Creatives Grab Coffee - Sales Strategies (ft. Your Story Agency) | Creatives Grab Coffee 20

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, a podcast on the business of video production, hosted by Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov.Our goal is to make the video production industry smaller by creating a sense of community. Whether you are a creative, an entrepreneur, or a professional there is knowledge for you to learn. Join us as we have industry professionals from around the world come on the show and share their insights on the industry and business. Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee. Welcome to Video Production.This weeks guests are Braeden Fairbridge and Cameron Russelle from Your Story Agency (https://www.your-story.agency/). They are a Vancouver based Video Production company that provides businesses with results-driven video and strategy to help them clarify their message, connect with their customers, and automate their business with video.To learn more about the show, visit: https://www.lapseproductions.com/creatives-grab-coffee/Subscribe and follow for future episodes!Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2vHd8BdbkMQITFZmDJ0bo9Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/creatives-grab-coffee/id1530864140 Instagram: @CreativesGrabCoffee https://www.instagram.com/creativesgrabcoffee/Produced by LAPSE PRODUCTIONS – https://www.lapseproductions.comInstagram: @lapseproductions https://www.instagram.com/lapseproductions/

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, a podcast where we talk about the business of video production. Well, anyways, guys, let's kind of dive right into it. Welcome everybody to Creatives Grab Coffee. We're joined by Your Story Agency with Cam and Brayden. Their agency provides businesses with a result-driven video and strategy to help them clarify their message, connect with their customers, and automate their business with video. Welcome, guys. Appreciate it. So let's kind of dive right into it, guys. Tell us a little bit about yourselves. What is your story agency? What's your story? Yeah, definitely. So I mean, long story,

obviously it's been the past four or five years since we started the business, but not your traditional path into video production. Myself and my co-founder Colin, we're both trades, trades people. So we're both electricians slash plumbers before we got into this. So didn't have a whole lot of experience in the industry coming into it. And I think that was beneficial for many different reasons. We were able to, one, come at it from a passion standpoint. It was something that we just asked ourselves the question, what do we want to do with our lives if money wasn't involved with the process? And landed on the creative side. Colin's been shooting photos and filming since he was a kid.

So he's always had that as a hobby or a passion, but it wasn't necessarily a business. We initially connected through social media. So I found Colin through the photos and videos that he was posting on social. While I was working, wasn't satisfied with the work that I was doing. I think anybody who's worked trades knows it's not the best environment to be in. So I wanted to change up. I had started shooting photos with my buddies from high school at the time and just really started to click, really started to get into it, started doing lightroom tutorials, Adobe Photoshop, started diving into the Adobe Suite, YouTube University, basically just started learning, watching videos, consuming content.

And long story short, there's a lot of intricacies that happen, but I'll save the entire story. I had two weeks to put in at the job that I was currently working at, at the time. And Klon and I had linked up, connected well. He had a couple real estate contacts in his network that we had reached out to, to start filming some real estate videos. Landed a couple of clients, wasn't the best financial decision or the best situation to jump ship at the time, but it felt right. It was aligned and I put my two weeks in, bought all my camera gear on my credit card and we just dove head first with

pretty much no idea what we were doing, right? No industry experience, no client experience previous to that, but just YouTube and trial by fire is basically how we made it work. Oh, you guys really took the risk right head on with the credit card, maxing that out. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, in hindsight, it would have been a good decision to max out the credit that I had before jumping ship. But I mean, that's entrepreneurship in a nutshell, right?

You figure the shit out as you go. And that's really what it was, just diving into everything related to the business from, from there on out, but started in real estate. That was really what, what got us into the industry. Oh, okay. So how did you guys kind of like land your first client, uh, diving right into real estate? Yeah. So Colin had been freelancing before I met him. So he had a wedding business at the time. He got into shooting weddings, family portraits, all that good stuff for quite a few years before I met him.

And he had dabbled a little bit in real estate previous to that. And he really just went right to the top right away. I think the first person that he cold called was a West Vancouver realtor, which if you guys aren't familiar, it was like five, 10, $15 million homes in Vancouver, just right to luxury real estate. Like bridal path in Toronto. Oh, wow. That's wild. Yeah. So definitely didn't go for the low hanging fruit in that regard. Just cold called the top agent that he could find. They gave him a chance, set up a meeting and I wasn't involved with that that was a few years before i had met colin but um that was back in the day before there was gimbals before there was anything he was carrying around a like a 10 foot crane with him walking

around uh i was trying not to scratch the floor oh my god yeah so he's he's got some of those uh those videos on youtube i think still on like a unlisted playlist but um we when we partnered up we went directly to them as well because he already had that contact um so we started to build that network started to get in touch with some of the luxury agents in west fan um and i think at the time when we first started shooting real estate we're probably doing like four to five videos a week um and just kind of scale that from there yeah real estate is definitely an industry that you can do a lot of work for but it's smart that you guys went after like the luxury side of the real estate market because a lot of the times like if you just do the regular real estate stuff it's the pay is not a lot but there is a lot of work out, like if you just do the regular real estate stuff, it's the

pay is not a lot, but there is a lot of work out there, but then you kind of corner yourself into that. Yeah. I noticed a lot of people in our, um, in our network here, not a lot, but like a few where they started out doing a lot of real estate videos and they were really great at, you know, churning out really quick work. But then they, all of a sudden sudden all those companies started giving them huge volumes of that, which almost is like kind of like strangling them with the amount of work that they're doing.

But, and then they would be telling us, it's like, Oh, like making 150 bucks per project or 200 bucks per project. It's like, that's not sustainable for the long run, but a great way to start. Yeah. A great way to start. Right. And it did lay the foundation for our business one, because I personally didn't even have the creative experience, but it got me familiar with the technicalities of video production, working with clients, um, going through the production process. Right. So it was a really good foundation in that regard, but to your point, it was a natural transition, right? Because we were doing these cookie cutter videos for agents, the house would get sold, the video would get archived,

and then likely reproduce the next time the house would get sold down the road, right? So there wasn't a life cycle for the videos that we were creating. So both from a sales perspective of being able to charge more and position more value for the client, which wasn't quite there. But we leveraged our network. We had, you know, five, 10 ongoing clients that we were working with. We started to pitch the idea of brand marketing videos, assets that they could leverage for a longer life cycle and continue to get use and value from. Did you get a lot of, did you hit a lot of resistance with that when you were first pitching that? Yeah, I think it was a, it was a natural evolution, right? I think the first video that we did was the first like video business

card, what we call it now, but the first like brand marketing video that we did was around like 2000, 1500, 2000. So we were going from, like you said, 400, $500 real estate videos to to basically 4X, whatever we were doing for a 60 second to two minute video. So I think there was an initial resistance at first, but it was really the mindset shift of understanding how valuable the assets they were producing for them actually are. them actually are. And it was a discovery process for us as well, knowing how much our clients were utilizing the videos gave us the mindset shift to be able to charge more, to be able to position ourselves in a better light and naturally just gravitated away from listing videos. Yeah, that's kind of what we've been doing lately as well. Like we've shifted from just approaching them and saying like

hey like you know this thing is coming up to like phrasing it in a way where it's like this is an investment so what do you want your investment to do for you right like what kind of returns you want this to give you and just phrasing it that way i think our clients are starting to know like understand like it's true value they're not seeing it as a video anymore. They're seeing it as like an investment. Right. So, so I'm like, good. You guys did that early on. We're doing that now. We should have started that earlier too. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. We just,

we just made the basically pivotal decision to make that switch. Right. But to answer your question with the resistance, definitely at first, right. Because our, our, our current client list and network that we were working with was used to paying $400, $500 a video. justify. So in a way that in a way we really had to rebuild our network and start changing our branding and our messaging to communicate to a different demographic. Right. Did you stick with the real estate industry or did you expand to other other industries? Yeah. So real estate's been a foundational part of our business for the past four or five years still is i'd say it's a lot more diversified now um but for i'd say for the first year or two it was service-based businesses right so

mortgage brokers uh real estate agents lawyers things like that um and yeah it's just so many intricacies that happened throughout the journey, but naturally started to gravitate and attract some larger clients in that process. Was it kind of like a natural kind of progression to the expansion of like your client list? Or was it kind of like you were doing real estate, you said, with some lawyers and other people and mortgage brokers in that industry? Did you think to yourselves, oh, we would like to do, we would like to work with X, Y, Z type clients. Was it something like that or did it kind of be, or was it just simply whatever opportunities kind of came your way?

