strategy

Eric Miller Animation’s 2017 New Year’s Resolutions

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I wanted to take a moment to set some goals for 2017 on what I want Eric Miller Animation to accomplish. I feel it is important to write down my goals at the beginning of each year, and to constantly revisit those goals as priorities change. You can see how I did on my 2016 goals in my earlier post “Report Card for 2016’s Resolutions“. Here are my goals for 2017.

New Bink Short:
It would be an understatement to say the progress on Bink is slow.  It has always been on the back burner as we work on other projects. I also need to make sure I have enough money coming in from client projects to pay for the work on Bink.  This situation has caused our progress to be much slower then I hoped it would be.  We are currently working on a 3-4 minute Bink short, and my goal for this year is to have it finished.  The major hangups right now is getting the fur working properly for lighting, and locking down a great story.

Grow Team:
This year is all about new relationships for me.  I will be spending a lot of my time meeting with talented people in the industry, and finding ways for us to work together.  I would love to be able to build a great team of very talented people who are ready to take on any new challenge which might come our way.  My goal is to bring on more people to help grow the company. This could be producers to help bring on more clients, directors or creative directors to take the creative lead on our projects, or advisors who can guide me with their wisdom and experience.

New Clients:
We have had 5 clients we have worked with since I started the business in July of 2014.  I would love to continue working with these clients on new projects, and I would also like to bring on additional clients.  The first few years have been about getting things setup, but for this year I really want to take off.  I will be setting a very ambitious goal of 5 new clients in 2017.  I think with the momentum we ended last year with that this is an attainable goal.

Be Profitable in 2017:
I’m actually surprised I have been able to keep the company profitable considering most business can expect to loose money in the first few years.  So far the only year I was not profitable was 2015, and that was because we were doing work on the Bink Teaser.

With my business 1 project could be the difference of a profitable year or a loss.  I’m not selling widgets to consumers where it is all about pushing product.  My business is more about building relationships with my clients, and hoping when they have animation work they think of Eric Miller Animation Studios.

While the business has been profitable I have yet to take a paycheck for myself.  I have been keeping the money in the business to help it grow.  My goal for 2017 is we make enough of a profit that I can take a reasonable yearly salary, while still having money left over to grow the business.

Grow Social Media Followers:
Growing our social media is important to me for several reasons.  I want to be able to share all the amazing things we are working on, and also would love to increase our chances of finding those new clients.  I think social media is a very cost effective way to market our services to grow the business.  While the quality of our followers is more important it is a hard thing to track.  I will set the goal as growing all our social media accounts by 50%.

Increasing each network by 50% will be as follows:
Facebook: 4829 -> 7,243
Twitter: 1033 -> 1,550
LinkedIn: 233 -> 350
Google+: 23 -> 35
InstaGram: 697 -> 1,046
YouTube: 282 -> 423

 

Well, these are some of the general goals I have for this year. I hope to not only achieve these goals, but to go above and beyond them.  I hope you all have a great and successful 2017!

 

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

Eric Miller Animation Aug 2016 Company Update

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Lately I have found it rather difficult to keep up with these weekly blog posts, but I wanted to at least give the monthly Eric Miller Animation Aug 2016 Company Update.

Bink:
There are two things I’m working on with Bink, and the first is getting our writers together to work out the rest of the Bink shorts stories.  I want to take the ideas I have for Bink, and work them out with the writers to get a full script and storyboard.  I would like to do it in a way we could then break it up into smaller episodes, since I don’t think I have the money to do them all at once.

The other thing is working on the fur again.  We got the fur to work for the first episode, but it required a lot of work for the lighter getting it to work in each shot.  We are looking to get the fur to behave a little more reliably, so it will be easier going forward.  I plan to bring on a fur expert to help with this task.

MagicMeeMees:
This is our client project we have been working on since the beginning of the year.  We have completed two episodes, and are working on completing the 3rd and 4th episode.  I’m really excited about these future episodes, and think each episode ends up being better then the last.

Social Media & Marketing:
A few weeks ago I brought on Marta to help us as our new Social Media and Marketing Coordinator.  Brittany was handling this for us before, but she moved to New York city for another opportunity.  Marta has been doing a great job, so very excited to have someone helping out again.  She handles posting and responding to comments for all our social media accounts, writes the company’s weekly blog, sends out the quarterly newsletter, and a few other things.

