Adapting on the Fly • What happens when the business changes your plans for you?
by Levi Smock, Head of Production
Over the last month of the year, Motivo CEO Tim Hedberg and I decided that we were going to use the time most of our industry uses as a break to game plan our next year. We huddled together for hours, day after day, while the rest of the offices around us went quiet and dark.
We wanted to start 2025 with a clearer vision, an eye on where we wanted to go and how we wanted to get there. Dreams were discussed, plans made, scorecards assembled. We broke every long-term goal down into weekly tasks.
So, by January 3rd (the first Friday of the new year), I was on pretty level footing. I knew what I would be doing for the next few weeks and into the next month and I believe in filling my time. I certainly knew what my day looked like and it looked busy.
Ten minutes before our daily round-up my phone rings. Tim’s on the other line and he’s pretty excited. He gives me the headlines: A colleague's company had a producer drop out of a feature-length project at the last minute and they called us for help. Do we want to do it?
When we were working through our goals for the 1st quarter during the last weeks of 2024, we both noticed one thing missing from the calendar. A big ticket item. We were making steady progress on our ongoing projects and had some proposals out for small and middle budget jobs, but we didn’t yet have a bigger project in our sights. We didn’t spend too much time worrying about it. We were doing all of the right things. We knew it would come.
And I was still caught completely off guard when it fell into our laps.
Aligned on Goals - Success is where Preparation and Opportunity Meet
“Do you want to do it?”
My answer was, “Of course, but it means I have to drop everything.”
It turns out all of those planning meetings were well spent. Tim and I didn’t really have much to discuss in taking on the project. We knew our goals and we knew what we knew what piece was missing… this one.
In the next 30 minutes we came up with a game plan. I’d clear my schedule for the day, spend the weekend working on our proposals and getting familiar with the creative of the project. The delivery date was 7 weeks away and we were just at the starting blocks.
The planning meetings that the team participated in had given us clarity on what we needed to accomplish our goals, and that had allowed us to know our bandwidth and easily identify whether or not this was something we wanted to take on.
They had also reinforced our structure. We were doubling down on our project management software, implementing new accounting and budgeting processes, opening better lines of communication between our internal and external teams.
All this is to say, we were able to lean on the pieces that we had put in place to shift around workloads, allowing me to focus my attention on the project that now looks like my next three months. The standing meetings that can feel like a slog are the same ones that made it possible for us to balance the new load between team members without skipping a beat.
Big take away here: Spend time building foundations with your team.
I’ve run companies with 3 employees and headed content, production, and post-production teams numbering over 200. New projects and challenges are always coming down the pipeline, when you spend time (yes, meetings about meetings) building up the processes and structure, your teams learn how and when to communicate. When you align your stakeholders on goals, and everyone has a clear vision of where your team wants to go, you’ll be able to recognize and jump on the opportunities that can get you there. After that everything else is just imagination and elbow grease.
NEXT UP:
Development Meets Preproduction – Creating a Production Plan
About Motivo Media
Motivo Media is a Seattle-based video production and marketing agency specializing in storytelling for non-profits and growing businesses. With expertise in digital marketing and audience engagement, we create compelling content that connect with audiences and amplifies your mission.
Get in touch by emailing us at hello@motivo.me