This Motion Designer Made $500,000 in His First Year

I realized that I hadn't really just built a video Department within a startup I'd really kind of built a business model within my first year I made over $500,000 worth of sales which is still mindboggling to me that's Kevin rra he came up with a system that helped him to create half a million dollars in his first year as a freelancer talking about money is hard especially with creatives it feels like a really nebulous space the way I thought about it when I was first starting is oh dear God how do I do this uh

I think was the the first paralyzing thought so for the motion designer who is looking to expand their business who is looking for additional service offerings that they can put together and how they can Market it the things that I would recommend are in this episode you're going to learn how Kevin made 500k in his first year typically when I'm looking at like a systems-based project it usually starts in the range of a around 25 to 40,000 A system that you can steal to make more money if you Market that you can do everything you're

really marketing that you can do nothing how to attract clients on LinkedIn in a non cringy Way by leveraging my expertise on LinkedIn that has been one of the biggest drivers of business for me and how you can create content easily so that you can grow your business I've spent 15 years building other people's Brands and now I had to go oh so what's what's mine so Kevin do you want to tell me how you made 500k in your first year of business uh yeah absolutely I'm excited to be here thanks for having me so

I started a motion design in content development business about a year ago and you know I wasn't sure how it was going to go um it's my first time being on my own I really liked working for other companies where they took the risk and then paid me Steady paychecks that was really really nice but I decided it was time for me to try and do my own thing I had learned a lot from a lot of my various experiences IID started as a motion designer and worked my way up through the studio pipeline to

becoming a director and after about 10 years of working in the studio pipeline I then got the opportunity to work in House at a really really fast growing startup and I learned a ton from that experience first I learned how to deliver value to a business not just how to execute a creative brief but really figure out what work delivers the most value to a business and I also learned how to optimize my own creative processes so that I could create systems of content that would speed up development would reduce the budgets would overall create

more value to the brand as a whole and they'd get more content and they'd get more opportunities to try out different channels to test out different creative messages all sorts of things so it gave them a lot of opportunities as a business and I found this was a really marketable service so I was showing up on LinkedIn and I was marketing these fairly unique service offerings there weren't a lot of people out there doing this kind of scalable content systems I was able to Leverage my network to make a lot of sales without even really

having to sell it was really I was talking about the work and talking about the value of what I was doing and people were coming to me for it and as a result within my first year I made over $500,000 worth of sales which is still mindboggling to me yeah it's crazy and it's it's really good like I'm so impressed and obviously that's why I wanted to bring you on here but I I guess when you talk about scalable content systems can you dive a little bit deeper into that and tell us more about what

exactly that is or what it might look like in a certain project yeah absolutely that's a great question I mentioned that I worked at a startup I worked at a company that when I first got brought on I was brought on to run their video department and at the time the company was only 100 people it was a series B startup and within 3 years it was an 1,800 employee public company the largest IPO in the history of the state of Ohio so it it just massively massively scaled and because of that we had to

create a lot of content we had a tremendous amount of value in video as a medium it was our highest performing ad Channel we had a lot of content that performed really really well in the video space so in order to produce the volume of content that we needed in order to in the business we had to be really strategic about how we created content and so instead of just creating whole cloth new content just like brainstorming A New Concept every time we made a new video we started getting more content systems in place and

what I mean by that is instead of creating a shoot for one specific concept where we storyboarded it out and we executed something for one concept we said what if we did a 5-day shoot where we captured just a huge swath of content so that we could essentially own our own stock library of footage so we would capture a bunch of product interactions we'd capture lifestyle footage we'd capture driving footage cuz it was a car insurance company and we would just get as much content as we could so that we weren't just editing one video

we were leaving a shoot with enough content to make hundreds of videos and we did the same thing on the motion design side we built templates we built just a bunch of internal systems so that we have transitions type builds illustrations all sorts of things and one of the things that we did most effectively is we transitioned our Graphics from 2D illustration over to 3D the reason we did that is most people immediately think oh 3D it's so much more cost and intensive time intensive so much harder it takes so much more effort and it

does if you're thinking about a short-term project but if you're thinking of a long-term brand something that's going to live for years once you create those models once you set them up once you have the rigs it's a lot easier to create new illustrations or create animations on them once you already have those built so for example if we wanted to have a car at multiple angles what's EAS you're drawing a car eight times or taking that model and then just repositioning it and having another camera render it out that was so much more efficient

