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Growing Your Production Company with SEO
121 Plays4 years ago
Max and Jake speak with Blake Barnett of Blare Media about how they have successfully scaled their operation through very unusual and clever tactics like having multiple satellite offices (they have 10!!) and mastering the art of SEO.
Blake goes on to talk about Blare's strategy to hit $5M in revenues with his new venture Shoots.Video, an online listing service for production companies and production staff.
It is a true cornucopia of interesting and unusual tips for growth. If you're feeling stuck in your current revenue and client base, and looking for new, exciting ways to grow - you'll want to listen to this one!
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Crossing the Access' and Pipeline
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome back to another episode of Crossing the Access the Biz Side of Video Production. I am Max Keiser from Pipeline, the video production management platform that you've always dreamed of having. You can find it at videopipeline.io.
Introducing Blake Barnett and Blair Media
00:00:22
Speaker
I am here also with my partner in crime, Jake Warda.
00:00:26
Speaker
Hey, I'm Jake also from pipeline. Hey, and today we have an extraordinarily special guest Blake Barnett from Blair media. You probably have heard of Blair media because they probably outrank you on a search engine somewhere, but they've got 10 locations, which is just incredible. They have six in California and one in Nevada.
00:00:50
Speaker
One in Washington, one in Texas and Arizona. They offer all kinds of services, aerial, live, social, as well as your core video production services. They just truly have shown a way to scale beyond the confines of what many of us think of for our production
Blake's Journey into Video Production
00:01:11
Speaker
companies. So we just
00:01:12
Speaker
Thought it would be really fascinating to get Blake on, talk about scaling, talk about marketing, and help give us some ideas for how we can take those things to the bank. Blake, nice to see you. Hey, Max. Hey, Jake. Thanks for having me. Wow. What an intro. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about Blair and how things got started or how they got started for you.
00:01:35
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we've been in business since 2005 and how it started was I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. I had like a limousine company and I had more time than money. And so I was like, Hey, I'm going to create this TV show, local TV show, and then I'm going to get advertisers. And then I'm going to put a commercial for my limousine company on there. And so where I was doing all this work,
00:01:59
Speaker
to do this and then I found out like I had way more fun doing the video side than the actual limousine company and I ended up meeting my business partner because I was trying to do this all myself and not knowing what I was doing at all more of the marketing business side and so I met Justin who's my business partner and I'm like why am I doing this part like let's just form a company and then so we formed Blair Media and that's how it's been since 2005
00:02:26
Speaker
Um, and what, and what kind of work did you get started with your core things? Okay. So when we first started, Justin was doing a lot of wedding videos because you know, that's like, he was, that's what he was doing. He was doing some music video stuff. And, but I'm like, man, let's do some TV commercials guys. And so, uh, this was like kind of pre pre-internet. I think the internet existed, but it wasn't like it is today.
00:02:50
Speaker
And so I was just knocking on doors. Like I would just go out and I came from a sales background. I came from like the phone book background. So I'm like, I just would go to places. I'd go to use car lots. And I'm like, Hey, we want to get, you know, you want to get a commercial? And I'll go in there with my DVD player that they would have back then. And I'll play them some stuff. And they're like, wow, that's really cool. And I'll do a commercial for them for $500.
00:03:13
Speaker
And that's how we started.
Blair Media's Growth and Revenue Goals
00:03:15
Speaker
So let's fast forward then to today. Tell us about where Blair is today. What are your revenue numbers? Who are you working with? Give us some idea of where you are.
00:03:26
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I mean, we haven't actually broke a million dollars yet. We've been really close. And like year after year, we're like, and so what I decided recently was like, forget million dollars. That's where we're not gonna, let's forget that. Let's go five million. And so since that way, I've changed that mindset. Like this might be the first year we break a million dollars.
00:03:50
Speaker
I love it. That's awesome. For a long time, the thing is we grew really quick in the beginning. We got up to 300,000 in the first year, two, or three, and then 500,000. Then our goal was, even then, our goal was a million. Since day one, we got to get to a million. 15 years later, we still haven't broken a million, but this year, we're on track.
00:04:17
Speaker
So one of the things that is truly different about Blair is that you have multiple offices, not many of us do.
Expansion through SEO and Strategic Offices
00:04:25
Speaker
How did that start? Yeah, that started because like
00:04:29
Speaker
We were advertising in the phone book and then we're realizing like that's the wave of the future is the internet. And so I, one of my friends was, you know, web developer and was doing a lot of like SEO stuff. And so like, like he's a good friend. So I'd go to his office all the time to swing by and like pick his brand. I'm like, what are you doing? How do you do this? And like every week I'll like learn something new and I'll get tricks. And so for a while we started out in Fresno, California. And so.
