Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Death to the Corporate Video with Guy Bauer
119 Plays3 years ago
Imagine bringing in revenue of $3.5M one year only to find that you’re actually $1M in debt? That’s where Guy Bauer found himself at the end of 2018. His production company (Umault) was more successful than ever, however, due to poor financial management, and lack of direction, Guy was only months from bankruptcy.
Listen in as Guy shares candidly with us how he successfully relaunched his company, slimmed staff from 32 to 4, moved the focus from “the gear” to the creative, became highly profitable, and most of all, started enjoying his job again.
Guy and his team have officially killed the corporate video - and it has paid off in spades.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Pipeline and UMALT
00:00:04
Speaker
Okay, we are back with crossing the axis, the biz side of video production. I am Max Keiser, the CEO of Pipeline. We are an all-in-one project management software to help you keep your production company organized, profitable, and on the way to bigger things. But that
00:00:24
Speaker
pales in comparison to the importance of what I am doing today, which is having an incredible interview, I hope, with Guy Bauer of UMALT, which is a video marketing agency out of Chicago, which
Death to the Corporate Video?
00:00:39
Speaker
There's literally so much to learn from what UMALT is doing. It is fantastic. I doubt we're going to be able to get it all in half an hour. Maybe we'll have Guy back again, I hope, because there's just a lot. Guys work with clients like Dell, Whirlpool, MassMutual, James Hardy, Deloitte. What is special about UMALT? I would have to say,
00:01:03
Speaker
that when a company that makes corporate videos declares death to the corporate video, there's interesting stuff going on. And I want to dig into that. I want to dig into how they go from being a production company to a video marketing agency and what that means and what that's meant for their business.
Founding UMALT Amidst Recession
00:01:22
Speaker
And I want to talk about their videos, which are incredible and very, very, very different from the average corporate video that's out there.
00:01:31
Speaker
But let me get started by introducing Guy. Guy, welcome to the show. Thanks, Max. Nice to be here.
00:01:38
Speaker
Can you tell us a little bit how Guy goes from being an aerospace major at Purdue University to being a video marketing agency owner? Yeah, I'll give you the quick version is. Yeah, so I got a full ride to Purdue under a Navy ROTC scholarship to do aerospace engineering and my first semester.
00:02:04
Speaker
I realized engineering was very hard and I started making, actually I've been making videos since the seventh grade, it's just been my hobby and I found myself at that first semester just making a bunch of videos, a
Financial Struggles and Restructuring
00:02:20
Speaker
couple videos I made
00:02:22
Speaker
went viral, and this was 1999, so the way they went viral was people had to burn them on a CD's and then move them over to the intranet in another dorm because the dorms couldn't talk to each other. So there I would be in my naval uniform, my ROTC uniform, and people would be like, hey, you're the vacation guy or whatever video was going viral at the moment.
00:02:46
Speaker
So I kind of got the idea like maybe you know, maybe the navy wants me to make videos and I asked the navy if I could keep my scholarship and they're like no we don't need you know videos yeah so um yeah I left.
Creative Ideas vs. Production
00:03:00
Speaker
and started interning for a show called Crank Anchors and then moved on to the man show and found my way into radio executive producing a morning radio show and all the while video was still my hobby. And then in 2009, the recession hit
00:03:18
Speaker
And you remember, it was awful. I went on, I sent out like 100 resumes. I didn't go on one interview. And I picked up this Money Magazine article in January. And the headline was, how to make money in 2010. And I was like, yes, I need to know that. And there's a little article, hey, if you have a talent, if you have a hobby, there's these freelance websites.
00:03:42
Speaker
that you can go on and start freelancing. So I made a profile and I started freelancing on a site called guru.com. And my first project was for 50 bucks to edit a puppy video.
00:03:57
Speaker
I got a five-star review and a nice write-up, and then I used that to go get a $70 job and an $80 job. My goal was just to augment unemployment until I could get a real job, but it just kind of took off.
00:04:13
Speaker
And so in 2010, I started my company and proceeded to make every business mistake you could ever make over the next eight years.
