Why the project-by-project business model is the biggest barrier to growth for video production professionals and how to fix it

Introduction

If you've been in the video production world for any length of time, you're likely familiar with its biggest challenge: lumpy cash flow caused by the project-by-project business model. One month you're on cloud nine with projects rolling in, and the next you're scrambling to find work just to keep the lights on. This feast-and-famine cycle creates enormous stress and makes it nearly impossible to plan for the future, invest in your business, or achieve the freedom you set out to find when you started your video career.

In this render break, we explore why the project-by-project model is holding video professionals back—and more importantly, how to break free from it by building certainty into your video business through a retained business model.

What You'll Learn

• Why the project-by-project business model is the biggest barrier to growth for video production professionals
• The real story behind building and losing a $20 million production company—and the lessons learned
• The three essential skills every successful video business needs beyond production expertise
• An introduction to the Retain Success Loop: a five-stage framework for building recurring revenue
• How to transition from one-off projects to long-term retainer contracts

Why This Matters

Most video professionals got into this industry because they love creating content—not because they love marketing, sales calls, pitching, and chasing payments. Yet without mastering these business skills, you'll never escape the hamster wheel of constantly hunting for the next project. The result? Burnout, stress, and a business that controls you rather than serves you.

The project-by-project model creates a vicious cycle: when you win work, all your attention goes to delivery—pre-production, shoot days, editing, client management. What you're NOT doing during those busy periods is looking for the next project. So when the current work ends, you're back to square one, scrambling to find, pitch, and win new business.

The Three Pillars of a Successful Video Business

After analysing over 2,500 projects, studying thousands of pitches and proposals, and consulting with leaders from major marketing and advertising agencies, three essential requirements emerged for building a successful video business:

1. Marketing Mastery – You need to know how to market yourself and understand your audience intensely. This drives a constant flow of opportunities perfectly suited to your business.

2. Sales Excellence – You need to know how to win pitches, proposals, and quotes by showing buyers what they really want: results.

3. Client Retention – This is the game-changer that most production companies miss. You need to know how to convert one-off projects into long-term contracts. You need to build retainers.

The Retain Success Loop

The Retain Success Loop is a five-stage framework designed to help video production professionals transition from project-based work to a retained business model:

Stage 1: Train – Constantly learning the marketing strategies, tools, technology, and developments in the video marketing world that will have the biggest impact on your customers. When you can deliver the best results, the transition to retained work becomes smoother and faster.

Stage 2: Gain – Understanding who your best and most profitable clients are. Without profit, you can't release stress or build a sustainable business. This stage ensures you're attracting clients worth retaining.

Stage 3: Obtain – The sales and marketing engine of your business. Because this comes after the Gain stage, you know the clients you're attracting will be profitable—allowing you to focus your marketing efforts without distraction.

Stage 4: Frame – Positioning yourself as the expert and securing a seat at the table. Instead of continuously responding to briefs and competing against others for one-off projects, you work in partnership with clients to formulate ideas together.

Stage 5: Retain – Transitioning clients onto long-term retainers full of profit. This is where everything you've built in the previous stages pays off, allowing you to forecast cash flow at least 12 months ahead.

The Power of Recurring Revenue

When you have a retained business model, your entire life becomes easier. You're able to work hand-in-hand with clients, effectively removing the competition. Questions about price and budget concerns fade away because you can demonstrate your worth through results. Most importantly, you can forecast your cash flow 12 months ahead—enabling confident investment in your team, equipment, family, and future.

The Retain Success Loop is designed to be repeated. Each time through, your business improves as you gain proof of concept with retained clients and evidence of the impact your work has on their businesses. By the second, third, or fourth pass through the loop, your business will be so dramatically transformed you won't recognise what it once was.

Take Action

Breaking free from the project-by-project way of working isn't just possible—it's closer than you think. Sometimes it's simply about knowing what you need to do and how to do it. The free Retain book, video course, and audio book walk you through every step of the Retain Success Loop in detail, providing the training, lessons, and processes needed to build certainty into your video business.

Get back to doing what you got into this industry for in the first place: creating beautiful video content with clients and in industries that you love.

Transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:32:00
If you've been in the video world for some time, I'm sure you're aware of the biggest challenge that the industry faces. One-off projects that lead to lumpy cash flow. Don't get me wrong, there's no better feeling than winning a project, getting the go-ahead from the client. But when it comes to an end, you're back to square one, and the search starts again. So, in today's render break, we're looking at why this happens and how to stop it by building certainty into your video business.

