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Shira Jeczmien – CEO & Founder of one of our Investment Portfolio companies, SCREENSHOT Media – tells us about her experience at the Business and Trade Committee Oral Evidence Session.
On 16 April 2024, I was invited to speak at the Business and Trade Committee Oral Evidence Session at the Palace of Westminster. As the founder and CEO of SCREENSHOT Media, I was asked to share my insights into the UK creative sector and more specifically for me, the digital media landscape and my experiences building a successful creative business in the UK.
The Committee uses these sessions to explore how the UK Government can build on its areas of comparative advantage to grow the economy and achieve strategic objectives like enhancing economic security and reaching net zero. I was joined by James Palmer from Herbert Smith Freehills, Timothy Fassam from Phoenix Group, and Sally Jones from EY UK.
SCREENSHOT Media is an award-winning next-generation media company that I launched in my mid-20s, while I was still working as a consultant for an app, managing their copy. I would come into our then studio in Dalston maybe twice a week, funnelling all the money I was making into bringing on interns to start writing for us.
Since then, we’ve grown into a thriving team of over 40, managing multiple digital brands with a cumulative audience reach of 250 million per month and a quickly growing agency arm, working with some of the biggest brands in the world. We’ve achieved all of this without raising capital, bootstrapping our way into a company that has more than doubled its revenue each year and this year we’re due to triple.
As inspiring as this may sound, founding and growing a creative business in the UK has not been without its challenges. We’ve faced significant hurdles, from navigating a digital media landscape in constant flux to being able to invest in scaling the business at the rate we needed. Despite our success, these challenges reflect a broader difficulty faced by the UK’s creative sector, and it’s a topic that deserves more attention from policymakers. The creative sector is in desperate need of further specialist development funding. The key issue is that as a sector, we are deeply misunderstood. Any business owner in this space would agree that we are too often pigeonholed as ‘high risk’ businesses, when in reality businesses like SCREENSHOT Media, a digital media and content business, can be incredibly scalable and profitable. And the lack of early stage development capital for the creative in the UK is having a deep impact on the sector’s ability to grow to its full potential as well as forcing founders and business owners to seek investment elsewhere while selling our IP overseas.
Joining the Business and Trade Committee Oral Evidence Session was a chance to voice firsthand frustrations and insights directly to ministers, policymakers, and MPs. It was also an opportunity to highlight just how important it is to nurture the UK’s creative sector. I worked closely with the amazing team at Creative UK to form a clear argument based on my experiences.
A crucial aspect of SCREENSHOT’s journey was the Kickstart Scheme, which was fundamental to our growth. Introduced in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK Kickstart Scheme aimed to create jobs for young people by providing funding for employers to hire workers aged 16-24 who were registered as unemployed. For small companies, this initiative was a lifeline, enabling businesses like ours to bring in fresh talent, create more job opportunities for future workers in the sector, and build the foundation needed for sustainable growth. Through the scheme, we were able to bring on more than 12 full-time employees at SCREENSHOT, some of which are still working with us today.
I further highlighted the UK’s role in creating and exporting intellectual property and talent worldwide. However, the session’s recurring theme was the comparison to the US, which ultimately boils down to cultural differences: the US understands the importance of nurturing and investing in its creative sector, while the UK continues to overlook its significance, leading to UK companies moving overseas, selling bigger pieces of its equity or selling off completely to overseas investors.
The Business and Trade Committee session was an invaluable opportunity to contribute to discussions shaping the UK’s creative landscape. The chance to share the insights and hurdles I’ve come across through SCREENSHOT Media’s journey reinforced the need for more robust support mechanisms for the creative sector.
I’m hopeful that through ongoing discussions and actions, we can build a stronger foundation for the UK’s media and creative industries, allowing them to thrive and compete on a global scale.
