TAYLOR STEELE'S 5 TIPS FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS
- Know your niche: When I came in, all the movies were company movies. There were no unbiased views of surfing and surfers. It was all to sell something. I wanted to be that unbiased, magazine-style point of view. Nobody else was doing it.
- Keep overheads low with staff, productand expenses.
- Timing: Make sure your timing's appropriate. In the surf movie market, don't release your feature if a big movie is coming out.
- Attitude: Treat people great no matter what. You don't know if you'll be on the way up or on the way down. Be courteous and nice because it's a short trip both ways.
- Be smart with your money: Keep it in the company as long as possible because you're going to need it for future projects. You don't want to be so strapped out that if a movie tanks you're done. Keep it for future growth. And don't invest badly.
Taylor Steele, 33, from Solana Beach in Southern California, operates Poor Specimen Productions- the company responsible for every important high-performance video since 1992 - the Momentum series, Campaign etc - as well as the brilliant Drive-Thru series, So highly regarded are Poor Specimen movies, the world's best surfers crawl over each other to get a section. And this isn't because Taylor is an auteur in the mould of, say, Jack McCoy - it's because ever since Momentum, the world uses his movies as an indicator of where contemporary surfing is at.
That's what I pride myself on, being on the cutting edge of what's current in surfing," says Taylor. "That's the goal of those things - to show what's going on now, to inspire and to push people to try something."
Late last year he brought the distribution arm of his business, Steelhouse, into Australia. It means he can cut out the middleman, get the movies into store himself, and price 'em even more keenly." I'm a control freak, I want to be in control of my destiny. I want to know that someone's working really hard to make sure my product is out there and being marketed correctly."
Despite the torrent of DNA jettisoned into his face, Taylor's a low-key guy. He wears white sneakers, jeans and the sort of billowing white shirt that would save his life if he ever fell out of an aeroplane. His only concession to his radical schedule of filming and editing is the new model Blackberry phone, Look over his shoulder and you'll see his inbox filled to the rim with emails.
Taylor's got two big projects on the boil right now - Campaign II, which comes out in September and his great filmic opus, Sipping Jetstreams, due out next year, Remember that gear of Bruce and Andy Irons shot from a chopper in Bali in Stab issue four? That's from a Sipping Jetstreams session,
"It's my romantic version of travel... a little bit more, I guess, idealistic," Taylor says. "That's my pet project. My bread and butter are the Campaigns and Drive Thru's."
In the meantime, he's working closely with Kelly Slater for his section in C2. Kelly held the prestigious closing section in all of Taylor's movies for a remarkable 12 years, until Bruce's section in 2003's Campaign. "This new one, I've never seen him so psyched. In the early days it all came naturally - we just went on trips together, now he has to consciously make an effort to film. He gets so many demands on his time,"
Taylor's been in business for 15 years now, What mistakes has he made, what lessons has he learned? "I learnt mistakes the hard way - financially," he says, Taylor bought into Conan Hayes' ill-fated label 17 (sued by US chick's mag Seventeen), bought a big warehouse and got himself a huge staff. "All those things will eat up your money and profit real quick," he says. "Now it's all about streamlining and being a lean, mean fighting machine. For me, the biggest lesson is to be really focussed, I was lucky. I started so young that I was fearless, I went into it not caring about sales. If I started now at 33, I'd be more scared, more tentative,"
And his advice for the yet-to-blossom entrepreneur? "Know your market and know your place in it. Understand the market, find a hole and fill that void Derek Rielly.
Taylor Steele, photographed by Steve