Yeah. I mean, the initial marketing strategy that we were going down, the route that we were going down again, coming from, from no prior experience in the industry was cold calling, cold video pitches, um, just direct, direct reaching out and then obviously referrals. Right. So in regards to the specific niche, we never had like, oh, we're only going to do real estate. We, we thought about that because obviously we had the opportunity to scale listing videos, but didn't see it as a, as a long-term one fulfillment standpoint and to like a long-term play from the business side. So we've definitely thought, and even recently we've thought about going down a specific niche,

but we've gravitated more towards results-driven video production for businesses. And that's a wide variety of different industries. Yeah. That basically covers like every, every frontier, right? So when you talk about results driven focused video content, like you said that that's kind of like what you've niched into, like, what does that typically entail? Like in terms of like results, like how do you get results driven based content? Yeah. Cam, if you want to touch on that one. how do you get results driven based content? Yeah. Cam, if you want to touch on that one.

Yeah. So basically how we're approaching it is, is what videos fit where in the funnel. And ultimately, you know, there's multiple types of videos that a business can create in some, some type of businesses more than others. Right. And so we look at it at every video has some sort of outcome or goal that it's typically looking to achieve. And better put, when a client comes to us, they have a certain goal that they're trying to achieve in which we're going to map a video to that goal. So based off of where they're at, you know, where they're getting their leads from, if they're getting leads, what's happening before the lead comes to them, what kind of information are they consuming? It's really going to depend on the type of video that we're putting out or building for them. And so I'll give you an example. The video business card that we create for now realtors, but also many types of businesses is much more of like a top of funnel video that they've just become aware and, or this

video is allowing them to become aware of the brand. And so it's more of a brand awareness type video where there was no kind of pre-context. And so the messaging that's involved in a video like a video business card is going to be different than something like what we call like a signature process or a how-to or like a product-based video where they now have awareness of the brand. And if we want to talk to five levels of customer awareness, they're going up that pyramid where they're now seeing more of what they need out of a product, right?

They've probably become aware of their problem. They've become aware of potentially this brand and also potential other competitors that they're now comparing. And so now we're moving deeper into the funnel where we're starting to look at, okay, we know they already have some context before they're watching this video. So the shift is going to change within the script and within the imagery and within the call to action on these videos. And then you can even go a step further on the bottom of funnel with the type of videos that are being pushed out. So really our strategy when it comes to developing those

result-driven videos is around positioning it within the funnel and knowing the actual context that we're, what we're sticking these videos into. I think a lot of agencies, when they call themselves just a video production, they think that these videos are being put into a vacuum where there's nothing else that's going to interact with it. And that's just not the case, right? Unless you're just watching it internally. And even that's still not the case. These things are going to be put into an environment that has different variables and different pieces of information floating around it before and after the viewer engages with the video. And so we really want to be cognizant of that context that's happened before and what kind of context they want to have leaving that video. Cause again, a result can, can mean so many different things to so many different people. So when we talk about results,

we're like, what is that result? And then how can we create a video to reverse engineer that? So, um, in a broad scale, we can dive deeper into what that looks like, but broad scale, that's kind of how we talk about it to our clients. And that's how we approach it when we're, uh, when we're trying to solve for the problem that a client comes to us for. That's really cool to how you guys kind of, uh, reverse engineered from like what the end goal is. A lot of the time people talk about the end goal, but a lot of the time they're also first talking about the idea and kind of the general buzz that they want to get. Um, one, One thing I wanted to kind of also touch upon was because results are, it varies drastically.

It's very symbiotic also with marketing and advertising. So what happens like, for example, if a client tells you what result they want, but they haven't considered a marketing budget or anything like that, and they've just come to you straight for video, it's like, this is what we want you guys to do for us because your results focused. How do we get these results from you guys? Yeah, it's a good question. Ultimately, like still for the time being, we are working on

this actually in our messaging, but because our, our website still very much indicates that we are video focused, which is never going to change, but separating like the expertise to the execution side of things, people always come to us typically with some sort of initial bubble of an idea. Right. But what we can do and what I think is very important as creative agencies is to not let that dictate the end result or the end deliverable that we're going to give them. Cause a lot of the time, and some clients are actually kind of taken back from this, but then they can understand it as long as you convey it properly. What they come to us for

isn't what we're always going to try to offer them because they aren't the video expert in this case, hence why they're coming to someone like us. And as an expert, we need to take that stance and say, hey, we're first going to diagnose what your problem or challenge or better yet goal that you're trying to solve for. And then we're going to then put together a map or a strategy or an action plan that's going to fit that, right? So when we go through that process, the first thing, which I think a lot of agencies and just sales people in general, it doesn't have to be in creative, it doesn't have to be agencies. They don't diagnose, like they don't actually ask the key questions as to what they're trying

to achieve or what their current situations are, what they're currently doing outside of whatever the services that we're going to deliver for them. Again, going back to the vacuum, too many people think like our service is in this vacuum and so again it's it's about diagnosing is what really understanding the challenge the goal and we haven't even talked about audience audience obviously is a big part of that but um the challenge in their current situation and then how are they how are they trying to or not how are they trying to solve it but like what goal are they trying to solve for so yeah i hope that's kind

of answer that question that answer what do you do yeah like because what do you do when like the client just approaches you and says like look i'm i'm still looking around for companies like i just need like a quick quote for this uh we need this type of video roughly like because what you're doing is much more like intensive. Like you're doing a consultation first to diagnose the problem and whatnot, but which is great. Cause that's the way it should be done. But a lot of times they just reach out and go like, I got like 10 of the people I got to reach out to just to get like five quotes so that my manager can just approve one of them. Right. So, yeah.

Which is like, like rough. That's kind of what we deal with on a regular basis. I'm sure you guys deal with that too. Right. do but uh so i get i get thank you for clarifying that so i get what you're going about on that that's where that being the expert really plays in and showing up as the expert first and the executioner second and um you know there's a really good book called that I was just just in the midst of reading called the. Winning without pitching manifesto by and or something. That's the second time that book's been mentioned. Nice. Yeah. Well, the reason it's so good is and I've read a few other books on like expertise.

Is it really shows you how important being an expert is when someone comes to you? how important being an expert is when someone comes to you. If that person that you're describing is talking to 10 other people and they're not willing to give you the time to let you, the expert, diagnose their problem, to give them a proper solution or strategy to solve that goal, we're not going to work with them. We don't want to work with a client like that, that you're just looking for some commodity.

You're looking for a pair of hands. You're looking for a camera that can go do this thing that you feel is the best thing that's going to solve for that. But if you're coming to us, that's looking to get a problem solved, we're going to, we're going to take it on us to say, we're the experts here. We're going to lead you through our process, our framework for solving for that problem that we've done for X amount of clients. Here's our process. Here's how we do it, but this, we need to go through this. And if we don't, if you're not willing to do that, then we're not, we're not the right fit for you. So I think a bit of it is

again, owning your framework and a lot of, again, a lot of agencies, a lot of salespeople don't have a framework. So they just, whatever. It's funny when I'm on the flip side, because I do a lot of our selling for the agency, but whenever I'm in the other seat, like when I'm the client looking for a solution, I always ask them, I'm like, listen, whatever your process is, I'm willing to go through it. Nine times out of 10, they don't have a process. So when a client that is going to be very forceful and very type A, that person, that salesperson is just going to instantly kind of puppy dog to them, right? And let them lead the situation. It's like, no, no, no, no. We're the experts here.

You're coming to us to solve a problem, not the other way around. And if you let it be the other way around, you instantly become commoditized. And then you are being compared to 10 other people. And it is price that matters. And yeah, you can make a fancy proposal. And yeah, you know, you can try to woo them with all this extra stuff that you're going to put on the table to get the deal done. But ultimately what you need to do is say, here's our framework, here's how we get results. And if you want that result, we're going to go through this framework, right? And really letting them guide that through. And And if you want that result, we're going to go through this framework, right?

And really letting them guide that through. And one thing you mentioned is like, hey, I just need to get this quote and bring it back to my manager. I get the manager on the phone. And if I can't, then I get really, really clear on what the manager's like and what they need to know

in order that I don't care about fancy proposals. I care about the content that's in the proposal that when the manager does read it, I'm connecting with the manager. But a lot of the time, if you just ask, and a lot of people are afraid to ask for the decision maker to get in front of them, like, oh, they're too busy, right?

