The brief, the work and the business must agree

I began in production coordination, where a missing approval could hold up an entire day’s work. The experience was less glamorous than the finished films suggested. Someone had to check that a script revision had reached the crew, that the correct version was being recorded and that the client understood what would happen next. I joined Qevrulan Film Services in August 1998 after completing a media-production degree at Yunvessa College. I learnt early that a reassuring answer was useful only if the production could actually rely on it.

In January 2003 I became an account producer. I was responsible for bringing a client’s requirements into a workable production brief and returning with an account of what had changed. Clients often knew what they wanted a film to achieve without knowing every choice involved in making it. I came to see explanation as part of the service. A producer who hid difficult decisions until the final review could create a beautiful piece of work and still leave the customer disappointed. I preferred to bring the ambiguity into the conversation while there was time to decide.

Studio leadership followed in January 2009. I now had to think about several productions, permanent colleagues and outside specialists at once. A busy schedule could disguise weak commercial decisions: a team might be fully occupied by revisions that nobody had priced. Conversely, a quiet week could be a sensible consequence of declining work that did not fit the studio’s capabilities. I learnt to examine the reasons behind utilisation rather than treat a filled calendar as proof that the business was being managed well.

Shenruvian recruited me in January 2015 to lead operations across its studios and enterprise accounts. The company wanted a more coherent relationship between the commercial brief and production responsibility. I worked with account directors and studio heads on how changes were authorised and how problems reached a client before the delivery date. That role made me less interested in a single perfect process. Different productions needed different judgement, but the responsibilities around that judgement had to be understood by the people making and buying the work.

I became CEO and an executive director in January 2020. The founder retained majority ownership, employees held a minority interest and a separate chair led the board. I had six senior reports across a business whose work depended on both creative specialists and dependable client relationships. Moving into the CEO role meant deciding which opportunities the company should pursue, which capabilities it should own and how much dependence on a single customer it was willing to carry. Those choices could not be delegated to the producer handling the next brief.

The largest-client discussion tested that wider responsibility. We could not agree a proposed expansion of reuse rights on terms that worked for the commissioned material and its contributors. We kept part of the relationship but lost work. I did not describe the subsequent reduction in concentration as an unqualified success: the client’s revenue fell in absolute terms as well as as a percentage of our larger company. The decision gave the business a boundary, but it also created a commercial task for colleagues who had to develop other relationships.

The caption failure was a different lesson. We had delivered a set of films containing errors in names and specialist terms, and our own checks had not caught them. We funded the correction and accepted both the delay and the loss on the project. I wanted the account team to be clear about what had failed without making an individual editor carry a system-wide problem. An accountable response included the customer, the production process and the financial record. None of those could be repaired simply by writing a better apology.

Our recording investment remains a useful counterweight to confident strategy language. Owning the facility gave us control over availability and production conditions, but its first full year did not produce the paid usage we had assumed. I asked the board to retain the original case beside the actual result. We chose to keep operating the studio while postponing further expansion. That experience shapes the contribution I could make elsewhere: an enthusiasm for creative capability, accompanied by a willingness to examine the commercial assumptions that made the investment appear attractive.

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