My success at Global Fire
I'm tremendously proud of what I achieved at this video production house; I rejuvenated the brand and laid the foundation for growth in revenue and talent.
My success at
Global Fire
My success at
Global Fire
I'm tremendously proud of what I achieved at this creative production house; I rejuvenated the brand and laid the foundation for growth in revenue and talent.
Role: Creative Producer, Partner
2014-2017
As a producer for this production company, I managed the production of corporate, internal, short-form, animation, and advertising videos for clients from SMEs to Fortune 100 companies.
I supported the process from concept to delivery with a full production team for whatever we dream up.
As a partner, I managed and mentored the company to keep us on a growth path. I made it my business to grow the company, and very quickly identified the following needs:
- Increase revenue
- Plan for people and talent growth
- Diversify the portfolio of clients
With a fresh pair of eyes, I was able to see what changes we could make in order to increase the bottom line of existing accounts.
Remit:
- Creative Direction
- Ideation
- Needs Assessment
- Operational Process
- Photography
- Public Speaking
- Tactical Process
- Video Production
Early wins
I immediately introduced up-selling for existing projects and identified areas where we could instantly add value through existing talents in the team. Additionally, I negotiated new budgets, releasing the creative team from this responsibility, to focus on creative demand.
I found that Global Fire was greatly underselling the value of their talents. By embedding myself in every area of the business, I found that there were a few common errors being made that seemed minor but had a major impact on expectation management and, as a result, client satisfaction and loyalty.
By addressing these opportunities, the reward for Global Fire was immediate.
In my first year, we saw a 110% increase in revenue and hired 3 new team members.
"Elizabeth is a highly motivated, hard-working, and big-thinking individual. She positively challenges those around her to think beyond. She faces challenges head-on and isn't afraid to get out of her comfort zone. I am extremely proud to have had Elizabeth on our team here at Global Fire Creative."
-ROSS GILL, FOUNDER, GLOBAL FIRE
Listening to learn
Upon joining the business, I got the sense that the team felt we were bottom-of-the-pile of suppliers for our largest client, Vodafone. We were not the only business of our kind supplying this global brand and, at the time, we were low quality compared to the others.
We were hired for our cheap prices and fast turnaround (which came as the expense of quality). I made it a goal to increase our exposure in the company as a choice supplier of unrivaled quality. I believe that your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room, so I began a listening exercise and found that what the Vodafone clients were saying about Global Fire is that we were "fast and cheap".
No matter what spiffy logo we use or how we talk about ourselves, if this is what people say when we're not in the room, well then THAT is our brand. So the very first change I implemented to achieve this goal was to lead a re-brand.
The Rebrand
When I joined, Global Fire was positioning itself as a production company. But I saw the potential to be trusted to conceive the ideas, not just produce the assets. I called on a brand design (who eventually became my husband!) and within 6 months, we rolled out the new brand and a new website. I then introduced branded uniforms for all customer-facing crew members.
When we were on-site with clients, we were now branded and thousands of people began recognizing us as "the video guys", approaching us with new projects. This bolstered our brand recognition, lead generation, and sales.
Getting larger budget projects meant getting real with the team and identifying reasons why we had been achieving such uninspiring results.
I uncovered that most of this had to do with poor planning and low budgets which meant we had limited resources to dream bigger and produce better quality creative work. But how do you get bigger budgets when you haven't proven yourself? It was a chicken-and-egg situation, so I strategically managed specific jobs to leverage the best relationships we had in the company. Winning trust and bigger budgets, we pushed the team to dream bigger and work harder to produce more creative and outside-the-box results.
The clients raved. Our budgets increased and so did the value of our reputation. Now, Global Fire is sought after for their strength in ideas and solutions they can provide to address their customers' greatest business challenges.
Long term results
I introduced pricing changes in the form of band-A and band-B pricing. B band pricing was our existing rates. Band-A pricing were our new rates - larger budgets we could use to make more impressive work.
This change meant we could increase prices (double them, in fact) without losing or upsetting existing relationships. Navigating such major pricing increases can be fatal for companies of our size but we were able to accomplish this seamlessly and very successfully.
Through my experience in content design, I introduced a marketing strategy that cost nothing because it relied on the creative power of the team and making the most out of projects which were already being paid for by our clients.
An example of this is introducing behind-the-scenes filming on our bigger projects. Not only did we use these as marketing pieces, they also added value for the clients and gave them a second piece of content that they shared proudly (inadvertently advertising us to their peers).
To give this content legs, I split each film into bite-sized standalone films which promoted individual values we could bring, not just as an agency, but as a full-service production house. We were then able to use these films as a foundation for content-rich case studies which helped the team secure contracts I don't believe we would have otherwise been able to achieve.
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