That's something you make up in your mind. Then ultimately you won't get in front of them. But if you just ask, a lot of the time they will actually allow you to schedule time with the manager, get in front of them, just put a good reason, which there is a good reason. Hey, if we want to give you the best service, we need to talk to everyone involved in the project. Right. So yeah, that's kind of how we go about that. Again, sometimes it's saying no, but a lot of the time it's showing up as the expert and leading

them through your framework, but you have to have a framework. It's been very ingrained in our messaging since we started as well and made that shift from real estate to marketing videos is we're not just videographers. We're not just going to have somebody show up with a camera and shoot what you're looking for us to shoot. It's the consultation and diagnosis before that, because at the end of the day, how easy is it to go buy a camera off Amazon, show up and start shooting something, right? You can have no concept as to what the video is that you're shooting, no strategy intended behind it, no, no result plan for it. And yeah, you're going to have a video that you can put on your website, but it's not

going to have any focus or context, right? So things like that have helped us differentiate ourselves throughout the past few years. Do you find that you're still limited though? Because yeah, you can, you can create all these different videos that can help them with their goal. But at the end of the day, if they don't put the marketing into it, that would be required, right? Cause video is one side of the equation. Marketing would be the second side. Wouldn't that like affect, um, like the quality of, well, not the quality,

but the results that you guys are are kind of pitching to them because it's like okay i created this video for you you're not marketing it you got poor results why would i go through with the other five other videos that you proposed yeah this happens a lot like we've at least early on we noticed with a lot of the earlier projects where they they wanted the the best of the best in the, in the video. We did that. But then at the end of the day, I just ended up sitting on, uh, on YouTube only accumulating maybe at most a couple of hundred views. And, you know, like, is that like one of the things that you guys typically vet for when you are looking for, uh, when you are in taking a new lead is if they want this particular result, would it need an advertising budget or a marketing

budget to push it out there and get those results? Because you can have the video, but if you don't have the push, then that video won't, won't reach those results either. Is that one way that you kind of vet through them as well? I mean, first of all, I agree on that point and that's, that's pretty important. And we've gone through phases of that. And even before I came to the picture, which has been a year now, I know Brandon and Colin have, have handled that in different cases, but I mean, Braden, by all means, like at some point, you should bring up Franklin enclosures and how we approach that,

but there's a few ways to go about it. So the first thing is, is we were in the process of kind of like Colin, Colin Braden, and I've joined a year ago. They've built it up to a really good point where we have a good structure. We have a good network. We have a good brand. You know, we have lots of not case studies, but we have a big portfolio now. And so we were at the position where do we niche down and kind of broaden what we're offering to that point, start to offer more things like the advertising side of it, the implementation, the distribution, or which we've come to conclusion on is we're just going to horizontally position ourself where we're now going to separate from the individuals that need the video and the marketing to just implementing the video into a marketing team. So give you an example. We just signed on a great furniture company that has an entire team dedicated to pushing out advertising. Their whole team's dedicated around branding. And they're, you know, again, a 50, I think 50 to 70 person company,

bigger revenue, marketing budgets are there. They have a dedicated team that's going to implement that. So when they come to us, they're just looking for the video side and lot of them don't have a dedicated marketing team. So you got to do two things. And I'll let Brayden touch on what we did for Franklin because you can either partner with an agency that you say, hey, we're just a video team and we have partner A that's going to then implement this. Because if you don't, you're not going to get the results that you're looking for, right? Or you then expand and start to put some of those

services before and after and say, hey, we're going to put some ad spend behind it. We implement your email marketing that pushes it to whatever that looks like. You either got to do it in-house if you're going to be promising that, or you got to find a reliable agency, which there's tons of them out there that focus around YouTube ads, focus around Facebook ads that can work with you on an ongoing basis. But we did that with Franklin Enclosure and I'll let Brayden talk on it because we got amazing results by doing that partnering with an agency. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you mentioned it with trusted partners, right? We didn't,

we never wanted to be a full service agency and be, just have all of these different skill sets that we're offering, but not really be an expert in one of them, right? We're experts in video. That's what our focus is. And we bring in experts as needed to run the marketing in that case. And can I mention Franklin Enclosures? We worked very closely right from the beginning of that project with them to create a series of Facebook ads that were going to be utilized in a very specific way to drive traffic to their product. Right. So it's those, I won't go into the intricacies of that, of that Facebook campaign that we ran for them. It was very successful,

but it was that relationship that we had with the marketing agency that allowed us to create results-driven videos that were specifically going to have traffic dripped through those videos. So a rough overview of that campaign that we did, somebody who would watch the first 20 or 30 seconds of the first video on Facebook would unlock the second video. So basically be nurturing a cold audience through to their product or service, right, based on the interest and the viewer engagement that they had on Facebook. So those types of projects can be successful if you have the partners in place. But to Cam's point, as of recently, I'd say in the past like month or two, we've really niched down the fact that we're going to be working with clients that have large budgets,

that have large teams, and they already have a team and plan in place or have ran multiple campaigns in the past. And they just need somebody who's going to create an emotionally engaging, creative story, which is ultimately our logo, right? So that's what we focus on. And just to add on to that, something really important for any creatives or agencies that are listening,

if you're going to go down the path where you're finding an outside partner to work with, bring them in right as soon as you know, you're either going to be working with them or like starting to develop what that video or what the plan is going to be. Because correct me if I'm wrong, Brian, but like, that's when Mike, the partner was involved, like right from the get go. Because if you go create these videos, and you don't involve the partner until they're ready. And the partner's like, man, we-go, because if you go create these videos and you don't involve the partner until they're ready, and then the partner's like, man, we needed this, this, and this in the videos.

We can't be leveraging these. So have that. And over time, you ultimately want a partner that you can trust and lean on and go back to time and time again and really build that relationship. But the key I want to point out there is if you're going to go down that route

where you know you want to at least have the conversation with the client that we can you know, you want to at least have the conversation with the client that we can also distribute not through us, but with a partner, have the partner involved early on in the process. Yeah, that's, that's definitely a smart move because another thing that you also kind of inadvertently do with the client is that you also show how valuable it is to respect the experts in the industry, because you know what you know, but you also know that you need other people who know that other part better, because like you said, you can do everything, but you could be, um, well, I don't remember the exact phrase, like a master at a nun, but like being able to do anything. Uh, but you won't be, as you

said, the expert in all those aspects, it's good to focus on one and work closely with people that are experts as well. And then you guys all elevate each other collectively, you know, because they also have their network that they can leverage. You have yours that you could leverage. And then that just kind of is like a snowball effect allows you to expand further. Yep. Definitely. Cam, we didn't get your background.

So why don't you tell us a bit about like how you started, how you got to how you joined the team and everything? Yeah. Yeah. We can take a few steps back. So I've been it literally been a year. I think I closed the first deal with for your story start of February. It was like first week of February back in 2021. like first week of February back in 2021. But myself, Braden, Colin, you know, we've known each other since like mid 2018, when I actually moved out to Vancouver, where we all live now, through a door to door job, and we just started to get to know each other. Nothing really came of it. But then fast forward to myself leaving a tech startup, whereas the first employee helped grow that up from, you know, zero to $30,000 in MRR, very focused on the sales and marketing side, amazing opportunity. But when I left that, I was kind of like, you know, what's the next step?

And I've wanted to explore a few things on my own. So I ended up, you know, testing out an e-commerce product, which was red light therapy. And it just so happened that I was out here on a trip with Braden, Colin and some other buddies. And we ended up like deciding to go in on it together on this e-commerce kind of venture. And in the midst of that, as we were really grinding to make this thing work and it was a tough go, I'm not going to lie. It was a tough go, but in the midst of that, they knew that I had sales experience. Colin and Braden were getting busier. They didn't want to focus on the sales. And like, dude, why don't we're

working on this e-commerce thing together? Why don't you just come, you know, take some of the sales and we'll just pay you commission. And so over time, while we're working on above club, we just very naturally started to do this thing with your story where I would just, you know, get any inbound calls, inbound leads, I would take them, close them, get paid commission. And it, it just flowed so well. I think for two reasons, one, the three of us are very aligned from like a value standpoint, you know, how we see a look on life, but two, we all have different skill sets. I don't know if you guys are taking like any personality tests, but we're big on personality tests and just like

really understanding everyone's strengths and weaknesses. And we're, we're literally very complimentary of each other. And so it just naturally fit. And then the conversation just came up. You're like, Hey, like we're not making any money off this, you know, e-commerce venture, but we're just doing absolutely nothing on this, but actually making quite a bit of money, putting very little effort into this. Why don't we just, you know, cut our losses here, go all in and really focus on this. And that's

when, you know, we decided all three of us would focus all of our energy back on this, go full time on your story, start to build out the sales systems, which has never been done. And, and really, I think on Colin and Brandon then turned into a real business. Like they just saw it as an opportunity to be their own bosses. And when all three of us took, took an oath to each other to step in and go, go full time on this, it became something real. And, and now it's been going to the next step. We did our biggest year last year since myself coming on and starting to implement some early sales. So my background sales and marketing,

I've done some cool things door to door, ran my own painting business, um that's kind of the path on how we've integrated into each other's lives and now business have you have you guys so uh brandon braden have you like like the whole sales talk you were doing earlier like is that something that you brought to the team or like did you guys braden did you have something similar and then Cam just helped you guys solidify it? Yeah. So we had a variety of tools that we were using for sales. I'd say as of the past two years, we've had a lot of organic traffic, putting some investments into SEO. We started ranking on page one of Google and a lot of grateful now that a lot of our traffic does come from, from inbound. In the early stages when it was, nobody knew about us, we didn't have a website that was ranking. We didn't have social media profiles. We had zero network and no

experience in the industry. It was picking up the phone and cold calling 40 hours a week, right? It was getting the reps in, talking to people, talking to business owners, figuring out what their problems are, what are they struggling with, practicing what we were preaching, sending cool video pitches, again, with the same format, going through sales training, Jordan Belfort's courses, Grant Cardone's courses, just whatever we could get our hands on. Right. And that was working very well for us. People were, people were very receptive. I'd say in regards to having a full on sales system, that is something that we are now developing and that Cam has brought to, brought to the table with his expertise. Colin and I are really on the, on the production systems end and the the actual end product, right?

