CGC Guides

Running a Video Production Company in a Small Market

By Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov | Updated October 5, 2026

Yes, you can build a real video production company far from a major metro, and plenty of people already have. The trick is to stop treating a small market as a big market with fewer people in it. It is a different game with different rules: relationships matter more than reach, being the trusted name beats being the biggest brand, and your location can become the very thing that sets you apart.

This guide pulls together eight owners from the Creatives Grab Coffee archive who have done exactly that, in Jackson Hole, St. John’s, Omaha, Dartmouth, Reykjavik, Albuquerque, and New Orleans. Some stayed hyper-local and became the person everyone calls. Others used the same small base to reach clients around the world. Here is what they agree on, where they disagree, and how to apply it whether your town has a hundred thousand people or far fewer.

Be the Person, Not the Agency

In a small market, the buyer wants a person, not a logo. Braeden King built There Media in St. John’s, Newfoundland, a market of roughly a hundred thousand people where, for decades, the work ran through a handful of trusted veterans and the word agency barely registers. His edge was not scale, it was presence: he became the name people pass around, in a place where supporting your neighbours is close to a religion.

That dynamic is the small-market operator’s biggest advantage over a big-city studio. When a client can hire a real person they trust instead of choosing between fifty bidders, the relationship wins the work and keeps it. It is why the production company versus lone videographer question plays out differently outside the metros: clients are often buying you specifically. Braeden still built There Media as a brand, because a personal name does not scale, but he earned the brand by first being the guy. The instinct mirrors how clients choose a video production company everywhere, just more personally, and for the full local lead-generation playbook, see our guide on how video production companies actually get clients.

Know Your Local Economy Cold

Your market’s character decides your niche. In Omaha, Margaux Towne noticed something everyone else missed and built Digital Moxie Studio around it: she was the only woman-owned video company in the city, and clients sought her out for exactly that. She also read the local economy right. Omaha is unusually philanthropic, a culture Warren Buffett helped set, so its nonprofits are well funded and hungry for storytelling, and one gala she produced raised more than a million dollars in a single night.

Paul Jew read Albuquerque the same way. His family has run businesses there since 1929, and he pointed Moji Cinema squarely at the beating heart of a mid-size city: its beloved local institutions.

Then he turned that read into a growth engine. His ABQ Iconic initiative ran a public poll asking the community to name its favourite local companies, which doubled as market research and a warm introduction. He approached the nominees with a simple pitch, you were nominated and people want to hear your story, and landed everyone from a legendary local restaurant to a hot air balloon company to a 600-person plumbing firm. The lesson underneath both studios: the industries, institutions, and quirks of your town are your client list. Back in St. John’s, Braeden watched a rising tech scene bring in funded startups with far healthier budgets than the average local business, exactly the kind of growing tech clients worth building alongside.

Small Markets Run on Freelancers

Almost no successful small-market studio carries a big payroll. The default model is a small core plus a trusted freelance bench, scaled up per job and back down between them. Edward Holub has run New Orleans Video Productions this way for more than two decades, with no full-time staff, assembling crews that range from himself and an assistant to a hundred-plus for a big convention. His logic is pure economics: a great producer does not want to sit idle on salary through a slow stretch, and you do not want to pay for that idle time, so you bring people in at their day rate for the job and let them work elsewhere in between.

Tower 3, Digital Moxie, and KGB all run the same way: a lean core layered with specialists who let them staff a big commercial one week and stay lean the next. It is not a small-market compromise, it is how healthy studios of every size manage a feast-and-famine business.

There is one genuine dissent, and it is instructive. Paul Jew hired film-school graduates as full-time employees from day one at Moji Cinema. But he is candid about why he could: an existing business with systems and other revenue streams cushioned the video side while it found its feet. That is the real rule hiding inside the disagreement. Full-time hires make sense when something de-risks the slow months, whether that is other income, a book of recurring work, or genuine year-round demand. Until then, crewing out keeps overhead low and cash reinvestable.

Turn Your Location Into a Niche

The most counterintuitive small-market move is to make your location the point. Chris Kitchen started KGB Productions in Jackson Hole shooting ski films, and turned that outdoor DNA into commercial and branded work for Patagonia, ESPN, The North Face, and Wyoming Whiskey. KGB is happiest where other crews will not go, remote mountains, rivers, and deserts, and that willingness became a genuine moat. The tiny mountain town was not a limit on the work, it was the specialty that won it. Your region is a kind of niche, and if you want the full case for specializing, we built a whole guide on whether you should niche your video production company.

