Transcript
Speaker: The clock of peace.
Speaker: What's up and welcome to the To Conquer Peace podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host, D'Angelo.
Speaker: On this podcast, we explore ways for creatives to overcome creative block and imposter syndrome.
Speaker: This season is dedicated to the gift of information and how that could lead to releasing the stigma of something being too big or unattainable.
Speaker: Today, I got, I'm going to say this every time, but I have a special guest in the room, primarily because everyone loves a cool-ass white guy.
Speaker: So my boy, Dom, what's up, man?
Speaker: How you doing?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's quite the intro, man.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Appreciate it.
Speaker: Yeah, no problem, bro.
Speaker: So I don't know what year this was.
Speaker: Me and Dom have the most randomest story of meeting each other.
Speaker: I was renting some equipment from him.
Speaker: He was a fly guy.
Speaker: I was a fly guy.
Speaker: We're like, hey, we're both flies.
Speaker: We should probably talk and hang out.
Speaker: So the rest is history.
Speaker: I've really, really enjoyed seeing Dom's
Speaker: progression from the standpoint of and what we'll be talking about which is being a self-sustaining creative in the sense of like the things he create is what he makes a living off of which there's a journey to obtain something like that um but man bro how are you dude i i'm i'm blessed i'm
Speaker: It's an interesting question when you're pushing limits and trying to do new things and taking big swings at things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Since COVID, how is the business doing?
Speaker: Different question than how am I doing?
Speaker: It's been interesting.
Speaker: I love that you said that.
Speaker: And that's something that we'll kind of get into too, right?
Speaker: Because...
Speaker: Especially as creatives, artists, your mental and emotional world will impact the things that you're creating, the things that you're a part of.
Speaker: And, you know, those are some synonymous relationships.
Speaker: And we'll try to get into that.
Speaker: But I want people to know, other than being a cool ass white guy, who you're speaking to.
Speaker: So a quick little bio, and this is kind of to parlay the point of what we're gonna be talking about, guys.
Speaker: Dom released his first short film in 2013.
Speaker: He went on to be a commercial producer and director for brands like Banana Republic, Esquire, Mercedes.
Speaker: He's operated as an executive producer.
Speaker: He's created art photography exhibitions.
Speaker: And most recently with his creative partner, Tucker, who's a dope guy as well, they debuted this sneaker table, the sneaker hoop, and the brand Le Swish.
Speaker: which you can actually get more info about that if you check out their doc that they just released on YouTube called All or Nothing that I watched.
Speaker: And it was like really dope because it had a level of vulnerability to it, but it had an aesthetic and it was only 15 minutes.
Speaker: So, I mean, by definition, you literally cannot put Dom in a box in any capacity.
Speaker: But what I'm curious about Dom is...
Speaker: What's the mind?
Speaker: And I'm gassing you up.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I know I'm gassing you up, but I got to gas you up.
Speaker: I like the good energy.
Speaker: That's what I do with my friends, man.
Speaker: I try to bring light and good energy to them.
Speaker: And you've done the same for me.
Speaker: But my first question to you, though, because we're going to be talking about the finances of this journey, in addition to the things you've done, what's the mindset you need to be able to accomplish making a living off of the content you create?
Speaker: It's a great question.
Speaker: I guess the first thing would be, the first challenge I have to people that want to sort of do it on their own, so to speak, is to take a good hard look in the mirror and ask yourself, you know, why me?
Speaker: Ask yourself the same question that any development executive would ask you, which is, what are you doing that's different?
Speaker: Because it's really easy to look at the industry of art and entertainment and all the cool shit that you get to see all the time and say, like, I want to be cool and famous.
Speaker: Duh.
Speaker: Who doesn't want some of that?
Speaker: At least a piece of it.
Speaker: You know, it's real.
Speaker: It's real.
Speaker: Ephemeral on the surface.
Speaker: But I think the real question would be.
Speaker: You know, if you're going to sit down and pitch you to yourself, what are you doing that's different?
Speaker: What is it that is, you know, kind of whispering inside of you that says, like, I have to try something that's sort of outside of this scripted journey that's available to me?
Speaker: My entire artistic practice and the reason the reason that you see me in these different spaces of fine art, entertainment, commercial, entertainment,
Speaker: is because my study is perspective.
Speaker: And so I bring that to my fine art and I bring my perspective and my creative partner's perspectives.
Speaker: And I try to challenge cliches and expectations.
Speaker: In my brand work, it also means that I have workflows that I've sort of developed over the years that allow me to sort of take the brand's perspective or maybe take a new perspective on the brand and try to explore it.
Speaker: You also have to ask yourself if you actually have the composition for this kind of life, because the most abundant and fulfilled times of my life have always been predicated upon financial disaster, extreme career blockage, bad actors, broken contracts.
Speaker: I could literally, we could take this entire day, not just this hour, we could take this entire day and I could show you with receipts, you know, a dozen or more examples of contracts that have been broken or projects that have been sort of broken apart by nefarious, you know, individuals and people that had exploitation on their mind as opposed to collaboration.
Speaker: And you can get vindictive and resentful about that.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And you can let that be your story.
Speaker: Or you can decide, you know, that you're going to just continue to be the person in the arena.
Speaker: And you're going to just keep going.
Speaker: And, you know, this is a conversation I've had a number of times when it comes to creating sustainability.
Speaker: It's like,
Speaker: There's a lot of ways to do it, but at the end of the day, when you're working with private investors or brands on large-scale media projects or any of these kind of things that we have the opportunity to do, eventually, you got to take big swings on your own, too.
Speaker: You got to be in the mindset of the decision maker a lot of the time, too.
