Creatives Grab Coffee - Business Conversations (ft. By the Booth) | Creatives Grab Coffee 13

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, hosted by Kyrill Lazarov & Dario Nouri. CGC is a platform where creatives and business professionals discuss industry topics and share experiences.Today we welcome our guests Garus Booth and James Murday. By The Booth are an Idea Company, focused on discovering their clients' stories and rendering them into animation, motion graphics and live-action.Subscribe and follow for future episodes!Produced by LAPSE PRODUCTIONS - www.lapseproductions.com

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, hosted by Dario Nuri and Kirill Lazarev. CGC is a show where we invite business professionals to discuss industry topics. Today we welcome our guests, Geras Booth and James Murday. By the Booth are an idea company focused on discovering their clients' stories and rendering them into animation, motion graphics, and live action. We hope you enjoy our discussion, so let us start. graphics and live action. We hope you enjoy our discussion, so let us start. Yeah, so James, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself, like how you got into the industry and where you're at now? Oh boy. Well, I've been in the industry for

approaching 25 years now. Started back in 96 in a place called StanCon Video, which was a creative name for a place that does standards conversions. So amazingly named, but everyone knew what we were doing and we did a lot of good work there. And then that particular company got bought by my Joe years ago. And then I went out, left there, went to Sim. Well, before that, I created my own company called station x which was digital delivery systems and uh and basically digital delivery of large files and back then uh when we were starting it it was it was a little bit harder to do it back in 2012 and uh we sold the companies in 2014 at the time i was also the was also the VP of sales for both Pixel and for

Finney Films. After, I guess, just last year, I was approached to see if I'd be interested in another position. And Garris and I met and we've been living happily ever after since. Okay, so you started your own company and then sold that. Tell me a bit about that process. Like, how did you know it was the right time to sell? And how did that feel selling your own company? Yeah, well, I mean, I was one of two partners for that particular company. You know, Mark Backley was the original founder of it, I would say. He was the one that reached out to me.

He was a client of mine at the time. And he was the one that decided, he was asking me, what about large formats? And can we do digital deliveries? And what's the viability? And I said it was, and we got together. So it was an interesting way, two years of building the business. The first year, as you guys know, it's always the toughest year. And with that, it was relationship bound.

We were trying to get relationships with the stations to be able to get the content to them, as well as relationships with new clients. So it was a real fun time. But then what happened, I guess, about, well, Mark Backley again came to me and he was like, he had been approached by Sim and he was thinking he wanted to sell. And so we discussed it and I agreed with him. It was a good time for us to do it. I could start seeing that that large you know large file format delivery was going to be something that everyone could do sooner or later and in it was fast approaching so it was best for us to sell the companies and was all

three of the companies at the same time so mine as well as the other two and then we came part of sim and sim's a great company. I worked there for a number of years as well. And a lot of good relationships still there. It was just for me, it was about going back to the roots of a small company again and, and getting away from that corporate structure, which, which is totally necessary when you, when you have multiple establishments in different parts of the world and hundreds of employees, you need that structure.

But also that structure slows things down to a certain degree. So it can be a bit frustrating. It's not as fun as being in a smaller business where it's more like a little motorboat and you're just sort of speeding around and you can make adjustments where you want to. You can have a meeting in the afternoon and by the end of the day, you're, you're putting things into effect where with, with a corporate structure, you could, you could have a meeting about getting a meeting and, and it could take a long time to make change happen. But yeah, it was, it was a little weird selling your own company and then being an employee of it also for a little while was also interesting.

But I wouldn't have traded for the world for sure. At certain times, the stress level was exceptionally high. Sometimes you're wondering, did I make the right decision? Did I leave? Because when I was at MyJo, it was a great job and great company. And my wife still works there to this day. It's now Extreme Reach Canada, but she still works there to this day. So when you have that constant paycheck, that job, which you really know well, clients on a regular basis calling in and then leaving that to really fend for yourself.

Yeah, there were some nights when sleep didn't come so easy, that's for sure. But it was good. You mentioned that you first saw that the industry was shifting and a lot more people were starting to pop up and do something very similarly to what you did. Do you feel that if you continued with the business, do you feel that you probably would have had, the company would have been worth a lot less because of that fact? Or did you feel like that, did you feel that was the right time to do it? Absolutely. It was the right time to sell. I think if we would have tried to hang on too long, it's a lot like a stock. Sometimes you hang on to it a little bit too long and then it's got no value whatsoever. And I think that's really what would have happened with Station X, unless we changed the business model to a certain extent.

If we went in different routes and expanded the offering. offering. But at the time, we were already starting to see just post facilities being able to create, not just create their own files, but format them for the station. And then the stations also allowing them to receive it, right? At the time when we were creating it, stations weren't wanting to receive content from all, you know, all sorts of different people because they can say, well, we want a quick time and we wanted all these specs and no one would follow it right so quick time can be many different things to many different people and uh and it could be close but it's not the same and then it would be rejected by their their servers and their service their um their tech at their side of things

and uh yeah that would be no good. So for us, that onboarding, they knew exactly what we were giving them. We're giving them vanilla ice cream all of the time. And they were getting it consistently, right? Where with other suppliers, it could be all over the place. Sometimes it's tiger tail and no one likes tiger tail. That sucks. Like, I guess selling your company is something that we kind of foresee in our future as well. But we haven't really thought too much about it. Is there anything you would tell maybe your younger self prior to selling, like some things to watch out for, maybe to think of? Maybe in your early years. Yeah, maybe something to, maybe during the negotiations, it's something

you should keep in mind. Yeah, Yeah. Hire good lawyers and read the documents thoroughly for sure. There's a lot of contracts and a lot of writing there and it's very thorough and their lawyers know it very well. And of course, those lawyers are making sure that that agreement is very advantageous for them so for you you got to make sure that your lawyers are really good at contract legal and make sure that they're reviewing it the right way and that you're making sure that you're negotiating the best deal for yourself at that given time for sure you mentioned that after you sold the company you continued to work at station X for a

little while just a quick question, how long roughly was that for? Well, we sold it in 2014. Well, the company entity probably lasted for another year to a year and a half, I want to say, as a brand. And then the service wrapped into Pixel Underground as a service level offering there. So I'd say StationX probably lasted for about a year, maybe a little bit after that, after we sold. What was kind of your thought process after that?

