Creatives Grab Coffee - Restarting the Podcast | Creatives Grab Coffee 15

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Hello and welcome back! Creatives Grab Coffee restarts after a year-long hiatus. In this episode, Dario and Kyrill go over why the paused the podcast, why they restarted it, and their plans going forward.For first time viewers, this show is about the business side of the video production industry, with key lessons that are likely applicable to many other different types of industries.To learn more about the show, please visit: https://www.lapseproductions.com/crea... Subscribe and follow for future episodes!Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2vHd8Bd...Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...Instagram: @CreativesGrabCoffee https://www.instagram.com/creativesgr...Produced by LAPSE PRODUCTIONS – https://www.lapseproductions.com

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, a podcast where we talk about the business of video production. And we're back after a one year hiatus. Welcome everybody to the Creatives Grab Coffee podcast. Welcome, welcome. So what happened, Carol? What what happened we're gone for a whole year oh you know we just kind of we went on vacation you know to the caribbean you know it was just one of those things you know we just needed to escape everything right we were just so tired of the lockdowns we just said peace i wish i really wish we could have done and it's not about a matter of affording it.

It's more so like, you know, it was so random what was happening last year with all the lockdowns and the traveling measures that were constantly happening. And it was just... That has absolutely nothing to do with why we stopped the show. We're basically just trying to paint the uh an uh an idealistic picture of why but anyways anyways we're back we're back it's 2022 we're two months in and

we're now on episode 15 of cgc and we just wanted to kind of take this episode as like an opportunity to just kind of do a little bit of a recap what we're planning to do and uh what uh what everyone can expect next absolutely maybe we should start off with why we stopped and that'll go into a recap of 2021 yeah no that's we'll come we'll circle back to our plans for the show going forward sounds good so dario inario, in your opinion, why did we stop? I think we stopped because we just had way too much on our plate. And I think at that point, the show kind of served its purpose. You know, for those that don't know, we kind of started the show a as a way to just get back in the groove of creating stuff because we were jobless for several months during the height of COVID in 2020 and the second reason was obviously to network with like-minded professionals

and I think we achieved both of those and then once that happened we kind of just let it off left it on the side and forgot about it it wasn't't planned. It was kind of like, like, essentially, we kind of had the plan to re kickstart it or to restart it in 2021. But one thing we quickly realized was a lot of things that were lacking in our business that we wanted to kind of implement, or at least start implementing. And like, for example, one of those was, you know, redoing our website, implementing SEO and online marketing, because we'd never done that before. And that was one of the very first things we started to implement. And we decided to just take a pause on the show, revisit it at a later date, and then just kind of see where we can go from there. That I think you just summed it up perfectly. I think we were actually surprised that the warm reception it was receiving from a lot of people that we knew. Everyone was always like, oh, yeah, I checked out an episode.

It was really good and all that. And I was like, OK, that's good to hear. I think part of it also, though, is it's not that they didn't like the show, but I think in in 2020, people were all trying to kind of like push each other and motivate each other, you know, and it was great always to see other people, you know, still working, you know, amidst, you know, such an unexpected, like, halting of work, you know, because we knew a lot of people who were either losing their jobs, or, you know, losing their businesses. And so anytime, at least for me, like anytime I saw someone like being able to execute a project, you know, or still keep working, you know, you wanted to kind of celebrate that. And so people were kind of reciprocating that with you as well. Oh, okay. So, yeah. I think that's, that's the main reason why, why we stopped it. And then

now we're restarting it because uh i gotta admit i kind of missed it a little bit it was really nice to network with a lot of people um it was great to find out more about the industry you're in and then also just talk business with other people like um i found it to be better than listening to those Gary Vee videos or I don't know, whichever videos. I know what you mean. Like the feel good business videos, you know, the ones that are super motive that try to be super motivational, but are also very general and don't, and you can't really relate or

apply it. And that was the one cool thing that we, that I liked about doing this show is that it seemed relatable, you know, you know, how you, it's always weird to kind of like look back at some work that you do, you know, or like if you ever see yourself on camera, I didn't, I didn't think like that when I saw, um, each of our episodes, I'm like, oh, well, this is actually very casual. It's, you know, it's, it's, it seems very relatable. At least that's what also some people have been telling me. And I thought that was definitely a great um attribute of it yeah it was just real people just having

a real conversation you know and they were honest i thought like we we kind of shared pretty openly and the people that came on were sharing their struggles or their achievements pretty openly as well. Yeah. I think that's, it didn't, you know, like sugarcoat anything. It was just raw. I think that was one thing that a lot of us didn't really expect because I, the one funny thing about this industry is that we're always, uh, everybody's very in their own space, a bubble space, right. And they're all, or at least in their own bubble.

