Hit shows change companies.

Recall Cineflix Media in 1998 launching with the popular Dogs With Jobs series pitched at Banff to receptive  international buyers, and in recent years bringing the U.S. market hit shows like American Pickers and Property Brothers.

But shifting market winds also change companies, especially when they are too slow to trim their sails.

And after mistiming the Canadian unscripted TV market and making a costly foray into scripted dramas, Cineflix has gone back to the drawing board to rebuild the company from the bottom up.

“We’re taking a different approach. We’re diversifying structures and businesses. It [Cineflix] won’t be built around one person. It will be built around strong companies,” Cineflix co-founder and co-CEO Glen Salzman told Playback after completing a recent restructuring.

The indie producer/distributor shed top executives, promoted others, some with financial bear hugs, and devolved management to defend its market position.

The aim is to ensure Cineflix’s three key markets, the UK, U.S. and Canada, have separate and strong development teams pushing out development ideas and series for a fast-shifting world market.

“One of our core strategies for Cineflix 3.0 is to decentralize our creative streams, so more ideas are developed throughout the company, rather than be focused in one place or one office. That was an earlier model,” Salzman explained.

Simon Lloyd

Of course, Cineflix 3.0 followed Cineflix 2.0, started in 2006 when Salzman and co-ceo Katherine Buck lured Simon Lloyd, managing director of Cineflix Productions U.K., to Toronto to expand the company’s production slate across the U.K., U.S. and Canadian markets.

Other Brits, known for their reality storytelling skills, followed to help lead the company, including Joanne Virgo joining Cineflix’s Toronto office in June 2007 as an executive producer, and Joe Houlihan crossing the Atlantic in 2009 to become SVP of programming.

Lloyd also spearheaded a lucrative coproduction model for Cineflix, starting with Property Virgins, which bowed on HGTV in Canada before landing with HGTV U.S., and more recently with Property Brothers for W and HGTV U.S. stateside.

The model has Cineflix getting Canada and U.S. to cover all production costs at the same rate as if Canada produced the show on its own and Cineflix secured a U.S. distribution sale.

Cineflix then retains international rights to allow shows to sell around the world again and again via its Cineflix Rights distribution arm.

Other coproductions from Cineflex include Mayday: Air Crash Investigation for Discovery Canada and National Geographic International, and Tori & Dean: Cabin Fever, for HGTV U.S. and CMT in Canada.

All are distributed by Cineflix Rights.

The fast-growing Canadian producer also diversified into scripted fare in 2010 launching Cineflix Studios, hiring veteran cable exec Christina Wayne to run it as president, Vlad Wolynetz as president of production, while also opening a Los Angeles office and a separate New York City base.

Peter Smith

And Cineflix in 2012 landed an equity stake from Participant Media, with an eye to jointly developing and making TV series, while Cineflix Studios hired former NBC Universal International president Peter Smith as its London-based CEO.

That hire followed the scripted division securing its first series order from BBC America for Copper, a period crime drama whose promotional tagline was “Justice is brutal.”

The irony was the Canadian TV business soon became brutal for Cineflix after the CRTC in 2010 changed the goalposts and gave broadcasters programming flexibility via a new group-based programming regime. The result, according to Salzman, was the major networks ordered fewer unscripted shows as they shifted dollars into global formats. And as overheads kept mounting at Cineflix, Canadian commissions stalled, even as commissions and recommissions continued from the U.K. and U.S. markets.

In a fast-changing Canadian TV market like that, there are two ways for a producer like Cineflix to expand: continue developing your own content, IP and catalogue, or produce international formats for short-term cash flow, without owning the rights.

Rivals like Insight Productions and Proper Television stepped forward to turn global formats into local shows for the Canadian broadcasters.

Salzman looked at those deals, bid unsuccessfully on some, and was wary: he wanted to keep growing his catalogue to feed his distribution pipeline at Cineflix Rights.

“You can’t build equity doing formats. So our idea was to build a library,” he recalls, as the Cineflix catalogue stands today at around 3500 hours.

But with Amazing Race Canada and Big Brother Canada clicking with viewers, Cineflix largely excluded itself from an attractive market gap that rivals filled.

Salzman recognizes that now, and is pressing Cineflix into action on the format front.

And a world-facing Cineflix is creating its own IP in the U.K. and U.S. that is formattable.

