#founderstalk

Join us for an inspiring fireside chat with Rich Pham – the man who helped launch Coca-Cola in Vietnam and led Pocari Sweat to a valuation of over $200 million. From the U.S. and Japan back to Vietnam, Rich will share his return journey, the challenges he faced, and the lessons he learned as an Overseas Vietnamese (OV) who chose to come home and build. Time: Friday, June 27, from 6:30 PM to 9:30 PM Venue: La Siesta Premium Saigon, 180-188 Ly Tu Trong, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City Entry fee: OV members: 150,000 VND | Non-members: 300,000 VND Food & Drinks: Free flow sponsored by WisePass and NFQ Moderator: Lam Tran – OV Saigon Lead This event is open to everyone. No pre-registration required. Hashtags: #OVSaigon #FoundersTalk #FiresideChat #VietnamStartups #JourneyBack

The year 2021 has kicked-off and honestly, we couldn’t be more excited about it. But why isn’t this positive mindset at all obvious to us, though we are often so passionate about running this business?

This is why: we truly hit a low point with Iiris just two months earlier. When the year was coming to an end, due to numerous reasons, we questioned ourselves if there’s any point to keep this business up and running and if so, do we have the strength to do it. As Iiris already shortly explained in her recent blog post, it had been a tough year with lay-offs, tough negotiations with clients and countless other covid-related situations. But we can’t blame covid-19 for all. After founding the network and concept 6,5 years ago and the limited company 5 years ago, we suddenly felt quite exhausted with where we were at that point. We are used to making small changes constantly and not sticking to old ways too tight, but it still felt like we had been dealing with the same challenges for too long and not getting forward as much as we had wanted to.

After making exit plans together and picturing other rather negative future scenarios for two days, we talked again and humbly agreed that we are not yet ready to let go of this precious creation. It took almost two months to reboot and let ideas evolve in their own pace before suddenly the slowly cooked, improved vision of the business was there. We found energy for the intensive business strategy work and as a result, I think the execution plan is more professional than ever before (thanks to all the lessons learned previously and to seeing the possible outcomes more clearly).

Though big changes are ahead, you’re not going to hear about major expansion plans or fancy go-to-market strategies from us (at least not this year). The change we felt that was most in need, was in the core of the business: culture, values and ethics. These are things that are there every day, but in time they get blurry, and even outdated, if not thought thoroughly on a regular basis. Our dip in the deep end last year motivated us to work on the actual core and the meaning of our business – exactly what was urgently needed.

I wish there was an easier way to develop the company, but so far it seems that every year the challenges get more serious and we need to dig deeper every time in order to find the right way. But at same time I see the silver lining in all those tough phases – without all the serious questioning and melancholic feelings, we wouldn’t need to work on the solutions hard enough, and we wouldn’t know if the business still meant us enough to be worth keeping it up and running.

I’m writing this after working on our new website copy for all day, on a Sunday. Feeling quite tired but the excitement of the ongoing changes is strongly present. 

To sum up: I can’t wait to see our strategy in action alongside with the refined values and guidelines, and to see where they will take us during this new year..! 

Sending all the strength and optimism to fellow entrepreneurs and colleagues,

Emma

Thoughts of the last year by our Co-Founder, 1st Assistant Director Iiris, who funnily enough has been working abroad for most of the time.

Highlights

I decided to highlight some of the fabulous people who’ve I’ve had on my AD teams this year. It seemed appropriate as people make the productions in the end. These three seemed to find their way on most of my productions - of which I need to be very very thankful.

Aino 

It’d been couple of years since we got to work on the same project in the same team. Feels like every new adventure we have - together or separately - brings us closer to same mindset. I do not recall having as much fun as we’ve had in the long nights of 2020 - starting from Night of the Living Dicks (short film), our event production in Berlinale NFFC UG Party (first festival event Aino managed fully herself on site!), then Memory of Water shoot in Estonia and Norway (feature we completed on two parts due to hitting pandemic) and now lastly our ongoing production in Sweden. She’s grown outstandingly and I feel like we’re equally challenged by our duties. It’s not only me being the supervisor, supporting her - she’s supporting me fully on my mission and covering for my weak spots when I need help. And she knows me inside and out - on good and bad. (At least she’s grown to find most of my jokes funny.)

Aino and Janne working on Night of the Living Dics short film by Bufo, picture taken by amazing Mitro Härkönen.