for us in the long run and saved us just so much time and money by the end of the process we ended up saving about $5 million a year in production cost because we were developing a system of content rather than creating each piece of content whole cloth from the jump yeah it makes a lot of sense I guess what I wonder about and what potentially people listening will wonder about is how do you convince someone upfront to I guess put more money upfront in the first place so then they have this system over the

long term that's right how do you sell it right is is is the question and the way I do it is is usually by easing them in because usually when they're coming to me from the first project they're usually saying hey can you make me an explainer video hey can you make me these performance ads something like that right they're they're coming for a initial project where they have a low investment that they're trying to just get one individual asset out of it and so the way I approach that is to explain to them the

value that they'd get if they started thinking about systems early and so instead of just optimizing one specific piece of creative because 5 10 years ago that's what you do you would make one explainer video that was around 90 seconds and it would be 16 by9 you'd put it on YouTube You' put it on the website you'd put it everywhere and you'd have a 30-second cutd down if you wanted it for broadcast that was pretty much the standard play but now there's Facebook which needs things in 4x5 aspect ratio to be successful and there's YouTube

which you know a six-second bumper might be the most appropriate deliverable for that channel there's so many different channels out there which have entirely different specs and entirely different needs and so if you're thinking about what's the one deliverable that I need for this video campaign you're setting yourself up for failure so I start by helping them understand that that there's a lot of opportunity if they think about this in a more systemized way if they don't just build creative for one deliverable but build creative in in a more modular way so that they can

optimize all of the content for the different channels and then I explained to them that there's even more opportunity if they start testing messages so what if they tried five different six-second bumpers and then they find out which of those messages is their highest performing message then they can take that and carry that through in the next campaign that they make there's lots of opportunities for them to learn as a business what performs from a channel perspective and what performs from a creative perspective those kind of learnings are worth way more the investment that they

put into the project I use the term meal prep as an analogy a lot because when you build every meal from scratch of course it takes longer of course it takes more effort but if you spend your Sunday and you cut your peppers up you cut your onions up you cut your mushrooms you've got enough to make a bunch of meals throughout the whole week and it saves you time it saves you money and it makes things a lot easier throughout the entire process yeah it makes a lot of sense so are you asking them

more about their businesses and like the problems that they're trying to solve and then almost saying okay this is the package that I would recommend for you or something along those lines 100% because a lot of the times when they are asking for an explainer video they're asking for can I have the thing that I know will convert right that's typically the ask is traditional marketing story will will tell you that an explainer video is what you need to have a high conversion asset that is the best tool that we have in the toolbox to

tell our story and they're not really thinking about how that plays out today cuz again 5 10 years ago they were right that your explainer video was the the perfect thing to throw it on the web and gain some raction but now our channels are much more diverse the way marketing is done today digital marketing is done today requires a lot more proliferation of your brand you have to show up in different spaces and you have to show up natively and so I really try to understand what the brand is trying to do what Their

actual goals are because if they're trying to raise awareness I have a different recommendation than if they're trying to get conversions and so yes then I will recommend a package for them that will get them the most valuable content that will help them achieve those objectives yeah it makes perfect sense from someone who kind of Dives a lot into marketing and and Geeks out on this stuff I love this this is really exciting but thinking like from everyone who's listening to this he's more creative he's like okay you know this sounds great like I want

to make lots of money like Kevin too and and obviously you're really excited about this marketing stuff but how can a motion designer who you know maybe is like more focused on the creative and things like that how can they kind of make baby steps towards this kind of thinking and and would you recommend it necessarily for everybody absolutely I I think this is something that's really scalable because you know I'm a creative too right like I I come from a creative background I just spent a lot of time with marketers and so I I

started to understand how businesses actually implemented the creative work that I was creating and I got a sense of what things actually performed and what things didn't so what I'd recommend to motion designers is to do that too is to spend time with their their clients and ask them questions how are you actually implementing this creative because if they're saying we're putting it on a mobile feed and your recommendation is to give them a 16x9 video remember that's only taking up a small portion of the the screen on a mobile feed right A 4x5 or

