What Video Teams Can Learn from Becca Cooper Leebove About Leadership
Becca Cooper Leebove is the founder of ShuBu Creative Group, a branding, marketing, and PR agency. Her career has included agency work as well as leadership roles at Starz Entertainment, Vail Resorts, and a major real estate brokerage before she launched her own company in 2018.
Her Authority Magazine interview focused on the lessons she wishes she had understood before becoming a CEO. Rather than offering a broad checklist of leadership traits, Leebove was specific about what running a creative business required her to learn: sales, confidence, authenticity, judgment, visibility, delegation, and trust in other people.
Those lessons translate naturally to production companies and creative teams. Strong work still needs clients. Creative leaders eventually have to stop doing everything themselves. Opportunities often come from relationships built before there is a project on the table. And as a company grows, the leader’s job shifts from personally executing every detail to creating a structure where talented people can do their best work.
Learn the Business Side, Especially Sales
Leebove’s experience shows that creative expertise alone is not enough to sustain a company. She entered entrepreneurship with strong marketing experience but limited sales training, then learned more about pipelines, proposals, contracts, and business development through coaching.
For video-production leaders, understanding how clients buy can strengthen the creative process. It helps teams see where prospects hesitate, how scope affects budgets, and which business problem the treatment actually needs to solve.
Sales knowledge does not mean turning every conversation into a pitch. It means understanding how a project moves from inquiry to signed agreement and how good work can lead to the next relationship.
Do Not Play Small Because the Company Is Still Growing
Leebove’s second lesson is not to diminish yourself because you are early in the business or believe you have not reached a certain level yet. Her own experience included pursuing opportunities outside her existing comfort zone.
One example came when she learned about an RFP to rebrand the Commerce City Police Department for recruitment. She had not previously responded to a government RFP and did not have a background in law enforcement, but her team pursued the opportunity and won the project. The resulting campaign helped the department recruit 35 officers and eventually led to broader visibility for the work.
For video companies, the equivalent is not pretending to have capabilities you do not have. It is refusing to disqualify yourself simply because a project is larger, a client is more established, or the opportunity requires assembling resources differently.
A production company may not have every specialist on payroll, but it can build the right crew. A regional team can coordinate a national production when it has access to an established nationwide production crew network and the logistics to manage it. A company known for one type of work can still pursue a new category when its underlying skills transfer.
The useful question is not, “Are we big enough to deserve this?” It is, “Can we responsibly deliver what this project requires?”
Lead as Yourself Instead of Performing the Role
Another of Leebove’s lessons is to be yourself rather than feeling pressure to perform a version of what a CEO is supposed to look like. She connects that confidence to drawing on the experience already accumulated throughout a career.
That idea is especially relevant in creative businesses, where leadership can easily become performative. A producer does not need to dominate a room to lead a complicated shoot. A director does not need to have every answer before listening to the DP, sound mixer, client, or subject matter expert.
Leebove described herself as someone who listens to other points of view and believes leaders should allow specialists to navigate their areas of expertise.
On a production, that creates a useful leadership model. The person in charge provides direction, protects the goal, and makes decisions when needed, but does not have to prove expertise by overruling everyone around them.
Strong creative leadership often looks less like controlling every choice and more like building a team whose judgment you trust.
Trust Your Instincts, Then Make the Decision
Leebove emphasized trusting your instincts when making difficult decisions. Elsewhere in the interview, she described one of her toughest business calls: renaming her agency after discovering a trademark conflict with BCreative. The company eventually became ShuBu Creative Group.
Creative businesses face similar judgment calls. A client may look promising but raise concerns during preproduction. A strong treatment may still miss the audience. A timeline may be technically possible but leave too little room for quality.
Data, budgets, schedules, and feedback should guide the decision, but experience matters too. A defined process for client revisions can help prevent unclear feedback or late requests from quietly turning into scope creep. Trusting instinct means recognizing those signals early and addressing them before they grow.