Speaker: You got to decide at some point if what you're saying culturally, you know, in your artistic practice, whether it's whether you're making an Instagram reel or a 30 foot public sculpture.
Speaker: Is this the hill I'm willing to die on?
Speaker: Being OK with failure.
Speaker: It's funny because.
Speaker: I think a lot of, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of like self-help or life coachee kind of.
Speaker: voices talk about failure like, oh, well, nothing's really failure because failure leads to progress and innovation and whatever.
Speaker: And that's true.
Speaker: But I also think that, I mean, failure is a word, you know, like it means something.
Speaker: And, and,
Speaker: I think the more that we deny that it's failure, like, what is that for?
Speaker: You know, it's just because your ego is tender or something.
Speaker: It's like I did.
Speaker: I could walk you through a list of my failures and and I actually love the fact that I'm willing to fail.
Speaker: You know, I think that that's my one of my superpowers is I I don't give a shit.
Speaker: I'll try.
Speaker: I'll try it.
Speaker: You know, if I believe enough in the idea,
Speaker: Not that you want to be sort of blaza fair or haphazard, but a little bit, though.
Speaker: Because if you're going to innovate, if you want to get to new places, innovation, there's an author, Blair Enns, who wrote this book, The Win Without Pitching Manifesto.
Speaker: And in that book, he says, we have this problem.
Speaker: I think it's in the book.
Speaker: It might be one of his other writings, but he talks about what he calls the inefficiency problem, which is that efficiency and innovation are on opposite sides of a pole.
Speaker: They're opposite poles.
Speaker: And if you want to create efficiency, you've got to do systematized behaviors.
Speaker: You've got to do things that are predictable and
Speaker: risk-free.
Speaker: And if you want to innovate, you got to take big risks that take a long time with no guarantee of results.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so if you think about
Speaker: you know, ask yourself the question, am I going to culturally innovate?
Speaker: You know, is that what I'm here to do?
Speaker: Or am I here to basically innovation is sort of the opposite of scale at, at least at the beginning, you can't scale innovation because it takes forever and it's really expensive.
Speaker: So you kind of have to be willing to take that swing by yourself at a point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: so many gems that you just dropped that could take me in so many different directions.
Speaker: But one of the things that you talked about, and it almost sounds like you're in the midst of this, is the frustration of things when you are investing in something out of your pocket, it not playing out the way that you think it will.
Speaker: Now, it sounds like it's also not the first time that you've experienced this.
Speaker: What has been your process to work through that to not become jaded, to still stay open in some of the things that you were just speaking on?
Speaker: I mean, the first thing is go ahead and be jaded and heal.
Speaker: You know, it's like get jaded and punch a wall and then get over it.
Speaker: You know, every single false start, every single frustration has lessons.
Speaker: And I think to me, the goal is I don't really I try to be really like.
Speaker: There's other people in our in our space that make art that's adjacent to the art we make that make entertainment that's adjacent to the entertainment we make.
Speaker: I like to think that our stuff is pretty distinct and has its own voice.
Speaker: But when other people put stuff out that's cool, the first thing I do is thank the universe that that cool thing exists.
Speaker: I don't get jealous.
Speaker: I don't compare myself to them.
Speaker: I'm just grateful that there's more space to work.
Speaker: I'm grateful that there's more people that are bringing awareness to this kind of genre of work.
Speaker: So I think the first thing is just like,
Speaker: Stay grateful and stay positive about what you're... Dude, there's a lot of people that are legitimate competitors to doing the things that we do.
Speaker: I still want to applaud them when they win.
Speaker: And I want to fucking go beat them at the pitch too.
Speaker: It's all good energy to me.
Speaker: I think healthy competition is how you get a Michael Jordan.
Speaker: And that's, to me, the template of greatness.
Speaker: free market at its finest.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What was the question again?
Speaker: Sorry, it went off on a tangent.
Speaker: No, no, you answered it.
Speaker: You did.
Speaker: You answered it.
Speaker: You said, how do you persevere through the frustration?
Speaker: And you said that you've got to allow yourself to feel the frustration.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: That's the first step and then keep it moving.
Speaker: So I think that that's so perfect.
Speaker: And look, we're going to start to go to
Speaker: when you first came to Los Angeles, because he's LA based, did not start in LA, came out here, you know, like many looking to chase a dream.
Speaker: But before we get to that, you just said something that was so, I think, essential that I really want to highlight.
Speaker: And maybe we'll have a conversation about this.
Speaker: You know, you guys are coming to this podcast
Speaker: for tips on the financial world, like just balancing the creative and the financial world.
Speaker: But part of before you can even get into that, it's all about your mindset.
Speaker: And it's something that I really, in my conversations with you, I've learned a lot.
Speaker: This book I read, Artist's Way, Julia Cameron, it's a workbook, everyone loves it, helped me with this too.
Speaker: You have to be okay with doing some shit for the first time and it not being good and releasing it and learning from it.
Speaker: You have to be okay with failing.
Speaker: You have to be okay with a little bit of a, hey, F it, F it.
Speaker: I'm gonna try this out and we'll see how it goes.
Speaker: And you have to use those as lessons to keep you moving as opposed to as just failures and, oh, I'm not good enough.
Speaker: And I think that you're speaking to that in your journey.
Speaker: And I just think it's so, so essential as a creative.
Speaker: You can't be a successful creative without having that as part of who you are.
Speaker: Is that something that you resonate with or you feel like you just have in you?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, we do.
Speaker: We have a list of lessons, you know, inside of Das Audi.
Speaker: We have, we have learned so much from every single, every single attempt that we've made.
Speaker: We have a list of
Speaker: you know, sort of like the 10 commandments that we stick to.