You know, like, you know, now that you've already sold the company and you've moved on and you decided it's time to move on to some other bigger, better things. How did you start to kind of come up with some of those ideas? Or like, how did you make it to the next step for yourself? For me, I was still in the same building with the same facility, with the same people. And with the absorption there, I was still doing sales for, for pixel underground, um, and Finney films at that point too. Um, and then Finney folded into pixel as well. And I can't remember exactly if, if I'd assume if I remember right, that Finney and, and station X both folded into pixel at the same time. Um,

cause there was a bit of a transition there. Um, so for me, the job didn't change so, so much really, other than I was having to do sales for all of Sim at that point too, right? So for the post offerings for Sim, both at King Street location and the Mutual Street location, that was a little bit more challenging just because now I was offering pro like real audio post production, which wasn't something that I really had done before. And they were doing series like, you know, Penny Dreadful and what was the other ones? Handmaid's Tale, Schitt's Creek all those right so they were I mean when I when they first bought us you go over there and you see their their awards uh section and you're looking at 80 awards plus at that time

they're probably well over 100 um awards now for sure right and you're talking Emmys and all sorts of things so some pretty good stuff so you you went from doing sales in what capacity? What were you selling before you went over to Sim? It was video post-production services. So we were finishing, mainly we were finishing TV series. A lot of TV series. We were finishing TV commercials as well. That was something that I was trying to pull into the company a little bit more as well as myself, Marcus, Valentin, and Mark Backley. So we were

all trying to get a little bit more commercial work into. And then we were also doing the odd documentary, docu-style TV shows, and the odd feature as well. Okay, so you basically went from like commercials, some documentaries, and then into television shows, right? Well, we were doing, we were doing all of that. So, so it was, the difference was that now I was offering audio posts as well as the video post offering, right? So we were already doing quite a lot of video or sorry, a lot of TV series at the time um specifically like say for cineflex so like shows like mayday uh which of which is i don't know one of the longest running canadian produced tv series um around um and in a number of others so yeah it was uh it was fun but like

i said the audio post side of things was a new world for me. Um, that's when I got to meet and work with Peter Gibson, who's the general manager over there. Um, I think now he's VP of post, um, and post SIM, uh, overall, um, Canada. And then also Jane Tattersall, who's been around for forever. Um, who's both of which are great, great people to work with and really wonderful people. And she's the senior VP of Post Canada for Sim as well. If if nothing's changed since I've been there. Diving into the category of sales, how were you able to navigate that challenge of, you know, first you were selling one specific service and now you're selling several other services to a much higher level of clientele? Well, I mean, for me, the sales is sales. A lot of it's relationship based and what I would always do is exhaust

who I know right away and try to figure out who they know and try to get them to introduce me because those are, that's, intros are always the warmest way to meet someone. But I mean, it's, like I said, it's relationship based. I'm, I have, I have fun making relationships with new people. And they had some pretty good margarita parties which made it a little easier to meet some new people there too their annual margarita parties are legend so um yeah just make sure that you're not always uh taking a shot every time a client wants to have a shot with it it can end up messy.

Per se, knowledge, just saying. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so it's interesting, though, because at that level, it seems like the pool of people you're targeting is a lot smaller, right? So very specific kind of skill sets that they're looking for and level of quality, right? Yeah, yeah. So how would you kind of go about it with i know you have to go kind of build a relationship but how different is it maybe from what you're doing now with gary's over at by the booth where instead of like very

limited prestigious clients it's kind of like you know businesses like of any size you know small medium large corporations. Yep. Well, there was a little bit more door knocking for sure. We'd visit studios. So we'd go to the West End and we'd hit up certain studios and that's where they're shooting. And then we would, you know, go and meet up with different people there because they're there in their offices. Most of the time it's temporary offices in those facilities. And we get meetings with them there, chat with them. As far as audio goes, they were really well known. I mean, Tattersall Sound and Picture is some, you know,

is a audio post facility here in Toronto. That's if you're in the industry, especially if you're creating high end series work, you're probably going to know Jane Tattersall. And if you don't, then, then, then you're probably, there's a, there's weirdness going on. There's a weird disconnect, but yeah, I mean, it's, it was, it was that it was also looking at different, finding different producers that I knew would be working on specific types of shows and just reaching out to them,

whatever way I could. But most of the time, I'm trying to do it as warmly as possible. None of us like getting a sales call, right? Like if I'm at home and someone's calling me and they're asking me about my cable package, no one likes that. And it's a

hard one to overcome, even if you're calling them to help them, right? And for me, it's always about calling people because I know that we can help them. And I'm convinced of that. And that doesn't matter if I'm in a large company or if I'm in a small company. If I'm like with By The Booth, I know that we can help our clients. I know we can create great content beyond all that. I know that we can make it easier for them too. We can make a, have it as be a good experience for them from the beginning to the end. And I also know that Garris really cares and, and, and as an owner, um, which, which is,

uh, which is big. Um, I've worked at lots of different companies and there's lots of different types of owners. And there's certain ones that really care. And then there's other ones that are a little bit more numbers business driven, which is fine. It's just for me, I like working for a company where it aligns with my moral compass, I guess you could say. And Garris and I got along really well. We fleshed out who we were as people as well as who we were as professionals. And that's how we came to be as far as that goes.

Do you want to tell us a bit about... I'm answering your question. Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah. I just thought it was interesting because, well, another thing I wanted to ask is that back when you were at Sim and even before that, well, especially at Sim, you're dealing with, like when you go out to pitch, how many competitors did you have? Because at that level, it's, I'm guessing, Sim and maybe a couple of others.

