CGC Guides

How to Start a Video Production Company

By Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov | Updated September 21, 2026

There is no license, no degree requirement, and no standard route into owning a video production company. The honest version, from eight founders who did it, looks like this: start before you are ready, keep your overhead near zero, put every early dollar back on the screen, and do not quit the day job until the numbers tell you to.

This guide draws on eight founding stories from the Creatives Grab Coffee archive: a JP Morgan producer who ran his company as a second shift for years, a river guide who built a war chest, a BBC screenwriter who started in his bedroom, an actor who pivoted through TV news, and four more routes in. No two stories are identical, but the patterns underneath them repeat, and every one of them is learnable.

Start on the Side and Let the Numbers Decide

Gabe Nazario built Offbeat Creative the patient way. While holding producer and editor roles at Fox, Disney, and a brand-new content studio at JP Morgan, he ran the company as a second shift: every night after logging out at 5 p.m., he opened the same laptop and took every small job he could get. He kept that up for years, grew slowly and deliberately, and even hired a part-time producer as a safety net while still employed. He only left corporate once Offbeat’s profit matched his salary, a story he tells in full on winning on trust in a crowded market.

Five years into running it full time, his lean team serves clients like Fox, Peloton, and Disney. The lesson is that the leap is a math problem, not a courage problem. The side hustle phase is where you build the client list, the systems, and the proof, and the day you go full time should be decided by a threshold you set in advance, not by frustration with your job.

Fund the Dream with Work That Compounds

Greg Cairns ran the same play with a very different day job. A senior Idaho river guide, he guided the Middle Fork of the Salmon in the summer, guided in the winter, and spent almost nothing, so he always had a pile of money that let him be patient with film work in the off-season. That war chest meant he never had to take a full-time job he did not want, and it carried him through roughly five lean years until film filled in, the arc he traces in from river guide to filmmaker.

The guiding did something else too: it built a moat. Class five whitewater, blizzards, avalanche terrain, and wilderness medicine are skills most crews do not have, which is why clients like Patagonia and the National Science Foundation hire him solo where others would need a safety team.

If you need bridge income while you build, pick work that compounds: either it banks savings fast, or it teaches you something rare that becomes part of the pitch. Greg’s did both.

Turn the Hobby into the Business

Chris Leclerc picked up a camera at 13 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, shooting macro photos of dew on flowers, and started winning the county photo contest several years running. A teenage film festival entry with his brother became their informal film school, and a local patron named Trigg, fresh off selling the largest agency in Wisconsin, gave the young team an office and introductions to the county’s biggest companies. The breakout was a single cinematic film that made their county look beautiful and put local CEOs on camera. After the premiere, more work came in than they could handle, and Chris had accidentally defined a model for what a cinematic corporate video could be, the story behind betting on your own vision.

The other half of his origin is riskier: early on he made three or four self-funded directing projects that did not turn out, throwing every dollar he had at them anyway. He calls it young and dumb, and credits it for everything that followed, because the failures built the reel and the conviction that now win the work.

Start in the Bedroom and Reinvest Everything

Damian Fitzsimmons arrived in the States as a Liverpool-born BBC screenwriter with a romantic plan to write the next great film from his apartment, and a less romantic reality of cafe shifts and detailing cars on weekends. Instead of waiting to be discovered, he leaned on what he already knew, writing, editing, and shooting, and started Braveman Media out of his bedroom. For the first three or four years, essentially every dollar went back into the productions, a stretch he walks through in from corporate to feature films.

That instinct, spend the budget on the screen and protect the reputation, is what turned a bedroom operation into a studio with corporate and commercial accounts, and eventually made a half-million-dollar feature film thinkable. It is the kind of unglamorous origin most shops share: Dario and Kyrill tell their own version in how Creatives Grab Coffee and Lapse first started.

Take the Sideways Route In

Sean Collins did not study film. He studied new media, talked his way into an internship at the Converse headquarters photo studio during his junior year, and set out to learn everything about lighting sneakers. After college he freelanced, then came back to Converse when they needed photo help. They also needed editing bandwidth, so when they asked whether he could edit, he said yes and started cutting sizzles and shooting small studio jobs. Those little projects compounded into a body of work, and eventually into Jukebooth, the award-winning Boston studio whose path he traces in propelling your business.

The sideways route is a real founding strategy. You do not need permission or a film degree. You need proximity to an organization that buys creative work, and the willingness to say yes to the adjacent job, then let the small yeses compound.

Pivot a Career You Already Have

Margaux Towne started as an actor in Orlando, working at Universal Studios and appearing on Nickelodeon and America’s Most Wanted, before a TV-station job turned her into a living-segments reporter and producer. Choosing the talent, the music, and the story hooked her, and she never went back in front of the camera. A move to Omaha led to a one-person video department at a medical-supply company, then a small studio, and finally her own shop around 2016, after which, she says, she woke up feeling more alive than she had in years. She tells the whole arc on running a woman-owned video production business.

Before going out on her own, she researched the local market and saw the same thing everywhere. What she did next is a masterclass in turning a market gap into a founding thesis.

