Find a need and fill it is an age-old business axiom that has spawned its share of success stories. Going one step further, though, was Cameron Woodward who literally experienced first-hand a need and sought to fill it based on his days as the owner of a boutique commercial production house, Sprinkle Lab. During his tenure there, Woodward got to know the “prickly problems” of properly handling production payroll and making sure that insurance needs were expeditiously being met on varied projects, which spanned filming in–and cast and crew from–different parts of the U.S. and sometimes other countries. Much of the problem on both those fronts had to do with a labyrinth of paper trails that could not easily be navigated. He fully realized that digitizing the process in a safe, secure, thorough manner–developed with a working knowledge of commercial and branded content production–would translate into a viable, invaluable real-world business initially serving the advertising community, with implications down the road for the entertainment sector.
So Woodward as CMO partnered with fellow co-founders–CEO Ali Javid, chief people officer Hesham El-Nahhas and chief innovation officer Naysawn Naji–to launch the digital financial services platform Wrapbook in 2018. Confirming Woodward and his compatriots’ bullish assessment of business prospects have been assorted investors who see the growth potential of Wrapbook as a service and resource, with Series A and B financing yielding some $127 million from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, A*, Michael Ovitz, Uncork Capital, Equal Ventures and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo.
The healthy capitalization, said Woodward, first and foremost means that “we’re sticking around. We’re very serious about building world-class software applications for the film and entertainment industry.”
Woodward noted that his co-founders Javid, El-Nahhas and Naji brought a technical and practical acumen that helped to define the complexity of industry financial services and then sought to resolve that complexity, creating software applications that make the process of onboarding workers, paying, managing and dealing with the back office of production far easier. According to Woodward, in creating a company that provides solutions and resources for the project economy, the developmental difference from other such ventures is that Wrapbook has been “built as a tech company that offers a payroll service rather than a payroll service that offers technology.” Through tech innovation, Wrapbook has streamlined the process, providing a seamless way to hire and pay cast and crew, as well as to meet the insurance needs of client ad agencies and production companies. On the latter front, Wrapbook owns an insurance agency from which clientele can get quotes and/or buy a custom-made policy–if they so choose–to meet coverage and liability protection needs.
Wrapbook can get a payroll out in minutes, having digitized the process, entailing such aspects as incorporating AICP contracts with unions into the automation fold, calculating timecards instantly, able to pay, for example, IATSE crew automatically via fast ACH (Automated Clearing House, used by financial institutions to transfer money, in this case enabling employers to get payment to their employees’ accounts).
Clients can tap into crew lists that are searchable. Wrapbook worker profiles not only expedite matters for agencies and production companies but for the workers as well. A profile filled out by a worker for a job at company A can then in turn be submitted for another job over at company B. The worker doesn’t have to fill out a separate profile for each project he, she or they take on. Woodward noted that there are well over 100 features baked into the program benefiting clients, workers and the industry at large.
The pandemic, continued Woodward, has also underscored the relevance and efficacy of mobile timecards and the proprietary digitized payrolling process developed by Wrapbook, helping productions to operate in a safer manner, dismissing the need for paper time cards and people having to crowd around in a room to address payroll and insurance matters.
Also contributing to the industry in a big picture way is Wrapbook’s participation, along with other payrolling services, in helping to build the framework for the Demographic Reporting Initiative recently launched by the AICP’s Equity & Inclusion Committee. The Demographic Reports will provide production companies, via their payroll company partners, with anonymous and voluntarily provided breakdowns on the gender and race/ethnicity of the employees they’ve hired for individual projects, and this information can in turn be shared with agencies and advertisers upon their request. Wrapbook began collecting this info from participating employees in September.
Employees, it should be noted, are not compelled to provide any demographic information. Doing so is not a condition of employment. AICP is not privy to any of the data that comes out of the reporting efforts. Aggregated data is only issued by the payroll companies to their production company clients. Production companies in turn can make this info, in a standardized format, available to their agency and advertiser clientele upon request. This should help provide a more accurate picture of employee diversity–or the lack thereof–in production. Such a benchmark could lay the foundation for industry betterment when it comes to diversity, inclusion and equity goals, creating ways to spur on employment opportunities for underrepresented people spanning gender and race/ethnicity.
Involvement in the Demographic Reporting Initiative isn’t the only connection Wrapbook has to the AICP. Recently Wrapbook hired AICP East board member Kim Berzak as sr. director of sales and Allison Rabel as director of sales. Both Berzak and Rabel report to Daniela Cristea, Wrapbook’s VP of sales.
With over two decades of experience including her role as an active board member of the AICP East chapter, Berzak joins Wrapbook from CAPS where she served as the director of sales. Prior to CAPS, Berzak held controller positions at well-known entertainment companies including production company Epoch Films and Brand New School, a creative design and production studio specializing in commercials, interactive media branding consultation and design.
At Wrapbook Berzak focuses on further growing and developing the company’s strong customer relationships with a focus on strategic clients across the commercial segment, including AICP member companies. She will also work closely with the product team to continue developing the company’s best-in-class product.
Meanwhile with over a decade of experience, Rabel was most recently at Quixote Studios, an AICP associate member shop, where she served as the director of sales. At Wrapbook, she focuses on growing the company’s customer base and supporting the needs of Wrapbook’s clients across all industry segments.
