JOEL MISHCON INTERVIEW

25 Jun

Joel is the founder & CEO of Chrome Productions, a global creative production company, creating films and programming for some of the world’s most iconic brands.

Starting out an extreme sports filmmaker he founded Chrome in 2002, aged 24. Chrome has grown to become a leading player in an industry that is radically transforming and has built long-standing relationships with brands including Christie’s, Sotheby’s, TUI, Ford, Standard Chartered, as well as major sports teams & institutions - RFU, the FA, ECB, BOA etc. In 2022 Chrome was selected as one of 40 companies to take part in a government backed trade mission to Cannes Lions, representing “the best of UK Creativity”.

Long Term Greedy

I know that in this lifetime, I want to leave some kind of legacy. I want to do as much as I can in the years that I have; I want to go to as many places, meet as many people, and experience as many things as possible.

In Business As In Life

I think business is no different to everyday life. Unless you have the lows, you can't appreciate the highs. Unless you have the kickbacks, you can't appreciate the glory of a win or of a success. Unless you're sick, being healthy has no real meaning. That correlates to our emotions as well. If you don't experience sadness, how could you possibly appreciate being happy. Business is an everyday test of the balance of life. People talk about learning from mistakes, picking yourself up off the floor, coming back stronger; it doesn't mean it doesn't hurt every time. It doesn't mean it doesn't make you question what you're doing or how good you are or whether you even have a place at the table, but if you can find it in yourself to brush yourself off and to say, right, I’m going to turn this to my advantage. I don't feel good right now, but I know where I’m headed and I’ll just take this as a hit, I’ll take this as a learning.

The Gut Feeling

I didn't know where my career was going to take me. I had an overriding sense that it would fall into place if I followed my passion and if I worked hard and I felt that it would just slot into place, and in many ways it has. I might have been very lucky, and it's a wacky word, but I suppose without even knowing what the word meant, I probably manifested the journey in some way. I think that philosophy also relates to decision making. Even if you have an idea where you're headed, you've got to feel your way and sometimes that means sitting back and waiting until it feels right. Even if the odds are stacked up against you, and even if people tell you that you shouldn't do something, if it feels right to you, and you feel it's a risk worth taking, then you should probably take it.

It’s a really interesting topic isn’t it.

Someone put into words recently what I think sums up my approach to business, and my approach to my life in general, which is the saying “long term greedy”. I know that in this lifetime, I want to leave some kind of legacy. I want to do as much as I can in the years that I have; I want to go to as many places, meet as many people, and experience as many things as possible.

I feel like the career that I’ve chosen, or could argue that the career that has chosen me, is one that enables me to live the life that I have always wanted to live, and that when I get to the end, I hope I can look back on it and be proud of the mark I’ve left behind. But to achieve that goal will not have been plain sailing. It will have taken graft, sacrifice and pain, both mental (and in my case) physical. And so the words “long time greedy” carry a responsibility to not just live in the moment, but to accept, and work for, a bigger purpose.

Building relationships is a major part of that. I’m useless at cold calling in many ways. I’m actually, not obviously, quite shy in terms of making approaches. I’m not one to naturally put myself out there, or certainly to put Chrome out there. I don't think we've ever really marketed ourselves in any way, shape or form. It's only very recently that, through the help of others, we're doing more social media and talking about ourselves more, but that's never come naturally for me.

Building relationships is very much about building trust. It's about a generosity of spirit and what I mean by that is, that it falls very much into the “long term greedy” approach. I believe that in order to get anything out of life, you have to give as much as you possibly can, even if it means you get less back.

That applies to our personal relationships - marriage, friendships etc., but also very much in business and specifically in our relationships with clients. I’ve always had the belief that the more that we give, the more that we'll get back, and that may not correspond purely to financial gain. We certainly have probably been underpaid for work many times over but I think what we've created through that generosity of spirit is relationships that have stood the test of time; relationships that don't fall away, and it's enabled Chrome as a production company to build very different relationships with our clients. That in itself has allowed us to develop a business model that is hopefully going to help define not only our future, but, potentially, the future of our industry, which for a production company is about being much more closely associated with individual brands and servicing their everyday production needs; all the way from small films to the biggest films.

