Transcript
Speaker: Okay, we're back with Crossing the Axis, the biz side of video production. And today it is myself, Max Keiser, and Jake. And Jake.
Speaker: Yeah, both of us from Pipeline Video Production Management Platform, the producers of this podcast as well. Today, we are going to be talking about building systems within your production company to build success. And this, I got to say, this is something that is very near and dear to my heart, because I think this is kind of the key, personally. What is the system, Max?
Speaker: Well, a system is just sort of an ordered series of events to get a predictable outcome. And that's about as basically as I can think about it. It's just a critical ordering of events, usually written down sometimes in software, and we'll talk about that later.
Speaker: that just help you get more predictable outcomes. And we have such an unpredictable business that if you can get any more predictable outcomes for yourself, I highly suggest you do. What are a couple of examples of systems specifically in the video production space? I mean,
Speaker: The ones that we started with long ago, we started with the very first one. I was very, very frustrated with our business in that we constantly seem to be reinventing the wheel on every single production. And we constantly seem to be coming up against the same challenges over and over and over again.
Speaker: I read a book called The E -Myth that a friend of mine who'd been very successful in small business recommended to me. And the E -Myth is based on the idea of the entrepreneurial myth. And it's an old book. It's from the 70s. But it basically says, if you want to move out of the starting gate with your small business, you need to systematize.
Speaker: And he used a lot of examples that made you think of sort of McDonald's in your company. But that is not what it turned out the systems were. Of course, McDonald's does have a lot of systems and it allows them to grow like crazy. But it doesn't mean you can't have systems in your company too. And anyway, I read this book and I just remember I actually listened to it on tape in my car. And I just kind of remember actually crying, listening to it because I realized it was going to solve so many of my problems.
Speaker: And it was just using this really basic throughout the book. It talks about this woman who's making pies and how she systematizes the making of her pies and winds up with more pies that cost her less to make and that are actually way better for her customers. And I was like, I could get into making some pies. So to answer your question, Jake,
Speaker: The first system that I started with was I just hit the biggest problem that we were having at the time on the head. And that was that we were constantly going on shoots, getting there and not having all of our gear. And this was with very professional crews. It was just that we were starting to do a lot more shoots. And it was one thing we were doing one shoot every two weeks, but when we started doing two to three shoots a week,
Speaker: It became very easy to overlook certain critical pieces of gear that would shut us down cold, send us back to the studio to get stuff, assuming that the shoot was in town, and really was starting to hurt our business. And I just took some pages out of the book of the EMIF and decided to make a very simple system where we documented all of the gear,
Speaker: down to the smallest screw that was, you know, critical. And we created a form that you had to go through. And before you shoot one designated person, generally the DP, but sometimes someone else would have to go through and check off each piece, putting their fingers on it, and then sign at the end of it.
Speaker: And then we added that they also had to sign when it all came home because another problem was people were leaving it behind. Literally overnight that problem was gone, just gone, eradicated. It no longer was a problem for our company as long as I owned it. We truly just never had that problem again. I'm not saying we
Speaker: stuck exactly with that system for the next 10 years after that. But we did it religiously for about a year and a half, and then it filtered into our systems that we developed later. So just having that one little thing, one little checklist. So basic, right? I mean, just so, so basic. When you say a system, you're not talking this big scary thing, a workbook,
Speaker: I mean, that's what we ultimately love that so much. We started building all these other systems. And then at the time, you know, there were all kinds of issues. You had to output HD tapes for TV spots and stuff like that. And we had to document exactly how you did it so that we didn't do it incorrectly. Cause that often happened. Things would come back. You know, we deal with a lot of specs in our business and it's very important to get those specs right so that you don't get things back.
Speaker: I mean, it still happens even just in the digital world that you have to get the specs back. There's plenty of times doing trade shows for Microsoft and such that we had some very complicated specs and we needed to develop little systems around those for each one to check through them. But really that, yeah, exactly. A system that really just comes down to, it's really almost always just a checklist, basically, as you go through things. They can get a lot more complex, but yeah, that's the bottom line.
