Note: This is a chapter I wrote for a book about the roles of CEOs written by CEOs.
Inside the Minds: Concrete Pictures – JEFF BOORTZ, CEO
A pioneer in promotion, Jeff Boortz has spent more than two decades designing for and promoting brands within the entertainment industry. As the founder Concrete Pictures, it is Jeff Boortz’s artistic vision that has set the tone for the award-winning creative agency and multiplatform production company. For over 10 years, Boortz’s leadership has earned his company international prominence and extraordinary kudos for successfully launching MSO brands and television networks in the U.S., Latin America, Europe and Asia.
Concrete Pictures’ impressive roster of current and past clients includes Charter Communications, Comcast, Discovery Channel, Travel Channel, MTV, ESPN, HBO, CBS, NBC, FOX, Showtime, A&E, Telemundo, and Court TV, among others. On the international front, clients include Pro Sieben, and Sat 1 in Germany, Sony’s AXN, Animax, and SET, Universal’s 13th Street in France, and Canal Fox in Latin America.
A thought leader with an ardent rebel spirit, Boortz has personally designed and produced concept-to-completion brand expressions: marketing strategies, positioning documents, on-air packaging and promotional campaigns. He is the recipient of multiple international design awards, including two Emmys and “Best of Show” accolades from the Broadcast Designers Association (BDA).
Boortz’s renaissance spirit has led him into areas branding firms don’t usually venture, including the production of Journeys of the Heart, a 9 Hour pro-social reality series for Rainbow Media’s Equator HD channel set at an orphanage for deaf children in Peru. Not content to stop with programming Boortz conceived and created an original HD network, Moov HD for the VOOM HD platform, to expand the definition of television programming to include non-narrative motion arts.
Boortz has also channeled his passion for storytelling and the film medium into successes as a producer of independent art-house feature films (Dream With the Fishes, One, and Cherish) and as feature director (Tear It Down). Additionally, he expanded the scope of Concrete Pictures to include film effects, creating over a dozen futuristic advertisements for Steven Spielberg’s feature film Minority Report.
Boortz received an M.A. in Film Production from USC Film School and his B.F.A. in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Chapter Content:
I’ll Follow You Anywhere
I dedicate this chapter to Lauri, Gabriel and Nola, without whom work would have no meaning.
The role of the CEO
The Chief Executive Officer is the heart and soul of a company. His contribution to the company’s success is comprised of two equal parts, leadership and passion.
Leadership comes first. The entire company either marches or sits by the side of the road, based on the CEOs vision, and his ability to translate that vision into a compelling mission and tactics to achieve it. A CEO cannot succeed alone, in fact, only by energizing and motivating others to pursue a common goal then giving them the rope to do it, does he stand a chance at success.
Passion is next. There are a million ways to make a lot of money. The least effective of them is to set out just to make a lot of money. Why? Because there is never enough money to reward you for an endless string of eighty hour weeks. The work must, on some level, be its own reward. The only way that is possible is if the work you’re doing is in an area you are passionate about. If you love it, it doesn’t feel like work. If you love it, you will find a way to succeed when the casual or cynical competitors give up. I have been inspired by the twenty-year-old dot.com billionaires. They don’t spend years eating pizza and sleeping under their desks for the money. They do it for love.
Balance and Guidance
When building a team, a CEO first needs to understand what each team member’s role will be. He needs to select his core team with an understanding of how they will interact with each other. Then, butt out. The CEO that installs puppets instead of strong individuals is doomed to fail. Many minds are more powerful and productive than his alone, unless he dominates and controls them to the point that they cannot think and act freely.
What a CEO does day-to-day varies based on the roles and responsibilities of the rest of his team, but his most important task is the daily reinforcement of the company’s vision and mission; ensuring that others don’t lose sight of the forest, while climbing the trees. The CEOs vision and passion inspire his team. If he is smart enough to stop there, and let the team turn that passion into creativity, the result will be innovation. The CEO must not micro-manage the creative process but must be able to recognize and champion the innovations of his team to the rest of the company, the board, and, of course, the marketplace.
The COO is the most important member of the CEO’s team. Side-by-side they run the company. The CEO should strive in this key relationship to be the thorn in the COO’s side. The COO is the Yin. He wants an orderly, predictable, consistent progression moving from one, step-by-step, through to ten. The CEO is the Yang, constantly and creatively disrupting that progression in search of a breakthrough, a short-cut, an elevator, or rocket ship that makes his company jump from one, not to ten, but to one hundred.
