I build companies I would want to hire.

I came to Texas from Romania with an accent, a camera and no clients. I started Tone Films in Dallas in 2017 and spent the next few years finding out whether that was brave or stupid. There were months when money was tight and projects fell through, and I kept betting on myself anyway, largely because I had not built a fallback.

It worked. Tone Films now works in 31 U.S. cities, I still direct every project it delivers, and I read every enquiry myself, which people keep telling me I should stop doing. I will not. Two more companies came out of the first one. Tone Talent Agency, a Dallas-Fort Worth modeling agency, because casting in this market kept hitting the same wall. Atomic Accounting, a bookkeeping firm in Plano, because I was tired of watching good businesses fail at bookkeeping rather than at the work.

None of this came from film school. My father is a pastor, and I took my degree in ministry and leadership at Oral Roberts University. Then an MBA in finance at Liberty, and the years before Tone Films doing accounting and financial projections for other people’s companies. I am now finishing a PhD in leadership studies at Dallas Baptist University. That path explains the accounting firm better than the camera does, and it is why I read a balance sheet before I read a brief.

I am not trying to be the biggest. I want the work to be undeniable, the people around me to be glad they picked up the phone, and to still be on set when it matters. Everything else is arithmetic.