Finding Clients:
This is what I spend most of my time each day doing, and sometimes I wonder if I know what I’m doing.  I have been going at this from a few different angles.

Interacting with potential clients through social media is one of the ways I’m doing this.  Basically I try and find those people I consider to be my target market and like/respond to their comments and posts.  This is a very subtle approach, and the logic behind it is to simply get them familiar with your brand.  If they like what you have to say they might follow you back, or look into finding out more about you.  The big thing though is when I reach out to them to see if they could use our services they will be more likely to respond because they know our brand.

Another way I have been looking for clients is by getting on different websites for finding freelance/production work.  I have a profile on a lot of sites now, so hopefully someone looking for animation services might come across my profile.  I also look through these sites to find postings of projects we might be interested in.

Networking is always a big one for me for finding clients.  I have been reaching out to people in my target market, and trying to set up face to face meetings.  I also try and attend different networking events where I can find potential clients.

I also do some paid marketing, but this is one I don’t do a lot of at the moment.  I need to find the right places to do this kind of marketing, because sometimes it backfires.  I’m offering high end 3D animation services, and this normally requires larger budgets then most companies have.  Marketing in the wrong place gets me a lot of leads, but I end up wasting a lot of time bidding projects to clients without a realistic budget.

There are a few other things I do, but I’m always trying new approaches.  If any of you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.

 

Well this about sums everything up of what I have been working on lately.  I will try and do a better job of keeping up with my weekly blog posts.

 

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

Eric Miller Animation July 2016 Company Update

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We have had a lot going on these last few weeks, so I thought it be a good time for the July 2016 Company Update.

Bink: Hopefully all of you have seen the first episode of Bink by now.  Through our different postings there has been over 50,000 people who have watched our yellow and blue little creature, so I think this is pretty good for our first animated short.  I have never been an expert when it came to YouTube, so before launching Bink I did a lot of research on the best practices.  Things like the best day of the week and time to post to get the most views, or should I post it as a Facebook video, a YouTube link, or a website link.

It turns out Facebook penalizes YouTube videos, and don’t put them on as many of your friends newsfeed as it does with its own native Facebook videos.  I wanted to drive traffic to my YouTube Channel, so in order to do this I ended up sharing a link to my website which contained the embedded YouTube video as website links are ranked higher then directly linking to a YouTube link.

Many of you have been asking when the next Bink is coming, and I’m still trying to figure this out.  Producing one of these episodes(even at 30 seconds) is pretty expensive.  Before committing to another episode I need to make sure the company has the available funds to do so.  I need enough client projects to bring in money I can use to fund future Bink shorts.  I will need to take a good hard look at my current client projects, and the company’s savings to see when is the best time to produce another episode.

Bink-AmuletI have been doing a lot of thinking on the Bink shorts, and have a lot of really fun ideas of where I can take the story.  I want to explain more about who Bink is, and about his species, where he is from, and how he end up in this testing facility.  Each episode will give you a little more insight about Bink to eventually help you see the whole picture.  Some of my future plans for the short will also take us outside the testing facility, and you might even get to meet more of his species(can you imagine how cute baby Binks would be?). A lot of very exciting stories I look forward to sharing with all of you.  The animated gif of the amulet is a hint  there are more to Bink then you might have expected.

Bink Merchandise: I have had a lot of people ask for Plush toys of Bink, and I have actually started looking into it.  It seems to be a little out of my reach at the moment, but as the series grows in popularity I might be able to support the expense of making plush toys.  My brief research has shown there are companies which will make custom plush toys, but most have a minimum order of 1,000 units.  I’m not sure there are enough people who know about Bink where I could sell 1,000 plush toys to make my money back on the order.

While we don’t have plush toys yet, I did add more Bink shirts and other merchandise to our online store, so be sure to check it out.  I ordered some test prints to see how they printed, and they turned out great.

FullSizeRender

MagicMeeMees: The big thing this week is we finally got to share the first MagicMeeMee episode which we started working on in January of this year.  We are currently working on 3 additional episodes each with its very own unique worlds and characters.  This web series is for our client, Future of Play, which is a startup toy company who will be releasing the MagicMeeMees toy line next month.  Depending on how the toys sell they may decide to make more episodes, so go out and buy the toys!

