It's just chronological really.
So I'm just going to start by saying, could you introduce yourself please and tell me a little bit about who you are?
Sure.
Hi, Barnaby.
I'm Greg Moyer, CEO of Blue Chalk Media.
And happy to be chatting with you today.
This is fun.
So obviously you and I know each other quite well at this point, but I have a feeling that I am still going to find out something that I don't know about you during today's
conversation.
So we'd love to just hear a bit about your career before you started Blue Chalk.
Absolutely.
Well, I've always wanted to work in the media.
think my first job was working on a local newspaper in the printing shop with the printing presses as sort of an apprentice back in high school.
I think I was in junior high school when I started working summers there.
And it was always been a fascination of mine to be able to work in the media one way or another.
And the fastest way in for me was actually to be
learning something about the printing trades.
And I enjoyed that work.
I worked in newspapers throughout the rest of my high school career, my college career.
I graduated from college where they went as a full-time journalist, had an opportunity to be both an editor and a reporter and a photographer at a local daily in the Philadelphia
suburbs in the United States.
And it was just an amazing experience because it was an opportunity to explore your curiosity and also to learn some craft, which I was really thankful for in the end.
But what really drove me was my fascination with television.
And at the time when I was in college, I had a professor, I said, I want to work in TV.
And he said, you know, given what you do, you're not really into the entertainment side.
You want to do more journalism or you want to do more nonfiction.
That's hard.
Maybe the only place to do it is PBS.
And he said, but I know this guy who is starting this thing called HBO and maybe there's something there with this satellite stuff.
And I mean, I look back at it now and it was Jerry Levine's brother who was my psychology professor at Bucknell University.
And of course, Jerry Levin went on to start HBO and run Time Warner and had an amazing career until it imploded with the AOL purchase.
But be that as it may, that launched me, not that I worked for HBO, but I did start hanging out with people who knew something about cable television.
And I landed a job on the founding team of the Discovery Channel back in 1985.
And that's really when my career took off.
mean, the journalism stuff had been fun, but it was small potatoes.
This was an opportunity to like get on a rocket ship.
And so I was, think employee number 18.
I was literally interviewed for my job the day the network went on the air, June 17th, 1985.
We had to watch the first transmission of the Discovery Channel on a big TVRO satellite dish because no cable company in the area carried it on day one.
So we had to pull it out of the sky ourselves to confirm that we were actually on the air.
But I joined six weeks later and for the next 13 years had a succession of jobs which included running the Discovery and what was then called the Learning Channel, now it's
called TLC and has a very different programming mandate.
But I ran the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel and for a while helped launch the Animal Planet Channel.
I was president of the domestic networks.
helped launch the international networks.
ran programming for five years.
I was head of marketing and communications when that didn't mean much, but it was at least a way to, you know, be useful.
And it was like tree house TV for a while.
It was so much fun.
And all these young people who had kind of just graduated from college had not a ton of experience, but it all gone to radio and television curricula.
you know, we just had a blast and we launched what was really a remarkable business that, you know, we can talk more about where it is today if that's useful, but, you know, for
the part I was in, which was 1985 to 1999, it was in the ascendancy and it was a hell of a place to be.
Yeah, sounds like an incredible time to be starting out your career and a kind of interesting arc, I guess, from being there on day one to the news recently that came out
about Warner Brothers' discovery and the write down of their cable channels.
So yeah, I guess that's kind of fascinating.
It's been, I've seen the entire arc, I've seen the entire business cycle with that one company.
you know, in one way or another, I'm still contributing to that company through their acquisition of our content that we make at Blue Chalk.
But, you know, it's just, it's just been a fascinating, a fascinating journey over the last 35, 40 years.
So what did you do after you left Discovery?
Yeah, I left Discovery.
I wanted to leave Washington, D.C.
We were headquartered down in Washington, or actually Bethesda, Maryland.
But I went to New York.
I wanted to get to New York, and I joined the programming arm of the big cable provider up here, which at the time was called Cablevision.
And I ran a number of their regional sports and news channels.
And it's actually a very difficult time because we had
regional news services in the New York area, which were really hyperlocal.
mean, the whole idea wasn't to do a broadcast version where the entire DMA was covered, but you did news for New Jersey or you did news for Connecticut or you did news for Long
Island outside of New York.