Building relationships is the only way that we've been able to do that. Our clients trust us to look after them. They trust us to protect them. They expect us to obviously do great work and to put everything into it and I also think they trust us to be a reflection of themselves and to not allow them to fall flat on their face. That trust hopefully makes our clients’ lives easier, and I imagine it helps explain why we’ve built such long-standing relationships over the years.

If I can just follow up on one bit there, and I’m not sure whether you're able to give any examples, but I fully agree with everything you've just said. If it's not cold calling that you do, but more building relationships, even like the relationship, for example, that we have together…, was it Hollie that originally introduced us? I’m not even sure how it came about in the end actually.

It was through our kids’ school. I remember it clearly. It was us having a coffee over at a kids’ party, where you said that you'd seen a film that we posted and loved it, and that was the start of the relationship.

Yes, it was the RFU red roses stuff, which still is one of my favourite clips of all time.

You talk about trust with clients and the RFU putting trust in you for something like that. I still to date haven't seen something as emotionally charged as that in the sports sphere generally, which is still magnificent. Anyway I’m going off on a tangent, but the point generally being is that if it's not cold calling that you do, and actually it's through building relationships with people that you do do well, what is it, if we could break down some of the processes that you think about when you are actually building relationships with people? I can tell you what I think you do, but I'd rather it comes from you.

I can give you some ideas, for example, I don't need to give you any ideas.

I think that it's changed over the years obviously.

Now hopefully a lot of our work speaks for itself which means building new relationships falls much more heavily on personality and trying to find connections with people. Back in the day, it was harder because we might not have necessarily had the body of work or the experience, but when you're still trying to bat above your station or move into areas where you're not necessarily worthy of being there, even if you believe that you are, it becomes a fusion of trying to instil confidence without being arrogant, trying to show understanding whilst still being humble, and I suppose more than anything, it's about demonstrating passion for what you do and a particular project or a particular outcome. I think that passion, if you enjoy what you do, if it's part of you in some way, counts for a huge amount when you are building relationships and the potential for new business.

Passion can be infectious, in so far as our clients are passionate about what they do and what their company represents. If we can naturally harness the passion that they have and layer our own on top of it, it can only help create natural, lasting, meaningful relationships.

I was thinking about this whilst preparing for our chat. You're an extremely good listener and whenever we chat, throughout the conversation, it comes across very naturally. Obviously you've been fully aware of the conversations we've previously had, so then you're asking connected things based on previous conversations, which is actually a very undervalued skill that a lot of people don't necessarily do.

Ironically it's the one thing that my wife would completely disagree with you on!

I’m not going to start causing a domestic, but maybe there's something in particular brains, mine included to an extent sometimes, which separates the personal with the professional.

I’m not sure whether that's because we are living more of our professional lives, because of the passion, the curiosity and the drive that we have in our professional lives to succeed and excel and keep going and keep building and, as you said, leave that legacy, whereas sometimes that can be quite an all-encompassing, positively pressurized, but passion-filled existence a lot of the time.

When you switch off, if you manage to do so, that time off is not the time that you need to be doing the same things that you were doing, whilst you were in your zone of whatever technique it was you're thinking about doing.

I think that you've hit the nail on the head there. When you live day to day in an almost constant state of adrenaline at work, it's hard to switch off. It takes time to unwind. You have to, but it's not easy, and I don’t think I do a very good job of it. You articulated that really well.

That's the nail on the head in terms of the entrepreneurial life as well.

I’m coming at this from a partner in a law firm; a much more, possibly stable, traditional existence, whereas you are on the cutting edge of the creative industries of forging a world-class fit for purpose organisation from scratch, and that takes, in a lot of ways, more risk, more dedication, more all-encompassing brain time; that's the poor way of trying to articulate the same thing, which means that you know your identity is rattled up in the thing that you do constantly.

I'd throw that back at you and say that, actually, becoming the “lawyer of the future”, which I always tell people that you are, is probably even harder because you need to break out of a very traditional model.