And it's hard to kind of understand what other people are going through on the outside, except for what you see online, right? You know, like to most people, what's happening at LAPS is basically what we've been posting or not posting, right? And that's actually one of the things I want us to start doing a bit more of over the next year. Posting on social. want us to start doing a bit more of over the next year on social. Yeah, we've, it's been a little bit of a hiatus for us in terms of getting, uh, in terms of like putting ourselves out there

a bit more like that, at least in a public forum, we've been out, we've been networking and reaching out to people and trying to develop the business internally, but haven't been so much on the external side, kind of been pushing outwards. And I think that's one of the, the first things I want us to kind of focus on for this year. And, you know, surprisingly, it's not very difficult, but it's also at the same time, hard to kind of keep the habit going or at least get started. Right. I mean, it's not hard, but it is very time consuming. Like that's the thing. Like this week I was focusing a lot on outreach for the show and it's it's so time consuming and now it like it's starting to pick up the pace too and we gotta

release this like i'm guessing by next week yeah because we've got to get that ball rolling i just wish we had like more people that we could just delegate this to yeah but you know like any like any business you have to start. But you know, like any, like any business, you have to start somewhere, right. You know, not all those fortune 500 companies, you know, they didn't just become that massive in scale just like that. You know, you got to start somewhere, you got to build the foundation and that's essentially what we're doing. You know, like I, I definitely look forward to the day when the laps team expands further than what it is right now. Like currently it's just the two of us who've been doing this now for what, seven or eight years. But, you know, I look forward to like a day where

we have more and more peers that we kind of like work with on the daily basis. You know, it's cool that we get to work with some freelancers pretty frequently now, you know, with some editors and shooters, but it's, it's not the same as having like a very core team right i agree yeah that's definitely in the three or five year plan for sure yeah get an office get a team it's getting there symbol style avengers assemble yeah we're right now on iron man that's that's where we're at right now we're at we're at we're at iron man too right now i I would say. Yeah, I would agree. Iron Man 2. We're teasing some things. We're meeting the people.

We skipped over Thor. Yeah, no Thor. We missed out on Thor. The Avengers Assemble, we get mini episodes of that every now and then with each project, but it's not like a permanent Avengers thing yet. That's funny. with each project but it's not like a permanent avengers thing yeah that's funny we should someone should actually do that where they um relate to the progress of the marvel marvel movies so it's like right now my business i'm at iron man 2 level yeah exactly it's because it's

like a it's like a filmmaker's blueprint at this point right yeah man that'd be a funny way to do it so what we're like a lot of the a lot of the companies will be bringing on going forward are definitely past uh the first avengers movie though oh yeah absolutely that's the second that was like the one cool thing about the first few guests that we um that we interviewed because they all were completely different you, not only in terms of size and scale, but also in terms of their niches, the types of work they did, their process, like everyone, everyone is different. I have yet to find two production companies that are exactly the same. Like they're all just a little bit different, you know, as, as Vincent Vega once said from Pulp Fiction, you know, over there, they have it all just a little different, you know as um uh as uh vincent vega once said from pulp fiction you know over there

they have it all just a little different you know my question is who uses uh mayonnaise instead of ketchup for the fries i don't know you know i feel like i feel like mayonnaise is more so like the really big companies you know ketchup you know is uh in certain aspects but i yeah yeah it's because you're selling uh i forgot who said this uh but it's because we're not we're not selling products even though video is a product i was actually debating putting product on the website instead of services but going back to it is because we're selling uh we're selling ourselves which is art in a way right because we're all creative so we're selling different artworks for each client right yeah now it's not saying it's like we're doing starry night or anything like that but it is kind of like that. So it's not like we're selling, I don't know, cameras where roughly it'll be like this and like that, and you can mass produce it.

Everything's like tailor-made to the client for the client. Exactly. And what people don't realize is no matter what business you're in, but especially in the video production industry, you're selling yourself. You know, you are in a way the business. And that was one cool thing that we learned from one of our podcast episodes. I think it was Chris from SVG that said it was that, you know, like content is constantly changing, but you know, no, wait, no, that wasn't it. Sorry. I mixed up. I think I need to rewatch the episodes. I think I need to rewatch the uh the episodes uh no okay let's rewind back a little bit here this is staying in this is staying in oh my god all your all your mess-ups are staying in oh that's funny no it was actually no uh john corbin uh from corbin visual that said you know

there's no one that could sell story better or sell themselves more than you, you know, only you can sell your business. Yes. You can kind of delegate some ideas, you know, to other people, but you can't entrust other people to be the only ones to ever sell you because no one can sell you better than you. And that was a one thing that was made apparent. Cause I remember early on when we were starting laps, we were trying to find other,

other people who could essentially just handle the business aspect of it, you know, and, you know, the sales aspect of it, but they can't do that necessarily. Right. Um, like they can't do it at least, uh, to the level that we know the business. Right. And so once I made that realization realization i think once we both made that realization you know it just kind of became a little bit easier in terms of how we interacted how we networked and what we focused on with the business there's some companies that i think do have sales people that are selling for them i know uh I know. Who's the animation company we brought on? Oh, my God. It's escaping me. By the booth?

