The Finish Line has been crowned “Gold Winner” in the Broadcast magazine best places to work in TV for the second year in a row!! If it was just the one time, we might have thought it was an accident, but now we know we are doing something right, and we would love to help more companies make the list! TV & Film is a notoriously unhealthy industry that is rife with exploitative business practices, but it doesn’t need to be that way. Below, we’ll do our best to cover simple things that you can do to make life better for your employees and help them to be able to do work they love while also enjoying life outside of work.

It’s official! The Finish Line is one of the best places to work in the UK broadcast industry. Not just our words, but those of Broadcast magazine, which just gave us several accolades at their annual Best Places to Work in TV awards! (We came 3rd for Training, Development and Resources; and won first place for both Leadership and Planning and for the Non-Indies category.)

The team at EditShare interviewed me recently and you can find links to both interviews here. They also wrote this story about how The Finish Line came to be which I’ve included below.

This is an excerpt from this article in Broadcast Magazine. Zeb Chadfield, founder and CEO, The Finish Line What has been the impact of coronavirus on your business? We are built for pop-up and remote post-production so the main difference is a lot of our system installs are happening at the houses of our staff instead of the offices of our clients. Our HQ is also not client-facing so we can easily limit and manage the people coming in and out with all the standard rules in place for washing hands and disinfecting surfaces. Aside from a few minor tweaks it has been business as usual for us so far.

The demo video below is of us using BTSync with Shared Storage and Avid Media Composer working across multiple locations including a laptop, FLiP (cloud based media composer) and our HQ.

I often hear young people who are trying to get into our industry or any industry for that matter refer to the chicken and egg situation that is how to get experience when every job is asking for people with experience. How do you get experience if no one will give you a job to get it?

• Disclaimer: This is an internal email that we are sharing in the interest of helping others. Howdy! I figured it was time to send one of my semi-(ir)regular motivational-ish emails. I hope all is well with everyone and you are all enjoying life at The Finish Line. If you aren’t please let us know, we want to continue to improve and you are the most important thing to the company, without you, more importantly without you bringing your best to everything you do, we wouldn’t be what we are. You could say you are our unfair advantage. What does that mean?

Robert Rodriguez has been a massive inspiration of mine since watching El mariachi in the early 90s and learning about how he made it for $7000 and went on to win at Sundance. This episode of The Tim Ferriss show is a great listen and covers a lot of why I think he is someone everyone needs to take a tip or two from. I had the pleasure of meeting him at IBC in 2014 which was great. Very hard not to be a massive fan boy but I got through it. If you haven’t read Rebel Without a Crew you should but at least listen to this show.

I like to send out little emails to our team from time to time with tips on how I like to approach work/life/learning/tips/tricks… basically anything I find helpful that I think will help others. I’ve debated for a while what should be shared internally and what should be shared externally, ultimately I’ve decided (you will hear more on this later) that sharing is caring and if anything I have to share could help anyone then I should make it public. This is one such post. For me there have been a few specific things that have contributed to our success thus far and after reading Ed Catmull’s book Creativity, Inc I realised that a bunch of them are things that I have always done that have had major benefits for getting the most out of my time, work and most importantly, helping me to constantly improve, I thought I should share these tips.

We couldn’t be more excited to have Jonathan Blessley joining our team as Managing Director! He starts with us on the 5th of January and I for one am over the moon. When I started The Finish Line in 2011 I had a very clear idea of what I wanted The Finish Line to be and imagined my dream team. Jonathan was always the person I had in mind for MD of the business, there was never an alternative.