Hammad Zaidi is a managing executive of several successful endeavors, which includes being the CEO of Lonely Seal Releasing, a film and television distribution company that has represented over 40 projects, including Julian Lennon’s Whaledreamers and Harrison Ford’s Dalai Lama Renaissance. He also owns Lonely Seal Pictures, a production company, as well as his newest division, Lonely Seal Apparel, which focuses on selling apparel worldwide and donates a portion of the proceeds to help stop the senseless slaughter of Harp Seals.
From time to time he is an adjunct professor at various universities including UCLA and Chapman University. He is also an avid writer, and publishes a weekly national column for Film Threat.
Here are my 5 questions with Hammad and my summary of his answers:
1) Owning and operating a film and television distribution company requires the intrinsic ability to manage and capitalize on calculated risks. How have you successfully developed this ability over time?
The most challenging element of this process is learning the needs and desires of your audience. In this sense, the old adage “know your customer” is essential. Since my company primarily distributes internationally, which requires us to travel 100,000 miles per year to the world’s most significant film festivals and film sales markets (Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc), I’ve had to be re-educated about what projects international audiences respond well to, as opposed to what audiences in the USA want to see. Thus, my calculated risks are based on the trends I see while traveling to different countries and immersing myself in different cultures. However, there is always a bit of uncertainty. One of the most important lessons I learned in film school is it is almost impossible to determine if you will have a hit on your hands, but it is usually pretty easy (if you are honest with yourself) to identify a project that will fail. This same lesson can be applied to any business and an important takeaway is that you can learn a lot more from prior failures than successes. In other words, it is difficult to find a blueprint to success (if this really existed everyone would be rich), but there are plenty of well known paths to failure. Avoiding these paths is a great way to navigate and successfully leverage risk.
2) You have flourished at managing multiple entrepreneurial endeavors at the same time, what is one of the most important lessons you have learned along the way about operating several companies simultaneously?
Delegate, delegate, delegate. I have a tendency to think there are 31 hours in a day – but unfortunately there are never more than 24. Thus, I believe my ability to manage multiple endeavors simultaneously largely depends on my ability to surround myself with highly talented, positive-minded people that I trust and respect. I’ve also learned that if you bite off more than you can chew, you will most certainly choke.
3) Like every entrepreneur over the past several years, you’ve had to weather one of the worst recessions in our nation’s history. What was your strategy for mitigating the negative effects of the current economical climate as it pertains to your businesses?
My companies were – and continue to be – deeply damaged by the world financial crisis. But, we’ve relied on our strong ethics and solid relationships with our clients to navigate through these dark times. My company has always taken pride in being honest, transparent and ethical with everyone we do business with. Thus, when the financial crisis deeply pinched our regular cash-flow, our clients have stood by us because our actions in the past have proven our “good faith.”
We took the radical step to cancel over 80% of our distribution slate. When I started the company in 2005, the business model included distributing 50+ small films, TV shows and documentaries and earning a respectable amount on most of them. Today we distribute only 12 select projects, but they all have performed very well internationally. The reduction in the number of films we distribute has also allowed us to thin out our staff a bit, and allowed us to move into a more cost-effective office space.
Lastly, I also started writing a weekly national column called Going Bionic for Filmthreat.com in May of 2010. Going Bionic focuses on the ever-changing world of international distribution, and provides filmmakers with valuable insight from a distributor’s point of view. Writing my column has allowed me and my company to remain relevant to filmmakers, because of Film Threat’s incredibly wide reach. My 20th column comes out on Tuesday, September 28th, and I’m also currently in discussions with a publisher about writing a book based on my column.
Simply put, to me it’s not about weathering the storm. It’s about keeping my eyes on the daylight ahead.
4) Over the course of all your entrepreneurial endeavors, describe an experience where, based on new learning that you did not have at the time, you would go back and do things differently? What is it that you now know that would have changed the experience?
Another lesson learned the hard way by many in business — perform thorough due diligence when picking any founder during the start-up process. When I started my distribution company, I hired a 20+ year veteran in the world of international film distribution to help guide it. Although he had a wealth of experience, he was not willing to change the way he did things, or embrace the new technologies required in order to remain current in the quickly changing world of distribution. Thus, while the rules of the distribution game were changing in front of our eyes, we were still playing the game with the old rules. I clearly saw this happening, but I was a bit hesitant to second guess someone who had far more experience than I did in distribution. The result of my mistake put my company on life-support, until I took charge and began to right the ship. If I were to do it again, I would have taken control of my company’s direction much earlier and made the needed changes. What I know now is to always listen to my gut feeling.
5) You are known for playing as hard as you work, as a connoisseur of life experience what is your fondest experiential moment outside of work (to make it harder it cannot be sport related or the day you got married)?
Wow. No sports, no marriage? Okay, I’ve got one. When I was 22, I attended the most mind-blowing, memory tattooing concert in my life: The Knebworth Festival on Saturday, June 30, 1990 in Knebworth, England. The performers included Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Phil Collins, Genesis, a Robert Plant/Jimmy Page Led Zeppelin reunion, Elton John, Dire Straits, Tears For Fears, Status Quo, and Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Simply put, it was heaven.
The key to my experience at Knebworth wasn’t the concert itself, but how I got there and what I learned while I was on the trip to London.
The Knebworth Festival was a charity event for the Nordhoff-Robbins Music Therapy Foundation. One year earlier, on Tuesday June 27, 1989, I attended another concert for the Nordhoff-Robbins Music Therapy Foundation: The Who performing their rock Opera Tommy at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City.
After seeing Tommy I went on-air on my college radio station (at Rider University in New Jersey), and announced that I would never see a greater concert. Minutes later, someone called in and told me about the concert in Knebworth. It suddenly became my mission to attend. Although tickets were sold-out, I was determined to find a way there, so I contacted the company that sells prize give-away trips to radio stations, and begged them to allow me to buy the trip to Knebworth that other people were winning on various radio stations across the country. After three weeks of begging 5x per day, they finally sold me the trip.
Since I went on the trip alone, once I got to London, I roomed with another person traveling alone – Gary, a 45 year old man from California. Meeting Gary changed my life forever. The first thing he told me is that he had AIDS, and that I could take another roommate if I felt the need to. Of course, I did not.
The second thing Gary told me is that when he found out he had AIDS, he truly began living his life. He took out a second mortgage on his home, bought himself a race car, and started taking as many vacations as humanly possible. His advice to me was to live my life to the fullest, because every day could be my last.
Since meeting Gary, it’s become my mission to actively seek out tremendous life experiences, good and bad, because it’s those experiences that make us the sum of who we are. My mission has allowed me to attend the last 18 straight Super Bowls, make 10 trips to the Canadian Yukon to see a three day concert under the midnight sun, and it’s allowed me to try to inspire everyone I meet to live out their dreams to their fullest capabilities.
It reminds me of the quote from The Shawshank Redemption. “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.” Given the choice, I’d rather “get busy livin’”.
) where he challenged a group of students to contact three seemingly impossible-to-reach individuals for a chance at a round-trip ticket anywhere in the world. In the first year of conducting the experiment not one person was able to complete the assignment. The second year Mr. Ferriss was able to do a better job instilling confidence in his students stating, “From contacting billionaires to rubbing elbows with celebrities – it’s as easy as believing it can be done.” In the second year of conducting the experiment, 6 out of 17 of Tim’s students had completed the task within two days.
by David Mann.
by Seth Godin, and include 10 things you can do to increase permission marketing in your own business. Enjoy!
If you are a would-be entrepreneur working a normal day job, I encourage you to watch his YouTube video below…