a 9x6 is going to be something that performs better because as someone scrolling it takes up more of their screen so for motion designers the thing that I recommend is really understand what your clients are asking you to do understand what they want out of the work and use your best judgment on how you can tailor your work to help them meet those objectives so can you tell tell me a little bit about how each project looks in terms of like from revenue and then also if you have people helping you to kind of achieve

your goals so the the way my business is structured is that I am the only full-time employee but I have lots of really great and valuable partners that I bring in uh I liken it to a heist you know I have my explosives expert I have my conman expert I I bring the right experts in when I need their expertise and so I have a collective of a bunch of great motion designers designers production companies things like that Nimble resources that can work with me that understand the way that I work and that I have

a really great comfort with and and know that they can execute the types of things that I that that I need so when I'm bidding on a project you know I will typically run creative Direction and overall strategy and usually copyrighting and then I will bring in the right resources to help me execute everything else yeah so what do those budgets look like and how how can you like account for all those people because I think people find it hard to go from it's just me on my own and then how am I kind of

you know accounting for oh I need to bring this person and that person in yeah the really hard thing is how do I charge for my time how do I do I decide to charge overhead for you know managing bringing in an external contractor all of those are really really hard decisions to to figure out and ultimately they're they're business decisions they're business finance decisions and those are those are hard ones to make so the way that I've structured it is that I have a fixed day rate for for my services and then I have

fixed day rates for all of the contractors that I work with and I typically try to charge a little bit more than their average day rate because I want my contractors and my team to really love working with me and so I raise their rates to work with me because if they have an opportunity to work with someone else or with me I want them to choose to want to work with me because I think the only way to do the best work is to have the best talent and the best way to retain the

best talent is to treat them fairly pay them as well as you can and set them up for success as best as you can when I'm talking about budget of course it varies because everything varies but typically when I'm looking at like a systems-based project it usually starts in the range of around 25 to 40,000 that's that's about an average like hey we need to do an explainer video but we want to convert it more into a systems approach to give you multiple different deliverables and so the average cost per deliverable is usually around 3

to 5,000 when I'm creating video content but the overall project might be somewhere in the range of $3 $335,000 then you know I have other service offerings where it's like more of a one-off project where they might just need me to come in for strategy or they might just need me to come in to direct a shoot or something like that and that that's where I just work on my normal day rate of $1,500 a day so that's that's how I typically approach pricing I typically build the projects in a way where you know there's

minimal overhead for my business because it's just me so I don't really do a ton of marking up of the time of my other Freelancers I really just try and give as much of that extra Revenue over to them um so that I can have really great relationships with my vendors as well as my clients yeah thanks for being so honest and open about that and explaining it to us cuz I think it really helps everyone to get to know the behind the scenes like of how people do stuff right and like how you're getting

to this number you know of like half a million over a year yeah yeah and um just just for you know transparency I I I think transparency is really really important because talking about money is hard especially with creatives um it feels like a really nebulous space um so I typically sell about a project a week that is usually you know I I'm up to about 60 projects now and I am you know just about 60 weeks into this so I'm averaging selling about one project a week and not every single one is $335,000 right

or or more some of them are you know $1,500 a day because somebody needs me to come in and help write a script for for a day so there's there's a lot of variation in what I do and because people see the content systems and understand that I have a lot of different service offerings I'm not really leaving money on the table um you would think because I'm getting so granular about the one thing that I do that oh man I'm not really marketing my copyrighting service or I'm not marketing my ability to direct a

shoot but people still know that I do that because they see that that I'm capable of all of these content systems that they're still willing to reach out to me for these other projects so that's you know I'm even working with other production companies and other agencies who who still see the value in what I do so it's it's hard to Niche down and select something that you want to do because you feel like you're I I'm not marketing this other thing that I can do and I can see it making money you don't have

to you know you can still be very very clear about what you do and and be for a very specific audience and still show that there's other services that you have without really truly marketing them as as full force as you do your your key offering yeah that makes a lot of sense thanks for clarifying that I wanted to ask you at the moment like what is just your Revenue look like in terms of what you would consider the content systems and what you would consider your kind of I guess like more bread and but

stuff that you've kind of been known to do yeah I I would say it's probably a 50/50 split um in terms of like if we're looking at 500k a year there's probably about 250 of it that is more systems oriented work and then 250 of it that is more you know oneoff projects or something that's more execution focused I I look at the systems work as as the more strategic work that that I do it it it involves me being a lot more strategic about how I approach the work and then so so the other

half is a little bit more executional in nature um I I would say it's about a 50-50 split right now and you know how much of that goes to me versus how much of that goes to contractors and the other people that I bring in I'd say I think it was around 200,000 went to external contractors and then around 75,000 of that went to like business expenses you know all of that fun Finance stuff so that's that's about how how that Revenue breaks down um in terms of the finances of it so my next question

