Raw Studios SA — my production company — is booked six months in advance most of the time. People assume that’s because of inbound from my personal brand. It isn’t. Six months of pipeline is a deliberate operational design, and any production company can copy it.

The pipeline math

Production work has long sales cycles (60–120 days from first conversation to shoot date) and project work, not subscription revenue. To stay booked, you need 4–6 active conversations at every pipeline stage simultaneously. Most production companies have one or two; the math doesn’t work and they swing wildly between famine and overwhelm.

Step 1 — A real CRM

Embarrassingly basic, but most boutique production companies don’t have one. Every conversation with a brand, agency or producer goes into a single system with a stage, a value estimate and a next-action date. Without this, you forget who’s in the funnel and miss obvious follow-ups. We use a stripped-down Notion CRM; what matters is that it exists and gets reviewed weekly.

Step 2 — The ‘next 30 / next 60 / next 90’ grid

Every Friday I sort our pipeline into three columns:

  • Next 30 — projects that need a yes/no in the next month
  • Next 60 — qualified leads that need nurturing
  • Next 90 — early conversations that need to be kept warm

Each column gets different actions. The discipline is to ensure none of the columns are empty. If next 90 is thin, marketing kicks in immediately to refill the top.

Step 3 — Inbound velocity, not inbound count

Most production companies measure inbound by total inquiries. The right metric is qualified-lead velocity — how fast a real opportunity moves from first contact to scoped proposal. We obsess over reducing that number. Faster cycle = more shots on goal in the same calendar = pipeline stays full.

Step 4 — The ‘half full’ rule

We never accept a project if it would book us past 60% capacity for the next quarter. If we’re more than 60% full, we either raise prices or refer the work to a peer studio. Counterintuitive, but: full calendar = no room for the great client who calls Tuesday. Some of our biggest projects came from quick yeses to opportunistic inbound that wouldn’t have been possible if we were 100% booked.

Step 5 — Repeat business as a system

Most pipeline anxiety is about new logos. The cheapest pipeline is repeat. Every project ends with a structured wrap conversation: what worked, what didn’t, what’s the next campaign for them. Around 60% of our quarterly revenue is repeat business from clients we made happy. The Raw Studios approach to retention is the same as any product company’s.

What founders get wrong

They build a great body of work, get a flurry of inbound, accept all of it, deliver well, then realise three months later the pipeline behind today’s work is empty. The famine arrives like clockwork. Pipeline work is not a phase; it’s a constant.

The honest part

This isn’t sexy. It’s a CRM, a Friday review, and a discipline of saying no when full. The reason most production companies don’t do it isn’t that they don’t know — it’s that the work feels less interesting than making the films. Doing both is the difference between a sustainable studio and a glamorous freelance career disguised as one.

Running a production company and want a pipeline review? Email me.