By the booth. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. I'm so bad with names. James. Yeah, James. James is a salesperson. Right, right. Yeah, James. James is a salesperson.

Right, right. So I think after you get to a certain stage, you just have to. But by that point, it should be a normal thing to do, right? I think being able to delegate sales is when you have a little bit more of a streamlined sales process. It's very difficult to do it when you have a very custom-based approach. But yet they do it. Because I've started noticing with some of the other companies we're outreaching to if they're really big they have like specific people doing like sales and marketing or whatnot right so i think it's just a matter of scaling right i think

maybe once you get to a certain size it's inevitable you have to do that anyhow yeah i'm very curious about what the step-by-step process and the scaling will be because i know there were some companies like uh like like dorothy from uh what was it qv media q media solutions q media solutions yeah sorry guys if we can't remember the the names and the companies it's been 12 months it's been it's been a little bit of it's been longer than that i think, I think it's been just over a year. Yeah. Yeah. Just over a year. But anyway, back to my point, like, um, uh, Dorothy mentioned that, uh, one of the things that forced, uh, her business to scale very quickly was the fact that

they got this one massive project just like that at the beginning, which took them from like a zero to like zero to a hundred real quick type of company, right? All of a sudden you have to bring in a whole core team of people so that this project can be executed. You know, there's a whole lot of work that needs to be done. So like, that's, that's an example of something scaling very quickly. Whereas you and I were going the very, you know, the slow ETF approach, you know, with growth, you know, it's not like the stock market where it just like shoots up and down constantly like that. You know, we're trying to kind of get that steady growth, you know, so that there's like

a little bit more of a stable foundation because before it was like that, right? It was like busy one month, two months, then nothing busy another month, then nothing, you know, and we're trying to kind of break out of that a little bit more. Yeah, I think, yeah, we're trying. I think there's still a good amount of luck involved with that, but we are at the point now where we are getting more steady inflows of leads coming in, which is nice. Before it was all referral-based work and it worked. It wasn't bad, but we were starting to plateau and then pandemic happened. And as I would say, right after the pandemic happened and we were empty were empty till about september and september november it was like all the work that we missed out on came in and 2021 has been fairly consistent

2022 started off with a bang which is great yeah i don't think we've ever had a january i don't think we've ever had a january where we were shooting almost every day i don't think any company is or at least not many companies have that you know so we were shooting almost every day. I don't think any company is, or at least not many companies have that, you know, so we were very, very fortunate, um, uh, to be able to be given that opportunity, you know, and, um, yeah, so we're looking forward to kind of replicating that, uh, more so, uh, in the, in the coming months as well. I really want to get to the point where it's like, I want to be able to tell incoming leads when you need this by, oh yeah, sorry. We're busy for the next six months. Like that's the stage I want to get to. It's not that we want to turn away work guys. You know, we just want to get to the point where like,

you know, we want to dedicate ourselves to our clients, you know, to the point where like, you know, we're focused on them and we're not going to be like splitting our focus, you know, with too much work that's coming in. Yeah, no, at that point, all we do is we just refer the work to other vendors that we know. Yeah. Which is one of the purposes of this podcast. You know, it's like, we want to get to know other great people within the industry that, you know, like if, if ever we aren't able to take on a certain project, we would love to be able to just pass it off to other people that you know we trust can do the the work well or if we have a shoot in another city that that uh production company is in yeah i'd love to just hire them

and have them take care of it like and you know hopefully that comes back the other way around too but yeah it's mostly for networking first industry second and then obviously there's multiple perks associated to that yeah a lot of people see other businesses in their industry as as purely as competition you know and just want to you know avoid them or you know do better than them only but you know one of the things that we also see is that it's a collaborative effort, because like you said, sometimes a project is needs to be done in another city where, especially during the pandemic, that wasn't as easy to do because no one could travel that easily from within countries, right. Because of the virus. And so

a few, a few companies from the States reached out to us, uh, where they needed some work done here in, um, in Toronto. And we were able to help them out with that. And, um, you know, like we have a few projects now where like people are asking for certain cities within the States and, you know, this is why, you know, like we see it as a collaborative effort. Cause we all help each other, you know, we're all putting food on the table yeah like we're not competitors because there's enough work to go around at the end of the day no one can take it all because no one can even scale to those levels to be able to handle it all there's like natural limits in place like i think our business we didn't know this going in but there's a limit to the amount of work you could possibly do and i forgot who talked about this but um

like it's hard to scale past like i think i forgot which episode this was in but it was like easy to scale to a million million dollar company million dollar production company one to three is is difficult and then past that it's insanely hard i think it might have been matt from viva media i think he was the one who might have touched the touched upon that a little bit but yeah like when it comes to scaling a business like it's it's like the the i guess it depends though like in some some businesses like the first million is the hardest and then it becomes a little bit easier but but think about it like this think about it like this think about it like this though i think about the last month we just had in january yeah okay that took up the whole month

now we made we made some really really good money off of it but january we weren't we weren't yeah like we could have i guess like on weekends, but then we would have like been burnt out by the end of it. Right. Well, here's what we could have done. If there was enough work coming in, uh, in January where like some other bigger projects, cause I think there were some clients that were talking to us about doing some work, but it didn't pan out, but I was already ready with an idea of what we can do.