I think then would be okay so who are are these brands that don't have you know a whole agency behind them but are kind of big enough that you can make enough money working with them and things like that is there kind of like a sweet spot or a level or a way to find those types of clients that's a great question the majority of the clients that I'm working with are in that Tech space that's where I've had the most experience myself and I find it to be kind of a sweet spot for me

because they have a product that's pretty defined but their marketing usually Isn't So companies that are in the the series B funding stage which means they've gone through two rounds of venture capital funding is usually around that sweet spot for me they are companies that really don't know how they want to market yet and so they are very eager for lots of content to help them test and learn and they're usually more willing to let a partner help them take the lead so how I've been able to acquire those clients is of course knowing people

in the industry people that I've worked with in the past that have gone to other tech places but also by leveraging my expertise on LinkedIn that has been one of the biggest drivers of business for me is by talking about these types of content systems and I'm talking about the problems they're trying to solve which is they are trying to find High performing content right that's what a company at that stage is they're trying to find what is the formula for a high performing ad so for the motion designer who is looking to expand their

business who is looking for additional service offerings that they can put together and how they can Market it the things that I would recommend are start to understand who you are serving right understand clearly who would get value from me offering a service like this who would get value from a systems-based approach who would who would like to get the type of content that I can offer and start to message that and Market it the way that you would Market the work that you do for for other clients so Market yourself the way that you

Market other other people that's how I'd recommend a freelancer or you know a small motion design business to start thinking about those Services think about who would get value from it and figure out how you can develop a service offering that meets that types of of client need yes so there's a few things in there that I want to unpack great so the first thing is um that you said almost Market this service how you'd want your clients to market right I feel like this is something that we never speak about or people like really

don't know how to do because you know traditionally we're creatives we're not marketers but I feel like now more and more we kind of have to get more into that space and especially if we want like the bigger budgets and things like that because raising yourself up I think to like a strategic partner level is it seems like from you and you know from other people that I've worked with as well that is kind of what is going to get you there so in terms of that first off can you explain a little bit about

you know Zoom back kind of to a year ago when you were kind of shooting out on your own like how you thought about that and how you really got started doing that that's a great question Haley the way I thought about it when I was first starting is oh dear God how do I do this uh I think is was the the first paralyzing thought the next thought was okay who am I really for who would get the most value out of what I do and what is it that I do that isn't just

a set of skills but is a marketable service that I can build a business around because I have a wide range of experience I've directed campaigns I've directed tons of different pieces of video content I've done visual effects Motion Graphics you know there's a lot of different avenues that I could go down and the problem when you have a lot of skills uh that you could go down different paths is which one do you take because you always feel like you're leaving money on the table if you don't Market everything you do but if you

Market that you can do everything you're really marketing that you can do nothing because you don't truly communicate who you're for you communicate that you can do all sorts of things but everyone then wonders okay but what do I actually hire this person for so I recognized that I had to get more strategic and more specific about what my actual value was and when I looked back over my experience when I looked back I was trying to figure out what is the thing that makes me unique in this space right because I'm no longer just

competing against you know other creative directors I'm now competing against Studios I'm competing against every freelancer that's out there I'm competing against agencies so when I looked back at my experience at the startup the thing that really made me unique was I was able to save them $5 million a year by developing strategic plans that helped them create over 1,500 video deliverables each year and the overall Video cost was around $2,500 per video deliverable which is I think pretty low for the quality that we were producing those results were pretty powerful and I felt that

