You know the video already.
It opens on a black and white photo of the original shop. A voice says the company was founded in 1952 by a man who believed in hard work and doing things right. Then a slow zoom across a timeline. 1968, first expansion. 1994, second location. 2011, third generation joins the business.
Everybody in the family loves it. Nobody else finishes it.
That is a retirement party video with a logo on it, and it is what most family businesses get when they ask for their story to be told.
Founded in 1952 means nothing to a buyer. What the company refused to change and what it changed anyway is the story. How to tell it without a timeline.
Why the history version fails
Not because the history is boring. Because it answers a question nobody asked.
Your buyer is not wondering where you came from. He is wondering whether you are going to do this job right, and whether he is going to regret picking you.
The years are real evidence for that. Seventy years means you survived four recessions, which is a genuine argument. But it only works as evidence, and the history video treats it as the point. Lead with it and you have told somebody a fact about your family instead of a reason to hire you.
The thing nobody says out loud
There is a second problem, and it is the one nobody brings up in the meeting.
To a forty year old buyer, third generation family business does not only read as trustworthy. It also reads as slow. Will not answer email. Still faxes things. Has done it the same way since before he was born and is not going to change for him.
That is unfair and it is also sitting in his head.
A history video makes it worse. It is ninety seconds of proof that you think the past is the most interesting thing about you.
So the video has two jobs, and most of them only do one. Show that the years mean something. Show that you are not stuck.
The two lists
Here is the whole approach, and it is simple.
What has this company refused to change?
Every real family business has something. The material they will not substitute. The step they will not skip even though everybody else skips it. The customer they kept taking care of when it stopped making sense.
That is the values claim with proof attached, and it is worth more than any sentence with the word integrity in it.
What has it changed?
This is the one people leave out, and it is the one that fixes the slow problem.
What did the second generation do that the first one hated? What does the daughter run now that her father would not have touched? A company that can point at something it modernized is telling you it is still alive.
Those two lists are the story. The dates are just where they happened.
Film the disagreement
The best footage in a family business video is two generations in the same room, not quite agreeing.
Not fighting. Something smaller. He says we have always done it this way and she says yes, and I changed it in 2019 and it works better, and he makes a face and then admits she was right.
Thirty seconds of that does more than ninety seconds of narration, because the viewer watches continuity and change happen in front of him instead of being told about both.
It is also the hardest thing to get, which is why almost nobody has it. You have to get two people who work together every day to be candid on camera in front of each other, and somebody from outside the family has to be the one asking, because nobody inside it can. There is a whole separate question about who should actually be in front of the camera, and in a family business the answer is almost always more than one generation.
Do not start at the beginning
Chronology is what makes these feel like a lesson.
Start with the work happening right now. The shop this morning, the crew, the thing being built. Get the viewer interested in the present, and then let the history in only where it explains something.
History works in ten second pieces, dropped in as the reason for something you just saw. My grandfather bought that press in 1964 and we still run it because nothing new does it as clean. That is one sentence and it does more than a timeline, because it is attached to an object the viewer is looking at.
Which brings up the other thing worth filming.
The object
Every family business has one. The original hand tool. The first truck. A sign in the back nobody moved. A ledger in the office in somebody's grandmother's handwriting.
Find it and film it. It is the only way a viewer feels the years instead of being told the number, and it costs nothing.
A founder story built around something real holds up for a long time. We did one for Aspen Irrigation that has outlived the reason it was made.
The part with a clock on it
If the generation that started it is still alive and still coming in, that is the whole reason to do this now rather than next year.
Not for the video. For the record. Once that person is gone, everything they knew that nobody wrote down is gone, and the family finds out what they wish they had asked at a funeral. That is also true for companies getting ready to sell, which is a related and slightly different problem covered in what gets lost when a company is sold.
Sit them down while you can. Two hours. Even if nothing is ever cut from it.
The short version
Nobody outside your family wants a timeline.
Make two lists. What you refused to change, and what you changed anyway. Film the current generation and the one before it in the same room, slightly disagreeing. Find the object. Start in the present.
The years are your evidence. They are not your story.
If your company is on its second or third generation and you have been putting this off, happy to talk about it. The part worth moving on is the oldest person in the building, and that one does not wait.
Dylan Smith is the owner of With A Twist Media in Greensboro, NC. He has been making documentary style video for manufacturers and construction companies across the Triad since 2019.