Speaker: And that list keeps growing.
Speaker: It's, you know, every single interaction, every single business deal, every single collaboration, it breeds all of these insights and all of these, you know, you get pushback on things.
Speaker: And those lessons, I mean, what you have to do is, like I said, keep your head up, celebrate the wins in your category, celebrate the wins that happen with people around you.
Speaker: Even if you don't fucking like their shit, you know, it's like celebrate wins for the tribe, you know, like that's good.
Speaker: And then start tweaking.
Speaker: your machine, you know, take that lesson and plug it in and be like, OK, well, that didn't work.
Speaker: What was, you know, example, we had a big exhibition that we had planned and we had a financier come in and match our money and we were going to do this.
Speaker: It was like the biggest show we've ever done by far.
Speaker: And it was like 12 collaborative sculptures and it was going to be part of Miami Art Week.
Speaker: And, you know, it was like a big deal and it had a big price tag on it, you know, as far as
Speaker: what the end result for us was gonna be.
Speaker: It was gonna be a pretty cool purse at the end of the rainbow.
Speaker: And our other financier essentially walked all over the contract and we ended up pulling out and said, we're not gonna spend six months working with you guys if month one means contract violations.
Speaker: so we had to really take a look and and ask each other me and uh tucker my my uh partner at das audi we're like all right what what were the real takeaways here and now you know we're a couple years removed from that now and we're still deciphering we're still like oh you know next time here's how we can get in front of that you know here's how we can
Speaker: you stay sort of in the driver's seat of our own projects.
Speaker: Here's how we can avoid other people trying to exploit what we're doing.
Speaker: The problem with cool shit is that everybody wants it, right?
Speaker: And everybody says yes, and everybody wants to be a part of it.
Speaker: So you got to like once there, I think that there's phases in your career and the first time, the first few times you're pitching ideas, your ideas aren't that good.
Speaker: And people give you all kinds of notes and,
Speaker: and tell you how bad your shit is and everything.
Speaker: And then you start going, okay, well, in a commercial environment, a capitalistic environment, some of these notes are valid if I want this thing to have its own legs.
Speaker: So what can I tweak?
Speaker: And then you start pitching other ideas and you go, oh, well, what if I had a great actor attached to the movie?
Speaker: Oh, that well, that's going to be a totally different conversation than just an idea for a movie.
Speaker: What if I have money attached to it?
Speaker: You know, so you start playing with the ingredients, you go, oh, well, these people, you know, they really responded when we had this set of ingredients and they really responded with this set of ingredients.
Speaker: And they said they'd green light if we had, you know, X, Y and Z factored in.
Speaker: And and your ideas get better.
Speaker: You know, your ideas get better over time.
Speaker: And then once the ideas are really good, everyone says yes.
Speaker: And so now the problem is.
Speaker: What does yes mean?
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: As you said, you know, there are a lot of phases to the journey.
Speaker: I want to take it back closer to the beginning.
Speaker: When you first came out here, what were you envisioning your
Speaker: success was going to look like yeah i think um when i came to la you know it's funny it's actually funny the reason i pause is because i have to rewind a little bit before that and my dream was always i moved around a lot as a kid but i was i got really into comic books and i always got obsessed with you know all my favorite heroes were saving new york and
Speaker: New York was this like fantasy land.
Speaker: It was the comic book backdrop.
Speaker: And I when I was a teenager, I went to visit for the first time and I realized that this is a real fucking place and it's just as cool as in Spider-Man, you know.
Speaker: And I thought this is for me, like at the time I was focusing primarily on my photography work.
Speaker: And I thought, you know, New York City just seems like the perfect backdrop.
Speaker: There's a photograph in every direction in any part of town, you know.
Speaker: And to me, that just felt like I always thought that's where I would end up.
Speaker: And then around the time I was like late high school age, like 17, 16, 17, 18, I started a little production company with my brother.
Speaker: And we started literally our first job, our first gig that we booked, we got on Craigslist and looked for people that were asking for videographers.
Speaker: And we just like...
Speaker: got hired to go it was we were shooting like real estate promos for for real estate agents that was our first gig and uh and at the same time i got certified as a final cut pro trainer and started training editors and stuff on how to use final cut and i was using that in our business as well and then
Speaker: One day I was talking to a client and they were like, man, your post-production skills are really strong.
Speaker: You should go to LA and work on movies.
Speaker: And I had started dabbling in short films and been to a couple film festivals and
Speaker: started putting work out.
Speaker: I won my first festival around this time.
Speaker: And I started thinking like, oh, maybe the movie thing, maybe LA is the right place.
Speaker: And I didn't really know how to do LA.
Speaker: I'd never been.
Speaker: So I came out to visit.
Speaker: I talked to some mentors.
Speaker: An old mentor of mine is this guy named Peter Fox, who was a script reader for a long time.
Speaker: And he helped me understand sort of the flow of the business.
Speaker: And so my thought when I came to LA was,
Speaker: know i have this portfolio of commercial projects i feel like i can get agency work and work on commercials and support brands and in the meantime i'll be focusing on my writing work and packaging screenplays and you know kind of do this writer director uh track and more or less it kind of happened i was working on projects out here and i was got rostered in an agency right away when i moved out here and
Speaker: And then about six months in, I hadn't booked any work yet, but I was pitching, you know, at my agency.
Speaker: And the the agency shut down.
Speaker: because they went out of business.
Speaker: And it's funny because that's actually when you and I met when I was renting equipment out, we met via the great social network of ShareGrid.
Speaker: And I was at my agency that day that you came to pick up the rentals from me.
Speaker: So that was I was working over there in West Hollywood.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Yeah, shortly thereafter, the agency closes doors.