So the service delivery. But super excited now. Obviously, we have our inbound that's performing really well, and we're going to continue to invest in that. But Cam, I mean, you can allude to what you're kicking off with the outbound sales system now, right? That's definitely an evolution of what we were doing doing a few years ago yeah yeah do you guys want us to to kind of go down the sales rabbit hole a bit yeah sure yeah like i mean we our our sales uh process is like super straightforward but you guys like seem to have it nailed down to like a science so it's so interesting to see that you guys have

implemented this in our industry because like i i don't know too many people that or too many companies that probably do it the way you guys are doing it like you guys yeah like probably one of the first ones that we've talked to that do it like this it's it's super interesting to hear because i would have never thought someone would have implemented it in our industry successfully so yeah we we've mentioned in previous episodes that it's how difficult it is because we've tried to do something similar in the past. And I think we just were unlucky in the fact that we didn't meet the right people. Whereas you guys were fortunate enough to find someone who shared the same values as you, you know, have worked together, have known,

known each other beforehand and just kind of like, it just made sense for you guys. Right. So, um, but you also mentioned that it was like the first time, um, you guys went full time kind of like somewhat recently over the last few years. Right. Was it like when you guys, the three of you decided to start working together or was it kind of a little bit before that as well? Yeah. So we were just for context, like we were, we were operating for probably three or four years, uh, before last year, before Cam came on board. But he mentioned that, that transition period where we started to take it a little bit more seriously. I feel like in this industry, there's a, uh, and in any, this is in any business, right? There's a, a gap that you need to fill from

being a freelancer or being the actual person delivering the product to running a business. Yeah. Um, so, so hence why our team has grown. We're roughly seven or eight people now we're getting more and more detached from the actual service delivery. And that was the transition that we really made when the three of us partnered up just for. What would you say is that gap? Like how would you describe that? Working in your business versus working on your business.

Yeah. Yeah. The moment that you go the moment that you go from being the executioner which is technically being self-employed you don't report to anyone but like you still need to show up and do the work versus having a business that's growing you know on like someone else's time right that you have a team that's showing up to do the work that you've implemented through the systems that you've built on like someone else's time, right. That you have a team that's showing up to do the work that you've implemented through the systems that you've built. So like with you coming in and like developing the sales strategy, is that kind of forced the three of you to just kind of take,

as you mentioned, take that step back and kind of focus on the business more so and the sales aspect and the growth. Yeah. It's been a lot of, it's been a lot of systems building over the past year or so in all areas in all areas because inherently with more sales becomes more projects you know and two people can only film so much and edit so much right yeah it's pretty with post-production like that natural limits exactly the not the natural limits of post-production right you can only

be working on a few projects at once so that realization paired with the fact that we had goals that we had set and there was a direction that we wanted to go in inherently meant that we needed to hire. So what are the hiring systems that we need to build out? What is the production systems that we need to build out to maintain quality? I feel like that's a big challenge that a lot of videographers have is, and it was for us, is how do we maintain the quality, which is what our business has been built on for the past three or four years. It's our product. How do we maintain that when we're onboarding somebody, right?

It's a, it's a lot more than, Oh, look, this editor has a great portfolio. We need to bring them on the values need to align. The communication needs to align. We need to build out a revision process and a a template that we can utilize in google drive to leave comments efficiently and communicate with with clients right so it's a lot of those that we've been developing over the past year or so and again that just comes back to turning it more into a business than it was what that it was previously how did you how fast did you grow your team because i remember looking on your website you

guys seem to have like it's pretty big team like did that happen people all at once or did you start off with like um i don't know bringing on a full-time editor and then slowly adding like a pa full-time and then like tell us about that yeah so that's been all in the past i'd say six seven months months that we started growing the team. It was literally me, Cam and Colin, when we started to build out these systems. But inherently it was one, we have way too much post-production. We're up till two in the morning editing. We need an editor. So that was the first conversation, finding somebody part-time at first that could eventually roll into a full-time role, which is more so what it is now.

We needed help with all the admin stuff, communication with clients, emails, like when you have- So time consuming. It's time consuming, right? So we brought on an executive assistant who has now merged more into like a project manager role. Who's really in charge of the scheduling, logistics, emailing back and forth shot lists storyboards things like that to to make sure everything runs smoothly on set

uh as cam mentioned he's building out an outbound sales uh outbound sales system so he naturally needed another hand with that so we have a sales development representative on board now as well um and then we also have a photographer that we that we work with as well and have now onboarded a full-time cinematographer to really man man the rig on set so wow like what kind of like outbound like strategy do you have you guys kind of developed it's like that requires that such a huge amount of like focus like i like firstly like finding one person to do sales is hard oh man yeah sam's the wizard behind that yeah i mean ultimately in in all transparency this is something that's just being ramped up because just to give some context like year ago year ago i joined it was just a matter of

like, I never sold video in my life before that I was selling software and, you know, in between software and video selling cars. So the sales cycle is the same with most of the stuff, but ultimately you still got to figure that out. And so the first step was like, just getting a hold of, of how to sell video. And like, the nice thing was I had the marketing experience, but then for that first, you know, I would say almost six, seven, eight months, it was just getting really comfortable selling video and the different types of video and like my take on it. And this is where it coming back to being, being an expert versus just like, you know, doing whatever the client is. And so now we're at the point where like, I'm really confident. I feel like I can be

the expert in the situation. And so we've now got to that point. Then we had the conversation of, okay, here's where we're at in the business. Do we niche down and start to expand, which we've talked about, or do we just really hone in on getting good at selling video into marketing organizations, right? Made that decision. And so now we're like, okay, how can we drive a crap ton of leads? And when those leads come in, effectively nurture them and close them. And so that comes in twofold. SEO has been great. We have a bit of Google ads that we're running. SEO has clearly been a great tool and great investment for us, which we're going to continue. So the outbound is going to be complimenting that

because here's the thing about outbound or better yet, here's the thing about SEO is SEO is great, but you don't, you don't control that. Like you are at the will of big tech, right? And so you, with outbound, you are in complete control of all the inputs, which then naturally controls the outputs. And so on the outbound side, I'm in the process of developing that through my experience in doing door-to-door, selling at the tech company when I built up the sales strategy at the tech company, and now taking all the knowledge that I've built over the past year to develop something that really makes sense based off of who we're selling to and what we're selling. Okay. So the outbound strategy that we're putting in place is actually from a few different resources, but I found like a core resource that for anyone listening,

