Hi all! Today I have an interview with Brendan “Beej” Dery from Loading Ready Run about all of the amazing stuff Loading Ready Run does as a comedy troupe that touches on gaming and various geek media. Their community really impresses me, and I wanted to talk to someone in the leadership about the work they do and how they created the space. Check it out!

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For the uninitiated, what is Loading Ready Run (LRR) to you and what is your role within the organization? What makes you excited about LRR?

I’m Brendan “Beej” Dery and I work as the Business Manager for LoadingReadyRun. LoadingReadyRun is a comedy troupe that does all of their work on the Internet, focussing on sketches, streaming, podcasts, and playing video games and tabletop games, including a lot of time playing Magic: the Gathering. Working for LRR is still work, but it’s a lot of fun too.

As Business Manager, I spend my time working on managing our merchandise and taking care of office admin whatnot, but I also get to spend time acting in sketches or streaming games, so there’s more variety to my job than just sitting at a desk. What gets me excited about LRR is meeting people who enjoy what we do and seeing them in Twitch chat or in our Discord (http://discord.gg/lrr/), talking about the stuff we make, but also just interacting with each other in general. The fact that we’ve built – and are still building – such a great, supportive community of people makes me really proud to be a part of something so positive to so many people.

You seem to have a caring focus, ethically. As a group that’s run their shows for so long, how do you work towards maintaining high quality and variety while not burning yourselves to dust?

I think we keep ourselves honest by listening to each other and to our fans. Integrity is one of those things that you can cultivate for a long time, but lose it immediately. So we try to train ourselves to be better people. It’s not about “acting” a certain way, either. It’s easier to write comedy that doesn’t punch down when you have the kind of mindset that doesn’t punch down. That’s not to say we haven’t messed up before, or that we won’t mess up in the future. But I do think we do our best to acknowledge mistakes, listen to each other, and try to learn to be better.

We’ve also been making a ton of content for over fifteen years, so it’s not as if some of us haven’t felt burned out every so often. As the group has gotten bigger and taken on more projects, we’ve also been having regular meetings to plan our production and streaming schedules, to plan editing, and to write upcoming sketches and pre-recorded bits. That’s helped a lot, but we’ve also adopted a new rule – “Get to 80%” – at our last annual “take-stock” meeting. “Getting to 80%” means to limit the amount of projects we do, so that we’re operating at 80% of our maximum capacity. That way, when special projects pop up throughout the year, we’ll be able to do them (as opposed to missing great opportunities to do something fun or lucrative).

Like, Road Quest was a lot of fun, but it was also a lot of work, a lot of time spent, and a lot of money. And with all of the other projects we’re still working on, it’s taken longer to finish Road Quest than I think we’d like, and that’s meant having to do things like temporarily putting me on CheckPoint+ or putting Watch + Play on hiatus. Getting to 80% has helped inform some of our production scheduling and I think it’s going to get better and better for us as time goes on.

Experience and specialization has also helped a lot. Graham and Paul have been doing this for a long time, and over the years, they’ve trained new people to do some of their tasks. And that’s let everyone learn new things in their specialties to improve how we make stuff and entertain people. And as we get more experience, I think we’re getting better – and faster – at our jobs.

For those that make such decisions at LRR, how do you determine who to have on which shows, and how do you handle any problems that you encounter with personality conflicts, ethical concerns, and so on?

A lot of content is driven by the people that are interested in making it in the first place. We don’t assign people to do shows – people volunteer. We’re trying to change up the ensemble shows more and more (like AFK, The Long Game, or Friday Night Paper Fight), because we think the variety helps keep things more entertaining. When it comes to pre-recorded content like Friday Nights or commodoreHustle, that’s driven by the needs of the script or by how simple we need to make the filming process.

Like, we don’t have time to film more than a six-minute commodoreHustle during a LoadingReadyLIVE filming day, so it’s usually solved during the writing meeting that happened weeks before. Who hasn’t had an episode focus on their character yet, how are they getting into trouble, who else should be involved, etc. As far as streaming or other pre-record content goes, it’s like I’ve said previously – if someone wants to do a thing, we see if we can support it. Not all stream ideas will ever make it to air, and not all pre-record ideas are going to get filmed. But if an idea has a champion, it’s going to get a lot further.

We all like working with each other, but that also doesn’t mean there’s no conflict. It’s hard for me to address a question about personality conflicts, because I just straight-up don’t like having them. And I want to keep the focus of LRR on what we produce for people to enjoy. When it comes to solving conflicts between people, it’s down to Graham and Paul, largely, as they’re the co-presidents of the company. Same goes for ethical concerns – most of us in the office will become aware of a problem pretty fast and then we’ll end up talking about how we’re going to address it. We don’t always agree on how to handle things, but again, it’s a business and an organization and everyone wants our decision and our message to be unified, so that no one is confused about our position. We owe that to our audience.

What kind of content do you most enjoy bringing to streaming, whether it’s games or sketches or larger things like Road Quest, and how do you make the decision for what’s “good for TV,” so to speak?

I like making stuff that focuses on our strengths as entertainers – we’re funny, we’re positive, we’re doing our best. Road Quest was amazing but it’s not the kind of thing we can make all the time. Logistically, it requires a ton of planning and effort and funding just to get to Day 0, and then we have to start making the thing. And after that, there’s a lot of post-production, and that involves even more people. And the impact that a large project like Road Quest has on the rest of the production team is easy to see – reorganizing streams, allocating editing resources, etc. But I think it’s exactly the kind of content we want to bring to our fans. Road trip shows have been done before, but I think us doing the road trip show brings that kind of “surprise and delight” that we hope keeps everyone entertained.