I could communicate those in ways to say hey we can cut your budgets in half we can cut your timelines by a quarter by implementing a more systemized approach to the way we develop creative and that to me was kind of my hook that was the thing that I provided that was unique in the space that I was approaching things differently than other people in the space were doing and so I really just started leaning in on that I I started leaning in on the systems and I started leaning in on the value of the

the approach that I brought that was unique and I started marketing that in the channels that I had and since I wasn't going to be paying for ads and I wasn't going to be doing billboard campaigns anytime soon the best channel for me to Market that was on social and so I started putting things on LinkedIn and I started with small Investments where I would just do text only posts on LinkedIn and I would start to just test the waters to find out which messages were resonating and I started to see a return on that

investment of my time I saw clients coming to me I I started to sell work just through my post on LinkedIn so then I invested more and more time into it I started you know taking the messages that I saw working and building some Carousel PDFs around it and I started creating videos around it and I invested more and more effort into building my presence on that platform that was really what I mean by marketing my own personal business the way that I Market somebody else I would always recommend start by testing and learning what

messages is perform and then scale up scale up your efforts based on what is actually working double down on what's working and that's how I've really built the business that I've built today is really getting granular about what my service is the one that's unique the one that's differentiated in the marketplace and scaling my marketing efforts around that unique service offering yeah and I think you've done such a fantastic job I what it makes me think about is obviously like everyone who ever has listened to this podcast or watch any of my YouTube videos knows

how much I love LinkedIn and especially right now um and I think what everyone struggles with is how am I talking directly to my clients you know and and like potentially the rest of the motion design industry too right it depends on who your client is that you're trying to attract but how are you sort of thinking about that and were you ever worried about how that would kind of come across absolutely I've spent 15 years building other people's Brands and now I had to go oh so what's what's mine right what's my story and

all of us are going to find that we are the worst clients because we are the pickiest and we pay the least we are nightmares of clients for ourselves as creatives so yeah there was a lot of how much of my own personality shows up in my personal brand how much of this is communicating to my target audience which which is like a VP of marketing or a chief marketing officer at a series B startup and how much of it is going to be communicating to my fellow creatives which is I'd love to help them

as well that's that's a big part of my linkedin's presence is to give them some of the tips and tools that I've learned over my career so there's lots of things that I've had to balance in order to figure out how to communicate in my own marketing presence where I've LED landed is my personality is I think a plus and an attribute not something to be feared I don't fear making myself super buttoned up for LinkedIn I don't I I think the content that I don't like on LinkedIn is the stuff that feels very sand

blasted like all the personality is completely filed away in order to appear as professional as possible um I think the fact that I am a little looser and and more genuine in who I am is an attribute that helps other people understand what it would be like to work with me and figuring out how to message and be clear about how I split the content that creates some being more towards sales and so I'm being more towards providing tips and advice and recognizing that every piece of content that I make is just one piece of

a larger overall story in the same way that I'm Building Systems for my clients I'm building systems for myself and I'm thinking about different stages of the marketing funnel right so I'm thinking about some of the content that I make is for awareness it's to get eyeballs it's to get people to just know the highest level who I am and what I do that's it and then something is more of a conversion post where I'm going to explain a little deeper about how I approach a case study right giving more detail on the content systems

approach and what I do that's unique and then some things are messaging that messaging for conversion where I'm just trying to say here's the value that you get out of working with me or here's a happy client or here is a portfolio piece that I just finished right so I'm understanding that every piece of messaging that I create is part of the overall funnel part of the overall story and I'm doing my best to communicate My overall value in different stages of that funnel so that people would know what it's like to work with me

know what they would get and find it to be valuable yeah so do you have a way to kind of keep up with all of this because it's a lot of work right putting all this stuff out and and also people are shy and they they kind of want like what's the you know what's your system and what's the kind of an easy way that people can get started to the the best recommendation that I have is you know everyone will tell you just start just do it just get out there just do it just

post things and you know not everybody's up for posting not everybody's feels super comfortable putting themselves out there especially on a platform like LinkedIn what I would recommend is start small start with minimal investment you can post once a week and you can start by just you know sharing a portfolio piece or sharing a quick six-second motion sample and explaining what you did maybe you do like a quick breakdown of you know style frame to motion test to composite to full animation right there's lots of different things that you you have to offer that people

will be interested in I think all of us underplay ourselves and think well I'm just not the person that people want to listen to when every single person I post on there whe they have hundreds of thousands of followers down to 10 they all have a story and they just put it out there and and tried to communicate to other people there are people with giant accounts that you know maybe don't resonate with me but there are people with really small accounts that do resonate with me because they're telling a story in an interesting way

