Videography expansion: four growth routes

What to take away

The four routes

Almost every owner reaches for the fourth and has not finished the first. Deeper is the cheapest revenue available: an existing client has a budget, a relationship and a problem that recurs, and most small companies deliver a project and then wait to be contacted.

Before any route: find the constraint

Growth applied to the wrong part of the business changes nothing.

Ask which of these is currently true. You are turning down work because the edit queue is full. You are turning down work because you have no shoot capacity. Inquiries go unanswered for days. Or you simply have fewer inquiries than you can handle.

The first three are capacity problems. Hiring in a specific order addresses them; see our guide to hiring and training a videography crew. Only the fourth is a demand problem, and only the fourth is solved by marketing or by a new market.

Getting this wrong is expensive and common. A company that widens demand while its edit queue is full delivers late, and late delivery destroys the referrals that were producing the demand in the first place.

Going deeper, properly

Three habits, none of which cost money.

A message a month after delivery asking where the piece ran and how it landed. It reads as care and it produces outcome information you can use.

A note at the start of the client's planning or budget cycle, offering nothing.

A suggestion when something changes at their organization that a video would help with: hiring news, a product launch, an office move, a conference.

Then look for the recurring version of what they bought once. A monthly internal update, a quarterly recruitment refresh, a standing arrangement for event coverage. A recurring line flattens your year, which matters more in a business with this much seasonality than an extra one-off ever will.

Going adjacent without buying a new business

An adjacent service is only adjacent if it uses the shoot you are already doing, the clients you already have, or the skills you already own. Two of the three, ideally.

Test it before committing. Rent the kit rather than buying it, deliver two projects at a price that assumes you will be slow, and measure the finishing hours honestly. If the second project was not meaningfully faster than the first, the service is not repeatable for you and it will stay expensive.

Kit standardization is what makes an adjacent service cheap or costly, so compare the decision with our videography equipment and setup guide. Pricing it from your current model rather than from a competitor's website is the other half, covered in how video projects are priced.

Going geographic: what actually has to be rebuilt

A second market is not a marketing exercise. Nine things are local, and every one of them restarts at zero.

The regulatory layer is the one people underestimate. County, city and site requirements rarely travel even inside one state, so the research has to be redone, which is the point of the layered approach in licensing, releases and compliance.

For pay expectations, use published estimates rather than assumptions. The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics tables publish employment and wage estimates by occupation, state and metropolitan area, which is a defensible starting point before you add burden and non-productive time.

Judging whether a market can hold you

Look for evidence rather than population. Four signals are visible from outside.

Recurring buyers. Employers hiring at volume, membership bodies with regular communications, organizations with internal channels to feed. Recurring buyers are what make a production company stable and they are rarer than one-off buyers.

A calendar. Conference venues, event spaces and seasonal occasions produce work that exists whether or not anyone has a marketing budget.

Existing suppliers and their visible gaps. A gap in delivery reliability is a better opening than a gap in creative style, because it is easier to demonstrate and easier to sell.

Travel time from your base. A market you can reach and return from in a day behaves completely differently from one requiring accommodation, because the second consumes a full day of capacity per visit.

The Small Business Administration's business guide is organized around planning, launch, management and growth and is a reasonable neutral structure to check an expansion plan against, though nothing in it is specific to production.

The staged approach that usually works

Do not open an office. Stage it.

Take occasional work in the target market and measure what it actually costs in travel and capacity. Then build a relationship with a local crew member so you have hands there. Then take a recurring client in that market, which is the point at which travel becomes justifiable. Only then consider storage, a base, or a person.

At every stage, ask whether the fixed cost you are about to add is smaller than the revenue already proven. Adding fixed cost against projected revenue is how a profitable company becomes an unprofitable one.

What has to be working before you go anywhere

Expansion multiplies whatever your operation already is. A written pipeline with defined stages and exit tests survives a second location; an operation held together by the owner's memory does not.

Two things in particular have to exist first. A documented workflow, so someone who is not you can run a project correctly, which is the shoot-to-delivery workflow. And a repeatable way of getting work, so the new market is not a gamble on a single introduction, which is winning work and growing the client list.

Expect the work itself to change too. Schedules and environments in this occupation vary widely by production, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics description of broadcast, sound and video technicians records, and adding travel to that variability is a lifestyle decision as much as a commercial one.

Common questions

How do I know I have exhausted the deeper route?

When every past client has been contacted after delivery, has been offered a recurring version of what they bought, and has been asked who else has the same problem. Most owners have done none of the three systematically.

Is a satellite office worth it?

Rarely, early. A local crew member and a rental relationship give you most of the capability with almost none of the fixed cost, and they can be unwound if the market does not respond.

Should I lower prices to enter a new market?

Entering below your own floor buys work you cannot repeat at a sustainable price, and the clients you win that way expect that price forever. Enter on delivery reliability instead.

How long before a second market pays?

Longer than the plan says, because the rebuild list above has nine items and each takes months. Fund it from proven revenue, not from optimism about the new market.

What if my best clients ask me to follow them to another city?

That is the strongest possible reason to go, because it removes the largest cost: the relationship rebuild. Treat travel work for an existing client as the first stage, and let it prove the market before you commit anything fixed.