CGC Guides

Buying or Selling a Video Production Company

By Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov | Updated October 26, 2026

Here is the uncomfortable truth first: most video production companies are worth less than their founders hope. Revenue is project-based, recurring contracts are rare, and the assets are mostly gear that depreciates, which is why even firms with twenty years of history cannot reliably predict revenue six months out. What actually moves the number is everything a buyer can keep after you leave: recurring revenue, client retention, strong relationships, and documented systems. Which leads to the one piece of advice every voice in this guide agrees on: build the company as if you are going to sell it, because even if you never do, you end up with a better business.

The depth below comes from three vantage points. Ant Darvill sits on the buy side, having acquired Melbourne’s 77 Productions through a management buyout and lived through the client transition that followed. Dario and Kyrill deliver the valuation reality check from their hundredth-episode retrospective, along with the partnership paperwork they admit they put off for eleven years. And Ryan Spanger, twenty-plus years into running Dream Engine, shows what a durable, transferable business machine looks like in practice. Where they seem to disagree, worth little on paper versus worth buying, the resolution is the most useful idea in the guide.

The Valuation Reality Check

Start with the hardest-nosed assessment in the archive, because it comes from the hosts themselves. In their hundredth-episode retrospective, looking back and moving forward, Dario and Kyrill lay out why production companies are generally not worth much on paper. Revenue arrives project by project, recurring contracts are the exception, and the balance sheet is mostly gear that loses value every year. Even companies with twenty-plus years of history cannot reliably predict revenue six months out, which is precisely the uncertainty a buyer is being asked to pay for.

Their conclusion is not despair, it is discipline: build the business as if you are going to sell it. Documented processes, organized client lists, clean systems, and diversified income are what make a company transferable, and a company that could be sold is simply a better company to own. That starts with running a real business rather than a person with a camera, the distinction at the heart of a production company versus a videographer.

The Buy Side: How Ant Darvill Bought 77 Productions

Most founders in the archive built their companies from nothing. Ant Darvill bought his. Through a management buyout, he and his business partner Gina Hanrahan acquired 77 Productions, a Melbourne studio that began as a post house before being folded into an ad agency, and turned it into an award-winning, full-service video, animation, and audio operation, a story he tells in buying a video production company. The detail that matters most: he knew the business intimately from the inside before the purchase, which de-risked both the price and everything after it.

His accounting of the trade is clear-eyed. Acquiring 77 handed him instant credibility, an extensive client database, and proven infrastructure, advantages that would take years to build from zero. The catch is the deal within the deal: the client transition. Relationships are most of what changes hands in an acquisition, and they do not transfer automatically, so retaining clients through the change of ownership is the most delicate work of the whole process. Every client quietly re-runs the decision they made when they first went about choosing a video production company, and the new owner has to win that decision again. Ownership also changed him as an operator: agreements got real teeth, with timeline commitments and restart fees, scope got documented, and boundaries got set early, because once you are the one signing the checks, the gaps you never defined are where the profit leaks out.

What a Video Company Is Actually Worth

Put the buyer and the sellers-in-waiting together and the valuation picture sharpens. Ant is practical about what moved the number on his deal and what moves it on any deal: recurring revenue, client retention, and the strength of the portfolio and relationships, far more than equipment or a raw count of past projects. The hosts arrive at the same list from the other direction: the reason most production companies are worth little is that most of them have none of those things in durable form.

That convergence is the whole game. The two highest-leverage valuation projects a founder can run are making revenue recur and making clients stay, which is why our guides to retainers and recurring revenue and client retention double as exit preparation, whether or not an exit is ever the plan. Gear is a tool, not an asset a buyer pays a premium for. The premium is paid for income and relationships that survive your departure.

Selling Readiness: Build a Machine a Buyer Could Run

What does transferable value look like in practice? Ryan Spanger has run Melbourne’s Dream Engine for more than twenty years, serving businesses, government departments, and universities, and his conversation on building a video business that lasts reads like a checklist for sale-readiness even though selling is not his subject. His diagnosis of the industry’s biggest mistake: most video businesses never build a marketing system. Work arrives through word of mouth, someone stumbles onto the website, and the pipeline stays accidental. An accidental pipeline dies with the founder’s network. A system, a defined target market, refined messaging, an offer that converts, and a deliberate path from conversation to client, is something a new owner can operate.