I would highly check it out. It's called Ultimate Salesman Machine by Chet Holmes. And the core premise of it that we're really developing is like education-based marketing. And the core premise of it that we're really developing is like education-based marketing. And so you want to take your knowledge and turn it into some sort of core story is what he calls it. We're calling it like our thesis, right? That we believe this is the best way to execute on X desired result, right? So if you're coming to us to get more brand awareness, we're going to say this is the best way to do it. If you're coming to us to convert more leads into appointments, this is, you know, how we go about it. And so we're going to build education to then deliver to our, our potential prospects and ultimately

turn them into leads. And by shifting that from just like trying to get on the phone and have conversations with them and try to pitch them right away to building educational assets that we call them or email them and be like, Hey, you know, are you looking to do X? You know, here's some great strategies on how to be doing it. Hop on the phone with me. I'll walk through three strategies that we're seeing in your industry right now that works. Okay. And by the end of that, this does two things, right? It positions you as an expert, right? We were going back to this expert thing. So it positions you as an expert. And then it also educates them on our process. So the, it making it either the best and only way to get this X

result that they're looking for. So by the end of that call, they're like, this sounds great. What do I do with this information? And the natural next step is how, right? So you say, Hey, you know, can I take like five minutes and explain what we do? And maybe we can hop on another call and see if we're the right fit for actually helping you execute on some of this. And then you naturally progress into what would be a sales call or what we would call a strategy session or strategy call. And so the outbound, the outbound looks like scraping leads. Again, you can get leads or I should say prospects, leads are people that are actually showing interest prospects or just people within your target audience. Scraping prospects, you want

email, phone number, getting them on the phone via email or doing a quick cold call, whatever, you know, your preferences. There's so many ways to do it with like sales automation tools, email sequencing tools, such as, you know, Woodpecker, Lemlist, tools like that, Close.io or Close.com now. And then once they're on, get on the call, do what we're positioning as education-based marketing. We're giving them value upfront, right? We're not just trying to pitch them on something,

but we're educating. Really what we're doing is we're educating them on a process to get a result. So if they're looking to get that result, they've just bought, if we do a good job, they've just now bought in to the way we get that result as the best or only way to do it. And so again, natural next step, how do I do it? Now we get on a strategy session. That strategy session turns into, hopefully there's a decision makers coming on. If the decision maker is not on, this is basically what we'll be doing. We run through everything. We identify that, Hey, you know, does this all sound good? If you're going to be the end user or say a marketing manager, right? If we're talking to a marketing manager, then probably

not the decision maker, the CMO or director of marketing is going to be. So does this all sound good? Do you buy into this? Do you think this would help achieve your marketing goals? Yep. Okay, cool. So let's get, you know, Sharon, who's the director of marketing on the call. Let's review what we just talked about. Let's reaffirm, see if she has any questions.

And at the end of that, then I'll kind of present what it would cost to work with us. Does that sound good? Okay, cool. And then we go through that process again, get her to buy into the thesis, get her to buy into what we're going to be providing for them and then we go through that process again by get her to buy into the thesis get her to buy into what we're going to be providing for them and then ultimately close so that's going to

be the outbound process it's predictable right the more input you put in ideally once you get a solid system in place you can have an expected output and you can just crank it up and that's why now I have I've kind of recruited a sales guy, killer guy. It's very similar to myself. So once I get this up and running, we're going to be bringing him in and it's just a numbers game, right? Like the more, the more prospects you can put in the top, you know, the more sales you're going to get at the bottom. So that's, well, that's a crazy long process. I can imagine. I understand why, like you, you brought on another person. Cause yeah, that does take a lot of time, right? Like, cause you are doing a whole, it's you've developed like quite the process. I gotta say.

He is the sales wizard. Cam is the sales wizard, you know, like it's straightforward, but it's very like, like intensive at the same time. Right. Like, uh, again, the, the thing that you guys want to pay attention and by all means I'm, I'm learning from wizards. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, right? Like this isn't me just pulling it out of my ass. It's learning, right?

It's figuring this stuff out through repetition, right? But also learning. And I think a lot of people don't do this when they start businesses. They get too focused on the doing. And then they're so busy doing the work that they don't work on their business or work on their skill set. So it doesn't matter figuring out who's doing it the best and bringing it into your business. But the biggest thing, the reason that all in place, it's very straightforward. You just need to know what are your inputs? What are the scripts? What are the next steps? What are the clear frameworks that you're putting in place and just executing on it, right? So once we have that, it's a matter of just cranking numbers. I wonder though, if it works, do you think it'll work across all boards or do you think like you're you're you're limited to certain types of

businesses like that like you'd have to get like direct access to some of those people versus like like i'm trying to think of our clients that we've we've gotten your clients or or uh or they just reached out to us directly like i wouldn't even know how i would able be able to do that kind of process with them that kind of cold calling approach or cold calling with educational content approach. Cause it's like, it seems like there are a lot of, a lot of these people are kind of insulated. Like it'd be really difficult to reach out to them

within that manner. What, give me, so let's break that down. Who is like, who's some of your bigger clients or like mid- bigger clients or like midsize clients, like even industry wise? Okay. So as an example, maybe we can use, okay, let's say someone in the financial industry, right. In a bank, would you be able to do like that whole, would you be able to implement that system with like a CMO of like a bank? So you guys have worked with like

CMOs for, for like the big five, or are you talking like more financial advisors, like wealth management firms? So we've worked with banks in the past, but more so like in certain departments, right? So the one thing we've learned with like a lot of these much larger organizations is that you're not going to be working right away with the CMO. Like that, that just doesn't happen. You know, they're usually working with massive global ad agencies, you know, for these global campaigns. But they do, there are a lot of like, say, departments or sectors within the business,

within the bank, for example, that also do their own portion of work content and things like that. So it's hard to kind of figure out who those would be, Right. And a lot of the time we've only done work with them because, you know, we got recommended or it was word of mouth. Whereas like now a lot of the kind of companies that we work with are more kind of like midsize where it's a little bit easier to get in touch with them. So like, I guess it's a Dario's point. How would you identify those kind of like niched out, like sectors within bigger companies to work with? to have, you can have, you have certain business tools, like a tool that we're going to be using, like Seamless AI or LinkedIn Sales Navigator, where you can start to understand the structure of the business and what departments are what. But ultimately, the first couple of times it's,

it's kind of, you know, throwing a dart in blind, but once you start doing it, you get the hang of it, you start to understand who's who. Start to understand what titles are what. And again, like you mentioned, you're not going to be dealing with the CMO of Scotiabank, but they're going to have their sub budgets. And so once you understand who those are, that's probably going to be the case for all of the banks. The titles might be a little different, but the, say, director of marketing and consumer services might have a $50,000 or $100,000 budget to spend on local

marketing. And that's probably the case for the big five and then all the other smaller credit unions or wealth management. So once you understand that, and that's why it's really important to hone in, even if you're going to horizontally position, pick three or four industries and identify who those people are. And a lot of the time, here's a little trick. You don't need to know who the decision maker is right away. You can go in and say, Hey, are you the right person for X reason or for X cause? If not, can you please refer me to who this would be? You're not giving any context to what you're selling. You're just like looking for contact. And a lot of the time it's no risk to them just to fire off and forward that email and say, Hey, here's who you'd want to reach out to. And then you can start to pick up on that through a one. And the best part is when you do that,

you get a warm referral from someone in the company by getting that. So if they end up firing back, be like, Hey, you know, Joe from X department just sent me over your information, thought it'd be a good time to connect. We do X reason, right? This is why I'm reaching out. So there's a few ways you can go about it, but I think the biggest thing is repetition, identifying and like getting really

into a scientific method about it, like being very methodical about, okay, this person typically isn't the influencer, they report to so-and-so. And you start to build these like internal charts as like, you know, maps almost. And then a lot of the time, you don't need to know who the decision maker is

off the first go. Get on a call with someone, educate them, get them to get buy-in and become an influencer internally and be like, hey, Joe, like who else do we need to get on board? Like, do you buy into this? Do you think this would help like the organization

or the goals for, you know, your marketing? Oh yeah, like this is amazing. Okay, like how can we get so-and-so involved or who else needs to be involved so we can push this through the company? Because a lot of the time, especially in these bigger organizations, it's not like everyone has a piece

of the company attached to them. Like if you're a smaller company, there's very much like that emotional attachment to the company and they're more defensive about it. But when you're talking to just some marketing manager at a huge company, man, they want to just impress their boss. So if they, if you can get them to buy into how this is going to get them a promotion or get them to look good in the company, they're going to make shit happen for you. Right. So it's about that education part, providing value upfront to maybe it's not the

decision maker right away, but providing value and then getting in seniors, getting seen as a trusted advisor or expert, and then moving your way just by simply asking. So there's a few ways to go about it. But again, there's lots of tools that allow you to find key people with the emails, with the phone numbers, and then just probing in using tools like Lemlis and Woodpecker to fire cold emails out, get the touch points, get on the phone and go from there. It's incredible to hear how like such classic sales strategies and ideas, even though like you've essentially kind of elevated them and merged them with the video production industry, there's still like, it's just amazing how they,

it shows that it still works at times, right? It's just a matter of like how people are executing on it, right? It's almost like sometimes you even hear like these sales strategies about cold calling and cold outreach. Yeah. It's tedious for most, but you know, if you know what you're doing, you're gonna find out who is the key person in that company. These are like strategies that go back decades. It's crazy to see how they still work

even in these industries. A lot of the time it's a limiting belief that it doesn't work. They want it to not work because they're like, I don't wanna do the cold calls. I don't want to like sit there and send the emails. And I, the reason I can say that is because I did door to door for two years. I didn't want it to work because I'm like, oh, you know, I don't, I don't want to have to go knock doors, but it works. So it's like,

it was a limiting belief of mine that it didn't work. And I think, especially in the creative space, and this is why you, I think you guys said what you said, you've never heard of a company kind of applying this sales in the way we are is because a lot of creatives like get this in their mind that, you know, these old gimmicky sales methods, they don't work. Nobody wants to do it, but it's like, is that the case? Or is it just a limiting belief in your mind that I'm thinking this because I don't actually want to go and do that? Or do we need to all find a cam? Right, Brayden? Is that it? Is that the approach? We all need to find our own cam? Well, the reality is there's no way to learn that stuff without putting the reps in, right? Like it's the door to door.

