Creatives Grab Coffee - Creating Connections and Content in Video Production | Creatives Grab Coffee 59

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

Sam Rossiello from Captiv Creative shares insights on building and maintaining client relationships in the video production industry. They focus on creating a positive on-set experience and building personal relationships with clients. They also use outbound sales strategies, such as email campaigns and phone calls, to generate new leads. Sam emphasizes the importance of persistence and follow-up in the sales process. The typical time from lead to contract signed and project started is under two weeks for their company. The conversation in this part focuses on the process of completing projects and the market in Houston. Dario and Sam discuss how they have streamlined their sales funnel and project timelines to shorten the time it takes to complete a project. They also talk about their payment structure and the importance of getting paid on time. Sam shares insights about the video production market in Houston, highlighting the dominance of the oil and gas and medical industries. He also discusses the mission of Captiv Studios to fill the gap in studio space and foster a creative community in Houston. In this final part of the conversation, Sam discusses the importance of leadership and learning from mistakes in their business. They reflect on their experiences in business school and how it didn't provide the practical knowledge they needed. Sam also shares the structure of their current team and the roles they have. They talk about the need for versatile team members in the production industry and the importance of having directors with specific styles for certain projects. The conversation ends with Sam expressing gratitude for being on the podcast and sharing their website and social media information.Creatives Grab Coffee is produced by Lapse Productions, a video production company based out of Toronto, Canada. Reach out to them for your video production needs.SPONSORS: Canada Film Equipment: www.CanadaFilmEquipment.com Audio Process: www.Audioprocess.ca 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2vHd8BdbkMQITFZmDJ0bo9 🍏 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/creatives-grab-coffee/id1530864140 🎞️ Produced by LAPSE PRODUCTIONS – https://www.lapseproductions.com To learn more about the show, visit: https://www.creativesgrabcoffee.com/ #videographer #videoproduction #podcast

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, the podcast on the business of video production. Creatives Grab Coffee is hosted by Daria Nuri and Kirill Lazarev from Labs Productions. Our goal is to share knowledge and experiences from video production professionals around the world. Whether you're a freelancer looking to start your own business or a seasoned business owner aiming to scale your company, this is the show for you. Join us as we develop a community of like-minded creatives looking to learn and help each other grow. Welcome to the business of video production. Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee. Before we get started with the show, let's go over today's sponsors. Do you have a shoot in Toronto? Do you need crew or a strong production

partner to help you with your project? Laps Productions is one of the top production companies in Toronto and your go-to video partner. With our strong creative skills and extensive network, we can help you achieve your goal. Laps Productions is able to offer you production services,

white label services, or finder fees for project handoffs. Reach out to us on our website at LAPSProductions.com to learn more. My name is Mehran. Welcome to Canada Film Equipment. We are a boutique rental house based in Toronto. We are here to help you guys out with all production sizes. Feel free to contact us to get a quote if you are a production house and you're looking for lighting, camera packages, or lighting and group plan packages. You can see our contact information in the link below. We are more than happy to help you guys out. Make sure you follow and subscribe to CreativeScrapCoffee.com.

Thank you. Hey, what's up everybody? I'm Matt Bell. Hey, what's up everybody? I'm Matt. Welcome to Audio Process. We are a boutique audio company doing location sound, sound design, post sound, ADR, Foley. We service equipment. We do all your audio needs here in Toronto.

We got you covered. Come on down. Audioprocess.ca. Don't forget to like, follow, subscribe, and all of the other internet things to creativesgrabcoffee.com. They'll be waiting for you. I'll be waiting for you. And we're all going to have a real good time. And now, let's begin the show. Okay. Well, guys, welcome to another episode. And today we have Sam Rosello from Captive Creative. Sam, welcome to the show.

Welcome, welcome to me. It's actually Rossiello. Rossiello, sorry. No one gets it right, don't worry, don't worry. It's good to be here. Thank y'all for inviting me on. It's all good. You had some trouble with my name as well, but to be honest, every guest has a little bit of issues with mine. I've gotten all the different kinds of iterations cal kyle kyrel you know luckily dario's is pretty easy yeah yeah you'd be surprised i understand so where are you let yeah actually go dario i was just gonna like ask him to do a quick intro like you know what all our what all of our guests we just need, we just need a little bit of backstory. So Sam, just tell us a little bit about who you are

and I guess how you started your company. Yeah, so I'm Sam. I'm creative director of Captive Creative and also co-founder of Captive Studios, our sister company. And we started Captive Creative about 11 years ago now. Um, so we've been, we've been going strong for a while, almost a little over a decade and, uh, captive creative started as a wedding film company. We only shot weddings. We probably did about 15 of them before we decided that was too much work. Don't want to do that. That's very stress. And

yeah, we didn't get that deep. That's such a small number. It was like you experimented with weddings and decided that's not for me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, my, my cousins and I were all in school and it was a side hustle for us. But kind of quickly became a, became a full-time thing. Within five years, we were all three. There were originally three of us, all three making enough money to get by. And yeah, Captive Studios, on the other hand, is brand new. We just opened Captive Studios in June of 2023, so not even a year old. And, uh, yeah, yeah. We're a captive creative. Uh, once we got out of weddings, we immediately started doing commercial stuff,

small businesses first, uh, that slowly took off. There's a, there's a pretty large sporting goods retailer in the U S called Academy sports and outdoors. Uh, they found us, which was like our big break. And they hired us to do a couple of projects. And that was in 2016. And we still work with them today doing even bigger stuff. So from then, from 2016 onward, we really cut out the events, cut out the weddings and really just focused on commercial work. Yeah. A lot of companies we spoke spoke to they always have that one project that really helps them get to the next level and i guess that was what happened with you with that sporting company right yeah yeah that's

the one uh we we don't share that first video we made for them because it's bad uh it's real bad uh we've made much better stuff for them i'm'm sure it's fine. We're all our worst judge, you know? I'll show you the link after this and you can be the judge of that. Sure thing. What I like to hear though, is that they've stuck with you for eight years, you know, like the one biggest challenge a lot of people in our industry faces is the turnover rate sometimes with a lot of clients. And even if they're good relationships that you have with people, sometimes marketing needs change, companies change, people move around. But it sounds like there has been kind of like you've really grandfathered yourself into your relationship with them, which is great, which has allowed you to really expand into your studio.

which is great, which has allowed you to really expand into your studio and even having the capability to buy a Cinebot, which I saw on your website. And not a lot of production companies or studios even have that in their inventory when you think about it. Yeah, we were the first ones in Texas. There's another one now, I think, in Austin. But yeah, the client relationships is very, very important to us. We've actually, we try to make more relationships with the people rather than the actual company.

