A Tour de Force
Finley-Holiday Film Inc. has produced slides, photos, films, videos and now CD-ROMs for tourist attractions, starting with places such as Marineland and moving up to national parks. For nearly a decade, the family company had its sights set on doing a video tour of Graceland. Mark Finley, the firm’s marketing director, said it took a combination of savvy, experience and luck to close the deal.
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Back in the mid-1980s, we became aware that Graceland did not have a video tour and we knew that it would be a product that would sell really well.
Every year, we met the buyers from Graceland at gift industry trade shows. Our vice president of sales would go to the Graceland booth and try to pitch the idea.
But it seemed like we just never could get our foot in the door.
During the early ‘90s, we began doing historic homes like Mount Vernon. As we got more experience, we learned what worked, and when people talked about videos, our name came up.
But it seemed like Graceland would not budge. For one thing, I think, with a project like this it would be tempting to go after something bigger--a broadcast-quality video with a celebrity host.
The problem with that is you simply cannot afford to make it and sell it at a price low enough to be a souvenir item for consumers.
What finally made the break for us was a piece of luck. One of our biggest accounts is the Kennedy Space Center. When the man who was the director of merchandise there left and was hired by Graceland, he looked around and said, “Where’s your video tour?” He knew how well Kennedy had done with our video.
So he talked to the management at Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc. and mentioned how happy he had been with our services.
That really helped get the ball rolling for us. They took a more serious look at our proposal. Timing played a part too, since they wanted a video to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Elvis’ death.
They considered bids from other video companies. But in our bids we pay all the production costs ourselves. There aren’t a lot of companies that are willing to take a risk and do that.
We break even and make a profit on the back end, by having the exclusive right to sell them the video for their gift shop and catalog.
We also know how busy everybody in this business gets, especially during tourist season. So we do all the hard work of video production, writing and editing for them, and we shoot at night.
We got the contract to do Graceland about a year ago, and it is scheduled to be available this week.
We have high hopes that it will be our biggest seller in a long time. It was expensive to make, but it was a fun project. Our average video takes about three years to break even, but we hope that this one will start turning a profit in a year or two.
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AT A GLANCE
Company: Finley-Holiday Film Inc.
Owners: Bill and Winnie Finley
Nature of business: Production of audio-visual souvenirs for gift industry
Location: 12607 E. Philadelphia St., Whittier
Founded: 1965
Employees: 25
Revenue: $2.5 million
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MORE SMALL BUSINESS: D10
