Today we’d like to introduce you to Carrie Burns.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Carrie. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I used to give tours to friends coming into town for events like Dragon Con and other conventions, generally around The Walking Dead since we all loved watching season 1 film in and around my neighborhood, Castleberry Hill, where I’ve lived since 2001. Filming has been a big part of Castleberry Hill and working with productions to try and make things easier on the residents and businesses is always a big deal so I developed a relationship with many folks working in locations. A girlfriend invited me to a dinner in January 2012 and inevitably we started talking about The Walking Dead, which all fans do. She said we should do these tours as a business and three months later, we did it and ran our first tour on March 21, 2012. We built the brand around our love of movies and Atlanta and it’s the perfect combination of everything fun about filming and tourism in our great city.
We started with 1 tour a week and now have four different tours based around The Walking Dead, Hero Tour focusing on all the super fun Marvel filming around Atlanta, Best of Atlanta Tour encompassing hundreds of movies and t.v. shows dating back to the ’70s, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind Tour focusing on Margaret’s life as a writer in Atlanta and very soon, we will have a tour based on Stranger Things. We now run around 30 tours a week and have had over 65,000 people tour with us. We are #1 on TripAdvisor for tours in Atlanta and always working on fun ways to boost the overall guest experience to show off the great #GeorgiaFilm industry!
Has it been a smooth road?
Starting and growing a business is never really “smooth”, but we have built an amazing team who love everything about the company, the guests and being engaged in the film and tourism industries here. Having a strong second is key to the success and health of a business and business owner and I’m lucky enough to have my rockstar sister Anna Caraballo in that role. There are always going to be tons of things coming at you as a small business owner, emails, meetings, etc., but learning to focus and having the tools in place to help inspire and grow are hugely beneficial. Learning to prioritize is key and knowing when to say no. We tend to weigh things more heavily that don’t need or deserve the time/energy, it’s in our heads and ultimately takes away from the bigger goals. Taking a breath during the day, organizing yourself and prioritizing helps with the struggles that will inevitably come. I’m a big believer in finding the tools that work for you – Asana for task management, Slack for team communication, Calm app for meditation, payroll, call routing, employee scheduling, everything has tools. I find that financial stress generally weighs most heavily on myself and most business owners I speak with and finding a good bookkeeper and accountant helps. I always take time for myself, whether it’s working out in the morning, getting my nails done, meal prepping, whatever the case may be, if the world is going to fall apart because you have your nails done you haven’t built something sustainable. Build a team, start with trust and you will succeed. Just remember that “success” is different for everyone and, much like money, you can’t chase success.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Atlanta Movie Tours story. Tell us more about the business.
Our business was founded to build amazing experiences showcasing everything that is great about Georgia film while educating our guests on why it’s here and how we work hard to keep it here. Having guides who work in the industry provides such a unique perspective to the guests so they have an opportunity to have fun, while learning, which is the best way to learn! We actively monitor the productions around the city to ensure we have a running list of locations to watch out for on the big and small screen and incorporate them into the tours.
We branched out from our tours with a fully-stocked Georgia Film retail shop in Castleberry Hill featuring fun merchandise from plenty of movies and t.v. shows that have come through the state. We are continuing to expand this and possibly add-on to it with a coffee shop in the near future, which will be film fan-friendly and certainly geeky!
There are very few companies in Georgia (and the world) who actively engage in both film and tourism, but having worked with productions coming through the city and the locations teams, we are super sensitive to the size and scale of filming and respect that every step of the way. We work with city and state officials to encourage and teach about the unique aspect of film tourism and show that the Georgia film tax incentives do more for the economy than they think. We also work with many different tour operators in and around Atlanta and film tour companies around the world through the Association for TV and Movie Tours (ATTAM).
It’s difficult to pick what I’m most proud of, but our team is probably it. They are a family, have each other’s backs, have my back and alllllllll the TripAdvisor, Google, Yelp and other reviews are 100% a reflection of their love for what they do.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Ideally both film and tourism will continue to grow exponentially in Georgia and Atlanta as it has for the past ten years. The economic impact of tourism on the state now stands at $66.2 billion and film sits at $9.5 billion, that’s a lot of billions! These numbers have continued to climb since the incentives were boosted in 2008, but Jimmy Carter started it all when he was governor in 1973 after the filming of “Deliverance.” The productions have now hit a massive scale with Pinewood Studios choosing to locate their first U.S. studio here in Peachtree City, just south of the airport and Marvel signing on with them. We now have 1.2 million square feet of purpose-built studio space and 1.1 million square feet of retro-fitted space and that continues to climb as well.
All this to say, we are at the intersection of, not only fun but a very lucrative industries in the South, and we look forward to growing and evolving with both industries. Our geeky fun fans make us great and we enlist them every day to help build and grow this small business, we listen to them and react to make every experience one that they not only enjoy but want to be part of.
Contact Info:
- Address: 327 Nelson St SW
Atlanta, GA 30313 - Website: http://atlantamovietours.com
- Phone: 855-255-3456
- Email: info@atlantamovietours.com
- Instagram: atlmovietours
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ATLMovieTours
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ATLMovieTours
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/atlanta-movie-tours-atlanta
- Other: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60898-d2646993-Reviews-Atlanta_Movie_Tours-Atlanta_Georgia.html
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Carrie Burns
June 12, 2019 at 3:08 pm
Thanks so much for this opportunity! Looks great!