That has actually gained us even more clients because over the course of five, 10 years, people change jobs. Like our original main point of contact at academy is now with capital one and we work with him with that capital one so we uh we definitely build those personal relationships with people not the companies because people move and uh we maintain that relationship and they bring us with them which is really cool what do you think you've done that has helped you maintain those relationships um do you think you've done that has helped you maintain those relationships? Um, do you think that there's something unique that you've done or what are, what are some tips that you might have for people? Yeah. Um, we, uh, as, as a company,

as captive creative, we really, really focus on our onset experience. Uh, we make sure our clients have a great time while they're on set. Um, we hear from a lot of our clients who have moved video production companies that we're one of the, we're one of the most professional and fun crews to be, be on set with. Uh, we, we provide lunch. We, we crack jokes. We, we have it a very lighthearted vibe on set. Even when things are tight and stressful, we maintain a positive attitude, and we really push that on all of our vendors that we work with. And, yeah, I think the thing that's kept people coming back to us,

even as they move to different companies, is we're people people. And we really focus on the relationship almost above the content that we create yeah well it's part of it like we've discussed in the show before where you're trying to cultivate an experience for them they're also looking for that too if they just wanted a simple video project you're right they can go to anywhere if they want to get to the process of just shopping around for the lowest price and that's all they care about. There's that avenue too, but you're giving them something beyond just what they would

get with any other company, right? Your onset experience is going to be unique to you. It's going to be unique to everyone else. It's going to be unique to us just because of the people that we are. And I think a lot of times people in this industry can forget that you yourself is what you're selling, not just your product, not just your company. Yeah, yeah. And that's actually something we've learned semi-recently in the past few years is that it's who you know. It's the people you know. Yeah, your work will do some good for you,

win some awards, show some good stuff on Instagram. work will do some good for you win some awards show some good stuff on on instagram it'll do good things for you but really getting to know the people you work with and building a relationship with them is what has what has driven us uh the most uh even though we still try to win some awards and make great content but yeah it's the people that uh that keeps us going what do you do in terms of developing that relationship like after the project is done? Yeah, we have a process around it. We use a platform called monday.com

for all of our project management. Really, really helpful. We've been using it for probably seven eight years now uh haven't even looked anywhere else for another platform um just to all the creators out there use monday.com there's a free version of it you can track all your projects it's very very flexible um this has been sponsored by monday.com just kidding no it's a great platform it's a great platform but uh the process we use is built into that platform where we once we have a relationship with someone they're they're in our they're in

our system and we make sure we have regular monthly follow-ups uh for the clients that we really like to work with and we want to keep working with we'll actually go visit them in person uh kari my business partner is a really, really good at this. He'll, he'll go and grab a few of our team members, pick up some, pick up some donuts, pick up some coffee and just show up at, uh, at some of our clients offices. And that's surprisingly the old school, that old school way of doing things works really well. And, uh, that's just one of the things we, we do, but mainly it's just reaching up, reaching out, checking in, commenting on video content that clients put out themselves, because we have a lot of clients that do their own social, but really they come to us when they

need a bigger project done. But yeah, reaching out, making sure their content's working, following up on how things are going. Um, personal questions are always great to knowing, knowing someone's family and their pets and, uh, asking about those things. People, people really, they like talking about themselves and, uh, it's, it's good to, it's good to know those things too. They want to see that you care essentially, right? That's, that's what a lot of the time people do. I don't know why I just thought of this, but it reminded me even of this one office episode of when Michael was going from business to business with the, what was it? The gift baskets with the truffle turtles.

They are the turtles. Yeah, I was going to say, do you guys go back and take those donuts if they don't want to go to business? We leave them. We leave them. It's fine if they don't want to go to business. We leave them. We leave them. It's fine if they don't take them. Granted, those are clients that you actually have worked with. That's the difference. He was trying to find new business, right? Yeah. Yeah. New business is a whole different ballgame. A whole different ballgame. How have you gone about that in terms of finding new business down in... Oh, yeah. We haven't mentioned on the show, but you're from Texas. in terms of finding new business down in... Oh, yeah. We haven't mentioned on the show,

but you're from Texas. So for all of our listeners, he's based in Houston, Texas. Yeah, that's right. If you can't tell from my accent and the fact that I use y'all all the time. You really don't have an accent, though. I couldn't pick up all of them.

Okay. Well, that's good to know. Sometimes I hear that I do. Sometimes I don't. Today, I guess it's not as thick. But yeah, I'm from Texas. Do we have something specific to ask about film down here? I do, yeah.

Like, how is the market down there? Yeah. Well, first, the previous question was just more so, like, how do you go about looking for new business down there, right? Yeah, so really, at first, it started really at first it started referrals, referrals, referrals, referrals. Uh, then we started running Google ads a long time ago. We've given Google a lot of money over the years, but it works. Uh, it works less than it used to, but it works. And, uh, Google ads is really how we've, we've gained most of our new clients. We haven't done

a lot of outbound sales until the past year or two. Luckily, we hadn't needed to. But now we've Google isn't doing as much work as it used to do. So we're doing a lot of reaching out. We have some we have some outbound sales help that we that we use a outsource sales team that helps us make calls send emails and set up calls for us it's it's been really really uh helpful so far that's been about two months that we've been doing that can you tell us a bit more about that i'm curious about that yeah it's actually it's a it's a company called munzai and they they reached out to us over and over and over again they were very persistent and that was a good sign we were like okay if they can do that to us then they can

probably do it to potential clients as well and they have a very organized system we use another platform called zoom info which is a it's a it's a data collection platform that's where you can find emails and phone numbers right yeah you can find emails and phone numbers, right? Yeah, you can find emails and phone numbers for pretty much anyone at any company. It's a little scary, but it works for us. And we've made calls. The team at Munzeyes made calls. And we've actually set up probably five or six meetings in the past couple months that are in our in our opportunities pipeline now that hopefully will become sales in the next couple of months so yeah that's that's the route we're going with

outbound um kari my business partner he's the one that's like really focusing on that i manage more of the inbound stuff do you do you pay them or do they get a portion of whatever you guys close for them it's a it's a monthly retainer same amount every month doesn't matter how many sales they close which is great for us we don't have to pay out commission and uh they work really hard and give us updates all the time but yeah typically salespeople require commission but with this uh with this route they didn't need it which was nice for us so they get in touch with the client and then they like once the clients warmed up they pass them over to you or like you like put it that's the part i'm curious about because when you're you're doing outbound you're kind of like like i'm curious what the funnel looks like do

they just get in touch with the client and then transfer them over to you? Or like, how's that work? Yeah. So there's a, there's a series of, of things that happen there. At first they, they start with some warmup emails. They send some emails that they know are going to go to the spam account of whoever they're sending them to. But once, I guess once you send a few emails to someone, it starts getting filtered into the real inbox. And then they start another flow of emails.

I think there's probably about five to 10 that go out before, before they kind of give up on a, on a lead. They also reach out on LinkedIn and they make phone calls. So there's, there's a lot of touches that happen before someone actually responds. I think typically like seven or eight touches before someone actually responds and wants to set up a meeting. Yeah. I guess with the cold approach, yeah, you gotta, it is really kind of like being persistent, you know, it's not a matter of just one email and then it's like, oh, they're not interested,

move on to the next. And I was going to say though, like, I mean, it's only been two months, so it's hard for you to gauge, I guess, how effective it has been at this point. Like when you've got like five, he's got like five to six meetings already. So as long as he does his job, it'll pay off for him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, of course. So it's like five, six meetings from two months, you said so far? That's pretty good. Yeah, approximately. And I think maybe half of those have wanted a second meeting. The rest are like, we're not quite ready right now. Because outbound sales, they're not people that are looking for the work. Yeah, exactly.

You have to convince them. You have to ask the right questions and understand what they need and then suggest the work. But now you're in their radar too, right? So you're in the discussion, so that's good. You planted a seed, essentially. Yeah, we're kind of getting in their heads, kind of like Ge're, right. You're in the discussion. So that's good. You planted a seed. Yeah. Now when they, yeah, we're kind of getting in their heads, like, like kind of like Geico's advertising. I mean, they,

they're not looking for someone to sign up as soon as they see a commercial. They're just looking to someone looking for someone to just think of the name when they think of insurance. So I like, yeah, I like that because normally if how I always thought about is like, okay, if I have to do all that before i net a result like it's almost not worth it i might as well focus on something else but the fact that you have like another company focusing on that is pretty good actually because they're they're going through all the all the bs and all the you know no responses and sending out

the emails and the phone calls and the yada yada. But yeah, if it just, if they just send you the warmed up leads, that's, that's not too bad either. Are they very expensive? Like how's the, how's their rate? They're, they're roughly inexpensive. They're actually not in the U S so rates are a little bit, a little bit cheaper. Um, but yeah, they're, I'd say it's pretty reasonable for what we're getting. Yeah. I mean, at least at this stage, right? And honestly, like some leads,

it really does take time. Sometimes just getting the, like as Dario said, getting your name out there and being on the radar is more than enough. Even leads that reach out to you can take quite a while. Like one of our longest,

not our longest, but like one client of ours that we've been working with now for almost three years, they first started off with like a cold call from them to me actually. And just having conversations periodically over email and a few Zoom calls for like about two, three months before they felt ready to kind of dive in. Then they finally were ready to get started and we kind of moved through, right? So just seeing how long it can take on that side, it can take even longer on the opposite side because they're not looking for video at that point, right?

And again, it's unique to every company and all it takes is that one lead that you can sign that will become very useful over time, right? Because if you get a long-term client it's definitely worth it in the end companies itself oh yeah oh yeah um i'm curious for y'all what is what's the typical like new lead to contract signed project started time what's what's the window there for y'all like how long it takes usually yeah yeah not that uh not that long for us actually um okay nice i would say under like to to get them to sign is usually under two weeks once we have that nice

mascara has become a whiz with the sales process. Our pivot is slightly different. Like our, our positioning might be different from yours. Cause for us, we're positioned kind of like in the middle in terms of pricing and everything. So people that come to us, they already have a project in mind. It's very easy to just tell them, okay,

these are our rates. This is your budget. Okay. Let's just get it done. One thing we focused on a lot this year is just shortening down on the amount of time it takes to complete a project. I guess that also factors in the sales funnel as well, because instead of going through too many meetings, like we just kind of simplified it. Like we used to have like the intro call, then a follow up meeting, then, then you know like proposal stage and then another one after that and i just kind of simplified it to just okay let me see how the lead is if i don't

get what they're asking me i need more information i might do like a quick 10 minute call if not i might just go through like the final stage it's literally like i've kind of prepared like a proposal and i'm going through it with them during that first meeting and then by the end stage it's literally like i've kind of prepared like a proposal and i'm going through it with them during that first meeting and then by the end of it i have the proposal done and i just send it to them so after that it's like you either want to sign or you don't yeah no that so you build a proposal on the first meeting sometimes i have like a template that i use and then based on the email i can understand kind of like what case studies i need to showcase okay in that proposal and then i just go through it and then during the meeting if

