The Post Group CEO Stephen Buchsbaum

how did I get started my career I was lucky I went to school I said I grew up I was a poor kid in Beverly Hills lived in an apartment my parents struggled to get me to federal hill schools and they happen to have a television studio in film production in there for high school and I don't believe too many other schools had that at that in those days and we shot movies on super 8 and we had a video production room and we had our own cable channel that was went through Beverly Hills and I learned how to produce direct to write and to do the technical side of things and how to put something together without a budget and i ended up through a lot of different luck of the draw was originally thought i was going to be an actor and I got into drama didn't like it and got thrown in this television class and I went wow there's a lot of fun and it ended up like living in that television studio in the last couple years in high school and from that point I learned how to direct and learn that's what I wanted to do and then I went to UCLA and everything I had learned in high school is what they were teaching me in college and so my first major project in the television studio at at UCLA I did something very elaborate and the professors told me that I didn't know what I was doing and didn't know how to do it and I said could I try I think I do know how to do it and they were waiting for me to fail and I ended up doing very well and at that point I didn't really have to do a lot more work in my major so I was lucky was lucky ended up teaching people i did i did some other projects and I directed a lot of commercials and I assistant directed in the nineteen seventy-eight Jerry Lewis telethon where the director named josh white and i thought i was going to my career was there and I was going to be up I was going to be the next you know big director Steven Spielberg was starting to come on that was going to be me and then I couldn't get another job luck of the draw they didn't want to hire young kids you know right out of college to do directing they wanted the old seasoned veterans there weren't music videos there weren't that kind of you know programming for people and i ended up struggling a lot and got a job in post-production and worked my way up I always had a part of me was an entrepreneur I always had that kind of push to do things my way and I was always the leader and and I ended up getting two companies and doing more than they asked of me it's it's an it's an ethic that we don't see a lot now in in in the workers that that work for us now in my day and I'm again not that old but in my day you know you did whatever you could and you worked as long as you could and hopefully they would see that and they would move you up and so what I did was I ended up working my first real job was for a company called the Z channel it was in Los Angeles was one of the first pay television channels out there was a artsy version of HBO and I got a job there and moved to another company from there actually got hired there as their head of engineering not quite knowing what I was doing but I was said I'll try it and they hired me and I did okay and then I moved into a company called vid tronics which was owned by Technicolor and it was the number one post production facility back in his days and and I was able to slowly move up there actually I quickly moved up because there was a lot of turnover in our business somebody leaves and they hire somebody else did be their place and I always said you know something's open something opens I'll take it whatever it is I'll take it I want to move up and and the management like that they like to see people that are aggressive the people that you know that want to go over and above you know the call of duty and I never when they wanted me to work overtime I never said no when they wanted me to stay late I never said no when they wanted me to come in in the morning and earlier shifts or change around or when they you know I never said no and I kept moving from position to position and I did a little bit of editing and I was a position called the colorist which now is a very high end position at that time it was a long position but where we would take film and we would transfer it to videotape and we would color correct it and it was coming it was made for something called home video and it was in the early days when you could buy a Betamax or VHS machine and you could watch a movie and you would go to a store and you would buy a movie and you'd watch it at home it's very similar now to DVD and Netflix and all of that but in the early stages here and we would master these movies and send them out and all of a sudden the studio said hey this is a great business we can rent movies instead of you know selling them and that business took off and I moved up from that point and moving from several different companies and typically in this business you'll stay at a company a few years and then get another opportunity if you're good and you'll be stolen by another company they take you away and they offer you a lot of money and you go over there and then somebody else offers you more money that's typically how you get raises in this business is you move from company to company and I ended up working for a lot of different companies and slowly moving up and there was an opportunity at this company the post group where were I'm one of the owners now to manage a division and we created a area called the digital Center the first digital post production environment in the world they spent a lot of money on building this I was able to help them design it and able to help them also market it and they gave me a management position so I wasn't behind you know in a console with clients anymore I was outside managing people and I liked it and it allowed me to say hey this is something I want to do