Speaker: And so this dream of like getting paid to do commercial work while I was putting together a sort of large scale entertainment projects, it just kind of went away.
Speaker: I mean, it was running out of money, you know, like the reality set in.
Speaker: And I thought back to, I had been on a round of meetings and I had one connection in LA when I got here.
Speaker: One person.
Speaker: I didn't know anyone other than this one guy.
Speaker: And my friend introduced me to him, set me up with a meeting.
Speaker: He's this big Emmy award winning producer.
Speaker: He's got awards on the wall, you know, big A-list roster.
Speaker: And he agrees to meet with me.
Speaker: And so I'm like, all right, well, agency thing aside, like maybe this is kind of my shot to get in with a production company and, you know, develop projects.
Speaker: And he reads several of my scripts.
Speaker: He watches my shorts and sit down across from him.
Speaker: And he's like, man, you got great work.
Speaker: I love your portfolio.
Speaker: It's good shit.
Speaker: And I'm over here like, oh, amazing.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Best case scenario.
Speaker: And he's like, yeah, I'm never going to call you.
Speaker: And I was like, wait, why?
Speaker: Like, what?
Speaker: Didn't you like the work?
Speaker: And he was like, honestly, man, you're already doing it.
Speaker: You're better off instead of talking to someone like me, like you're better off doing things that you care about with people you trust.
Speaker: Like keep keep it in the family.
Speaker: And.
Speaker: At the time I was a little bitter about that and I thought that was kind of a, I was a little salty about that response.
Speaker: But what I realized in thinking about it was, number one, I could have thrown a tantrum and I could have said, I'm not going anywhere.
Speaker: You know, this is like, I want to work with you.
Speaker: That's always an option.
Speaker: You can double down.
Speaker: But I think the takeaway for me was he sat across from me and he saw someone that had the ambition to sit in his chair.
Speaker: And instead of coddling me, he was saying like, go fucking put your put your company together.
Speaker: And so I walked away from that meeting.
Speaker: You know, my agency is defunct.
Speaker: I don't have any money.
Speaker: And I thought, you know, if I really want to have some actual say in the matter, I'm going to do exactly what this guy challenged me to do.
Speaker: I'm going to like follow this, this double dog dare, and I'm going to start my own label.
Speaker: I'm going to start my own agency.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: You know, that first year, literally, I broke my lease at my apartment.
Speaker: I moved into my buddy's spare bedroom.
Speaker: I was paying like $700 a month in rent.
Speaker: I went and started washing dishes at a cafe down the street because I didn't have any skills.
Speaker: I mean, the only thing I've ever done is make art.
Speaker: You know, I don't have any like, I don't have like a college degree or any sort of professional resume other than my creative work.
Speaker: You know, my job before I was in art full time was I delivered appliances for Sears, you know, like, I guess I could do that again.
Speaker: And so I'm washing dishes at this cafe.
Speaker: I'm not making any money.
Speaker: I start my business, I saved up enough of working nights and weekends to be able to take meetings during the week and file for my LLC.
Speaker: And I filed for my LLC.
Speaker: And what happens when you first start your business is you'll get offers for business credit, which is an amazing tool because it doesn't apply to your personal credit.
Speaker: And even if you don't have great credit, your business can have credit.
Speaker: So I didn't really have any credit at that point, but I qualified for a business Amex and there was a fee on it.
Speaker: It was like $100 a year for the card, but it was like a $5,000 limit.
Speaker: And I basically funded my first year of pitches off of that.
Speaker: And it took me a year.
Speaker: to get anything put together.
Speaker: And then the first, you know, and here I am freaking out because I got $5,000 balance.
Speaker: I maxed out this credit card and I'm squirming thinking like, how am I going to pay this off?
Speaker: I'm making like 500 bucks a week at this cafe if I'm lucky.
Speaker: And my expenses are already sort of right there.
Speaker: You know, I don't have any margin for error here.
Speaker: I have no days off.
Speaker: I'm trying to take meetings and hold it down and pitch like an artist and innovate with people that I think could be my clients.
Speaker: And I'm still thinking about like, I got to go to work in 15 minutes, you know?
Speaker: And eventually what happened is after a year of trying, I was able to put together my first deal.
Speaker: And that $5,000 risk on that credit card
Speaker: basically turned into about a half a million dollars in revenue over the next two years.
Speaker: And took me to New York City, put me on large scale, put me as the, you know, put me in charge of large scale media projects for commercial clients.
Speaker: And I started working with brands you'd recognize, 77 WABC in New York, producing big podcasts for them and feature films.
Speaker: I did my first two feature films in New York.
Speaker: And this is 2019, right?
Speaker: Yeah, 2019 is when I, yeah, it's when Soul Matter took off.
Speaker: That $5,000 risk was, you know, at the time, I was really freaked out because there's no way I was going to pay that back on barista salary.
Speaker: So you got to take outside, you got to take the chance, you know, you got to think like a venture capitalist.
Speaker: And sometimes you got to put the bet on yourself.
Speaker: You took the words out of my mouth, man.
Speaker: And I love, you know, you're a great storyteller and you're, as you're answering, you're answering all my questions as you're sharing.
Speaker: So I was like, all right, perfect.
Speaker: Like he's got it.
Speaker: So, you know, thank you for that one.
Speaker: And two,
Speaker: The moral of that story was a lot that we could take away from that story.
Speaker: One, you came to this city with a portfolio.
Speaker: You didn't come out looking to start.
Speaker: You had already started.
Speaker: I think that that's something, especially if you're going to be relocating, that's something to keep in mind.
Speaker: What can I do now?
Speaker: so that I can help future self out, right?