Though he rarely gets to choose them (or at least not all of them), the board of directors is the second most important part of the CEO’s team. A good board of directors is like having your parents, your spouse, your school principal, and Gandalf the Wizard covering your back. In order to project confidence to his employees and the market a CEO needs a sounding board that can validate or temper his ambitions, fears, aspirations and the means of attaining them. He needs a place to think freely apart from the scrutiny of either the company or the marketplace.
I’m not an MBA but I can read. That means that I, as CEO can also include some of the greatest business minds of all time on my team. The library and bookstore shelves are brimming with great advice and guidance for CEOs. I found Jim Collins, Good to Great makes a lot of sense. I also read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowieck. Both of these authors stress the power of building a group of INDEPENDENT minds in pursuit of a common goal. Finally, I reread Joesph Campbell, occasionally to remind me to always “follow my bliss.”
Ensuring that your team can continue playing and winning after you’ve left the game is a CEO’s final responsibility. Succession can be a ticklish problem. The CEO should remember not to try to clone himself, nor should he choose a successor who will fail so that, by comparison, his own tenure will seem brilliant. Think like a parent and help your daughter (company) find the right partner (new CEO) that will allow her to be happy, grow, and thrive long after the departing CEO is dust.
Think Fast, Communicate Clearly, and for God’s Sake, Focus
The importance of the CEO is greatest in emerging or fast-evolving industries. In our industry, which boils down to promoting brands through electronic media, things are changing at a blistering pace. In order to navigate this rushing river effectively, a media CEO has to understand the processes of his businesses from top to bottom and be able to connect with and inspire the board of directors as well as the entry-level animator. The gap between these senior and junior positions is growing wider with each technological advance, and it affects the ways people across the spectrum relate to one another. Can you inspire and motivate someone if you cannot communicate with them? No. Older CEOs must immerse themselves in new trends, consumer electronics and pop-culture and younger savvy CEOs must rapidly gain the necessary experience and maturity to lead their companies. If they last long enough some CEOs must eventually do both.
The fast pace of technological change contributes to one of the greatest challenges faced by most CEOs today. It is difficult to remain focused when new opportunities are bubbling up every minute, and the deck of social order is getting reshuffled every day. Spotting and exploiting trends, harnessing new technologies to create an edge in business, or drafting off an emerging social phenomenon is no longer a yearly or quarterly pursuit, it must occur every day.
In this “Wild, Wild West” business climate, the CEO is like Shane, the protector of the company’s culture. Everyone looks to the CEO to see if the company knows where it is going, is passionate about the work, is respectful of the employee’s contributions to the company’s success, and their quality of life inside and outside the company. The CEO should give voice to what everyone is feeling, push hard when hard work is required, indulge when indulgence is needed. Another way to look at it is that the CEO is the collective soul of the business. If the soul is sick, bored, confused, or disenchanted, the company culture will be too. If the soul is vibrant, optimistic, dedicated, and creative, the culture will be too.
That’s the internal role of the CEO. Externally, the CEO has to be a master communicator of the company’s vision, mission, and passion for the work to investors and the marketplace. We are a small company, not funded by venture capitalists. So we are our own investors. Being an investor means taking a gamble. Do I put money here? Or there? The answer depends largely on who I believe has the passion, talent, skills and experience to succeed. The CEO is the face of the company and the person I look to when formulating that answer. In the companies I invest in, I look to the CEO to judge whether the business knows where it is going and how to get there. I look for signs of focus or distraction, confidence, or strain.
The good CEO identifies relevant trends in the marketplace two ways. First, he immerses himself in the culture he or she hopes to serve. This is where passion comes in. It is impossible to make great camping gear if you hate the outdoors. Likewise, it is difficult to anticipate trends with girl tweens, unless you are one, or have a daughter that is. There is no substitute for primary, first-hand, knowledge when trying to predict the future or recognize and exploit a powerful emerging trend.
Secondly, the CEO identifies relevant trends by studying the competition. Human brains make decisions through evolutionary algorithms. We sense our surroundings, then compare them to our memories of similar situations to decide how to act. Over the millennia we’ve learned that other humans are doing the same thing, and so we compare our proposed response to what we see others in the same situation doing. If we a see a tiger and we think it’s time to run, but we don’t see anybody else running, we probably won’t run either. Likewise, if we are attracted by the smell of Italian cooking and see that the restaurant is packed, we’ll probably join the line. Trade groups are filled with businesses just like your own. Studying what they do and considering their actions quickly and carefully when deciding what to do yourself can mean the difference between getting in on a breaking trend or not.