Janne

Oh boy oh boy how ready for action this gentleman was and how deep in it he got through 2020! Besides taking a lot of new duties and responsibilities on his shoulders in multiple new productions (Janne has grown to be a fantastic call sheet creator which is one of the most challenging tasks film production includes) he became a truly trusted team member of mine. After working on two complex short films - one filming 8 and one 9 days - and recreating all call sheets dozens of times, sometimes in the morning of the shoot, discussing through detailed FX make ups, animal wrangling, SFX works and VFX plates on his own I was even slightly afraid he’d ask Emma to work on someone elses team for a while. But luckily he’s been there for me on huge breakdowns by the end of year too - and I’d proudly take him on any upcoming project with me.

Emma H.

There aren’t many young talents who are ready to take in lots of new tasks, people and projects within a short period (how is it that always with me people get fully pulled to the deep end...) and also to listen to strict new rules and demands from their supervisors. Emma has been incredibly brave, smart and very independent already in the beginning. I was wondering if she’d find professional filmmaking limiting, too traditional, too by the book (even though it can be everything else) but she embraced what she learned, showed her humble attitude and understood so much more than what was asked. From an Intern visiting her first professional set she became a strong Assistant and even took her first step towards 2nd ADing one day by working on a student short film as one. Go Emma! I’m eagerly waiting to get back on set with her. (Ps. She also standed me as her roommate for 2 weeks on a shoot, which is quite much.)

Me, Janne and Emma on set of Mehiläiskesä (Summer of Bees) short film by Aalto University. Picture by great Atte Männikkö.

Challenges

The company - best and the worst

We truly thought 2019 gave us all we could handle but no - there came 2020 which didn’t save us from much. We’ve used our every penny, we’ve talked and counted through bankruptcy scenarios several times, we’ve had to lay off people, we’ve had some cherished gang members moving to their independent life and we’ve had harder negotiations with clients than ever. We’ve even talked if we’d just shut our doors because we as founders were too tired to figure out a way to get our business run better. Somehow through all this - and after extremely long phone discussion - we took some time to think. On the next call both me and Emma humbly stated “I’ve truly thought it through and I feel like I’m not ready to let go yet. There must be some weird adventures we should still join with this.” And that was it. Even when having a will to do something great we’ve still felt like we’d run out of all flow states and visions for it. Nothing to say, no new development ideas. However - when writing this we’ve just randomly had 6 hours on phone today while working remotely on our strategy and new webpage for next year. I cannot wait to get back home to Helsinki in March 2021 to make my share of this. YES! 

Greatest thanks to Paula, who became our Board Deputy Member and reminded us on what we as BBG have been, what we are and what we could be. She’s been a key on keeping us sane on some days.

Mine and Emma’s home office style.

Finding inspiration after understanding how much besides work there is 

After lockdown in Helsinki I found myself from a weird place, having slept and eaten well, exercised a little, spending time with my dogs and my partner more than ever before. I didn’t even realise how much of questioning it’s brought through the following months on how important work is and isn’t. It’s not made me love filmmaking any less - but it’s surely made me value other things more than I had before. Sometimes it’s brought me great challenges on getting motivated to do the part of my work that’s not as nice and fun as others. I’ve had to come up with new ways to both think and choose the work I commit myself to. 

Painting our office wall - Aino opening champagne to avoid getting desperate.

Victories 

My work language - English

This may be my yearly thought as it feels like each year I get more confidence and vocabulary. But it always feels like a victory itself (even when re-correcting the same mistakes especially on prepositions time after time) as I’ve hated this language all my childhood. Now I’m using it more than my native language - it’s strange what life brings to us...

Combining difficult productions, mandatory work and some creative time for our concept 

I’ve battled through this same equation since BBG was born and I feel like I’m getting closer to balance slowly but surely. It has a lot to do with having Anni and Emma keeping the firm up and running without me when I’m on duty somewhere else. Emma is my support network, sometimes telling me not to work any extra as I might break myself and sometimes taking some weight from my shoulders on things I feel like I should be doing instead. We’ve had some hilarious mistakes made (like ordering awful masks with BBG logo, one and only time any merch is confirmed without my approval) but we’ve made it through with jokes and good new decisions after.

Never giving up Finnish traditions though filming abroad! Klaffijallu Bufo’s style in Tallinn.