Speaker: Like, and then you had some money in your bank account and you had some opportunities when you came out here so that when things didn't go the way you wanted to, you had a little bit of a reservoir.
Speaker: So that, and then, of course you had to adjust and you had to humble yourself and you had to do these other positions that maybe that's not what you envisioned doing, but you were connected to the larger vision of where you're trying to go.
Speaker: And that's why you were able to persevere through those things.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, you still had to take a risk.
Speaker: You took out $5,000, you did not know if you could pay back.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: And that is, some would say that's illogical, but that is a part of the journey, taking those risks.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: We're not advising you to take out $5,000, and it's an option.
Speaker: Here's what I'm going to say.
Speaker: I'm not the best at math, but I understand certain economic truths that
Speaker: One of the things that always comes up for me is that these ideas are not economically sound.
Speaker: They are completely illogical.
Speaker: To try to push the envelope and do something different, to make art.
Speaker: That's why every artist you've ever heard of that's, you know, at least in the modern culture, at least, you know, 70s, 80s, the pop art boom, you know, the Banksy's, the Basquiats, like these are not economically sound ideas.
Speaker: They're destructive ideas.
Speaker: You're doing things that are not sanctioned, are not safe, are not allowed, are not profitable.
Speaker: And eventually, maybe they do become profitable or they become more financially sound.
Speaker: But some of the economics of the industry that we live in are, let's think about this.
Speaker: Why come to Los Angeles?
Speaker: it's the most saturated place in the world for people that want to be professionally creative.
Speaker: And so you're going to show up here day one.
Speaker: And my, my, my rude awakening was there's 30 guys out the door that are,
Speaker: better than me, the better the technical aspects of what I do.
Speaker: So at the end of the day, your perspective needs to be the thing that sets you apart.
Speaker: You need to be able to come in and have a different take on what the brief said, right?
Speaker: And, you know, honestly, like in today's world, for example, my, you know, I've now produced a couple independent feature feature films and, you know, been through distribution independently.
Speaker: And what I've learned from that is like Los Angeles and California is the worst place in the United States to try to make an independent film.
Speaker: It's nothing but red tape.
Speaker: There's, you know, it's, it's permit hell.
Speaker: It's fucking expensive.
Speaker: It's logistically challenging.
Speaker: And and yet there's a lot of talent out here.
Speaker: You know, it's like everybody's here.
Speaker: So you you end up kind of just sticking it, sticking it out.
Speaker: But I think that's the thing is you have to sort of what what I had to do was uncouple.
Speaker: this identity from place, from role.
Speaker: I realized that living in Los Angeles doesn't matter to my identity.
Speaker: Being a director doesn't matter to my identity.
Speaker: None of this stuff matters.
Speaker: I am just me.
Speaker: I'm just an artist.
Speaker: It's the only word I need.
Speaker: I don't need to be based in New York or Los Angeles or any of these places.
Speaker: Now, like I said, there's pros and cons to all of those things.
Speaker: But just understand, I guess the point is understand the economics of what you're trying to do.
Speaker: If you're coming to Los Angeles to pitch a movie, dude, Tom Cruise pitches movies in Los Angeles.
Speaker: So just, that's the conversation you're going to have.
Speaker: So just be ready.
Speaker: Just be ready.
Speaker: The people that I see, I mean, there's a cliche here in LA that has never been more true than it is today, which is only funded projects get funded.
Speaker: That's how LA works.
Speaker: So you're gonna sit down and you're gonna show people all your financials, all the stuff you've done, and you might even have a million dollars attached to the project and they're still gonna ask you, well, who's attached?
Speaker: You're going to have an A-list talent attached and they're going to say, well, where's the money?
Speaker: You're going to have money and talent attached and they're going to say, well, where's distribution?
Speaker: Everybody is waiting on the next guy to make the move.
Speaker: So you have to at some point promote yourself to CEO and say, I'm going to fucking do this.
Speaker: I'm going to put, I'm going to take the loan out or I'm going to put all the money on my credit card or I'm going to do whatever it takes to do this thing.
Speaker: And y'all can join me if you want because I'm not stopping.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Not taking no for an answer.
Speaker: That's what I hear.
Speaker: What's up, guys?
Speaker: I hope you're enjoying the podcast.
Speaker: Thank you for listening thus far.
Speaker: I want to give us a little bit of a mental break.
Speaker: We're halfway through the episode.
Speaker: Just a couple of thoughts real quick, and then I'm going to give you about 15 seconds to get your mind right.
Speaker: If you have any questions, any thoughts, anything that you would love to hear from Dom or hear from me, please leave.
Speaker: Jump on YouTube.
Speaker: This is also a video podcast.
Speaker: I would love that to be our space for discord.
Speaker: I'll be on there responding replying to comments anything like that I would love to have that as a space for community for all of us But in the meantime, take a second take a breath and we'll be right back
Speaker: You don't need other people's permission to do stuff at the end of the day.
Speaker: Because I'll tell you right now, there's a project that we've been developing for a bit.
Speaker: It's kind of our newest project, but it's top of our slate.
Speaker: It's this project that we're moving forward on this year.
Speaker: I have about a half a million dollars invested myself in this project.
Speaker: And every pitch meeting we have about it, every development meeting we have about it,
Speaker: executives are telling me I need to justify my rate and my fees that I'll be assessing out of the project budget.
Speaker: And I'm looking at them wondering why they're lecturing me about financial risk when I funded it.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: Don't you don't have to tell me about the financial risk.
Speaker: I paid for everything.
Speaker: You know, I'm I'm telling you where we're at now is if you want to invest, this is where we're at.
Speaker: This is the juncture we're at.