Essentially it would have been simply like us splitting off. So for example, on this project, it was both of us on it. Whereas if we had say one other project each week that we, someone needed to be on, one of us would go do that project with a team of, uh, shooters and, um, and crew. And then we would bring other crew for this one. So it just depends on how many people can manage projects within a business that you can kind of scale, right? So for example- But there's a limit to that, dude. There is a limit.

The limit is how much each of us can handle, right? So there's two of us. If we want to expand and grow in terms of being able to take on more work at the same time we would essentially need to find other people who can do what we do right so another producer that can you know handle and manage projects like this and just but then you're also yeah but you like look you're still leaving yourself open to missing out on other work because it's like okay if everyone is uh all crew on on deck for that whole month you're not going to be taking in any new business yeah because everyone's just

focusing on that yeah like think about like trying to handle new business coming in you got to prepare the pitch you got to prepare the proposal there's stuff on the back end you got to do there's other projects that are moving in other stages of the production process i don't know like i think there's a natural limit to it right there's always going to be a natural limit yes you could hire more and more people as they go but um yeah i mean but even hiring other people you can't really hire people that are like, like you can't really find temporary. Yeah. You can't find like a freelance producer like that, like just out of the blue, like that. Right. Yeah. You have to be able to see what, how much consistent work you're coming in and how much consistent work is coming in. And then that's when you can even bring on people

full-time maybe. But even then there there's that limit. Like you said, like, say for example, the limit for each of us to manage at the same time was three to five projects, right? That means that any given time, we should only have 10 projects at maximum happening at the exact same time. Right. So that is how we determine our limits. And then if we need to, if we're starting to see that there's more of a demand for more of that, then we can start bringing another time. But like you said, you can't just temporarily bring in certain people that manage all this stuff. Because again,

like it's, like you said, there's a natural limit. I mean, if you look at all these ad agencies that are massive or global, like they technically also still have limits, you know, otherwise, if they could take on literally everything, there would only be one agency. They probably have access to different things or they probably have access to funding since they're like a corporation, they might go public or they might get bought out by another bigger agency. So they'll, they probably have way that they, I mean,

they definitely have bigger resources, but for companies like ours and other people in our industry, we're not kind of at that level, right? Like it's still just, it's still like small teams of people running a business, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's, that's where we're at right now. That's where a lot of, a lot of the companies are at right now. And to be honest, it's not a bad place to be at. Cause it means that you and I take home a chunk of the profits, right? The more people you get, the less your profit margin is. And what else? Like even if you expand your business, like it just adds more costs, right? I think the way we're doing it now is pretty good.

Yeah. We're on a good trajectory, you know, and I like the slow growth because it allows us to figure out more things about our business, what works, what doesn't work, what kind of talent we could years ago, we thought we needed to hire, like as our first hire, we would need an editor, a shooter, and a sound person as full-time. Say we needed that. It's like, that's what we thought we needed. And then imagine if we decided to just go for it then, you know, because we all of a sudden had the influx of work, hired them, but then we realized, oh, we actually didn't need to hire all three of them maybe we only needed to hire one or two because of what the long-term uh projections have been right um whereas now it's like okay at this stage we know that we would need say an editor to come on come in full-time uh in the somewhat near future so we can at least plan for that right so it's it's constantly changing. Right.

I mean, I mean, look, there's, there's benefits and negatives to both, like expanding your team or keeping it skeletal. Yeah. I personally think for us, skeletal is the best way to go forward. Cause again, it's like, we get to take home a chunk of the profits. Like we handle stuff that we know we can handle. There's again, once you grow your business past a certain size, you introduce a whole other set of things you need to think about. But I think the way we're going about it now is fine. Yeah. Going forward, skeletal team, I think is the best approach in this kind of industry, I

think. Yeah. Well, it's because it's constantly changing. And, you know, with what happened with the pandemic you know everybody's focus kind of shift but at the same time one big benefit about. I don't want to, I hate saying benefit with the pandemic because a lot of people suffered with it. But, I mean like one, one side effect that came from it was that video became even more and more important and people realized like because of the pandemic everyone realized how important it was people you know how many years i had people like uh showing me statistics or like um about how important video is you know how it's so key to grow or to communicate with clients it's like people knew that but they also had their own