Being the only woman-owned video company in her city has won her work directly, including clients who sought her out for exactly that reason. Two lessons travel well: a past career is raw material, not wasted time, and market research before launch can surface a differentiator you already embody.

Learn the Trade Before You Own It

Arni Thor Jonsson took the oldest route there is: apprenticeship. He grew up inside his father’s pioneering Icelandic production house, absorbing the craft and the business by osmosis, and in 2005 he and his brother Lalli turned that inheritance into Republik, now one of Iceland’s leading production companies with clients like Audi, Sony, and Ikea. Along the way they bought out a business partner to steer the company on their own terms, a chapter he covers in crafting stories in Iceland.

You do not need a family business to run this play. Working inside an existing production company, even for a couple of years, compresses a decade of trial and error into a paid education. And Republik’s partner buyout is a useful early reminder that ownership structures are not permanent: companies outgrow their founding arrangements, and that is normal.

You Will Get Things Wrong. Fix the Fundamentals.

Bear and Wolf Prandelli founded WulfenBear Media in Phoenix in 2017 as, in their words, two broke film school dropouts. Neither had worked at another company first. They built the business from scratch while learning the craft in real time, and Bear is the first to say they did nearly everything the wrong way before it clicked, the confession at the heart of the growth stages of a creative business.

The unlock was not a camera or a client. It was the unglamorous fundamentals: learning to price themselves properly, building a repeatable workflow from concept to final delivery, and running real pre-production instead of just showing up to shoot. Dialing that in changed the caliber of clients they could win. Dario and Kyrill relate hard: they describe their own early years as two freelancers who only realized they had been running a hobby, not a business, once they started interviewing operators on the show.

The Growth Stages: Freelancer, Business, Employer

That episode also produced the framework this guide is built on. A creative business moves through stages: first you discover you are really just a freelancer, then you become a genuine business, often still just the founders, then you take on employees, which requires consistent recurring income to support them, and eventually you push from small shop toward something bigger. Each stage needs the income and systems to support the next, and it is normal, even smart, to consciously pause at one. The difference between a production company and a videographer is exactly this climb.

In a feast-and-famine industry, full-time payroll only makes sense once you are busy year round. Until then, crewing out per project keeps overhead low and cash reinvestable. When you are ready to push past the founder stage deliberately, that is its own discipline, covered in our guide to scaling a video production company.

Your First Team: Partners, Freelancers, and the Adapt Test

Most of these companies were not built alone. Damian’s head of production Ian LaQua joined about two years in, a night owl with a key to the apartment who edited from midnight to five so a two-person shop had round-the-clock turnaround. Arni built with his brother Lalli, Bear with Wolf, Chris with his brother before an amicable split. Margaux went the other way: on paper the company is just her, in practice it is her plus about five core freelancers she uses constantly, scaling up only when a project needs it. Both models work. What matters is that roles are clear and overhead stays variable, the ground covered in our guide to video production business partnerships.

When you do start bringing on crew, Sean Collins offers the most useful hiring filter for a young company. Plenty of freelancers only want the cool projects. The ones worth keeping will shoot the bank video and the music video with the same energy.

When to Quit the Day Job

Three tests emerge from these stories. Gabe’s test is arithmetic: leave when the company’s profit matches your salary. Greg’s test is runway: leave when the war chest can carry you through the lean years you should assume are coming. Margaux’s test is proof: she was already doing the job for someone else, running a one-person video department, before she did it for herself. If you can pass even one of these, the leap stops being a gamble and starts being a transition. If you cannot pass any of them yet, that is not failure, that is the side-hustle stage doing its job.

The Playbook: Starting a Video Production Company in 10 Steps

Distilled from all eight founding stories, here is the sequence that repeats.

1. Start while employed. Treat evenings and weekends as the second shift, and set your leap threshold in advance: profit matches salary, or a fixed runway in the bank.
2. Pick bridge income that compounds. The best day jobs either bank savings fast or teach rare skills that become part of your pitch.
3. Keep fixed costs near zero. No office, no payroll, minimal owned gear. Rent what a job needs and let each project pay for itself.
4. Study what buyers evaluate. Learn how clients choose a video production company and build to that standard from the first job.
5. Price like a business from day one. Know your day rates and what a video actually costs to produce, then quote from cost, not confidence.
6. Reinvest early profits on the screen. Make the $2,000 job look like $5,000, and let reputation compound ahead of the bank account.
7. Chase one breakout project. A single piece that shows your market what you can do, even partly self-funded, can define your model the way one county film defined Territory 6.
8. Build a bench, not a staff. Freelancers, partner shops, and clear roles keep quality high and overhead variable until the work is year round.
9. Know which work pays and which work grows you. Keep the promotional and corporate work that funds the company front and center, and treat creative bets as investments, the balance covered in passion projects vs paying the bills.
10. Revisit the growth stages once a year. Staying a lean two-or-three-person shop is a legitimate choice. If you do climb, build the recurring income before you hire.

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.