Speaker: If you don't want to invest, I'm going to keep doing it myself.
Speaker: So, OK, you said two things that I actually wanted to talk about.
Speaker: We talk about these financial risk, but, you know, there's been success for you, but there are gaps in the journey.
Speaker: You know, it hasn't been.
Speaker: You know, the journey has its ups and downs.
Speaker: It has its lows.
Speaker: It has its ups.
Speaker: How did you organize your finances through these seasons?
Speaker: You know, we could probably take a month on that question and break down all the sort of financial strategy.
Speaker: I can give some I can give some like overview.
Speaker: steps to that.
Speaker: The first thing is read a book called, there's two books to read as far as financial organization goes.
Speaker: One is called Profit First.
Speaker: If you Google it, it's a whole method.
Speaker: It'll come up.
Speaker: You'll see it.
Speaker: And basically he suggests a breakdown for your finances
Speaker: where you have a number of business accounts.
Speaker: And essentially, it's really simple math.
Speaker: If I make $100, the first $10, I transfer out to a different account that lives somewhere else.
Speaker: It can be a simple savings account or checking account somewhere else.
Speaker: That's your profit account.
Speaker: The whole idea here is we're going to take the profit out of the project before we spend any money.
Speaker: So we're saying out of every $100, $10, that's profit.
Speaker: That lives in my...
Speaker: my paycheck account over here.
Speaker: The next 15% is gonna be for business taxes.
Speaker: You withhold those, you put that in a separate account.
Speaker: Essentially, it's like three or four different accounts that you'll set up to just separate your money.
Speaker: And essentially, out of every $100, you're only gonna spend 50 of it on the project, right?
Speaker: The first half is your paycheck, your taxes, your fees and withholdings, everything that you're gonna take.
Speaker: So you're pretty much working with $50.
Speaker: out of out of 100 so you need to plan for that when you're working with a client and they say the budget's you know 200 you go well that to me that means the budget's 100 is that enough that's not enough the budget needs to be 500 because out of the 250 i gotta i gotta make the whole project
Speaker: Because it's my responsibility as a business person for my business to be in good standing and for my utilities and all the things that I do, all the wireframe, the back end of this company needs to be working seamlessly so I can go focus on your project.
Speaker: If my affairs are not in order, I cannot be a responsible business person or a responsible vendor to my client, right?
Speaker: So you set aside all that money first and then you're really just working on half the budget.
Speaker: The other side of it is the next book I would recommend is called Built to Sell.
Speaker: And it's basically thinking through your business as a growth and scale engine as opposed to simply a mechanism for you to get paid.
Speaker: And the idea is, could your business operate without you?
Speaker: You know, could your business operate if you if you sold it to someone else or if you wanted to go on vacation for a month, could your business continue to operate?
Speaker: Now, this gets a little gray with artists because now we're in this like, you know, we're back in this inefficiency problem of I'm really innovating and I'm really pushing the envelope, then.
Speaker: I kind of need to be involved.
Speaker: I need to, you know, I don't want it to grow on its own.
Speaker: But, you know, there's a there there could be a moment at which you'd want to do that.
Speaker: So it's at least good food for thought and food for strategy.
Speaker: So those two things, just the basic breakdown, we call it the splits.
Speaker: You want to withhold all your money first.
Speaker: You're only working with half your budget.
Speaker: So you have the system in place for your business to thrive while you're working.
Speaker: So you don't get to the end of a project and have no money and have to do this all over again.
Speaker: And then you have to think about sort of the long-term strategy of how this thing is going to be profitable over time.
Speaker: Yeah, that's good.
Speaker: And I think that, you know, even, you know, you have your, you have specified your ideology and your process.
Speaker: I think though, what I also want you guys to take away, you can directly apply what he said, but
Speaker: Dom seek the wisdom on it.
Speaker: He reached out, he looked at books, he looked for books.
Speaker: I'm sure you had conversations with people, you learned from them.
Speaker: It wasn't just going at it aimlessly.
Speaker: It was a, I'm gonna, what's my process?
Speaker: What's my vision?
Speaker: What do I want things to look like?
Speaker: Who are people I respect in these areas?
Speaker: Which there were people that wrote books that you really respected, their ideology.
Speaker: And then committing to that.
Speaker: I think that is so essential and so smart, especially with the unpredictability of the finances and when they come in in our industry.
Speaker: I have one more piece of advice for this category, and that is to.
Speaker: All that being said, read all the books I recommended, and I'll have to also thank my coach, Joel Pilger, joelpilger.com.
Speaker: He helped me.
Speaker: He's helped me a lot over the years.
Speaker: And honestly, dude, I've spent a lot of money on coaching and mentorship to mixed results.
Speaker: You know, some of it's been great.
Speaker: Some of it's been challenging.
Speaker: Joel is someone that has always given me really good material to work with and really challenged me in my thinking as a business person.
Speaker: But the next piece of advice I would give is, uh,
Speaker: read all the books, study all the material I just mentioned, and also don't take any advice from anyone.
Speaker: Because at the end of the day, this is all good information to have, but if you're architecting something new and you're trying to do something different, everyone's gonna tell you don't do it.
Speaker: So just be willing to break away at the same time.
Speaker: You know, this is, like I said, it's good strategy.
Speaker: It's good to know.
Speaker: It's good to think.
Speaker: It's good to learn how to think like business people think, like, you know, economists think.
Speaker: Because at the end of the day in Los Angeles, the thing that people don't understand about the entertainment industry, and I'm doing this for, I understand this firsthand.
Speaker: I'm doing this literally every day right now, is I'm going and pitching people
Speaker: in boardrooms on creative, innovative, creative projects.
Speaker: And in general, they have terrible ideas, because they're bankers.
