We were lucky to catch up with Sean Horejs recently and have shared our conversation below.
Sean , appreciate you joining us today. What sort of legacy are you hoping to build. What do you think people will say about you after you are gone, what do you hope to be remembered for?
There are several things that I think are foundational in balancing business and life: First, love what you do. Nothing else works if you can’t do that. Secondly, trust your abilities and your capability to listen and learn. Lastly, be grateful for the faith your clients and family put in you, and return that trust by doing your absolute best in taking care of them. Those are the benchmarks for me, and the only things for which I care to be remembered by. Profitability and making a good living are nice things, but nobody is going to care if you complain, disregard outside opinions and aren’t giving it your all during the process. I certainly didn’t understand that at first, but I’m trying to live by it now.
I’ve delivered thousands of sports news reports and crafted countless videos over the last 25 years, but I don’t remember any of them as fondly as the relationships I’ve built with collaborators and clients along the way.
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?
I am the Owner/Executive Producer for a small production company called Altitude Media, currently based in San Antonio, TX, which specializes in crafting video/visual content for clients in the energy and maritime spaces. Whether it’s just writing a script, building crews for commercials, capturing aerial imagery from a drone or live event coverage, it’s all in AM’s wheelhouse. Global energy companies, seaports, PR and advertising agencies, healthcare providers, nonprofits and even other production companies are all a part of AM’s client history.
How I personally got to this point is a bit of a winding tale. I graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Nevada-Reno in 1999, but my career began more than a year prior. I interned at KOLO-TV in Reno and quickly landed a full-time sports producer/reporter role that included coming up with story ideas, shooting and editing video, scriptwriting, and on-air reporting. That line of work carried me from Nevada to South Texas, where I worked as a Sports Anchor and eventually Sports Director for KRIS-TV, the NBC affiliate in Corpus Christi, Texas.
I left TV news in 2010 and moved to Long Beach, California, not quite sure what the next stage would be. But some freelance producing work with the City of Long Beach that year turned into a nearly six-year full-time relationship with their video communications division, which I still revisit for spot projects here and there. During my time in Long Beach, I did a lot of work with the Port of Long Beach, one of the nation’s largest and most critical seaports. Seeing ships three football fields long up close, chronicling the construction of a 100-year bridge, and getting to know the inner workings of the nation’s economy got me hooked on that arena from a visual perspective. I get to go places most people don’t have access to, and it never gets old.
Once I started Altitude Media in earnest in 2016, the port theme continued, as AM began work as a video provider for the Port of Corpus Christi, along the Texas Gulf Coast. It’s a client that probably best represents the kind of service AM delivers. They had just a few YouTube videos in their archive at first, and today there are hundreds of individual works and what I believe to be a living history of the most pronounced period of growth in their 100-year history. We provide internal and external-facing content for Port CC and have worked with several of their associated stakeholders in recent years, developing a deep knowledge base of their collective footprint and facilities along the way.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
As a sole proprietor, every day can be a “near death” moment for my business. Every day, I have to decide to keep it going, and it’s not always easy. I like being my own boss, but that is quite a weight to carry. Even though Altitude Media carries very little debt, every vacation I take can be a situation where my business (me) is not earning, and I have to budget around that. Every piece of equipment I buy or project I take on is a financial risk, so I really have to rely on how much I love what I do as opposed to how much money I make. The dreaded pandemic was a pretty good example of that. While I came out the back end of it in pretty good shape, it was terrifying. I couldn’t schedule shoots, which at first, meant no post production revenue, either. But I had to start reminding clients that assets from older projects are still assets, and they can always be used in other ways. So I just started pitching ideas about how to use footage that hadn’t been utilized previously, and re-purposing stuff that had. Those projects really saved the day, along with more graphics-focused content.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
The switch from TV news to a more PR/corporate video communications-based track was a difficult one. It was one of my choosing, but that didn’t make it easier. There was a time I felt like I wanted to be an ESPN anchor, for example, but I fell out of love with the schedule demands of tv news in the years after my first daughter was born. However, when you do something every day for 12 years you start to feel like that’s all you can do and there’s a sense of entrapment, where you don’t even look at the wider world. “What am I going to do, if not that?” is something I said to myself and others more than once. I had to sit down and figure out exactly what I liked about that line of work and what else I could find that would satisfy those needs. When I dipped my toes into the world of freelance producing/content production, I realized I could freely explore the paths my acquired skills opened up to me. I found out pretty quickly, especially surrounded by the rise of social media, that everyone was going to need more content. It took me a few years to get the confidence to create a company that provided it, but I wouldn’t have gotten there without clients willing to take a chance on a former sportscaster as a freelancer, which allowed me to learn how the production business works.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.altitude-media.biz