00:00:32:00 - 00:01:06:00
Why the project by project business model is the biggest barrier to growth for video production professionals and how to fix it. Welcome to this week's render break. The chance for you to learn a powerful marketing sales or retention tactic that will have a massive impact on your video business. So, the video production world, you love it, but you also hate it. As someone who runs a video production business, there's a good chance that you got into this game because you had a love for creating beautiful video content or a certain part of the production process.

00:01:06:00 - 00:01:48:00
You probably didn't get into it because you love marketing, sales calls, pitching, pulling quotes together, chasing payments. But as we all know, without those things, you don't get the chance to do what you do for a living. But all of those things are time-consuming, costly, and to be honest, stressful. For the vast majority of videographers, filmmakers, video production company owners, the owner, you wears a lot of hats. There's a lot of juggling to do. You're responsible for finding work, delivering it, working with the client, pre-production, shoot days, editing, dealing with amends, invoicing, chasing payments, the list goes on.

00:01:48:00 - 00:02:12:00
And that's not to mention all of the other things that come along with running your own business, like tax returns, managing cash, supplier payments, potentially hiring and managing staff or freelancers. Again, another endless list. It's no wonder that you probably feel burnt out. There's no time to rest. But when you've got work coming in, it pays well. Certainly better than most 9to5s. But when you don't and you're either taking on projects that don't really fire you up just to keep cash flowing or worse, you don't have any projects coming in at all.

00:02:12:00 - 00:02:37:00
It can be the most frustrating and stressful thing in the world. But this is so common in our industry. Everyone experiences it. One month you have a ton of projects land and you're on cloud nine. The next month you have nothing. It's the very definition of feast and famine. And this makes it so difficult to invest confidently into you, your business, into kit, maybe even your staff, offices, your family, because you never truly know what's around the corner.

00:02:37:00 - 00:03:28:00
I know this only too well. Let me give you some context. Back in 2007, I was in charge of the marketing and online video channel at Sussex County Cricket Club, which is a professional cricket club down here on the south coast of the UK. Cricket is a bit like baseball and the UK's second most popular sport. This was my first proper job and in the space of 2 years, I managed to increase their online viewing figures by 500% and I doubled revenue generated from their website two years in a row. Good for you, I hear you say. Well, thanks. But it was because of those results that I figured that I should probably look into doing this for myself. At the time, I didn't have a wife. I didn't have any kids. I didn't have a mortgage. To be honest, I didn't have any real responsibilities at all.

00:03:28:00 - 00:04:14:00
So, I handed in my notice and went solo on a shoestring and started a production company from my grandma's spare bedroom with nothing more than a camera, a laptop, and a dream. Over the course of eight years, that production company grew. We moved offices four times, developed swanky headquarters in the heart of the city. We had satellite offices all over the UK. At its peak, I employed 33 full-time members of staff, and we had hundreds of freelancers working on projects at any given time. We worked with brands such as Adidas, Nike, and Euron. We won countless awards for what we were achieving, and the company was valued at over $20 million. Then in 2018, it crashed and burned. We filed for bankruptcy.

00:04:14:00 - 00:05:10:00
I walked away bruised, embarrassed, and honestly severely depressed. My life fell apart. I spent a year buried in debt and depression, not knowing what the hell to do. I'm sure that I'll tell you more about this another day. But why am I telling you this sob story? No. Create a bit of drama at the start of a video? No. I'm telling you this because it's important for you to know that I've experienced all of the pains and joys of being a freelancer to start with and then running a growing video production company. And I've learned a lot. It's from learning from those experiences that I was able to build the foundations that I teach today. And the frameworks that I developed and all of the lessons I learned allowed me to build back stronger. So, if you're feeling stuck or frustrated or you just know that your business could be better, I'm here to tell you that it's closer than you think.

00:05:10:00 - 00:05:58:00
In the weeks and months after losing my business, I remember thinking to myself, how the how have I managed to grow this business from nothing to the leading production company in the UK for it all to disappear like this? I just couldn't get my head around it. I knew that I had always been good at sales and marketing. You don't build a business of that size that quickly without that skill. So, how did this company get so messed up that the day after I signed a major contract with the Ministry of Defense, I found myself sitting in the liquidator's office signing papers to close down my company. But then I read a book, Blackbox Thinking by Matthew Syed. To summarize that book in one sentence, mistakes are there to be learned from, but you have to take time to learn from them.

