GETTING RECRUITERS TO COME TO YOU, SIMPLE HABITS TO LIVE LONGER & A GREAT HALLOWEEN COSTUME FOR YOUR DOG!

Welcome to Potentially Focused! Hope your Thursday morning is off to a good start and September is treating you well! Today, we … Share ways to get recruiters to come to you, morning habits to help you live longer, and the latest data on TV & Film jobs.

Plus of course, we've got some much-needed fun stuff for the weekend!

And, for the first time ever, we're reposting a Tuesday interview in our Thursday edition. With the week after Labor Day finding many people still on vacation or just digging out, we want to give our interview with Texas Crew Productions Co-Founder and CEO, David Karabinas , another run. It's a great conversation with some much-needed positivity to start the fall off with it.

Potentially Focused is a newsletter for busy people in the TV business (or not) who are curious. Anyone interested in growth, great new possibilities, and the stories we tell ourselves and others that get us there or hold us back. Each edition features quick links to at least one great piece of content on professional development and one centered on personal growth. It’s practical information just a few quick paragraphs away.

Please like, subscribe, and share with your favorite recruiter or recruitee! All are welcome here!

Thank you very much for your continued support,

Marco

HOW TO GET RECRUITERS TO COME TO YOU

For people looking for work or new opportunities, September is a natural time to look at how you've been approaching your job search. Are you struggling to find leads? Does your search seem stalled?

I wish I could tell you I have the easy answers. I don't. But I do think it's always worth examining how you are going about something, particularly if you're not getting the desired results.

No doubt it's tough out there in media at the moment, and if you are struggling to find that next thing... It's not your fault. We're dealing with much larger issues, but that doesn't mean we should accept complacency.

So with that, here's a link to a LinkedIn course from J.T O'Donnell, CEO of Work It Daily, an online platform dedicated to helping people solve their career issues. In the course, O'Donnell takes you through ways she says you'll up the odds of having recruiters come to you.

Will this work? Should you take all of her suggestions?

That's up to you, but I thought she made some interesting points and that the course was worth the time it takes to go through it.

There's much more in her course, but here are some key points she makes about LinkedIn Profiles and Resumes:

FOR YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE

• The top fold of your LinkedIn profile is most important - Your picture needs to be approachable. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. And keep your banner simple as well - nothing too busy or distracting.
• Your headline should be five or six skills you want to use in your next job. Focus on those keywords. It's all about them...
• Keep your about section short. She suggests three sentences - years of experience, size of the companies you worked for, and one key metric. Then, under those three sentences, list a long list of keywords. Again, it's all about the keywords!
• Your work history should be facts and accomplishments. Quantify everything you can versus saying how you did it.
• Endorsements and recommendations - help get recruiter attention
• Make sure to note the newsletters you read (no pressure, but this one is a great one to mention), groups you're in, and the top voices you follow in your interest section.

FOR YOUR RESUME

• Like your LinkedIn Profile, the top fold is the most important thing. On average, recruiters will take six seconds to look at a resume. Make them count by making it easy on readers of your resume.
• To do that, O'Donnell suggests losing your big objective statement. Instead, she suggests a headline with two columns of your key skills underneath it.
• Your work history on your resume should be the same as on LinkedIn or you risk confusing recruiters or making them feel like it's a bait and switch.
• And as with LinkedIn, keep it lean. Focus on facts and quantifying where you can.
• One of her biggest notes is less is more. Keep your resume readable with enough empty space so it doesn't feel over-packed and is easily digestible. To O'Donnell, both your resume and LinkedIn profile should function as marketing tease copy for your career and capabilities rather than a full recounting of everything you've ever done.
• How do you know if you got it just right? O'Donnell suggests giving a friend your resume to read for six seconds. Then, take it away from them. What can they tell you about you? If it's not the main things you want to communicate, then go back and revise it.
• Format-wise, she recommends 1" margins, 11 point font or bigger, no italics, and using bold sparingly - for things like job or section titles.

Now that we've simplified our LinkedIn profile and resume, let's talk about...

SIMPLE MORNING HABITS TO HELP YOU LIVE LONGER

There are good habits and bad habits. And, which ones we choose have a huge impact on how long we live. More importantly, it's critical to know it's never too late to adopt some good habits to give yourself a better chance of living a longer and healthier life.

Experts say how we start our day goes a long way toward our health outcomes.

Curious to know more? It's all right here in this article.

And for those of you in a time crunch, here's a quick summary:

Get a Good Night's Sleep - Research shows men who get enough sleep live five years longer than those who don’t. (I assume this holds for women as well)

Get exercise - It's one of the most significant behavioral factors for health and longevity—even a small workout yields benefits. Working out first thing in the morning makes sure nothing interferes with your exercise routine and gets you in a healthier mindset for the day.