00:04:54
Speaker
We would own like the like eight of the 10 listings on Google. So if you type in Fresno video production, eight of those would be some might be like a YouTube video or some other website that would that we, you know, had us on there.
00:05:07
Speaker
But we were represented on the, and we weren't getting enough business. And so I'm from the Bay Area. I came down to go to Fresno State. And so I'm like, hey, let's start marketing. It's a bigger city. Let's just start marketing in San Francisco and San Jose. And like that was gangbusters for us because we were, and it's only two and a half hour drive. And so once we started doing that, and then one of our guys moved to San Jose, we had like little satellite San Jose office for a bit.
00:05:35
Speaker
That was great. And like, hey, this is working really well. Let's do this in other cities. And so over time, we just started expanding. Yeah. Well, I can personally vouch because I competed with Blair at my old company Handcrank for Seattle space all the time.
00:05:51
Speaker
And I can give you a story of how Seattle started. Seattle started because we had an employee move from Seattle to Fresno and he worked for us. And then, you know, worked for us for about a couple of years. And then he was like, you know what? I'm homesick. I want to move back to Seattle. I'm like, hey, you're moving back to Seattle. We could do business up there. And so, boom, we just started doing marketing in Seattle.
00:06:10
Speaker
And next thing you know, that was when you could just buy video preps in Seattle.com and rank number one. You can't do that anymore. And so we don't rank as good as in Seattle as we did like many years ago. I think we're on the second page, but our
Flexibility and Remote Client Work
00:06:25
Speaker
other side, our shoots that video site is on the first page. Right. So would you say that your reasoning behind doing that was to scale, but to scale in places that you were close to, even if you weren't physically in?
00:06:38
Speaker
Yeah, we needed to have some sort of representation because clients didn't want to come to us, to our office to, they didn't want to take time out there. They're busy people. They didn't want to come take time out their day, come to our office, have a meeting. They always wanted us to go to their, go to them for a meeting. And so like, so the office is kind of, it was like a weird thing to even care about unless you're going to go to San Francisco anyway. Why not just say that you're in there. Yeah. And so we would normally, we like,
00:07:03
Speaker
the vast majority of time we're always going to them and meeting with them and they never actually see us even till today. They never want to come visit us but it's very rare they might swing by to pick up a hard drive have someone could do that or something along those lines but for the most part, some of our biggest accounts I've never even met and they're my account.
00:07:25
Speaker
I just met an account as an ad agency and they're based out of Virginia. And we've been doing business with them for like five years, I just met them this year. That's just so fascinating and it just but it speaks to being willing
00:07:40
Speaker
And this is something in our business you have to be willing to do. And that is throw away any rules. There are no rules and you just, you have to go with what works every time, right? And I mean, it sounds to me like you just sort of followed the thread of what was working for you and said, and now it's just such a unique business model, but it really works.
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah, you have to try different things like it when you're an entrepreneur, you try different things, see what works. And like we tried, you know, tried trade shows, we tried advertising on TV, like you name it, we tried it and we're like, we don't get the same result.
00:08:20
Speaker
Right, yeah. So how do you manage these different offices, I think would be one question for certainly for me, we had two offices in my old place and I couldn't imagine having any more. And so how do you do you all share the same portfolio you all share the same like website design and stuff like that.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we use Slack to kind of keep track and see where we're at. And then we have like sales managers that handle certain territories. So if leads come in for certain, you know, territory, like, Hey, we know who to assign it to. And then we use HubSpot for that on our contact forms and we can just quickly assign it to the right person.
00:08:56
Speaker
Um, and then management wise, it's mostly just task driven. We can really be located anywhere. Um, I mean, the only problem with being anywhere is, uh, we're not quite there with like editing wise to get files over from one place to the other. That's still kind of a pain to get large files. And so we like, we typically like to have the local team edit it as much as possible. But even then we, we end up mailing footage back a lot.
00:09:20
Speaker
Do you have like a salesperson in every office and a producer or is that person that's in every office? I wouldn't say it's straight that way because there's one person that handles multiple territories and then we'll have a producer that
00:09:36
Speaker
is there, but they might go someplace else. We do a lot of mix and matching, depending on the project. Sometimes our producer in Fresno will go out of the country, but out of the state, because the client has a good connection with them and they would just want them to go there. It's really not even location-driven. We try to get as many locals as possible just to save on cost.
00:10:01
Speaker
but it's really mix and match depending on how the situation happened. And it's really a personal connection with our clients. And so yeah.
