#StartupsEverywhere profile: Carolyn Pitt, CEO and Founder, Productions.com
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Helping the Production Community Locate and Hire Talent
With Georgia becoming a global destination for film and television production, an Atlanta-based startup named Productions.com (formerly known as Film Connx) is working to promote diversity and simplify the hiring process within the production industry—in the Peach State and beyond—by connecting stakeholders with local and vetted production professionals. We recently spoke with Carolyn Pitt, the CEO and Founder of Productions.com, to learn more about her startup’s role as a job marketplace for productions, the challenges she’s experienced as a Black founder, and the steps that policymakers should take to support more equitable investments in early-stage companies.
Can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to launching Productions.com?
I’m an intellectual property and entertainment attorney. My background also includes management consulting, strategy work, business development, and even placement work—which comes in handy when you have a job marketplace as your business. As for entrepreneurship, I was bitten by the bug very early. I remember at the age of six I realized that I could sell seasoned popcorn to college students. My dad was a professor at the time, and I learned that college students are hungry and will give a cute little girl money for popcorn. So from then on I’ve always been involved in entrepreneurship in some form or another.
Tell us more about Productions.com. How does your platform work to connect the production industry with vetted local crew, and how are you working to address some of the inequalities within the industry?
Productions.com is the job marketplace for productions. We connect industry stakeholders to vetted local crew across the US and in Canada. We’re based in Atlanta, which is the busiest production hub in the world. However, while we’ve got more production activity than anywhere else—due in large part to the state’s generous tax credit—the local and experienced crew that live here still struggle to find work. And that’s also the case in every other production hub. The system is really disorganized and there’s a lot of room to improve equity and parity—and efficiency—as it relates to industry hiring. Productions.com exists to solve those issues.
Our goal is for production professionals of all backgrounds to work in their craft, make a living, and advance in their careers. The production industry—film, television, and even music—has been very monolithic since its inception, and opportunities tend to not be as available or accessible to women and people of color. So we’re very intentional about ensuring that women and professionals of color who are underrepresented in the industry get the opportunity to work and expand their careers. We have a diversity and inclusion division, called Include, which is designed to help level the playing field. Women, professionals of color, veterans, persons who are disabled, and persons in the LGBTQIA community can very easily be found and hired on our platform through Include.
What we’ve seen in the industry is that there’s definitely more of a push and an appetite to diversify. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—which oversees the Academy Awards—recently announced that movies will need to have certain inclusion standards moving forward, such as having a certain number of women and people of color in roles of influence on the production. Those steps are also beginning to happen in most of the Hollywood organizations that mandate what happens in the field. And we are here as a mechanism to help make that happen.
What are some of the challenges you’ve had to overcome as a woman founder and entrepreneur of color?
Accessing capital is one of the hardest things that founders have to do. And research has shown that it’s much harder for women founders to access capital, and even harder yet for founders of color. As a Black woman founder, my experience has borne that out.
While the vast majority of venture capital is granted each year to white men, .0006 percent is granted to Black women. But it’s not just venture capital that is more challenging for underrepresented founders to access. Black and Brown founders often don’t have a friends and family round—or they have one that’s substantially smaller than their counterparts—due to the lack of generational wealth. In addition, when we consider securing loans, we often encounter additional barriers and difficulties.
Although challenges with accessing capital haven’t gone away during the pandemic, I will say that there has been a sort of silver lining. In 2020, in large part because of the murder of George Floyd, there were more opportunities for Black founders to have office hours with investors. I was able to get office hours with some investors I wouldn’t typically have been able to access, and that was helpful regarding securing some investments and engaging in fruitful conversations.
What startup and tech-related policy issues do you believe should receive more attention from state and federal lawmakers?
I think the opportunity for public-private partnerships to better support startups would be a great step. Last year, I had the opportunity to speak on a virtual roundtable with senior staffers on the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) had recently introduced the New Business Preservation Act, and there are a number of provisions in the legislation that would truly address some of the issues with accessing capital. When I spoke before the committee, I shared that the bill seems like a model that could provide value for all parties. It could provide capital access to those startups that need it, help guide VCs who are struggling to identify whether their dollars can be used in new and impactful ways, and allow the government to have a stake in making sure there is broad access to capital. Not only do Black and Brown founders and women founders face these challenges, but founders allocated outside of Silicon Valley face similar investment issues as well. So there’s an opportunity to have the government partner with venture capital to ensure that those dollars are available, and also ensure that entrepreneurs who come from underrepresented communities or outside of Silicon Valley have the ability to build and grow their companies.
In terms of supporting Black and Brown founders and women-owned businesses, we need to make sure that they have equal access to credit and capital. We need to increase access to federal contracts, and also make sure that COVID relief is truly reaching our businesses. Some reports found that around 90 percent of Black and Brown founders and women-owned small businesses did not access the first round of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans or Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL). As a result, 41 percent of Black businesses have failed and shut down in 2020.
In terms of pandemic assistance, future relief efforts should also include a way of providing technical, legal, and accounting assistance so that—in addition to capital—founders gain critical tools that they need for their businesses. Policymakers should also ensure that they’re reserving stimulus funds for small businesses, regardless of the ethnic background of the owners. What we’ve seen on the news is that a large percentage of those loans went to larger companies. Reserving at least half of the funding, for example, for businesses who have 50 employees or less would be helpful.
How has the coronavirus pandemic affected your company and the production industry, and what can policymakers do to better support small businesses at this time?
The industry was absolutely devastated by the pandemic. Filming ground to a halt, and hundreds of thousands of workers were unemployed for months. Many of them are still unemployed. What we’ve seen, fortunately, in some markets—particularly in Georgia—is that the industry is back up and running, and even thriving. Currently, there are more than 50 TV shows and films being actively shot here in Atlanta and the surrounding area. Productions have enacted protocols on sets that include frequent testing and oversight; however, this adds a lot of expense—often around 25 to 30 percent in additional costs to get personal protective equipment and other required resources to minimize COVID exposure.
In response, Productions.com began providing jobs on our platform that aren’t strictly in the production industry. We want people to have the opportunity to make an income while waiting for the industry to fully return. We’ve also begun offering content—both originally created and in partnership with others—to provide people with training. This includes topics such as how to edit, produce content, and draft a shoppable script. We want people to use their downtime to pick up new skills. We’ve also begun providing compliance training, and we now have compliance production professionals on our platform to help people find work. And we also partnered with an organization in Los Angeles to provide COVID testing to productions. So we’re doing what we can to make the industry more effective and efficient in getting crew back to work as quickly and safely as possible.
When people think of film and TV, they might think of industry professionals as wealthy, but the entertainment industry is really a gig marketplace. The lifeblood of the industry is the production crew and the people working behind the scenes. They’re hard working folks who are great at what they do, but they often have trouble finding the next opportunity because of the way that the system is organized—or, more accurately, disorganized. We work to ensure that production professionals always have access to consistent viable work.
What is your goal for Productions.com moving forward?
A few weeks ago we were selected for a Jane Walker grant for $10,000 by Halle Berry herself, which is outstanding because she is someone we truly enjoy and respect in the industry. We plan to continue our momentum moving forward to provide even more value to everyone involved in the industry.
We’ve had some interest from other countries—including, but not limited to, Canada, where we already operate—regarding expanding our operations, and we plan to continue growing within the U.S. and beyond. We’re also expanding our efforts, including working with our client Sony Music to provide them with sound engineers and song remixers. We will continue to expand into additional areas of production to help bring about as much equity, parity, opportunity, and efficiency as we can, while also leveraging technology to really make the production industry the best that it can be.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email edward@engine.is.
