A gem of an idea: Working together with his competitors has boosted this production company’s revenues by 50 percent since January.
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New Mexico Business Weekly – by Karen Jarnagin NMBW Staff

Clay Wright had an itch that looked like it might never get scratched.

In 2001, Albuquerque-based Wright, a longtime veteran broadcast journalist, was busy with Desert Gem Productions Inc., his 11-year-old, full-service video production company that largely focused on corporate identity and marketing pieces for companies including Honeywell and Kansas City, Mo.-based Allied Signal Aerospace, among others.

While Wright had largely hung up his reporting microphone, he still occasionally accepted small, non-corporate jobs that required a journalistic presentation. So when the city of Albuquerque hired him two years ago to write, shoot and produce a 30-minute piece on the mayor’s annual Arts Summer Institute, an arts program for area youth, he gladly accepted.

The experience — which led to him winning a regional Emmy award — lit a fire in Wright, 45, that he had long ignored. “That really ignited that desire to get back into broadcast [news],” he says.

But horning his way into the world of network-level television proved more difficult than he ever imagined, especially in a town like Albuquerque, which already had about five freelance videographers with ties to NBC, ABC, CBS and other major television companies, who would hire the cameramen if they needed local or regional video for national-level stories.

“What I found out was it was very much an old-boy network,” says Wright, whose wry demeanor suggests someone who has seen it all. “There was no way in heck I was going to get into that. They weren’t going to let that happen.”

Early last year, however, he had an epiphany. “It dawned on me pretty quickly that I ought not to be competing with guys who could bring me work,” he says.

Sitting down with several of his competitors, Wright floated this idea: Instead of all of them trying to vie for network assignments, why couldn’t they work together?

That is, since Wright had reporting and producing experience, he could take the network freelance jobs needing those kinds of talents, while the videographers could accept work strictly requiring shooting skills. Meanwhile, the two sides could refer jobs to each other, depending on what the networks wanted.

Today, 75 percent of Desert Gem’s business comes from network-level jobs, verses 25 percent a year ago. Desert Gem’s revenues (Wright declined to release actual numbers) since January have increased by 50 percent because of competitor referrals, and he’s now a sought-after, freelance on-air talent and producer for NBC and MSNBC, and has done production work for ABC, the News Travel Network, RAI Italian TV, HBO and Fox, among others. His recent assignments have included stories on the Elizabeth Smart abduction case, local stories from Fort Bliss regarding the U.S. war in Iraq, and the space shuttle disaster in Texas.

By next year, Wright hopes to increase his network jobs by another 25 percent while still maintaining a solid roster of corporate accounts. But he is also realistic enough to understand his good fortune could fall through at any moment. After all, he says of the news business, “you’re only as good as your last story.”

No more ‘low end guy’

Wright — who serves as company vice president; wife, Peggy, a former health reporter for KOAT Channel 7, is president — had already been fine-tuning Desert Gem even before deciding to make the leap into network news.

In the late 1990s, while still focusing on the corporate work, he decided to invest $50,000 in broadcast standard equipment — high-end camera gear several steps above the industrial-grade equipment he had previously been using. “I was stigmatized as the low-end guy,” before the investment, he explains. The goal, he says, was to eventually make himself attractive to network clients, or even to upper-end corporate accounts.

Wright had also made another decision: Be less picky about the jobs that came his way.

“Up to that point, it was all or nothing propositions,” he says. “Either I got to write the script and take it through delivering the finished product, or I didn’t want it. I decided it was a fatalistic viewpoint.”

Since many clients wanted Wright to do portions of the work for them — such as shoot video, or just produce a project — he decided to simply perform those duties rather than turn work away outright. “We were still a production company, but were ready to do aspects or elements of videos, not the whole thing.”

That strategy alone doubled Desert Gem’s work within a year. “It certainly opened up a lot of new avenues,” he says. And it set the stage for his plan to offer individual services to network news stations a few years later.

It’s no surprise Wright found himself drifting back to journalism. Born in Indiana, but raised all over the world due to his Air Force upbringing, Wright caught the reporting bug in the fifth grade, when he was named editor of his school newspaper.

Later, while working on his journalism degree at Texas Tech University, Wright took a last-minute internship at a local TV station. “I liked the immediacy and the visual aspect of telling a story,” he says. That led to a job as a news producer, which paid about $9,000 a year.

Two years later, Wright was in Amarillo, Texas, where he worked as an assignment editor and executive producer for an NBC affiliate. A stint covering the Democratic National Convention in the early 1980s led him to meeting Ralph Green, the former assistant news director for Albuquerque’s KOB Channel 4, who hired him as a senior reporter in 1985.

That job ended in 1990, when Wright was fired. “I was a little outspoken,” he says, unapologetically. “I didn’t necessarily know when to keep my mouth shut.”

Using his large roster of sources and contacts, Wright later that year launched Desert Gem, investing $30,000 for a Sony Hi8 camera, lighting kit, editing system, phone and a few notepads, and began tackling the corporate market.

His first year in business brought Wright about $30,000 in revenues, but by a decade later, corporate work was starting to dry up. That, along with the city’s Arts Summer Institute gig, got Wright thinking about getting back into the news industry again, which led to the discussions with his local competitors.

Warren Benjamin, owner of Albuquerque-based Video Enterprises Inc. and Video Factory LLC, was one of the first people with whom he spoke. Benjamin had worked with Wright years’ prior, and was open to collaborating with him again.

“I like this idea,” he says. “If you take your mind off the competition, you open up a lot of new opportunities.”