Eat Protein - Eating a protein-filled breakfast encourages satiety and can help prevent you from making unhealthy food choices for the rest of the day.

Meditate - Meditation can help take you more calmly through your day. And meditation may help you manage symptoms of some medical conditions.

Don't Smoke - Life expectancy for smokers is at least 10 years shorter than for nonsmokers. Quitting smoking before the age of 40 reduces the risk of dying from smoking-related disease by about 90%.

Go Outside - Outdoor daylight and/or sunlight are beneficial to your health in a number of ways.

Pack Your Lunch - Planning meals and snacks ahead of time increases the likelihood that healthier food choices will be made throughout your day.

Take a Walk - Metabolic diseases such as high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) or diabetes can be improved by movement, or, in the best case, can help you not develop those issues in the first place.

And now...

THE LATEST ON TV & FILM JOBS (FROM THE LA TIMES)

Wide Shot is a great newsletter about the business of entertainment from the LA Times. You can sign up here.

In yesterday's edition, they published some recent information on TV & film jobs. For all the TV nerds out there, much of this you will know and there is some good news, but it comes with caveats.

Here's what they reported:

Recent data from research firm Ampere Analysis suggest that film and TV commissions by streamers, including Netflix and Amazon, are starting to pick up again after a steep downturn. But overall, the number of green lights is nowhere close to what it was in the Peak TV years of 2021 and 2022.

Much of the work that’s getting picked up is being produced either out of state or overseas, which is a challenging reality for anyone who’s put down roots in Los Angeles with the purpose of making a living, let alone supporting a family, in the entertainment industry.

Also, many of the deals getting made today are smaller in value, according to agents who spoke to my colleagues at The Times for the paper’s analysis of the long-deferred comeback. This combination of factors has caused some people to consider different lines of work, turning side gigs into their main hustles.

Meanwhile, it’s no better on the studio side, with Paramount Global targeting 2,000 layoffs before the end of the year to hit massive cost-saving targets, with most of the workforce reductions expected to be completed by the end of this month.

And in case you missed it on Tuesday while you were digging out from the holiday weekend...

POTENTIALLY FOCUSED WITH DAVID KARABINAS

I’d known David Karabinas for a relatively long time before I first worked with him on a project. He’d been pitching me for a few years and we had yet to find something to partner on, but I always looked forward to our conversations and was grateful he continued to keep us in mind. First, because he and his team always brought something my way I hadn’t heard before. As a buyer, this is a rare and treasured thing. And, second, because our meetings were always fantastic conversations.

David is a very grounded person. While he’s extremely passionate about storytelling and his business, he has a healthy understanding that making TV shows, while important, is not life and death. Add to that a clear intelligence, a good dose of humility, and an excellent sense of humor and you can see why people gravitate towards David. He’s something in seemingly short supply, an authentic human being.

But it was the inhuman or should I say the undead who finally brought us together in a partnership. A few years back, AMC+ was launching its first dramatic series based on Anne Rice IP, Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire. Our team was doing a companion special looking at the making of the series. The series was a huge priority for the company, and we had to find a production team that could do it quickly and right.

It was the opportunity I’d been looking for to partner with David and his great team and I’m so happy to say we took it and ran with it. Not only did Texas Crew get it done in record time, but they were also a joy to work with on what turned out to be an excellent special which helped successfully launch the first season of AMC+’s great drama. Huge shout out to Executive Producer Jen Patton too!

So, thank you again, David, and welcome!

What's one thing you're currently excited about?

There's a lot of disruption right now in our business, but I am choosing to be an optimist, and I'm going to say that what's exciting me most is the anticipation of what our entire unscripted landscape is going to look like in the next six months. People love watching screens and there needs to be something on the screen for them to watch. It can't all be Tik-Tok videos and other user-generated content. There will always be a place for great professionally produced programs and we just have to figure out the best way to continue producing it and putting it in front of people. We're in a challenging moment but I'm confident we'll get through it and I'm excited to see what it looks like on the other side.

You and your team have always done quality?work and I know from experience what a pleasure it is to work with you. So, for sure some of your success comes from that, but you've also made smart strategic moves. Talk about how you've navigated challenging circumstances over the years.

I appreciate the kind words about our work. Being easy to work with and making great shows is really the best strategy any production company can employ and I like to think we have done that more often than not over the last 13 years. But outside of that, I think the smartest thing we did was stay lean as a company. We made a decision early on that we couldn't have people on our staff who weren't being billed against a project. This was out of necessity because we didn't have investors, none of us were independently wealthy, and we weren't going to take on debt, so we built the company around the model that if we had just one job we'd all have a role in creating it, we'd all be a line in the budget, and the company would be solvent. We also made a conscious effort to diversify our client base so if one client slowed down or flat out stopped commissioning new projects we wouldn't have all our eggs in one basket. I'm really proud of the fact that over the last ten years we've managed to work with most all of the major buyers in some capacity.