set of um they had their own set ways, you know, and there wasn't as much of a disruptor to the industry quite like the pandemic to make them realize that. Right. So there's a lot of opportunity now. And like, ironically, like how we're doing now as a business at last productions is, is we're doing a lot better than what we were, than how we were doing before the pandemic, which really shocked me. It's been, yeah, it's been,

we're one of the few businesses that's like done well during the pandemic. I mean, it's not done yet, but. Yeah, well, I think it's done. Are we done yet? I don't know. Well, according to the government, we're done. So I don't know. They might come out in like a month's time and be like oh no it breaks my heart to do this but we know i think i think it's completely done yeah you know what's

going to be really interesting is talking to international companies and seeing what it's been like on their side yeah we have we're gonna we're reaching out to people in the uk australia us obviously uh are there any other English speaking countries out there? Predominantly. I said Australia, no? Oh, did you? I think so. Either way, we actually did have someone.

We could do a New Zealand, maybe. That's very niche. There's like three companies there. That'd be fun to get. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, who knows? You know, like this is episode 15 you know like uh you know rome wasn't built in a day the joe rogan podcast wasn't built in a day they have

like he has like 1500 episodes it didn't happen overnight right so that's crazy 1500 we already uh we already shot two before this so today's february 23rd uh This is the first one that's going to start off the series. We've shot two already and we have like what? Another six or seven on the way. No, no. There's I got two more people that are interested this morning. Tomato. We've got billions of interviews.

But yeah, I think we're already past 10. I think we might be at 10 and 11. So if we do this, like my goal was to get 30 for this year, but I think I will get that easy. I honestly want to do it like once, like post once a week. Yeah. Scheduling the interviews so that we're doing them twice a week. But if we post them once a week, I like that. Yeah. Well, I mean, like the way we're kind of going about is where, like, for example, if there's like a week where we get really busy with client projects, you know, we don't want to, you know, divert our attention, divert our attention away from those projects.

So at the very least, we'll still have content for our audiences to, you know, be able to watch and be entertained with. Yeah. But a lot of people are going to be coming on we have to start reaching internationally to spruce it up because right now there's a lot of canadian companies coming on but i want to get like a mix i want it to be like mixed a little i i also don't want to do too many in the beginning because you know like so i i like having some of the content also be you know know, like topics that are like key at

that time. Right. You know, like the last thing I want to do is also like, if we do like, say 30 episodes in one month, and then one of those, uh, like some of those, uh, videos, we're all talking about pretty much similar things that are happening at that point. You know, like, no, no, we're not doing 30 in a month. Like, no, I know. I'm just saying as an example, like two a week at max. Yeah. Yeah. No know i'm just saying as an example do like two a week at max yeah yeah no i'm just saying as an example right yeah yeah no and then posting wise like it's just being posted once a week uh oh another thing that surprised me too is that the old episodes are starting to go up in like view counts yeah i don't know if it's just uh because it's been like a year and a little bit that just naturally got some views but

it was pretty funny about the, that one guest that you reached out to. Why don't you share that? Oh yeah. Yeah. It was a Toronto based company. I obviously can't remember the name cause I'm terrible with names, but what's my name?

Say my name. Say it. my name say my name say it forrest the bullet dodger god damn right mini dodgers bullets who's gonna get these references no one's gonna get the well i don't know some people we're talking to we're talking to movie fanatics they they better get these references comment below if you didn't can you imagine to the one guy listening on spotify it's like but where's the comment section just email us email us complaints at laps productions at idontcareatllifesproductions.com okay so yeah I reached out to this one Toronto based company they got back to me and they're

like uh we're he said they were too boring to come on the show which I think was a cop-out but he's like I'm actually a fan of the show and he took he sent me a screenshot of his apple podcast playlist oh yeah he was listening to i forget which episode but he was listening to it am i that's that's cool to know that that um as little of a show that it was at the time you know that it actually got a little bit of outreach um i don't know how it probably got into their hands because we didn't do all that much marketing back then right barely so i don't know maybe it has something to do with the name of the podcast you know because it's a pretty pretty catchy one creative scrap coffee which is funny because i don't drink coffee anymore so oh you're drinking tea too well i'm i'm i'm doing the double i got my

toronto zoo mug i i got i got tea and coffee oh you're mixing it no i just have a coffee cup from earlier that's all i just wanted to have tea for the episode creatives grab tea it doesn't have the same vibe to it it doesn't have the same ring nobody ever says you want to go get tea who says that me i've never emailed uh um i've never networked with people and said hey you know what we need to do we need to go and catch up over a cup of tea unless you know what we have in england in england with the uk we have to do it there we're gonna make sure we like get only english breakfast you know keep it keep it simple oh my god i would love an english breakfast in the morning you know if i was really rich i would just get a i would hire a chef and i would just as soon as i wake up

i would just have the breakfast right there that's like my goal in life you ever fantasize about like winning the lottery and the stuff you do no because i don't want i don't want to i don't want to depress myself i let myself sometimes and it's an awful experience by the end of it. Why do you do this? You like torturing yourself. You know what I do? You know what I do? I fantasize like, oh, man, what if I bought that $8,000 with the ship in 2019?