they don't like those case studies i can swap them out quickly by the end of the meeting or either during the meeting or after that call is done then by the end of it i just send it to them and i just don't have to worry about it either they want to move ahead or they don't yeah and then that's efficient yeah i leave the ball in their court and then for our whole production process like again i want to wrap things up quick so it's like okay i need all this information let's quickly get started on that and then set up the production to the production date post again i've uh spoken to kira about this and we've we've simplified that process as well so like when we ask an editor like how long would this project take and they say two days well we've kind of let them know it's like i want it within two days like

can you make it work so if i give it to you yeah if i give it like today's what the third april third or whatever like i give it to you we shoot on the third i give it, like, today's, what, the 3rd, April 3rd or whatever, like, I give it to you, we shoot on the 3rd, I give it to you by the 4th, you say two days, I want it within two days. Because then after that, we review it, send them the first draft. Because our projects used to take too long, right? That's one thing that I noticed was, like, causing a lot of issues was that it's taking too long, and then it would take up more time on our end. But again, like, because of our market positioning we can kind of get away with it like that because it seems like you work on more complicated projects like your timeline is going to be way different from ours right yeah yeah for sure uh yeah some of our

so our time to from like when someone reaches out to closing unless it's like a rush project, like we need you to shoot on this day. Uh, it typically takes anywhere from like two to four weeks, uh, discovery call, maybe one follow-up call proposal meeting. And I mean, sometimes our, our quotes can be 30, 40, $50,000 plus. And that's a, that's a big decision for someone to make. So they have to like run it up the chain. Typically we're working with a marketing department or an ad agency and they've got like three people that need to look at everything and other options to consider. Yeah. It's, it's that beginning stage of the process takes a while. We've been trying to shorten it for sure. And we've definitely cut out a couple meetings and gotten our proposal platform working a lot more efficiently. So it all depends. There's always going to be factors that can extend the timeline for a lot of projects. What we're talking about,

what Dario and I are talking about is more so trying to simplify it in the most ideal circumstances. Like in our most ideal client project, this is what we're going to be aiming for in terms of moving things along. Of course, if it's a much bigger project where there's a lot of moving parts, a lot of deliverables, things can take a lot longer. And like even now, like we have like a project where a lot of people have to look at certain drafts of like, say, 10 to 15 videos. They all have to put their input on it.

Then they have to discuss to agree what input that is going to be. And then they have to come to us to let us know what's doable. And then we figure it out. And then the project can start. And just getting the feedback. That's on the post then. Like on the post, it's like we kind of like guarantee them like, look, one week for the first drafts. After that. Yeah, if it's like one video. Yeah, guarantee them like look one week for the first drafts after that if it's like one video after that yeah after that it's in you control it's in your hands yeah you

control get us the feedback and we'll get it done yeah yeah you control when it gets done exactly so there are a lot of there are a lot of factors in it and the reason we simplified the the project in the pre-production or sorry not so much the pre-production, with the leads was because, like Dario said, we noticed that there were too many touch points where a client or, sorry, a lead could fall off. You know, if we're artificially creating this need to do several follow-up calls and then create a brief call as a separate thing, it provides more opportunity for them to kind of, you know, get busy and not be able to move forward for it sometimes as well. Or go with someone else especially, because it's like if you need to get it done by a certain day. But yeah, and then especially on the production side,

like we were looking at the projects we were doing and I was like, this, it's not at a level where it should take this long. Do you know? But again, we're dealing with less complex stuff and yeah well we have everything we have the same the same problem even with our more complex projects like we just wrapped up something that we've been working on for a year um if if things were moving quickly we probably could have wrapped it in like a month. Um, but client back

and forth clients got busy. A lot of our clients, this is like a minor thing for them. Uh, they have a lot more responsibilities on them. And, uh, we try to, we try to be understanding, but we also try to be a little pushy. We want it. We want to get your project done. You want to have your assets to use. Uh, and that's, that's's that's the way we kind of go about telling them to hurry up it's like you want this you came to us you signed up for this uh you want to get your assets and we want to get those to you um so yeah no we have the same issue but just stretched longer i guess yeah but are you getting paid on time at least because that only becomes an issue at least for me if they don't pay on time that's usually when i tell them like i let i let them determine the timeline but my my payment timeline

does not change so if they want to extend things sure but i need my money now no i'm glad you brought that up because we used to not do that we were like okay same we give you the final deliverables you'll pay us the final invoice. We don't do that anymore. If you want to know exactly what we do, I mean, we invoice, we usually do 50-50, 50 up front, 50 when the project's done. But we've added a new clause that's, the second half is due 30 days after production,

no matter what, whether we're done or not, which has been very, very helpful for us and highly recommend doing that for sure i think we have cash flow going i'm pretty sure we have i got to double check but i'm pretty sure we have a similar thing um i just pretty similar we do have we do have the we we have the exact same thing i break it up into usually i break it up into three sometimes two if it's like an easy project i might do two yeah um but i do project management and pre-production as one uh production as its own and post as its own right so i issue them all when they're they sign the contract but they're

all due at specific dates and they're usually i think the latest is like the post one is like 30 days after production yeah yeah that's a great way to go about it because i was like okay three smaller ones like instead of like two big ones the it might might look easier for them to swallow that pill a little more digestible one one cool thing i noticed is that a couple times they ended up paying all three at once because they'll send them to accounting right and accounting sometimes might not check the due dates on each one so they'll just pay them all at once so just run them it's great we get we get all the money right away that's not a bad idea maybe we should do that obviously like if it's like a bigger project

and there are some potential unforeseen costs that come later on, you could always reissue another one or something like that. But again, it all depends on the project. But that's what we've been doing up until now. And like Dario said, it's a nice little bonus when we get paid a little bit earlier for projects. Yeah. Yeah. We love that. I want to go back to, sorry, can I ask him about Houston? Just about the market there. Yeah, go love that. I want to go back to, sorry, girl, can I ask him about Houston?

Curious about the market there. Yeah, go for it. Because we kind of touched on it earlier. I'm just curious, like, what's the market like down there? So the film industry, like, as a whole here is pretty small. We're, there's, everybody knows everybody. That's the kind of community we have here is in the film industry. Uh, all the video production companies know, know of each other.