Yeah, like a few. Yeah. I mean, I would say the competitors were probably in the neighborhood of five five or six real competitors on that side of things on the audio and video post side of things um right um i mean there's lots of different audio and video post house i'm not saying that there isn't um but the ones that are doing the audio and post for specific, those types of series, it's, you know, yeah, there's not all of them are getting those particular series for sure. Yeah. So it's five or six other people, and I'm guessing you're one of

them too. So are you guys going, are you really pitching them based on the whole relationship building aspect or is it really margins because i'm guessing at that point everyone pretty much has roughly the same prices you know same costs and same overhead yeah yeah yeah the the overhead's different depending on the facility and how they build out um definitely uh like like say with with the old Sim King Street or old Tattersall, their build was far different. I mean, they had installed a Dolby Atmos mixing theater, and they were, like, second in Canada, I think, to have one. And that was just to get one client in.

So it was this person. It was the movie Hyena Road. I don't know if you've heard it. It's a Canadian war movie. And basically they came in and talked with us and said, you know, we want to work with you, but it needs to be a Dolby Atmos mix. And for that to happen, they had to build it

and literally built it. But yeah, I'd say you're right to a certain extent. Overhead's similar, but the, you know, talent's different as well, right? And the more decorated the talent, the more chances that someone's going to want to work with them as well. Prices of an issue. Yeah. I mean, it's sales. It's all of those things. It's relationship, it's price, it's facilities, it's personnel. It's all of those things, right? So yeah, you'll end up with some producers where they're just looking at the dollars and pennies and think, well, you're all similar and whatever. And then there's others that won't work anywhere

else and uh and there's you know they had clients like that as well like david cronenberg had worked with them a number of times um sarah paulie same sort of thing away from her was uh um the first movie they mixed in one of their new theaters at the time so yeah it's uh it's different do you find that uh pitching talent has become more and more prevalent in the industry especially you know because now so much it's a good one so many different uh companies are starting to pop up and a lot of a lot of people have the same capabilities right and people are doing it for cheaper uh not better necessarily but like as you said if there are producers that are looking for those dollar values you feel like there's uh been um you see there being a bigger stress on talent yeah no um like

since joining with garris and and and with by the booth we're a creative animation company, which is far, you know, which is different than what I was doing with the other companies. Um, and there, that seems to be more about style and about the look of the content. Like what is the creative look like? Um, how that decision making process goes with each person must be quite different. You know, they might look at a piece of our content on our website or wherever, and then match it up with what they, they think their brand's supposed to be like, right. That's one of the decision making processes. But yeah, with us,

it's not about the name of the of our, our particular talent, it's about the content we've created in the style that it is but you're you're you're not wrong um like say on the uh let's say production company side of things if you had a roster of directors then the names totally matter if you had a roster of DOPs that would totally matter right because? Because producers really know them. They say like, what's that guy's name? Mr. X, I think it was, or Director X or whatever. He's got a cool name and has some pretty cool content and people want to work with Director X or whatever his name is.

So yeah, names can be a thing, but for us right now and the content that we create, it seems to be about the style and the creative look of it and how we can help them through that journey from start to the very end, ideation. Right. Hold on one second. So Geras just joined us right now. Let's uh let him into the room hey garris how's it going very good guys thanks for thanks for having me and i very much apologize i'm half an hour late no no that's okay you actually came at a good time because we basically caught up with james up until i guess up until he kind of left sim so the my next question was going to be how did you and garris

meet so uh i guess it's james me oh sorry yeah the yeah well yeah james and garris how you two met right how did we meet it it was very clinical i uh it was a dating website wasn't it? It was. I swiped right and here we are. Here we are a year later. It was actually, I had hired a bunch of people before with varying degrees of success because it's difficult. And, you know, being an entrepreneur, I, instead of like getting it right the first time, I decided to learn the hard way and do it a few times and figure out what I don't know how to do and make corrections. So I decided that this time around, I was better off leaving it in the hands of an expert. So I hired a recruiting company, a very reputable recruiting company, who I was actually referred to by

someone I was working with in the advertising industry who had had good experiences being placed by that recruiting company. So I reached out to them. I had a couple of conversations just kind of describing the role and they do a great job of like getting the information out of you. So I described some of the key things around the role. And then they originally put me in contact with actually one of their recruiters who was more on the sales kind of business operations side. And it was interesting because my personality did not gel with that individual. Great person, great at his job, but it wasn't right for like the creative industry. great at his job, but it wasn't right for like the creative industry. Um, and so I felt like the person that was, you know, looking for a prospect needed to really understand the industry that we worked in. Um, so at that point they did a great job of kind of switching gears and my

original contact actually took over. Um, and yeah, he, you know, put me in touch with a whole lot of people. And I think, you know, personality fits huge, for me, at least. So James and I kind of get along, I think, on a personal level, which just makes doing business a little bit easier. Everybody that they, you know, presented my way was more than capable of doing the job. So it really just came down to like, who felt like they were the right fit. And so far, so good. It's been a year. It's been a year. So it's very much like, like the dating app that we just described. Yeah. Yeah.