Getting a Thinner Slice of a Bigger Pie
Television and the World Wide Web have ushered in an era of borderless culture, one that is not homogenous, but rather a giant melting-pot, with pockets of specialization churning in a broth of common wants, needs, and desires. The geographic relationship between the CEO and his or her customers, suppliers, and partners is already not as important as their product’s relevance to the lifestyle, needs, dreams and aspirations of their customers.
That said, a good CEO understands that you don’t need to serve the whole marketplace in order to succeed. In fact, he knows that his company cannot be all things to all people. Finding his company’s niche in the global marketplace is critical and will increasingly have less to do with where his customers are, and more to do with how their needs, and desires align with his company’s mission, values, services and products.
In a world where people, goods, money and ideas travel vast distances easily and rapidly, but where wages and standards of living vary wildly some CEOs will see opportunity. It is likely that lot of money will be made by cynically exploiting the margins between what constitutes a living wage, and acceptable quality in the first and the third worlds over the next few decades. Thankfully, this sort of neo-colonialism is not a winning long-term CEO growth strategy. As the changes in India demonstrate, i.e. the rise of a middle class and corresponding increase in the costs of doing business resulting from the out-sourcing of services by U.S. companies demonstrates that variances in markets are temporary and eventually equalize. That is unless force is applied to maintain the upper hand—but I don’t even want to go there.
As I’ve said, a good CEO recognizes that he cannot accomplish much of anything alone. He unites people in pursuit of a common goal within his company. On another order of magnitude, he recognizes that companies, especially tiny ones like mine, can accomplish a hell of a lot more in concert with other like-minded companies. Seeking out companies that are in pursuit of parallel or complimentary goals, and forging mutually beneficial relationships with them gives each member in the association an edge over their direct competitors, and a greater chance of achieving their mission. The CEO is the ambassador for the company in the formation of these types of alliances. All business success is a function of relationships. Strong relationships based on mutual respect and trust are the cornerstone of the free market. Networking is the way these relationships are forged, and nurtured. So, yes, successful networking IS VITAL to the CEO’s success.
Marketing and public relations are tools for the outward expression of the company’s passion, experience, talent and progress towards the successful completion of their mission. Marketing and PR allow the CEO to speak directly to the business’s stakeholders and exert some level of control over the messages they receive about the above.
Failing Successfully
No matter how perfect the plan, and how carefully it is adhered to, failure is a possibility. Accept that it will happen, often. Denying failure allows it to grow and spread like a cancer through your culture and business. Only by embracing it and defining it, can you plot a new course towards success. I’ve learned the hard way that failure, left to fester, can eat the soul of your business. It undermines the company’s faith and trust in their leaders, and the leaders’ trust and patience with one another. Failure is the knocking down of the tower of blocks the CEO, with his company, has built. In order to convince it to start building the tower again, the CEO has to convince his team that the site is still right, or that another should be chosen, and how the design should be improved so that the tower, once rebuilt, doesn’t fall again. Most importantly, the CEO must show his team why the world will be a better place for all if only they can succeed in bringing another tower into existence.
The good CEO thinks like a parent. The most important aspects of a goal are that it brings him or her closer to the successful completion of his business mission. For a parent the goal is raising a good boy or girl, who will be happy and prosperous. Likewise, the CEO wants a company that is happy and prosperous. Goals that do not align with the company’s vision and mission though successfully achieved, actually undermine the business’ prospects for success. Making your painfully shy son audition for the school play will more likely lead to his embarrassment and further isolation instead of popularity and happiness. Goals that are too far-reaching, like trying to teach your toddler algebra, will lead first to failure, then frustration, and ultimately resignation. The CEO should insure that goals are aligned with the company’s vision and mission, and that they may be aspired to, and achieved.
The better a goal is defined the easier it is to develop objectives based on it. Objectives are all about defining quantifiable, desired results. It is easy to see whether your company has achieved a well defined objective. For example, our goal is to become a leading agency in the promotion of socially responsible enterprises. An objective that flows from that goal is to become the agency of record for two “fourth sector” businesses in 2007. We have something attainable to strive for, and, come December 31, 2007, we will absolutely know whether we have succeeded or not.