Focusing on Meaningful Projects
00:04:32
Speaker
It's a winding path, isn't it? None of us went to business school. What's so funny is
00:04:42
Speaker
I read all those business books and don't work in your business work on it. All those tropes, just because you know how to make videos doesn't mean you know the video business and all that stuff. But what I've learned is you just have to feel it. I can read a book about cashflow,
00:05:09
Speaker
And every guru says how important cash flow is, cash flow, cash flow. And theoretically, it's hard to grasp what cash flow is. And I'll tell you what cash flow is. Cash flow is on a Wednesday night. Your wife looks over to you at the dinner table. And on Wednesday nights,
00:05:31
Speaker
payroll hits. The money comes out of the account because then on Friday, everyone gets paid, but they take the money on Wednesday night, at least our payroll does. And on Wednesday night at dinner, my wife says, we're short. And I'm like, how much? We're $22,000 short.
Enhancing Creative Processes
00:05:50
Speaker
I'm like, oh, that's cashflow. It's not until at 6 p.m. I've got six hours until payroll hits that I have to find $22,000 to get the lottery tickets going.
00:06:04
Speaker
And where did I find the $22,000 in a line of credit? In a line of credit debt, went into massive amounts of debt. And then you don't know how debt affects your balance sheet. A balance sheet is boring. It's very abstract until you feel what too much debt feels like.
00:06:27
Speaker
And when you're on a treadmill of just interest payments and nothing is being done, and you're like, oh, this is why debt is bad. And so yeah, so from 2010 to 2018,
00:06:43
Speaker
grew the company from zero to 32 full-timers. 2018, we made the Inc. magazine, Inc. 5000 at number 800, whatever. Wow. So yeah, cool, right? But it's that same year. And by the way, Inc. advertises it, they don't go, you know, the way you get on the Inc. 5000 is by top line. They don't look at your bottom line. They only look at the top line. What kind
Client Trust and Advocacy
00:07:10
Speaker
of revenue numbers get you in there?
00:07:12
Speaker
3.5 million top line, but Inc. 5000 is the fastest growing. So what they do is they look over your year over year growth. So in 2017, we did something like 2.8. In 2016, we did 1.9, whatever it was. So it was like very fast.
00:07:31
Speaker
But they measure it by top line, but then when they award you, they go, the 5,000 best companies in the United States. And that is a function, I think, of why so many people get in trouble in this business is that the credit card companies
Transition to Video Marketing
00:07:50
Speaker
say,
00:07:51
Speaker
get a credit card or take on a loan so you can grow your business. Everything is about growth. You have to grow your business. And I fell for that thing. I also fell for bragging about top line. Yeah. So max in 2018 landed on 800 something in the ink, $5,003.5 million of top line. Guess what? That same year I lost a million dollars. Oh my God.
00:08:18
Speaker
I could have just gone to Vegas and had like a crazy, I could have stayed in a suite for like a month straight and gone gambling. How many lambos is that? That's like at least four lambos. That's how I always think about losing money in terms of lambos. I don't know why. It's just easy. Quarter here, quarter there. It's unbelievable.
00:08:44
Speaker
Well, that's that's so you restructured. Right. That's what happened. Yeah. So from 2010 to 2018, we were a company called Guy Bauer Productions. And in 2018, in 2018, it was so sad. You know, I laid off a ton of people, great people.
00:09:06
Speaker
I mean, it was down in the dumps. We actually had a light up sign
Creative Risks and Ownership
00:09:10
Speaker
because the logo was like a quill pen and then Guy Bauer. That was like the logo. And we had a light up sign, a big light up sign with my name in lights with the logo.
00:09:22
Speaker
and we had to take that sign down because we had to, you know, like sublease the place and and they just I saw it later and it was in a dumpster and it was this it was like my name in a dumpster. It sounds like a scene from Citizen Kane, you know, second half. It is the lowest, you know, and and so all those things were a function of just irresponsible
00:09:45
Speaker
handling of finance, not understanding what these numbers were. I would pretend like I knew what they were and maybe I 50% knew what these things were.
00:09:57
Speaker
And it wasn't until 2018 when basically I was out of outs. I was always able to mask the poor decision making with top line revenue. We would just book a lot of crappy work. But eventually, we were a whole 32 person organization that was just on this treadmill of making terrible stuff.