00:05:58:00 - 00:06:48:00
The lessons from that book shook me to my senses, and I set out on a mission. I remember sitting down with my wife at the dinner table. This was just after I had read that book. Our children had gone to sleep and my wife and I were talking about the future now that our main source of income had gone. I told her about the book and that I felt that I've lived too much to just give up now. I wanted to go again. Now, she was obviously wary because she had seen the stress that I put myself through. She lived those moments with me. So did my children. She'd seen me working crazy hours just to keep my head above water. But I made a promise to her there and then. I promised her that I was never going to make those same mistakes again. I would study everything, the good, the bad, the ugly.

00:06:48:00 - 00:07:56:00
So, I took time out to do just that. I reviewed every single one of the 2,500 projects that we had won and delivered in that time. I studied thousands of our pitches, proposals, and quotes. And I studied our industry, what we do right, what we do wrong. And at the time that I lost my production business, a few other large production companies went under, too. I studied other businesses in other industries. I was lucky enough to have built strong relationships with the CEOs and the presidents of many of the biggest marketing and advertising agencies in the UK. So, I had lunches, dinners, calls, and meetings with about 30 of them to find out what they did and how their businesses were so successful. And here's what I found. To build a successful video business, you of course need to know how to create video and how to keep your clients happy. But outside of that, you need three things.

00:07:56:00 - 00:08:52:00
Number one, you need to know how to market yourself and you need to understand your audience intensely. Number two, you need to know how to win pitches, proposals, and quotes. And you need to show the buyer what they really want, and that's results. And finally, and this is the one that I missed and ultimately the downfall of my business, number three, you need to know how to convert one-off projects to long-term contracts. You need to build retainers. No [expletive] I hear you say. And yes, I understand that it probably shouldn't have taken me eight years to figure this out. But when you're in and amongst it and up against it, sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. But ultimately, through all of that research, all of those experiences being in and delivering thousands of pitches, proposals, and quotes, working on thousands of projects with tiny companies to start with, right through to the world's biggest brands, I was able to develop three frameworks that gave me the ability to bounce back.

00:08:52:00 - 00:09:50:00
I built a simple marketing system that generates a constant flow of opportunities that are perfect for me to my business. I built a simple sales system that converts the vast majority of my pitches, proposals, and quotes to paid projects. And the big one, I built a simple retention system that allowed me to effortlessly transition one-off projects to long-term contracts. Within weeks of starting my second business, I had secured a £200,000 retainer that's over a quarter of a million dollars with the world's leading energy company, Shell, and a £500,000 plus retainer. That's almost $700,000 with the UK's biggest estate agency firm, Countrywide. My life and the lives of my loved ones changed dramatically. I now don't have the stress that I had for eight years of running my own production company, and I'm a completely different person. Life is good. And the really exciting thing is that when I started to teach this to production professionals, they saw similar results.

00:09:50:00 - 00:10:48:00
Some landed bigger deals, some much smaller, but the common theme was that they had a constant flow of opportunities coming into their business. They were converting the vast majority of those opportunities to paid projects, and they were able to convert those paid projects to long-term contracts or retainers. We work in an industry that is built upon a project by project business model. It's feast and famine. One month you'll have a few projects land and you'll be on cloud nine. The next you'll be scratching around taking on projects that you know aren't right for you, but you have to take them just to keep cash flowing or worse, you won't have any projects land at all. But what I've learned and what my students have learned is that there's absolutely no reason for it to be that way. Your business probably exists because you have a love for production or shooting or editing or animating or even producing and you wanted to make that your job.

00:10:48:00 - 00:11:28:00
You figure that if you can earn more money than you would in a normal job, well, that's just a bonus. Now, that's not necessarily a problem, but when you win a new project or a certain part of a production, your attention turns to pre-production or shot planning or storyboarding or finding talent or location scouting or whatever it is that you need to do in order to deliver on that project. What you're not doing whilst you're on that all day shoot or in pre-production meetings or cranking out that midnight edit is looking at where the next project is coming from. So when that project is complete, you're back to square one and you've got to find, pitch for, and win the next project. And that's hard. That's time consuming. And I'll tell you this, it's incredibly stressful.

00:11:28:00 - 00:12:58:00
And that's just the production side of your business. We all know there are other things that you have to focus on. Landlords, bank managers, staff, insurance, purchasing equipment, issuing invoices, chasing payments. That's just the nature of the industry that we are in. But here's the thing, all of this is so common, and that's understandable because, as I just mentioned, video production professionals get into the game because they love creating video or a certain part of the video process. They don't start a video business because they love sales and marketing. And this is why so many production professionals end up feeling burnt out, working crazy hours, and never really enjoying their business for what it is and the reason that they got into the game in the first place. And this means that you're never really sure where your next project is coming from. You can never forecast your cash more than a month or two ahead. And that means that you can never really invest into you, your team, your offices, your kit, your family, your life, or anything confidently because, well, you just don't know what's around the corner.