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Seizing Opportunities for Expansion/Growth
My company is at an interesting point in its growth. Our core business, the promotion of TV network brands and their programming is contracting rapidly under tremendous pressures.
The TV network brand landscape, which saw a tremendous expansion only a decade ago (from a dozen to several hundred niche networks both domestically and internationally) has slowed and is beginning to reverse. Cable companies, that are using their limited bandwidth to deliver more profitable services (VOIP, High-Speed Internet, HDTV) have declared, “No new linear networks.” New TV Network brand launches, that my company once sold as many as a dozen a year, now come around once every several years, as existing networks shift their focus.
The proliferation of advanced low-cost video cameras and computers, and advances in readily available software have lowered the barriers to entry for creative people wanting to enter and compete in creating motion graphics and promos for network clients. There used to be only a half-a-dozen companies that could do what we do. Now there are over 100. The more of us there are, and the cheaper the tools we use get, the less customers are willing to pay us for doing the same job. Over supply + shrinking demand = downward price pressure.
Dealing with a Contracting Market
Television has always been about “selling eyeballs to advertisers.” Quantifying those eyeballs and demonstrating a direct cause-and-effect relationship between identity and promotion efforts with the blunt instrument of Nielsen ratings was acceptable when they were the only game in town, but now there is the internet. Advertisers are attracted by its highly quantifiable results and the interactive relationship it offers with potential customers. As ad dollars move from traditional TV to the web, networks are likewise shifting their resources from on-air marketing to online marketing and promotion. Television Networks, though evolving, are still siloed, with distinct On-Air and Online departments. Having had a long relationship with the on-air group, doing linear animations and promos doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get work from the new power brokers, the online groups within networks. They already have long relationships with creative shops that supported them in the lean upstart years to reward.
So how does a CEO help his company to grow in a contracting market? First, he takes a deep breath and re-evaluates his business from the top to the bottom. He ask himself, “is there still a business here?” Having been around since the 80’s I witnessed the introduction of the Mac into the design business, and watched, almost overnight, the evaporation of an entire industry of Typesetters. Poof. One day they were indispensable, the next day they were gone. Finding an answer to this question requires an assessment of several things:
What is the business that we’re in?
We needed to redefine the business we are in from, “We create and promote TV Network and Distributor brands in the linear video medium,” to “We create and promote brands in visual media.” Becoming technology agnostic has allowed us to launch an interactive media division, and a content division in the last year. We are now involved not just in TV but in every medium from mobile, to TV, to HDTV, to VOD, to Broadband, to DVDs, to Feature Films and even IMAX.
What are our Core Competencies?
The new filter for what we get involved with is not a medium, but rather our core competencies and our passions. Our core competencies are strategic marketing, identity design, motion graphics, editing, live-action production, experience design and story telling. Our skills in these areas can be manifested in all the media listed above and any that might be developed tomorrow.
How can we differentiate ourselves from our competitors? And, where does our passion lie?
Our passion, working to help socially responsible enterprises thrive and contribute to making the world a better place for all, has been present in our Vision and Mission statements since launch, but has, until now, been subordinated to the pursuit of all business that fits our skill set. In re-embracing our passion, we have discovered the means to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. Our goal is to be recognized as an expert in the promotion of socially responsible brands and the corporations behind them. In the present marketplace, the fortunate alignment between our passion and the rapid growth of the like-minded “fourth sector” businesses mean that we will be able to offer our services to clients inside and beyond the TV industry. Again, these like-minded companies are increasingly finding the need to harness our core competencies to express their brands in the visual mediums I have described.
Once we have reassessed our business assumptions developing a growth strategy built upon them is possible. Our growth strategy is simple: offer more products and services to the customers we have and find new customers beyond the entertainment industry.
We are expanding our expertise beyond TV into interactive, mobile, and theatical media. This permits us to offer more products and services to our existing customers. We are expanding beyond TV networks and distributors to corporations and institutions and narrowing our focus to socially responsible enterprises. I usually identify specific growth opportunities and my COO, Drew Fleming, tries to shoot holes in them. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he’s converted. If he is converted, we begin the process of involving our VP of Production, our VP of Creative Services, our VP of Business Development and our PR firm.