and I've had several different iterations of management of divisions and it was offered to me to become a general manager of a company I did that that wasn't very successful a little bit of it was I didn't quite know everything I needed to know and I always figured I could learn by doing and I probably needed a little bit more business skills than I had although I ended up learning in the hard way but I moved into a company that was really not financially sound and thought I could do my magic and get it going and didn't work out the way you want not everything is successful and after getting the company going and in the right direction the owners didn't have any money to to expand the company to buy new equipment and in this business it's very equipment intensive expensive technology changes every day and so you need to be there and you need to have the money they for capital investments and capital expenditures so you they didn't have that and I was very much struggling and I ended up at that point moving to another company that was a little bit financially sound and they all the owner of that company said hey look I want to sell my company get it to here and I'll give you a piece of it I give you a little percentage of it so I had had worked out a scenario and a deal where I got it to a certain area and I helped him sell it I got some money out of it but then I had to go find another place to go to work and I did this for three or four other companies i became a turnaround specialist it was rewarding but it there was a lot of insecurities and where was I going to go next and I didn't like that so in in 1995 after doing this for a long time and moving up and being paid very well there was this thing coming out this new technology called the internet and i decided i was going to take my money that i had gotten from the last company I worked in and I was going to do an internet startup company and I started a company with two other gentlemen called Creative Edge and we designed websites and we had an idea of because I knew all the Hollywood community of doing Hollywood and entertainment websites and luck of the draw we got big websites for movie trailers and sports we got into the sports area and we became the design company for the Los Angeles Dodgers for Los Angeles avengers arena football team for the Los Angeles Kings so I built that company up and even in the.com when the bubble had burst back in two thousand the company was still doing quite well and I decided that now is the time to the computers were starting to marry television and film and I needed to be in that so I kind of put my thinking cap back on and I got in with a partner over here and we decided that we're going to integrate the web and post-production and we now have eight companies that do that I run all the companies i don't own all the companies i own little pieces of all the companies but i run all the companies and manage the companies and higher really good managers to work under me and that's just that's the the trick to doing at least in this business is to have good managers people that make me look good early in the stages of business you wear a lot of hats and sometimes you have to do everything and it's very hard to to give delegate responsibilities to other people to other team members to other divisions because you're just not really comfortable with them doing it but as you grow and mature you have to you have to do that because you'll you'll kill yourself you'll you'll work too hard you you you I went several years without vacations my family didn't you know didn't love me not being home for dinner a lot and things like that and you have to you have to kind of put that all in place early stages you want to work with in your career you want to work real hard and there's a time or you need to think about yourself and go in that direction so a careful balance and learning how to hire the right kind of people to manage your companies under you that will take a lot of the burden off you but also allow your company to grow so now where i am now is the big idea the big picture comes from out of this office here and my team from here and we develop and we grow and we figure out when things aren't going right and a lot of times in business they don't go right not everything is like Bill Gates and Microsoft and all of that so most of them do we have divisions of our company here are run by seasoned professionals there are some people that are younger that have aggressively gotten into positions and are in some form of training or learning as they're going basically but most cases we we do a lot of very high-end programs and films here and we're not able to have somebody just training there we do believe though in having students or having new associates or or interns hands-on experience I really push with that it's not good to have somebody sit and watch somebody they need to they need to interact you need to understand they need to they don't need to go get coffee they need to go there and learn how tape machines work and learn how storage works and how cameras work and how you know how to put things together here I want to see people that you know our prerequisite for forgetting a job here is a you're not happy with where you where you're at you want to move up there are areas here where we have seasoned professionals that are editors and colourists and visual effects people here and there I want them to keep being motivated to to move ahead to grow to get new technology not to just sit there too i'm fine with what i'm doing giving my next job paying people well treating them well understanding that they have lives other than work here and and talking to one of the things that I believe is important is my door is always open here and I want to talk to people some some employees will feel free and come up some won't some will send to email and don't want