You might also notice this web series is a very different style and quality then what Bink is.  We had a very tight budget with these, so we designed it in a way to keep the complexity down.  For example none of the characters have fur, and are very simplistic in design, there are limited reflections in the world, and there are no FX.  We had a very talented crew working on these episodes, and they all did an amazing job working within the budget constraints.

There were other challenges such as we needed to stay true to the toys and their worlds as much as possible, and we had to tell a story without any dialogue or narration.  We also needed to make sure we showed off the different functionalities of the toys like the glowing chests to show their emotions, and their communication through buzzing/vibrations.  Food is also really important part of the toys, and you will see this more in the future episodes.

Here are the amazing crew members who brought MagicMeeMees to life.

Jared White – Writer, Storyboard Artist, Editor, & Co-Director
Carl Johnson – Composer
Linda Kurgpõld – Modeler & Surfacer
Nico Sanghrajka – Character TD
Jim Richardson – Rough Layout
John Eric Domingo – Animator
Eric Deuel – Animator
Chris Mayne – Animator
Danny Clark – Animator
Benjamin Liska – Lighter & Compositor
Boom Box Post – Post Production Sound Services
Jeff Shiffman – Sound Supervisor
David Carfagno – Sound Editor
Jesse Drake – Re-Recording Mixer
Eric M. Miller – Producer & Co-Director

Company: So as you can see we have been pretty busy with our different projects, so you might be wondering what is next for the company?  Now that we have a nice body of work I plan to update our companies showreel to include the Toys’R’Us, Bink, and MagicMeeMees work.  I feel this gives us a nice variety of projects and styles to show clients what we can offer.  I will be spending most of my time reaching out to potential clients, and trying to bring in more projects.  The more client work we can do the more the studio can grow, and the more money we will have to do our own projects like Bink.

 

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

Create Animated Content for Virtual Reality

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I have mentioned before that I wanted to create animated content for virtual reality, so I thought I would expand on what I was looking to do.

There are a lot of people who have a much better understand of VR then I do, so I won’t try and explain where we are technically with it.  If you are in the entertainment industry you most likely know there is a lot of interest in VR right now, and a lot of money being thrown at the development of the technology.  There are easily over a dozen VR headsets out there from Google Cardboard to ones like HTC Vive.

So you might be asking in what way do I want to be involved with VR?  I don’t plan to get into the designing the hardware for it, but I would love to get into content creation.  I found this neat little graph which shows “Types of Virtual Reality Content Internet Users in Western Europe and the US are Interested In Watching/Experiencing” You can see at the top at 39% is movies.  This is might be why Hollywood is so invested in figuring out how to make VR content.

Typically movies are shown to the audience by controlling what they see in the frame of the camera.  When the director wants the viewer to focus on something they can easily do that through framing and focus.  The difference in VR is you loose the control to direct what the audience can see.  It has the creative people in Hollywood trying to figure out the best way to tell stories in this uncontrolled lens.

I have been wanting to create content for VR, but was not really sure how to get started.  I have been seeing a lot of interesting stuff with the 360-video, and I believe this is a great place to start.  I might start by rendering one 360 environment(Maybe the lab where Bink is trapped), and seeing how it works to stitch the images together.  Then move into rendering video in the same way.

One of the animation companies who is creating some really great content is Baobab Studios. Check out this 360 animated short they made called “Invasion!”.  If you want it to work you need to open it on a mobile device and in the YouTube app.  It won’t work otherwise.  Being able to be in the world, and look around as you please is a really fun experience.  They do things with sound effects, and having the character look in a direction to help get you to look at what they want you to look at.

Another interesting use for 360 videos is horror films.  Check out this “scary” video.

You can find a bunch of other examples of these 360 videos on Youtube.  I’m still very new to all of this, but this is a perfect medium for animation film making, and it is the logical direction to head.  I would love to hear from all of you on what you know about VR.  Be sure to leave me a note in the comments below.

 

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

The Challenges In Starting An Animation Company

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In my blog posts I often give updates on what my company is working on, and things I’m doing to try and grow it.  It might seem like starting an animation company is easy, so I wanted to share with you the challenges I face.

