HOW TO BE A PASSION PLAYER
Sally Miles, CEO and founder of UK factual and format distributor Passion Distribution, recounts her experiences of setting up ID Distribution has helped her face the challenges of launching amid an economic slowdown. As I got closer to the launch of Passion Distribution over the summer, the economic cogs started to get stuck and my property was fast slipping into negative equity. I couldn’t ignore the fact I was starting a new business on the cusp of a recession, and if I am honest, the economic crisis gave me moments of doubt early on. Was this the time to re-enter the market with a new company? None of us truly knows how bad things will get and what impact this will ultimately have on our industry. All of this aside, I am quietly confident that if we are resourceful and look for opportunity in a changing environment we can grow our business. I strongly believe that as a smaller business we have the ability to be more flexible and faster on our feet in a time of change. Larger organisations with a hungry machine to feed and a large board to please cannot react as fast and with such flexibility. We can ride the waves full on and look for the opportunity. There is always opportunity. From a financial perspective, with private investment and low overheads, we are arguably more stable than some of the larger media companies that have borrowed to build and acquire through hedge funds and bank loans that are now unstable and unsympathetic to a downturn in the fortunes of a company’s business and financial numbers. I am fortunate enough to have had a trial run. ID Distribution gave me the training ground and an opportunity to build a reputation and strong relationships in both the acquisition of content and opportunities to exploit that content on platforms around the world. This time around, I don’t have to spend 25% of my time reporting to a venture capitalist. Not only have I learned on the job and have the unique opportunity to perfect it this time but I also have more time for the business and spend less in the board room. That doesn’t mean that many of the financial disciplines won’t stay with me forever. Valuable lessons were learned. When I launched ID Distribution, we went to our first Mipcom in 2004 with 15 hours of programming. I look back and wonder why I wasn’t more daunted than I was. I had a far greater task on my hands than I do today. It took years to build a strong team and to get into a position where I knew what individuals could achieve and add to the business. Passion Distribution opened with a team of highly talented and hardworking people. It is vital people are here because they choose to be and not because they need to be. We need that passion from people. And here we are with Passion’s first Mipcom under our belt, and so far so good. We launched with a catalogue of really strong formats and 300 hours of completed programmes that excited the team and their buyers. Even before we had time to walk onto our new stand in Cannes, deals were concluded and our business was embraced. The most exciting deal had to be optioning World of Wonder’s gameshow format Fashion Strip to Endemol in 21 territories. Our buyers greeted us like an old (and yet young and energetic) friend. It looked and felt like we had been away for a face-lift and a new wardrobe! There are challenges ahead. The acquisition of content is critical, and with mass consolidation over the past few years some companies we worked with are now locked into vertical groups that include international distribution. It has made some distribution businesses gain new titles by offering exceptional and sometimes commercially questionable advances to keep their catalogues fresh. We won’t compete with that, although we do offer advances and seek to deficit-fund production and cover the cost of international delivery. We work with many production companies in the UK and North America, and it’s critical to the success of these relationships and the value we add that we build their brands in the international market so we can achieve coproductions, pre-sales, output deals and healthy revenue. In harder times they need more from their distributor, such as help with production funding and for us to simply make things happen. Our role will be more important than ever, and this is an exciting place to be. After all, we all want to make a difference.