We, we like personally know some of them and, uh, I'm not frozen. Am I? You are, but I, I think the recording should be fine. I can still hear him. Yeah. Great. Uh, I'll. I'll keep going here. But yeah, no, everybody knows each other in the film industry. There's definitely a lot more commercial work to be done over the more film, narrative, documentary type work. If you all don't know, Houston is like the oil and gas hub of the country. Yeah. And it's also the medical hub of the country. Uh, we have the biggest medical, uh, the medical center, uh,

in the country here in Houston. And pretty much all the biggest hospitals are based here, uh, that, that are across the country. And so there's a lot of work to be done in oil and gas and medical. We don't really do any of that. So we haven't even tapped into those markets. You haven't even tapped into the biggest markets. That's hilarious. Yeah. That's awesome though. Yeah. It's great. I don't want to call those industries boring, but there is creative stuff to be done in those industries. But we, we tend to lean towards the retail, uh, more, more of the alternate services that, that people have in Houston, real estate products, uh, technology. Um, those things are more up and coming in Houston. Oil and gas is like the, uh, the old guys, the old guys that

have been here forever. Um, and a lot of video production companies work in oil and gas and work in medical and they, they're very successful and that's all they do. Um, we've, we've kind of stayed out of that industry. I don't want to say on purpose, but our, our creative vision and where we want to go as a company doesn't really align with that. But overall, Houston's got lots of opportunity for video, which is one of the reasons why we decided to open Captive Studios. We saw the lack of studios. There's very few professional film studios here in Houston. And Captive Studios is now the largest. I hope it's it's almost the largest I think we compare with one other studio in size. But we are the largest virtual production studio in Houston.

Yeah, so the lead into that was, as a video production company, we saw the lack of studio space in Houston. There's very few big film studios here. We're one of two of the largest spaces here in Houston, and we are the largest virtual production studio in Houston. We opened Captive Studios initially, or we thought of the idea initially because, because of that lack of studios, but that was about two years ago that we really started thinking about this and in a serious way. And, uh, as we got into it, we also realized that the creative industry here in Houston also needed a place to, uh, to live and to collaborate and have workshops.

And there really wasn't a place to bring all the creatives together. And that's one of the other big missions of Captive Studios is to host events, host workshops, educate the people of Houston and to show people in Houston that there are other creatives out there. Something that we've realized a lot with Captive Creative is agencies come to us and they see our work. We show a proposal and they're like, oh my gosh, I thought I had to go to LA for this. I thought I had to go to New York for this. And that's very common. I mean, we hear that like monthly, at least from people. And that's something we've we've realized with captive studios is Houston doesn't have the infrastructure that it needs to be on that level of LA and be on that level of Georgia.

So we want to help get Houston to that point where films want to come shoot here and TV shows want to come shoot here. And that's, that's the big hope with captive studios is to make Houston more of a hub for film production. So that's, that's kind of the genesis of captive studios. Since we opened, we've probably had about 10 workshops since last June, we actually just wrapped up our biggest one about a month ago, a month from, yeah, the beginning of March, we had a big event with red digital cinema. Um, and the YouTuber named Brandon Washington, he's, he's, uh, he's pretty big in Houston. He's got over a hundred thousand subscribers and he's pretty popular and he helped host that with us. And he pulled his, he's got a lot of connections to the camera and film industry.

And he actually got a couple red digital cinema trainers to come and teach people about red cameras. We probably had about 70, 80 people here and 16 red cameras all in the building, which is super cool. Um, I'd never seen so many red cameras all in one place before. Um, but yeah, that's, that's the kind of thing we're doing in captive studios and it's, uh, it's working. We see it. People are getting excited.

Um, people are, people have great things to say when they come here. They're like, I'm so glad that y'all are here and putting on these things for people. And we're, we're just, we're hoping it'll be fruitful for us and for the city in general. One really unique thing that you did that a lot of other companies dream of doing is that that a lot of other companies dream of doing is that is creating a studio space because the problem is a lot of people a lot of production companies want to open up their own studios and their own spaces and things like that they're doing it in cities and locations where there's such an abundant uh number of options especially on the medium to small end of things there's so like here in toronto there are so many spaces

that people can rent out for anything, like from small to medium sized projects. And even on the higher end projects, there are massive studios here, right? So if you wanted to open up a studio here, you'd be throwing money down the garbage, essentially at that point. Luckily for you,

you found a huge gap in the market in Houston and went all out. Instead of just creating a smaller studio space that's more unique to you you know that you could use you you went above beyond because you knew that there actually is potential here for growth and really like you said there really is only one other studio there that is competing with you and you can set the standard for the industry there so like that's that's the reason why I think yours will definitely be a success down there. Has it been how long now?

Like how long you've had the studio for now? Two years. June. We really didn't even start taking bookings until August. So six months, seven months. I like the community aspect you're doing with it as well. It's something you don't often see or hear about yeah we're trying to make that a big a big part of captive studios the goal is to have a a legit very educational workshop once a month uh we've

we've almost maintained that cadence since we opened but we want to have we want to have bigger guests come we want to have people who are bigger experts than us we've hosted a lot of these ourselves and done the trainings we've had some people come in but we want to invite people from out of the city to come come in here and talk and give their insight and uh yeah we think it'll do great things for for houston and the film industry here might take some time but uh we think it's worth it how's everything you've relance or seen down there like actually before i go into that like is houston the biggest city in texas or yes some people will say the dallas fort worth area is bigger technically it's two cities but houston houston is the uh highest

populated city in texas and how's the because you mentioned the that with production companies it's two cities. But Houston, Houston is the highest populated city in Texas. And how's the because you mentioned the with production companies, it's kind of like small, everyone knows each other. How's it with the freelancers? Are there a lot of them or? There are. We're learning that more now that we're hosting these workshops. We're we're seeing new faces that we've never seen before. I mean, we we've worked with probably 200 plus vendors over the course of the past five years. And in these workshops, we're seeing people we've never seen before, like 50, 60, 70 people we've never seen before who are in the film industry and want to learn about it and want to grow in it. And, uh, it's really cool to find out that there's even more than we thought there

were here. But I'd say that the vendor network is still pretty small here, relatively. When you get into Austin and Dallas, Dallas has got a little bit more of a commercial film industry. They've got more, more finished out studios, few more commercial film production companies. And Austin, on the other hand, is very film, film heavy. As you all know, South by Southwest is like one of the one of the biggest film festivals in in Texas, if not, it's probably the biggest in Texas. But there's a lot of film people in Austin, directors, DPS, people who want to make movies. Houston and Dallas, I think, are a little bit heavier on the commercial side.