Having more relaxed and honest work-relationships than ever before

Interesting how this seems to come with age and experience. Or I hope it would come to all others as it’s coming to me. It’s been a huge relief I’ve not felt like I constantly need to prove my worth to anyone or cover mistakes each time I make one. I can honestly tell my team when I’m sad, overwhelmed or pissed which really helps on not allowing the feeling to fully take over (shoutout to my amazing teams - like Aino telling others in the office “sorry, Iiris is having her 3 minute meditation, you’re free to stand by and wait when she’s done”). I’ve had the best conversations with other HOD’s, Producers and Directors when being able to stay fully honest and humble. I’m not sure how long it’s taken to feel this way and how often I do not feel like it (as there are those days too) but I’m very happy of it and try my best to bring the similar feeling to my crew members as well. 

Lessons 

Communication is the key 

Is there even a possibility to highlight this enough? I feel like I’ve re-learned to send emails this year. Taking time to customise the contents and fill in the gaps on information flow. Obviously it’s not always possible - but usually it is.

Being honest (but humble) is important 

Getting back to one of my victories, this has truly shown it’s face to me on many ways. 

When you feel like you should stop - maybe you should 

Depressingly I wasn’t able to stand up or interfere on some things that I feel like I should have (for me, not others, thankfully) during one production. New year I’ll focus on having more courage on similar situations. 

We are all humans in the end 

The crew members who seem more experienced than anyone else in the world have been interns once too. Ones getting angry and frustrated get sad and low as well. The richest might feel poor, the most successful might see themselves as eternal failures. We are all human and we all face the same ups and downs - though it might sometimes seem like some of us are made of steel.

Getting to know Stockholm better - very happy though the weather was not on my side.

What I’m waiting from 2021 (besides hugging, kissing, travelling, going to movies and having large parties)  

filming something spectacular in Finland with as many of our gangers as possible

learning new tricks from new friends 

taking our whole team for dinner to celebrate our 7 years old network

time together in our office with Emma and Anni (ideally having tea together in the mornings, walking around Helsinki harbour at lunch and popping champagne on Friday nights)

Crossing my fingers at least some of these wishes would come true - and some of yours too.

Lots of love,

Iiris 

There’s been a lot of talk about women in the industry and what’s the position their put in or problems their facing when working due to their gender. 

When we started Blockbusters Gang we surely though about how being four young women creating something new and battling against the old school ways of working would affect our sales. We had a small fear of being labeled as the “girlpower team” - not that there’s anything wrong with girls or power, but BBG wasn’t created to solve as womens but peoples solution for the industry. This had one special affect on our launch: the final chose of our gang outfits. When creating our uniforms there was one rule, nothing too sexy, since we didn’t want to be listening to those comments for all the days to come. So, we decided let’s be a bit (ok, a lot maybe) over the top and go with the Ghostbusters inspiration on that as well. Base of the uniform is sold as “nuclear warfare overall” on finnish market selling excess military stuff. It fits no one and looks like a garbage bag on everyone. Perfect. 

But actually sexism never had any impact on our concept except this. We always wanted to be as professional as possible to be as good as possible. But for sure professionality has an impact with other things as well. 

Most of our gang members work and live in Finland where things are overall pretty good. We’re currently 17 members of which 15 are women (sorry boys, we’ve met too many outstanding ladies when recruiting) and for sure we can say every one of them have experienced some harassment, downgrading or universal doubts on how good they can be on their jobs due to their gender. And this isn’t small or rare - we have many very sad and pretty horrible stories about encounters our gang members have had on their careers. These have affected us mostly by creating a stronger community and making us stronger towards strangers, creating more understanding towards those who feel threatened or too shy to even try.

Us founders are not afraid to be women. Being them has opened us many doors - not just because we’re tall scandinavians but because of the attention it sometimes brought to us we could pitch ourselves and astonish even the people who didn’t see it coming. Working in film is often turning our weaknesses into our strenghts. Is pretty sad to feel being young or pretty is a weakness. Actually we felt it’s absolutely hideous. So we didn’t and started not to care less about it - enjoying ourselves and ignoring norms and labels. 

We hope our attitude and work speak for themselves. We’ve chosen to embrace everyones qualities and personality as something that makes their work unique from others. We hope in our gang and working environment everyone is equal and will not be reviewed by their gender, sexual orientation, age or looks. We’re extremely proud to have gang members from multiple minorities and hopefully be able to make their road in film business slightly less bumpy. 

This is for all filmmakers out there - young and old, rich and poor, rookies and veterans - let’s make our industry the best possible to work in. No one needs to feel uncomfortable when at work. Give some room, treat people and their bodies with respect. That’s the least we all can do.

Every fall and every spring we seem to be at the same exact situation - at least on some level. Our gang is evolving, waiting for the next logical, but usually a bit suspenseful step. This autumn we were emotionally prepared and have tried to stay chill through the process. We’re half way there... and wish we’ll keep our heads calm until the end.

This step isn’t that big for “bystanders” - webpage updates, adding couple new members, new photos, pretty basic stuff. But besides getting the company up to date for our clients we’re trying to develop our in-house systems as well. This means all the boring and time-consuming stuff we hope to take away from our clients when hiring our members. Emma’s work desk is covered of bids and proposals from companies, she’s talking to company lawyers and tax authors daily and creating numerous excel sheets to keep up with everything. In couple weeks we hope all this creates one of a kind BBG 5.0 edition (5.0 already! Time flies so fast!)

While dealing with all this we wanted to have some instant excitement as well - so we ordered bunch of big textile badges with our logo and created a series of unique crew jackets with our members. Here’s Emma with her styled blazer. Pretty cool I say. 

Iiris  1st Assistant Director COO, Head of Production

Thoughts from the annual company development weeks in US Dec 2016 - Jan 2017

It’s very usual for anyone working in film: when a civilian (aka someone not working in film) hears about your career they assume it’s fun all day and glamorous parties every weekend. It’s not every production but every other one when producer or director encourages people to “have fun at the shoot”. Is it really necessary to point out having fun in a stressful industry like this - since it kind of feels like a joke most of the time?

We’re thinking it might be. Though it often sounds really sarcastic (yeah, sure I’m having fun rescheduling the next three days after a call in the middle of the night to be ready at 7am....) it’s not about the exact work you do. It’s about the attitude. And at Blockbusters Gang we surely appreciate a great attitude.

Me and Emma are describing our mindset as “cut the bullshit-thing”. For us it means couple of very important things:

1. Get to the point. Like it or not, everyone is always in a hurry. 2. We don’t need to hear dozens of explanations why something didn’t go as planned. Let’s just focus on the solution. 3. While working be present 100%. It’s much more fun fooling around at full later than mixing up these two things for the whole day.

Though we are pretty strict with many things we've also been very careful of making sure our company isn’t run with rules that exist just because there needs to be rules. It’s not once or twice we’ve popped out the champagne in an afternoon in the middle of the week or slept in on a Monday morning since nothing needed to be done before noon... After years or intense working you learn to let go of being productive in the moments you don’t need to. 

Anger or rudeness should never be part of any working environment although there surely is a lot of frustrating things about making films. We just have to accept them - living with the unknown isn’t actually as bad as it might feel at first. And not taking yourself too seriously helps in other life too.

Old sayings are still very accurately true: even the worst of the productions is great when you have the right people by your side. That alone is a good reason to form a gang. 

Ps. Pictures are from Santa Monica Pier.

Missing my crew back in Helsinki,

posted by Joy Foster, Founder Living in Luzern, Former Team Member US Olympic Archery, and speaker at a previous Founders4Schools event.

'You have had all these great experiences and opportunities that we don't have. We can't compete with people like you.' was one young girl's comment last November after a panel of entrepreneurs, myself included, had finished talking about our backgrounds. 

'Of course you can.' was my response. Yes, it is true, some people have all the luck. Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouths but most are not. 

The beauty of entrepreneurship is that it requires 2 primary skills:

A strong work ethic

A desire to overcome fear of failure

All of the panel members agreed that without a strong work ethic, it would be impossible to advance in the entrepreneurial world. That means that a student should be encouraged to be a hard working student because it is through studying the world's functionality and its problems that we can start to solve them. 

Overcoming fear of failure was another must. Here, I'm not talking about failing an exam - students who don't adequately study fail exams - rather, I'm talking about setting a lofty goal and then pursuing it regardless of whether or not it is a failure. When I finished university, I quit my job and pursued a spot on the US Olympic Archery team. Although, I failed to make the team, the lessons I learned from pouring my heart and life into archery for 6 consecutive years were invaluable.