Lighting designers, like most freelancers, tend to be peripatetic. An extended gig is usually more like two months than two years, and outside of Hollywood and New York (as long as you have a union card) life leans towards the itinerant rather than the permanent. And even on the coasts you’re only as good as your last credit.
But the same entrepreneurial streak that allows someone to subsist or even thrive in that kind of self-employment arena becomes the core support beam for business ventures down the line, and more and more erstwhile LDs are taking their experience off the road and trading their union cards for corporate cards.
“You don’t leave lighting—it’s in your blood,” says Bob “Flash” Finical, who was once the LD for classic country artists including Lee Greenwood, Mel Tillis and the Oak Ridge Boys, and who parlayed 22 years of road work into Theatreworks, a lighting sales and rental company he started in Branson, Miss. in 1997. “But today, instead of dreaming about lights, I dream about buildings and the lights that fill them—in inventory.”
Making the transition from road warrior to shopkeeper may be easier as the lighting industry continues to consolidate: a landscape of fewer, larger conglomerated companies tends to create opportunities for new startups. That’s particularly true when technological innovation accompanies it, and the LED revolution has hardly played itself out yet.
An example of that kind of opportunity is how Finical leveraged his geography. “What worked here in Branson wouldn’t have worked or worked as well in Southern California,” he says. “One of the big differences between freelancing as a lighting designer and running a lighting shop is that as an LD, you’re at a venue because you know there is a need for a lighting design. Why else would you be there? But figuring out whether an entire market needs lighting, and what kinds of lighting it needs, is a completely different thing. Being able to figure that out successfully is the distinction between freelancer and entrepreneur.”
Jim Crisman, who spent 18 years on the road with music artists such as the Lost Boys, had an even more difficult transition. After the theft of a truck containing all of his uninsured equipment in Philadelphia years ago, he was, as he puts it, “reduced to rubble in a single night. The lesson about going from LD to businessman, this was the litmus test for that transition for me.”
Crisman went to work for Merv Griffin, for whose company he lit huge premieres for films like Armageddon and Con Air and events like the Democratic National Convention. He later joined Coast Wire, where he did sales. Crisman says it was a difficult fit at times. “You’re trading the security of a paycheck for the freedom to do things your way,” he says. “The inclination is to try to run someone else’s company the way you would run yours.”
Crisman fought that tendency, instead learning from Griffin and Coast CEO Frank Zorbino lessons in the distinction between client and customer, a crucial one in the transition from LD to businessman. “I knew how to make a band happy, or a promoter happy,” he says. “From that experience working for others, I learned how to make everyone happy. I learned the bigger picture that you don’t always get as an LD.”
Crisman formed Entertainment 1 in the Los Angeles area with partner Billy Davila, which does equipment sales and touring supplies, a niche with definable parameters in the city with a dense entertainment industry. “I don’t know that I’d want to go through that experience again, especially the theft.” He says.” But I know it’s what’s helped me tremendously in making the successful transition from LD to this.”
Chas Herington started Zenith Lighting in Orlando when he came off the road six years ago, but he had been thinking about it for far longer. After extensive touring since 1978 with artists including Madonna, Dire Straits, The Pretenders, Bob Dylan and The Steve Miller Band, Herington wanted to make sure the next phase of his career was well-planned. A key point was to remember that, as much as he enjoyed freelancing as an LD, clients hold your professional life in their hands. “I really gave substantial thought to how to structure a rental and supply business in which the workplace was as rewarding as it was challenging,” he says. “I’m still working on that, but it’s definitely do-able.”
On more practical matters, Herington says the biggest difficulty in the transition is adjusting to the huge amounts of paperwork common to any new business and to the lighting industry, where job rentals can involve hundreds of individual pieces, all of which have to be accounted for. “All the compliance issues, dealing with OSHA—this is the hellish part of the business, compared to the relatively simpler life of an LD,” he says.
Greatest lessons learned? “That it’s a seasonal business in Orlando and in the summer to make sure we have stuff cross-rented to other production companies and tours. And to focus in on lighting pieces that other companies might find too expensive and shy away from. It’s a way to establish a niche no matter where you are.”
Evolution may be good science but it’s not always good business. Before jumping out into the void of owning a static business, you need to make sure you’re temperamentally suited for the rigors of that life. You also need to learn how to delegate. Bob Finical says it’s harder to keep up with all the changes in the technical side of the industry as he runs Theatreworks, so his strategy is to make sure his employees do, and he guides the application of that knowledge as he grows the business.
F. Scott Fitzgerald questioned the possibility of a second act in American lives. The people outlined here prove it can be done.
