Christy’s, a Burbank-based post-production company, was founded in 1969 by two brothers as a film equipment business.

Eventually, Craig Christy – son and nephew of the founders – took over the family business in 2002. This was a critical time in the post-production industry as emerging technology in the 1990s had changed the game, leading to a shift toward digital equipment; the British horror flick “28 Days Later,” the first feature film to be shot entirely on digital, had just been released.

Over the years, Christy’s has integrated advancements in technology into its business. While the company still sells and rents out supplies for traditional film editing and archival, Christy’s began providing digital editing systems to customers since they were introduced and has evolved with the industry providing access to film and video data storage systems for in house and remote editing around the world.

“Due to that, we needed more buildings to expand and build more server space and server rooms and that led us to (realizing) we needed another building,” Christy said.

At this time, Christy was leasing two buildings, but he knew he wanted more permanence through investing in building ownership.

In 2022, Christy began searching for a building but struggled to find the right fit.

“Because of the market, things were just very, very expensive,” Christy said. “A 14,000-square-foot building was somewhere in the range of $5 million to $6 million in Burbank, which had almost doubled in the last seven years.”

With that, Christy looped in his banker, Bertha Hernandez, who manages Banc of California’s Glendale branch, to see what his options were. After getting connected to the bank’s SBA loan team, Christy decided to scale down his target building size, settling on a 9,000-square-foot building in Burbank and was approved for a 7(a) loan of $3.5 million.

Staying in Burbank

Securing a building in Burbank was important for Christy.

“It happened to be directly across the street from our main building, which works out really well, especially since in Burbank, we can tie buildings together via fiber interconnects for very cheap compared to most ways to source data connectivity between buildings (because) Burbank has its own network and is very cost effective,” Christy said.

After finding the right building and officially starting the loan process, Christy said it only took about three months to close and required very little time on his end compared to some of his other experiences with loans.

The process was easy for Christy, who said Michelle Coberly, a vice president of small business lending for the bank, “held my hand through everything.”

Aside from speed, Christy was also pleased with the bank’s ability to tailor the loan to his needs, adding that the SBA team provided four or five different structures and worked through requests for modifications for terms such as what to put up for collateral.

“We could have done a traditional loan and thrown a lot of money at the front of the loan and maybe gotten a better term, but this way, I have capital reserved to build out the space exactly the way we want it,” Christy said. “… This is something that should help us out over the next 10 to 20 to 30 years.”