And during our stay or my run there, you know, we had 9-11 and it just turned everybody inside out.
I mean, the amount of work that went into those weeks and ultimately years of recovery were just remarkable on so many levels.
But that included the people in the news business who really had to take quite a number of risks immediately after the attack to survive and to keep working and to face, frankly,
the horror of it all.
So it was a tough time to be in news, but I had always wanted to have that experience I wanted to sort of electronic version of what I had seen in my early newspaper days.
I got it and I got enough of it and so I ultimately left to join yet another really great company scripts networks, which ran lifestyle channels Probably most famously known for
its channel called the Food Network
or Home and Garden TV, HGTV.
And they had never done international.
They had never taken their channel outside of North America.
They had Canadian versions.
But it was US and Canada, that was it.
So they hired me as their first president of international and I helped over, I had a three year contract to kind of get them started, because I was getting older at that point
and I kind of didn't want an endless opportunity there.
So I did a three year deal and we launched the Food Network in I think 60, 65 countries in that three year period and laid the groundwork for relationships with the BBC, UK TV, and
also did some of the initial research into the purchase of a terrestrial broadcasting system in Poland.
So it was a really fun time.
It let me do a lot of travel, which had always been part of my career, but this was...
travel and steroids.
And that was kind of why I only wanted to do it three years because I knew living in airport lounges was not going to be great for me or my health when I turned 60.
Yeah.
So then what is it that prompted you to start Blue Chalk?
Well, gosh, yeah, well, I'm a horrible golfer.
And, you know, I kind of love this work.
I love this business.
And there was a creative itch that I needed to scratch.
And that was that particularly in the, later years as I was going up to, you know, I was in sort of presidential or C-suite type.
roles or least divisional president roles for the last 20 years of my life as an employee.
And I thought, yeah, this is great.
There's a lot of financial upside to that, but I'm not doing exactly what I loved when I first was at Discovery, which was frankly commissioning or bringing content into
existence.
And so I wanted to be in the creative space for my last act.
And it took a little while to figure that out, but
ultimately started Blue Chalk with a business partner I met when we both worked at Discovery, a woman named Pam Hewling, who is extremely instrumental in helping build the
core values and personnel of the business.
It was good partnership.
And we've been doing it continuously for 11 years, so it's survived.
But what I really wanted to accomplish was a place where I could experiment with maybe somewhat more soulful content than what I saw a lot of television content being made.
I wanted to experiment with new formats that might allow us to find business models that would permit us to do the kind of sort of documentary style television or at least short
films that
we had always wanted to make, but for whatever reason, someone said no.
So it was a little bit of a chance to just do my own thing and sort of without having to ask permission, without having to research it endlessly before we said yes.
And I thought that was a terrific freedom.
And I really did enjoy it and I needed to kind of get that out of my system.
But maybe to jump to your next question, which is,
Well, why aren't you just continuing to do that?
the point is I do want to stop at some point and I don't want to work until I'm dead.
I do need to take some time off and I need a succession strategy.
And I also need to realize that I often was my own angel investor.
So I had nobody to answer to.
I could say yes to anything I wanted to that I could afford to spend money on.
And I don't think that's good for the business.
I actually think the business needs to be more disciplined.
And I want the people, my two dozen employees, to have a business that is strong and sustaining.
And for that to happen, we need to get a little more business-like.
So was pretty clear I wanted to go into the market and figure out who to partner with, that I could turn the company over to, ease my way out, train the next generation to run
this thing, or at least train them on what I know.
because there's many things I don't know that they need to learn.
But that was my motivation for wanting to ultimately look for a sale, look for an exit.
Okay, so just picking up on something you said earlier about Bluechalk giving you the creative freedom to kind of go out and do what you wanted.
There's still a commissioner though, right?
So in practice, how did that turn out?
Because I think that's a dream for so many people, isn't it?
To sort of do something with unfettered creativity, but in practice, how does it work?
How did it work for you?
Well, clearly your creativity is never completely unfettered.
fact, creativity without boundary never happens.
In other words, creativity only happens when you know you have to operate within a box.