Arni Thor Jonsson makes the same argument from the edge of the map. Running Republik in Reykjavik, in a market too small to win on budget, he competes on creative storytelling, adaptability, and deep local expertise. His framing is blunt: in a market that small, you cannot outspend anyone, so you out-story them. Iceland’s dramatic identity, and his crews’ ability to plan around brutal, fast-changing weather, are not obstacles to apologize for. They are the reason international brands from Audi to Sony hire a studio at the top of the world.

Reach Beyond the Map

A distinct identity gets you noticed. Search gets you found. Alden Wood built Tower 3 Productions from a one-woman operation in Jackson Hole into one of the largest production companies in Wyoming, and the tool that broke the local ceiling was SEO. By investing in search, Tower 3 reaches clients well beyond the Tetons, clients who would never otherwise have found a Wyoming studio. Search is the great equalizer for a small-market shop, which is why it pays to treat ranking your video and site as seriously as the production itself.

Edward Holub found the same lever in New Orleans: after the local film industry contracted, a website he built to actually work became his main source of inbound. In a thin market, being findable is the business. The second escape route is to be remarkable. KGB’s passion projects and award-winning documentaries are not indulgences, they are the portfolio and the calling card that break the company into new markets and new kinds of clients. Between the two, a small-market studio stops being bound by its local population.

One more thread runs through every one of these owners: confidence and pricing. Alden is candid that early self-doubt kept her underpricing, and that experience is what finally let her charge what she was worth. If you are still guessing at numbers, anchor them in real ones, what a video actually costs and a clean competitive quote.

Longevity Is Adaptability

The small-market studios that last do it by changing constantly without lowering the bar. Craig Moore has run Spider Video as a deliberately boutique shop out of Dartmouth, across the harbour from Halifax, for more than twenty years, surviving every format shift from mini DV tapes to 4K to multi-camera live streams. He calls himself a friendly cousin of the big film scene, same craft, three people instead of thirty, and his durable niche is corporate storytelling built on hundreds of interviews. His unglamorous survival skill is one many owners skip: charging for the producing time nobody sees, the admin and communication and archive-digging that is real work and real money.

The same durability shows up as a mindset, and Edward Holub earned his the hard way. He watched Louisiana’s film industry boom on generous tax credits and then contract sharply when the state capped them: within about a year, roughly eighty percent of the work moved to Atlanta, where uncapped incentives and heavy studio investment built a new hub. Forces he did not control reshaped his entire local market almost overnight. What kept him working through it was an identity that travels with him from job to job.

That is the quiet warning inside every small-market success story. A single industry, employer, or incentive program can carry a local market and then pull the floor out from under it. The operators who survive stay diversified, stay marketing-driven, and keep the flexibility to follow the work. Craig’s twenty years, Alden’s fifteen, and Arni’s family production heritage tell the same story: longevity in a small market is not stability, it is a willingness to keep adapting the tools, the formats, and even the geography while the standard of the work holds.

The Hosts' Take

A quick word from the other side of this. Lapse Productions is in Toronto, one of the biggest markets in the country, so we say this with real envy: the small-market owners on this show often have something we have to fight for. Deeper client relationships. Less price-shopping. A referral loyalty and a support-local instinct that a big city, with its fifty bidders for every job, simply cannot manufacture.

What we notice most is how little of their playbook is actually about being small. The lean core-plus-freelancers model is exactly how we run in a huge market. Investing in SEO, building a distinct identity, charging for the invisible producing work, staying adaptable across formats: none of that is a small-market tactic, it is just how good studios operate. The small market simply makes the lessons impossible to ignore. If there is one thing we would underline for anyone building outside a major metro, it is that the ceiling is real but it is not fixed. Every owner here who broke it did the same two things: they became findable through search, and they built something distinct enough to travel. Do both, and your town stops being the size of your business.

The Small-Market Playbook

Pulling it together, here is the sequence.

1. Audit your local economy. List the industries, institutions, and cultural quirks that actually spend on video in your area, and pick the niche your market can genuinely sustain.
2. Become the person. Show up, support local, and build a referral reputation before you build a brand. In a small market your name travels faster than any ad.
3. Stay lean. Build a small core and a trusted freelance bench you can scale up per job. Do not put people on payroll until you are busy year round or another revenue stream de-risks the slow months.
4. Turn your location into a specialty. Whatever your region is known for, lean into it. A distinct local identity is a niche that makes you both findable and memorable.
5. Invest in SEO early. Search is how clients outside your town find you, and earning page one takes months of unglamorous work, so start now.
6. Make your website your best salesperson. In a thin market, being findable and easy to contact matters as much as the reel. Put budget ranges in the form and make reaching you effortless.
7. Use passion projects as marketing. A great self-driven film is a portfolio piece, a calling card, and a door into new markets and new clients all at once.
8. Plan for shocks. Do not bet the whole business on one industry or one incentive program. Keep your range, keep marketing, and keep the flexibility to follow the work.

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.