Speaker: They might work in entertainment, might be an entertainment company or an entertainment finance company, but at the end of the day, they're all owned by Wall Street.
Speaker: So you're going to go sit down and have a conversation.
Speaker: Go try to take a loan out at your local bank.
Speaker: It's the same conversation.
Speaker: Well, how much money have you made?
Speaker: What's the rate of return?
Speaker: Where's your sales history?
Speaker: How much money did you make last year?
Speaker: How much money did you make the year before that?
Speaker: Do you have any outstanding tax liens?
Speaker: Do you have any outstanding debt?
Speaker: What's your liabilities?
Speaker: You end up having the same conversations in entertainment boardrooms as you do trying to take a personal loan out at your bank.
Speaker: It's because
Speaker: The industry is run by bankers.
Speaker: So you got to just know who you're talking to.
Speaker: So knowing how they think is really important, knowing how to speak to finances and having the literacy to be able to talk about ROI and principal investments and, you know, any anything that you're going to need to talk about in any sort of financial agreement.
Speaker: And then at some point you also have to say, you also have to accept that nobody knows anything.
Speaker: And the ideas that you're getting from people that seem to be in positions of power are typically terrible.
Speaker: You gotta believe in yourself at the end of the day.
Speaker: I mean, it's just that simple.
Speaker: You can rely on what other people say.
Speaker: or you can use that as a lens, but then at the end of the day, you gotta lean on what you believe and what you want.
Speaker: And if it doesn't work out- Let me ask you this as a rhetorical question.
Speaker: You think Steve Jobs would be watching masterclasses?
Speaker: Point made, point made.
Speaker: All we gotta say.
Speaker: I mean, I love it, I love it.
Speaker: I love that, and I love that vantage point.
Speaker: And I think that success,
Speaker: in this industry because we've talked about this, the competitiveness, the fact that there's so many people here who are super talented, you gotta have confidence in yourself.
Speaker: And confidence might come from experience, experiencing success, but confidence, you kinda like, I don't know, you kinda have to have a blind confidence in yourself too, to where when things don't go out, they'll go the way you want them to go.
Speaker: you keep it moving, I think is what I'm really gathering from your journey.
Speaker: And so now I do feel like you have confidence from some success and from knowledge and from research, but that thing that you have now was in you when you first came out here and you were washing dishes.
Speaker: That was a really interesting time because I remember being in that cafe, washing dishes and on my lunch break, pitching clients and building sizzles for, you know, for potential clients and making pitches and all this stuff and telling my boss that I'm like, I'm out of here in three months.
Speaker: And he's like, whatever.
Speaker: And I'm like, nah, dude, I'm out of here in three months.
Speaker: And it took, you know, 10 months, but I got out of there with a half a million dollar paycheck.
Speaker: You know, it's like the.
Speaker: That confidence, most people are just going to tell you you're a dick.
Speaker: You know, so I think.
Speaker: OK, you can think whatever you want to think about me, you know, when I moved to New York on that on that first big agency project I booked.
Speaker: I got texts from people saying that I was too Hollywood for them and that I was, you know, too full of myself and all these things.
Speaker: And I'm like, bitch, I'm just grateful to not be washing dishes.
Speaker: Like it's not hubris.
Speaker: I have more to contribute than washing dishes.
Speaker: And respect anyone who washes dishes.
Speaker: If that's someone's contribution and that's what they want to do, it's like respect.
Speaker: I don't see one thing as any more valuable than the next thing.
Speaker: I just know what makes me feel good.
Speaker: You know, I want to wake up and think about specific things.
Speaker: You know, I don't want to wake up and think about washing dishes and making lattes.
Speaker: That's not, it doesn't excite me.
Speaker: And I see people in every career that get excited about it or, you know, don't think about their careers very much.
Speaker: And they get excited about things like their family and, you know, playing softball on the weekends.
Speaker: And I have respect for all of it.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Just realize that pretty much you're on your own out there.
Speaker: Your friends, people you thought were your friends, they don't want you to win.
Speaker: And you have the option of becoming bitter and resentful.
Speaker: And again, you can isolate from that or you can just welcome that conversation.
Speaker: You can welcome that critique and you can continue to celebrate your wins and the wins of the people around you.
Speaker: Love it.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: I have one final question for you.
Speaker: And then I'm very thankful for this conversation.
Speaker: I think you dropped so many good gems, but again, we're going to go back a little bit to the earlier phase of your career.
Speaker: I think that there's always this confusion on how to know what rate to charge, how much to charge people, how to determine that, how to discern that, what were some of the processes you used to figure that out?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A couple, couple things.
Speaker: The first thing is how much money do you want to make?
Speaker: You know, that's the first question.
Speaker: One of my coaches, another guy I highly recommend.
Speaker: He runs a community called Variable.
Speaker: His name is John Briegel.
Speaker: Big time commercial director in New York.
Speaker: Variable used to be a production company.
Speaker: And now it's a community.
Speaker: It's mental health community for artists now, which is a really interesting evolution they've gone through.
Speaker: But it's kind of reflecting John's own evolution of just getting burnt out in commercial.
Speaker: And I hired him as my coach for a while.
Speaker: Basically, to answer that question, I had an opportunity to do a big project.
Speaker: I got a green light on it.
Speaker: I basically called him and I was like, I have a budget.
Speaker: I don't know how much to pay myself.
Speaker: I don't know how to make sure I have enough for the project versus for... This is before I knew all the splits for Profit First.
Speaker: He just goes, yeah, how much you want to make?
Speaker: It hit me.
Speaker: I was like, oh, well, that's really all this is.
Speaker: If I think about a year, let's say I want to make...