Building a Brand:
You might ask why building a brand is important, but as a service company it is very important.  Making animation is extremely expensive, and for my clients is a huge investment.  They want to make sure they can trust the company they are investing in to create their commercial, web series, or other animated video.  This has been a huge challenge for me, because I don’t have much of a reputation yet.  I have talked to a lot of other owners of animation or VFX companies, and many of them said it took awhile(around 10 years) before they started getting steady work.  I’m sure some of this had to do with them figuring out their business and target market, but they tell me a huge part was simply building their brand’s reputation. Sure they might have had enough smaller projects to keep the lights on, but it took awhile until the bigger opportunities started to reveal themselves.

Competition:
As you might have guessed there is a lot of competition in this space.  I’m competing against well established companies who are in a much better position to win jobs.  They already have their feet firmly through the doors of the bigger clients.

The other competition is from companies outside the US.  First, there is Canada with their amazing tax credits, and then you have areas like India, Korea, China, and South America to name a few with much less expensive labor costs.  The talent there is also getting better and better all the time.  I often get emails from foreign companies offering their animation and VFX services if I want to outsource any of my work to them.  I always ask them for what their rates are to see how they compare to US rates.  If I tried to match their rates with US workers I would not only not be able to pay the artists what they are asking for, but also not be making any kind of a profit.

Rendering:
This might seem odd to anyone who is not in animation, but this is a big hurdle for me.  For those of you who don’t know what rendering is it is the process of the computer figuring out what each pixel will look like to create an image based on the settings you put into the software.  It calculates the models, where the camera is, what kind of lens, how many lights, where they are coming from, their color, intensity, how they interact with the different materials on the objects in frame, and many other things.  For a more detailed explanation go here.

This requires very powerful processors to figure all of this out.  I remember when I was in college, and working on my animation project ChessMate(see image below).  I would work on the project late at night, and before I left I would setup 5 or more computers to work on rendering my project.  I would leave signs begging people not to touch the computers.  After rendering all night I would come back in the morning to check on them.   I did this every night for months until I finally finished.  It would take over 16 hours to render one 2 second shot, and often there would be errors requiring me to start the whole process over again.  Computers are now faster, but the graphics are much more intense.  We also now render in HD at resolutions of 1920 x 1080 if not much higher, and ChessMate was only 728 x 414.

ChessMate Scene 1

 

I’m getting a little off topic, but my point is it takes a lot of computer power and/or time to render animation. So far what I have been doing is having the lighting artist handle the rendering.  This should work for small projects, but as I get more clients I will need to figure out other options.

There are online render services, but they can get very expensive.  The other challenging part is you don’t know how long something will take to render until you can do test renders.  This makes it extremely difficult to bid out a project for a client when there is a big unknown of how much your render costs are going to be.  One frame might take a few hours to render, or it might take a few weeks to render.  Your 5 minute animation will have 9,000 frames, so you can see how those costs could add up very quickly.

If you want to try and control those costs a bit more then you are going to have to build your own render farm.  Now you are buying thousands of dollars worth of hardware which will be outdated, lets be honest, as soon as you buy it.  Not to mention you are going to have to have enough space to keep all this hardware. Have you seen pictures of Pixar’s render farm?  Here is an image I found online.

Data Storage and Transferring:
Now you know all about the rendering challenges, so what will you do with all these images these computers are creating?  One of the 3 second shots for the client project I’m working on is 12GB, and this could have been a lot larger.  Not to mention all the files needed to create these projects.  Anything from photoshop documents, Maya files, Final Cut files, and all the other files needed to make these projects before we even start rendering.

With a remote team I also have to have a way to transfer these files between the different people on the team.  I have been using Dropbox, but I’m quickly outgrowing this.  I had to get a Dropbox Pro which gives me 1TB(1,000 GB) of storage, but found each member of the team who is synced to the project folder also has to have this much storage space.  I need to find a better option, but regardless of what option I go with it is going to be another costly expense.

Staff vs Freelance:
Currently I’m the only full time staff at the company, and everyone else is freelance who is hired based on the work we have.  This works well to keep costs down, but it makes it difficult to build a company.  It is challenging to line up project schedules with freelancers.  You might have a great artist for a project, but you might have to find someone else for your next project because the last one is unavailable.