It's the tech companies working for it. It's the books. It's the education. It's the resources, right? The longer you do it, the better you get at it. I did it's the education it's the resources right um the longer you do it the better you get at it i did it for me and colin did it for probably a year to two years um and then we decided we wanted to really focus on the production and storytelling side we're creatives right that's why we that's why we started it we love the story we love the the engagement right so um but yeah it's just it's just putting the reps in with the sales side, Cam has experience. So for advice for anybody watching this, a hundred percent, like if your skillset and passion and focus and drive

isn't towards sales and marketing, cool, you're gonna have to learn it to a degree if you're gonna start a business. That's the reality of it. You need to have the foundational knowledge, but if that's not what you wanna focus on, definitely find somebody, find somebody you can bring in, partner with, incentivize them. That's, that's not a bad approach and it's going to help. It's going to help the business grow at

the end of the day. You know, what's interesting is that like, you know, like kind of like looking back on it, what the one thing that you guys, uh, Brandon, you and Colin did right was you set your foundation up with the business and set up like even the sales like ideas early on so that when someone like cam came in it was easier to kind of give him at least something to work with and start so that everything can be elevated when we were looking for a sales guy back in like 2017 2018 um we didn't we clearly didn't have that foundation uh at that point because uh one thing that darren i've talked about in the past is how up until the pandemic, we basically were like two freelancers that just kind of worked together a lot. That's kind of how our business was.

And then the pandemic kind of made us realize, oh, let's redo this a little bit. Let's kind of reverse engineer it. But now looking back, it's like, oh, it's because of that. There was no foundation back then for that other salesperson to kind of work off of. They were trying to kind of guess. And that's why it didn't work out for us back then. Whereas for you guys, it did. Yeah. I'll mention something because there's two very different things from a salesperson and like an entrepreneur, I guess, is the best way to describe myself is like, I've always seen myself as my own business, whether I'm working in someone else's business

or running my own business. And there's a very, very big distinction from that to a salesperson. And I know a lot of salespeople from being in sales, doing door to door, you know, knowing just people in the sales industry, those kind of individuals that don't have the entrepreneurial drive, but are just like, they're good at sales, they're good at talking, they're employees. And so they think as employees and employees need systems to get told what to do and have that kind of chief aim to get almost like a carrot, you know, the carrot on stick, they need something like that.

And a lot of the time, these sales guys like commission, they want the commission. And so if that's not there, if they can't see a way to join your company, sell a great product and make money, a lot of them, they won't be enticed or you won't find someone by reaching out. And that's why Braden mentioned, like, if you can find a partner that is someone more entrepreneurial, that's willing to put the systems, if you you can find a partner that is someone more entrepreneurial, that's willing to put the systems if you don't want to put the systems in or can't put the systems in place for whatever reason,

that's where someone like myself can come in. They can build out that system off the foundation because all I wanted from Colin and Brayden was great product because that's the hardest thing about a salesperson. If I don't have a good product to offer, it becomes extremely difficult to do my job and my conviction drops, which is the number one trait a salesperson has to have. So as long as there is a great product with great testimonials and great case studies, I can build everything else. But if you don't have someone

that's going to have that like self-motivating system, system oriented mind, then you need to go out either learn how to put the system in place and then say, Hey, salesperson, here's the system. Here's the product. Here's what you can make. If you do X, Y, Z inputs and just go and do. And a lot of you find it's one of those salespeople. Like I found now that I have the system in place, I can just plug them in and the guy's just going to go nuts. Right. But up until then, it's going to be very difficult if you don't put that system in place, unless you find someone that's systems oriented is willing to come in and build that foundation for you. Yeah. I think you guys definitely lucked out finding each other because, um, I mean, for a lot of, uh, uh, video production owners, it's, it's hard to find, find ones that have business partners. It's

usually either them running the business. Yeah. Actually it's mostly just one person running the business. Right. So it's, it's hard enough for, for them just to find another partner that can just help them out on the creative side of things, let alone on the sales or marketing. Right. So that's, I think that's probably why a lot of, a lot of, uh, uh, production owners don't really focus on, uh, sales that much. It's mostly referral or networking because it does take up a lot of time. Like what you're, what, what cam you're doing there is like, it is just a full year. You're just so business sales. And especially with the, with the system you're, you're implementing,

like you can't really focus on that in the morning and then go to a shoot or go at it right after, right. You got, you just got to focus on that all day long. Right. So for people that are running their own thing, like it's, it's tricky to do the sales, do the marketing, the selling and creating. Yeah. And have, you know, pitches for projects. It's hard to manage everything at once. Yeah. And that, that is the gap between the freelancer and running the business as a sole proprietor and the business, right? Like you're not going to be an expert in every single thing. You need to bring people in who are experts at what they do, because it takes

a lot of time. It takes a lot of energy to to scale right um you can only be wearing so many hats but like you can wear all the hats great but you're not going to be doing the things as effectively or as efficiently as they can be right and one of the big things that i want to stress like just about our business and the growth that we've had is i don't want to downplay the mindset because the mindset and the limiting beliefs that can mention is 99% of it. You can have the greatest sales system. You can have all the tools and resources that you need, but it's really the mindset of I can do this or I can find somebody like, uh, I feel like I've run into that issue with,

with a lot of, a lot of creatives is they'll say like, Oh, this just hasn't, hasn't worked or I can't find the right person or a lot of other people can't find the right people to bring in. But it's, it's just shifting that to, I need somebody and I can find somebody. And there is somebody out there who's going to be able to come and add value to the business. Right. Um, it's 99% of it in life, in life in general, but like, especially in, especially in business, right. It's just like changing the vocabulary. Oh, a hundred percent. Like I remember when, uh, when we were starting out, um, I was actually like about half a year to about a year into it, uh, before Dario. And, uh, when we were first

kind of like talking about, you know, working together, like I knew, like, we knew that we had the right mindsets together, you know, like we had a lot of like the same kind of ideas, the same interests. And, you know, we knew that we could probably grow together. So even though like at the beginning, there wasn't that much experience, you know, we saw that there was potential down the line. And that's why we've been able to work so well together, you know, through the good and the bad, you know, like things like pandemics can typically, you know, destroy companies, destroy business partnerships. You know, I'm sure that happens all the time, but because, you know, him and I had the same resolve and, and, and, you know, like, and vision, we knew that we were going to be pushing forward. So I completely agree with you on that. It's

always hard though. Like it is still hard to find other people with that right mindset and you need a little bit of luck and you know, a little bit of life to kind of like throw you a bone in a way. And in that sense, once in a while, I'm still shocked how many people you guys added in like six months though. Like that's wild. Like, first of all, just on the payroll end, how do you like set aside that much for like, cause I mean, you can't just bring someone on and like six months, something happens, you don't have enough to pay them. So how did you guys like, uh, figure that side out or like the projection side of it? It's like, how did you determine the projections that would allow you to take on that many people? Yeah. Just look at your monthly cashflow, right? If you can't

afford it, you can bring somebody on if you can't, like, it's pretty, pretty black and white in that case, right? When you're looking at your finances, if you can't afford it, um, one thing that has helped in regards to payroll that I think would be relevant to that question is retainers, right? So like having monthly recurring revenue coming in, that's what changed our business from the degree of being able to scale. Because we went from one-off videos that we were producing for clients where we get 50% deposit up front, the video might not be finished for a wide variety of different reasons for one month, two months, three months. So what does that look like from a cashflow perspective? Pretty hard to have people on

payroll and on salary when that's the case. So that was- Which we are switching. Yes. Yes, exactly. Well, this improving, increasing lifetime value in general, right? But retainers is the answer to that question for being able to grow. How long ago did you guys start shifting from one-off projects to retainer work? Yeah, I mean, in an ideal scenario, all of them are retainers, right? Like there's only so many clients that are, one, willing to do that, but two, need the ongoing work and help right

so that is a that is a search to find the clients we're always looking for more um but we've yeah go ahead yeah yeah it's just gonna jump in because there's two things i mean one to the to your first question about um about when's the right time and like, how do you, how do you make that happen? One thing, because our first hire was the VA. So I was on commission. So there wasn't any VA is what, sorry. Or sorry, EA executive assistant. Yeah. So like that was our first quote unquote hire. Cause I was on commission. So I wasn't anywhere on the payroll calling and Braden were paying themselves. But so I only, I only got paid when, you know, money came in, right. On the VA side or EA side, we hired someone that was freshly out of school. And there's a program for anyone in Canada listening called Venture for