An example is American Pickers turned as a format into Canadian Pickers, and its UK kids series Pet School being pitched to Canadian networks as a format.

But challenges at Cineflix weren’t restricted to the unscripted arena.

Cineflix Studios running up huge cost-overruns on the first season of Copper had producer Nomadic Pictures coming on board to ensure a second cycle.

Jodi Flynn

The bottom line was ballooning overheads and a shifting TV market put Cineflix on its heels, leading Salzman and Buck in April 2013 to hire former Shaw Media exec Andrew Akman, a turnaround specialist, to launch a root-and-branch restructuring to reduce overheads and reshape management for the future.

Eventually, Lloyd, Houlihan and Virgo in Toronto left Cineflix, as did Smith in London, and Flynn and Levenson in Los Angeles.

After that talent exodus, not least to bring costs into line with revenues, Salzman insists he has Cineflix 3.0. better positioned to survive and thrive in a new global TV market.

“We are a stronger, profitable and more healthy company today,” Salzman insisted.

But servicing a major slice of the English-speaking TV market out of Canada, the U.K. and the U.S., with complex and conflicting customer needs, will call for Cineflix to get its geography right.

To do that, Cineflix is betting on creative execs like Tony Wood’s Buccaneer Media and Cineflix U.K., led by Rob Carey and Camilla Lewis, and another ideas stream coming out of Toronto, New York and Los Angeles.

Tony Wood

“We have development going on in Toronto, New York City, Los Angeles and people are coming up with and pitching ideas in all three centres,” Salzman said.

Kim Bondi was promoted to EVP, and will be helped in pitching to Canadian broadcasters by New York City-based Charles Tremayne spending three days a week in Toronto.

And Cineflix is set to hire a creative director to be stationed in either New York or Los Angeles.

“We’re looking for the best person we can find. And then we’ll figure out where they will sit,” Salzman insisted.

To be certain, retaining rights in the U.S. market remains a challenge for Cineflix and other Canadian producers.

But there’s no ignoring a U.S. market where spending on cable dramas or streaming fare for Netflix, Hulu and Amazon continues to grow.

Cineflix will remain active in the Canadian market. The producer is hiring another development exec in Toronto to complement the eventual creative director to be stationed stateside.

That said, Cineflix recognizes Canadian networks face challenges, buffeted as they are by new technologies and digital platforms.

As a result, said Salzman, Canadian networks are looking to keep a bigger share of the back end for themselves, which has Cineflix looking outside its home market to ensure growth.

So Akman likens the new management structure at Cineflix 3.0 to a matrix, rather than a pyramid as with Cineflix 2.0, to shape how development execs in a highly-diversified company will communicate and work together in a fast-shifting world market.

“The idea is to build it in pieces, having smaller units producing great content,” he explained.

That means an end to a top-down, central management structure, and more creative collaboration and interdependency among the varied satellite offices.

And on the scripted side, Cineflix Studios has been dramatically pared back, Salzman said, with Smith exited and Christina Wayne in talks about her future at Cineflix.

Smith is also in discussions about a possible future role with Tony Wood at Buccaneer Media, on whom Cineflix initially will rely for the bulk of its scripted programming for the U.K., U.S. and Canadian markets.

Wood, who comes out of the U.K. market, has already pitched to Canadian and U.S. broadcasters ideas that could work across the Atlantic.

Where possible, Cineflix will structure Wood’s series destined for North America as coproductions.

And Cineflix will be pragmatic about building out its scripted division with first-look deals or other bolt-on acquisitions.

“Our idea is to have different companies, either through acquisitions or mergers, that find great talent that can have their own brand, and where we own it,” Salzman said.

Following the lead of Buccaneer Media, Cineflix is eyeing other joint ventures with top creative talent.

Partnering companies would act as independents under the Cineflix umbrella, to be based in the U.S., the U.K. or Canada.

And the budgets for Cineflix scripted fare will be more on Canadian levels, $1.25 million to $1.5 million per episode, rather than the $3 million to $4 million that’s standard in Hollywood.

It’s all part of recent cost-cutting at Cineflix that, while painful for the co-founders after years of growth, has also left the company slimmed down and more efficient after years of bloat and over-building, according to Salzman.

“You hire lots of people, and then when you realize you have to cut, and you cut all over, you realize we can do this a lot leaner and lot more efficiently,” he explained.