I think that something that might be helpful that's just come off the back of what you've said is, Chrome is a nearly 20 year old company now, which sounds like a very long time, but I genuinely still feel, and I hope I never lose this feeling, that we are at the beginning of our journey. It's possibly because we've had to adapt so much over the years as our industry has changed and metamorphosized into other things. Chrome’s business model was very much an “outsider” model for many years, but now we’re seeing more of the companies we would consider our idols, begin to adapt to our way of working. The fact that we are not a traditional production company does make our identity harder to articulate, but it is also incredibly exciting because we have the opportunity to help define what the future of our industry can be.

Being able to adapt and remain agile is so important, both as an individual and also as a business. That hunger for proving yourself and the hunger for finding new opportunities and new challenges that are going to push us outside of our comfort zone; I genuinely hope that that never ends, because that is the driving force behind, I believe, a fulfilling and exciting career and life.

This is one of the ways that I feel like I can help our team that might at times feel out of depth on a project. We have had recent conversations where I’ve said to them, how lucky are we that at this stage of the game, nearly 20 years in, we're still scared, we're still stressed about whether something is going to work or not, whether we can pull this off or not; as much as that is painful in the moment, the results when you do pull it off, when you do get there, and when you have moved things forward and changed the game and created new opportunities for yourself and for the business, is a key part of our identity. It’s one of the most satisfying and gratifying parts of what we’re able to do as a creative business, but the feeling of vulnerability of doing something for the first time feels no different today to when I was 24 and really just starting out.

As someone who is growing a business, I could think of nothing worse than not feeling like there's another ladder or a step on the ladder to climb.

So, is that trying to do everything you can to avoid complacency? The flip side of complacency is almost feeling so ingrained in the ownership of the project that that's what spurs you on to do your best work constantly.

I don't want to ever feel like our last project isn't the most important.

We've been working with some of our clients for upwards of eight years. There's been many a conversation over the years about us becoming retained or moving to a retainer relationship and I’ve never wanted to do that for two reasons. One, I personally don't want any business to feel like they own us because I think that changes the dynamic, but also from our side, I don't want myself or anyone on the team to feel like it’s just a given and that we know that we're safe for a year or two years and so we'll sacrifice creativity for better margins, or it doesn't matter so much about this one, let's look to the next one; for me, that's not what it's about.

Maybe that speaks to the ‘generosity of spirit’ I mentioned where we’re driven by something greater than money; it's certainly something that I’ve wanted to protect.

If I can pivot into one other area, and again I don't want to keep you for too long, but it's what we talk about quite often; we talk about reading books, about podcasts, about interesting people, interesting things to read, fantastic recommendations that you always give me loads of, and a lot of the stuff you've pointed me towards on occasion has been to do with routine, good habits, and doing things in particular ways, to the extent that you were telling me recently about the swimming that you do, about the routines that you have quite early in the morning, the stuff that you do generally.

Has that habit or routine, or whatever you want to call it, evolved over the years? Do you find comfort in that and how productive does that make you, bearing in mind the different things you will do over a week?

I’ve never considered myself a routines person, but actually my mornings are incredibly important to me. Before I got married and had kids, my weekends were filled with hobbies, whether it was kart racing or heading to the hills to go downhill mountain biking or the mountains for snowboarding. You know what’s it’s like…when you settle down and you have a family, and with work on top of that as well, I let all my hobbies go.

I’m very fortunate to have a great relationship with my dad now, but when I was growing up, he worked as hard as I worked, but he also did sport all weekend and so the effect of that was I never got to see him and so I didn't end up having a relationship with him until I was an adult effectively. I suppose I didn't want the same thing for my children. I want to be a very present father in their lives, so weekends are very sacred to me and that's family time. But during the week, it's very much about getting through the work load and being as productive as possible.

Mornings have been the most important component in that. I do the same thing every morning and when I don't do it, it can really throw my whole day; it can throw my mind-set for the day.

