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Hi my name is Mike Michel and welcome to our Down and Dirty Help. I need a production company fast. I am CEO and the co-founder of Grashoek of Advance Media. We are the production company in San Francisco bay area, Hawaii and New York. So, what I wanted to do is kind to give meeting planners and overview in what they should look for when they are calling for a production company.

First of all, there are two different things I wanted to talk about. The first one is of course experience. You want to find a company that has experience in doing what you do. The second thing is four things, it is the four C’s and I kind of came up with this earlier, because everything begin with a C, so I thought I call it the four C’s. It is competent, creative, and cost conscious.

Competent, means you want a company that is competent obviously, but to find that out you want to call the referrals. Get referrals from the production company and say, “Hey … Call the referrals first of all, because a lot of people never call their referrals. Call them and grid their referrals. You say, “What kind of stuff have you done with them?” Just like your hiring this person for a job that you are going to spend everyday with. So, find out a lot about them. Find out from their referrals, examples of what they have done. Find out where they have worked. What type of build-ins, in what capacity, and what they can do and what they did or those referrals? Do they just come in and get a venue and put up a stage or that they do the whole kit and caboodle. So, anyway I really want to say, you want to look for somebody who is competent.

Second of all is creative, it is all about the story, it is all about entertaining the people your flying out there to bring to this, to meaning. If it is a meaning that … it is an internal meaning, of course you have even more of a chance to do a great story and wrap it all in for the whole time that your attendees are there or the video that you are going to produce or the website or animation. You want to make sure there is a good, good creative behind it so again, check the production company’s referrals, go in there and see what kind of stuff they have done, how creative where they. When you get the production company, talk to them about those jobs they did. Dig down deep, it is worth your time.

Lastly which is the Giant Gorilla in the Corner in every production, no matter what size it is, is the cost conscious. Talk about the budget, get it out there, find out how they run their budgets, how you keep track of costs and how they keep track of costs on site, because of course things happen, changes are made by executives, changes are made just by the weather sometimes and you have to have some processes in place to find out how to handle that budget, so thanks a lot for listening and I look forward to talking to you again, bye-bye.

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