Picturing Profit

He’s gleefully dangled from rock cliffs, juggling 40 pounds of video gear. He’s battled avalanche conditions in Canada to capture award-winning ice-climbing footage. And he’s dug into rock and mud to shoot mountain bikers hurtling downhill 3 inches from his lens at 70 mph.

But fear comes when Michael A. Strassman sifts through his bills and tallies the cost of more than a decade in the outdoor-adventure video production business. He lists: $30,000 in credit card debt, additional money owed for equipment, and a fading sense of the creative inspiration that drove him in the early days.

His first film, “Moving Across Stone,” shot in 1986, became an award-winning, best-selling video. Since then his Range of Light Productions company, based outside Mammoth Lakes in the eastern Sierra, has won, then lost, the financial backing of a wealthy investor and fellow climbing enthusiast.

Despite a string of new films, including “Know Limits” and “Rock,” the company has struggled to generate enough revenue to cover costs and hire desperately needed staff. Range of Light hit bottom when a business plan, a last-ditch effort, was turned down by the company’s former backer in 1996.

“I was ready to just close this thing down and open a little trailer park in Bishop,” Strassman said.

Instead, he regrouped and decided to implement the plan without the extra financing. It’s been a slow process, but with the help of a single employee, Strassman has shifted from making one outdoor-adventure video a year to more immediate lucrative work, including selling stock footage from earlier films to Sears, Gatorade and others. He’s also done contract work for outdoor and sports television producers, produced commercials for local companies and made resume videos for area athletes.

His biggest recent break, though, came when he entered contract negotiations with the Outdoor Life Channel. The channel, a former client, wants him to produce a 13-episode series on climbing and mountaineering. An even bigger potential deal with a national advertiser to produce a series for kids on extreme sports is in the preliminary stages, Strassman said.

It’s high time, said business consultant Victor H. Prushan, president and founder of VHP Associates in Thousand Oaks and the author of “No-Nonsense Marketing: 101 Practical Ways to Win and Keep Customers.”

“He’s been in business a long time; it really is time to get that company moving in the right direction. This is not a hobby,” Prushan said.

Strassman could be well-positioned to take advantage of growing mainstream interest in his area of expertise. Outdoor adventure and its recent offshoot, extreme sports, have caught the attention of major television networks, Prushan said. The networks want to give their advertisers a bigger audience share drawn from the ranks of recreational and professional snowboarders, skateboarders, mountain bikers, rock climbers and armchair enthusiasts.

“He is in a very exciting market area, which attracts all the right demographics to attract major advertisers,” Prushan said. “If he can just focus his own activity . . . he has a tremendous opportunity to do it right.”

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Strassman should focus on making big sales--contracts with large clients and major video productions--that will bring in money to eliminate debt, hire help and pay for production costs, which Strassman has kept at rock-bottom.

“The fact is he doesn’t have a cost problem, he has a revenue problem,” Prushan said. “This guy has got to get some business in; he’s been down at the $100,000 [revenue level] for years.”

Strassman should spend his time landing the big fish. He also needs to hire someone to handle the rest of the sales work as part of a major push in sales and marketing at the company.

“Mike is well-suited to be out there talking to those kinds of people [big clients] because his enthusiasm and his knowledge come across very well,” the consultant said.

Until those big deals land, though, Range of Light, despite its decade in business, is like many start-ups: lots of ideas and potential opportunities, but not enough people or cash to take advantage of them. That’s why Prushan encouraged the company to continue building business for its more mundane products and services, such as stock footage, local video production and facilities rental.

By hiring a salesperson with some of the money expected from the deal with Outdoor Life Network, the company could build revenue quickly. For a base salary of $20,000 plus commission, Strassman could find someone excited about working in the film business and living in the scenic Mammoth Lakes area, Prushan said.

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If the new salesperson could generate $10,000 a month in new sales, the company could double its existing business, which totaled $118,000 in revenue last year.

Strassman has already offered a job, starting in January, to a recent college graduate, a young woman with a marketing background, to handle some sales, as well as production work.

The next step in the company’s sales and marketing push is to generate publicity within the outdoor-adventure video production industry, Prushan said.

“He has to make himself more widely known,” he said.

How a potential customer perceives a company compared with the competition is the essence of “positioning,” and Range of Light Productions is not well-positioned, despite its track record and new deals, Prushan said. News releases pegged to the company’s most recent successes could garner notices in industry trade papers.

But hiring a PR firm to handle the task is not an option, cost-wise, for many small businesses, Prushan said. He suggested using a publicity-related software package such as Publicity Builder by JIAN, to get started. The programs offer sample letters and news releases, plus strategy tips. Any good marketing book in the business section of a bookstore will also provide information on publicity, he said.

A company’s business plan is also an important part of its sales and marketing efforts, Prushan said. Creating an effective one can be a challenge, though.

“Most business plans I look at from start-ups, or even ongoing companies, are long on description but very short on action,” he said. Strassman’s business plan is realistic and emphasizes action steps, but the 1996 plan needs to be updated and made even more specific, Prushan said. An effective plan has to lay out exactly what the business is going to do, how it will accomplish those steps, and when.

As for new investors, it may be a little early, Prushan said. First the company needs to demonstrate a sustained and substantial increase in revenue. Although Strassman thinks success is around the corner, Prushan is more pragmatic.

“I’m a little goosey because he’s been struggling so long, but I think he can get it going,” Prushan said. “He’s talked to enough people lately that I think he’s been reassured that he has a business.”