But I think it's also impossible to downplay the amount of luck that is required to succeed in this business. In our case, we were lucky that over the last few years we had become known as good true crime producers when true crime experienced a real boom in popularity. We hadn't set out to specialize in true crime but we kept getting pitched these great projects in that space and before we knew it, most of our development slate was true crime. I wish I could say that was part of a grand plan but it was more of a happy accident.

Agree that luck plays a part, but also I’m reminded of something someone once told me that’s always stuck with me. They said all of us have lucky things happen to us from time to time, but some people are more skilled at realizing it and capitalizing on that moment. Seems to me that’s a skill you have, David.

And now, turning to others…. What would?you say to someone who wanted to start their own production company today?

This may be a surprise, but I actually don't think that it's a bad time to start a production company as long as you are realistic about the finances and you don't bite off more than you can chew. The days of 100 episode orders are mostly behind us and the budgets are getting smaller so I'd be careful about investing in infrastructure and hiring too many too fast. Stay lean. Focus on ideation and instead of investing in your own facilities right off the bat, consider partnering with a company that already has everything and can handle your production services until you really have the business to support it.

Great points all and it’s refreshing to hear a more optimistic answer to this question than we usually do.

Tell us about being in Texas. With so many of your competitors based in LA or New York, does being in Austin give you some creative advantages or a different perspective?

Perspective is probably where it affected us most. Being in Texas insulated us from some of the competitive instincts that we may have developed had we been in NY or LA and been surrounded by other production companies and more aware of who was selling shows and who wasn't (especially when we weren't). We are kind of in our own bubble just doing our own thing and I've never really felt like I'm in competition with other companies. I think that's why we've always been so open to partnerships and collaborations with outside production companies and producers.

What is the best lesson a bad boss ever taught you?

I've worked for people who think they can do everyone's jobs better than they can. They only know how to have people work?for?them and not work?with?them. That's not the way to lead people or get them to work together as a team - and our business is definitely a team sport. You don't want to be the smartest person in the room - you want to be in a room surrounded by smart people.

What's the best thing a mentor ever shared with you?

Don't take it all so seriously. It's just TV. We're not saving the world. Do your best, work hard, but keep it all in perspective.

In an alternate universe where you are happy but aren't doing any of the things you are currently doing professionally, what do you think you'd be doing professionally?

I'm not sure if this is my alternate universe or my retirement plan but I'd work at a bicycle repair shop and have a side gig once a month playing classic rock songs on an acoustic guitar at a coffee shop. I love fixing bikes because it's very black and white - the bike either works or it doesn't. No room for interpretation. No notes. The only problem with the coffee shop side gig is that I can't sing and my guitar skills are pretty mediocre.

In a time when many are looking for new possibilities, any book, podcast or thought leader you find helpful?

Right now I'm reading Richard Haass's The World, which is a primer on why the world looks and operates the way it does today from a geo-political standpoint. It's non-political, really easy to understand, and what I think it illustrates more than anything is that everything about the way the world works is subject to change. Just because things work a certain way now doesn't mean they have always operated this way and certainly doesn't mean that it has to continue to work this way in the future. We can change things - and we have changed things - over and over throughout history. I think that's a helpful reminder these days, especially as our own industry continues to evolve. Nothing is set in stone.

I love that and think we can’t say it enough. It’s not always easy, but we CAN change things.

Thanks so much for sharing your experience and smart POV, David! Wishing you and Texas Crew continued success and give my love to Cowboy!

HAPPY WEEKENDING!

As we do every Thursday, sharing some fun stuff for your weekend. Enjoy!

Believe it or not... The US Postal Service has a sense of humor. Here's their fun facts page. PS - You can even buy a postal service outfit for your dog if you're interested.

And if AMAZING FACTS are your thing, here's an amazing fact generator to kill some time with.

THAT WILL DO IT!

We’re all done for this week. In this edition, updated our profiles and resumes based on some smart tips from J.T. O'Donnell and discovered the power of starting the morning off right.

Plus, we finally tracked down a place to buy our dog a postal service outfit. Can't wait for Halloween!

Looking forward to bringing you our next edition on Tuesday. Until then, wishing you all a fun time with family and friends this weekend!

Thanks to you all for reading. Please let us know what you want more or less of. Please feel free to share information you’d like me to pass along to our readers. Also, always happy to feature guest contributors.

And of course, please like, subscribe, and share.

All the best,

Marco