00:12:58:00 - 00:13:56:00
So, losing my business was the best thing that ever happened to me. It allowed me to get out of, albeit with a bumpy landing, that neverending hamster wheel and get systems in place that allowed me to build a better business. So, imagine what it would be like if you could see more than 12 months down the road. How good would that be if you had 12 months worth of projects lined up booked in? That would be cool, right? What would that mean for you, for your business, for your family, for your stress levels? Well, it's closer than you think. It's more realistic than you think. It is so much easier than you think. And as I said earlier, sometimes it's just about knowing what you need to do and how to do it. Now, I've written three books that I offer as free video courses, all built off the back of what I've learned. The lead generation machine is focused on the marketing strategy that drives a constant flow of opportunities that are perfect for you into your video business.

00:13:56:00 - 00:14:56:00
Conversion 90 is focused on sales and teaches you how to convert over 90% of your pitches, proposals, and quotes to paid and profitable projects. You can get all of them via the link below, but it's the third book that I want to talk about here because this helps answer the challenge in question today. How do you break free from the project by project way of living? The third book is titled Retain. And again, it's free via the links below this video. So, what I want to do here is to spend a bit of time talking about that framework and how you can apply it to your video business to build certainty and see at least 12 months down the line when it comes to cash. There's a great couple of books called Built to Last and Good to Great written by Jim Collins. In these books, the author studies what truly makes a business successful, one that lasts. The common theme with the most successful companies, apart from great leadership and team morale, was contracts, extended long-term contracts that built foundations for solid, secure empires, recurring revenue.

00:14:56:00 - 00:16:06:00
I looked back at everything that I had built, and this was the one thing that was missing. I was never focused on locking my clients into long-term contracts. Having worked in the industry for 16 years now, I knew that no other production company was actually very good at this either. In the run-up to me losing my business, several other major production companies in the UK went under too. So, I studied what they did, what they didn't do. It was the exact same thing as me. No long-term contracts, no retainers, no contracts that they could bank on, build a business on, or make solid business decisions on. This became my number one priority. I knew that if I could fix this, I'd be able to bounce back stronger than ever before. And I knew that I'd be able to teach others how to do the same. Now, because of my background and experience, I knew what marketers wanted. I had all the marketing knowledge. I knew that a retained business model would work for production companies, but they would just have to shift the way in which they went about their work and help marketing professionals achieve their goals.

00:16:06:00 - 00:17:18:00
You see, when you have a retained business model, your entire life becomes so much easier. You're able to work hand in hand with your client and completely eradicate the competition. You remove any question of price or any budgetary concerns because you are able to show your worth to your client. You lock your client in and you're able to drive real results. But you're also able to forecast your cash flow at least 12 months ahead, which is one of the biggest stresses that any production company faces. So the challenge was clear. How does a production company or freelancer build a retained business model into their business? I set out to find the key to the biggest stress within the production world. Lumpy cash flow that comes from a project by project business model. I studied this hard and dedicated about two years of my life to building and fine-tuning a simple process that I could work into my consultancy, but also one that can be built into any video business around the world. Whether that be a 50 person strong agency or a self-employed freelancer.

00:17:18:00 - 00:18:20:00
That simple process is now called the retain success loop. And it's a process that has allowed me to secure multi-million dollar contracts for me and many of my clients. It's simple, it's effective, and all it requires is a few simple processes to be built into your business in order to achieve everything that a retained business model brings. So, we know the benefits of a retained business model and what it will do for you, your business, and the people around you. So, I'm not going to labor those points anymore. You know the freedom that it will give you and you know the way in which your stress levels will be reduced. But the question that I want to address here is why is it so difficult to build a retained business model within a video production company or within a video freelancing operation. Well, there are two main reasons that production professionals struggle with this. The first is knowledge. Knowing what you need to do and how to do it. And the second is structure. Having a process to follow in order to make continual improvements.

00:18:20:00 - 00:19:02:00
And that's exactly what the retain success loop will provide you with. The framework outlined in today's session will provide you with the training, the lessons, the how-tos, and most importantly, it will provide you with a breakdown of how to get there. When you're running a video business, you're constantly thinking about and juggling things like selling, delivering projects, keeping the client happy, growing your team, maybe investing into kit, keeping on top of your game, paying the bills, chasing payments. The list is endless. So, it's easy to become overwhelmed with it all. Dipping in and out of the different parts of your business, wearing different hats, never really focusing and making big gains. That's why having structure and a process to follow is so important. When you break it down, it's simple. You need to attract clients. You need to win clients. You need to deliver for clients. And you need to build ongoing relationships with those clients.