Overall, I’m happy that we’ve been able to split our production into a wider variety of things. In the early days – when I was just an actor coming in on weekends – I wasn’t sure how all-year streaming was going to benefit us, but looking at it now, it’s clear that providing the variety has allowed us to attract more people to work with LRR and let us have a lot more immediate fun with our audience. And I think that’s what helps us decide what’s good for TV: is this going to be interesting or fun for us to make, and do we think that the majority of our fans are going to respond positively to it. And then after that, can we afford the money to make this, and can we afford the man-hours to make it. We’re still a business and we still want our employees to be able to make rent every month.

You may be best known for your charity event, Desert Bus for Hope, which is an annual playthrough of the Desert Bus video game for the Child’s Play charity. It seems like a real logistical challenge! What has kept you coming back to this event every year, and what does the planning entail for each of you? How do you keep safety in mind?

In order to answer this question properly, I’d have to go into a ton of detail about different departments and the number of planning meetings we have and managing a project that’s grown to involve fifty people on-site, as well as multiple people from around the world making contributions in other less visible ways.

So instead, forgive me for answering it purely from my perspective and involvement. I started doing Desert Bus for Hope during DBfH 5, and I showed up because I knew LRR and I wanted to be up there, performing for people and having fun. The charity aspect didn’t enter my mind. These days, I’m the de facto Zeta Shift producer, meaning that I take my job of getting Desert Bus from midnight to 06:00 very seriously – and I do that by trying to not to care too deeply about it. There’s a “screw-it-let’s-do-it-live” aspect to DBfH that I’ve always loved and if we ever lost that, I’d probably be done. So I try to bring that sense to the Zeta Shift by prepping only a few things, but mostly just seeing where it goes. It’s fun to come in at the start of the week and see “$0.00” and then see “$700,000” at the end of the week and just marvel that so many people came together to raise that money in exchange for a week of sleepless broadcasting. That’s pretty amazing.

Everyone else has different feelings about DBfH and I’m glad they do. It means that everyone found a piece of the show that they love and want to preserve, and I think it means that the bus is always going to keep running.

As for safety? There’s enough people on-site that safety is critical. We tape our cables to the floor, we leave as much room as we can to move around the equipment, we have food volunteers that do their best to adhere to FoodSafe guidelines. We also try to look for volunteers who have first aid training or better – we’ve even had off-duty paramedics on-staff before. While we mess around on camera, the audience doesn’t want to see any of us choke or break a bone. So it’s very important for us to be as safe as possible.

What are the tools and decision-making you consider essential as a streamer and a performing professional in games that you would recommend others ensure they have before starting streaming on their own?

The most important tools are also good life advice:

Grow a thicker skin.

Get a good emotional support system.

Breathe.

Your time may not be worth that e-mail in your inbox.

We lucked out when we started because we had already built a good community from our sketch comedy videos and from Desert Bus for Hope. So don’t tie your hopes and dreams of streaming fame to what we did – we had to make videos for over ten years and also engage with our audience in our forum and try to build things that would keep that relationship growing. Unless you have done some amazing stuff already, you are not going to step into an instant audience.

But when you are getting started, you will have to hustle. You’ll probably need a day job, or a partner with a day job. You’ll need to project integrity and confidence – and that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to change your mind about things, but you’ll need to show your audience that you’re trying to do the right thing and that you’ll willing to admit when you’re wrong. And that might also mean not taking every opportunity that comes into your inbox because it’s a quick $200. Or maybe it’ll mean that you need to take it to make rent, and you let your audience know what’s up about that.

Being a streamer or influencer or social media whatever is a rough gig these days. Not everyone can do it. And it’s not an easy ride. But whatever you do, be honest to yourself about what you want to do and why you want to do it. Play the games you want, host the streams you want, talk about the subjects you want. Don’t pander to your audience, but don’t ignore them either. Be willing to put in the work to push your career forward, but also – and this is really hard – be ready to recognize if it’s not working out. Maybe you can pivot to a different kind of stream. Maybe you’ll need to find partners to stream with. Maybe you’ll need to stop altogether.

I believe firmly in leading in place and skills transfer, and it seems like LRR does too! How do you each act as leaders in your own roles at LRR, and how do you handle skills transfer with the team?

This is kind of a difficult question, actually. With hiring so many people, we’ve been trying to provide training and also write documentation so that we can have processes and procedures to refer back to, if employees have questions about e.g. running tech on a podcast, or what style guidelines we use for our videos.

This is new territory for us, because LoadingReadyRun hasn’t had to do this before. With the amount of work we’re already doing, finding time to document what we do is really hard. BUT! We have recognized that it’s important and we’re trying to find ways to do it.

We’ve also established more people in specific roles. Graham and Paul are both co-Presidents of Bionic Trousers Media Inc – our operating company. James acts as our scheduler and producer for the bulk of our shows. Kathleen is our Managing Editor and also performs the vast majority of our writing. And I’m the business manager, meaning my eye is on the bottom line (and also on merchandise development).

Everyone is trying to involve team members with more projects and teach them more skills, but given the nature of our office and how we do business, we don’t do things like seminars or group teaching. The most instruction you would get was by working on-the-job – here’s how you hold a boom correctly, here’s how you operate the camera, here’s how we use J-cuts when editing, etc. I’m hoping that developing some documentation will help make training easier for both the trainers and the employees.

We absolutely have a long way to go, but I’m optimistic that we’ll get there – especially if we can get to 80% first.

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Thanks so much to Beej for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out all that LoadingReadyRun has to offer!