Speaker: somebody could get started with a system without just solving one tiny specific problem. Yeah, I really encourage people to just pick one thing, just one simple thing that's driving them nuts and sit down and really try to figure out what would be a system around this. And generally, it's quite basic and generally involves some pieces of paper. You know, more and more, you can use the computer. And we'll talk in a little bit about how our systems evolved into software and ultimately became pipeline, the software that we're now
Speaker: selling, but it really just begins with getting things down on paper. And I think the thing is that there's a lot in our business, there is a lot of resistance to that. When you just even say the word system, people cringe. They get upset about it. They think, oh, I'm creative. And creative and system are two different things.
Speaker: And it took a lot for me to convince folks in our company that actually your creativity is freed by systems. It's not hindered by systems. Cause you're not thinking about everything else. Yeah. Well, crushes creativity is fear, fear of messing things up or cleaning things up, spending a lot of time cleaning things up. That really hurts your creativity. Creativity. When you feel like you have all your things buckled down.
Speaker: your mind is more free and open and you can be much more creative. We did all of our good creative work after we instilled systems. I mean, that's really it. And I'll say, you never get it perfect. Right up until the very last right before we sold the company, you know this, you're part of it. The very last big system we started was because we were once again, super busy.
Speaker: And we were starting to have some fires on our jobs. And we were starting to have some things happen where we had multiple, multiple producers simultaneously working on different jobs. And it was very difficult for us to stay on top of them. Well, I remember it. I remember running into this problem. Tell me about what we did back then.
Speaker: I mean, we really, we were just so frustrated, right? Cause it was just like these fires were popping up when we knew they shouldn't be. We had one basic thing. Well, some, some were pretty big. Like there was one, there was one time where the agent showed up for an edit with his client and we weren't there.
Speaker: The messages got confused along the way and no editor was there to edit their project for them. The gear wasn't, the drives weren't loaded up and we lost that client and that got big surprise. And that of course devastated the salesperson that had sold that account so hard for two years trying to land that. It was a big agency account and it was just kind of the pinnacle of a bunch of other
Speaker: A little cascading problems that were really hindering our ability to grow you know to be able to manage that i think we measure seventy projects a year at the time and we were just feeling the breaking point but we figured out was that it didn't happen.
Speaker: We decided to give a little test and that was to say to the producers, what we notice is that it's the jobs that have been sitting for a little bit. It's not the loudest job that falls apart and it's the quieter jobs, the ones that are just sort of operating under the surface a little bit that people sort of forget about.
Speaker: And those were the ones that wound up causing the serious headaches. And so we instituted that new rule where basically you had to, every two days, you had to touch your project as a producer and leave a note in the project stat notes in our software then saying, I've looked at this, everything is on track or resolved, whatever problem has been brought to light here.
Speaker: and by touching it within every two days and we would have an alarm go up if it hadn't been touched in two days and you were the original alarm. Yeah, right, exactly. And it was sort of a hodgepodge process when you were doing it without a system. But once the system got in place, it did two things. It took the heat off of you being the bad guy, testing these things all around because no man, you just have to do the system. And it also made it so that people understood, okay, and within literally
Speaker: Two weeks, zero fires, right? Yeah, absolutely. Well, the big thing was just people would say in their stat note, they'd say, I did this or there's nothing to do today, but here's the next thing. And having that next step, whether it was a week away, whether it was two weeks away, just knowing what that next step was and acknowledging it and reporting out to others.
Speaker: And sometimes people would say, oh, this thing needs to happen today. Not necessarily a fire, but, you know, there's this one issue in the project. And because they looked at it and saw it, they can solve that problem right now instead of waiting until it popped its head up two weeks from now.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And I think the thing that people in our business also mess up with systems, they don't take them very, very seriously. They take them sort of halfway seriously. And the halfway serious system is like worse than any at all.
