Jim Johnson argues production companies should pay crews fairly, slightly above market rate, but not so high it kills profitability or quality. Loyalty to long-time crews matters, but business sustainability comes first. Incentives can maintain quality without breaking the budget.
you gotta think about market versus loyalty. And so we wanna retain our crews, but we don't wanna retain our crews at the cost of our business. And so we have to understand what our market rate is. If we don't understand what that market rate is, we're gonna struggle. We actually have quite a few tactics that help understand that. But what's the market rate going for my market? And what kind of volume do I have? You really need to think about volume in this equation too. That if I have more volume than the other guys out there, I have more steady work. And that would be something that somebody would want in their lives is stability, not one-offs here and there. We also have to consider loyalty that, hey, we may have worked with these crews for a long time and that allows for us to, that they deserve to be paid fairly. And so we wanna make sure that we do pay fairly, but we don't wanna pay it at the price of quality. So how do we incentivize our crews to do high quality while keeping our costs down in a fair market? Because what's happening is those costs have gone up, and if we don't push back, we're not going to have anything left over and they're not gonna have a place to work. And so we have to be fair and equitable and maybe even a little bit better than market rate, but we don't have to be ridiculous. And I've seen so much ridiculousness out there.
