"Emerging talents... Ones to watch for the future."

That’s what the Televisual Peer Poll said about us when we first featured in the UK Top 50 Corporate Production Companies in 2012.

We’re still so stoked to have been recognised as the Number One Brand Production Company in the UK last week.

When we first entered 13 years ago, we were Number 18 in the overall poll, and were over the moon to be ranked 11th= in the Peer Poll.

We'd been looking at this feature in Televisual magazine for a few years. The companies at the top of the list were huge, so talented, such impressive clients and work. Somehow over the intervening years, we’ve climbed the slippery pole (poll?) to be Number One.

"We tend to overestimate what we can achieve in a day and drastically underestimate what we can achieve in a year.

- Bill Gates

So I thought I’d put together some of the reasons (I believe) we went from 18 to 1...

1.        Culture. The decentralized nature of Casual is unthinkable without the work we’ve done on our company culture. This started with clearly defining our values, then using them to hire, promote and incentivize our team. In the 10 years since we went through the values process this has built an extremely motivated team, where everyone knows what is expected of them, and what good looks like.

2.        Marketing. We have continually sought to build out a proper new business pipeline. No sooner is one channel really working than it starts to diminish in effectiveness. This means we need to continually search for more new channels.

It’s amazing speaking to the operators of other production companies, how few of them seem to market themselves properly – they all rely on referrals, which is great but it is completely unscalable. You can’t control it or increase it as you need.

3.        Risk. There have been a few moments when we have had to make a decision that really hung in the balance. In those moments, we have by and large chosen the more interesting/risky path. Whether this is an acquisition or a territory expansion, on balance they tend to pay off.

4.        Process. For a long time when we first started we thought that if we made a great film then it didn’t really matter how we got there. What we discovered quite quickly was that the process is essential – if the project was a nightmare, it didn’t matter how good the output was. As a result we have continually worked to improve every step in every process. This makes our output reliable and scalable.

5.        Craft. We bloody love filmmaking. The work we get to do on behalf of our clients is such a privilege. We’ve travelled all over the world and delivered thousands of projects, but we try to remember how lucky we are, and to use that opportunity to tell stories in new and interesting ways – even when working with complex organisations and traditionally drier business subjects.

6.        Adventure. I am a little hesitant to use this as for many of our staff what adventure there is is fairly metaphorical – beyond the evolving work and techniques where is the adventure for an editor for instance? But… from our first journey to Mongolia in an old Mini, through our expansion to the US and Asia and beyond, Casual has been the most amazing adventure.

As with the risk point above, we’ve tried to favour the path with the most colour and interest. That has made the experience – while extremely challenging at points – rich, rewarding and ultimately inspiring to continue growing.

I hope this list doesn’t appear immodest. There may be other reasons, but I thought some people would find it useful.

Thanks again to everyone who voted us and for all our amazing staff (past and present) and clients. We’ve got so much more to come, but it’s always nice to take a moment to reflect on where we’ve got to, so thank you.

For those who are interested to dive deeper into the survey results, you can explore the full details here.