Speaker: Because if you don't do that, like, for instance, the check -in had to happen every other day, period. And people in the beginning would give us shit for it, right? They'd be like, dude, nothing happened on my project. Why do I have to say anything? And we would say, you know, it's because we don't know that. And like you said, sometimes they would realize, oh, actually there was something in there that I forgot about. And that was the point of the system.
Speaker: Like you said earlier, it's those quiet jobs where they don't seem like they need your attention every day.
Speaker: Yeah. Because you're always looking at those projects that are in progress or the big ticket ones. And then you forget to go even, you don't even know what you don't know. And going in and looking at it and touching it every two days, our definition of touch was leave a status note that you remembered, oh yeah, this project is happening. And there are some things that are coming up on it.
Speaker: And it also required us to have you to have an individual who is paid to stay up to date with those systems. So systems don't run themselves. I mean, you need someone to be checking in on the system to make sure it is running. Now that is like one.
Speaker: 50th the cost of a system that is not managed and losing that client, right? I mean, losing that client probably cost us what it would cost to pay a person for a year to manage all the systems. So I mean, you know, easily a hundred grand worth of work.
Speaker: potential out the window right they were lining up jobs for us you know for the next year yeah and and so the small cost of having so yes you do need someone to keep an eye on the systems after you have created them they don't run themselves and they constantly require maintenance little changes you know you always want to say how could we tweak this a little bit to make it more flexible and that's where you work with your team to have them say you know
Speaker: Maybe it should be every day, you know, that would have been cool. We probably wouldn't find that, but you know, uh, but just that they're never done. It's never done. And they always need maintenance and they need supervision. And that's critical that if it's not you doing it, that you're paying somebody to do it, uh, and that they have.
Speaker: an easy place to track it all. And I really don't mean for this podcast to be an ad for Pipeline because you can use a lot of other software for it. You can use Asana, you can use million things if you want to. Don't really care. I think Pipeline obviously is the best because it's bespoke for our industry and we actually have lights that come on when you don't look at something for two days and we make it very easy to make those
Speaker: updates clear when someone has made them. And I'm happy to say that our clients that are using Pipeline are doing just that. Our users are doing just that. I see them go in, you know, on a Monday morning and they tell me that they've, you know, gone through every, they get together with their crew and walk through all their jobs. And that's, that's just the system. And that's part of it. I'd say that that one tiny feature that, that status note, such a basic thing has been one of our most used features.
Speaker: Yeah, most useful, most popular, most powerful for our users. And so it's important, just that simplicity of what a system can be and just starting with something really, really basic. So if you're a company owner out there or you're a producer who manages a bunch of other producers, please hear us. Then it doesn't have to be the recreation of the wheel every day. And that's no way to move forward. And you can't move forward if that's what you're doing. You will be stuck.
Speaker: And you can apply, we had created, we had,
Speaker: And we're going to, in the podcast notes for this, will include some of our systems on paper that we have that you can get started with, things like checklists for meeting with the client, things like checklists for an edit going out. We had checklists all over the place, and we mostly had them loaded into our software that we were using, but we still had a lot on paper too that people would just go through and just make sure. I mean, it's the same way when you,
Speaker: have a pilot flying a 747, the guy knows exactly what he's doing. He's been doing it all his life. He still has to go through the checklist every time before he takes off. Every time, yeah. And I would add one more thing on systems in general, and that is the person, like we said, you do have to have someone that's accountable for managing the systems.
Speaker: But I'll add that that person doesn't have to be a person in authority. It doesn't have to be a senior. No, no, it just has to be someone that's looking, making sure the systems are are in place and are someone's doing what they're supposed to do.