00:10:21
Speaker
And so partly, you know, I like, you know, version A of the narrative is, you know, in 2018, they renamed and
Future Growth and Creative Exploration
00:10:30
Speaker
relaunched as U-MALT. You know, that's version A where we're in control. Version B is really, they made a ton of mistakes and they got their ass handed to them and they had to think of a new way to do things. And that's why U-MALT was launched. And I like to say that it's a bit of both because
00:10:49
Speaker
I started making decisions in early 2018, like rejecting client work that wasn't profitable. I started making those decisions, but failed to adjust our staff accordingly. Just awful, like just going by the seat of my pants and having no real structure. So in 2018, we brought in a consultant
00:11:14
Speaker
by the name of David C Baker, and he came in, and it's a two day engagement it's called the total business review. And his rates are on his website it's $20,000. So, I didn't even have $20,000 I went into debt and another 20 K, because I was like, I just, you know, I can't do this.
00:11:36
Speaker
And on day one, he was like, you know, you're weeks away from bankruptcy, my friend. So what's your plan? And it was like sobering, very sobering. So we had a layoff. We had to do two rounds of layoffs. We had to sublease our beautiful space that we spent all this money rehabbing and making it look good and
00:11:57
Speaker
Oh, they had exposed brick. I love exposed. It had exposed. Oh, yeah. So it's the best. Yeah. Yeah, it was great. And and we had to move into coworking and like, you know, same thing. Name in the dumpster going from our space that was custom design with edit base and all this stuff to coworking spaces.
00:12:18
Speaker
where we're crammed in with those tiny little IKEA desks they give you. So it was super depressing, but I like to think that we are totally turned around and in the right direction now.
00:12:37
Speaker
I feel like if I edited these, which I don't, I would put the saddest music over what, the last part is the sort of going down and then sort of a windy street sound and we're out. But we're back because you decided to focus on, I mean, you really changed the entire,
00:13:02
Speaker
What you basically went from, as you explained very well in one of your blog posts, you changed the focus from being a guy, a company that sort of cranks out videos to something very different. And what is that?
00:13:23
Speaker
And this is like a theory that was in my mind ever since I started my company, but it could never put my finger on it. And it took me like eight years to figure this out is that when you look at a video or when you look at an ad, I don't like to call them videos anymore. I like to call them spots or ads. But anyway, when you look at a piece of content in the video form, what are you looking at?
00:13:50
Speaker
You are looking at an idea that is being transmitted to you through the medium of video. You're not looking at a video because if you were to just want to look at a video, you could just pull up a blue screen and just look at that blue screen. But the blue screen doesn't have a story. It doesn't have an idea. What you are doing when you watch, when you consume video, when you read a book,
00:14:14
Speaker
or when you listen to a podcast or whatever, it is a delivery method for an idea. Over my eight years of making every single bad corporate video ever imaginable, there were also videos that I made that were very good. One of them is still on our site. It's the premium beat spot.
00:14:37
Speaker
Love that spot. Thank you. As someone that used premium beat for, and I still kind of do, but I mean, it just, goddamn, you hit, you hit the audience, you hit the user base, you hit everybody that ever has used premium beats. It's absolutely hilarious. Really well done. Thank you. Thank you.
00:14:54
Speaker
go on their site folks. There's a there's a couple of pieces we're going to talk about today, but I know most like that the premium beat and it's it's just hilarious with the premium beat guy literally saying the name premium beat live every single on every single track. You know the sound that makes you absolutely freaking crazy when you're trying to edit and you're still not sure you want to choose that song.
00:15:17
Speaker
but you still keep hearing that fucking premium beat guy again and again and again. The idea of how that came about and that he's doing it live on every track is something that you have to watch. Thanks. But yeah, I was wondering like, why is that good?
00:15:34
Speaker
Because it's not the video quality, because actually our whole gear list for that was a light panels, one by one we didn't have diffusion so somebody took off their white T shirt and we use the T shirt is diffusion that's it, it was done on a C 300 not mark to not mark three C 300 so it's not the gear.
