As I'm increasingly seeing whilst reading through LinkedIn, entrepreneurs around the world are taking this time of year as their opportunity to reflect on the year just gone, their goals and ambitions; and how they will improve next year. So with that in mind these are our top 5 achievements in 2023 as a business, what we've learnt from them and how we'll build on them next year!
Our Office Space
In July of this year we started renting and our new office space out, with intent of adding a studio too (we'll get to that!). We rented a space right in the centre of Bedford town, to allow easy access for meetings, whether clients are coming to us or we go to them. The office space has allowed us to professionally meet clientele, hosting them at our own space aswell as being closer to venues such as pubs and cafés for public meetings. Having worked from home prior to this move, I can personally recommend every entrepreneur to look at an office space, whether it be a shared co-working space or somewhere more private like ours, productivity is through the roof! It turns out that having a space decimated to focused work and a home for relaxing really changes your mindset in both locations, resulting a much better work-life balance! Gone are the days of working until 1am (although it does happen sometimes, but not because we didn't start until midday!). The office space also means that we now have dedicated working hours, making it so much easier for clients to get in touch with us via our business phone number, with consistent public opening times!
2. Rental Space Launch
Why did we get a private office space? Because we actually got two rooms, and in November we launched our studio rental services! Whilst a basic set up at this time, the aim of our studio is to make content creation easy and accessible for all. Not all businesses can afford to commission us for content creation and so we wanted to create a cheap offering for local businesses to come and create content in our studio. We have a professional and adaptable lighting set up with green, white and black screen facilities, ideal for most small scale content creation. The facilities also enable our own content creation, it's a win-win for us and our clientele! And the reviews are already rolling in, we definitely look forward to scaling this side venture over time and supporting local business with content creation.
3. Attending Wedding Fairs
Having focused a lot this year on building our wedding clientele (and close now to fully booking summer 2024!), we have started attending wedding fairs which are an excellent way to interact with couples face to face and take advantage of our in person selling skills! This has turned out to be really worth it for us, I personally love speaking with potential clients face to face, and I also love prepping a stall for clients to look over! We attended 2 fairs this year and are slowly learning what does and doesn't work, speaking with customers face to face can be quite difficult at times but I'm definitely building my confidence now, as well as the amazing team around me. Big shout out to Maddie for attending both fairs with me this year and making a conversion of her own at the second one! Ultimately, I've realised that the goal of these fairs is to build awareness of the brand, as time goes on we hope to become more recognised at these fairs, especially since we've now got 8 booked for the first 2 months of 2024! Going to be a long couple weeks with a lot of lessons to learn but I wouldn't change it for the world, maybe I'll be seeing some of you there!
4. New Gear Purchase
What an awesome bit of kit! We have worked hard since September to build out an ultimate wedding camera rig and we believe this is it, we've prioritised lightweight run and gun filmmaking with accuracy on focus and a dynamic focal length range. Our rig has now been tried and tested on several client project and the results are looking better than ever, in fact I am asking myself why we didn't invest any earlier! We want to remain competitive in the industry and supply our clients with high quality products, and this year we've realised that this can't be done without investment and the risk that comes with it. Having learnt this, we have already started planning future investments for the company and actually just made a new one in time for the new year. We have just invested in live streaming kit and some new backdrops for our studio allowing us to build out a livestreaming studio for our clients to come in and use, studio rental services will be expanding in the new year and we are extremely excited!!
5. Building Partnerships
The biggest lesson learnt this year, in my opinion, is that partnerships are extremely important. As a company we have now partnered with 6 other businesses in both the corporate and wedding industries to bring our services to more people. Pictured above is BTS from a shoot with the YouthTV Group who we have partnered with to bring high quality youth made productions to the local Bedford community, we have also partnered with a local sports club to create professional brand content for their sponsors and a local marketing agency. Finally our biggest current partnerships are with an array of wedding venues across Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Hertforshire, becoming their sole videographers for weddings and offering exclusive packages to their clients. This has been a massive break through for the company, especially for weddings, and so building on this we intend to begin partnering with wedding planners aswell in the new year. The power of people skills and providing value first offers to local businesses has proved to be priceless this year, and I cannot wait to meet network with more businesses in 2024 and find plenty of new opportunities for the company.
I hope this has been an enjoyable and informative read for you, I intend to share the ins and outs of starting up a video production company as my blog continues as well as continuing to work on the short form content masterclass. Follow us to stay up to date and wishing everyone a happy new year!
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