RIA Breaks Into Georgia's Booming Film Industry

Georgia has earned the nickname “the Hollywood of the South” from the plethora of projects filmed there, including television shows like The Walking Dead and Stranger Things and movies like the Hunger Games franchise and this year’s multiple-Oscar-nominee Black Panther. The state, which a decade ago started offering film production companies generous tax credits, saw a record-breaking 455 television and film productions during fiscal 2018.

An Atlanta-based RIA firm is getting in on the action. About a year ago, Patricia Sklar, a wealth advisor at Brightworth, was noticing more and more film and TV activity in Atlanta. In addition, news stories about the pace of the industry’s growth in Georgia piqued her interest.

“We film more major motion pictures here in Georgia than L.A. does at this point,” she says. “There’s tremendous opportunity for us to help people.”

Sklar attended an introductory class on the film business taught by producer Linda Burns, did her own research and started attending film industry events “to try to up my game and understand it better,” she says.

It’s not just actors who are generating wealth but also producers and others who work behind the scenes. “It’s shocking, if you’ve ever been on a movie set, how many people there are,” she says. The percentage of her client base that hails from the film industry is growing, she says. It includes a mix of Georgia natives and transplants who’ve settled there for work.

(You can meet Sklar and hear more about her advisory business during the “Building A Niche Market” session at FA’s Invest In Women conference from April 29 through May 1.)

Corporate executives and business owners that Brightworth works with—including the Coca-Cola Co. and other companies in the Atlanta area—have pretty steady and predictable incomes, says Sklar. But people in the film industry work on a project basis: Each project pays differently and has a different time frame, and they may not know where their next paycheck is coming from.

“It really is feast or famine,” she says.

It’s important to help them learn how to budget and save for retirement, and often “learning the concept of an emergency fund is huge, too,” Sklar explains. Some film people have retirement plans through unions, which she’s had to learn about.