I think it was the same. Yeah. Wow. It definitely sounds like Texas all together is kind of booming at this point in terms of growth. And a lot of the things that you said that you're doing has been all pretty recent too, you know, studio six months, sales team two months. Like it's pretty crazy how things have kind of progressed. Like, did you find with,

cause you said you've been in business now for 10 years. Did it, do you find like a lot of like the push that you've been doing has been something like since say like the pandemic or has there been kind of like a bigger push even before that say for you uh there we were uh i'll say we've learned some things since the pandemic uh right now we have a team of six before the pandemic we had 10 people um which uh was actually too much. We realized we're not educated in business. All three of us went to school for different things. I went to school for geology. Justin, I forgot what he

went to school for, but Kari, he went to school for, uh, something to do with, with web design and, and that kind of thing. So none of us are, are technically educated in business. So we've done a lot of learning along the way. Um, unfortunately it's, it's caused some problems in our business, not, not knowing things does lead to, uh, lead to mistakes and you got to learn from those mistakes. I don't think, I don't think i don't think business school would have helped you because we went to it yeah like carol did marketing i did business in law it's funny i did a minor in entrepreneurship there and a lot of the stuff that i got from it it just i couldn't apply any of that to to our business or anything you know why because

you had you had someone teaching it that is not an entrepreneur that was the thing that i noticed that was the funniest thing that i noticed is that the people who teach a lot of these classes are not people who actually have gone through it and i mostly learned just how to delegate delegate or work with other people and projects so that was probably the only thing that I, that I got out of those classes, honestly. But in terms of hiring, running a business and things like that, you're only going to learn by doing it.

And you said now you've kind of like gone down to six people. Actually, before we get to that, you said that like you made some mistakes along the way that you've learned quite a bit from like, what would you say is one of the biggest learning experiences that you've had in your business so far? It sounds like a hard question, but it's actually easy. Uh, leadership really, really simple. Uh, being a good boss, uh, has been the biggest thing that we've overcome,

uh, as the owners of this company. Uh, it was when we had 10 people, uh, we, we had never had any, like, we didn't read any leadership books. We didn't really read any business books. And, uh, we, we lost a couple employees due to bad leadership. Uh, we, and we, we almost blame every issue that happens in our company on leadership. Um, we we've done some coaching and we've learned a lot about leadership in the past few years. But yeah, I'd say having a team, you have to be a good leader. If you lead the correct way, your business will grow.

It's almost undeniable. And before, like 2020 is when we started doing, uh, some, some business coaching and leadership coaching, read some books, got some insight, learned some hard truths about ourselves and how, how we lead in our issues and, uh, really made us much better and better people, uh, in our personal lives, as well as in our business. Um, there's a book that, uh, in our personal lives as well as in our business. Um, there's a book that, uh, I can't remember the name of, but it'll come to me that, uh, that really kind of spurred it for me. Um, and the, the main point of the book was that being a leader, the most important thing that you do is caring. And it seems, it seems so simple.

I mean, I,, obviously I care about my employees and I care about them as people, but I wasn't the best at showing people that I cared. I would think it, I would be like, yeah, this, this guy did a great job. She did fantastic on the project, but I wouldn't communicate that. So no one knew that I was really appreciating their work. And that was, that was the biggest hurdle for me is being more vocal and, and, uh, telling my team when they were doing a good job. Um, but yeah, I mean, financial struggles are one thing, uh, dealing with employee problems is another thing, but if you have a good leadership foundation and you understand what you need to be for your employees, you can pretty much get past any issue, financial or personal.

That's really been the biggest thing that I've learned in the course of the whole business. I'm sure a lot of people will take quite a bit away from that. Because, yeah, like when you think about it, a lot of the time with any organization or company it starts at the top if it's if it's not good at the top it's gonna trickle down to the rest of the team if morale is low from the leader morale is gonna be low for everyone else that's why you see a lot of CEOs and heads of companies a lot of the like some of them are very make it a point to be very energetic like we have we had one guest from from the UK Rupert from perspective pictures who is a lot of the, like some of them are very, make it a point to be very energetic. Like we have,

we had one guest from, uh, from the UK Rupert from perspective pictures who is like this, he's guy, he's like an adrenaline junkie and he shows that you, anything can be done. And then I feel like that really trickles down to a lot of his team as well. And you can kind of see it in the work and even in the marketing material that they put out, like that's a video production company example. But you mentioned now that you've kind of solidified yourself to a team of six. How is the structure in terms of your business, like with those six? And are you looking to add more people or kind of keep it the same? Yeah.

