Interview with Lee Kemp, Fullrange
Who are you and what do you do?
Lee Kemp Managing Director of Fullrange. We're a corporate film production company. Mostly we take business problems and turn them into well-produced, measurable films. Our clients include lots of small to medium local companies and a range of global brands. We were recently named as one of the top 50 corporate production companies in the UK.
What was your route into this job?
I started this company with 3 friends having worked together at another company. In March 2008 I took over from the previous MD.
What companies/ organisations are doing really interesting things at the moment?
I tend to like the big stuff so Cadbury's recent collaboration with yahoo and google to measure offline results from online marketing was superb. It will take a long time to filter down to most companies but it demonstrates that anything can be measured if you apply the right resources. The Old Spice campaign is a particular favourite of mine. I like it as a particular example of a good idea, well executed, that flies in the face of the general truth that social media is a waste of time.
Which tools of the trade could you not do without?
Google. From gmail, to maps, to calendar. My company runs on it and the one instance of downtime we've had in the past two years has been more than made up for by getting it for free or the tiny cost of google enterprise. A surprising amount of conversation in the office goes on via gchat too. Omnifocus is my task management tool of choice. I've just got into time tracking with paymo.biz. I started this because I was making one of my staff do it so I said i'd have a go and its had the peculiar effect of making me dramatically more efficient. It divides my day into tasks and one of my task labels is 'arsing around on the internet'. I can see how much time i've been doing that and get annoyed at myself, so I do less of it now. If i'm recording how I spend my time I find that I want to use it much more effectively. Finally I've just got Default Folder X. It makes saving and finding files on a Mac several orders of magnitude easier. Its such a tiny thing to complain about in the Mac ecosphere but the way Macs offer options for save locations is really dumb. This programme gets around that. In our Monday morning team meetings one item on the agenda is always App of the Week and one of our staff members is a former Apple employee who picks something cool for us to play with.
What events might we catch you at?
I don't tend to frequent too many 'creative networking' events because Birmingham doesn't have any good ones. I could genuinely count the number of useful creative networking events i've been to on the fingers of one hand shortly after I'd pulled that hand out of a blender. They're also not places I'm likely to find my clients. In terms of business networking I've found the Chamber of Commerce to be very useful and the Chamber Executive Club within that has picqued my interest. The Institute of Directors' Young Directors Forum have run some interesting events recently but I get the impression that the IoD don't take people seriously until they're 60. The creative industries needs to look outside itself and go to where the clients are. Birmingham Forward and Birmingham Future provide good local networking, particularly now that they're opening up beyond the professional services.
How do you keep up with what’s going on in your industry?
Twitter's pretty good for showing me new, interesting films but its quite scattershot. Then we have a culture in the office of sharing interesting stuff we find amongst each other which builds on this. I get two updates from the FT every morning as well as Business Desk West Midlands, then when I get into work I browse my RSS feed (Helvetica Reader over google's reader) which has about 20 blogs I'm interested in.
Where do you tend to look for new team members?
We advertise on our blog, Screen West Midlands, the Producers' Forum and on Twitter. This has worked for the last three or four and as a manager, i'm fiercely proud of how well we recruit so I can say that this simple solution works for us.
What would you like to see more of in your industry?
Measured results and solutions to briefs that solve communication problems. Many companies just pander to clients and provide what the client thinks they want.
Who’s in charge of your blog/twitter updates at Fullrange?
I tend to write the blog but my colleague Rachel occasionally adds stuff. Individually all 7 of us have our own personal twitter accounts. People can tweet whatever the hell they like but everyone is mature enough to accept that there's an irrevocable link between somebody who works for a small company and that company. Our main corporate account is @thefrontdoor which tweets about people who visit us, listing who they are what they do and a link to their website. We use it to give our clients visibility. We have two more but they've sort of died recently due to the strength of individual's personal accounts.
Can you give an example of a creative/ memorable portfolio you’ve seen?
I very much admire the work of 383 Project in Birmingham, their growth has been extraordinary and their client portfolio seems to go from strength to strength. I'm also very impressed by Substrakt who've found a niche within architecture that they're consolidating very well.
- Take a look at Fullrange on Jobplot