Speaker: And that person has the power to speak up when something is not functioning. Exactly. Or someplace really clear and easy to put the information that things are going wrong so that you can see it as the boss and make that decision yourself. And again, there will be resistance. Believe me, there will be. You hire these people to be creatives. They don't like
Speaker: to be checked in on, and yet it's that trust but verify that you've got to use. You're in a business, you are in a business. If there's one thing from this entire podcast that everybody gets, it's that there is no escape hatch that makes our business any different than any other. It's still a business. You have money coming in, you got money going out.
Speaker: and ensure we make a creative, beautiful, awesome, wonderful product. And of course, we have very tricky demands on our time and what we do. But at the core, you still have to treat it with the respect of a business and any good business that's making it has systems. And when you have them, you're just going to find that you can really, really
Speaker: move forward. What it allowed us to do was have a firm ground. It gives your company shape. It gives it form. It gives it a firm ground for everyone to stand on safely, keeping fires from happening and moving forward together. They say good fences make good neighbors. I think it helped us
Speaker: there was never any finger pointing in our company. And there was, everyone always kind of knew, um, wherever everything was. And I think the systems really helped that. And we always looked at it like if something fell apart, it wasn't the person's fault. It was the system's fault. Some system had failed them somewhere along the way. We, we had failed them with the system. That's 99 % of the time, the 1 % of the time, no, that person screwed up. And sometimes, you know, that person had to go, but, uh,
Speaker: But 99 % of the time, it was just a system that had screwed up. And so we would just sit back and be like, OK, how can we how can we change the system? So can you kind of give me a we talked about a couple of the systems we used and you've lightly mentioned the book, the production. Can you kind of give me the history of how we went from that book, which was mostly a series of checklists to how that evolved into a software system?
Speaker: Yeah, so we then we had a software system that was sort of a no code platform that I was just we're using all these paper systems and I thought what is this 1932 I mean we we we should we should turn this into software and and we tried all this other software and it wasn't really what we wanted.
Speaker: And so we just started building our own in -house and they really were often just checklists in software that you had to click the check button. And so then when we decided to make pipeline, we decided to try to make the checklist
Speaker: less obvious, you just have to check things off, and more inherent. And by that, I mean, for instance, on the right side of every project, we have a project timeline that walks you through what you're doing in that project in just a natural way. So yes, there are places where there certainly are status notes so that you can keep track of
Speaker: who's locked, who's been reached out to, those sort of questions. And there certainly is task management so that you can keep track of all the tasks and you can copy those groupings of tasks and start off new projects. Because all you're really talking about with a typical list is a list of tasks. So try to make that really easy to make very portable for you as you move those around. But it had to be very customizable, right? Because I think that was the hard part was we were able at
Speaker: at our old company to make ones that work for us. It's different when you have to make a product, a software product that allows the flexibility for each company to make the systems the way they want them to be. Everybody has a different animation workflow. Everybody has a different creative workflow. And we're honestly, in Pipeline, we're just figuring all that out.
Speaker: We're just now coming out with the best task tools we can. The early ones we had were pretty rudimentary. And just in the next couple of weeks, we're coming out with the strongest, a much revised based on our users experience and feedback where they're like, dude, I need it to work like this. I need drag and drop. I need all these things. And we're like, yep, you do.
Speaker: uh so it's been pretty cool now that we're working with all these users that are out there running these pretty big companies and agencies and they're getting in there and they're seeing the light but they're like wait a minute uh what if it was like this and we it's very fun as you know just hearing that and then be like all right that's how we should do it and that's kind of how it's been so now it's like
Speaker: It's actually cool because the systems before were just us. Now we're literally gaining knowledge from all of our users in the business that have been so generous with their time to sit down and write out like, this is how I'd really like this to work. And then we would hear it from five different places, almost in unison. And we say, OK, that's clearly how it works. So building that is difficult, and it takes time. So sorry, pipeline users. It hasn't come out yet, but it is on its way.
Speaker: It is and it was I'd say it's been really cool to see the different ways people work and the different systems that they're using, even if they don't realize that what they are using our systems. That's right. I think that's what we were trying to do the pipeline is hide the idea of the system in the software.