Canada. I do think, I don't know if it applies to Ontario, I have to check, but we got up to $7,500 for her and we pay her $22 an hour, um, to do everything. And like, I think we had four months worth of work already paid at a part-time for like 20 hours. So there's grants not to get into details, but that's some, some tangible stuff you can take search up right now, apply for and find some great, great people coming out of school that's eager to learn in the creative space like she's been amazing like amazing amazing hire that we found so I would recommend venture for candidates looking into grants so that's the first way to kind of make the transition the second thing though is starting with other freelancers is

like that's what we've done with our other editor is starting with someone on a freelance basis, couple hours, build the relationship, get them to buy into the vision. So they're not like, you know, out doing their own thing. They're pretty focused on committing to you, but you can't commit full time to them. And then as the work builds up, the retainers build up, then you say, Hey, listen, let's go to 25, 30, 40 hours. And then let's bring you on full-time salary. So just to clarify for everyone thinking like we just instantly brought six people on payroll. It's been a progression, but what we have done is we've gotten six to seven people to buy into your story and say, I work with your story. I'm not just a

freelancer that's invoicing your story. And they're one of many, like all of them are very committed. They show up to our morning huddles and they bought into the vision because a, we have a vision, right? A lot of people don't even have a vision or values that you can get your employees or your team members to buy into. And then two, once they bought in, then it's just a matter of bringing them into a full-time scenario. So that's the first thing. The second thing when it comes to retainers is going back to that funnel, because we know that there's going to be multiple types of videos.

And because we're positioning ourselves as an expert, some people naturally come to us for retainers. Like we had some great, we had some great clients come in, boom, retainers. They're looking for retainer right off the bat, but naturally you can get someone in on a one-off do amazing work. And then because you have an amazing work and you pitch them on what the next steps are, you got to lead the vision for the partnership. If you don't give them anything to like, look forward to, they're going to be like, cool. Well, thanks for, you know, doing the work. If, if something comes up in our mind, we'll come back to you. But if you, the expert goes to them and say, Hey, listen, I know you're looking to solve this other thing, or now that you have But if you, the expert, goes to them and say, hey, listen, I know you're looking to solve

this other thing. Or now that you have the awareness side, why don't we talk about the consideration side? Or why don't we talk about the education side? Here's a couple of things we've been thinking about. And now you can start to bring them up the front or bring them up the ascension ladder, the value ladder, however you want to describe it. And maybe it doesn't start off as a retainer. But what it does is it expands the LTV, the lifetime value of the client to keep revenue going in. I don't know if you

guys have ever heard it. I think it's like five to 10 times cheaper to keep a customer or five times, five to 10 times more expensive to get a customer than it is to keep one. So how can you continue to drive the LTV that happens with knowing upfront what that vision looks like, working together as partners, whether that turns into a retainer or just multiple projects, you got to be the one leading them through. And that's something that we've done well

because A, we've done great work. B, we've provided a great vision, but we're also, we know we can do way better because the amount of money, once you get trusted as an expert, is insane in some of these companies that have the budget to spend. Wow.

Like at this point, um, uh, Cam, uh, you've been, I've been working with, uh, with the team for about a year. Uh, and it's great that you've learned like so much and you've like elevated everything with the company. Do you find that at times when you're pitching to certain clients, they're asking about certain capabilities that you guys can do? Do you find that you need to kind of consult with either Brandon or Colin occasionally, you know, on, in terms of like, if certain specific things can be done, cause like there've been times where clients have asked us,

can we do this one thing where it sounds easy to do, but it's not easy. You know, it's like, can we make the, can we remove that person from that video shot? It sounds easy. Don't forget his sales process is long. He's not closing them on a call, right? So he probably gets all that information like on the first like three calls. To that point though, it's a good point to make. And especially if anyone, you know,

is thinking about bringing someone on from a sales perspective that either isn't a creative first and they are coming from a sales perspective and then learning the creative side that's been a challenge for me is like i started to get comfortable and sometimes i would just pitch numbers out of my ass and just say yeah it's gonna be 9500 for this video not knowing if colin and brady is gonna shoot me after or if they're like holy you said what you know so there's a bit of that. And then there's a bit of saying when there's really, what it's come down to, I've really like honed in on what it typically takes that.

And, you know, we found a process internally now that we have employees, we know our hard costs of how much time the video is going to take. So we can get a little bit clearer. But a lot of the time I go back to Colin and Brady when there's a lot of logistics involved. So multiple locations, lots of additional expenses, hard shots, like things like that. I'll say, Hey, listen, this is typically where we're going to hang around. Does that sound good with you guys? If we came back around that, would you be okay with that number? Yeah. Okay. Let me talk to Brayden. Let me talk to Colin. I'll get back to you the firm number in our proposal.

So that's normally how we take that. If I'm, if I'm really, well, this is like very logistically heavy. I don't know what Colin and Braden are thinking, we'll have a conversation, we'll map out the scope, we'll talk about the expectations, and we'll put a number down, and we'll move forward. But up front, it was a lot of like, figuring out trial and error. I know I've shot a few numbers up, and it was like pretty tight on terms of budget. And then sometimes I shot a number up and it was like 90% gross, you know? So, uh, I was going to ask, I was going to ask, there must be a funny story. There must've been a time where you probably said something like Brandon, was there like one where like he kind of pitched something that kind of like, like locked you guys in a box. It's like, Oh shoot.

I don't know if we can do it, but we got figure it out yeah i can't think of one specifically but there's definitely been a couple of those david reimers with a real a recent realtor like we were trying to you know get some video extra videos done and like there was just miscommunications that ended up being like a logistical you know drag where we had to go to multiple, but nothing crazy, nothing crazy, honestly, but. But it's all trial and error, right? Like you learn as you go. And usually like anytime that something like that happens, it like people can figure it out, you know, and work it out as always. But, you know, sometimes you never know. There's sometimes always like that one funny story. Like whenever we have to pitch for a pro or where they're asking us for numbers for

a project, then we're having that initial call with them. I always use the excuse of, yeah, so let me talk to my business partner and I'll get back to you right after that. That always has been helpful. It's like saved us a little bit, you know, where it's like, if we've accidentally over, over pitched or under pitched or on anything like that, you know, and that's the one value of having partners. And then especially amongst the three of you now, like there's like a good collective of everyone you know kind of like helping like figure out what is the right approach for every project so that's great yeah i think there's something to be noted there sorry britain

but uh something to note there though is like as you scale if so if anyone listening is looking to scale you want to find a systematic approach to pricing. Like every project is different, but that doesn't mean you can't create some sort of systematic approach to putting a number in front of the client in a more efficient manner without dragging, like, because there's been times where we've haphazardly like spent an hour to two hours with three of us on a call that's six hours of, of the team's time trying to figure out this project that we don't even know we're going to close so sometimes it's good but a lot of the time you should or most of the time unless you're just trying to again maintain a freelance like smaller

team you should work towards building some sort of systematic pricing where whoever's doing the sales they can pop open the spreadsheet they can you you know, think through on the call and put a number in front of them because it can get a draining when, you know, you have seven strategy calls this week that you were pitching price and, hey, Colin, hey, Brandon, can we hop on a call and like talk this out? You know, so it's good upfront.

And for some projects it's needed regardless. That's the nature of the creative business. But, you know, there's definitely ways to systemize it. I don't know if you had anything to add there, Bryn. Yeah, well, a big part of that was productizing the services as well, right? Knowing what a certain type of video entails from one number of shoot days to if there's actors that need to be involved, how many locations. Productizing it to a degree. And then there's only that little bit of variable cost on top of that so kind of having this base number uh and then based on the client and what

they're looking for you can kind of adjust as needed but um productizing your productizing the services has been like super super helpful for us from from that perspective yeah you guys are just like breaking all the the notions we had going into this like going into this or like i don't like we we didn't think we could you know someone was implementing this kind of sales approach to the video production industry and then you guys are talking about like retainers with this and like productizing i think we even had a discussion about this in another episode where you can't really productize what we do but it's like you guys like have a whole different approach like i feel like right after this episode, I got to really sit down and just like go over everything

slowly. Well, I think in the reason, as soon as Braden mentioned that, the one thing that's so important to flip back to is the expertise side. Because again, if you can't productize something, if you're letting the client be the leader of the partnership or the relationship, because if that's the case, how can you productize their idea? But again, if you build the expertise, you build the leadership and you say, hey, what you're looking to do is this. And then you have a repeatable way to bring them back to this outcome, bring them back to this vehicle that is the product, right? Which is like a video business card, a signature process video, testimonials, case studies. Like you can box a lot of these videos into products, but if you aren't taking the client by the hand and say, come with me, I'm going to show you what's best for you.

