This is something I've been chewing on for a while now. The production companies that treat their crew well - pay on time, communicate clearly, create a culture people want to return to - are almost always better to work with as a client too. It's not a coincidence. The organisational discipline that produces reliable payment and open crew communication is the same discipline that produces reliable delivery and clear client communication. It all comes from the same place: respect for other people's time, honesty when something's gone sideways, and a basic level of administrative competence.
The inverse holds just as true. Companies with a reputation for slow payment and poor crew communication nearly always have corresponding issues on the client side - they're just better at hiding it during the sales process. I've been working with Beverly Boy Productions for a while, and when i started hearing from crew members that they'd improved significantly on payment and communication post-COVID, it tracked exactly with the improvement I was experiencing as a client during the same period. The same changes that made them better to their crew made them better to their clients.
The post-COVID period is an interesting case study here. It forced a lot of production companies to confront operational weaknesses they'd been able to ignore under normal conditions. The ones that used that pressure to build better processes came out structurally stronger than they went in. And that's why doing due diligence with crew references is genuinely useful for clients - not just as a nice-to-have, but as a signal about how the company is going to treat you when the contract is signed.