And the other thing too is he had reached out to a friend of mine who is, you know, the head of production at a big agency here in Toronto. And she told him, you know, ask me that I might know someone that would be interested and not thinking I'd be interested in it. And just because, you know, I was in a bigger company and all that. And, and I looked at it as a really good opportunity to, to go back to, to that smaller non-corporate kind of company and, and help grow and work with people that, like I said before, you know, aligned with me, you know, personally as well. So it's been good, like Gareth said, so far. You know, we should do Gareth. Why don't you just give us a little background on yourself? Yeah, I got a little confused on that aspect there. I'm like, one year, you guys have done

all this? James is the best salesperson. I know. We should have just said yes. All in one year. I don't know what what do you want to know like what so just tell us how you got into the industry and and you know i guess how you got to where you are right now how by the booth came to be yeah uh i i never know how to answer this question because it starts like at birth no I'm just kidding it starts it does start a little ways back though because I I've always been interested in like art and design I went to OCAD for design and like the only I've had like one agency job and other than that I like worked at you know Radio Shack um but I is that still around I think in the U.S. yeah maybe

yeah totally but I I mean I I've always kind of been doing freelance work like I moved to Toronto like from high school moved to Toronto and I was doing freelance work to I moved to Toronto like from high school moved to Toronto and I was doing freelance work to pay for my like apartment while I was going to university I used my freelance to pay for university like I've essentially had a job of some kind since like as long as I can remember so the uh by the booth thing I can't even remember when I branded that sort of company name but it came from the freelance that I was doing um and you know I freelanced for a number of different organizations. One of the big ones is I was working at Radio Shack and I got a phone call from a friend saying, hey, do you want to do the night shift at Sportsnet? And that was while I was in school, right? And I was like, yeah, sure.

I definitely want to do that. So I showed up and started doing the night shift and I was around all these people that were like motion designers creating stuff for tv and because I was in school for graphic design I was like oh there's like this real correlation there right and just realizing that everybody I was around at school was going to graduate and be a graphic designer I thought well why don't I learn some stuff from these motion guys? And when I graduate, have a, you know, much smaller pool of people I'm competing with. So that's more or less what I did. And then I, you know, I've, I had a number of like smaller ventures that I started as,

as businesses and things like that. And I really started to learn like the sort of startup mentality. Like the, there's this like a thing that I use or used to use. I don't know as much anymore, but it's called a lean canvas. I very much remember putting together this lean canvas around photographers in toronto what's that oh it's like a 3 000 foot view of a business so it lets you kind of like outline um what you're offering is who your target might be who your early adopters could be

um loose numbers around pricing like where your break even point would be based on like what what you put into the business to get it going and you can build tons of them uh around a single business with different models of how to approach the same problem so i just like identified i was doing motion graphics work, but I was like learning how to edit was kind of not, I don't want to say it wasn't hard because editing is definitely a skill, but it was something that I saw that I could also do. where are the possible opportunities in the marketplace and I'm talking like 10 years ago for an editor and that was the moment when a lot of photographers who were holding DSLR cameras were starting to move into like being videographers but there was a big gap between shooting and editing for them so I realized that there was an opportunity there and I started going after that market. And I think that although I had had like other business ventures before that,

and I was doing freelance, learning how to run a business and learning the structure of how to start a business was very helpful. And that was the moment when I kind of really created by the booth, when I was like, okay, there's a market here that I can see that I can market to and solve real problems for. And that's when it became more of a business. And then I started looking at like, how do I structure other things? How do we grow? How do we, you know, what is the business going to do beyond this niche entry point that I found? And then over the years, just have grown it by making mistakes and fixing things and always trying to keep in mind, like, what value are we really providing?

in mind, like what value are we really providing? Um, so what were, I guess, what would you say are your three biggest mistakes that you made and that you learned a great amount from? Um, I think one of the biggest things is not being patient. So trying to rush things, um, without really like a reason to rush them uh caused me a lot of problems early on because i always wanted something i didn't have like what can you give us an example um better clients what i would would have deemed in the past to be a better client which really at the time just meant a larger client, but it was too fast because a business needs things in place to support larger clients.

You can't just want the larger client and then try and deal with that yourself. Cause there's a lot of things that you, that go on in a business that you don't see or you don't think are necessarily, necessarily part of the tangible end result that are involved in you know client management uh so that just yeah speed is a speed and patience are two things you want to be like going really fast with your business but you want

to be thinking a little bit slower um which is kind of, I know it sounds contradictory, but it's definitely a mindset. And then I think the other big thing is being enticed by a talent's history or resume and thinking that just because they've done something in the past at another company that if I hire them they will be able to do that that same thing at my company I learned that that's not necessarily always the case so I guess which is why I was saying that personality fits like really important because like hiring for someone's skillset is a little bit different than hiring someone that's going to be able to like work within this business. Yeah. Those are kind of two being very humble is important.

Like being able to admit that you've changed your mind or you screwed up uh and you know like working through that with other people that's important I always thought that like I knew how to do things correctly and process was king or queen or whatever you want to call it. And I realized that process is part of it, but people come first and that you got to get that in place. And then the processes get built off of that. So early on in the business, I did that the other way around and it was not great. Well, that's not true. It was great to a point, but what gets you there doesn't always continue to, to improve and scale in the same way. So, you know, you always have to be assessing that. At what point in, in your business,

did you realize that you needed help with sales? Because like anyone who runs a business, sales is always probably not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind, you when you're starting out you want to think about you know what your product is you're offering your service you want to make sure you're really good at it and then the sales process is something that seems to always kind of be pushed back at what point did you realize that you might need help with that well i i'm big on taking advice from other people that have been somewhere before me. Like that's one of the only, well, it could be the key defining factor in any success I've ever had is just like asking somebody else's opinion and actually listening to what they say. and my accountant at the time who I think I at the time had known for maybe five or six years and now it feels like probably I don't know crazy amount of time he was very smart guy he just made a comment to me one day that was like not even as I don't even think he would remember it

or think it was a serious comment but he just, every client you have is going to go away one day. And I was like, ah, right. Okay. Well, if that's the case, I probably need to work on something that gets new clients. And, you know, and they don't go away because you did something wrong. They just maybe outgrow you or their needs change or any number of things can happen. So that idea of just like, well, that's someone's full-time job, right? So I should probably start figuring out how I hire that person.

And that goes back to like the school of hard knocks, right? Like screw it up a whole bunch of times and eventually you'll figure it out if you learn every time. So I just started as soon as Tom said that to me, I was like, okay, sales is a thing. Let me figure out what sales means. And it has my opinion on what sales is definitely changed since then, but that was the impetus for me you know getting on on that path yeah and you're and you're a really good salesperson too garris by the way like like i've been on quite a few sales calls with garris and and i've learned things from him so um he's he's a good salesperson but like every business, there's too many hats to wear.

