Why I Stayed in Cache Valley After USU and Started a Production Company Here
Everyone who graduates from Utah State gets the same question: so, when are you leaving? Here is my answer, several years and a lot of shoot days later.
I stayed in Cache Valley after graduating from Utah State in 2020 because I had already started Sarah Rasmussen Productions here in 2019, and the valley turned out to be a better place to build a small production company than any bigger city would have been. The market is small enough that you learn every part of the job, and connected enough that good work travels by word of mouth.
- In a small market you shoot everything: commercials, menus, ranches, social content, drone work
- Repeat clients and referrals do more here than advertising ever could
- Everything I need is within a 30-minute drive, including the mountains in the background of half my frames
The question usually comes from someone who did leave. They graduated, moved to Salt Lake or Denver or somewhere with a real airport, and they are back visiting and mildly baffled that I am still here, still shooting, still driving the same stretch of Highway 91 between Smithfield and Logan. So: I'm Sarah, Sarah Rasmussen Productions is the commercial photo and video company I started in 2019 while I was still a student at Utah State, and I have been running it out of Cache Valley ever since. This is why.
I started the company before I finished the degree
The timing is the first part of the answer. I did not graduate and then look around for what to do. I started taking commercial work in 2019, graduated from USU in 2020, and by the time I had a diploma I also had clients, a growing folder of finished work, and a reputation that only existed in this valley. Leaving would have meant starting over from zero somewhere that had never heard of me. Staying meant building on a year I had already put in.
That is not a romantic reason. It is a practical one. But most of the reasons that hold up over several years are practical.
A small market makes you learn the whole job
In a big city, a production company can specialize. You can be the food photographer, or the real estate video person, or the one who only does commercials. There is enough demand for each slice that you never have to leave your lane.
Cache Valley does not let you do that, and I think it made me better. In one month here I might shoot a TV commercial, a full restaurant menu, a ranch, a fruit cup for a packaged food brand, a month of social content for a shake shop, and a drone flyover of a property. I got my FAA Part 107 drone certificate because clients here wanted aerials. I spent about five years shooting local TV spots, including a long run of Taco Time commercials, because that work was here and somebody had to do it well. Every one of those skills came from a client in this valley asking for something I did not do yet.
Word of mouth is the whole economy here
I have never had an advertising budget that mattered. What I have had is repeat clients and a valley where business owners talk to each other. One good menu shoot leads to the owner's friend who runs a shop down the street. One commercial leads to the next owner who saw it and wants one. About five years of creating social content for Sawyer Hemsley's Cache Valley businesses came from doing the first job well and being around for the second one.
This works because the valley is small enough that reputation is real. If you deliver late or shoot something badly, everyone knows by Friday. If you deliver early and the photos are good, everyone also knows by Friday. I would take that trade over a city where every client is a stranger and every job is a cold pitch.
Leaving would have meant starting over from zero somewhere that had never heard of me.
The 30-minute rule
Here is the thing nobody tells you about running a production company in a small valley: the logistics are absurdly easy. From Logan I can be at almost any client in Providence, Hyde Park, North Logan, or Smithfield in fifteen minutes, and anywhere from Preston to Wellsville in thirty. I do not lose half a day to traffic. I do not scout locations for a week because I already know where the light is good at 7 a.m. in October. When a client needs a reshoot, I can be there tomorrow, not next month.
And the mountains are always in the back of the frame. That sounds like a throwaway line but it is a real production advantage. A brand shoot outside a Logan storefront gets the Wellsvilles or the Bear River Range for free. That backdrop costs a fortune to fake anywhere else.
What I did not expect
I expected to stay for the clients. I did not expect that the work itself would be better here. There is a specific satisfaction in shooting a commercial for a business you drive past every day, or photographing a ranch whose owner you will see at the grocery store, or seeing a restaurant menu you shot on the table when you go out to eat. The work has consequences you can see. In a big city you make a thing and it disappears into a feed. Here you make a thing and then you live next to it.
I have written elsewhere about why I started the company and about what I like about working with local businesses. This post is the piece between those two: not why I started or what I love, but why I did not leave. Turns out those are three different questions.
If you are a USU student reading this
You do not have to stay. Plenty of good reasons to go. But if you are trying to start something and you already have one client here, one professor who knows your name, one business owner who liked what you made, you have more than you would have on day one anywhere else. Small markets reward people who show up repeatedly. That is a skill you can practice here for a lot less rent than you would pay to practice it in Salt Lake.
If you want the version of this argument aimed at business owners instead of students, why Cache Valley is a great place for small businesses makes the case from the other side of the camera.
If you run a business in Cache Valley, make a list this week of the five local businesses you already recommend to people in conversation. Then message each owner and tell them you do. That is the entire referral economy in this valley, and almost nobody says it out loud. The ones who do get recommended back.
Several years in, the answer to "when are you leaving" is the same as it was the first time someone asked. I am not. The work is here, the people are here, and the mountains are in the back of the frame.
Logan is home base, Sarah Rasmussen Productions is the company, and commercial photo and video for Cache Valley, Northern Utah, and Southern Idaho is the job.
Building something in the valley too?
If your business is here and you need photos or video that look like here, I would love to hear what you are working on.
Say hello📞 Call or Text: 435-764-3606
✉️ sarahrasmussenproductions@gmail.com
📍 Serving Northern Utah & Southern Idaho
