After a 40 minute drive out of the city, the team arrived at their destination in Etyek, Hungary, Korda Studios. Korda Studios is a high-tech studio with the third largest sound stage in the world surrounded by the beautiful vineyards of Hungarian wine country. While touring the facilities the team went from 16th century Rome to the surface of Mars, to a war-torn Brooklyn. As the tour proceeded, we asked questions about the studio and the industry, using the answers to frame a complex business problem.
Renaissance city “set” at Korda Studios
Guest blogger: Max Byers, MBA’16, is a student in Cliff Holekamp’s Venture Consulting course. Student teams travel to Budapest, Hungary to meet with companies to research a consulting project they will complete over the summer.
Using a framework championed by the consulting firm McKinsey, we evaluated the goals of Korda, what the obstacles to achieving those goals are, and how to overcome or eliminate those obstacles. By using the MECE framework, meaning “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive,” the team developed hypotheses about how to overcome or eliminate Korda’s obstacles.
The main questions the team focused on were “What factors contribute to U.S. and U.K. companies filming overseas?”, “What are Korda’s competitive advantages?”, and “How does Korda market to U.S. and U.K. decision makers?”. These questions will be used to guide our project throughout.
Along with the questions guiding research, these questions can be broken down even further, and the answers have helped us gain knowledge about the film and big budget TV industry. For instance, tax incentive schemes for attracting film production vary around the world. Hungary has a 25% “soft-money” scheme that is a tax rebate of 25% of the expenses spent in Hungary, while other countries like the United States offer tax incentives on a state by state basis.
One of the more surprising things we learned is that catering is a big deal in pleasing a movie production once it has decided to film there. According to one interview we did, about 20-25 people in Los Angeles are highly influential in filming decisions, and that there are multiple bids made before a studio is selected in most cases. The film industry can be considered a “word-of-mouth” industry, meaning that studios like Korda must be accommodating and easy to work with.
Overall, using MECE and having those questions guide our future research will help us arrive at a plan for the main question, “How does Korda attract more films to its facilities and Budapest?” The trip to Budapest was very beneficial in framing the project and gaining initial insights.