Effective SEO Practices for Business Success
00:10:11
Speaker
As far as the marketing is concerned, is it still really SEO driven? Yeah, I would say, I mean, we, we have returning clients, but I don't think we've ever gotten work from social media. We have received some requests, but we also don't, we're not very good at marketing on social media either.
00:10:28
Speaker
Yeah, it never worked for me. I never could get it to work for for hand crank. It just, and I see other production companies trying it and spending a fair amount of money and frankly AdWords never really worked that well for me it was always organic search that
00:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, I have a like, AdWords did work for us for a little bit. And I think that might've been me just being lazy. But because we were doing a lot of SEO and then we'll also Google for a while is this really, your algorithm was really hard to understand. And I just couldn't seem to be making any kind of headway. Like all my usual tricks and tactics weren't getting the job done. And I was like, man, okay, Google AdWords it is. And so I did that for a while. And so like our, we're paying, I think,
00:11:13
Speaker
at the time, like $3,000 to $4,000 a month with Google AdWords. And we started with like $500. We started at $500 a month. And then it worked its way up to like $3,000 or $4,000 a month, maybe even like $5,000 on some heavy months. But we're like, OK, we've got to stop this. And so I went back to my roots. And SEO seemed to be a lot easier. It seemed to settle itself down again. And so
00:11:37
Speaker
My usual, I mean, not everything still is the same, but most of the main things are still the same. You need to have unique content, your content's clean and distribution is clean. And that's typically the way. And you need some backlinks still, even though people frown on backlinks, it's still a thing. And I would imagine having eight or 10 different sites for yourself and being able to cross-reference between those gives you an awful lot of domain authority as well.
00:12:05
Speaker
It does. We're actually trying to get rid of all of our extra sites.
00:12:09
Speaker
it's just a lot of headache to manage. And it's not as necessary as it used to be. We used to make sites specific like we would make one just for Seattle. And it was because we could just make the whole site Seattle based and like change everything. And like Google really liked it. Now the Google seems to really like a bigger site. And so you can get more, we can show up better with our bigger site in multiple locations where that just wasn't the, we couldn't seem to make that work before.
00:12:36
Speaker
Yeah. So when it comes to SEO, I know a lot of folks I talked to, they would always ask me, Max, how did you guys get some of these sales? And I would say, well, Amazon found us on Google. Google found us on Google. And they would say, well, how did you get started with SEO? And I said, well, first I read this big fat book.
00:13:01
Speaker
and I worked on it for about two weeks when I realized I was seriously outgunned and I hired a guy who was just very, very capable and he got us in those top three rankings. That was my way of doing it. How did you
00:13:17
Speaker
figure it out. And what would you say to someone today who is just, they've got a website and they've, do they need to start creating tons of blog articles? What is it that one needs to do to start ranking for SEO and the ways that would help them with their marketing?
00:13:32
Speaker
I mean, it depends if they're local and they're doing SEO for their local market, then they should focus on local SEO, which 100% can mean just like Google Places. You want to go on there. You want to fill it out completely. You want to add pictures. You want to add content.
00:13:50
Speaker
like on an ongoing basis. And in that way, Google starts like, oh, this company is updating their stuff. And they start putting in the top three. And now you're going to start getting business that way. That's like low hanging fruit for a lot of production companies that aren't doing. Google Place is number one easiest thing to do. Do it. And then I would say join directories. Like there's like Clutch. There's UpCity. They let you have a free listing for your location, for one location. Actually, Clutch lets you do multiple locations.
00:14:19
Speaker
But yeah, you would want to join a lot of different directories. But if you're looking at your actual website and issuing your website,
00:14:28
Speaker
You're going to have to either learn or pay someone. And so that's a different thing. Um, and it takes some time. Like I've tried to teach SEO to some people and some people just really just aren't willing to forget it. I don't want to do it. And some people pick it up. Like the one I had a good friend who worked for us. Um, and then I taught him SEO and he's the one who did the Seattle. And so his name was Burke. His name was Burke. And so if you could have took Burke out of the picture back then, then you know, we wouldn't have been competitive in Seattle.
00:14:57
Speaker
Yeah, 100% was responsible for Seattle. Back then. That's so cool. Well, I, and now how going back to, I think they're just two really interesting things here and they're so interesting the way they combine and that is your unique marketing methods and then your unique structure. How, how do you
00:15:20
Speaker
I asked about how you manage the team, but how do you work out the sort of hierarchy of the team? You know, in terms of like, are you, do you creatively review everything the team does or do each office operate pretty independently? How does that work?