And so when you get creative, as you figure out what kind of story can I tell, what kind of technique can I bring, what kind of structure can I suggest that works within a
particular budget,
or within a particular need from a story point of view.
So we always had a box to work in.
And it's not as if we were running grad school for 10 years at Blue Chalk where everybody could make the film that they wanted to use for their graduation ceremony.
We had customers, we had clients, but what we tried to bring to them was assume that they meant
that they gave us the assignment with their best angels, meaning we're going to give them the best film, maybe even a little bit bigger film than they're paying for, which was
maybe not a great business strategy, but what it did mean was that we stretched our creative muscle because we would always over-deliver on the quality or the...
Usually it was the time it took to make the film better.
and we were willing to donate that.
And for a while I did it because I thought, well, I've got to build my portfolio.
And, you know, thankfully we made well over 1,500 films in our decade.
And, you know, there's, we've had to select, think, 50 to be on our portfolio page.
But honestly, there are two or 300 that I could be just as happy to have on that page because we really did some beautiful, beautiful work.
And I think that learning how to build a creative muscle that respects the constraints of the box you're given, and that box can be editorial, can be budget, it can be time, it can
be travel or the lack of travel.
That's the fun of it is you need to learn how to do those things.
And then putting a really good strong
business framework around those boxes is the part that we never spend as much time on.
But we're going to get better at it, I'm sure.
Yes, I hope so.
But talk to me a bit about the growth and where did your first commission come from and how quickly did you of scale up to the team that you've got today?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, our first commission, we opened the company literally on my 60th birthday.
We signed the incorporation papers.
And then we took six months and I had four employees at that time who we built a website.
We actually self-commissioned a few stories that we could do so that we had films that were at least available on our website to show what we were capable of.
We pulled together just a couple of quick assignments from friends so that we had some clients that we could list.
So we started small, but honestly, one of our first films we ever made has now been seen 40 million times on YouTube.
I mean, it's our most viral film.
And so we started doing really good work right out of the gate, and that helped.
Our first paying client...
of any size came the day after we announced the formation of the agency and some old cable colleagues of mine at the Weather Channel said, hey, why don't we get Greg and his new
company to help us make a film, one a month for a year, about people who absolutely need the weather forecast to be accurate to make their job or their application work.
talk about another dream assignment, we didn't have a ton of money, but we had enough.
Even in that first job to do some beautiful films, we profiled winemakers and how much the weather affects each vintage of wine.
made a film about, farming was an easy one because people absolutely needed the weather to be right.
But we also profiled a surfer in Hawaii who
was a student of meteorology because he wanted to understand wave structure and when the waves would be the most favorable for surfing.
you know, that was a case where we're given a remit and said, go find and cast stories, come back, we'll approve the story and then you can make the movie.
And we did these three minute films for the Weather Channel.
I think they stopped after nine months, but we had a...
that we were off and running because that was the perfect type of assignment that we needed to kind of float the business.
And then, yeah, then talk to me about the growth of the team and how you built that and how you ended up with an office in Portland.
Yeah, well, right from the get-go, we wanted to hire our first employee was our creative director, Rob Finch.
And he had been employed by The Oregonian, which is a newspaper out there, big statewide newspaper.
And he had kind of taught himself how to do video remarkably well, spent a good bit of time training and training and we decided we needed him as our creative lead.
His condition was he needed to stay in Portland if he was going to be part of our company.
Had little kids in school, the whole thing.
And we said, well, OK, you've got a garage, so we have a Portland office.
And so from the garage, we've been in four different venues since then.
At our peak, think we had about 45 people employed in Portland in a big warehouse.
Subsequently, we've shrunk that down to probably
15 people or so.
We had a big client.
We've gone through a couple of waves of thinking we had the next great idea for how we were going to keep Blue Chalk afloat.
First was branded content, and we're kind of back to branded content.
But branded was the way we began.
Next big idea was we were going to do a lot of educational videos, and we actually had one of the world's largest textbook publishers commissioning hundreds of videos from us.
and that became a bit of a factory and that's when we had the maximum number of staff people.
But they then decided they had new management and killed the whole program and within six months a multi-million dollar contract was being renegotiated and just shelved.