Freelancers also provide their own workstations and software which can be a good thing, but can also cause issues.  For example one of your artists might be using Maya 2014, and another is using Maya 2016.  Now you have the issue where they can’t open each others files.  Software version incompatibility has been a huge challenge for me. On the Toys’R’Us project we had to have extra versions of After Effects to open and save the files in order for another artist to be able to open the file on a different version of the same software.

Physical Studio Location:
Having an actual studio location would help in many respects.  For starters it would speed up the production of our projects.  Being able to lean over to the person sitting next to you and ask a question or get approval is much more efficient then sending an email, and waiting for a response.  It would also solve some of the other issues I mentioned above.  We could control the workstations, and make sure they are all using the same versions of the software.  There would be less data transferring, and we could actually store the data on our own servers instead of online storage options. This would all be great, but it would be an additional overhead cost.  I would need to make sure the business was bringing in enough projects, and enough income to cover the monthly office expense. Add to this having to buy all the workstations and software licenses, and you can see how quickly it would all add up.

The Unknown:
It is easy to plan for the challenges you are aware of, but what really scares me are the things I’m not aware of.  Running your own company you have to wear many hats, but in no way am I an expert in all these different areas.  I try and reach out to others for help when I can, but you know some things will slip through the cracks.  Anyone of these unknowns could be what brings down the company.

 

As you can see there is plenty to keep me awake at night, and you might think I’m crazy for taking on all these challenges.  Well, I might agree with you, but I also see a lot of opportunities in these challenges.  I have to be creative, and look for other ways to overcome the challenges.  I’m glad it is not easy, because otherwise everyone would be starting their own animation company.  The challenges take out all the people who are not really passionate about this industry.  I only hope the challenges do not also take me out.

 

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

Our January 2016 Animation Company Update

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I think now is a good time for our animation company update for this month.  I have been crazy busy, and it seems like we have had a lot happen since last month.

Bink
Work on Bink slowed down during the holidays, but we are now moving along nicely.  We are still testing fur on Bink, and trying to figure out how to solve all the technical difficulties involved in getting it to look right.  We are finishing up the surfacing on the lab environment, and moving quickly on the animation.  We are now at a point where we can record all final dialogue, and start working on sound design and the underscore.

I wanted to share with all of you the first 6 seconds of the short as a little animation teaser.  A little perk for reading my blog.  Everything is still in progress, so temp SFX, no surfacing or lighting, and animation is only blocking.  We are getting closer every day, and I can’t wait to share more with you.

 

Project-MMM
We started a project for a client at the end of last month, and we have been busy working on it.  I can’t share details about the project, so for now I will call it “Project-MMM”.  Jared White wrote the script for us which the client loved, so he is now working on storyboarding the first episode.  We have also been working on the character assets, and the first character is almost done in modeling, surfacing, and rigging.  Animation is already starting to do test poses with the character, and we hope to show storyboards and character model to the client on Tuesday.

Our crew includes:
Jared White – Writing/Storyboarding/Editing
Linda Kurgpold – Modeling/Surfacing
Nico Sanghrajka – Rigging
Jim Richardson – Layout/Animation
Benjamin Liska – Lighting/Compositing/Rendering

Project-HIWB
Another project I can’t talk about details is what I will call “Project-HIWB”.  It is a project I recently bid on which sounds like it would be a really fun and interesting project.   I sent my bid to them yesterday, so I’m waiting to hear if we will get to work on it or not. Please keep your fingers crossed for us!

Social Media Marketing Coordinator:
In a previous post I mentioned I was looking to bring on a Social Media Marketing Coordinator.  Well I was able to find someone who I’m very excited to have onboard, Brittany Potter.  You might have noticed more activity on my social media sites, and that is due to Brittany’s work.  She will be helping with growing my social media network, reaching out to potential clients through social media, writing weekly blog posts(on the company blog), and sending out quarterly Newsletters.  She only started with me last Friday, so she is just getting warmed up.  I have to admit it is a little odd to see posts from my company which I did not personally write.  Her first blog post will be coming out tomorrow, and it will be about her joining the company as the Social Media Marketing Coordinator.  To subscribe to the company blog head over to milleranimation.com and find the “Newsletter Signup” button at the bottom of the page.

