It doesn't sound terribly ground breaking right, but one of the biggest learnings since we've been in business, is that being yourself is a totally legitimate business strategy.
We started Play Creative two years ago now. I had the marketing and communications experience, and Dan had the design, photography and videography skills, so we thought why not combine forces. It wasn't terribly official at first, we started creating a few brands for friends and slowly built up our experience, to a point where we decided to buy a camera together.
As we went through growing the business, we initially thought we had to conform to how other people did business, questioning ourselves a bit as we went along because we didn't feel like we were terribly 'official'. In hindsight, the fact that we both hadn't worked in businesses in the videography industry before starting our business, was the best thing for us. We didn't know how the big businesses operated, so we just made it up as we went along. Instead of getting caught up in the fact that we 'had to do it this way, because that's how it's done', we were able to create systems and processes that just worked for us and our clients.
I think a lot of people get caught up in the official feel of the 'business' world and forget that ultimately a business is just a collection of people offering services to other people. Our goal is always to try and make the process as simple, easy, and enjoyable as possible for our clients, whilst 'being ourselves' in all interactions.
The flow on from this is that there's no moment where we feel we have to put our 'official business hat' on, or to change our personality at all. In short, we try to be genuine, real, human-beings, and to make other people's lives easier - and hey, it seems to be working pretty well so far!
Two years on and we're working with a huge variety of different businesses and people who are all passionate about what they do. We're helping them connect with their stories, and communicate them to the rest of the world. Seeing people gain momentum from seeing their stories articulated through a video is still the thing that lights us up the most, and fuels the fire to keep producing video content for our clients.
Go be you team.