And when you start getting more and more clients in, you have to start realizing, I've got to pare some of these things down. I've got to start sharing some of these duties or I'm going to get nothing done because I'm just pulled in so many directions. And Gareth is so good at so many things that he does tend to fold into a lot of directions, right? Which takes a lot of energy, both mentally and physically. It's not easy to do that, be the entrepreneur and run everything. So yeah. That's the marketer in James. I would say it differently.

I would say that I'm mediocre at a whole lot of stuff. So I got to hire some people that actually know what they're doing in some areas. I want to throw it back to James right now. Sorry, I want to throw it back to James right now. So you came, you started working with Garris in November. And then this year, we had obviously, like the pandemic and everything. So you probably joined at a very interesting time, right? right i mean you joined and then shortly after the whole playing field kind of changed right so you being a salesperson in a new in a new job like how did you navigate this new landscape new challenges yeah no it's a good question um my position is a dual role so so i I'm both marketing and sales um so really what it came down to is is

once it happened and we realized we were closing the the office and we weren't coming back anytime super soon I mean at that point we we had no idea when I think at the beginning maybe we were thinking weeks or months or or whatever now now we're wondering if we'll ever go back. But right away, we sat down and had a meeting, you know, just the key players us and, and discuss what we wanted to do or what we thought we should do. And we came up with some different ideas. And one of them was to do a webinar series and the by the booth live show. And, and that's been helpful as far as being able to get new conversations going with, with companies. We never would have had conversations with before in developing relationships

with them in, in a, in a different way than just sort of like that cold calling that I was talking about earlier. It's far different in this regard. We're developing real relationships and giving them real value. We've had it where we've done referrals from here from a Canadian client to one of our guests who was in South Africa, which was really fun to see. So yeah, that was one of the things that we did. Um, Garris, did you want to add to it? Um, I don't know. It's, it's hard to, cause so yes, COVID happened and is happening, but, um,

I just kind of looked at it as like, uh, similar to any other challenge that you would face as a as a business and i think that um uh taking action is like always important so like what james was describing was just us going okay here's this new problem what are our possible solutions and I think that that's just built into the culture of the business is we're always looking for, there isn't one option or one solution for any given problem. There's always lots of options. So James is just describing one of the options that we exercised in order to

maintain marketing and sales. We did a whole bunch of other, you know, less noticeable, less sexy things. And, you know, they all contribute, I think, to the success or potentially lack of success. I mean, some things don't work. The live show is working out really well. Yeah, no, like with any business that faces a certain challenge, like you said, there are so many different avenues of what you can do as a response and not necessarily all the time. It's the right one, but I find even when it's not the right one, you're, it's almost like

a trial and error, kind of like how you said, right? You learn what works, you learn what doesn't work. You know, like we went through the same thing and i feel like anyone in our position went through the same thing it's like how do we keep relevant how do we keep ourselves going you know stay sane through this whole thing i mean obviously the first few months it was you know it was tough it was tough it was quiet nothing was happening but then you know like you guys with your show we started this show because we wanted to kind of have some kind of consistency well Well, we started it for three reasons. Well, a few reasons. Yeah. So our reasons are basically, um, to learn as much as we could from the guests we brought on board. So, I mean, in September we shot, I think it was something like nine episodes or something like

that. And we learned more in September about the video production industry than we did in the five years that we were, we were in it. Right. Um, And I'm sure it might have been the same for you as well. So that was the first reason. Second reason was to network as much as we could. So we networked with a lot of video production companies, but now we are starting to expand a bit more and we're kind of going in the same direction you guys are going as well

to kind of like build relationships with future potential clients, right? Or even just interesting people in in in certain industries right like maybe if there's like a marketer that has a really interesting topic story or topic that they've uh that they're popular for like it's cool to bring them on board and just have a conversation with them and just learn as much as we can and then the third was also to kind of just build our own uh audience like get our faces out there a bit more just again like what you guys said just market yourself right do you find it's

a lot harder nowadays to kind of uh push through that and uh and really get yourself out there i mean with with content being you know so not polluted is the word but it's like overcrowded you know oversaturated oversaturated that's the word yeah with content being so oversaturated now like how do you think that any company would have to try to you know maybe stand out from uh from others um do you want me to go at this one james it's up to you i mean i haven't i have an answer but you you go for it. I've got an answer too, but you go for it. I want to hear yours. For me, I'm the one that comes up with most of the topics. You know, it is my realm. So I'm coming up with the topics, finding the people and running it so far.

I haven't found a time when we haven't come up with a really good topic, one that we wanted to do. And as far as crowded goes, the type of content we're putting out there, when we start, you know, when I'm searching for what we're doing, say on YouTube or Google in general, it's hard to find. Most of the time time it's people trying to do test to trying to do how-to videos and all that this is a lot more informational it's a lot more specific to businesses that are in our industry in our area most of the time although we are doing more international so no I've been I've been finding it good that way for us it. There's so many good parts about having the content that we create.

Like you said, we've learned quite a bit. And I'm going to continue to learn more and more. The last episode we did was on technical marketing, which we had some really cool technical marketers that really had some good things to say and some interesting ways of doing things that make me, you know, want to dig in. Well, I immediately dug in the next day and started trying to do different things that they had mentioned, right? So like you said, you're learning from it.