Society Mixer
This last Tuesday we had our 7th monthly networking mixer, and this was one of the biggest ones so far.  We had around 25 people sign in, but I feel like there was a good number of people who never signed in.  We had a good mix of people who ranged from those who have been in the industry for many years to people who are still in school.  One of my favorite parts of this last mixer was seeing an animator who has over 20 years experience giving priceless feedback to a student who was sharing his work.

Keep an eye out for the mixers each month, and try and make it out if you are in the LA area.  Join our Facebook Group to be invited to the mixers each month.

Producers Guild Awards:
This Saturday my wife and I are going to the 27th Annual Producer Guild Awards.  I attended the award show last year by myself, so I’m excited to get all dressed up and go with my wife this year.  What is everyone’s predictions on who the winners will be?

 

Well, I believe that about covers everything I have going on.  It seems like things are getting busier every month.

 

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

My Sales Hat: Read what I learned about Animation Sales

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I often talk about how you wear multiple hats when starting a company.  Well, today I wanted to talk about a hat I have been wearing a lot lately, and this is my Sales Hat.

Have you ever thought you knew a decent amount about a topic only to have an eye opening experience which completely blows your mind?  I kind of had this happen to me recently when it came to sales.  I have always thought I was pretty good with sales, and had a good understanding of it.  Even when I worked at Apple selling computers I was always one of the top in sales at the store.  It was often me and Max who would always be competing for the #1 sales person spot.

When I started my own company I saw sales as the task I did when someone called me about a project.  I relied very heavily on my marketing to bring those potential clients to me.  Unfortunately my marketing only consisted of my website, so I did not receive many calls.  Thinking about it I’m actually surprised I got as many calls as I did.  Many of them were people who wanted a 30 minute Pixar quality animated video, and their budget was $1,000.  While I got to meet and talk to a lot of really interesting people it was from a business point of view, a waste of time.

I kept focusing on my marketing thinking the sales part was not the problem.  The truth was both were not working as well as they could have been, but it took me awhile to figure this out(I’m still figuring it out).  I also had potential clients interested in my animation services emailing me, but after I responded I would forget about them until they emailed me back.  This worked fine as long as they responded, but when they did not I lost track of them.

By now any experienced sales person reading this could see many things wrong with my sales process.  I also realize there was something not working right, and I set out to find a better way.  I started searching for a way to keep track of these potential clients, and actually had a hard time finding anything.  I obviously had been searching with the wrong keywords, since I was not finding anything.  One day I stumbled across three letters which lead to my mind blowing experience, CRM.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and is a term which refers to practices, strategies, and technologies companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data.  This is what I was looking for, and it turns out I was not the first person to think of it.  Actually as it appeared I might have been the very last person to think about it.  CRM is nothing unique, and has been around for a while.  I felt a little silly because I have not heard of it earlier.  There are also many online software tools to help companies with their CRM.

I started playing around with 2 of them to see how they might be able to help me.  The ones I have been looking at are Salesforce and Zoho, and this is where the lights really turned on for me.  They setup the whole sales process as a pipeline with different steps along the way.  This pipeline concept is something I’m very familiar with, because 3D animation is all about the pipeline.  You have different tasks which need to be done, and having a pipeline helps you keep it organized and flowing in the right direction.  I never thought to look at sales in this way, and I’m surprised it did not occur to me earlier.  I’m still learning about sales strategy, but let me share with you what I have learned so far.

What is a lead?  I normally called a lead a potential clients which is about as far as I went with any type of structure.  In a CRM they look at Leads as the first step in the pipeline.  Leads can be people who contact you directly through your website,  referred to you, brought in by marketing, or were on a client list you purchased.  There is a whole process which you take the leads through which includes stages like discovery, nurturing, and converting.  You start off by trying to find out as much as you can about the lead and qualifying if they are a good lead or not.  Then you make first contact to find out about what their needs are, and how your services can help them.

Once you know what they are looking for you start to build a relationship with them.  I read a study which says on average it takes 7 times of reaching out to a client before making a deal.  Most people reach out to a potential customer 2-3 times before giving up.  My thought is 7 times would be annoying, but I heard this multiple times.  So when I hear it a 7th time I guess I will have to believe it.  The idea is people are more likely to do business with someone they are familiar with.  You want to build trust with your clients, so they are willing to take a chance with you.