I'd be like a five billion. I'd be a billionaire. I'd have $5 billion. What would I do with all that money? The crypto market is one scary place especially like nowadays it's just like constantly like it's it's giving me a stronger stomach i will say this i used to be so risk averse are you checking it out like every day you're not supposed to check it out every day because like you i also like to torture myself listen you don't know torture okay

my my chain link and polka dot you don't know torture what's happened to my babies make it sound like these are trading cards you know they don't even sound like stocks they sound like trading cards my chain link my polka dot like what is funny is it's a lot of companies have the dumbest names when you think about it like that like facebook but it made sense because you know it's a book it's an online it wasn't it's not really a book it's not really a book though it was yeah yeah like there was another name for it originally they had another one it was like face mash or something like that uh they had like a different name but that one was that one was where they were rating students. To think,

to think, to think that company just started because Zuckerberg wanted to get laid really bad. Wanted to hook up with college eds. You know, what's that's how it started though. You might laugh. It's true.

A lot of earth's uh achievements and advances have been in the pursuit of going of getting laid yes look at what happened in troy oh yeah the battle for troy was all because one one one prince took the other king's wife and millions died because of that such a shame anyways yeah we're about to go on uh we're going on a tangent you know this ceased to be a video production podcast type of type of chat we have in our whatsapp group other people care about that uh Okay, going forward though.

Yeah. The focus for the podcast is also going to be that it's strictly focused on the business side of the video production industry. We'll obviously talk creative as well when the opportunity arises, but that's going to be the focus for us. Yeah. I actually got that from John Corbin,

from Corbin Visual, because I was helping him out on a shoot. And he mentions to dp ken that uh we have a podcast and then ken was like oh what's it about it's like oh they do a podcast on the video production industry i'm like oh my god of course that's what we do yeah because we were originally trying to make it like a jack-of-all-trades type podcast where we talk to creatives and people from different parts of the industry, like in the marketing. And if you listen to the other episodes, like the intro we have for it,

it's so convoluted. Like we're trying to figure out a way to like be open, like leave it open ended. It's like, we're not just doing video production companies, but to be honest, I feel perfect. I feel perfectly like calm and confident talking to other video, video production companies. It just feels like a natural thing. I think if we spoke to like ad agencies at the moment,

at least like we just wouldn't know what to talk to them about, you know? Yeah. Cause I think the one thing that we, as we mentioned before, is that the show needs to be relatable to the people watching it, right. At least to its audience. And, you know, like we're basically sharing our experiences and not comparing necessarily, but kind of like sharing with other people so that they could learn from ours and then other, and so that we could also learn from them. Because the one thing that, as we mentioned before, is that, you know,

we think we're in our own bubble where we're, we're only experiencing these things ourselves. Everyone else is a success. Everyone else is, is. Everyone else is thriving. It's not like we're the only ones suffering. No, no, everybody has very similar challenges, especially when it comes to starting a business. You know, even though we're in the video production industry, a lot of the challenges that we face running a business,

you know, other people face in other industries as well. Like the grass is not always greener on the other side type of thing. Yeah. It's like, oh, you know what? It may be greener on the other side or it may look like it is, but you know, that's what we call social media. It makes it, it's a filter that makes it look greener. You know, I'm just glad to have grass you know considering that having land in toronto is next to impossible with houses going 600 000 over asking which i was just seeing an article about about an hour ago and i'm like listen how lucky are we though that we're self-employed and we can kind of we can decide how much money we want to make versus like someone who's employed

where it's like how much we want to make you know obviously but it's like you know like i i know obviously like we're not gonna like make like a million dollars a day type of thing but it's like if we're doing a nine to five thing it'd be oh it's more locked in like that one is a little bit more locked in whereas this one it's like yeah we could make there's potential for more potential there's potential yeah like at least that that calms me down a little bit because it's like if i don't make a lot this year it's because i'm a i was being a bum so it better motivate me for the next year you know yeah it's yeah it's it's nice to know um it's nice to know like the work that we would put in you know like it will it will

be recognized and like it will be it will move forward you know like well i i did this one networking event with the american marketing association toronto chapter they were talking about how people always want to see how valued they are within the organization that they work with and it was interesting just hearing people talking about, you know, working with teams and other people, whereas, you know, it's just the two of us, right. You know, and pretty much the immediate clients that we work with. And I feel like a lot of the recognition and, uh, you know, and, uh, feel good that we get from that is, you know, like creating great work for our clients and seeing them happy with the work that we do. And so like, that's what I'm always striving for, you know, and, uh, and pushing for our business, you know, and I feel like