I’ll wake up and do fifteen minutes of exercises, which is really just to protect old injuries and then I’ll walk to work. I’m very blessed to have the entire length of one of London’s best parks, Hampstead Heath, as my commute. It's an hour door-to-door and it's just beautiful, no matter if it's pouring with rain or covered in snow or bright sunshine; it's just the most meditative walk and a journey through nature and it's good exercise. Hampstead Hill is a decent hill to march up and march down and then on the other side of it, when I get to the office, I usually drop the dog off and then go and hit either Hampstead ponds or the lido, which is an unheated swimming pool and I swim all through the winter in the mornings.

It's a relatively new hobby for me and this is my third winter doing it. A few people were telling me about it and it got me intrigued and I can totally see why, because an hour's walk and a cold water swim before I get to my desk literally makes me feel like there isn't anything in the day that I wouldn’t be able to cope with, especially in the winter. It's six degrees water temperature at the moment and the assault on my senses first thing in the morning and the recovery from that shock as you warm up, it has the most incredible ability to make me able to not only attack the day invigorated and full of energy, but also to be able to deal with the general day-to-day stresses that can very easily become over-consuming.

It puts everything into perspective and it just makes you feel good and strong and alive. In a very short space of time, I can have the type of adrenaline rush that it might have taken me a day of traveling and hiking and whatever else it would be to get it.

Before the world of Covid hit, and when you were obviously traveling a lot more, and on sets and shoots and whatever else it might be, were you able still to have those types of ingrained routines or was it harder to motivate yourself to be able to be like, I need to do this exercise, I need to have this me time; it feels like it's almost investment time to make yourself be better at the job

This year I really haven't travelled, I was supposed to be traveling, but I would have probably been away for half the year this year and last year. I was traveling to the States for a week out of every month but I would always stay in a hotel that had a gym. I wake up very early when I’m in the States, usually doing short trips, and I’ll always again start my day with a walk. I’ll just go out and I’ll walk and then I’ll hit the gym but not do anything aggressive, it's really just the same kind of workout that I normally do every morning.

Fresh air and exercise is what I need for mental focus. Some mornings I want the headphones out and I'd literally feel like I’m going to get more out of it by just being in my own head, and other mornings, I crave information, so it's my opportunity to listen to other people's stories and learnings and I find those in audio books which is the best opportunity that I have for reading.

I’ve done that all the way through having Chrome. I started Chrome at 24 years old. It was really the first job that I’d ever had, other than delivering pizzas at Pizza Hut at uni. I didn't have anyone to learn from, I missed out on that, and I envy people that have started businesses having learnt from the mistakes of others; it's definitely a shortcut that I haven't had, so it's taken longer to get to where I’m happy to be at.

It also means that the only way that I can learn is by listening to and reading about other people's experiences and trying to pick little bits out that resonate with me and either teach me something new or just compound a feeling or a sense about something I may have.

There's a great book that you may have already read or already use as that word ‘compound’ in your last sentence made me think about it. It's a book that I’ve mentioned to a few other people called Atomic Habits and I’ll send you a link if you need. It's written by a guy called James Clear and he wrote it about a year or so ago. A few people recommended it to me and his first chapter is all about this idea of compounding and the miracle of compounding your knowledge through very small changes or compounding your habits through very small changes and compounding your network by keeping on looking to expand and to build relationships, exactly as you mentioned.

You talked about generosity of spirit and it’s one of the themes that I'd started writing in my book. I haven't called it that; I call it something like ‘as soon as you're not static, you're dynamic’; that was my phrase.

What I see that you're saying is how all of those compounding effects of everything that anybody does, it builds and builds and builds and creates new pathways and creates opportunities, gives you things to talk about, gives you things to hear, gives you things to learn and to listen to. The crazy thing I’m beginning to realize is that the more I learn, the less I know, which is great, but also extremely demoralizing; that’s maybe not the word, but extremely overawing, I think that’s the right way of saying it.

The compounding thing has really resonated with me and the whole idea of doing more, creates more for everybody.

I do think that fits very much into this generosity of spirit; giving a little helps you get a lot.

I don't know whether this is useful or not from business terms, but it’s a guiding principle that I’ve found really helpful and it's something that I experienced before I even started my career.

