Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Daniel J. Harris. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Daniel J., thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?
Building a team is incredibly important. With the right people you can reach the stars. With the wrong people it’ll be a daily battle.
It’s people who make the business. As a business owner and entrepreneur you have an idea, a plan, or a strategy and you want to achieve something with your business. If you have the right people on board who buy into your vision and they also want to achieve something in line with your vision you can work together to create something great. It’s incredibly important to outline your vision and share that with your team, to talk about what you want to do and why you want to do it. You also need to listen to your team and understand what they want to achieve in their lives or their work. If you can find a way of weaving their goals and ambitions into your vision they’ll believe in the big picture and feel a part of that journey. They will then work with you to drive the business forward. Giving people something bigger and more important that just a financial reward is important. You and your team need to be driving for something more meaningful than money, and if you can find out what that is and build a team of people who are driving forward towards the same goal the business will thrive.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m a creative professional and entrepreneur. I’ve always felt a little bit of an outsider not getting opportunities in the media world, and so I set up my own business to create opportunities for myself, and then for others. My previous company, EatSleep Media, grew quickly and received lots of attention in the sports media space in Wales and we won Best Digital Business at the 2023 Chambers Wales Business Awards. My current company, Focus Shift Films, is a BAFTA Cymru nominated production company.
Both companies have found success in various projects, but the thing I am most proud of is producing the commercially and critically success feature film, Tosh, the story of Swansea City’s meteoric rise under John Toshack. As a huge football fan it was a pleasure to tell this story and to bring to the masses the story of Swansea City’s incredible journey under talismanic leader Toshack between 1978 and 1982. This was my first feature film as Producer, and we were working with a small budget, but with a great core team we were able to deliver a film that has been sold to Amazon Prime in the UK, into several foreign territories and has received great reviews and feedback from audiences. Producing a feature film is not easy, especially for a working class boy like me without access to bottomless pockets of money. To see the reaction of audiences at our premiere in Swansea, where players and fans from that period whooped, cheered, laughed and cried was an incredibly proud moment for me. And then, to watch the film in Barcelona at a film festival with over 900 people, including John Toshack himself, and see the reaction the film received there was bordering on surreal.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
I’m a huge fan of reading or listening to stories about other businesses and business people, and for books around maximising your business or life. There’s a number of books I’ve read that have inspired me or informed my thinking, including Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’ and ‘The Tipping Point’, Simon Sinek’s ‘Start With Why’, ‘High Performance’ from Jake Humphrey and Prof Damian Hughes, to name a few. I also listen to episodes of the Acquired podcast when there are businesses of interest to me; the NFL, NBA, ESPN etc.
The story that has impacted me most is that of Nike. I first heard their story on the Acquired podcast, and then red Phil Knight’s book ‘Shoe Dog’. I was absolutely blown away by their story, the challenges that Nike faced, the moments when everything seemed lost, and how Phil Knight built a company driven by like minded people who were super passionate about running – during a time when running was not a thing. Phil wasn’t driven by money or success, he was driven by wanting more people to enjoy the benefits of running and to do so in a great shoe. The people he first hired were crazy about running too. And despite so many set backs, challenges and near disasters they built the world’s biggest and most recognisable brand.
Phil Knight and Nike’s story is one of resilience, passion, and digging in with like minded people. ‘Shoe Dog’ tells the 20+ year story of Phil starting the company and it nearly failing pretty much every year, despite turning over millions as it grew. And finishes with the near miss of another financial disaster, followed by floating the company on the stock market – and Phil waking up the next morning worth over $170m.
I love this story because Nike did so many things that changed the game – how they made shoes, how they marketed shoes, how they worked with athletes, and it was all driven by a small group of people who wanted to people to enjoy the benefits of running in a good shoe. In the 1970s running wasn’t a thing, and runners often got drinks cans thrown at them from passing cars – but Phil and his team loved running and wanted others to find the love in it too – and they created the running market. Now, the running industry is a global multi billion dollar industry.
There’s so many takeaways from the Nike story – but the main one for me is that if you believe in something and you find like minded people who believe in it too – you can achieve anything.
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
Filmmaking was always something I wanted to do, but getting into the industry was tough. I didn’t know anyone in the film or TV world, had no ways in and wasn’t exactly sure how I built a career in the industry – despite having a degree in film and TV production. We weren’t taught how to build a career on the course, it was all about technical skills. When I finished my degree I didn’t know how to go about getting opportunities, so I bought myself a camera and created content for local bands and business for free or next to nothing to build my experiences and develop my skills. Friends told me I needed to get a proper job.
But, over time I created more and more content, and found more opportunities. A big opportunity for me came when I was offered the role of videographer at a new Fieldsports YouTube channel, Team Wild TV. When I arrived I was the only member of staff and the channel had 15,000 views. When I left 3 years later, TWTV had 175,000 subscribers, 51 million views and a team of around 13 people. Across that 3 years I learnt various valuable lessons about running a business, working with clients, building a team and how to commercialise content and build online audiences. Working at TWTV was tough, there were tight deadlines, low budgets, lots of pressure and very little time off, but I also learnt what I was capable of when it came to heavy workloads, tight turnarounds and working under pressure. The lessons learned there – good and bad – have become the foundations for the type of person I am today, how I manage work/projects and what sort of business I want to run. There were plenty of times that I wanted to quit TWTV and walk away, but I dug in and kept going, learnt all I could and I found growth as a result.
When I left TWTV and returned to Wales I set up Focus Shift Films, and then EatSleep Media. Having worked for someone else in a small start up business and watched how that was run, I then had clear ideas on what I wanted to do and avoid in my own businesses.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.focusshiftfilms.com
- Instagram: @haza_focusshiftfilms
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/focusshiftfilms
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieljharris1/
- Twitter: @focusshiftfilms
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZinKpfxmCSW1b5-G7s0uDA