And they're leading you. There's no way you can ever show them your, you know, your options that are productized. So it goes back to that being expert first execution or second, and not letting the client lead you, but rather you lead the client. No, I'm actually curious is like, as, because you've now gotten to the point where you product productized your, your, your business and your services, has it kind of like gotten to the point where you product productized your, your, your business and your services, has it kind of like gotten to the point now where like you have like a certain set range of budgets that you typically only accept where it's like, say like minimum, you need to be getting like at least five to 10 K from a project in order to be viable, especially when you have such a big team now with certain overhead, is there kind of like a baseline that you guys always stick to and hold your guns on? Yeah, I'd say that that baseline has grown over the past three to four years, right? You start to expand as the projects get logistically more involved as well as there's more people involved.

But yeah, we definitely have a baseline number that we work off of and then go from there for sure. I mean, the reality is coming back to that comment that i mentioned at the beginning of you're never going to turn a five hundred dollar client into a five thousand dollar client never never never it's very similar turning a two or three thousand or four thousand dollar client into a ten thousand fifteen twenty thousand dollar client right they have an idea of what they want to spend what what the the value of the video is worth um and it's just a, it's just a mindset gap. I mean, Cam, you can touch on that a little bit more.

Yeah, it's, you know, um, I really do think it just comes down to, uh, saying like, Hey, what's the actual thing that we're being asked to do? Uh, and is this the right thing for that, that they need? And sometimes like, we'll have these one-off things like i don't know if you guys ever get where you get contacted by another agency and the agency just needs like film right no editing no nothing yeah yeah for those things like yeah sure we'll we'll not go with our standard uh of like a minimum maybe it's you know a couple thousand dollars, we just show up, shoot, ship off the hard drives. But when it does come to those products, those like specific videos that we've like categorized, there's typically a line, right? Video business card. That's normally no less than 7,500. So there's normally these limits that we

start to set on them simply because we know what it's worth to the client and we know what it costs us to do yeah uh kem i actually had a question since we're on this topic like during your sales process you're taking an educational approach right like but how do you introduce like your minimum, like required pricing for your videos? Right. So if like, you are going to then pitch them later on in the process on like a video, a video card, like, how do you let them know? Like, do you let them know at that stage later on that?

Hey, it's actually, we start at 7,500, like at the very least, right? Like, cause what if that's like way above their budget? How do you know when to kind of like, forget about a lead because they, they'll probably never be able to afford it. Cause at the beginning, you're not really picking their brain on what their budgets are. Right. Yeah. Good question. So you actually want to like, get it out of the way, you know, as soon as you think they, they could become a potential opportunity. Um, so for us, when it's an inbound lead versus inbound and outbound is different, right? Outbound, you naturally have to put more time in because you have to nurture them. You have to provide some value to get them to listen to you.

With an inbound though, we have two things. One, when they request a quote or request a project price, they get redirected to a Calendly. If they end up booking on our Calendly, there's a few questions on there. One of them is price. So we have like, I think seven different price ranges starting at 3,500 going all the way up to like 100K. We'll get an idea. That's not always the given, but at least we know, and twofold, at least they know our minimum, right? And then two two we know where they're at and then that makes sense that makes sense for that one is just the other one i'm sorry what was the term for that one where you're reaching out outbound yeah for the outbound it'd be a little more

interesting to figure out how you would navigate that because it seems like if you're gonna you know put all that time and effort in only to find out like, man, this department just like would never even give me that budget. How do you know when to like cut your loss off early? Two things. One, once you get moving, it's the law of numbers, right? Like you naturally know that if you're, if you're playing in the right field and you're targeting the right type of companies, if these companies are multimillion dollar companies, or even if they're doing like one to $5 million in revenue, you can assume they have some sort of budget. And as long as you're educating them, this is why the education part actually like creates more of a need because they get educated on why if they're looking to solve X problem or

hit X goal, your vehicle is the best or only option to going there. So you're, you're selling them on that, which now in their mind, they've become focused on, well, shit, I need this because this seems like the only way to hit this goal that they've just been educated on. So part of it's that, because again, anytime price is an issue, they either literally can't afford it, which means you probably shouldn't target those people in the first place, which you can find out pretty quickly. And that means you should just switch who you're trying to target or to what you're presenting isn't providing enough value. And they can't see the justification because anytime someone buys something, they're like

the money that I'm giving you, am I getting more value from this? That perceived value can come in direct ROI with when I put a dollar in and get $2 out, that can be time-saving, that can be status increase. A lot of the time with video, it does come down to status increase, right? I'm differentiating myself. So I'm positioning myself differently. So you need to position these videos to say, is $7,500 worth differentiating yourself in the competition? And then two, realistically, talking objectively about the time commitment, if you're doing email automation, it doesn't take a lot of time to set those up. That's why I said the system upfront takes a lot of time. Actually running it doesn't. The time that it takes to actually get on one of those calls and run through the educational calls is 30 to 35 minutes, right? If you really want to take time, 45 at the most, 30 minutes to do

the presentation, 45. At the end of that, you're going to know if they're qualified or not, because at the end of that, you're going to say, hey, listen, we just provide you with all this. We could definitely help you execute on this. Typically, our services start at 7,500. Is that going to break the bank? Is that going to put you in the poorhouse? Or is that something that's within budget for you and the team? And if like, no, like that's probably something we could work out. I'd still need to talk to so-and-so. Okay, perfect. At least when they give that affirmation, then you can move to the next stage, but you're really only committing 30 to 45 minutes of your time upfront on the call. You're building a relationship. It might not be the right time now.

So, and then the play in the law of numbers, you know, once you run it through, you need to do 20 of them to close one. Okay, I don't care what one out of that 20 is gonna be it. I'm just running the reps. So it's a few things, but ultimately you gotta start with the market. If you know the market isn't willing to pay to begin with,

don't be chopping at that tree. That pretty much answered it. Okay. So yeah, Carol, I think, I think we went way over. Yeah, we went way over and we want to respect your guys' time. Cause like, we're trying to keep these to an hour, but like, clearly like, you know, all these conversations, like, like they're like, we're, we're sharing so many great ideas and just kind of like bouncing things off each other. Like it, and then we're now at like the hour and a half mark, but kind of like, uh, before we, um,

before we set up, um, how did you guys first come up with your story? Tell us a little bit about that. Like the name, the name. Yeah, it was initially Envision Media when we first started. So four or five years ago, that was the first company name. And it just came up in conversation a lot, right? Like this was what I had envisioned for the project. You know, this is what, this is my vision for my business and why I started, right? So it was really tied around that. The only reason we changed the name is because I took a break from the business for probably two months to two, three months. And I went and lived in the UK and worked with a Forex trading company for a bit. Wasn't aligned, came back, Colin and I partnered back up and

basically just as a re-spark to a new direction, we called it Your Story Agency. Yeah, there wasn't a huge intent behind it when we first named it, but it has been a great brand asset in the sense that people come to us for story. Our logo is story. And then like the deeper meaning in our logos, like the wise unfinished, right? So people are hiring us to come fill in the rest of that rest of that vision and help them help their business out. So.

Wow. That's, that's awesome. Always cool to hear everyone's origin story in a way, right? Yeah, definitely. Okay. Well, thank you guys so much for coming on. You know, it was great to have you on and I'm, I'm sure we'll probably bring you back on in about like a year's time just to see how everything's been going, how the new sales process is going. It'd be really interesting to talk about that.

I'm expecting like maybe 15, 16 people to be on the team by that point. Yeah. Well, thanks for having us on. It's a great idea for a podcast. There's a lot of value that can come of these conversations, whether it's people just just getting started wanting to get into the industry scaling like whatever phase you're at right there's a lot of uh a lot of nuggets i wish i had more resources like this when we were first starting so oh absolutely like when we were all starting out you know there wasn't as much back then and at least you know maybe maybe this will turn into something down the road but at the very

least this is also a good way to also get to know you guys, you know, get to know like who is out there in Vancouver, because you never know that. We might get a client that, you know, needs someone to, to execute some stuff in Vancouver. You know, it might be easier to just have you guys execute for us and vice versa. If you guys ever need someone trustworthy in Toronto, you know, we're, we're happy to help. Yeah. You guys do great work. So we'll definitely keep that in mind.

Thank you. All right, guys, we'll take care and we'll keep in touch. All right, guys. Take it easy guys. Take care.