The 2005 book ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’, by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim, is all about creating and capturing an uncontested market space, thereby making competition irrelevant.
That’s a tall order you may think, when we’re all fundamentally chasing the same kind of production or post-production work… But that’s precisely what a red ocean is: in red oceans it’s overcrowded, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known.
In a blue ocean, demand is created rather than fought over and the rules of the game are waiting to be set. The ideal end game is to find opportunities for rapid, profitable growth, where you define the rules.
My audio post-production studio, The Audio Suite, started in 2002 and was located in Birmingham, England. By 2012 it was not an area known for its bountiful production or post-production. So we looked at who delivered ADR services in a 50 mile radius around. What we found was no one was offering ADR within 80 miles of us… So we specialized in this and found a highly profitable niche thanks to actors who either couldn’t or wouldn’t travel to London or Manchester, and who got to know, like and trust us; and so did their out-of-town and overseas clients.
And this served us very well for more than a decade, until 2023, when we closed in the UK; and in a planned move, switched all of our operations to Australia.
Not least of all for the sun, sea, blue skies and palm trees.
The fun of business for me – especially this business – is in finding solutions to challenges. That’s an adventure we’re enjoying now: making podcasts from our home studios, whilst my colleague Jason Nicholas and I also continue to act as a dialogue editing team on filmed drama.
But since moving to Australia, for me, the most exciting development has been in helping new creatives to find their own space in a crowded sea, and to help get experienced professionals heard in a noisy world.
The waiting list for my coaching services and details of my coaching content, including how to download my free eBook on the benefits of coaching for creatives, awaits you here:
www.soundproducer.com.au/coaching
(By the way, this is my calm, happy place – my home studio: where I create educational podcasts, I dialogue edit, and I coach colleagues all over the world, live and online, in different time zones… From The Sudan to Canada; and the UK to LA.)
