Mid-level players are more obsessed with quality than size. It seems they have learned valuable lessons from the rash of film and TV companies that went public in the 1990s, drawn by the allure of millions in new coin from the Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.

Quebec’s Incendo Productions specializes in TV movies for the Canadian and international marketplace and has kept annual production volume at around $23 million over the past couple of years. The company also runs a television distribution company, Incendo Media, and has offices in Toronto, L.A. and Montreal.

Once upon a time, this profile would have made the prodco ripe for a public offering, but times have changed.

Incendo cofounder and director Stephen Greenberg says that public markets don’t necessarily fit a production company’s mandate.

‘Being a public company and being in production is often like fitting a square peg in a round hole,’ he says.

‘To hit quarterly earnings targets, a public company may be forced to put things into production whether they are ready or not,’ explains Greenberg, whose vast industry experience includes more than 20 years at Astral Media, effectively a publicly traded broadcaster.

‘The production business isn’t as orderly as other businesses, and the timing of production doesn’t necessarily correspond with the needs of public companies,’ Greenberg continues. ‘You also have to be prepared for the fact that in today’s world, there is a lot of scrutiny of public companies.’

High-profile scandals involving publicly traded companies have made it tougher to get a prosperous company listed on the TSE or Nasdaq. And then, of course, there’s that nagging question of creativity.

WestWind Pictures executive producer Mary Darling says that shareholders and producers often don’t have the same priorities.

‘We don’t want to have to answer to shareholders,’ Darling says. ‘Sometimes you have a passion project that is hard to fund, or doesn’t make a huge profit, but you make it anyway. We don’t want to have to answer to people only interested in the bottom line.’

WestWind doubled its volume to over $16 million in 2007 due to its expansion into dramatic production with the launch of the CBC hit comedy series Little Mosque on the Prairie. Its 2008 slate includes season two of Little Mosque, 13 episodes of the HGTV series The Style Dept. and Mind Struck for Global, which follows a mentalist who works one-on-one with people.

‘If we end up producing additional dramas or comedies or primetime lifestyle series, we will grow to whatever size is required to service those productions,’ says Darling.

Incendo will also expand through increased production volume, making three TV movies this summer in the $3.5-million budget range (including Final Verdict starring Smallville’s Erica Durance), and plans to forge into TV series production.

‘We aren’t a ‘bigger-is-better’ type of company,’ explains Greenberg. ‘We want to grow, but we also want to avoid the pitfalls that can bring down a company, such as excessive overhead, crazy development expenses and rushing projects into production, just to increase volume. We may have to add a couple more strategic people if we do more series work, but we plan to grow cautiously.’

Caution is also the buzzword at Toronto’s Whizbang Films – a partnership between Paul Gross and Frank Siracusa – despite its rapid growth. The prodco saw its activity jump to $26.1 million in 2007 from $10.4 million the year before. Its recent productions include the 8 x 60 series ZOS: Zone of Separation for The Movie Network/Movie Central, the CBC miniseries The Trojan Horse and feature film Passchendaele.

‘In 2007 we were pushed to capacity,’ says Siracusa, noting that Whizbang has seven full-time staff plus the owners. ‘We were doing way more than what a small company can handle, but we were very careful not to over-grow.’ It has no plans to increase production volume in the next few years.

‘The requirement for programming among broadcasters and distribution companies just isn’t there to sustain a large-sized company and the kind of volume this requires,’ he says. ‘If you can’t show the revenue to sustain that kind of overhead, it can kill you.’