Time to blog!

This blog is about life in the media production business.

Already running a small media production company?  Thinking of starting or taking over one?  Then I think you will enjoy and appreciate this blog, which is dedicated to and, hopefully, entertaining and informative for, our kind of business.

After 18 years in the Hollywood production community, editing and/or directing hundreds of hours of broadcast TV, I, my wife and my son, packed up and moved out to Boulder, Colorado in 1995.  It was supposed to be the "end of struggle" for the Strassners.  I had sold my company, Strassner Editing Systems, to an outfit called Videomedia which gave us the cash we needed to uproot and leave Los Angeles (it is very expensive to move!).

I had used Videomedia's machine control hardware to develop my line of linear editing systems, based on the CMX and Grass Valley styles of keyboard editing, but on a PC instead of customized mainframes, so they thought we should team up.  Part of the deal was that I got to live anywhere I chose and using the Internet for day-to-day communication.  All went quite nicely, until decisions were made by the powers that were that made the company implode.  So here we were, two years after the move with no employment (my wife was also employed by Videomedia for public relations) and absolutely no opportunites -- save one.

A dear old friend of mine from college days at the University of Colorado at Boulder had developed a company called Flashback Video.  She even bought one of my editing systems a few years earlier.  She and her family wanted to move to Hawaii and sell their company.  It seemed like the perfect thing to do!  Back in production!  We'll make millions! Yeah.

At the time, Flashback was a small event-driven video company; weddings, etc., although they did manage to land a few large jobs here and there.  They  had a nice little office space with a linear edit bay, a non-linear Media100 system cramped in a backroom, Beta/SP decks and VHS duplication services.  We bought the company, tripled the number of VHS duplication decks - it used to be a great business - and built up a nice non-linear bay for the Media100.

We also had a partner, a dear old friend from college days who worked for CU in their media department.  In fact, he was the reason I got into the production field, being the first person I ever watched direct a small production.  Screw my honors degree in Psychology.  This looked like a lot more fun!

So armed with a business plan that seemed guaranteed to make us millionaires in a short few years, we got ourselves an SBA loan and bought the company.

Pretty straightforward up to here.  But wait!  There's a lot more to come.  Consider this a "forward" and stop back.