So we're actually doing the same, if not more amount of work now that we were doing when we had 10 people. So we, we, we become more efficient. We've hired, hired, uh, even, even more talented people. Um, but our structure now is I'm, I'm our creative director. I kind of, I oversee projects. I'm not producing any projects and we have two, two producers. Uh, one's a senior producer, one's a producer. They are the ones that run our whole, they're getting more into the sales process. So they're taking discovery calls, they're building proposals, sending invoices, sending contracts. But they also run the projects. So our two producers take a client from start to finish. They kind of act as account managers and producers at the same time. So they hire vendors, they, they do everything that needs

to be done to get the project done. Um, and it's also their responsibility to maintain that relationship with the client and, uh, make sure they're happy with us. Um, with, uh, my other two business partners, Justin, Justin is our feet on the ground guy. He's our, he's our lead director of photography. Um, he's, he's directed a few projects as well. He's also our bolt operator, uh, and will be our virtual production tech, uh, moving forward. So he, he's, uh, he's very much production hands-on. He loves, he loves getting his hands dirty, getting his hands on the camera, uh, traveling and going to shoot wherever we need to shoot. Um, and then Kari is our, our president and he, he's very much our PR guy, uh, and our outbound sales guy. He, he does a lot of networking. Uh, he's on the board here in a, in an advertising

organization and he's really, he's, he's amazing at building relationships. He's, uh, he's, he inspires the rest of us to do a better job. Uh, and when I say inspires, I mean, he tells us do a better job. He's a, he's very persistent and keeps everyone else on top of that side of things. And yeah, he's a networker. So we got a networker, creative director, boots on the ground, couple producers. And lastly, our editor, Stuart, he's a workhorse. He's fantastic. He can handle almost all the editing we have. Sometimes we got to outsource a little bit

but he's uh he's very fast very efficient knows what he's doing and uh yeah really it really helps us get done and post a lot faster it sounds like you got yourself a team of swiss army knives essentially which honestly in our industry i feel like you need to you can't you can't just get one person that only does one job and then that's it right that's like it's hard to hire for that if that's the case then a lot of the time you hire freelancers for that right um i've i've seen even like some guests in the past have had people on their team where their on-set person was uh was an audio op but then behind the scenes they're producing or they're editing. You know, like they got like a lot of hybrid roles.

And I think that's like hard to come by these days. So it's better to have a tighter knit team with people who are willing to do more and willing to learn more a lot of the time. Like, I mean, Dario and I have had to do that over the years and take on roles that we never really thought we would do. And honestly, even like through this podcast,

we've learned a lot. It's like, oh, this is what we should probably be doing. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, you know? It's like, oh, we've been doing it wrong this whole time, just even discussing these ideas, you know? And I think sometimes production companies just need to talk about their business to even figure out what's missing, what's working, what isn't working and, you know, just share the ideas.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And we we try to do that with our whole team, too. Like we have we try to have a monthly meeting. Meetings get moved all the time. But we call it our our team collab meeting. We do it once a month and we we open the floor it our team collab meeting. We do it once a month.

And we open the floor to our team. And we're like, what are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? What are the steps it takes to fix it or get better at what we're doing good? And each one of those meetings, we look at the last list we made. We're like, did we do this? Did we not do this? A lot of the time, we get caught up in like, did we do this? Did we not do this? Um, a lot of the

time we get caught up in projects. I just, you really get caught up in your business and, uh, you, you gotta step back and look, look on your business. Um, but yeah, we try to do that once a month and hearing from our employees, what's going on in the business is a lot different than what you think is going on in the business. Uh business because they see things way different than you do. So it's important to get that perspective for us. What were the four positions that you no longer have? Because you said you went from 10 employees to six. I'm just wondering, like, are they like similar? Like, was it just extra producers, extra editors, or was it like in a different position entirely yeah so we we had uh we had two editors uh when we had 10 people we had two two full-time editors we also had someone dedicated to behind the scenes and creating

like blog style content um we also had a uh a full-time on-set person. So their main job was to kind of manage our gear and to be our crew member. Whenever we needed a cam operator, a DP, an audio person, a PA, they were there to be that person. We've realized that some of those roles couldn't be filled 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. And it was the right business decision for us to scale back a little bit, switch to use a little bit more freelance work, a little less in-house work.

And now our model is producers. We look for the best producers, producers that have the ability to direct as well. It's something we really look for when we're hiring. We want a producer that not only can manage a production, but can also push the creative behind it as well. Someone who can write, who can direct, and who can know what the edit should look like. So moving forward, we'll probably be looking for producers, directors, and editors. Those are really our main roles as we see ourselves growing into the future. That's really all you need.

That's like the heart of a production. biggest need i think in this in this industry where you have to be able to do a bit of you have to be able to do both uh you know just to kind of help move projects along because not every project is going to be 100k plus where you can hire a producer and a director which has to manage a lot of things there's like a growing need for things to be more efficient to be uh more run and gun even sometimes and even on the bigger scale, I hear from other people where they're trying to kind of expedite processes, you know, be a little bit more lean. And that is one of the first roles that it kind of happens. And it makes sense because the producer knows everything that the client needs.

And if he's able to all or he or she is able to do the, what's it called, the creative as well and understand the vision and help execute the vision, it's a lot more efficient on the pre-production side because then you don't have to communicate that with the director, figure out their needs, and then communicate it back to your client, then back and forth, back and forth,

just on that side of things. It can get a little bit, it can slow down the process essentially at that point. Right. And so that's why I think that's probably been the biggest role that, you know, I think if anyone wants to kind of get into this industry, being able to produce indirect as a, like together is a big asset. So yeah, it really is. And, uh, one, one thing we have been looking for, though, is on the larger projects, we do look for directors specifically. Because we know we can't direct any type of project. We don't have the, well, I won't say that.

We can do anything that the client asks. But there are directors out there that are better than us, that are better than us at certain things. And so there's a, some of our clients even ask for a portfolio of directors to choose from. And we're like, okay, here's, here's the people we've worked with before. Here's a couple of people from our team that we think would fit great. And, uh, we let the client decide which, which director, creative uh mind they want uh on their project right so that that has become a little more common for us actually is people looking for directors to choose from when they when they're working with us it's it makes sense because they're probably looking for a specific style and you know we can we can do everything but

sometimes by doing everything you don't really have a style because you can mold to whatever the need is. Right. But versus exactly with directors, they have a certain style. And I often notice that when I'm trying to do outreach for the show and a company is like they have a roster of directors, like each one has a unique style and you see it on like the portfolios. And you're like, OK, if you want that type of video, you got to go with that guy over there. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And we're trying to build that build that roster we already have quite a few directors that we work with but we want to make it easier for our clients to to see and make it easy for them to make the decision and we kind of run we run the production director runs the creative yeah again it depends on the scale and if like you said if it's a lot bigger and a lot more specific mind is needed or vision then that's that is the best