We are, and our viewers are learning from it too. So's it's giving really um like garris uh you know garris and i have talked many times about our show it's it's us giving a lot of ourselves to this show um it's a lot of time and effort what you guys do and what we're doing when we're creating these shows it's not something where we just turn on the mics and turn on the camera and start um shooting and and talking it's a lot more to it. Like you guys probably put in quite a bit of thought into it. And that's what we do too. It's fun. I kind of want to go back a bit to sales. So Garrison, I remember you mentioned that you met some people at the beginning and because they weren weren't in the creative industry they kind of

didn't know uh really how to how to do it for you right so can you kind of talk about maybe what they were missing i didn't know what i was looking for i i think i was someone yeah that's why i I mean, it's tough because like there's just different types of people and sales is like connecting with people. Right. And what was I looking for? I mean, that's a good question. Who's I looking for? I mean, that's a good question. I mean, when I think about like the people that I had there, so we, we do business to business sales. It's quite sometimes technical.

So I had in the past, you know, there was like a cold calling approach, which didn't establish any rapport with people. And it was really hard to build trust. So like there's, you can pull down a lot of numbers and eventually you're going to get a sale, but you have to put an awful lot of effort in. And then, you know, the chances of a repeat sale off that are almost a hundred, a hundred percent dependent on production to do a good job because you have no rapport. Um, you know, we tried email marketing campaigns and stuff like that, which in the, at the time, which the two or three years ago didn't work. I'm actually wondering if there might be a good idea now with a different approach. I had people who were real go-getters, but weren't knowledgeable enough

about the product. So again, it comes down to that trust building thing. Like they'd lose trust right away when they would deal with someone else who was technical and had some understanding. So if you're trying to sell to an agency and they have some understanding of what we do, you need to have some technical expertise to sell it. And then when you're dealing with direct clients too, when you're not going through an agency, you need to understand the technical side, but then be able to communicate it in a way

that everybody gets what value you're adding. So I think I just, I went through a whole bunch of different things and it it didn't come down to any one thing or even five things that I was looking for it it was like an evolution of our our process like our our marketing and sales funnel evolved and then you know the people that are part of making the projects happen have input on on that funnel and the adjustments that we make and we just keep doing it until it starts you know producing some sort of a result that we can go like oh that was a direct that was directly correlated to the way we approach this problem um and i mean some of the people that were in the

role in the past i'm sure probably could learn that it just wasn't the time right um so james brings like a lot of technical expertise as well as you know his people skills are amazing um which is yeah but i mean that's huge right it's, you can get in the door with a nice smile, but then you actually have to back it up with some substance, you know? So, and then if you layer in like a sales process on that, it's very helpful. Um, and it has to be honest too, right? Like we are actually adding value. So I think, you know, with some other, I hate

using the word sales over and over again, but with some other processes, it's a little bit more like, oh, ask these questions and get these answers and then tell them this and whatever. But ours is, well, we call it the value creation funnel instead of the sales funnel. So we're looking at every stage and every touch point in our relationships with potential clients. And at every single one of those stages, looking at how do we provide value. So we don't respond to an RFP by saying, this is how much it costs and we can do it or not do it. We respond with like creativity and solutions and questions and things they might not have thought of, you know, possibilities. And we work through a problem with them.

And we work through a problem with them. And then if we end up not being the right people to solve that problem, that's like a mutual decision basically. Or we can refer them to someone else that might be very helpful. But I mean, most of the time we're specific in what we do. That's not the case. Say most of the time, but yeah, it's, I don't know. It's hard to sum up in one word. It's a whole bunch of stuff you got to look for.

Yeah. I guess you're looking to not just give, not just do like a one-off project. You kind of want to build a relationship with that person. Right. So they, if they are after just the, the quote at the end of the day, it's almost like, okay, well here it is, but we're looking for something deeper. Right. Yeah. James, you always kind of say you want like a client for life. Absolutely. That's always my goal. I want that relationship to be so strong in that the offering that we're doing and the value that we're giving them to be so big that they don't want to go anywhere else, but they enjoy the process and they enjoy the people too much to go somewhere else. And that's my goal. Of course, I know it won't always happen that way, but I think it's a good goal to be shooting for. Oh, absolutely. And honestly, like sometimes you

don't even know where those relationships even come from. Sometimes they even yield results many, many years down the road. I remember when we were first starting out in the industry, I think back in 2013, we made a couple of connections with people that we worked with early on and we didn't realize how much of an impact we made on them because even though maybe for the next four or five years,

they weren't able, we didn't get a chance to work as much with them. Maybe they just weren't in positions where they could bring in content creators and video producers to help them with their work. Whereas down the road, like just a few months ago, we had a few people reaching out to us from way back and were saying, hey, I remember you were really great with video. I want to work with you again. And it's just kind of interesting to see how those relationships can foster even over time. It's like putting in the seeds in different,

in different gardens or pots. Yeah. And, and, and then it yields results down the road. I fully agree with that. I've seen it where, where I'll meet someone and we'll do work with them a year later. Right. and uh and that's okay um sometimes it just there's no projects that line up um until then but like you said sometimes they're just not in the position to be able to pull things your way um i've got i've got contacts right now that would love to do work with me right now but they they can't uh they can't pull work from their facility right now just because of internal rules, I guess you could say, for that particular company. But if they had the choice, they would do it. So who knows?

A year from now, maybe they will have that opportunity and be able to work with us. I'll still remain friends with them or, you know, connections with them. But like I said, my contacts are my friends. Most of them are. And I enjoy them, right? We have good times and we do good work for them. So it's fun. How do you go, like, how do you maintain that relationship

without kind of being annoying or like, you know, kind of sending him messages that kind of say, hey, you know, don't forget about me, you know, like, how do you maintain? They're not all friends. Like, yeah, let's be honest. A lot of them will tend to be acquaintances, right? They're not really on the, well, I don't know, maybe it's different for you. Based on what Gareth said, you might really be the friendly, the king of friendship. Right. level. It'll be about making sure that whatever communication I'm doing or sending their way has some sort of value to them. So maybe it's showing them a project that we worked on recently that's similar to the type of work that they would need done and just share it with them. Or just

saying, hey, we did this and I thought it was really cool. And I it's, you know, you work on Coke, we did something on Pepsi, I thought you'd find this one interesting. Maybe not quite those two. They don't like that. But, you know, there's a similarity between the work that we're doing and the work that they would like, you know, those kinds of things. For the record, we're in the Coke camp, okay?