00:15:57
Speaker
I was like, why is that good? And it's good because there's an idea and there's a story. It starts off in status quo and then it ends with the guy getting fired and there's an up and down. So I started putting all this stuff together and I was like, okay,
00:16:18
Speaker
You know, and I started formulating and this is probably what creative agencies and big entities know. Anyway, it took me eight years to figure it out is that, oh, to make a good video.
00:16:31
Speaker
that people like, it's actually a very distinct two-step process. Step one is come up with an idea, i.e. the creative, and step two is make it. And the other way to think about it is when you build a custom house, when you build a custom house, you don't go direct to a carpenter.
00:16:52
Speaker
What you need to do is go to an architect. The architect will ask you questions like, well, are you an indoor, outdoor people? Tell me what you like doing. Do you like cooking? Yada, yada. They'll ask you all those questions and then they'll draw you the plans. The end deliverable for the architect is just the plans, the blueprint. That's the storyboard.
00:17:17
Speaker
And then those plans then go to a general contractor to make it. And the general contractor is the video production company. True video production companies, like in the commercial world, right? They don't come up with the ideas. They are handed scripts and boards. And then they can put their spin on it. They assign a director and yada, yada. So I realized, oh,
00:17:44
Speaker
the clients that I had for all those years, what I was really doing for them, the non crappy ones, the clients that I still have to this day.
00:17:55
Speaker
They didn't like me for my video production, for the actual craftsmanship of the videos, i.e. the lighting and the negative fill and all that stuff. They weren't hiring me for that. What they were hiring me for was the thought, the ideas, the nuggets that were then translated into video. So basically in 2018, we just reversed the flow
00:18:25
Speaker
We were always a video production company, video production, we have cameras, we have the best cameras, HD, 4K, whatever. And instead of leading with that, now we lead with
00:18:38
Speaker
ideas, we can create ideas that will give you business results. Oh, and by the way, we can make it too, but that's the less important second step. Yeah, it really shows. I mean, on the site, it's on your site. It's like the ideas are just overflowing everywhere. It's pretty amazing. You just get the sense that you would go into a meeting with you folks and it would be pretty entertaining.
00:19:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's the goal. And that's great to hear that it's translating to you because every now and then it's like, I feel like I'm just writing to nobody. No, it translates really nicely.
00:19:22
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah. How do you in the in the videos themselves, I think that just to talk about them for a moment, let's just look at the Deloitte video. I love that video. It's very memorable in the video. Basically, it attempts to sort of personify or sort of
00:19:43
Speaker
show Deloitte's process for production chain management and sort of move a fire a little bit, if you will. You got to go watch the video but it's very entertaining sort of gives a sense of sort of like mission and not mission impossible but
00:20:01
Speaker
It just does a really good job of making a production chain come to life in a very exciting way. Can you tell us about how you approached that video? Because a production chain video, that's a really boring creative brief to get from the client. And I've worked with Deloitte before and I've seen their briefs. And we like to have a video about the production chain and why it's so exciting. What do you do with that?
00:20:29
Speaker
Right yeah so the product's name is synchronized planning and fulfillment and the brief was like 10 pages long and they send you a bunch of decks and everything.
00:20:42
Speaker
I could see the typical corporate video or the way that a normal video would be for synchronized planning and fulfillment would start with, like, meet Bob. Bob is the supply chain manager for a Fortune 100 organization with supply chain and fulfillment issues. He doesn't know. And it's like, you know, one of those things, like, now his organization managers can truck, you know, anyway. So that's the typical way.
00:21:12
Speaker
Now, what's interesting about this project is that three quarters of the way through the brief, somebody wrote down like this little story. It was like, you know, an order comes in and then this happens and like they wrote the flow of how synchronized planning and fulfillment works. And
00:21:38
Speaker
It just sparked in my mind, like, oh, wait, what if we had like a command center, like a NASA command center, so someone goes to buy a product and, you know, then we're in like the, we're in millisecond time, almost like inception when you move one layer deep and time is slow and you're going at the speed of light and all that stuff. And the idea like just came to us
00:22:04
Speaker
That's how that was done there wasn't like a specific we follow a process for every project, but that was a unique case in that it was like this little passage that somebody wrote that we just like kind of globbed onto.