After nurturing the relationship you continually move closer to close the deal, and turning this lead into a client.  In these programs they have leads, clients, accounts, competitors, and a much more organized way of looking at your client data. I found this all to be extremely interesting.  While I don’t plan to turn my company into a sales powerhouse, since I feel the whole process could easily start to feel robotic.  There is still a lot which I can take away from this.  I think a sign of a good sales person is someone who has a good structure, strategy, and process, but at the same time can be very personable and natural.  I would not want my clients to feel like they are just another number in the pipe.

Learning about this pointed out I not only need a better system closing deals with potential clients, but also I could do a better job at generating leads.  I can take a more proactive approach then sitting back waiting for people to visit my website and call me.  I have looked into brining on sales reps, but I have heard from other animation studios who have had mixed experiences.  It seems like the general consensus is doing it yourself is always best, but if you have to bring someone in then commission-only is the way to go.  Otherwise you risk spending money with little or no results, and the sales reps are more motivated when they only earning money if they are making sales.

I realize I still have a lot to learn about sales, but the more I wear this hat the better it fits.  I would love to hear from all of you about your sales secrets, and let me know if you have anything to add to what I mentioned.

 

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

Eric Miller Animation’s New Year’s Resolutions

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Happy New Year! 2016 will be our second full year in business, and I wanted to share my New Year’s resolutions for the company.   I recently posted how we did with the goals I set at the beginning of last year, and I’m hoping we can accomplish more of our goals this time.  Last year I was a little zealous in what I thought we could accomplish in our first full year of business, so this year I wanted to set more realistic goals.

Animated Short:
We are getting really close to finishing our first 30 second episode for Bink, and I would love to be able to make at least 2 more this year.  So my goal is to have 3 episodes of Bink online by the end of this year.

New Clients:
Last year I had the goal of 3 new clients with large projects, but I realized the difficulties in attracting clients if I did not have an animation portfolio to show.  I ended up shifting my efforts away from finding clients to creating our own animated short which we could use to show potential clients the quality of work we can produce.  With us finishing the first episode of Bink early this year I hope it will help in brining in more clients.  I will also be increasing my marketing efforts, so with the combination of the two I feel we will be in much better shape to find more clients.  So the goal this year is again to get 3 new projects this year.  While it be nice if they are large accounts I will take any profitable projects.

Learn Something New:
This is a pretty easy goal to accomplish, since I feel I’m learning something every day.  The reason I put it down is because I feel it is extremely important to always be learning, and growing.

Grow Social Network:
There are two parts to this goal which are both important for my hybrid company.  The company is hybrid because it is both an animation studio, and an animation service company.  The goal is we do service work to bring in money, so we have the money to create our own projects.  The way I want to use social media is in two ways.  First to build our fan base, so when we post our own content it can reach more people. Second is to use social media to connect with potential clients by reaching out to them by commenting, liking, and sharing their posts.  Basically anything to get them to notice us, and build a relationship with them.  Social media is a great way for clients to learn about your brand, and be more open to work with you.  I will be hiring a Social Media Marketing coordinator this month, and hopefully they can help me accomplish this goal.  My goal is to increase our network by 100% on all our social media networks.

Increasing each network by 100% will be as follows.
Facebook: 4,427 –> 8,854
Twitter: 513 –> 1,026
LinkedIn: 146 –> 292
Google+: 11 –> 22
InstaGram: 235 –> 470
YouTube: 5 –> 10

Profitable 2016:
I always expect the first few years to be a loss.  I started the company in July of 2014, and surprised myself when the first 6 months were profitable.  Then last year I ended up spending more money then I brought in, but we were only slightly in the red.  If you look at the entire life of the business we are still profitable even with the loss last year.  I also have not been taking a salary myself, and have been keeping the money in the business.  This year my goal is to make enough where I can actually take a salary(even a small salary), and still have the business be profitable. I do enjoy growing the business, but making some money would be nice especially with our growing family.

 

I will keep my the list of my main goals pretty short.  I will always be setting other goals throughout the year, but these are the big ones I’m hoping to accomplish.

 

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

2015 Year-End Review: Animation Studio

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As this will be my last post this year I thought I should do a 2015 Year-End Review of how the year went.  This year was the first full year in business, since 2014 I was only in business for half the year.  I would like to take a look at where I was at this time last year, and compare it to where I’m at now to see what I have accomplished.

