We were lucky to catch up with Marcus Flemmings recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Marcus thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.

Imagine being 15 and still not knowing what you want to do with your life. At school, especially high school, you are programmed by the age of 12 to know exactly what it is you want to do with you’re 35. A pressure I always found overwhelming.

So when you hit 17 and you’ve failed your first year of Business Studies (due to a lack of cohesive direction) your friends have all departed to college and are gearing up to hit university, life is, to put it mildly, tricky.

You know you are only a few months away from 18. The age you’re meant to be an adult. Coming from an old school Jamaican 1st generation immigrants type of house – the age you’re meant to be a MAN. I couldn’t have felt further away from either of those two expectations. So when 18 hit. It hit HARD. I was not in education, I felt highly unintelligent and I was about to start getting unemployment cheques from the government. Which remains to this date, one of the darkest times of my life. Waiting in the queue to see an unemployment officer alongside people in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s who had no intention at all in getting a job felt like I could see my own future.

For six months, I was at a point that was lower than anytime since. My parents, again old school, didn’t know how best to help me. The solution to them was “Just get a trade job or do an apprenticeship – become a Plummer” – this ‘solution’ irked me. In fact, it pushed me away from them deeply. I felt like they were part of the problem. Adding to the self-inflicted pressure I was heaping on myself. I questioned the purpose of my existence at this point. Was it worth carrying on with life?

In the UK, British Summer Time is a point of contention – should it remain in place? At 18 these minor questions didn’t concern me. However, the night that the clocks went back that year I decided to flip on my TV and spend the night doing nothing in particular. Just another lonely night with me and my thoughts. BBC 1 = nothing interesting. BBC2 = same but different. So I flip to Channel 3 (ITV) I see a film, it looks familiar – but not because I’d seen it before. Purely because I’d seen pictures of it throughout the years.

The briefest of flashbacks now, I am 16 and at secondary school attempting, with all my might, not be actually study Business Studies but to have fun with my peers. Something I sometimes neglected in previous years – there is this one kid, Amir. He’s funny and loves films. I listen to him because he’s funny. His rhetoric about films takes my interest every now and again, but not really. I am more keen to hang out with him as he had great banter. He looks like Keanu Reeves. Girls love him. Guys love him equally. He arose from nowhere, as prior to this, in the same high school he was always around but I never really knew him. Now at secondary school, same high school, he was like a beacon — roaming around telling jokes, quoting film lines that no-one knew. And more than anything, he would quote Scarface, Goodfellas, The Godfather – He would speak of his love for Scorsese, Coppola and his dislike for Spielberg, “What a sell out”, “He’s ruined films forever”. Again, these words meant very little to me. I liked film, didn’t love them. As I kid I had taped Wizard of Oz and Grease 2 (due to my crush on Michelle Pfeiffer) onto VHS and every Saturday morning I would make myself a fried eye sandwich and rewatch those two films on loop. So my film knowledge was limited. Stars Wars and Back to the Future also got some airtime via my VHS player. But now I got this kid Amir and he’s ranting and raving about how Al Pacino is the best actor ever and Bruce Willis can’t act. De Niro is incredible but Brad Pitt is just a pretty boy. Eventually, I found his words compelling. He was the cool guy that everyone listened to – his words started to seep into my subconscious thoughts – my initiation was him lending me Taxi Driver (on VHS!). A film I watched and gave back to him with the sub-par review: “It’s okay but the ending doesn’t make sense. It’s like a fairy tale.” I didn’t get it. Goodfellas was next – my subpar review “It’s really funny!” – when I didn’t make it onto year 2 of Business Studies I could no longer hang out with Amir. This was the thing I missed the most.

Now we’re back to Channel 3 (ITV), clocks have gone back, it’s British Summer Time remember? This film is on – it already 20 minutes in, I’ve missed the opening but there is a wedding sequence. Italians. Music. A young and dashing Al Pacino appears on screen. It dawns on me – this is The Godfather! I give it a chance. 15 minutes pass. 30. 60. Time has stood still. I am lost in the rapture of this film’s beauty. 3 hours later. The film ends. My life has changed forever. I sit in silence for 5 minutes. My eyes widen and I say to myself “I want to be scriptwriter…maybe even a director”.

Montage: I enrol in college, Media Studies to be exact. I pass with a distinction. I avoid university (because that’s all theory, I want practical!), I worked in a video store for 3 years and watch every film under the sun for free! I say to myself “I’m going to go to a film school”. That doesn’t happen. I fall in love with my first girlfriend. I stop thinking about making films. I realise I need a full time “proper” job to maintain this relationship. I get into finance. Three years later, I am a 9-5 zombie. Girlfriend, finance job, no filmmaking in sight.