00:19:02:00 - 00:20:08:00
And there's certain things that you need to put in place within each of those stages to ensure that you are doing them constantly and autonomously. When production professionals realize that a project is coming to an end or they can see that there's a bit of a gap in their schedule, they panic. They start to make phone calls. They update their show reel. They start posting more on social media. But it's so sporadic and it's so reactive that it never really achieves what they are intending. And that's why the retain success loop is so powerful and so important. By working on each of the five stages that I'm going to walk through and putting in the processes that I will guide you through, you won't need to be panicking. You won't need to be reactive. You'll have your systems set up and you'll continually be fine-tuning them. So, let's take a look at what the retain success loop is and what these stages are. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the retain success loop and I guarantee that this is going to change your life.

00:20:08:00 - 00:21:01:00
Now, as I mentioned, there are five steps to the retain success loop. The first is train. The second is gain. The third is obtain. The fourth is frame. And the final stage is retain. They're structured in this way for a reason. Let's quickly talk through them now to give you the context. And then we'll go into a little more detail before developing the processes that we need to build into your business. Stage one, train. Train is all about learning. Not just learning the marketing and sales strategies that are going to be most powerful to you and your business, but constantly learning the strategies, tools, technology, and developments in the video marketing world that are going to have the biggest impact on your customers. If you can get and show the best results for your clients, it makes the whole journey so much easier and the transition to a retained business model will be so much smoother and quicker. But you have to be armed with that knowledge.

00:21:01:00 - 00:21:54:00
Stage two, gain. So in the gain stage, we are constantly learning and fine-tuning who our best clients are and exactly what they look like. We need to fully understand what are the most profitable types of clients, industries, and types of video that make our production operation as profitable as possible. It's all well and good having big names, impressive clients, but without profit, you aren't going to release any of the stress and ultimately you won't have a profitable business. And if you don't have a profitable business, well, you won't have a business for very long. On top of that, if you manage to transition an unprofitable client onto a long-term contract, well, clearly that's not good news. Stage three, obtain. The obtain stage is all about how we attract and win new clients. It's the real sales and marketing element to the retain success loop. And because that stage comes after gain, we know that the clients and projects that we are attracting are going to be profitable.

00:21:54:00 - 00:22:40:00
This means that we can really focus on getting the right marketing strategy in place to attract the right clients without any distraction or worries. It means that our sales and marketing is arrowed in and fully optimized. Stage four frame. So the frame stage is all about our content and most importantly how we position ourselves as the expert and get that seat at the table. Getting that seat at the table and working in partnership with your client and not just responding to briefs is vital to winning long-term contracts. We want to be working with our client to formulate these ideas. We don't want to continually be responding to briefs and pitching against two others in order to win a one-off project. That's not a good use of our time and can become very stressful in itself. It's something that can be easily removed if we frame ourselves in the right way.

00:22:40:00 - 00:23:40:00
Then stage five, retain. So, the final stage of the retain success loop is retain. This is where we transition our clients onto long-term retainers that are full of profit. It's also where we learn how to manage and grow those accounts, adding further certainty to our business. And that is what we've been building towards throughout the previous four stages of the retain success loop. But it doesn't stop there. Once we've moved through the retain loop once, we go back around fine-tuning and continually improving. The second time around is always much easier because we have the proof of a retain model with our clients and we know the impact that our work is having on their businesses which makes the sales and marketing phase so much easier. You'll find that once you pass through the retain success loop the second, third, fourth time and so on. Your business will be so dramatically transformed that you won't even recognize what it once was.

00:23:40:00 - 00:24:35:00
So what I want to do here is to invite you to build a retained business model. As I've mentioned before, below this video is a link that will take you through to the Retain book, video course, and audio book. And that book walks you through the Retain Success Loop. And it takes you through in detail every single step that you need to take in order to build a retained business model into your video business. It's simple, it's straightforward, it's clear, and concise. It's a system that has now been implemented by over 3,000 video production professionals around the world. And you can get that right now for free. Sometimes it's just about knowing what you need to do and how to do it. That ultimately is what the retain system does. So, hit that link below, check out the course, break free from the project by project way of working, build certainty into your video business, and get back to doing what you got into the game for in the first place, creating beautiful video content with clients and in industries that you love. Thanks for being here and have a fantastic day.