we're slowly, slowly growing and growing. I actually did like a whole roadmap for the, for our business. And there's really not that, like, it seems like there's a lot of work we have to do to get to where we want to be, but there's actually not that much. Like you just have to do to get to where we want to be but there's actually not that much like you just have to do it yeah like when i broke it down i was like oh it's only yeah i was like it's only a couple of things it's not that bad like yeah for example like uh this podcast i we already said why we're doing it um and the steps to doing that like it's just a little bit every day just slowly growing the list of people to reach out to send like a couple of emails a day connecting with people or applying with other people and even just how we're going forward with these ones is just the editing is so easy like it's going to take like two minutes to edit this thing and then just upload it compared to how we were doing it before

it was like yeah three angles we had four angles three audio uh don't even talk to me about that stuff it used to take like half a day to go through that yeah we want to make this content easy and simple for people to watch because you know and for us especially because like oh that was oh my god yeah that was another reason why we kind of like left it on the side because it was too time consuming to go through the editing that's what it was yeah it definitely was that because uh we would have to get the one mistake we did before we were trying to make it like a show show when it wasn't when it wasn't there and so we would have to get together uh for each episode to film ourselves on a zoom call with a client so we would have to set up in kiro's very small like room like his uh his study over there yeah oh my god

it was it was a nightmare because then we we'd start sweating because there was no ventilation it's a small room it's not meant for that much light it was it was like we had like three massive lights lights three massive lights three cameras a small a small table with chairs it's like it's a study for like one one person to work in essentially right not so much and also i'd also have to spend like 30 minutes driving down 30 minutes driving back up there goes an hour of my day like it was just a nightmare. Now it's so simple. We're all in our office setups over here and it's easy to go.

Like right after this, I'm just going to slap on like the logo at the beginning, outro at the end with the social media, CTAs and icons and links and whatever. And that's it. Like this episode is good to go. Yeah. Sometimes you just,

one thing people don't realize is that keeping things simple does not mean you have to really necessarily sacrifice on production quality. You know, production quality does not equate to things being super convoluted or complicated, right? You know, it's just being smart and knowing how to make simple effective. Because once you do that, production value is very easy to kind of add into it. You know, it doesn't matter. Like if we were to do this show in 8k versus HD,

there's no benefit to it, you know, and, uh, the product, the supposed production value is lost because of the type of content it is. Right. You know, it, that only, um, production quality only is super key like for example if you're if you're shooting for something in like a movie theater right shooting 8k versus hd is going to be noticeable right so that's not really i think in the movie they show they show like hd quality stuff in the movie you know what i mean like they have a little bit more flexibility with it so i'm just giving an example this isn is yeah yeah yeah but then going back to it so there's this podcast there's uh uh just we just got to keep making blog posts for seo purposes you know and then we got to do their associated

vlog for each blog post so that's three right there then we just got to post on social media and like i think uh just oh yeah we got to do some courses just to up our skills we got to do google adwords analytics um we need to learn adobe um in design some photoshop there as well yeah that's it really like we don't have we don't have a lot of stuff we got to do to be yeah that's more on the technical side and like we obviously also want to continue to be. That's more on the technical side. And like, we obviously also want to continue to grow creatively, you know, and like one thing that we, that was a bit on the back burner for a few, a few years now, because of the pandemic was doing more creative type projects, you know, like also personal ones.

And I think that is the key to grow creatively a little bit as well, because up until now, we've just been focused on the business side of things which are very important but we also have to remember to also continue to grow uh creatively as well yeah like some mini docs would be cool i really like the one we did um and what i also want us to start doing is like um every month has specific events that are going on and we should do like spec spots for those months like yeah or something around that not necessarily a spec spot but like something i mean something related to related to that like even but even for like the spec spot

we can create like a fake company that we're doing it for and then we could even get the url for it and just have it redirect to our website and should we do it for e-c could even get the url for it and then just have it redirect to our website and should we do it for e-corp it's already taken i can get celia to just do the logo design for us so she just does like a fake logo and then like we pretend it's like a real company and whatnot like something like that's cool right like yeah but each month has like a specific thing like you have earth day and i don't know when we have mother's day. And that's for that whole month. Father's day.

There's Canada day. I don't know. There's like a bunch of stuff we could do like spec spots for those. Yeah. It all depends on how we delegate our time. We have, we have to just be organized on that. And that's,

that's the challenge. So it's like, we'll, we'll see kind of where it goes as the months go. But you know, Yeah. Like guys, like what we just told you right now is basically what we have planned for the year. But the thing is, it's just Carol and I doing all that stuff. Yeah.

