media companies and food preservation

I wrote a post a week ago titled, “Please Don’t Jump” in response to people expressing their deep concern, understandably so, about the future of our business. I wanted to convey a positive message as oppose to perpetual doom. My intent was to encourage innovation and the belief that uncertainty creates opportunity. On this topic, Marc Rigaux commented providing an insightful correlation. I thought it was worth sharing:

“If you made iceboxes during the turn of the century, you were out of business when someone invented the fridge. But if you were in the business of "food preservation", then you were not only working on the fridge, you were also likely working on the portable cooler, tupperware, and a host of other ancillary revenue streams.”

        

This comment resonated with me. It was analogous to the recent transformation of Epoch Films. For those of you who don’t know, Epoch Films is a commercial production company. Over our 20 year history, we built ourselves into a top production house. We have been able to maintain long term relevance in a business built on 30 second attention spans and the never ending quest for “new and improved”.

Our business model was not complicated and certainly not revolutionary. It was similar to many of our competitors. Build and maintain a roster of talented directors. Remain creatively and financially competitive. Nurture agency relationships. Keep overhead low. Spend less on the production than the contracted price while not compromising the quality. What separated us from our competitors was our taste level, our ethics and our culture. We viewed ourselves primarily as TV commercials producers (i.e. iceboxes). It was comfortable and profitable. Then someone invented the fridge (i.e. the internet/dvr) and the tide shifted.

As I mentioned yesterday, we need to broaden our perspective of who we are and what we do. In Epoch's case, we wanted to evolve our business from a vendor based production service model into a media company.  We made this shift through a lot of painstaking work and conversation. The first part was reworking our partnership and each our roles. From there we were able to complete a series of  deals. We created an affiliation for US representation with Rattling Stick, one of the top European production companies. This deal was followed up by the acquisition of Kirt Gunn and Associates to form Dandelion, our branded content company. After that we invested in a new production entity, Imperial Woodpecker, headed by one of our top directors and a long standing executive producer. Compile these changes with the production of our second feature film “Gigantic” and moving into a new office space in NY.

 

This all took place in the last 12 months. These deals and alliances changed the direction of Epoch. The most rewarding personally has been our ability to change our "hands on" management style. We empowered the people who worked for us in production, sales and accounting. We gave them more responsibility. Held them to higher standard and included them in our strategy. I learned that no matter the scale of our vision it will not succeed without the support and management of the people who do the work.

Believe me this transformation is very much a work in progress. Unexpectedly, our greatest challenge has been timing. We opted to leverage a 20 year brand by investing in a new business model during the worse economy any of us may ever know. We can only control what we can control.  We still believe it was the right thing to do. After all we'd rather be in food preservation than making iceboxes.