to talk about it so you have a lot of different ways of communicating with people but communication is important we are an entertainment and communication company here and when we fail if we can't talk to our employees managing the employees here personalities it's not just a routine every day where somebody comes to work and goes home and there they're fine it's not a factory here you know a lot of times you're dealing with people who have personal problems at home family members that are sick are haven't had a lot of vacation time and are quite burnt out there are other times when people are just angry at driving in in the traffic in Los Angeles or or you know frustrated because the client is late or they were supposed to start at nine and they don't start at eleven and affects their their day-to-day personalities so a lot of my job is being a psychologist you know lay down on the couch tell me what it's about it happens a lot it happens a lot managing people working together managing the team it's very much like a sports team it's very much like you have you have your starting lineup but you have to have your backup team in case somebody doesn't do well or somebody's out sick or you know we get overwhelmed with work and we have too much work and we have to have people doubling up here have to have a strong bench too strong you know backup team here hands-on experience when a client is talking to me I understand the technology I understand the dollars and cents a lot of companies our competition are run by numbers people see you know CFOs and people who don't understand the logistics sometimes you have to lose money on a job to get something in the two or three months from now that's a lot bigger than that there are times when you do a lot of things for free and you add it on to the bill at another area here there are times when when things don't go very well equipment breaks down people make mistakes here and you have to be comfortable enough to talk to the client and say we didn't do so well we need to redo this sometimes I've written they're not very happy because what we do and the programs that we do here you know they have air dates they have release dates and we have to make that happen and sometimes when things are late we have to pay for satellite time for it to get from LA to New York or we have to pay for special couriers to and carry it on airplanes and take it to other cities you know that happens and as the technology improves it's harder to do the work it used to be very simple now it's difficult now there's a hundred different ways of doing this thing high-definition 2k workflows the new red camera workflow people are shooting on industrial cameras some people are shooting on home video cameras one of our shows numbers which is on CBS they they have a a segment in each show where they shoot with the home video camera and it's a point of view of kind of walking through with one of their people here and that technology has to be in high definition and has to match the rest of the technology it's a 30 frame technology versus of 24 frame technology so conversions and has to be done right and the right people have to present that and then hand it to the editor and cut into the show and color directed and hand it off to visual effects and so there's a every show has a workflow that's the big word now we have his workflow used to be is you know you know here's the project that's edit and we'll ship it now it's what format high definition you know what color space is it going to go out to film it's going to be in a theater it's going to be on television is it sound five once around if five is it 71 surround is it just stereo is there music and effects track is it going to be over dubbed in another language you know you know a studio will make a project here and want to be able to sell it to different markets we need to know that technology it's one of the things I hate the most but it's regular occurrence we typically have a once a year capex budget but we are always buying big and little things throughout the years depends on what comes out technology-wise depends on what our clients are asking for there is a new form of high definition that comes out every two weeks just about and we need to know that the equipment we have can can handle that sometimes we have to say no we don't want to be in that in that area and that's difficult it's hard to turn down business but sometimes you have to do that losing money is not very good well I read The Wall Street Journal which is the best management book out there her but I I study a lot of business my dealings with with some of the other companies that work with that work very closely with their weather chief financial officers with the banking industry and I understand you know about about issues with with taxes with depreciation with with budgets with salaries with profit and loss with even collections accounts payable accounts receivable you know every day I am negotiating a deal with somebody on how to pay for something or how to buy something so you know if I had to do it all again I probably would have taken you know maybe a minor in business but I ended up with a minor in journalism it's just kind of what happened the biggest challenge is actually been this year and that is we've been in in major industry strikes have happened this year the beginning of the year actually the end of last year was a was a Writers Guild strike which affected the industry not just to not just directly but indirectly for for a lot of people a lot of people rethought their careers and got out of this business because of it it was a hundred a strike billions of dollars were lost during that strike not millions but billions it affected everybody from us in the post production area to the people who had the dry cleaners next to the studio who are no longer there on the restaurants no no longer