And we get distracted and we get distracted at times too. It's not necessarily distractions, but it's like, it's not the, the saying of like another, a fire just popped up. Right. But it's like, like sometimes, for example, working on a client project, you know, and where it's like nearly completed, you know, so then we start focusing on like some of the creative, but then the client needs like some changes made or they need to, um, uh, they need to jump on a call for some other project, you know, like that's how a business is, right? Things pop up constantly, you know, whether it's expected or not, and you have to learn to account for that. Right. And, and that's just how it is. So we'll see where it goes. We'll see where it goes in the

next few months, but I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be fun. Uh, I don't know what else to say, but I think people are probably sick and tired of listening to us talk for how long has it been now it's probably been like about an hour or so yeah that's the other thing too we're gonna keep these short going forward yeah one hour bang bang boom done air cold short under an hour that's that's the that's the goal that's the goal um but yeah we essentially wanted to just be like a, like a good platform for people to just, you know, sit back, relax, you know, not take three hours or four hours, like some podcasts are, but you know,

at least get a good, a good dose of information and learn. Yeah. We don't have, we don't have that kind of time. We then get a hundred million from Spotify to be able to do like four hour conversations. I know. Otherwise otherwise if we did i mean bye-bye video production and hello podcast production right but anyway no we appreciate everyone uh you know who take the time to to watch these episodes you know like i know it's not uh it's not like a massive uh a massive show with like hundreds of thousands of viewers but it doesn't need to be those those 10 of you that are watching on a on a weekly basis we appreciate you

no it doesn't like i don't even we never even started this to be big in it it was just for ourselves and for other people in our industry so i think as long as i think as long as people in our industry are enjoying it, I think we've achieved our goal. It was mostly for us and the people coming on, but to the people listening, if you guys are getting enjoyment out of it and you're getting good information,

then that's great too. Yeah, that's essentially it. We just want this to be a fun, low-key, chill type of show where people can just kind of like shoot the shit in the industry you know we're basically trying to take networking at events onto this that's kind of that's that's how i've been describing it to people i've been reaching out to just think of it like a one hour networking session yeah we're having coffee drinks whatever you know it depends on how late we do these shows right so if we do one at seven then

we could switch to harder tea you know you know irish coffees irish coffees yeah you know because we are reaching out to people that are international so there's going to be a lot of like time differences that we got to account for like even reaching out to the people in vancouver i scheduled one for like 3 p.m. And they're like, oh, wait, can you do it like PST instead of EST? And I was like, oh, right. I forgot about all that time zones. Yeah.

I remember when we were doing interviews for this one client project, we had to interview people from all over the U.S. and do it over Zoom. And that was a scheduling challenge right there because they would tell us what times they could do in their time and then i'm just googling on google just to see what time that is for us and then we could just schedule accordingly i i i reached out to a company in manitoba and i was like wait they don't use pst but they also don't use est they have a mountain standard time or something yeah i found out yesterday out yesterday. I'm like, oh, there's MST? Interesting. Yeah, there's time zones and each

time zone is an hour. I know. It's one of those things you just never think about though until you're like, oh, there's something aside PST and EST. Yeah, I know what you mean. But anyways, again, as we said, thank you everybody for watching the show you

know um hit that subscribe button or follow us on all our social channels and wherever you listen to your podcasts and you know stay tuned for some future episodes where should they follow us at should they follow us at labs or creatives grab coffee follow us at creatives grab coffee. And if you're also cool with it, why not labs production? Labs dot productions on Instagram. Oh, wait on Instagram though. Yeah. Can we change that back to regular?

No, because then it's harder to read. Yeah, but okay. It's harder to read. Okay. We'll have this conversation off the air. Yeah. Yeah. We're i'm also well we're also creating a a tab on our website where we're gonna have all these episodes over there yeah it's gonna have uh we're gonna start creating

not we'll put the transcript for the whole thing if you want to read through it and we'll also start to highlight like key points from each talk so if there's like several key points we'll just highlight those in the blog post and uh yeah yeah i guess that's it if you want to be on the show send us an email or just comment or i don't know get in touch with us you know how to do it info at laps info at laps productions.com yeah you'll be able to figure it out. It's not, I don't even know if we're using that handle anymore. Actually, Kiro. Do we know?

Just reach out to one of us. Yeah, just reach out to either Dario at Laps Productions or Kiro at Laps Productions. Yeah, or our contact. You know how to do it. It's not like we're talking to dinosaurs here. Like, you know how to find someone's contact info in today's world. Oh, man, this is the longest

conclusion to an episode we've ever done we're like debating on where where people need to find us or get in touch with us don't worry we're not we're not hidden why don't you just give them your address give them your home address oh why not right you know make it public make it public i'm in a bunker everybody no one will find me I'm in one of those old shelters you know from like the Cold War era I wonder if they have any of those in Canada anyways we're going off topic here

thanks everybody for joining us and we'll see you on the next one peace everyone peace that one was much better We'll see you on the next one. Peace, everyone. Peace. That one was much better. Yeah, I think so, too. All right, let's cut it now.