Then the last big phase was we started working in television and doing a lot of work in lifestyle programming for the Magnolia Channel which was
a joint venture with Warner Brothers Discovery.
You'll recognize the name.
And that went swimmingly for two and a half to three years.
And then Warner Brothers Discovery and so many other streamers kind of suddenly got judged not so much on the size of their potential streaming audience, but the profitability of
their companies.
And when Netflix had one down quarter, it literally changed the momentum in the entire industry.
in 2021 or 2022 and that has forced a reconsideration and what will ultimately be a major consolidation of the legacy media brands that are out in the world.
I also didn't realize I was talking to someone at the Ibiza conference last week how well known Chip and Joanna Gaines are and how much of a big deal that is.
Yeah, yeah, they I mean these are people who really made a name for themselves by being the hosts very charming hosts of Reality or I should say how to television, know They were
big stars on the HDTV channel with their home renovation show, but they've had like ten covers of People magazine, you know They're treated like they're treated like they're
movie stars and but they're very
very clever people and they ended up getting a joint venture with Warner Brothers Discovery to take over one of the secondary channels that Discovery Group was operating
called DIY Do It Yourself and they rebranded it as the Magnolia Network and they commissioned seven series from us.
So we were making lots of television for a better part of two and a half years.
Yeah.
Great.
you've, there's a lot to cover.
So you've kind of talked a little bit about why you're that you're sort of plans for succession, but tell me, tell me a bit about how, you approached.
So you had the idea that you kind of thought, okay, I'm, I'm willing to work and now I've, but I need
this company to go into the hands of the next person?
How did you go about looking for potential buyers?
Well, I did an initial search just to begin to understand this whole world, which I didn't know anything about.
I never owned a business, so I never sold a business.
I did talk to a couple of brokers.
It was pretty clear that we were subscale in terms of really going out in some sort of more formal auction.
mean, we really needed to have $10 million in revenue, and we had at that point maybe five.
So we were roughly halfway to being a big guy or big enough that somebody might just buy it out of a business interest, pure business interest.
So once I understood where we fell in the hierarchy of how businesses get sold, I realized I had to find people who really were closer to an endemic buyer, meaning they were closer
to the type of work that
we do and that we valued and that would find value in the quality of the work we were putting out.
And then it was just personal networks.
I approached a couple production companies that I had respected along the way who were doing good things.
I found, and maybe we want to just explain to people right now if you haven't done so in the introduction, that I found you through our mutual membership in.
an organization called the IQ, the International Quorum of Independent Film Producers.
And I found people in that organization, first it was a curated group of people, so it kinda came pre-approved, like these are good folks.
Secondly, the values of that organization mirror the kind of values and reasons I was in the business, in terms of wanting to do great work for people and do kind of...
as often as possible films that mattered or at least films that were going to move people in the right direction.
And so I thought, here's this guy, Barnaby, he's got a podcast called The Exist Strategy.
So maybe if there was no other listener, maybe the most important one was me to those early podcasts.
And I thought, gosh, this could this could be interesting.
who knows about it.
So I think, you know, we met once in New York or at least once in New York before we met for lunch in Budapest at our last conference of IQ, which was in the fall of last year,
fall of 23.
And I think at that point you offered to, you know, I was curious as to whether, you know, this is something you were interested in and you, thought were.
very different from most of the others because you said, you know, if you'll, do an NDA, show me your economics.
I'll give you a quick view of what I can do.
It may not be what you need, but this is what I can do.
And so it didn't take more than a couple of weeks.
And you had a document in front of me that established a baseline for what I thought I could ultimately negotiate with you.
That was
I didn't know enough to know whether that was the right answer, but it was a start and it proved to be the concluding deal or a version of it proved to be fairly prescient in terms
of what we ultimately agreed on.
Well, it's kind of interesting, isn't it?
Because I think the kind of offer and the structure that I put in was limited by kind of what I had available and, you know, what I, and I was, I felt like I was very sort of
upfront about that.
And then there was a period where you kind of said, okay, you know, it's not brilliant.
I'll go and talk to some other people and you did that and that's absolutely to be expected.
But then you kind of sort of came back to it almost which, yeah.
think and if, and you know, maybe I should, I'm willing to characterize the deal in broad brush and say, well, ultimately proved attractive.
