Filming an owner introduction on a phone

An owner introduction is the single most useful piece of video a franchise location can have. It is what proves a real person runs this business, it works on the location page, in local ads, in recruitment material and on the Google Business Profile, and it is the one thing the centre genuinely cannot produce on the owner's behalf.

It is also the thing most franchisees never get round to, usually because it feels like it requires equipment and expertise. It does not. It requires a phone, a window, a quiet twenty minutes and a willingness to do it four times.

This page is written to be handed to a franchisee directly.

Before you press record

Find the right spot

Two things decide the location: quiet and a window. A small room with soft furnishings and daylight will beat an impressive-looking space with a hard echo every time.

Stand or sit facing a window, with the window in front of you and the phone between you and it. Never film with a window behind you — the camera will expose for the bright background and turn you into a silhouette. This is the most common single mistake and it makes the footage unusable.

If your premises are visible in the background, that is a bonus rather than a requirement. A recognisable corner of your own location is worth more than a neutral wall, but not at the cost of noise or backlight.

Deal with the sound

Audio is where amateur video actually fails. Viewers forgive a soft picture and will not tolerate echo, air conditioning hum or a till beeping through the take.

• Turn off air conditioning, fans, music and anything with a compressor for the duration
• Choose a smaller room. Large hard-surfaced rooms echo; carpet, curtains and furniture absorb it
• Stay within about a metre of the phone. Phone microphones are good at close range and poor beyond it
• Use wired earphones with a microphone if you have them, which will outperform the phone's built-in microphone at any distance
• Record ten seconds and play it back before doing the real take. This catches almost every audio problem while it is still cheap to fix

Set the phone up

1. Use the rear camera, not the selfie camera. It is meaningfully better on every phone
2. Film horizontally and vertically if you can be bothered — two takes, same words. Vertical is what most social placements need; horizontal suits the website. If you only do one, ask whoever requested the video which they need
3. Put the phone at eye level, not below. Propped on a stack of books works perfectly well; filming up at your face does not
4. Stand about a metre and a half back, framed from roughly mid-chest up, with a little space above your head
5. Tap your face on the screen to set focus and exposure before recording, and check you do not look too dark
6. Clean the lens. It is smeared. It always is

What to say

Do not write a script and read it. A read script is obvious within three seconds and destroys the only advantage this video has over professionally produced brand material, which is that it is visibly a real person speaking normally.

Instead, learn four points and say them in your own words:

1. Who you are and what you run. Name, the business, the town. "I'm Sam, I run the Northgate branch."
2. Why you. One sentence about how you came to own this. Genuinely one sentence
3. What you want people to know about how your location works — the thing you would say to a customer standing in front of you
4. What to do next. Call, book, come in. One clear action

Sixty to ninety seconds covers all four comfortably. Shorter is fine. Longer almost never is, and the instinct to add context is what turns a good introduction into an advertisement nobody watches to the end.

Recording it

Do the whole thing in one take, and do it at least four times. The first take is always stiff, the second is usually better, and the third or fourth is the one that sounds like you talking. Nobody keeps the first take.

Practical points during recording:

• Look at the lens, not at the screen. The difference is small on the phone and large on the finished video
• Start recording, pause for two seconds, then speak. The same at the end. This gives whoever edits it room to cut cleanly
• If you stumble, keep going. A small stumble is human and usually stays in; stopping and restarting costs you the momentum that makes take four good
• Do not smile constantly. Normal is the objective

Sending it on

Send the original file, not a version that has been through a messaging app. Most messaging platforms re-compress video heavily, and a file that looked fine on your phone arrives at head office soft and blocky with degraded audio.

Use whatever file transfer route your franchisor has given you, or a cloud storage link. Send all four takes and let whoever is editing choose — you are the worst judge of which one reads best, and it costs nothing to send them.

Say in the message where it was filmed and roughly when, because that metadata gets lost and someone will need it in six months.

For the franchisor

The reason this guide is one page is that length is the constraint. A production standards document will not be read; a single page with four points and a warning about backlight will be.

Two things raise completion rates more than the guide itself. First, ask for it during onboarding, in the window before opening when owners are still enthusiastic — the pre-opening checklist in franchisee onboarding is the right place for it. Second, do the editing centrally: colour, trim, captions, brand frames and music. An owner asked to film is a reasonable request; an owner asked to edit is a video you will not receive.

Captions in particular should be added centrally and always, since a large share of viewing happens muted, and they are also what makes the content readable to systems that index video by transcript. Where this fits against centrally produced material is the subject of AI video for multi-location brands.

And re-film it periodically. An introduction video ages — staff change, premises change, the owner's haircut changes — and a two-year-old video of someone who no longer looks like that undermines the authenticity it was shot for. The off-season is the natural slot, as noted in seasonal campaign calendars.

Questions we get asked