From Director to CEO: Martin Juza on how to build an animation business in the CEE

This year’s Cartoon Business, held for the first time in Brussels, featured numerous panels centered around analytics and big data. However, Martin Juza, CEO of Prague-based production company Krutart, delivered an inspiring presentation that offered a captivating perspective on a smaller scale.

Before venturing into business, Juza started his career as a filmmaker and an artist and worked as a freelance commercial director / motion designer. In 2014, after several years of struggling to get funding for his own projects, he turned the tables and co-founded Krutart with Filip Veselý and Klára Jůzova.

Since then, the company has grown and produced short films, documentaries, commercials and tv series including Kosmix in 2020, a hit on Czech Television and now distributed worldwide by the French sales agent Dandelooo.

At Cartoon Business, Juza offered a glimpse of Krutart’s diversified strategy: a three-way revenue stream divided between regular animated productions, commissions for museums and sales for immersive media, with its own in-house sales department for immersive media projects and an editorial line with a planned release of one film per year.

Juza recalled:

From the beginning, there was a need to create a sense of togetherness. From the outset, my two co-founders and I have held strategic meetings every two weeks. Krutart launched with a team of five or six people from the start. Surrounding yourself with people who can inspire and propel you forward is crucial, and I believe that our emphasis on collaboration has been a significant factor in our growth.

As a former director, Juza went on to explain how he is now channelling his creativity into Krutart’s business strategy.

I think it all comes down to visualization. As a director, you are thinking all the time and imagining what your film will look like. As a CEO, I just changed the subject of this imagination. This still is a creative process, only I am now applying it to projects, business units or business models. I mean, spreadsheets are the most creative tools in the world! But seriously, it’s a tool of shaping the future in some way, because when you go into the numbers and look at every item in a budget, you really are looking at people, energy, only from a different perspective.

Krutart is currently working on season 2 of Kosmix, on a feature film from the same universe scheduled for 2027, and news IP’s.

More information to be found on: https://krutart.cz/