00:22:21
Speaker
So, how to come up with great ideas is, you know, really hard, and the ones who can do it will, it's like writing songs, you know, I mean, yeah, become you in different ways, right. That's right. And all I could say is the best way to do it is to actually listen.
00:22:39
Speaker
to shut up, to not go in with a standard, you know, back in the day when we were guided by our productions, pretty much every one of our projects was we interview somebody and then take B-roll around the office. Right. So interview the CEO and then do slow motion B-roll people at their desks on the phone and then in conference rooms and walking down hallways. And that was pretty much every project.
00:23:04
Speaker
that. And so we can get them at the whiteboard. Oh, yeah, whiteboard. That's a critical you want to see that. Yeah, the whole like, I like your video about that, by the way. Thank you. The drone. Yeah, all those spots that we make on our website, it's all out of pain. You know what I mean? That's it. But anyway,
00:23:25
Speaker
With Synchronized Planning Fulfillment, we truly came in with a blank slate of like, let's just listen and absorb and then just rely on
00:23:38
Speaker
your ability to synthesize and let your subconscious do the driving. I'm a firm believer in sleeping on it. Every one of our best ideas and my personal best ideas have always come on after sleeping on it and letting ideas kind of stew and marinate and not being on this like pressure to come up with something. Use your power of
00:24:07
Speaker
of sleeping on it and let your subconscious do a lot of the work. So that's how that project came to be. And what was it like, you know, what was it like selling it to the client? OK, so this is what we're thinking. I mean, Deloitte, they're not, you know.
00:24:23
Speaker
they can be pretty literal. And so what was it like trying to sell this? Because I think that's a big part of it too, right? One of the reasons I think you get stuck in that vein of making the classic corporate videos, you think, well, that's all the client's gonna accept, that's what they're expecting, that's what we're making. How do you go into that? And then obviously once,
00:24:48
Speaker
And we'll talk a little bit more about this, but once you've established yourself as the crazy people, then they're expecting that. But in this case, how did you sell it?
00:25:04
Speaker
This was during so this was actually made in 2019. So we we didn't have our process. We didn't have our sea legs completely down. Now we have like a very codified process of how to sell in creative work. And we take them step by step for that project. It was the biggest thing you need.
00:25:26
Speaker
in order to sell work is an advocate inside of your client company. If you don't have an advocate, if you're just dealing raw with a product person who doesn't have any marketing savvy and just sees you as just a vendor and they see you as more like a doer than a true expert or consultant, then yeah, the chances of selling creative work are very low because
00:25:54
Speaker
they're just going to tell you what to do. And they are usually extremely risk averse. They just want to do what has been done before. So we call it SPNF, synchronized planning and fulfillment. We did have an internal advocate at Deloitte who truly understood how to read a storyboard and how to read a script. And she would go to bat. So I would say that the
00:26:24
Speaker
What you need, what you need to do is you need to pre visualize as much as possible what this thing is going to end up looking and sounding like and feeling like through scripts and storyboards and pre visualization mood boards all that stuff. But you also need an advocate. And if you don't know who your advocate is.
00:26:43
Speaker
You know when you look around well a maybe try to find one is there someone that you can have a private call with and kind of have just a little one to one so that you get them on your side and and they potentially will go to bat for you.
00:26:59
Speaker
But if you don't have an advocate yet, the deck's kind of stacked against you. Well, I want to I got to beg you to come back on the show sometime because there's a couple of these topics that I just want to be able to dive into a lot more deeply and how to sell in your creative work and how to also be seen as a creative peer are two questions that I would love to expand upon at further length. But at the moment, I kind of want to stay on the track of this transition.
00:27:29
Speaker
from the prod code to the video marketing agency because I think it's something that when a lot of production companies get a little longer in the tooth and either get some success or hit a wall, a serious wall like you did, they start asking themselves,
00:27:45
Speaker
you know, how can I get a bigger seat at the table? How can I get my creative to be more seriously regarded and make that a bigger part of what I do and what our team does? And clearly you went sort of through that Rubicon and you came out on the other side and you started with the idea of
00:28:09
Speaker
of making the creative first, putting it above the gear and so forth. One quick question would be how did that change what your team looked like? You said you had 30 people. What does the team look like now?