Show Up Before You Know Where the Opportunity Will Lead
Leebove’s fifth lesson is simple: show up. She described networking groups and business communities as sources of referrals, collaboration, support, and unexpected opportunities. The Commerce City project began after she heard about the RFP at a networking event.
That translates directly to production. Valuable projects often begin with a conversation, referral, past client, or creative partner rather than a formal crew request.
Stay visible. Keep in touch with past clients, meet agencies and production partners, and treat crew networking as an ongoing relationship-building effort even when no immediate project is attached. When an opportunity appears, the relationship does not have to start from zero.
Learn to Delegate Before You Become the Bottleneck
Leebove said becoming a CEO required a shift from personally executing client work to building systems, delegating responsibilities, and trusting talented people. She described leadership as requiring the ability to “ruthlessly prioritize and delegate.”
Production companies face the same transition. One person can handle proposals, crew sourcing, client communication, shoots, and edit reviews at a small volume. As the company grows, that person can become the bottleneck.
Delegation does not mean lowering standards. Document how estimates are prepared, define who owns client communication, establish review rules, and give producers authority to solve routine problems. The leader can then stay focused on strategy, relationships, and quality without approving every detail.
Build Culture Around Values You Actually Practice
Leebove also stressed the importance of company values. For her, values should guide how the organization actually operates, not simply appear on a website.
That matters in production because crews experience culture through behavior. If collaboration matters, specialists should be able to raise concerns. If reliability matters, schedules and payments should reflect it. If respect is a value, it should extend to freelancers and production assistants as well as clients.
Pressure reveals whether those values are real. Delays, difficult feedback, weather issues, and technical problems show a team how leadership behaves when things do not go according to plan.
Practical Application for Video Production Teams
Production leaders can start by looking at where they personally remain the bottleneck. If every proposal, crew decision, client email, and edit needs the founder’s approval, document the standard behind those choices and assign clear ownership to someone else.
Sales deserves similar attention. Producers should understand the basics of the pipeline, including where leads come from, what information clients need before approving a quote, why projects stall, and which kinds of follow-up lead to repeat work. That information can improve both the pitch and the production plan.
Build relationships before you need them. Keep a consistent rhythm of checking in with previous clients, attending industry events, meeting agencies and vendors, and maintaining a strong crew network. The immediate payoff may be invisible, but creative businesses depend heavily on people remembering who they trust when a project appears.
Finally, define what your company values look like operationally. Instead of writing “collaboration,” decide how creative disagreements are handled. Instead of writing “quality,” define which checks cannot be skipped. Instead of writing “respect,” decide how quickly freelancers get answers and how change requests are communicated.
The more specific the behavior, the easier the culture is to protect as the company grows.
Team Beverly Boy's Takeaway
What stands out in Leebove’s interview is how much of creative leadership happens outside the creative itself.
Strong ideas matter, but someone still has to win the opportunity, build the relationship, organize the right people, and create a structure that lets those people perform. Leaders who try to personally carry every piece eventually slow down the company they are trying to grow.
We also connect with her emphasis on showing up. Video production remains a relationship business. Clients remember how a producer handled the difficult day, crews remember how they were treated, and partners remember the team that stayed helpful even when there was no immediate job attached.
The goal is not to become less involved as a leader. It is to become involved where your judgment has the greatest effect.
Conclusion
Becca Cooper Leebove’s CEO lessons offer a useful framework for anyone leading a creative business. Learn how the company sells. Do not automatically disqualify yourself from larger opportunities. Lead without performing a role. Trust the judgment experience has given you. Keep showing up.
As the company grows, add two more disciplines: delegate before you become the bottleneck and make your values visible through how the team actually works.
For video-production leaders, those habits create room for stronger crews, better client relationships, and a company that can grow without depending on one person to carry every decision.
This article is based on an interview originally published by Authority Magazine. Read the full interview here.