Speaker: you know, half a million bucks this year.
Speaker: Some basic math.
Speaker: Well, let's take 500 grand.
Speaker: I'm just gonna do the math in real time.
Speaker: 500,000 divided by 12 is a little under 42,000 a month.
Speaker: So 42,000 a month.
Speaker: What do I need to do to charge 42,000 a month?
Speaker: What's a product I could offer?
Speaker: So the next question is then product offering.
Speaker: Am I a client business or am I a customer business?
Speaker: You know, am I selling you this widget and this widget costs $100, in which case I need to sell 4,200 of them to hit that 42,000 mark?
Speaker: Or am I going to do two $20,000 projects this month?
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: And out of those $20,000 projects, I know that I only get half.
Speaker: So that's 10,000 each.
Speaker: So that means out of that half a million at the end of the year, if my splits are all correct, my actual paycheck will be, you know, 250 grand for the year.
Speaker: And then I have all my life expenses.
Speaker: So maybe I'm actually profiting maybe like 100 grand out of the year.
Speaker: Those are all sample numbers, but I think the point is ask yourself, what do I really want to make?
Speaker: What am I offering and how do I make a compelling enough offer that I can do?
Speaker: I guess the other question would be how many projects do I want to do in the year?
Speaker: Could I do...
Speaker: sustainably offer just do two projects a year you know just do two large scale projects a year or do i do five small scale projects a month or do i do one project every week it's just a matter of of design you know it's just it's a building the business model is an artistic practice as well yeah no that's good i mean what you're really talking about is
Speaker: as a creative, what is so connected to creative that a lot of people struggle with is you are an entrepreneur.
Speaker: You need to make your rate, you know, you have to sit down and figure these things out and scale it.
Speaker: And then the second thing I hear is that you had a mentor, you know, before you even got to get to that book, you have invested part of your, how you organize your finances is I'm going to invest in getting wisdom, career coaches,
Speaker: people who are further along down the road for me that can answer these questions that I need answers to.
Speaker: But you budgeted it because you had to pay them.
Speaker: And I think that people don't really think about those things.
Speaker: So I think that that's some really good tools and really helpful ideas.
Speaker: I didn't make any profit my first few years running my own business because all my profits I put back into education.
Speaker: And like I said, some of that was really well spent.
Speaker: Some of it was a total waste of money.
Speaker: The education is learning the difference.
Speaker: My business partner actually sent me this this morning.
Speaker: He sent me a text with the definition of entrepreneur.
Speaker: And it says, th is is from the Oxford, a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.
Speaker: That is the definition of the job.
Speaker: Hello, that's a mic drop.
Speaker: I mean, I can't think of a better way.
Speaker: to end the podcast.
Speaker: Dom, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker: We already plugged, you know, the doc that we want you guys to check out online.
Speaker: Is there anything else that you want to share with people to access you to, you know, be able to ask you questions, whatever?
Speaker: Yeah, 100%.
Speaker: A couple of things I'll say.
Speaker: First, yeah, if people are interested in my work, or we actually we do, I offer a workshop on
Speaker: kind of creating a system for innovative ideas.
Speaker: If you're in the business of pitching or even just positioning your own brand, your own practice,
Speaker: in a marketing sense, I do a positioning workshop called Magnetic, and it's available on my website.
Speaker: It's demaria.art.
Speaker: It's only 20 bucks.
Speaker: It's like a half hour workshop.
Speaker: I do it live sometimes too, but I taught it live in New York about a year ago, and I really liked the taping.
Speaker: I have that available if anyone wants to engage.
Speaker: And my contact info and everything is available on my site there so people can tap in.
Speaker: And then, yeah, I think the one other thing I wanted to say is anytime, whatever space you're in, if you're in the entertainment industry or the fine art industry or whatever sort of space you find yourself in, there's a lot of cliches.
Speaker: There's a lot of people that say things like,
Speaker: Fake it till you make it, right?
Speaker: Ha ha.
Speaker: You know, thumbs up.
Speaker: And all of these cliches, you know, I hear them all the time and they've just never really resonated for me.
Speaker: You know, most of them just don't really work for me.
Speaker: And what I realized in my own practice, specifically around the positioning, is anytime you hear a cliche, it's an opportunity to disrupt.
Speaker: If you just pause right there, your job as an artist is pattern interruption.
Speaker: That's the job.
Speaker: And so when people say things like fake it till you make it, you go, wait, should you really ever fake it?
Speaker: Or when people say things like, oh, this is one of my favorites.
Speaker: We're in business to solve problems, right?
Speaker: Are you solving big enough problems?
Speaker: And my challenge to that, this is what literally this question fueled my agency for five years.
Speaker: The question is, is solving problems really the main focus?
Speaker: Was Andy Warhol solving anybody's problems?
Speaker: Was Basquiat solving anyone's problems?
Speaker: Did Martin Scorsese solve any problems?
Speaker: are we in the business of problem solving?
Speaker: So maybe don't solve problems.
Speaker: Maybe create some problems.
Speaker: Obviously, Dom is going to be writing a book at some point.
Speaker: But hey, thank you so much for joining me, man.
Speaker: I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker: I sure as hell did.
Speaker: We are going to be giving you guys a lot of people who are experts in different sectors from business consulting, reality TV producers, news reporters.
Speaker: If you have an interest in something, let me know.
Speaker: I will find someone that can speak to what that journey looks like.
Speaker: This is just the beginning.
Speaker: Thanks for joining us for the To Conquer Peace podcast.
Speaker: I'll see you guys next time.
Speaker: Peace.
Speaker: To Conquer Peace.
Speaker: Peace.
Speaker: Peace.