Business:
At this time last year the business was still setup as a Sole Proprietorship, but as of July 24 my business is now an S-Corp.  This was a big change for me, and the business.  It has been a slow process transitioning everything over, especially all of the accounting and bank accounts, but now the company is setup and ready to go.

Financially speaking 2015 was a loss simply because we did not work on enough client projects to counter what I’m paying to have the animated short produced.  I expected this year to be a loss financially since I wanted to work on building our portfolio, and spent less time marketing and looking for service work.  The company still has money in the bank from last year, so the business is still in good shape and I’m not worried yet.  Next year my focus will be on finding more client projects to work on.  It is a balance between working on our own IP, and doing service work to bring in money.  I will also be looking into how we can make money off our own projects we are working on.

Bink – Animated Short:
Although the short is the main reason we are in the red for this year I’m really excited we are working on it.  I have learned a great deal from the process, and what we have learned will only my make company stronger.  Plus when we finish we will have a really awesome animation to show off for the hard work, and financial investment.

Networking:
This was a big year for networking for me, and I have made a lot of new connections with people in my industry.  I have attended several industry conferences, and Producer Guild events.  I still have stacks of business cards sitting on my desk I’m hoping to reach out to.  If only I had more time in the day to get things done.

I have also been reaching out to other animation studio founders, and comparing notes.  It is really great to hear about what others in a similar position as me are doing, and what advice they might have.  While we may be considered competitors I have found we are all willing to help each other out.

Social Media:
The company had a lot of growth this year in our social media, and while I might not have all the numbers for how much growth I know it was a decent amount.  I will be putting a lot of information down here partly so I have someplace to look to each year for comparison.  Not all the social networks have tools for seeing what your numbers where a year ago.

Facebook is by far my largest network, and also the network I put the most effort into.  I will bring on someone to help with social media and marketing for next year, so hopefully I will see growth in all areas in 2016.  At the beginning of the year I had 1,659 Likes, and currently we have 4,425 Likes.

In July of this year I started a company Instagram account, and we now have 235 Followers.

I can’t tell how many Followers I had at the beginning of the year, but I think it was around 200.  We currently have 522 Followers, and hoping to double this number in 2016.

While I have not been doing anything with YouTube other then posting my Demo Reels I hope to see my 5 Subscribers I currently have grow significantly in 2016 as I begin to post Bink animated webisodes.

In 2015 on Vimeo I had 1,439 plays, 1,725 Loads, and 3 likes, and currently have only 4 followers.  Similar to YouTube I have not been posting much on here, but will be when we finish with Bink.

Marketing:
This year we had a marketing consultant do some market research and develop a marketing strategy for the company.  I’m now in the process of interviewing applicants for a part-time Social Media Marketing Coordinator position.  They will help in implementing the marketing strategy, and hopefully bring in more client projects.  At the beginning of this year we had no solid marketing plan, so I feel this is a big step forward.

Society:
This year I started the Society of Creative Professionals(Temp Name), and so far it has been going great.  We have had a monthly mixer since July, and I have met a lot of really great people.  I have a lot of big plans for the society, and hope to accomplish many of these goals in 2016.

Personal:
At the beginning of last year my wife and I had an almost 1 year old son, and were trying to do our best to keep on top of our personal lives.  This year I feel like we did not do the best job of keeping in touch with all of our friends, and wish we could have seen them more.  It is challenging with the little one, and with both of us working full time.  This year we also announced we were expecting a baby girl in May of 2016.  I’m sure this will make having a social life even more challenging, but we are very excited to be growing our family.

Our growing family will not only make our personal life more challenging, but will also impact the business.  I will be getting less sleep again(after we finally got our son to sleep through the night), and it will add more financial pressure to succeed.  I would imagine starting a business with less responsibilities would be less stressful, but I feel my responsibilities motivate me to succeed.

Conclusion:
I feel 2015 was a year of learning and growing.  While I don’t have a lot of work or profit to show the success we had I still feel it was a very successful first full year.  I have set things up for a very positive 2016, and can’t wait to see how the year goes.

Have a great New Year everyone, and I hope 2016 will be the best year of your life so far.

 

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.