00:28:25
Speaker
Yeah, so this was the real sad part. So we had 32 people and they were all or I would say like 95% production roles, right? We had on-staff DPs, we had on-staff directors, we had on-staff equipment managers, we had
00:28:44
Speaker
editors, VFX, motion graphics, designers, it was all based in production. And unfortunately, when you move model, move the model to more of a creative first, that's where like, that's where those two rounds of layoffs came in. And it was like the saddest thing and just awful. Yeah. So now we're only four people. Wow. And it's,
00:29:10
Speaker
me, and then we have Hope, our COO. So she takes off the pressure of running a business from me. So I don't have to worry about the business just being in business anymore. So she handles all the business stuff. My wife, Jen, basically she's like our EP slash
00:29:31
Speaker
controller finance. So she will do EP tasks once the project is moving into production, because production is still half of what we do, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we have a project manager, and then I'm the only creative and
00:29:48
Speaker
we basically our policy is until you know for the foreseeable future is we don't take on more work than I can personally handle so you know and then maybe maybe that'll change a few years from now maybe we acquire another agency or I just meet a creative director that I really
00:30:10
Speaker
vibe with, you know, and we get along and maybe we expand the team like that. But basically, I'm the CD on every project and then we'll bring in a creative team. So we may bring in art directors, we may bring in copywriters, we may bring in editors or, you know, other producers. So we kind of expand and contract based on the project. What that allows us to do when I had 32 people. I had to take on
00:30:39
Speaker
stinky work just to keep everybody employed. And because everyone was employed, we had to take on stinky work. And it was like this spiral downwards. Well, when you don't have that many people, when you just have four full timers, we don't need to take on stinky work anymore. So that the low head count allows us to be very choosy.
00:31:00
Speaker
you said we went through the Rubicon, the transition. Back in the day in Guy Bauer Productions, we needed to close 60% of the deals that came in through our door. Now we close about 6% and it's not even because they're saying no, it's because we reject most of them because either they're not qualified or it's boring work or like we're just not into it. I don't know about you, but
00:31:26
Speaker
I can't do stuff that I'm not into. For some reason, I just don't like animation. I can respect animation. I don't like it. Maybe it's not that I don't like it. I'm not good at it. I'm not good at creatively directing animation. Like explainers and that kind of thing?
00:31:46
Speaker
can't do it. I did so many goddamn explainers for Microsoft and all kinds of different folks and one of the things is, and I think you have a podcast about don't get lost in the details in your video and explainers are just all details. That's it. I mean, it's literally one detail after another for the most part.
00:32:10
Speaker
Yeah. And, and that's the thing is that they're down funnels. So usually explainers are meant to be in, you know, consideration or decision. Yeah. And that's the other thing is I realized that I really like the awareness stuff and I'm good at it. Yeah. Yeah. I like getting attention, you know, like I really want. Being big, being big ideas, right? Big ideas. Yes.
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So now you've gone from 30 to 4 people closing 60 to 6%. What do the financials look like now?
00:32:44
Speaker
I'm not going to disclose our current financials, but I'll just say this. I'll say this, is that way lower than 3.5 million top line. But bottom line, we've been profitable the past three years. And so we were able to dig ourselves out of all the debt we rang up. And it taught me another lesson about business, like, wait a second.
00:33:09
Speaker
you can be profitable, like multiple times more profitable, making less top line, yes. You know what I mean? Yes, very much yes. And so right now, you know, I would say, you know, we don't have this drive to grow too. Like I said, I think that whole growth thing is such a dumb,
00:33:34
Speaker
American way to look at everyone wants to be a billion dollar company and everyone wants to have an exit and whatever. And, you know, there's this I know I'm rambling here, but Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson lets Steve Jobs write the last chapter.
00:33:53
Speaker
Steve Jobs writes, this thing in America where everybody is just looking to either sell out to private equity or have an IPO, basically, they're just in the arbitrage of a business mode instead of he's like, what about just having a business and just running it for a very long time?
00:34:16
Speaker
and instead of some big exit, you just take your distributions every quarter. It's so funny, I'm in software now and we also want to be in business for a very long time and make a product that we shepherd for a very long time and that is so out of step with trying to get venture capital money for that.
