AnchorMill can be your

What We Do

  • Project Management and Technical Direction

    We supply bespoke project management and technical production support services at a high level to projects and clients of all sizes within the entertainment, arts, broadcast, design and experiential industries.

  • Collaborative Planning and Facilitation

    We actively seek out opportunities to collaborate in a variety of environments and markets, with a particular interest in R&D, prototype, “year-one”, and hybrid-medium projects.

  • Management Consulting and Strategy

    We seek to support the long-term health and diversity of our industries by encouraging the successful, sustainable growth of small and young businesses and project teams.

  • Production Solutions

    We work with world-class suppliers to provide and implement a wide range of production services and equipment to serve your vision.

Capabilities and Services

Project Management and Technical Direction

We actively seek logistically-challenging projects to support and lead. Our focus is on providing process-driven project management, bringing levity and consistency to inherently dynamic environments without inhibiting creativity.

We draw from traditional project management techniques, collaborative arts and theatrical practices, PMI framework, agile methodologies, and years of production leadership experience to provide management and technical direction services across a wide breadth of project types and markets.

Nothing is more energizing to us than “we’ve got this project coming up, but it’s a little weird/different/hard to describe…” unusual logistics and technical challenges is where we thrive!

Production Planning

Getting started is often the biggest challenge to setting up a project for success. Our team has supported a variety of businesses through feasibility, bidding and estimating, scheduling, benchmarking, and development phases, assisting teams in the facilitation and development of their go-forward plans.

We tailor our involvement in each planning project based on specific needs. That can mean managing and executing a full Year-One project plan and documenting processes for future events; planning the work together in detail and providing regular support through hand-off; or creating a one-time set of planning documents and handing them over to a client’s internal team to run themselves. Clients that have used our planning services include production companies, fabrication shops, attraction operators, marketing teams and independent artists.

Management Consulting, Strategy, and Coaching

We take a curiosity-based approach to consulting, beginning and ending always with the knowledge that YOU know your business best.

We know that sometimes, an outside perspective— whether it’s someone who can help plan a future-state, to coach and mentor, or just to bounce ideas off of— can be just the jolt of energy needed to get to the next level. We help small-to-medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs with strategy, growth, staffing, efficiency, and development planning.

We’re passionate about working to see the entertainment industry become the diverse, growth-focused, energized, and balanced place we know it can be. We believe that small businesses, innovators, collectives, creatives, and independent makers & thinkers hold the keys to truly championing this growth.

Systems Design and Implementation

We work with a variety of independent designers, programmers, and technicians to specify lighting, AV, LED-screen, staging, scenic, automation and rigging systems and to design strategies for efficient installation, set-up, and maintenance. We work hard to stay in-the-know about equipment and suppliers, standards and gear capabilities, and partner with subject-matter experts across a range of fields to get to the right solution.

Product Sourcing and Referrals

We continuously foster and maintain strong relationships with shops, rental houses, production companies, vendors and transport companies around the world, as well as with independent technicians, designers, artists and experts. In design phases, we can provide product specifications, sourcing information, documentation packages and transport strategies. In production, we are ready to tap our network to get people and gear to you as quickly as possible, whenever and wherever you need it.

Our Core Values

  • Make Cool Things With Great People

    At the heart of it all, this is what we aim to do everyday.

    We approach the work with a lot of curiosity, a love of people and personalities, and a passion to deliver clever solutions for our audiences and clients.

  • Serve the Work with the Right-Size Solution

    We love variety, and we enjoy working with projects, companies and teams at a wide range of sizes and levels.

    Whatever scale you’re working at, we’re cognizant about making sure our recommendations and methods are the right size for the challenges you’re trying to solve, and that our focus is on serving the work.

  • Champion Smart Risk-Taking

    We love to work with teams on the bleeding edge; bold and brave new work is our favorite.

    The real magic happens when everyone working on that edge is cognizant about all the risks involved and actively works together to mitigate them. We’re here to provide the levity that anchors dynamic teams and keeps everyone working safely, sanely, and creatively.

  • Stay Nimble

    We believe in nimbleness in production— deploying only the resources you need, exactly when you need them. When we implement that idea in our own work, we may find that a client only needs our help for a small or specific part of a project. And that’s great!

    Our favorite way to apply our skills is to give projects and teams a “boost” at pivotal moments. We’re glad to help provide as much or as little support as needed.

  • Actively Plan for Balance and Sustainability

    We encourage our teams and clients to plan work around their life-schedules, and not the other way around.

    It’s important to us to understand and respect capacity and resources. We advocate for sustainable business growth and the building of supportive cultures.

Case Studies

Still unsure how we can help?
Here are some specific examples of challenges we’ve helped solve for our clients.

  • Resource and Staffing Strategies

    “We’re going to be staffing all of the AV departments for a major festival. We’ll need everyone on our staff to pull this off, and we’ll also need to hire a lot of freelancers.

    Our leads have a lot of opinions about who-should-work-on-what. We’ve had a lot of big disagreements on who to assign to each stage, so we we keep procrastinating on deciding, and we really need to get everyone working on this project quickly. There’s no way to please everyone, but maybe an outside perspective will help us get through this planning exercise so we can move forward.”

  • Planning Internal Projects

    “Our team is growing fast, and we’ve outgrown our headquarters. I have great managers and crew that will handle that move, but for now I need to get a budget and schedule together for leadership approval.

    Everyone is busy on funded projects and I don’t have the bandwidth to do it myself.”

  • Guest Experience Review

    “Our team has built an amazing immersive experience we’re really proud of. We’ve spent a lot of hours working on the main event, but we feel like the guest experience— from parking lot to show-time— still needs some work”.

  • Systems Assessment

    “We are a team of almost entirely new-hires at a performance venue that’s been non-operational for the last two years. We can’t figure out how to turn the lights back on— literally! There’s very little documentation from the previous team, and it’s clear that some equipment is broken or missing. We need help to figure out the specific issues are and make a plan to get it all working again.”

  • Project-Within-A-Project Support

    “We have a huge contract in process for a major corporate client, and we really want to knock this project out of the park. We’ve worked really hard on the finished product and we think it’s going to be very well recieved.

    This client requires a witnessed, in-person performance test before we can ship it to them. We’re confident the product will pass the test, but we’re nervous about hosting a large client team in our facility for a whole week for the test itself.

    How can we prepare for their visit and help them know what to expect?”

  • Coaching and Mentoring

    “We have a young department head that is a total rockstar. She’s only been here a year, but all of her projects have gone perfectly. Clients adore her, and our team really enjoys working with her. We can see that she’s capable and we want her to have a long career here, so we promoted her pretty quickly.

    She’s now struggling in her new role, and her confidence is really low. We’re not sure exactly how to support her better, but we know she can be great and we definitely don’t want to lose her.”

  • Logistical Support

    “We are traveling 30 people of several different nationalities for a big project in a country none of us have been to before. The visa and entry requirements are really tricky, and we need help parsing through all the requirements to figure out what each of our travelers needs to do. We want to make sure this goes smoothly and that everyone has a positive experience. We also need to send some equipment over, and get it all back home when we’re done.”

  • Growth Strategy Support

    “We’re getting more and bigger projects awarded to us than ever before, which is great— but we don’t have the capacity to take on all the projects we’re being offered. We’re looking for more space and we’ve posted a lot of new positions but we can’t find people to hire fast enough, and we don’t have time to focus on these problems.”

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