Speaker: So that if you sold it like this is systems for growing your business, people are gonna be like, no, I don't think that's what I want to do with my time. And again, please people, we are not trying to make this podcast is not about trying to sell you pipeline. It is about trying to help your business grow, learning from what we've done.
Speaker: So again, you can use so many things. You can use HubSpot for your CRM. You can use Asana for your tasks if you want to. All that stuff. So just have something. You just use a pen and paper, Google Drive, whatever you want. But just starting to build. And again, I just push you to just try one little system. And gear is a really good one to get started with. Gear is just a really, really, I mean, think about the time someone left that mounting plate behind and you guys weren't shooting dick.
Speaker: If you could give me like a two line summary of A, what is a system and B, why bother?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, again, a system is just a series of events to try to ensure predictable outcome. And then and why so that by having those predictable outcomes, you can get the outcomes you aimed for. And, you know, what we're going for is making amazing, gorgeous, beautiful, moving, creative videos that also make us money. Yep.
Speaker: And without fires along the way, without a lot of extra fires and pain. So many production companies that I've known of come out of the gate just on fire creatively. And they're just doing amazing stuff. And often they have partners, which is a whole different conversation to get into. But they come out of the gate. They're so full of fire and creativity and they've got a new look and they've got a new feeling. And I remember in the early days, I'd be really afraid of that competition.
Speaker: Oh my God, these guys are so much cooler than we are. And they're doing all this cool stuff, but they would burn up and burn out. They would through infighting, through missed deadlines, through, uh, through burning clients, uh, you know, and, and in the end I was like, wow, you can actually do pretty damn good by just kind of.
Speaker: You know, having some guardrails around stuff, it meant we could have great relationships with the people we worked with, with our clients, and along the way, create some, you know, just awesome, awesome material. Yeah, so it doesn't sacrifice your creativity. I still believe it doesn't. It's the opposite. I believe the systems increase your creativity in the end of the day.
Speaker: And I believe they help with your producer burnout too. And that's a real thing. I mean, that's another podcast we're going to have is about producer burnout. Because as we all know, I think it's the highest burnout that there is in the industry is the producers. I'm sure it is. Yeah. We're hoping Pipeline will help with that.
Speaker: And one other thing I'll add is that don't think that just because you're a sole operator that you don't need systems. In fact, I'd say that you almost need them more than anybody else because you do so many things. You wear so many different hats that with those times that you do those things that you don't do all that often, you're going to need
Speaker: to be reminded of what that system is, how you do it. And you also need to get some sleep. And I think if you don't have systems, the monkey never goes to sleep in your brain the night before the shoot. It just doesn't. But if you've known that you ran through your checklist, checked everything, you did all your gear checklists, you did your, you know, shot list checklist, you did it all.
Speaker: you can go to bed, you can go to sleep and you can be fresh. And then when there's a moment on set that avails itself with something awesome, you're going to be ready for it. And that's the difference as opposed to I've been on shoots where the whole day you're trying to catch up with yourself. You're trying to catch up with, with everything because of that piece of gear that got left behind the whole day you're trying to catch up. Imagine getting to the shoot and being ahead of time all the time. That's when, that's when you can get creative and you look great to the client and you get rehired and you're on your way to
Speaker: you know, a profitable business. So yeah, you're right, Jake, you can't wait until until there's, you know, you got 50 employees, it's not the right time to start systematizing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's about it, folks. We hope that you will take a look at some of the system documents that will include in the links and in the podcast and hopefully use some of them, download them. And otherwise, we will look forward to having you on
Speaker: the next podcast and thank you again for joining us. And don't forget if you want to, to give pipeline software a try at video pipeline .io, you can do a free trial for 14 days and give it a shot and see how we're managing all that stuff that we're talking about and putting our money where our mouth is on it. But otherwise, Jake, anything else? Nope. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Thanks for interviewing again. All right, we're back to work trying to get those features out for you. So we'll talk to you later. Bye -bye.
