Only a few more days until I'm off again!! woo hoo

We work hard. I can honestly say that as I sit in the studio at 11pm on a Monday night. I'm taking a break from ordering some photos to write this post. The cool thing about working hard is that i can play hard and not feel guilty.

Seriously - there are times when I'm upset that I can;t finish a project and I wake up in the middle of the night , open up the laptop and get to work.

Were off to Montreal to meet some clients and a franchise of ours. Kind of a vacation/work time off with the kids and Marianna. Should be fun. I love Montreal. In fact, I speak french fluently. We always stay at the same 4 star Shereton in Laval, we always have sushi at the same restaurant in Pointe Claire. And we alway go for breakfast at D.A.D.s bagels in Westmount.

We have 4 weddings this weekend so I'll definitely be needing a few days off. We have been expanding TorontoHomeMovies.com every month for the past 8 months and as I mentioned before we go National starting September 1st 2007.

Now this is cool.


When I first started doing transfers (converting old movies 8mm, super 8 and 16mm to DVD) it was over 8 years ago. We would do about $800 a year. Now we that in day. I love how a simple idea can grow into something so huge. The thing is though that you have to excel at 5 things.

1. Quality - No matter how fast you are, how cool, how cheap - Quality is the key to a successful business.

2. Know your process. - 95% of problems occur when a failure in the process happens. We have set up very stringent process for every possible outcome. This way ANYONE can handle nearly any problem and the business is not tied to tightly to one person.

3. Innovation- there are 1000's of photographers, videographers, webdesigners and digital specialties. At TorontoHomeMovies and CanadaHomeMovies.com we have changed the way that business is run with 2 major innovations. 1. We go straight to digital. Where our competitors run the 8mm footage to VHS then convert to DVD. We have created a process where every reel is capture DIRECT to digital .avi in the computer. This allows us the ability to colour correct, sharpen and even edit all footage BEFORE burning DVD. We even included a menu where other companies charge more money. Oh - were 15% cheaper too.

The second innovation we market nearly 95% by way of the Internet. Our customer find us and contact us through our website. We are only today, beginning to work as wholesalers.

4. The forth key to our success I believe is accounting. Proper tracking of orders not only keeps us in the black but by adding additional fields to our forms we are not about to see which ads we run are more successful than others. We know which type of film is in the most demand. So when we raise our prices we will not raise all our prices but only the 3" reels that account for 75% of our transfers. By doing so we will increase revenue dramatically while increasing the price by a very small margin.

5. Marketing. I mention the website, but its more than that. By identifying not ultimate use of the footage being transferredwe were able to increase revenue by %20 last month. Let me explain. In the month of may if an order for transfers came in we would quote them the price for the conversion and the DVD encoding. Done.

That would mean a customer would get their old film converted to one or 2 DVD disks and leave. By requiring all staff in the studio to ask the following question " what is the ultimate us for this footage?", we have been able to add uncompressed MiniDV tape for those people who plan to edit the footage. Slideshows for birthday parties and anniversaries. Even, booked a number of video and photo assignments.