Surround yourself with smart people who know different things than you do.
That’s good advice, isn’t it? Common sense, really. Other than changing environments, nothing else will spark creativity so well. It will help you in everything you do, from making better decisions to discovering new passions. Yet most investors go at it alone. Even worse, most neophyte investors in the film space go at it alone. Even when such investors are part of some sort of consortium, they most often have failed to get to know their partners in meaningful and beneficial ways.
Imagine there are 5, 10, 20 investors on a film. Imagine if during the time the film was being made they each individually tackled some aspect of the industry and how it applied to that film. They don’t have to be experts — they can hire experts to advise them. Damn, they don’t even have to be smart, as long as they can understand options to tackle a particular challenge most films face. Imagine how the film might benefit if each came to the table with a plan on how the film might best exploit different opportunities.
We know that there are a great number of challenges facing filmmakers, audiences, and the industry today. I have mapped out well over 100 problems on this blog alone. Not only do each of these problems have ramifications for each of the traditional three legs of the indie film table (audiences, artists, and industry), but even more so with the fourth leg that could support them all, if we just invited them to dine: the investors. With a little prep and good advice, these problems become opportunities. We need a structure that can educate those that are both incentivized to solve them, as well as have the means to make a difference.
Now think of what happens when they share that knowledge they’ve gained. It wouldn’t just be the film that won. Each individual in the room would benefit from one another. And think if this group did four or five films together, and each time they set out to learn another aspect of the industry on how it could be applied to what they are doing together. They would learn more, faster, by working together.
Investors tend to be busy people. They have the luxury generally to do more than just work. As a result though, they start to think in different ways. Their goals start to change. When you are fortunate enough to gather them together, the outcomes are different from other gatherings. And one of the real beauties of today, is that such communities can happen unbound from space and time. Sure, the physical will most likely be the most product, but the virtual can accomplish a lot. We can do more, faster, by working together. Group learning and lift.
That’s not a bad goal, is it? And it is entirely achievable. It’s kind of amazing what happens when you put people in a room together; it’s just that we are rarely motivated to extract the full value of that simple proposition. We waste such opportunity. But it could be the reason for being.
Read:
Towards A Sustainable Investor Class For Film Culture And Business
Staged Financing MUST Become Film BIz’s Immediate Goal
Towards A Sustainable Investor Class: A Portfolio Approach
TASIC: Accessing Quality Projects