there and then after the strike was settled work came back in very quickly but there was this looming Screen Actors Guild strike and the Screen Actors Guild have do not have a deal with the studios so right now the studios are not producing feature films they're producing their television that hold on feature films forty percent of our businesses feature films so we are we are experiencing a significant slowdown in that business area telling the truth you always get caught when you lie to somebody you always get caught when you you know don't tell it like it is one of the things that that I do with any of my customers is if they want I'll give my cell phone number they can call me at home they can wake me up in the middle of the night some of them do most of them don't but if they have a problem I want them to feel like they can talk to the guy at the top and you know I'll at least listen not always can fix the problem myself but I can certainly find somebody who can if it can be fixed but you know the lot of our business reputations of people of just saying yes to everything and and failing it's happened we do we don't do that we tell the truth and we and we sometimes don't get all the projects but we we don't take on projects that we know we can't handle I actually have the secret that one of my college professors taught me and that's to put together a task list and you know a lot of people I hear the story from everybody walk in in the morning or I have so much stuff to do I don't know how I'm going to get it all done well I I walk in the same way but I have this list in front of me and I actually do something a little bit different probably than most people is I actually write it down I don't type it up I write it down and I may have 20 items on my list of tasks to do for the day or you know projects to look at during the day and all of a sudden I start crossing off my listen at the end of the day I mean in the early morning most of the time I'm done with everything so organization you know planning being organized making sure that you're not running from meeting to meeting without a time break in between things and that happens a lot where meetings get pushed back thinking about running light and you have to cut a manager time that way but the most important thing is to get all is to be organized is to have to know where everything is in your office to be able to to easily get to things it's very nice with virtual private networks and being able to log onto my computer from home cell phones email all of that to be able to address you know test like that but on the bad side of it now especially in in in our society now people are dependent on you to answer their emails or answer their phone calls 24 hours a day seven days a week you know I have a lot of times where client sends me an email three in the morning wants to know why I didn't answer it and I said well I was sleeping oh well I thought you're there all the time I said well the phone next to my bed but I don't hear emails going off and I certainly don't get up to type emails in the middle of the night things like that but our society is very dependent on blackberries and cell phones and and you know PDAs and all of that and being able to get you know data back and forth you know I'm a lot of times out for dinner and I'm answering emails at the table and it's a little rude to do but that's what you have to do to keep dab the edge on on everybody it's responding back to their needs probably combining all the companies that we have now and creating a a workflow of post-production start to finish we can handle some or all of a project from beginning to end and the more you use with us the more money you save so we've put a very successful plan in place to take a client and hold their hand and walk them through a project and at the end we have something that's really great I mean a good example is HBO Sunday night is that Chris Rock is having a special well we're still editing that right now we have to ship it tonight to New York to HBO for quality control you know but they come here we did the the Justin Timberlake special last year they come here because they know we can handle that and we have the staff to handle it and engineering to make sure that that things don't break and the operations staff to make sure that the bright people are here and so on and so on all the way through the project to clients feel comfortable working with us the post group is is our largest company but we actually have Cameron ttle we have editorial rental evidence and final cuts we have web design we have DVD duplication and replication of in Valencia we have we manufacture DVDs out there for studios and for entertainment clients we have sound services we have digital intermediate services to finish feature films and we have the post group which does television and feature film shows like CSI house numbers Amazing Race and then a lot of you know big movies and small movies the movies that again have slowed down this time we should be and be doing a lot of Christmas movies right now and they just aren't unhappy probably at a 60-minute drama show around six to seven weeks we will the film will be shot will transfer it digitally to storage medium and they will cut the show for about four weeks get it set up and then will conform color correct and do the sound elements on it typically somewhere to forty fifty thousand dollars in episode depending on you know different films have different budgets every film has has different shooting schedules some shoot on film some shoot on electronic so no there's no real set number in that sometimes they're here two to three years sometimes they're here three four months we just finished a movie for Oliver Stone called W which is a some type of biopic on George Bush I haven't actually seen it but shot over the summer and it will release October so that