The geographical proximity of growth opportunities vary and the percentages have fluctuated wildly over the years. When cable expanded here, 100 percent of our business was domestic. When the expansion cooled domestically, it took off internationally and we did seventy-five percent of our work internationally. Now, broadband is global, and clients are global, so the geographic location of the client or the end user becomes almost meaningless beyond the need to market our services across the globe.
In the past we have financed all growth initiatives out of the gross profits of our core business. Since that core is contracting, and the cost of effectively and quickly seizing the market opportunities we have identified is substantial, as we need more people to handle big corporate projects and new types of expertise in our company, we have begun seeking capital from outside investors.
We have learned over the years how difficult it is to convince venture capitalists that there is a pot-of-gold at the end of the service rainbow, but I think we are entering a new era. YouTube, for example, was not about technology, it was about harnessing the power of a commonly available technology to offer a service and gather a large community of desirable consumers together. Venture capitalists who remain obsessed with defensible patents will miss out on the next big social phenomena and pot-of-gold.
If we can secure the financing we are looking for, we will be able to hire the right people, do the kind of showcase projects for customers in the new segments that our business development executives will be able to leverage more and larger work. In addition, we will be able to build beta sites for some truly innovative spec projects that will help forge the future of media. At the end of the day, it is all about sales. We look for at least thirty-percent growth year-over-year, without reducing profitability. That is sort of the baseline on which we add the wildcards of speculative media innovation projects that we hope will yield that pot-of-gold for us and our investors.
Growth, development, and innovation is essential. If the shark doesn’t keep swimming, it will die. I wish I could say that we make a plan and stick with it, then judge the results quarterly, yearly, or whatever, but things move too fast. We must constantly, or at least on a weekly basis, develop plans to capitalize on opportunities at every level of the business. The ROI for these efforts is simply the effect they have on the gross sales and profitability of our business each month. We are now, however, attempting to get a little distance from the changes, so that we can act more strategically, and less by merely reacting to rapidly changing forces swirling around us.
It is important not to panic in a contracting market. As I’ve pointed out, some of the services we presently offer are undervalued. But we are confident that this will change in the foreseeable future. The design industry is suffering a temporary technology drag that has effectively downgraded Design for the TV medium to Commercial Art. By this I mean that, unlike in interactive media, it is impossible for our clients to judge with any degree of certainty how much our work affects the success of the programming or network brands it promotes. Design is the crafting of a client’s message in a visual medium in order to cause the consumers they target to choose their product, watch their show, or engage with their brand. Commercial art, on the other hand, is pure decoration, usually chosen for its appeal to the sensibilities of the client, rather than its effectiveness in altering the behavior of the consumer. Because the effectiveness of a design solution cannot be determined clients trust their gut, and their personal taste when choosing solutions, and companies. But all this is about to change.
Once the migration to IP based TV is complete, or TV technology leaps forward to the level of sophistication existing on the web, our clients will know exactly how effective our strategy, design, promotions, and content was in helping to achieve their goals. Commercial artists will become designers again. Solutions that are effective rather than just visually appealing will yield a higher ROI for our clients. Visual appeal is completely subjective, the definition changes with each individual. Effectiveness is quantifiable, and therefore can be agreed upon by many people at once. The company that offers effective design solutions to a client’s branding, design, promotion, and content problems is delivering measurable value to that client, and will, in turn, become more valuable than its competitors. Already in interactive media, and soon in television, delivering proof of our effectiveness will give Concrete Pictures tremendous competitive advantage.
But are we too late? Robert Greenburg Associates, and Schematic, and a few others identified the power of interactive media years ago and have established themselves in this area. We believe, however, that while they have built up a base of clients and great work, the fact that the market is expanding so rapidly means that there is plenty of room for a newcomer. When they shifted their focus to interactive media television and the Web were different worlds with only thread-like connections. These companies shifted their focus to experience design and paid less attention to motion graphics, linear promotion, and content creation. Now television brands are building out huge web-based presences and those traditional skills and talents are again becoming very important. As we have taken the steps to build a strong interactive experience design operation, our competitors must re-build their motion graphics, promotion, and content capabilities. We will likely both offer a full range of services across all media about the same time. Even so, clients will likely not care who got there first, but only who is more effective in achieving the results they desire.
We do not have a board, other than our shareholders, who are also officers in the corporation. Going forward is essential, so we have begun building one. I like the venture capital model. It offers the capital and guidance needed to transform passion and creativity into action, and action into value. Check back with me next year at this time and I will have a great example of how this practice benefited our c