The most attractive aspect of it was that it believed in our potential to grow the business and it was going to reward us for growing the business.
Everybody else gave me a deal which was looking more backward than forward, or at least the best was half and half.
everybody had some grow with, but mainly you were getting graded on where you had been as opposed to where you were going to go.
And I felt pretty strongly that I was holding the business back because I was doing what I wanted to do with it and not necessarily running it as if it were, if there were other
shareholders.
And so I think the business has the potential to be kind of redirected and
grow much more aggressively than I ever pushed it to do simply because that'll be the new mandate as opposed to, well, Greg wanted to try his hand at this and he did.
Hey, it worked.
It was fun.
But was it a business decision?
Not necessarily.
It wasn't without consideration of business, but it wasn't done for the business per se.
So I wanted to have an opportunity to work with somebody who was going to
kind of put Blue Chalk on a more comfortably sustainable footing or more reliably sustainable footing than it had been and begin to reward me for having gotten us to this
place, but also my willingness to turn it into an even aggressively more profitable company over the next several years.
And that's what your deal ultimately did.
yeah, and I think in some ways, it was a bit of an unusual deal, or certainly some of the professionals that I then, you know, the lawyers that you then show it to kind of, you
know, I'm sure they've seen stuff like that before, but it isn't particularly the norm.
But yeah, I guess just, if, you know, if you don't mind me just sort of talking about the structure a bit, there was a
a consideration that was paid for the business upfront, but ultimately we haven't agreed the price, right?
So it's what happens over the next three years.
And then we do a calculation, a multiple of the EBITDA of the average from September, 1st of September or 2nd.
And then that kind of calculates the total amount that's going to be paid out.
And I really like that deal as well, because it just puts you and I
you know, we're completely or almost completely aligned on where we want to take this and what needs to happen over the next three years.
And then of course, at the sort of at the last hour, there was because you and I were negotiating for, well, negotiating is perhaps a bit of a strong word, but you know,
talking to each other.
Yeah, for nearly nearly a year and then at the last hour we had the introduction of the Auspicious group and Rachel and Mark coming in to join.
Yeah, do you maybe want to talk a little bit?
Yes.
answering.
But to me, I would just say, you know, I was satisfied to sell BlueChop to Barnaby.
But in fact, I'm getting kind of a three in one deal because in the last month and a half before we signed off, Barnaby pulled together
consortium of other founders of other companies that had been markedly successful and they're putting this holding company together called the auspicious group and then within
which Blue Chalk will now be one of multiple businesses and getting the partnership of Rachel and Mark along with you is just like this is bonus.
We're just pinching ourselves and thinking, my God, this is incredible.
And the ambition of it is even bigger than what I was going to be prepared to be satisfied with, with what you and I had talked about when it was just the two of us.
And that isn't to say you've already owned an agency.
So it would have been two agencies, and I'm sure you would have gone out and found more.
But it's happening faster and it's happening more powerfully because of the partnership you've built.
it with for auspicious and now with Blue Chalk keeping its brand, keeping its management, keeping its basic business intact, but with the expectation of growing it dramatically and
being part of what three or four agency holding company, very exciting for me, given that I'm betting on the future, the next three years being fantastic years of growth.
And I guess normally my next question would be about the integration, but I'm quite involved with that.
So, yes, I mean, we had a trip over at the beginning of September to meet the team.
We had a day up at Greg's house in, I'm not going to say it right, Mamaronek.
Mamaronek, I did, I got it right.
Yeah.
Just outside New York City, yeah.
to meet the team there and then a couple of days in Portland.
I have to say I was just, you know, I was expecting, I was expecting it to be a, you know, a fun trip and a nice bunch of people, but I was really sort of blown away with the
passion of the employees, the sort of dedication to their craft.
But also I think what's amazing about the team is a
a total sort of openness and willingness to kind of learn from this new chapter.
And that's kind of the perfect combination.
Because I guess there's a risk there isn't there that when you get kind of super dedicated filmmakers that they won't like it if anything changes or any kind of restrictions are
placed or any change, know, if anything changes from the way they used to do things.
But I think they've got a wonderful
combination of both those things.
So yeah, was just so impressed.