way because like daria said being a chameleon can be useful but you know you don't get a lot of uh face time with time with one certain kind of project, right? You know, like if we need to do a food type project that's very specific about how to make a food product pop, it might not be a bad idea to bring in someone who has worked very specifically on those kinds of projects because there are people who only work strictly food. There are some people who strictly work on like, like maybe like virtual commercials or something like that, you know, with those sound stages. Right. But you just need people who have experience in that particular area. If it's something that is a little bit more,

you can kind of like step into that's similar to a lot of other industries you've worked in. Sure. But it really depends everything really depends yeah yeah no an example of that is we recently did a project for an agency for a large online retailer uh you might know it starts with an a uh they sell almost every product you can imagine you can get it delivered in a day or two we did this project for for them and it required us to have seven different animals on set including a couple dogs a cat a bird a lizard and a rabbit jesus oh my god that was a bit of nightmare it was it was a bit crazy. How many handlers did you need there? One per animal.

One per animal plus the manager of the whole crew or the whole cast of animals. But yeah, that was very much of a learning experience for us. We had never booked professional animal talent like that before. But we found a professional that that's all they do and that's like their job and they made it really easy for us. Um, they, they provided us options just like a talent agency would do. And, uh, we presented them to the client, but it was the point of this is that you need a professional to do things that you don't know how to do. Yeah. Uh, it's, it's going to make things that you don't know how to do.

It's going to make the client happier. It's going to make the project go better. If we would have tried to pull our own animals, our own pets in, it would have been chaos. I have two dogs and they can sit still, but that's about all they can do. Other that they would they would have uh they would have been running off and barking and playing yeah it would have been chaos playing they wouldn't sit still with like a 20 person crew they'd be running around no especially with a cat and a bird in the room oh my god it wouldn't have worked out yeah oh my god that reminds me of that one dog food uh company that we worked with last year and um the client the client essentially makes a certain brand of dog food and uh they wanted a yeah treats yeah and they they said like

all right we'll get some shots of like some of the people who work here with their pets so they brought their own pets and i remember it was yeah i mean we actually did pretty much all right with the animals they were well be they were well-behaved, those pets. Granted, that's all it was. That's all we could do. The extent of the shots is also very minor as well. I mean, Dario, it was easy. It was easy because the whole point of what we were trying to do

was showing dogs like certain dog treats, and so it's just filmed them getting fed. It's a natural thing for a dog. But I guess if you're needing the dog to do something very specific, like jump a certain height or go through. I don't even know what you probably have to do for that ad, Sam. But yeah, we needed some like little head tilts and things like that. The bird had to look in a certain way. The lizard had to run across the backdrop that we had set up.

It was fun. It was fun. Because we hired a professional that knew what they were doing. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

We're at the one hour mark. Should we tail slate this? Well, before we do, Sam, is there anything else you kind of want to share or talk about, or even if you have any questions for us? Um, I, I think I, I shared a lot, uh, the, the biggest things I wanted to get across. Um, but I am, I am curious. I saw the, a company called iFly on your portfolio. Um, we've also worked with iFly. I'm just, I'm just curious how,

how that project went with them. And, uh, have y'all, have y'all gotten to fly? Oh, no, we didn't get to fly, but, um, that, that came about through like a partnership with a local, uh, wind tunnel in, uh, in Ontario. So we were working with the wind tunnel and they wanted to do a workshop for like, uh, skydiving and things like that. So part of that workshop was going to iFly. So that's what we did. Gotcha. Gotcha.

Cool. Cool. I would have loved to go fly. That would have been really fun. I mean, Dara and I already went skydiving. Dara and I already went skydiving for real. But that looked fun. It looked really fun in there.

It did look fun. It did look fun. I actually wanted to book two tickets, but oh my God my god it's expensive it's like over 200 bucks or something yeah our client hooked us up and let us let us fly at the end of our day there and it was the first time i'd ever done any kind of skydiving oh really and i was i was beat the next day i had no idea how how much of a toll on your body it takes really to be in that kind of wind yeah uh yeah how long were you in there so maybe oh probably about two minutes and i was sore yeah maybe because he was tandem yeah because we were in tandem like we were

hooked up to someone so we were kind of like just we were at the mercy of what they were doing. Maybe there are certain muscles that need to be used to kind of maintain a level. Oh yeah. Like fall. Yeah. Yeah. Like kind of like pushing down on the,

a little bit on one side or like this to kind of like turn. And to be honest, like if you're also in tandem and someone else is attached to you, you have to compensate for that too. A little bit. Maybe. I don't know. I never noticed that.

Cause after we went skydiving, like as soon as we landed i was like oh let's do it again yeah because we didn't do anything we just hung on to someone that's it yeah you gotta you gotta try the tunnel the tunnel's fun um but yeah no i i do want to just end this by by saying thank you guys for for having me on i i think uh what y'all are doing with this podcast is exactly in line with what we're trying to do here at Captive and Captive Studios. Educating people on the industry, getting people connected with each other. It's perfect. I'm very glad y'all have me on. Thank you.

Thanks for jumping on. I appreciate it and honestly we'll probably make our way down to Houston Texas again and when we do we'll definitely hit you up and come check out the space yeah yeah if y'all need referrals for other people let me know

I'll send some recommendations that would be great Sam before you go where can people find you what's your website your socials yeah so captivecreative.com captive with no e that's important and captivestudios.com

captive with no e same on Instagram both companies are on there give us a follow check us out we've got some entertaining content out there awesome great cool thank you for coming on thanks Sam thank you all have a good rest of your day Give us a follow. Check us out. We've got some entertaining content out there. Awesome. Great. Cool. Thank you for coming on.

Thanks, Sam. Thank you all. Have a good rest of your day. You too. Thanks for listening to this episode of Creatives Grab Coffee. Please make sure to follow and engage with us on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and your favorite podcast app. Creatives Grab Coffee is created by Laps Productions

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