The same goes for how he shapes the work itself. Ryan standardizes services around repeatable formats without going generic, segments clients into groups that each get their own messaging, and positions himself as a trusted advisor who shares strategic ideas before clients ask, the posture that turns one-off projects into relationships that renew for years. Notice that every one of those moves is simultaneously a durability play and a valuation play. A studio that runs on systems, segments, and advisor-grade relationships is the studio Ant’s valuation criteria describe: retained clients, repeat revenue, and a reputation that does not evaporate at closing.

The Paperwork Nobody Signs: Partnership Agreements and Succession

There is one more piece of sale-and-succession infrastructure, and the hosts teach it by confession: they ran Lapse for eleven years before signing a partnership agreement. For an incorporated business the document is a Unanimous Shareholder Agreement, and it forces exactly the conversations everyone avoids: what happens if a partner dies, divorces, or wants out. Their advice is to get it done now, while everyone still likes each other, and to pair it with life insurance on each partner so an estate buyout does not cripple the company.

This is not a side note to the buy-or-sell question; it is a precondition. A company with ambiguous ownership terms is a company that cannot cleanly be sold, bought into, or handed over, and most partnership failures trace back to the hard discussions that were skipped at the start. The same documentation instinct should run through the operational layer too: a written, repeatable production process, clean archives, and organized client records are what let a buyer, a new partner, or a successor pick the business up without you standing beside them.

Worth Little on Paper, Worth Buying Anyway

So which is it? The hosts say production companies are not worth much; Ant paid real money for one and calls it the best move he made. Both are right, and the resolution is the most useful idea in this guide. A generic production company, project revenue, founder-dependent relationships, a pile of depreciating gear, deserves the pessimistic valuation. What Ant bought was not that. He bought durable client relationships, proven infrastructure, and a brand with standing, and he bought it as an insider who could protect those assets through the transition. The value was real precisely because it was the transferable kind.

The disagreement, in other words, is really a definition of the work. If you are a seller, your job for the years before any sale is to move your company from the first category into the second. If you are a buyer, your job is to pay only for what survives the founder walking out the door, and to remember that the closer you are to the business before the deal, the less risk you are buying. A management buyout is the extreme case of that principle, and it is why Ant’s path worked.

Our Take

We will be honest: we are not building Lapse to sell it. But the hundredth-episode conversation changed how we run it, because build-as-if-you-will-sell turned out to be the best operating discipline we have adopted. The partnership agreement we put off for eleven years is signed, the insurance is in place, the processes are documented, and the client records are organized, and every one of those felt overdue the moment it was done. None of it was for a buyer. All of it made the company stronger this year.

Our advice runs in three lines. First, do the paperwork this month, not this decade: the shareholder agreement and partner insurance are cheap compared to any scenario where you need them. Second, run the valuation lens over your own business once a year, and ask what a stranger would actually be buying: if the honest answer is you and your camera, that is the to-do list. Third, if you are tempted to buy rather than build, get inside first. Work with the company, learn its clients, and understand what you are really acquiring, because the value of a production company lives in relationships, and relationships reward proximity. The best outcome of all this thinking is not a sale. It is a business that would deserve one.

The Playbook

The composite path, whichever side of the table you are on:

1. Run the buyer’s test annually: list what a stranger would actually acquire if you left. Anything that walks out the door with you is not on the list.
2. Sign the shareholder agreement now and insure each partner, so death, divorce, or departure cannot force a fire sale.
3. Convert project income into recurring income wherever trust allows: retainers and repeat programs are the single biggest valuation lever.
4. Make retention measurable. Track how long clients stay and why they leave, because retention is the second number a buyer checks.
5. Replace the accidental pipeline with a marketing system: defined market, refined offer, deliberate path from conversation to client.
6. Document the machine: processes, client records, archives, and financials clean enough that someone else could run next quarter.
7. If buying, get inside first. Know the company, its clients, and its numbers before the deal, and structure for the insider’s advantage a management buyout provides.
8. Treat the client transition as the deal within the deal: plan the handover of every key relationship, and expect each client to quietly re-decide whether to stay.

Frequently Asked Questions

Source Episodes

Every perspective in this guide comes from an on-the-record conversation. Go deeper with the full episodes:

The Hosts

About

Creatives Grab Coffee is a podcast about the business behind video production: sales, strategy, pricing, team building, and everything that happens off camera. New episodes every week on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Lapse Productions is a Toronto-based video production company serving tech, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing clients with corporate, promotional, event, and testimonial video. New to commissioning video? Start with our guide to the types of corporate video.