Well, as were we.
yeah, I mean, one thing that we have done well, and I won't be shy about taking credit for it, we've, and this is a big part of my business partner, Pam's contribution too.
She and I, I think have curated a great group of people.
And you know, one thing, you're gonna support your own business and be your own angel investor, you don't wanna have.
a lot of hassle with it.
You don't want to be fighting your team.
You don't, you you just want it to be, I want to come to work today kind of experience for everybody.
And I think we've done a pretty good job of that.
So I, they're ready, but they're ready to grow.
They're hungry.
They're ready to grow.
They're ready to, you know, be offered a bigger stage to play on.
They all want to advance in their careers.
So there's also a responsibility that I took
We took most of our employees directly out of college, oftentimes grad school, so they may have had one job or some job experiences, but we pretty much trained them in the way we've
been doing things.
that's been, for them, I think, a pretty exciting experience.
But they're ready to play on a bigger stage, and they're completely open, as you said.
That's what's so great about them.
they'll absorb new opportunity and relish it and see it as a way to advance their careers.
enjoy.
next question is, how does it feel?
you've owned this company for 11 years and you've sold it.
Yeah, you know, it may be one of those things where I haven't really processed it fully yet because it's, I mean, first off, there's no regret.
I'm thrilled with you and with Rachel and with Mark and so far the team has just been anything, nothing but excited.
So, I mean, there's been no angst here.
I think it'll be much harder for me in three years if I'm actually walking away.
And that'll be the moment that I need to prepare for.
But right now, it's almost like I'm more engaged than I've been because I want to integrate with you and I also want to keep the business going and I want to get new
clients and we're making big films.
So it hasn't been any sort of a let up as yet.
But let me give myself a little bit of grace here.
I think I'm willing to share credit with people.
And so if I want everybody to succeed in this thing, if they succeed and we do it in a way that produces some great award-winning work and we make some clients happy, I'm going to
be thrilled.
So, you know, that's the goal here.
I want everybody to win in this thing.
And then the question that I ask everyone, and so I have to ask you is, know, if you're having been through it now, is there anything that you would do differently and, know,
pretend I'm not here.
Yeah, no.
Well.
I'm trying to think, I mean, the quick answer is I'm kind of satisfied with the way things turned out.
It took about, I really started to think about selling the business.
We had an approach from another production company in the summer of 23 that kind of said, okay, I got it.
really take this seriously because they want to sign an NDA and they want to do stuff.
And I had been toying with the idea for six months prior to that, thinking, you know, got to do this.
I can't ignore this forever.
So I guess...
I don't know what I would do differently.
I really don't.
I don't think we were big enough to go too many other routes.
I don't think I had too many.
I needed to use my own network to figure out who would find value in what we've built because we didn't hit enough of the classic business metrics of scale to suggest that I
could turn it over to the experts and they would figure out how to sell it and do the right thing with it.
somebody would have bought it, but they wouldn't have necessarily cared.
And I did have, I had three other term sheets along with yours to consider.
So we did get offers from everybody that we approached.
And that was, I took pride in that because that said, okay, they see the value, but you had this kind of...
Again, the thing that distinguished the deal was it was all about what can we grow together?
Not here, I'm going to buy what you've done or buy your past and decide what goes forward.
And they weren't all, it wasn't black and white.
Everybody had some version of a hybrid future past view.
But, but I really appreciated the fact that, okay, if you, if I let, I give you the keys, you know, we're going to kind of
grow this together for at least a period of time and that will determine the value that we build at the end of the day.
So anyway, I'm sorry, I paused a long time.
Hopefully you'll edit some of the delay out.
automatically edits it out now.
So don't worry about that.
No, and guess just to say, I think the rich history and the legacy of Blue Chalk is sort of holding the keys to that now is genuinely an honor.
So thanks very much for deciding to go with.
me and the auspicious team.
So at the risk of this becoming too much of a sort of love-in, we'll probably just like wrap it up.
very good.
It's been fun to chat about this with you.
anyway, you can tell we're ready to roll.
Great stuff.
I will press stop.
Is that stop?
Have I pressed stop?
No, there we go.
Stop.
Great.
Yeah, there's a couple of little bits.
think.