00:34:39
Speaker
Nobody wants to give it to you unless you can show them an exit within a year or two. It's very frustrating that that's certainly the way the capital markets think and it's really tough when you really just want to say, no, I actually want just like a good old-fashioned solid business that I can sink my teeth into. So kudos to you for
00:35:03
Speaker
for looking at it that way. And of course, I think a lot of us only come to that the hard way for sure, because we're so taught. And our society, everything just sort of pushes you in the direction of just grow, grow, grow, get that top line up, brag about the top line. That's exactly right. Right. And, and just like, I'm so content
00:35:24
Speaker
See, the way we're growing now is not growing in top line and head cap. We're growing in the ability to codify a creative process. Like, you know, I used to have to read books on how to do cost accounting because I didn't know, you know, when I was in panic and how to, I didn't even have time to read books fully, but they were all about like fixing something that was wrong. Now the books I read are like Rory Sutherland, Alchemy.
00:35:53
Speaker
or John Cleese just has a book came out about creativity. Now the books that I read are more like, how do you do it better? Have you read the Pixar book? No. Oh, yeah. I'll find it. I've been looking around my office for it right now. But anyway, go ahead. Yeah, it's the best one I've read. But yeah. But now our organization grows in like
00:36:20
Speaker
efficacy instead of, and now we never looked at how effective our videos were either. I don't know about you, but we just sent them to the client. Yeah, I wanted to get to that as our last part of this, and that is that you've taken on
00:36:36
Speaker
or at least you are moving in the direction of taking on distribution and being on the hook for the efficacy of your productions. Let's talk about that because that's sort of terrifying to me. It's so terrifying, but it's the way I describe it is when you're doing trapezing, whatever it's called, and there's a net, you're going to,
00:37:01
Speaker
You'll still give it your all, but maybe it's 99% because you know there's a net. Well, when you have accountability now in terms of the results, you are trapezing without a net. What are the chances that you're really going to really, really pay attention to make sure because you're dead meat if you miss.
00:37:24
Speaker
It's the same thing as when a client, there's a bit of reassurance. There's a bit of assurance when a client rejects a bold idea you have and wants to go the safe route. There's a little bit in the back of your mind, you're pissed because the idea was great and you wanted to do it. But in the back of your mind, you're like, well, at least I'm off the hook for if this thing is good or not because we're just doing their annoying thing.
00:37:48
Speaker
But you know how when a client is like, yeah, God, whatever you think, you know, you get that creative blank check. Every time that ever happens, I get scared because I'm like, well, now, if this thing sucks, I only have myself to blame. I cannot blame the client because they gave me all the trust in the world. But 100 percent of the time, any time that's ever happened,
00:38:10
Speaker
where we've been given a creative blank check, it all comes out successful. So we don't do distribution for every client. We won't take accountability for results for every client. There has to actually be a good fit and they actually have to compensate us for all that stuff too. Because our method of doing things is a little weird. So they have to be on board with that. And so we're not gonna take the level of risk for every engagement.
00:38:39
Speaker
But yeah, I find that creating without a net leads to better stuff. It actually leads to being less safe. And it's not about taking dumb risks, but it's about taking like really calculated, smart, balanced risks. And I feel like our work just keeps getting better the more we take responsibility for what ends up happening.
00:39:05
Speaker
And there's something so fulfilling about owning that process from A to Z. For me, there was never anything worse than making what I thought was an incredible video that I knew, if it was marketed properly, would do incredible things and then just seeing it flop like a dead fish on their transom while they just put it up on YouTube and waited for some clicks.
00:39:31
Speaker
Oh, yeah. You're speaking. Yeah. Now you're, that's hitting me hard. Yeah. I mean, sometimes clients even left our filing, like our, our file name, it would be like two nine six underscore, you know, blah, blah, blah. V three final a final two.mov, you know, and I don't know why people aren't really watching the video. I don't know what's going on, but, uh, kind of not people aren't that interested.
