Helping fledgling indies soar

Ten years ago, Jamie Munro and Stuart Mullin presented entertainment exec Karen Smith with a plan. Smith and Munro had both stood down as co-managing directors of Shine TV and she wanted to launch an indie. What if, they posited, they could provide a cushion of support while she focused on the most important areas: creating, selling and producing the shows?

Smith’s indie, Tuesday’s Child, was the first client of Greenbird, Munro and Mullin’s incubator, and remains part of the network today. As it celebrates a decade in business, the vision remains the same: help talented creatives focus on content, with Greenbird providing back-office, pastoral care and commercial support.

“Setting up and running your own business is an exercise in anxiety management,” says joint managing director Mullin.

Commissioning speed

Tuesday’s Child swiftly won its first commissions, from the Travel Channel’s RV Rampage to the BBC’s The Hit List and global hit Lego Masters, which launched on Channel 4. This began Greenbird’s successful investment run, which quickly added the already successful Crackit Productions, founded by Elaine Hackett, into the network.

“What gave us confidence in the credibility of our model was shows being commissioned so quickly,” reflects Mullin. “Most producers we’ve gone into business with since have landed their first show within about eight to 10 months. That speed speaks to the talent we’re working with.”

“Indies have smart, capable people who need enabling. It’s patronising to think they need shelter”
Stuart Mullin, joint managing director

Greenbird has helped 22 indies deliver about 2,000 hours of shows – around £300m worth of production activity – since 2012. The indies remain autonomous – Greenbird describes itself as a hammock, rather than an umbrella. As Mullin says: “These are smart, capable people who need enabling. It’s patronising to think they need shelter”.

Nevertheless, says Munro, that level of activity effectively makes the Greenbird network the equivalent of a top-five company in the Broadcast Indie Survey. Today, Greenbird is involved with 18 companies, with former Comic Relief exec Mel Crawford’s Goat Films the latest to join.

“People thought we were mad starting a new business like Greenbird in a recession”
Jamie Munro, joint managing director

“People thought we were mad starting a new business like Greenbird in a recession,” says Munro. “We’ve stuck to our guns – providing the environment to help people who have run a show, but not necessarily a business, to achieve their business goals.”

Greenbird now has 18 full-time staff and Munro and Mullin credit its team, as well as the creative powerhouses running the indies, with solidifying the model over 10 years.

More recent events stress-tested that model. Fees are linked to production, so when the Covid pandemic halted much of that work,

Greenbird had to weather the storm. “They focused on working out how to deliver shows in whatever form, while we concentrated on providing an understanding of the various Covid protocols and providing business support in tough times,” says Mullin. “The right people were thinking about the right things.”

This holds true from an investor perspective. BBC Worldwide supported Greenbird’s initial corporate development and really saw the opportunity of the TV production incubator model combined with Munro and Mullin’s business experience. In 2018, Keshet International saw how the model was delivering value to the production network and took an equity stake in Greenbird, which has helped the network continue to grow.

For creatives, aligning ambition and activity is tough, and there’s no one-size-fits-all. Each Greenbird indie gets individual treatment for their business priorities. The pair pledge to continue to focus on liberating and enabling creatives to sell their ideas, while tackling funding issues and investigating burgeoning growth areas such as AVoD and other new programme financing models on their behalf.