At this point, I could have just played that scenario out until retirement. But something is calling me back. I remember how films saved my life, quite literally, and I start writing a novel. Which is published. A novel, which was aptly about a romantic breakup. Apt because me and my girlfriend broke up just beforehand after she read the draft and realised it was about ‘us’ – I wanted this to happen, due my inert inability to communicate to her what I wanted from life. I then make my first short film. It does well. But again the finance job remains the hurdle I need to jump. It was the bane of path toward what I perceived as my inevitable future. Something has to give. It allowed me to buy a house, at least. After five years of being at that company I knew I had to follow my dream. I sold the house. I quit the job. I started an online Casting Company for actors. Again it wasn’t my dream, but it allowed me to be in an industry closer to the dream.

My parents cautioned me against quitting a secure job. Friends were rather baffled by my decision. Come three months into quitting and starting the new company I was equally as baffled. What had I done?! The new company wasn’t making hardly any money. I was struggling to make ends meet. I had started a company with very little knowledge of how to run a business. I had no idea how to sell, market nor map out a business. And it showed.

It meant, I had to get another job. In finance again. I felt like a failure. The business remained in place. Making its pittance. I remained in the new finance job. Which was the worst job I’ve ever had. I was distracted. So they never saw the best of me. And the 3 person office was as silent as a graveyard. (Are graveyard’s silent?) Three months in I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to leave. However I couldn’t live on just my new companies’ income – what was I going to do?!

An epiphany struck me one day – this was the age of Facebook. Groups and Pages were the rage. There was ‘Hot or Not’ group on Facebook. I always found those rather unfair. People rating each other based on physical appearance. I thought to myself “Why can’t ‘normal’ people model?” So I set up. Group called The Model’s Portal. A group where I would promote ‘normal’ people as models and try and remove the rating system that was being levied at the time in popular culture. It took off. Then I saw a gap the model industry in the UK, South Asian models weren’t being fairly represented. So with the very little money I had, I set up an agency that catered for South Asian models. From there, things exploded. I left the job instantly and began my journey in the modelling industry. A few years later in 2016, I expanded that concept to cover representations for all models of colour. Rebranded using the word BAME – which in the UK means Black Asian Minority Ethnic. It’s a term I hate. It groups people together by virtue of them not being White. I decided to name the agency BAME and have models ALL colours, heights, ages. Thusly, using the term against itself.

Today, BAME Agency sits as one of the top agencies in the UK. We’ve helped to smash some of the barriers that were prohibiting models of all colours, ages, genders.

As for the the filmmaking, last year, I wrapped production on two feature films. My 4th and 5th features, respectively.

Taking calculated chances will always lead you somewhere. It’s all about how you navigate from then on in.

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.

BAME Agency, since it’s conception has had the fortune of having the clients I had from the previous agency I had – it meant that we had the advantage of being able to get our talent in front of pre-existing clients. We have worked with Asos, Burberry, Vogue, Nike, Puma and so on and so on.

The goal for us is to transition from the name BAME into another name – this can only happen when we feel the term has been dampened from UK culture. Which, I feel, happen soon. Growth for the brand would be hitting Europe and America with the same ethos. A movement, of sorts.

We’d appreciate any insights you can share with us about selling a business.

So the online Casting Company I had was called ConstantCasting and it was meant to be part of a Constant Group – the plan was to have Constant Films as part of that brand as well. However, because of my lack of business experience, the company had a disadvantage. We were also up against two really similar juggernauts in StarNow and Spotlight (And at the time CastingCallPro) so, although, after roughly 12 months it began to yield success, this was overshadowed by the conception of my other company TMP. Thusly, my time and attention was drawn toward that.

This mean that, eventually, I had to move away from ConstantCasting – I sold it to be a brother and sister duo who paid a very low sum for it. In the end, we had about 15k active members and about 1k clients. But most of those active members weren’t paying subscription so it was a difficult to maintain. The brother/sister duo wound the company down two years after that. Either because they asset stripped it for it’s data or maybe because they struggled with it.

My advice for first time business owners is: know your market. And be prepared for the first 12 months to be a rocky road. It’ll feel very isolating. If you can survive the first 12 months, find a way to step the game up and challenge yourself further. It will bring positive results.

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 like to play in the fine margins between management and personal. I learnt, mainly from my journey to this point, that thinking of yourself as ‘above’ people is absolutely the wrong way to go. For my own mental wellbeing. Whenever I’ve tried to play the role of ‘boss’ it becomes very difficult for me to not come across as cold and calculated. As a writer I am already lost in my thoughts on a regular basis. To isolate myself further a ‘boss’ or a figure of authority meant that people found it extremely hard to get to know what I wanted or who I was. I grew up thinking that’s how people in power had to behave. And, whilst that may work for some, for me it has the opposite effect.

I had unlearn this and retrain my mind on how to be part of something more organic and open.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bamemodels.com
• Instagram: marcusflemmingss
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcusflemmings/
• Twitter: marcusflemmings
• Other: Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4zZcgaDjy8QNIntXUKFG67?si=8b4b4e56ac184cee

Image Credits
Benjamin Mitchell Antonio Milevcic Veronika Casarova