Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Michael Schweisheimer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Michael, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

PWPvideo has been a mission driven triple bottom line company since before we even knew what those phrases meant. I founded the company with a single corporate project in 2000 that sent me and a small crew to five continents in 28 days (in coach) working for an automotive supply chain manufacturer. It was a life changing experience on many levels. Travel, production, and client interaction lessons abounded.

During the protracted editing phase, I landed our second client. This time it was a nonprofit celebrating 125 years of serving people with paraplegia. The difference between the two projects was night and day, and I learned that when serving a nonprofit, even a bad day was still pretty good. Plus, when the point of our videos was increasing the bottom line of an extractive manufacturing company, a bad day felt pretty awful. Was that how I’d hoped to spend my professional & creative life? That’s when I realized I could use my video production and communication skills for good, and I decided to focus all of my business development in the nonprofit sector. Eventually we expanded the focus to include sustainable businesses.

Like so many major decisions workers and small business owners are pushed to make, our expansion into serving sustainable businesses happened because of health insurance. When we hired our first full time staffer at the end of 2005, we joined our local chamber of commerce to access group health insurance. After a year or so we learned that the chamber was fighting against proposed changes to city laws requiring paid sick time for all employees, fair notice of schedules, and other basic rights.

We dropped our membership as fast as we could. And that’s when we found the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, where we have been active members ever since. And through SBN we found our people and learned the lingo. Triple Bottom Line (focusing on people, planet, and profits) was how we had been conducting our business since we switched our focus to serving nonprofits. Then we learned about B Lab and the B Corp movement, which aims to use business as a force for good. We became certified in 2012, and we keep focused on raising our score and impacts. I am now the new chair of B Local Philadelphia, which is our regional affinity group for Certified B Corps. Being mission driven makes everything better at PWPvideo, and we love every day we get to tell stories.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am intentionally a filmmaker, but an accidental entrepreneur. I didn’t grow up dreaming about owning a video production company that did client oriented work. Like most people who went to film school, I wanted to work in the movies. I have worked on a couple films, and some TV shows, and tons of commercials too, and in the end I’m glad I fell into founding PWPvideo.

We create videos for nonprofit organizations and sustainable businesses. That means one day I might be interviewing leading Impact Investors from around the country, then telling the story of a Habitat for Humanity homeowner, and the next I could be live streaming a mayoral candidates forum. Actually, minus a couple of other cool projects, that is exactly what I did last week.

I am very proud of the company we’ve built, our reputation, our work, but most of all I’m proud of our team. My first full time hire has been with me for over 15 years. The last time I calculated our average tenure for B Corp recertification, it was over 7 years. Nothing says more about our small business than that fact.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Word of mouth has absolutely been our best source of new clients. Our work is good. It is very good. But not only do we create compelling and visually engaging videos, we do it in true partnership with our clients. We are a very high touch boutique shop, but we make certain our pricing is accessible to the clients we want to serve.

We function as partners versus vendors, and we always look out for the project goals, and not our egos. And that allows us to defend our videos from creation by committee, or preventing blandness and sameness by doing what is easy. Since we care about our clients missions, that means their communication goals support that work, and when we create a truly effective video we get to help our clients succeed in their missions.

That recipe of caring and creating quality motivates viewers to reach out to us to help their organization. And our clients refer us, ALL, THE, TIME. There is no greater compliment than getting a phone call from a cool group and hearing that so and so from this cool company spoke very highly of your work and process.

Sometimes, and not complaining, that can create its own business challenges. Not every referral turns into a project for various reasons, but we spend so much time meeting new partners, discussing their work, and submitting proposals, that we don’t always have time to pursue new business on our own. That is what a business consultant friend of mine refers to as a “high class problem.” Hopefully, we will continue having these types of challenges.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

Thanks to our commitment to our mission, we attracted a team member who was not only a video storyteller but also a competitive story slam participant. He suggested that we throw a story slam for our nonprofit and sustainable business clients and their friends & colleagues where we could get together to swap stories of life as mission-driven workers, creatives, & entrepreneurs and recharge our batteries from the hard work of doing good.

And that’s how MISSION Story Slam was born. We’re about to host our eighth slam on May 23, 2023 at Yards Brewing in Philadelphia (slogan: “Brew Unto Others”). Over the years, our storytellers have included everyone from National Public Radio Hosts to survivors of domestic violence.

Our team gifts every storyteller a video of the story they told, which they can share with their own clients, colleagues, program participants, volunteers, investors, grant funders, and the general public to expand their impact. In 2018, we also launched the MISSION Story Slam Podcast, where we interview storytellers, nonprofit leaders, creatives, community organizers, and mission-driven entrepreneurs, o year round.

All of this has nurtured a widening circle of do-gooder friends in our region. Today we serve over fifty clients each year with our team of ten mission driven filmmakers and support staff. Our tagline is “Video with a Mission.” We’re united by commitment to creating the best possible videos to support great missions, and we love what we do. Bringing MISSION Story Slam to our community does more than foster brand loyalty, it demonstrates through concrete actions what our brand means.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://pwpvideo.com/, https://missionstoryslam.org/
• Instagram: missionstoryslam, pwpvideo
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/missionstoryslam
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pwpvideo/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/missionslam
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0Zzx6PrxeePumJYP4j6vEw
• Other: https://vimeo.com/pwpvideo/

Image Credits
Michael Schweisheimer, Dave Lamm, Pat Ganley