that that connects with what I'm interested in so I would I would recommend to start small just put some posts out there about things that you think are unique things that make you unique show your actual personality as you do it because your personality is a huge attribute not a detriment on a a channel like LinkedIn and be willing to stick it out for the long run right like don't expect immediate return on social don't put two posts out there and expect you know huge million dooll client to come in but if you stick with

it in the long run and you place yourself necessarily build a system for yourself but give yourself the opportunity to be consistent about it and start to learn from what you see is working and and what isn't and are willing to put the effort in I have seen a tremendous tremendous return on the investment of time that I've put into it so I I would highly recommend that others do it too yeah definitely and I love I love all of your stuff and if anyone's watching this on YouTube or listening on the podcast we'll make

sure we put a link um either below or also um maybe in the show notes of our social media guide because I think that's like a really good free resource just to get started because it's got 52 examples of different posts from real motion designers so I know that that's helped an off a lot of people so I think that's one thing as well I wanted to mention here and another thing that I think has helped a lot of our students too is just like starting to comment on other people's stuff like on other people's

posts because I think engaging with others as well is really helpful and even like some of our students have got clients just through like commenting on other people's posts and stuff like that because obviously at LinkedIn at the moment pushes you up in the feed and shows you to other people even if you're just commenting so kind of just wanted to mention that here as well um as kind of a good starting point yeah 100% Haley the LinkedIn as an algorithm rewards you for how much you engage and the relationships that you build and yes

that's great for visibility I should have mentioned that you know an awareness play for me is commenting right that's a huge awareness play because that is what gets you in front of a bunch of different eyeballs it also helps you build relationships with with people I've met some really really great people that I now consider friends great people that I now can consider clients um purely because I have made an effort to communicate with them to ask them questions when I think they're posting something interesting and you know just continuing those conversations yeah I think

that's awesome and that's how you ended up on this show as well which is really cool exactly exactly it's bringing a full circle yeah I think there's a few more things I want to dig into particularly around like exactly how because we talked a lot about the marketing and the systems and how that can be attractive but like how does someone become a client of yours so are you looking out there and sort of saying oh there's a VP of marketing I'm going to follow them I'm going to DM them are you like doing any

of that direct Outreach or is this all coming inbound it's all coming inbound um because I don't feel good as a Salesman I don't think I would be good at that particularly the managing a lot of cold Outreach and and sending awkward requests for like hey can we have a conversation I I would be bad at that the thing that I've been good at is is marketing that's that's honestly what my skill set is and so I've put more of my effort into building a brand that other people would want to come to me for

and that has been how I've sold every piece of that $500,000 plus because I have really been trying to leverage my skill set as a marketer and as a creative to build a brand that communicates what my value is and help other brands understand the that they would get a return on the investment that they put in me that has allowed me to attract the types of clients that I want so are they reaching out to you on LinkedIn by DM or like that and then where do you take that conversation from there yeah from

there I I have a couple of standard Decks that I've built so if somebody says Hey do you do an explainer video I say I do but here's the way I do an explainer video right here's the way I would do it I would give you more opportunities to test I would build you a system and here's the types of deliverables you would get and then I show them here's are some overall price ranges based on the amount of deliverables you get if you want a full 2D animation here's what it would cost if you

want 2D with some 3D accents here's what it would cost and if you want full 3d here's kind of the the overall range of what it would cost Then I then I would take that over to email and just say hey let me walk you through this presentation if you're looking for an explainer if there's somebody who's looking for more performance ads I have again the same type of approach where I would walk them through a deck of here's the way I would approach that type of work and here's how I do it in a

way that delivers more value to the brand and some people bite some people don't some some Brands will say no we we really just need an explain our video and I say okay cool I can execute it that way here's how i' do it and then some people go okay I really see the value of what you're offering and I'd love to talk more about that and most of the time my clients kind of stick around and bring me back for for more work uh so I've I've been very very fortunate that you know most

of the clients that I bring aren't one-off project clients they they tend to recognize the value of what I do and so they they tend to bring me back for more and more projects yeah that's awesome so once you kind of get into that negotiation stage what tell me a little bit about like what that would look like so I'm imagining you know maybe I've got some budget for an explainer video and you're saying okay Haley but I really think that you should build out this content system which maybe that's going to cost me a