After uni, I decided that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I was particularly passionate about snowboarding and so I decided I was going to make ski & snowboard films and be an extreme sports filmmaker. I went off and I travelled for three years, working in bars at night, but basically teaching myself how to film, and in the process of doing that, I ended up doing an avalanche rescue course because I was more interested in backcountry terrain.

On a particular course I had a very wise and experienced guide. He told me that you can explore all of the science around avalanches and whether a snowpack is going to collapse, and that's what you do when you go backcountry skiing or snowboarding.

It's a great metaphor for life really; before you do any kind of significant off-piste descent in the backcountry, you dig a snow pit all the way down to the earth, and you can literally see all of the layers of the snowpack and you assess how much snow you’re likely to bring down with you. In between each layer of snowfall, you've got these danger layers of ice and that's what you've got to watch because instability deeper down the snowpack will increase the possibility of a more deadly avalanche. He said that you can explore all of the science and you can read all of the books and you can do all of the courses, but nothing is as powerful as your gut instinct. Over the years it's something that I’ve put to the test many times.

As an example on one occasion when I was out filming in Canada, we were on a long hike to an untracked face we planned to session, and we had to traverse across a large exposed part of the mountain to get there. We’d done the same traverse the previous two days, but on this day something just didn’t feel right. The wind had picked up, it was noticeably milder than the day before, and I could see that the cornices at the top of the face looked heavy with snow. These were all signs to look out for but we’d already come a long way and there were other people that were already making the traverse including the people in our neighbouring house who passed us as we were deliberating. The athletes I was filming were adamant they wanted to proceed but I put my foot down, which was out of character for me as I’m an outright people pleaser. But my gut was telling me something wasn’t right. Ultimately, I convinced them to turn back and session a different part of the mountain. Sometime later, when we would have been in the middle of the traverse, the cornice collapsed and it brought down a big avalanche. All seven of our neighbours were taken out. 2 of them died and the remaining 5 spent the night on the mountain until they were rescued the next day. We would have been part of that pack. I’ve never forgotten that day, and that decision.

From that point on, it made me realize that we really do have a gut instinct for things, and we need to listen to it. More often than not in life and very much in business, I only have my gut to go by, because I’m dealing with things that I’ve never experienced before, that no one's taught me how to do; from do I hire this person, to how do I handle this situation? How do I fight this fire? These are not things that we can be taught or that you can read in a book, but I have definitely learned to trust my gut and to listen to my gut and to follow it. I suppose it's stood me in better stead than pretty much anything else in business.

Very cool. Let's leave that there then Joel. I don't want to take any more of your time, but if there's anything that you think of, even if it's for a 5-10 minute chat in the new year or maybe when you've reset and you want to have a chat about anything else in particular. I was thinking about the whole disappointment, resilience, and f word basically; I think that would be quite interesting.

That's a really interesting one to touch on. That's a whole other topic in itself and I think we should definitely talk about that. It's really interesting and I’m very happy to touch on it now.

Let me just think about it for a second. I’m just going to see whether anything comes to mind in terms of resilience.

I think business is no different to everyday life. Unless you have the lows, you can't appreciate the highs. Unless you have the kickbacks, you can't appreciate the glory of a win or of a success. Unless you're sick, being healthy has no real meaning. That correlates to our emotions as well. If you don't experience sadness, how could you possibly appreciate being happy. Business is an everyday test of the balance of life. People talk about learning from mistakes, picking yourself up off the floor, coming back stronger; it doesn't mean it doesn't hurt every time. It doesn't mean it doesn't make you question what you're doing or how good you are or whether you even have a place at the table, but if you can find it in yourself to brush yourself off and to say, right, I’m going to turn this to my advantage. I don't feel good right now, but I know where I’m headed and I’ll just take this as a hit, I’ll take this as a learning.

Coming from an extreme sports background, the only way that you can progress is to get hurt and to put yourself into precarious situations, because otherwise you simply cannot evolve as a sportsman and as an athlete. Growing a business is never plain sailing and there will always be pain points. But you’ve got to focus on the bigger picture, believe in yourself and your vision, dust yourself off when the punches roll, learn from the experience, and then do it all over again tomorrow.