00:39:59
Speaker
it's happened to me too many times. And it's upsetting because in our business, you know, I've been, okay, so I've been doing this professionally for 11 years now. I've run a business for 11 years. And I can say that 11 years later, it still hurts. It still hurts when one of my babies either like,
00:40:27
Speaker
doesn't like when the client doesn't like it or rejects it or makes notes and kind of messes it up. And you have to teach yourself over 11 years, like, well, you know, it's their work, like, you know, disassociate from it. But our business, there's a bit of your soul to do it properly, to do that synchronized planning and fulfillment thing. You are watching a bit of my soul in that.
00:40:49
Speaker
Like that I had to have an open soul and I had to have created like I haven't been hurt before and yada yada like you cannot do this without.
00:41:01
Speaker
like laying your soul out there and being vulnerable. It's just impossible. Absolutely. And you only have, you know, there's someone said, I don't know, they, you know, you're only going to have so many to give. So you got to make them count. You know what I mean? I mean, at Sunday, you're just, we're all going to say, okay, that's enough. That's enough of these. Cause I'm sick of putting my soul out there, but the ones that we're putting out there now, we got to make count. So you're right. It really hits your heart. It does. So, I mean, I just imagine that that,
00:41:29
Speaker
feeling of being able to own it all the way through is very fulfilling to the full picture. Yeah, it's a game changer. And all I could say is, listen, our file structure, we're on project right now, I think like 980. So 980 projects,
00:41:55
Speaker
900 different videos i've done over the past 11 years and actually we only started naming that after two years so. I probably done over 1000 projects and it's taken me 1000 projects to kind of get it into this zone of.
00:42:12
Speaker
being able to own the creative you know a lot of people don't even you know i i i talked to ton of young studio owners yeah like how do you do it you know and they wanna do it now and i'm like you know a lot of it is.
00:42:27
Speaker
When our clients hand us a check for $250,000, they're also handing that check over because they trust that we're not just going to blow it on a Lambo. There's almost- Now you're speaking my language.
00:42:44
Speaker
There's a different layer of trust and you can't shortcut that trust. They have to have known you in the marketplace for a very long time in order to have confidence to even write that check and send it to you. They have to have fiduciary trust in you.
00:43:04
Speaker
like have patience and it took me over a thousand projects and i'm still making mistakes we're still screwing up left and right and and you know realizing this and that so it's just a very long process to get to this point where yeah clients do give us these this trust in this rope but it you know it was
00:43:27
Speaker
It took a long time to earn that. It took a long time. Yeah, I feel it, man. I think I counted 7,750 deep myself when I finally exited the building. So I know what you're talking about. And well, it's been amazing talking to you, Guy. This has just been literally one of my favorite, I think most inspirational and informational, especially for our client base.
00:43:55
Speaker
folks that are listening, we're kind of aimed at companies that are a little more established and trying to figure out how to get past certain ruts and certain, and you're talking about some really deep ones that we get into. And you've given all of us some great ways to relook at the work we do, to reexamine, to reevaluate.
00:44:19
Speaker
to take those changes. And you've been so honest and candid with us, and that's what makes this show great. So I cannot thank you enough for it. And again, I really hope we're going to be able to have you back on because I got like five other topics that I would love to hit you up with. And folks, do go check out their website, UMALT. What is it, Guy? What's the thing? Is it umalt.com?
00:44:42
Speaker
Yeah, U-M-A-U-L-T.com. Just for the sheer value of watching the videos and then just seeing how a website can be done. Because they actually do one of the topics I want to do on this podcast is just about websites and they do a really nice job of providing a lot of
00:44:59
Speaker
great information that gives the client an idea of who they are, but it also has something called an idea generator in there. They have their own podcast going with their 30 or 40 episodes deep, all about ideas and generating great ideas, and it's just the kind of stuff that you're
00:45:18
Speaker
you're gonna wanna go watch, listen to, probably copy and steal, but do it, go check it out and you won't be sad you did. So anyway, again, thank you Guy for coming on the show and we really appreciate it.
00:45:34
Speaker
Yeah, my pleasure Max, anytime. All right, we will talk to you later and we will see you folks later in the meantime. Don't forget to give videopipeline.io a visit to get that project management software that you know you need to get yourself organized and profitable. All right, I'm Max Keiser and I will talk to you later.