We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jason Cherubini. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jason below.

Jason, appreciate you joining us today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

“Home runs may be exciting, but singles win baseball games.” Over the last five years, we have been able to consistently grow our firm by focusing on regular small successes instead of trying for big wins. These small successes not only allow for consistent and compounding growth but make the big wins easier.
In the film business, people want to aim for big-budget artistic stories with top talent and can look down on the content-driven needs of countless channels and streaming services. By focusing on having a consistent slate of these type of movies we have been able to rapidly grow our company and have seen a large influx of requests for larger projects. In the same five years we could have been trying (and failing) to produce a larger project, we have been able to successfully deliver almost 40 movies with most of them now being larger than what we would have considered a “large” film when we started.
By focusing on small and consistent successes, we were able to achieve exponential success.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Most of my career was in the management consulting industry, working with startups and early-stage ventures to solve financial and operational issues. When I started my firm, Seraphim Associates, we primarily focused on the creative industries, including the Edtech and video game industries.

In 2014, I had the opportunity to cofound my current company, Dawn’s Light Movies which financed television and film productions. After a few years of seeing where film productions had gotten themselves into issues, we decided to start producing our projects. Since then, we have financed and produced almost forty films, primarily in the thriller and action genres.

Over that time, I have had the opportunity to work with many of the local institutions of higher education, teaching courses in accounting, finance, and entrepreneurship. This has been incredibly rewarding for me to help educate the next generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

The key to our company’s growth has been the people we have been able to work with that make our films a success. Without a strong team of trusted filmmakers, we would never have been able to take on and successfully deliver the number of projects we have. By treating our team well, both on our projects and their personal endeavors, we have been able to have a core group of regular collaborators in an industry that is notoriously transient. The fact that we can rely on high-quality people that we have worked with before lowers the risk and stress of every project. It also helps in attracting new talent (both in front of and behind the camera) because our sets are generally a good experience for those involved.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I think many industries, especially those in the creative fields end up falsely glamorizing chaos and stress as necessary. part of the path to success. This was definitely true of our early days in film production where it was seen as expected that the packaging and producing of films would carry constant stress and the need to deal with unknowns. It was only after a couple of projects that we actively worked against this narrative and treated each step of the production process as a relatively boring cog in the machine, a series of steps that needed to be completed. By removing an expectation of stress, we were able to simplify and tame most of the process. As a creative endeavor, there will always be unknowns and some level of chaos, but by removing it as a necessity and only dealing with it as it arises, the overall process is smooth.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jasoncherubini.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jasoncherubini/
• Facebook: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncherubini/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasoncherubini