Most people on a set PA's first day are fresh out of film school. I wasn't. Before I picked up a call sheet in Bozeman, I'd spent years running client accounts, coordinating store openings across five states, and, before any of that, running my own small video production business out of Denver. None of it was film crew experience. All of it turned out to matter.
At E.W. Scripps, my job was strategizing distribution and reporting on KPIs for more than 80 local businesses at once. That meant juggling dozens of timelines, expectations, and personalities simultaneously without dropping any of them. A busy shoot day isn't so different: a dozen departments, a director, a client, and a schedule that's already tight before anything goes wrong. I'd already spent a year getting comfortable holding that many threads at once.
At Murdoch's Ranch & Home Supply, I planned three-day grand opening events across 12 new store locations and led a team of eight through execution. Grand openings do not get rescheduled because a vendor is late or the weather turns. Neither does a shoot day. That job taught me how to build a plan with enough slack in it to absorb the inevitable, and how to keep a team moving when the plan changes anyway.
The earliest piece of it, running MH Films as a freelance videographer for six years, might matter most. When you're a one-person production company, you are the PA, the scheduler, the client liaison, and the person who has to make the shot list work with the light you actually have, not the light you were promised. Filming on location in two countries taught me to solve problems with whatever is on hand, because calling for backup isn't always an option.
None of that shows up on a résumé the way a film credit does. But on set, it's the reason I don't need to be told twice where the schedule is fragile, which conversations to have early, and when to just quietly fix something before anyone above me has to hear about it. Corporate jobs get a bad reputation among people trying to break into production. Mine is a large part of why I'm good at this one.