Why Doing the Budget Dance is Costing You Money
Having a transparent discussion with your video vendors about your actual budget saves you time, money, and stress.
We’ve all done it. The budget dance. It’s the most commonly experienced sequence of conversations between video production companies and clients.
Here’s how it goes all too often:
Step 1: The vendor asks the client for its budget, and the client responds with “we don’t have a specific budget in mind”. They’ll say they’re relying on the vendor’s expertise to build out a vision and a budget.
Step 2: The vendor researches, brainstorms, conceptualizes, pitches, and presents a proposal to execute exactly what the client has said they want.
Step 3: The vendor pricing is often too rich for the client’s tastes, and then the client comes clean and tells the vendor what the actual budget was.
Why do we still do this?
We understand conversations about money are never comfortable, but having a transparent conversation from the very beginning of a relationship is so important. When a company like ours asks you what your budget is, it’s not so we can milk you dry of every cent you have to spend on marketing for the year.
It’s to understand the guardrails you’ve set, and the resources we have to help you achieve your objective for this specific project.
The reality is, creative people like the ones on our team are trained to iterate within the constraints of the resources we’re given.
We can build you a solution whether you have $15,000 or $50,000 to spend.
Those solutions will look different in size and scope, but either one of them can be done.
Like most things you shop for, video is not one-size-fits-all.
When you’re shopping for a home, if you’re pre-approved for a $500,000 mortgage, you’re going to work with your realtor to make sure you’re not spending your time touring million dollar homes.
If you go to a car dealership, there’s a difference between buying a reliable family sedan and a luxury sports car. And if you want the extra bells and whistles on your new car, you’ll pay more for those heated seats, extra large display, and a tinted sunroof.
The same is true in production. A standard camera package with a lean, 3-4 person crew is going to cost less than an elevated equipment list and a 10-person production set.
Having a real conversation about budget helps us to frame expectations. It’s the differentiator between a standard equipment package and something specialty. It’s one day of production vs. multiple days on set.
The biggest thing to remember is there’s nothing wrong with what you have to work with. We’ve had many conversations with prospects who seem embarrassed if their budget is low, almost as if they’re doing something wrong. But it’s not wrong. It’s your real-world constraint. In our industry, we have to be creative and flexible enough to develop different approaches that can achieve the same goal.
A real partner is going to have your best interest at heart, and be resourceful enough to maximize the budget you have. And a real partnership can only begin with transparent conversation. An engagement that doesn’t begin with open and honest conversation is much less likely to be successful.
Transparent video production budgets help your producer determine personnel, equipment, delivery schedule, and creative approach.
It’s also going to take up more of your valuable time to have to go back and forth in multiple conversations with multiple vendors. We know you’re working on more than just the project we’re talking about, but when we feel as though we don’t have all of the information we need to get you informed pricing, we’re going to ask for more meetings to make sure we’re giving you the most tailored approach to solving your problem.
Guessing helps no one. When we stop playing this guess and check game, we can jump into the pre-production stage much faster, and be that much closer to hitting your metrics and moving onto your next initiative.
It also prevents having to have uncomfortable conversations later in the process. When expectations aren’t set from the very beginning of the engagement, it can often lead to scope creep, change-orders, and costing more money on the back end.
So, help us help you. In our next conversation, let’s have a transparent discussion about budget.