00:15:36
Speaker
Well, it's typically a collaboration between who's who worked like say their producer worked on the project and who might be the same person who's like the count manager for the project, depending on the situation. So they'll be involved on, you know, the workflow.
00:15:52
Speaker
And then our lead editor would be always overlooking the projects. And if he's working on it, then Justin will typically provide feedback as well. And so we kind of all look at it as a team. I think I look at almost every single video that we do. And I look at it. I don't always give feedback, because there's normally enough feedback already from our guys. But we're in team effort here. We don't have this hierarchy. This person's responsible for that. But we're really not very structured.
00:16:21
Speaker
And not in a bad way, like in a good way, like we, we, we kind of have a synergistic relationship, all of us together, helping each other out. What do you use for your video review software? We use Whipster, which I, like I had Justin complains about Whipster, but then he also checked out Frame.io and then he complained about Frame.io. And so,
00:16:44
Speaker
I just think that, you know, you're not, no one's going to, you know, ever be a hundred percent satisfied. There's always things that you want different. Uh, but we got in whips really early and our, we, our rate is really low. And so there's no reason for us to leave. I actually frame IO called us cause I'm like, yeah, I'll learn more about what you can, you know, what you guys are up to and something. And he basically wanted to get off the phone with me just cause I told him what we were paying. Um, and he's like, there's no way that we could offer you anything. You should stay where you're at. Yeah.
00:17:12
Speaker
That's what he told me. Yeah. So we used to use a service before that called take off video dot com. And that was the first review service before Frame.io and before Webster.
00:17:23
Speaker
Isn't it funny how some of those don't make it? And then when like Framio just blows up into this. Yeah. Yeah. This totally blew up. So then there's only three that like, well, everybody's kind of starting to offer their versions of that, but there's really only three players to me. And then Vimeo became a player from Webster. They were teaming up for a bit. And then, um, and the Vimeo kind of went, went the wrong way. It can be a good deal just because you probably might be already paying for their business package for like five or 600 bucks a month. And then you get it for free. So.
00:17:53
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I've never really used the Vimeo's review tool. And so I'm not sure because we tried to use their live streaming tool and we just weren't happy with it. It just didn't quite, there was too much of a delay. And so, but we were thinking about if we did like it, then maybe we would get rid of Webster and use Vimeo's review tool if we liked their tool, but it didn't get that far.
00:18:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's good. It just doesn't have good, uh, foldering and, and, and structuring, uh, for your, for your projects, which I imagine for you folks would be a real pain. So, um, that was, that was, but they're, they're working on Vimeo also is now worth resilience and doing, doing tons of stuff. So, well, uh, Jake, did you have any other questions? Cause I mean, this has just been, uh, uh, if I would have had some of this insight early on, it's killing me.
00:18:39
Speaker
I was just going to ask, what do you see as the next method for scaling past a million?
Scaling with Shoot Stop Video Directory
00:18:45
Speaker
Is that brick and mortar? Is that more online presence? What is it?
00:18:50
Speaker
The way that we are going to get to $5 million, Jake, is our shoots that video. Basically, it's a director website. And what's happening is you're going to see SEO is going to get really hard for production companies to be on standalone to show up on the search results. And what you're going to see is you're going to see clutch, you're going to see up city, you're going to see design rush. And so I saw that happening. And I'm like, well,
00:19:14
Speaker
and you know back in 2016 ish but we really launched in 2018 but I saw that happening and I was like no way I could compete with these guys and they're just too strong and they have all this user generated content and so that's why we created shoot stop videos so that we can compete head to head and show up and
00:19:33
Speaker
across the country, really. The thing is, I'd like to share that wealth with other production companies. Right now, we're offering for free, so if there's other video production companies and we're not in that area, we only
00:19:46
Speaker
we can't cover the whole country. I mean, we're only, we're only, we're stressed in as it is. And we have, you know, we're just on the West coast base. So I've been hitting up a lot of other production companies, you know, and like New York and Boston and Miami. So, and I'm giving them, I'm showcasing those things for free and I'm pushing those to be up on the top of the search engines. And hopefully we can help each other out. Like they'll send us business. We'll send them business. I'm not, you know, I'm just, I'm open to,
00:20:13
Speaker
just seeing how we can network together and all grow together. So your goal is to get the directory on the front page if it's not already and then you, the video production company to appear on that directory.
00:20:26
Speaker
Correct. And then yeah, we have, and then we have a little more control over that too, where clutch, we don't, they could raise the rates and we can do stuff. And, um, like, I think when I was looking at clutch, it was like $250 per location. And so when you have 10 locations, you know, that's 2,500 bucks. So I was like, ah, man. And so that's why that's when I started doing the math.