Okay. Sorry. And then... But it could be an article too um you know sometimes i'll come across an article that i find very interesting and then i'll share it with certain people that i feel um they would find value out of those articles too um our show is one way of being able to keep in touch with them too, to a certain degree. So if our episode is of a specific topic that I feel that they would have, you know, find value out of again, that's what I would share. So yeah, just sending an email, just saying, Hey, how's it going?

You know, can work with certain people. But if it's someone that I'm trying to develop a relationship with and it's early on then it's probably little to no value i think that that email was like kind of dead before covid and then now that covid happened that thing like is obsolete completely like yeah what's obsolete sorry oh the the just hey i still exist email like i get that all the time right um and it it's an immediate delete almost because it's like there's just so many things going on in everybody's life right now that like if you're not sending something that has some sort of purpose and value to it it's kind of like like why yeah why add to an already stressful busy day you know like people have kids running around in the backgrounds now you know it's we've been

going through this for months and I think that it's come to a bit of a settling moment you know, it's, we've been going through this for months and I, I think that it's come to a bit of a settling moment. You know, some of the kids are back in school and whatnot, but there's still a lot of extra stress going around in people's brains. And I think if your marketing or sales stuff, um, doesn't take that into consideration, it's a, it's a bit of a, like, um, faux pas, you know, like not taking your shoes off when you go to someone's house or something. Like, oh, you didn't just consider I just washed the floors. It's like, you know, you're popping up in somebody's inbox,

which is essentially in their living room now. So like maybe just, I don't know, think about it a little bit, I suppose. James, what have been some of the challenges as marketing and sales going from, you know, fairly big company to, I'm not trying to say by the booth is a small company, but in comparison to in comparison to where James came from. Yeah. Right. Like it's, yeah, it's a completely different culture, I'm sure. Yeah. So what have been some of the challenges and how have you overcome them or what kind of solutions are you trying to figure out right now? Yeah. Well, I mean, for me, it was, you know, I hit the ground running. I think

the first day I started making calls and emails right away, letting people know that I had moved on. So as far as that goes, the biggest challenge, I guess, was just making sure that people knew that I had moved on and made sure that the story was accurate as far as that goes. When you leave a company, especially if you're going from a big company to a small company, some people can read into it and think, oh, I got let go or something like that. For me, it was very important for people to realize that I had not been let go by SIM, that I had let myself go and left on purpose

and joined by the booth for real good value and for a new exciting opportunity. So for me, that was the most important thing out of the gate at the beginning was making sure that no one got the story wrong, that there was no weird rumor mill happening, which in our industry can happen real fast and bad information get out there.

I wanted to stay on top of it. So yeah, I was reaching out to people immediately and a lot of them and yeah I'd say that was probably the the biggest thing that I wanted to do as far as challenges go it was you know understanding more about the animation process and what what what by the booth does there is similarities but then there's things that aren't the same. Um, you know, I was in a post centric facility and where this one was wider ranging, right. Obviously from, from ideation to out the door with production, um, and animation, emotion, graphics. So it was quite a bit of, uh, uh,

difference there. So it was about education and making sure that I understood it better and also understood the culture and how Garris wanted the company to be seen. So what about, let's talk a bit about the future. Where do you guys want to take the company now? I'll let you, Garris, know into that one i'm always so scattered with this answer which is horrible but um we're actually like we're on a real growth curve right now i know it's kind of surprising to say that during covid but um you know james has been doing a great job so garris yeah and uh it's putting pressure on our production pipeline now so we're

seeing like opportunities for growth in multiple areas as a result of that um so at the moment it's just making sure that we're uh you know making those happy, adding the value and making sure they come back. So at the moment, I mean, we are kind of operating with somewhat short term, I think we think maybe like a year out kind of, kind of thing. I don't have a, I don't have a five or 10 year huge plan um i think like our i try to make like goals that are attainable um and we can like actually see the success on uh especially the small business it's like nice to nice to see that happen so i think over the next year we're just looking at like scaling up that, that production pipeline and making sure that we can, um, increase the quality of work and, you know, keep the clients really happy. Um, something that we've been doing, I guess it's a little bit different than from say a year ago, just cause we have a healthier,

uh, pipeline now. So we're actually like suggesting more aggressive solutions for our clients. So in the past we would definitely try and help them solve their problems, but now we're reaching a little bit more. We're utilizing our network in Europe quite a bit more like on a regular basis now, whereas before we were kind of little bits here and there and, you know, a lot of this stuff happening in Toronto. But we're really expanding, especially because of COVID to become even more of like a global company with talent all around the world. Sorry, so you mean you have more, you have clients now in Europe that you're reaching out to and

doing, I guess, remote work for, right? So we do remote work for people in the U.S. Most of our projects and clients are in Canada, but our actual talent pool is what I was referencing. So yeah, like we were using talent from all around the world before, but now we're really leaning into that and growing our network pretty substantially. Yeah, I mean, like we have some ideas and things that are kind of percolating that I don't, they're not baked enough to probably start talking about, but as we're seeing the pipeline fill up and, you know, now we're booked well into the new year already. So, you know, when that starts, starts to really gain momentum like that, you know, in a down period like COVID,

that gives us a lot of options for what we can do next year. that gives us a lot of options for what we can do next year. I think we would have had a larger plan sort of answer for you if we weren't in the situation that everyone is right now, right? There's just so much change that's happening. The numbers are going back up again. So we don't know what's going to go on with production. Is that going to get shut down yet again um is trump going to get uh um in again next week or whatever that's a really good point because i mean one of the major pivots we made was we had built an

in-house color suite yeah really nice you know but now it's completely useless so I mean that was a massive pivot that we had to make and so you know now we're we have plans but they're not the same as our plans would have been um they're I wouldn't call them I wouldn't call them right now survival plans because we're actually uh I feel like we're quite in control of our sales and feels like we're in a thriving moment. But we haven't, like all our plans that we had, say last year going into, or I should call it this year, it's 2020. All our plans we had going into 2021 have changed. 2020, all our plans we had going into 2021 have changed. And not good or bad.

