What is a producer made of?

No one says: when I grow up I want to be a producer.

So how did I get here?
Turns out I was in training to be a producer long before I knew producing was a job.

It turned out I was very good at the very complicated shoots. Multi-city, multi-country, compressed timelines, challenging budgets. I was a specialist in large scale, complicated international productions, in English and Spanish. I became known for my strategic production and financial solutions and most of all the safety nets I installed on every project. I created guardrails — systems that protected the job, the creatives, the crew and the client and still provided enough flexibility to let the inspiration flow.

Production needs evolved. Photo became photo+motion. TV shoots became TV + photo. Single-channel marketing became integrated. Everything got bigger, faster, and more complicated. Brands needed more content across more channels, budgets were reallocated to favor quantity. I adapted to deliver assets for the entire pipeline. I understood the tech, the creative, the finances, the systems and the people. The fundamentals always remained the same, no matter the content, delivery channel or technology.

Agency & brand producers requested me to be their producer. They needed someone they could trust and that trust pulled me inside their world. I went from being their boots-on-the-ground producer to their colleague as a strategic production partner inside their organizations.

Then clients started bringing me in for something else entirely — to restructure or build their production departments. And I added consultant to my tool kit.

I didn’t plan to have three production careers.

Remember? No one grows up saying: I want to be a producer.

Iconic brands tell iconic stories with iconic imagery. No iconic imagery, no iconic story, no iconic brand.

Creative processes need real structure that allows creative people to be creative. No matter where I am inserted into the production ecosystem — agencies, brands or production companies — the guiding principles are the same.

Production is the glue that connects brand objectives to creative vision:

Build a system that scales. Create playbooks and best practices that create reliable and sustainable processes that can be utilized by cross-functional teams. Curate the best partners. Develop and mentor the right people. Design the financial architecture to support the campaign strategy and make sure the campaign strategy supports the financial architecture.

Build the right system and then stand back and watch the magic happen.