00:20:50
Speaker
Uh, when I saw it happening back up for one second, tell us a little bit about shoots that video, uh, cause we haven't really hit on that at all. So can you break that down a little bit? Cause this sounds amazing.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, shoot stuff video started out because we were doing work with a lot of different vendors and it was hard for us to remember who they were and would have to pull up all like invoices and paperwork. And I was like, because we used someone three years ago, but that person was great, but no one can remember their name. And we had a spreadsheet that we created and that was really noisy. So we created like a CRM basically.
00:21:26
Speaker
for our vendors. And I think we did that around like 2016. And then 2018, my thoughts were like, hey, this is a really good tool. Why are we hoarding this resource? Others should be able to use it. And I'd love for our vendors to get booked by other production companies or agencies. Like there's no reason for us to, you know, we only use them every so often anyways. And so I'd much rather share the resources. And other reason is when we had to hire people, we would go to like the production hub in Mandy,
00:21:54
Speaker
And they didn't have a review system. And so they had to vet them from scratch. And so our idea was like, well, we can write reviews and we can write basically notes about who we like and why we like them. And then others can do the same. And so I don't know if production hub of Mandy started it. I don't think Mandy has. I'm not sure about production hub, but I don't know why they're not doing that. If you're listing production hub of Mandy, it's a no brainer, like add some sort of review system.
00:22:19
Speaker
When you're, it's really a referral system and in our industry and not sure why that's.
00:22:26
Speaker
not super clear, like when we book people like, hey, who do you refer? Like that's just how it happens. Like we normally go through our Rolodex of like, we'll call John, see if he can refer us to anybody. But then when that doesn't work, then you go on Facebook and you do the same thing. Like, hey, can anybody refer me to somebody here? And so that's the way things really work. You don't go to some website and just like book some guy that you never worked with before without any referrals. You just need that. And so we really wanted to build that in there for everybody.
00:22:54
Speaker
And so that's how it started. And then while that was happening, I saw a clutch in up city and I'm like, okay, let's just make this a directory and compete for these key phrases. And then hopefully we can help out the industry in that way of ourselves, obviously as well.
00:23:11
Speaker
Yeah, that is fantastic, man. That is really cool.
Virtual Offices and Remote Work Trends
00:23:15
Speaker
And I remember one thing you mentioning, and that is that you were saying that for your team, the bricks and mortar approach really is not what you're looking for. You really don't have physical buildings for your offices and so forth. We just don't have the need. If the need was there, we would. The need's not really there.
00:23:34
Speaker
I mean, I mean I think what's the growth of our industry is there's less of that. I think it like a small like when you're first like I, if we were first starting out right now we wouldn't get an office, I mean we'll get a place to store gear if it wasn't in our like garage at our house, like, like even now today I think it makes more sense to buy office house.
00:23:54
Speaker
Um, but a lot of, a lot of these solarpreneurs that are, you know, act as like, maybe like a production company, you know, it sounds like a production company. They have a business name. They're really a dude with gear at their house. Yeah. I mean, it's sad, right? Cause we grew up in the, I mean, I don't know about you. I grew up in the eighties and like, and the cool thing on TV to work out was a video production company with the exposed brick and the neon sign. And like, you know, that's, that's the vibe I always want. Well, Max, we do have exposed brick in our office.
00:24:24
Speaker
Well, there you go. You actually do have an office. Yeah. Hey, I'm in my office right now, but, um, but it's not necessary. Like I could work from home most of the time. I like to go on work vacations and work remotely. Um, but I think one office for us is required, but, and then like maybe a satellite, but it's not. When you're first starting out, like we thought we needed one when we first started out to like be respectable, but you don't.
00:24:50
Speaker
It's so different now. If we start out now, we'll be more focused on buying gear than getting an office space. That's a really cool tip. Yeah, this has been just a cavalcade of great tips. And you speak so quickly and are so efficient that we kind of got through everything we needed to. But I just want to tell people, go to Shoots.video, get yourself signed up on there. Because clearly, I mean, that's an easy play.
00:25:16
Speaker
And check out Blair Media because these folks are way ahead of the curve on getting business in ways that many of us don't think about. Many of us walk around complaining, why don't I have it? There's a lot of different ways to do it. So Blake, thank you so much for joining us. This was awesome. And any last words?
00:25:40
Speaker
No, I was going to say, if you're going to join, shoot that video. It's for freelancers and for companies all of the above. Perfect. Awesome. Yeah, I appreciate you both having me. Thanks, Max. Thanks, Jake. Good times. Thanks. Let us talk to us. Thanks very much. All right. Well, we'll see you folks at the next podcast. Thanks a lot.