It's just, yeah, I don't have like a huge answer for it, except to say that we're just shoring up our production lines to make sure that all the work that's coming in is getting done properly. Yeah. I mean, to be honest, our industry is already so unpredictable as it is. And then COVID is just basically throwing a wrench in that and then seeing how much more damage it could pretty much do and how unpredictable it is but well our industry is unpredictable but i also think that we're really bad at marketing i think that we do a lot of like showing of our work and going like look at this cool project we just finished but we i think need to take a page out of the book of like people who market big tech companies um because they're responsible

for marketing qualified leads that go right to sales and you know sales is responsible for pushing that through into production we don't really do that in our industry right like we kind of we go what's the classic thing is we're a production company award we're a war award-winning production company yeah all award-winning production companies yeah we're all award-winning production companies and that's how we market um i think there's just a lot of room for you know opportunities for growth in that area just within our industry generally it's because everyone's like always referral like everyone we've spoken to they're mostly all referral based yeah uh anyways right so it's some like they don't i think you guys are maybe one of the

only ones that do sales of the people we've spoken to everyone else is referral based or they they we were doing sales initially and then they got to a point where they had enough coming in where they just stopped doing it so i mean i i think it's due to that if anything i think a lot of companies are pivoting and shifting especially when when you when when sales start to kind of work you start to tend to put more focus into that. And I think that's why it's worked out for you guys. And even though COVID has hit, like you said, you guys are still in a, in a moment of growth. You're still thriving. You know, like the company's growing. How big is your team right now? Actually the core, like by the booth team, just three people. Oh, really? Yep. Three people.

And we run a lot of projects and we have like a lot of freelance talent that we leverage to produce those. So with only three people as your core team, how do you manage so many different projects and so much talent, especially if it's across the world like i've always wondered how that type of relationship with working with someone say in europe versus working with someone

here would be like it's the same we're all people yeah and it's post right oh right yeah it's post it's not like they got shooters out there that they got to go and manage but one thing that's smart is that you brought someone on board to take care of again the sales and the marketing as well right because if you had to do it i'm guessing you would have been in the same boat where it's like okay let's continue with referrals because it's hard to like wear 50 hats i think like when we talk about like a talent thing like all around the world it's motion design work that we're doing right yeah so we we're not on location although there are ways of doing that as well um you know that's like a production service company is you can partner with them and pull things off uh remotely um but i yeah i mean

we it goes back to the beginning like i'm a big believer in process still. So we, you know, we put a lot of that in place to try and smooth things out. It's not perfect though. Like it, you're still dealing with, you know, everybody's personality and everybody's time zone difference. And, uh, you know, different people do things at different pace at a different pace. And you still have all of those real things to deal with and I don't know I can't I just I don't know if we're doing things right or wrong I just know that if we say okay we're going to do this and it seems like it's not working we change it and if it is working then we we keep doing it and we do have like an underlying fundamental process that we follow and constantly adjust

and i think that that that that's what allows us to do it um and just like me personally i have a lot of routines that i put in place throughout my day uh in order to allow me to like complete the kind of maximum amount of things I can do in a day. If you're not regimented about it, you just end up getting off course. Like I, I would usually try and start my day and look at like, what are the two or three things that I have to do today that are going to affect the largest amount of change for project or client or the business, whatever. And then usually two of those things get derailed

by other meetings and things happening and one of them is successful and then I just do that every day without any let up basically like that was even when COVID first hit us that was you know it's the routines that we have in place at every stage like from finance operations production sales marketing like the routines that are in place within all of those departments even though there's only three of us we still operate all of those departments and actually there's actually two more people there There's my accountant and our bookkeeper who are basically full-time. They should include them in the team as well

because they're integral in the whole cash flow thing. When something like COVID happens, I can very easily look at where all the problems are in each one of our processes, especially future cash flow, and start to make decisions on what we do with the business. What do we cut? What do we keep? Where can we manage cash flow? Like that's essentially what we did on the operation side of the business when COVID hit,

so that I knew exactly how much runway we had, and exactly how much time James had to start bringing in work. And my job as the person running the company is not to transfer all of that stress on to the other people on the team, but it's to try and make sure that we're in a good headspace and motivate us towards those goals. Knowing in the back of my head, oh, fuck, we've got like three weeks and we got to solve this problem, right? Did you just stop yourself from saying the S word and then you said the F word instead? Yeah, I think I did. Hilarious. So Sandra made that comment the other day about how I was 100% clean all of the time and I I was just like you know what it's true because in my non-work life I swear like a pirate so um new COVID leaf is that if I feel like dropping the f-bomb I just do it now

they can edit it out they've got editing skills they can do this yeah the magic of technology they've got the technology but the one thing i wanted to say though he mentioned about covid is is a lot of a lot of other companies and we've seen it all right but a lot of other companies sort of they started losing jobs or jobs got put on pause and it was like 70 80 percent of the work that you had planned on doing all of a sudden overnight you know paused and a lot of them just sort of stopped doing business to a certain degree there was a a few of them. For us, it was right away running and figuring things out right away. So it was great. Well, guys, thank you so much for jumping on the

Creators Guard Coffee Show. And you know, you really have shared some very unique insights into like more so like the sales side of the industry, which not a lot of people have been able to do. And you know, it's we really appreciate it yeah thank you guys no problem thank you anytime it's it's nice being on the other side of the interview yeah no for sure thank you for tuning into the creatives grab coffee podcast you can find us on spotify youtube instagram and linkedin let us know if there are any topics you would like for us to cover in future episodes. You can reach out to us at creativesgrabcoffee at gmail.com.