Out of resilience, I think there's another component to it which is also really interesting in business, and it’s our appetite for risk taking. There’s a very fine balance point, a tipping point, between calculated risk and just straight risk. It was my dad that instilled in me from a very young age this notion; whether he ever said it in these words, but when I think of my dad, I think of someone saying to me, “do something every day that scares you.” I’ve always tried to live by that mantra, but it’s not going to be for everyone!

It’s one thing to take risks when you’re on your own terms, like when you’re doing sport. But in business it’s more complicated. I’m ultimately responsible for the lives, and livelihoods, of the people that work at Chrome and that extends to their well-being, and even their families. As much as that petrifies me, it’s also the most amazing feeling to know that we, as a business, can help make everybody that is part of this business’s lives better. I believe that real progress and growth in business can only be made with an element of risk taking, but with these higher stakes it does make paying attention to your gut even more important.

Over the years, getting knocked down, being rejected, working really hard and not winning certain projects, even losing certain people that I care about from the business as they've gone on to do other things; all of those rejections build to something. In some ways they make you mentally stronger, and with that strength it gives you confidence to take more calculated risks to ensure we’re constantly driving forwards.

I didn't know where my career was going to take me. I had an overriding sense that it would fall into place if I followed my passion and if I worked hard and I felt that it would just slot into place, and in many ways it has. I might have been very lucky, and it's a wacky word, but I suppose without even knowing what the word meant, I probably manifested the journey in some way. I think that philosophy also relates to decision making. Even if you have an idea where you're headed, you've got to feel your way and sometimes that means sitting back and waiting until it feels right. Even if the odds are stacked up against you, and even if people tell you that you shouldn't do something, if it feels right to you, and you feel it's a risk worth taking, then you should probably take it.

Is it a case of the more resilient you've been able to come through particular setbacks, the more comfortable you are with yourself at taking risks with the possibility of failure, because you know what the worst that can happen is?

Yes, and you know you can live with the worst that can happen, and there is a strong chance you’ll get back to all of the things that we talked about, the feeling of being challenged, the feeling of pushing yourself, the feeling of new horizons, new adventures, all of that. Sometimes it's worth taking the risk of losing something in order to gain something potentially bigger and better.

…rather than not putting yourself out there, because your fixed mind-set is more protectionist, in terms of not wanting to risk, because actually you're probably subconsciously not aware of how fragile or brittle you might be if everything falls apart.

Fear can be crippling. Fear leads to stagnation and stagnation leads to, I believe, unhappiness.

In my career, I’ve had certain personal setbacks that I’ve had to overcome. Just when my extreme sports career was taking off, I injured my back in a way that changed the path of my career. Two surgeries later, the path that I was on, which was a dream to work primarily in extreme sports - that I had just managed to put into reality, was literally cut short from injury. It forced me to adapt and move into more commercial work. The interesting thing is that I was still able to carry the same ethos of adventure with me, but it actually likely allowed me to grow a more stable and successful business.

Physical and mental health is a major factor in us being able to achieve our goals. Speaking candidly, early in my career I found interactions with people more successful than me rally overwhelming, to the point that I would genuinely be so fearful of being in a networking environment; it became almost a phobia and I got very physical side effects including regular panic attacks. I remember, for a couple of years, I would feel like I was profusely sweating, even if I wasn't; it would just be that feeling of being so out of control of a situation.

Like the business setbacks I’ve talked about, the physical and mental hurdles I’ve had to overcome provide perspective for me, a grounding reality so to speak, and hopefully help me to be a more empathic leader. I had to force myself to confront my demons and find ways to turn negative situations into workable ones.

I’m not entirely sure what my point is, other than life is rarely easy, and we will invariably need to push through incredibly challenging periods in our personal and professional lives. I certainly don’t have all the answers but I do know that we, as humans, can overcome really challenging obstacles with the right mindset, belief system and perseverance. Being able to adapt and make the best of the cards we’re dealt with, is in my opinion, a key to not only survival, but lifelong success.

Daniel Geey

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