, we wanted such a small space and there was so much space available that realtors weren't even getting back to us. Like, you're not even putting a dent in our inventory. Like, we need somebody to rent 30,000 square feet, not 15. There's that. I just really think, like, there's a camaraderie part that definitely comes from an office that i think would be improved if we had an office but outside of that i think

everyone enjoys working from home um everyone's able to kind of work not necessarily more but like more effectively because you're not spending time commuting i don't want to commute every day um and you know it's just like and it's an overhead expense. We were talking earlier about taking on people. You look into what an office costs. I'd rather hire an employee or at least have that be part of an employee's salary rather than a space that, you know, we go to to go to. If there was a studio, we looked into having a studio or something and trying to make some money off of that. But just like when it broke everything down, it just made the most sense to keep everybody remote. And yeah, it's fun. Do you have a shoot in Toronto? Do you need crew or

a strong production partner to help you with your project? Lapse Productions is one of the top production companies in Toronto and your go-to video partner. With our strong creative skills and extensive network, we can help you achieve your goal. Laps Productions is able to offer you production services, white label services, or finder fees for project handoffs. Reach out to us on our website at lapsproductions.com to learn more. Before we finish off, I'm just curious about like the economic state for video production down in Boston right now, because, you know,

we have the high interest rates, economy is not doing so well at the moment. I'm just wondering, like, have you noticed your work being affected or maybe because of those specific industries

you work with, there may not be an effect? Like what's going on? Yeah, so I think that every industry's at least a little been a little affected we work a lot in healthcare and education to industries that are you know aren't as affected by what's going on you know necessarily all the time. So as a year goes, this year has been better than last year for us.

And there's definitely been some projects that have kind of fallen off based off of how companies are doing and things like that. But on a whole, there's still been a lot of work and it hasn't been like something that's been a super noticeable problem as of yet. It's been more something where, you know, there's a handful of things that outside of your control, outside of what you can do, whether it's the economy or just trends or whatever is going on and in each business and how that business is doing our consistent clients and all's good with them. And then we're able to keep looking for new clients. There's always gonna be clients that need video.

It's just a matter of finding them and making sure that you're the right fit with them. So I think that kind of, while that does affect, we try not focus on that too much because it's really easy to use that as an excuse right to be like ah we're not doing as good like you know it's because of the economy but what can you do about the economy zero um if you have you know if you look into what are what am i doing that affects this oh maybe you know what i'm not on as many sales calls or i'm not reaching out to as

many potential clients like you can look at stuff that you can control and try to work on that to help overcome what might be a factor outside of your control that you have absolutely nothing you can do with. That's a great outlook to have and a very positive one at that because, yeah, we find like sometimes when we talk to certain people, it's like, yeah, the industry is not good. So not a lot of work is coming in. But it's like, you got to kind of take responsibility for that. If the work is not kind of coming in, you have to look at what's working and what isn't working, right?

Like when the pandemic hit, that's what we had to do, right? We realized like, oh, we didn't really have a business set in place. Let's fix that. So we did that. But now you have to keep that going, especially in the down periods. It's like, why are we not having any work at this time? Oh, it's because we didn't preemptively work on any sales or outreach a couple months prior. That's why we have no work coming in right now.

So I think that's what every business owner in our industry needs to do is to take responsibility for when times are down. And that's what makes a successful business is being able to work through that. Yeah, I think, you know, in the nature of our work, it's like you get busy. So then you're like, crap, I'm too busy. I'm not going to be selling. But that's when you need to sell because that busy is going to those projects finish up. And then you're like, oh, here's all the work. sell because that busy is going to those projects finish up and then you're like oh where's all the work um so you know you need to keep feeding it no matter what and you know with like you said there's people that use it as an excuse or whatnot or they do fall off on on certain things um like i was saying there's so many video production companies out there that i think that that's

what can help you survive long term is to work harder and to kind of look at things a different way than some of those companies who might blame those external factors or start pulling back. And then all of a sudden, you know, they're they're not around as long. So it's, you know, trying to just control what you can control, do as much as you can do, and then hopefully that's good enough to keep things moving in the right direction absolutely well pat thank you so much for joining us on the show uh and and sharing your experiences and uh we look forward to keeping in touch and seeing uh where path eight goes or whatever the

next iteration of path eight is right thanks so much guys it was awesome to to chat with you and be on here and really appreciate you having me on yeah cool thank you all right man thank you take care thanks for listening to this episode of creatives grab coffee please make sure to follow and engage with us on instagram tiktok linkedin youtube and your favorite podcast app if you enjoyed this content and want to hear more, you can get the whole experience on our Patreon at patreon.com slash creativesgrabcoffee or click on the link in the description. You'll get access to full uncut episodes, all reels and highlights at episode release,

live shows and call-ins, ability to request cities and guests, as well as updates and BTS content. Creatives Grab coffee is created by laps productions a video production company based in toronto canada creatives grab coffee is also sponsored by do you have a shoot in toronto do you need crew or a strong production partner to help you with your project laps productions is one of the top production companies in toronto and your go-to video partner.

With our strong creative skills and extensive network, we can help you achieve your goal. LAPS Productions is able to offer you production services, white label services, or finder fees for project handoffs. Reach out to us on our website at lapsproductions.com to learn more. My name is Mehran. Welcome to Canada Film Equipment. We are a boutique rental house based in Toronto. We are here to help you guys out with all production sizes. Feel free to contact us to get a quote if you are a production house and you're looking for lighting, camera packages, or lighting and group band packages.

You can see our contact information in the link below. We are more than happy to help you guys out. Make sure you follow and subscribe to creativesgrabcoffee.com. Thank you. Hey, what's up, everybody? I'm Matt. Welcome to Audio Process. We are a boutique audio company doing location sound, sound design, post sound, ADR, Foley.

We service equipment. We do all your audio needs here in Toronto. We got you covered. Come on down. Audioprocess.ca. Don't forget to like, follow, subscribe, and all of the other internet things to creativesgrabcoffee.com. They'll be waiting for you. I'll be waiting for you.

And we're all going to have a real good time. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next one.