bit more on up front but give me more return later how would you go about that I would kind of explain to them it's like okay sure let's say you're you budgeted around 20K you've budgeted around 20,000 for a an explainer video here's an approach that instead of getting spending $20,000 on one video deliverable that you can test one time right you can only test this one thing in all of the channels that you are trying to put it in what if instead you got 10 video deliverables for around 30,000 and I just give them

kind of the understanding of how the money breaks down and why that's a better investment and I wouldn't recommend it if I didn't think it was the right approach and if I didn't see it perform really really well over time that's how by developing this approach that's how we found all of our highest performing pieces of creative by testing and learning and typically marketers understand that language of test and Lear they understand that oh I can see what I can do with that and then sometimes they say nope 20 grand is the most I've God

and so I say okay cool then let's make the best explainer video that we possibly can I think that you know where it really takes me to is really thinking about okay yeah that makes a lot of sense but what if they have other people who in their company who are like other stakeholders who are like no but we really just want this you know that this is always the battle that we've got to do right yeah you you never know what the internal politics of a business is going to be like you never know

there are times when you're going to be like I have no idea what that decision was based off of they they just told me this is why and you never know how that stakeholder you know put it up the chain to the other people that they needed to get Buy in from there there's so many elements that you cannot control in the work that comes to you the thing that you can control is how you message what your value is and if you feel confident that you have an offering that delivers value put it out

there you know you will attract the clients that Vibe With It ultimately the the people who say no are probably just not the type of clients that would understand the value of what I do and they might not be the right clients for me anyway that's okay the clients that do understand the value the clients that do value my services that do who appreciate what I do those are the people that I want to work with and so I'm not going to really change or alter my Approach in order to get you know hopefully more

of the types of clients that are wrong for me I'm going to be very very clear about who is right for me and try and Market my services to them yeah that makes so much sense I think we have a resistance naturally to do this because um you know it's scary right scary to to be like okay well you know that's fine if they don't want to work in that way I mean I it takes me to thinking about well you could start to test this out like we were saying test and learn test and

learn absolutely with some clients and then potentially see how that goes and then you can still kind of do the other work and maybe you know do this thing where you gradually reduce the other work over time or something like that yeah there's there's so many different ways to figure out how you want to evolve your business and the the way that I look at it is the media landscape is changing there are clients that are consistently asking for more content for smaller budgets that is a trend that I've been seeing over decades right like

that is just the way content has been going as companies invest more into social and invest into Ott and all of these other platforms that are out there they're consistently needing more content for smaller budgets so I see first big agencies and then medium-sized production companies feeling that squeeze and saying oh where are the you know million-dollar broadcast commercials why aren't those around anymore and they're having a harder time being able to accommodate these needs which is where small companies and Freelancers have a lot lot of opportunity to deliver a lot of value to those

companies that have these needs what I would recommend to any freelancer or small medium-sized business is to really understand where is content going what are the needs that clients have and how can I evolve my business in a way that helps these companies meet those needs and for me the way that I found to approach this is to really invest in systems and invest in Marketing Systems so that that large scale need of more content for smaller budgets is is really really attainable for those clients and you know I went full in on it I

I went you know I started off just going this is the thing that that I do and this is the thing that I do well but that doesn't mean that's how you have to do it you can continue to run your business the way that you run it but this might be a really ractive service offering for a small company or a freelancer because you know a company might not have the budget to really invest in a big agency to make this type of social social content but they can invest in this freelancer that they

already have a relationship with that they already feel comfortable with they they might feel comfortable giving you more robe to give them a wider service offering yeah well that's great I mean it's really impressive to essentially have this new business and basically 50% of your revenue is like generated from what I would consider kind of like upselling sort of work right like people are not necessarily going to expecting that but you're you're managing to kind of work with them in that way so I think that's fantastic thank you yeah it's been surprising and crazy and

just um exciting to to see how the business is has grown and recognize that it it is something that that companies are craving and I've been really excited about seeing things work that is something that I've always been really really curious about I get really excited when I see a project take off and try to analyze why it worked that's always been something that just tickles my brain is is to see something successful and figure out how to reverse engineer that success and replicate it so to be able to see that happen with a business

and come up with a business model and actually say I think I have a solution for a problem that's here in the market and see companies respond to it and see ways that I can grow and mature it has been really really exciting for me