was a quick turnaround for that type of project but we've we've had feature films we did a movie called we own the night which came out last year that was here for two-plus years it really depends on their budgets and what they have or have not to you know timewise to do the future is heading more to desktops and cheaper equipment but a lot of the work will be able to be done at home a lot of things that used to be on you know major projects of visual effects and with editing can be done on inexpensive systems at home the quality may not be exactly what you want but sometimes when you don't have the budget for something you do it that way but I mean I think this direction that we're going in a lot of people are taking things in-house so we have to keep the the edge on why why come here its talent driven it's the people it's the the experience here it's our rental space where we rent out rooms here were like a hotel you come in and say I need to work on a movie for six months that I need for rooms to for editors and 24 post supervisors and we have a kitchen here and we feed them we make cookies every day at three o'clock and we you know there's a there's a variety of things that we do you know on the weekends our clients come here everything is secured so you need to have badges to get into now the facility so to avoid privacy and the wrong people being in the facility you know if they want their cars washed or if they want their clothes taken to the cleaners or any of that stuff now they don't get that for free we charge them for that but that's you know what we have to do to keep people here in this environment about 50 50 on the business side we run pcs on the creative side with our max we have a high standard or quality here and we make sure that that every project is is quality controlled quality checked before it leaves our facility here and if it's not right we don't send it we did a movie last year a documentary on the who in the band The Who which was multi formats elements from black and white in color over the 30-plus years the who has been together and it was a it was a very difficult project to handle technically but we got through it don't know I'm just kidding the advice is make sure that your your it's what you want to do and that you're prepared to work hard long hours schedules are very difficult you could you know there are times when you're here for days without going home there are times when you know you have that thing to do with your family that you just don't get to do you know television is on the air 24 hours a day movies are being made all the time you have to work around the schedules of your clients a lot of times you thinks things are just going to be a few hours to do and they turn into days or weeks so you have to understand that you have to work very hard to get where you want to be you have to have a lot of patience and B and not react and get angry on things because a lot of things will frustrate you in this business and just be prepared it's going to happen it will happen something will go wrong always does just be prepared and say okay let's fix it and move on again honesty understanding talking to people you know I've been through that through just about every crisis imaginable and just telling me you've been there in your album but typically the crisis we are is never enough time to finish something and there's a deadline and we have to get it done and sometimes beyond our control things happen we don't get the elements in time the editor decides that they're the Edit staff decides everything needs to change after it's all been done we get notes from the networks to change everything I will give you a interesting example of a crisis that we had nothing to do with it what should have aired tonight on CBS on numbers was an episode about a commuter train and a freight train crashing and in Los Angeles as you know we had a couple weeks ago pretty bad crate train crash this was shot a month and a half before the train crash happened and the story is so amazingly like what happened even the driver the the commuter train was on the cell phone on a cell phone and the the was working a double shift I mean it's very much the same story going on there and the network said we can't air this so they scrambled to finish the show early and to take this show and cut it up a little bit and put a disclaimer at the beginning that this was shot before the train accident and in there doing this in memory of the people and so it's very difficult the odds of this happening or you know who knows but somebody wrote a script and it actually happened and so that we got this was the show that was going to air tonight so I got put on hold and they rush to complete another show earlier maybe the show didn't get as much attention as it needed but it got done and there was a lot of overtime and a lot of you know people having to move their schedules around to get this done but this happens a lot not to this extent but you know there are times when the network makes a change on something in it the air date changes or there's a emergency and the show never gets on the air or it needs to be recut or you know last-minute the network says we didn't like the performance of somebody go recut it and it happens you need to know every job in your department you need to know you need to be to to be able to when somebody from your department walks in and you're the manager understand when they're complaining about something or what they don't understand something you need to be able to tell them that so you can't be somebody who just has who has good business skills thrown into something and not understand you know the process so that's very important so we like our managers who've come up the ranks instead of walking in saying I'm smart guy I need to be manager

2020-12-21 22:46

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