Episode 3

Post Covid Productivity and Job Security

When COVID-19 hit, Lapse Productions went from a full slate of projects to nothing on the calendar, almost overnight. In the third episode of Creatives Grab Coffee, hosts Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov talk honestly about the two months they spent doing very little, what finally snapped them out of it, and what productivity and job security actually look like in an industry that can stop overnight.

This is a host-only conversation about the least comfortable part of running a creative business: what you do when the work disappears and there is no playbook for it. The answer, it turned out, was to stop waiting and start auditing.

When Every Project Disappeared

The story starts the way it did for almost everyone in the industry. Projects that were in the works were suddenly cancelled, everything closed, and there was panic and fear worldwide. For a video production company, the damage is immediate: the work is physical, it happens in rooms with people in them, and when those rooms close there is nothing to reschedule into. Dario and Kyrill are candid that for the first two months they did not do much work at all, not out of laziness but because they had never faced anything like it and had no idea what the right move was.

That period reshaped how a lot of shops thought about resilience. The show later returned to it repeatedly, from making work under hard room limits in creativity shifts to rebuilding the model itself in how to adapt your business model and how to pivot your business. In September 2020, though, none of those conversations had happened yet. This is the one recorded from inside the uncertainty.

Getting Fed Up, and Auditing the Business

The turning point was not a strategy. It was frustration. After the two month mark the hosts got fed up with not being able to do anything, and started brainstorming ways to keep themselves busy. What came out of that brainstorm turned out to be more valuable than the work they had lost: a complete audit of the business, the kind of deep internal review they had been meaning to do for years and never had the time for.

That is the quiet argument in this episode. Slow periods are not dead time, they are the only time most owners ever get to look at the business itself rather than the next deliverable. Turning a lull into structural work is exactly the discipline behind focusing on internal growth, and it is what pushed Lapse Productions toward the defined, repeatable production process it runs on now.

The Business Plan They Never Wrote

The audit surfaced something uncomfortable: five years into running the company, they had never actually created a business plan. Not a bad one, not an outdated one, none at all. Plenty of creative companies run this way for years, growing on instinct, referrals, and momentum, and it works right up until the moment something external stops the momentum for you. So the plan became the first thing they started working on, immediately.

It is a fitting bookend to the previous episode’s lesson about hiring an accountant, one of several hard-won key lessons for video production companies. The pattern is the same: the boring infrastructure is what makes a creative business survivable.

Consistency, Daily Calls, and Making Content Again

Coming back from two dormant months is its own problem, and the hosts treated it as one. Rather than waiting for the industry to reopen, they created consistency in their actions deliberately, and it started with something unglamorous: daily calls to keep each other focused. Two co-founders holding each other accountable on a standing call is not a growth hack, it is just structure, and structure is what dormancy destroys first.

The other half of the restart was content. Creatives Grab Coffee was itself created to get them back in the groove of content creation, which means the episode you are listening to is part of the solution it describes. The full origin of that decision is in how we started, the show’s first episode, recorded only two weeks earlier.

Productivity and Job Security in a Fragile Industry

The other half of the title is the harder question, and it is the one the hosts dig into in the episode itself: what job security even means in an industry where every project can vanish in a week. It is a question that shaped the years that followed, whether the answer is building income that does not depend on a single client type, as in diversifying your video business income, learning to work without being in the room, as in how to be a fully remote producer, or deciding whether to stay a solo operator at all, the tradeoff broken down in video production company versus videographer.

Press play for the full conversation, recorded while the answer was still genuinely unclear.

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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.