We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Stephen Kinney. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Stephen below.
Stephen, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about the best boss, mentor, or leader you’ve ever worked with.
I’ll never forgot the boss I had at my last corporate job.
The company was a growing young company. It had a lot of innovations in the sector of business that it competed in. Since it was young, I had a lot of opportunity to show what I could bring to the table, in addition to my actual assigned work.
In many cases, I went out of my way to try to bring my creative abilities to the table.
Well, rather than empower me, it got to the point where I was put to the “fire” about the extra curricular activities.
It all came to a point where I had a choice to relocate to the other side of the country or leave the company.
Choosing to leave the company was the best lesson and decision I ever had made.
It taught me a lot about the difference between great leadership and bad leadership. Which directly led to my successes in running my own businesses.
Long story short, the best boss I ever had was a bad one.
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’d go out on a limb and say that many of the readers do not know me. So I’m humbly grateful to be included in the conversation here.
I’m a modern day creator. I’m a music producer & engineer, and just like many reporters who ended up blurring the lines of their work into being their own camera operator, my job has blended into content creation as well.
I not only create music, but I film music videos, and content for artists I produce.
I’m not limited to that. I can film content, interviews, documentaries, short films for anyone who may need the service.
Perhaps it’s a high intensity promotional video for a gym, or a training video for a corporation’s new hires..
or maybe, you’re the next Shania Twain but you need an engineer to artfully capture your voice.. that’s all in my wheel house.
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
There was one particular client that I started working with early on in my career.
This client wanted to make a live concert DVD for their fans. That’s no small feat.. I had to take a step back and strictly put together a plan to tackle it.
Especially considering all the things that could go wrong while filming.. I needed staff, communications, a lot of equipment, limitations of the equipment, insurances,.. in addition to dealing with a live audience AND the live performance itself.
Not including the massive job of editing this Multicam together after the fact..
I had never done a job this big before…
To make matters more difficult, I had never had to quote for anything this large. I didn’t know how to price my time.. I probably severely underquoted.. but winning the bid felt like a massive win.
When the day finally came to film. We were ready. All comm’s worked. The staff was great & I made sure to empower them. I let them know that they were there for a reason. I trusted them to know what to do if a situation were to arrive.
The job went off without a hitch.. and it led to a number of other larger productions that ultimately drove larger revenues.
Massive win.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The most reward part for me personally, is when I get to innovate a new way to solve a massive problem for a client and hear them get wow’d by the finished result.
Many people are always budget constrained.. you can do anything you want if you have the budget for it… it takes a real pro to know how to pull off anything you want when you DON’T have the budget for it..
That is truly rewarding.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://kinneyproductions.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thestevekinney/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO7R1powDgHQ6J62f3TFdFA