Business Innovators Radio - Las Vegas Business Networking: Unveiling Success with Art Saenz

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

In this compelling episode of “Business Networking Influencers,” your host, Tim Knifton, dives deep into the heart of community-driven business success with Art Saenz, the founder of 4Twelve Creative and the innovative force behind the Successes brand. Art’s journey is a testament to the power of connecting across diverse communities and industries, all while maintaining a firm grip on one’s own identity and values.As you listen to Art’s dynamic dialogue, you’ll unearth invaluable wisdom on creative business strategy and cultivation of meaningful relationships. With a background that ties the entertainment industry to marketing prowess, Art offers unique insights into leveraging Las Vegas’s eclectic and vibrant business ecosystem to fuel growth and connections.From discussing the conception of 4Twelve Creative and Successes to revealing the secrets behind fostering synergistic business partnerships, each segment of the conversation is packed with actionable knowledge. You’ll discover the importance of community engagement, embracing discomfort to forge new relationships, and the impact of staying true to one’s roots in an ever-evolving cityscape.But it doesn’t stop there. If you’re curious about how to skillfully navigate networking to supercharge your business growth, Art stresses the effectiveness of organizations like BNI and shares tips that transcend the ordinary. He passionately discusses how one’s reputation and personal integrity play a pivotal role in long-term success, surpassing immediate monetary gains.This episode is not only a source of inspiration but also a toolkit for entrepreneurs, community leaders, and anyone looking to make a mark in their field. Tune in to learn, grow, and be influenced by some of the best in the business.**Connect with Our Influencers:**To join in on the transformative journey with Art Saenz and explore the potential of your business endeavors, follow him on Instagram @youloveart or visit iamartsaenz.com. The doors to networking success are open, and “Business Networking Influencers” is here to guide you through.**Don’t Miss Out!**Be sure to subscribe to “Business Networking Influencers” for more episodes filled with powerful insights and tactics to elevate your networking influence. Your next big connection is one episode away!—Enjoy this episode? Share it with fellow entrepreneurs and networking aficionados, and let us keep the spirit of connection alive!About The Show Sponsor: “Business Networking Influencers” podcast is proudly sponsored by RSVP Las Vegas, your premier direct mail postcard service in the heart of Las Vegas. With a commitment to delivering outstanding results and effective marketing solutions, RSVP Las Vegas specializes in helping businesses connect with their target audience through direct mail.Visit their website at RSVPLasVegas.com to explore the range of direct mail services they offer. From designing eye-catching postcards to precisely targeting your desired audience, RSVP Las Vegas has your direct mail marketing needs covered. Their team of experts is dedicated to helping your business make a lasting impression and drive results.Whether you’re launching a new marketing campaign, promoting a special offer, or aiming to boost brand awareness, RSVP Las Vegas is your trusted partner in direct mail marketing success. Contact them at [phone], and their knowledgeable team will be ready to assist you.Experience the power of effective direct mail marketing with RSVP Las Vegas. Trust their expertise and enjoy the benefits of reaching your audience directly. Visit their website or give them a call today to start your next successful marketing campaign with RSVP Las Vegas, your premier direct mail postcard service in Las Vegas.Business Networking Influencers https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/business-networking-influencers/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/las-vegas-business-networking-unveiling-success-with-art-saenz

Welcome to the Business Networking Influencers podcast, where connections become opportunities and relationships shaped success. Prepare to be inspired, informed, and empowered by the brightest minds in business networking. And now, your host, Tim Nifton. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Business Networking Influen, sponsored by RSVP Las Vegas. I'm Tim Nifton, your host, and thrilled to have you here with us today as we continue our journey through the vibrant world of Las Vegas business connectors. Before we dive in today's conversation, I want to extend a warm welcome to our featured guests joining us today is Art Signs with 412 Creative. We're honored to have him on the show today so he can share his experiences, insights, and wisdom. He's gained

over his remarkable journey to success, which he's going to be sharing with us today about success. So this is perfect. So without much further ado, let's get right into it. Art, welcome to business networking influencers. We're delighted to have you here today. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. Tim, how's it going? How's it going? It's good to see. Yeah, it's great to connect again and see you again. So, fantastic. We'll jump right in and hear a little bit about your journey and incredible work you're doing here in Las Vegas. So I always like to start the podcast with a little bit more information about who you are, what you do, and why people should be interested. 412 Creative. Awesome.

So 412 Creative is a strategic development and content creation company. It's basically all of the resources of a marketing agency without the competition, is what I like to say. And I have been doing this for about 15 to 20 years. I started in the entertainment industry. I've done everything from carry the wires and plug in the cameras to standing in front of the camera and making the music and the students. I have an entertainment background.

I got an album with a Grammy Award winner by the name of Skip Martin. Wow. We made music back in like 2009-ish, and we still currently make music today. I just not my main focus, taking care of my clients and offering quality services, helping the communities that I work in is really the big things for me right now. Wow, that's great. That's great. So before we started the podcast, you were mentioning,

you have a new venture called success. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, so successes is a business community built out of, I believe we're at like 235 businesses, I think right now. We have seven branded events. We do everything from financial awareness events to we just recently did a Women's History Month called Her Story event where we honored a bunch of women within the community and let them tell their stories to each other. It was really good. About 60, 70 people came out in attendance. We do everything from ribbon-cutting ceremonies for brand new brick-and-mortar businesses to virtual events as well. What we tend to offer is financial credit specialists, tax specialists, marketing both traditional and digital, social media.

and management, web developers, just specialists in all of those fields, and we offer them to our business community, real tangible resources. We work with nonprofits, and so we're able to make partnerships for tax write-offs all the way down to sponsoring events and helping the community. We have government programs, politicians in our community as well, so they're always bringing us things. The city of Las Vegas or the Valley, should say, is very vast in the different communities. So I found a lot of community builders, and I kind of just like gave them the options for these resources, and then they brought them to their communities. And now we have leaders within the health and wellness community, the medical,

real estate. We have, it's, I believe we're in like at least a good, 22 different industries, about 30 different verticals. Yeah, so we have something for everybody in this. And we're into creating power teams where we can get two business owners that can really benefit with working with each other because the market that they're in. And we get them to create a synergy there. So, yeah, that's kind of us in a nutshell, success.

That's great. That's great. What inspired you to start 412 creative, 412 creative, and successes. So 412 creative is based off of my birthday. Born on 412, we made it real simple. Oh, it's coming out. Yeah, yeah, right around the corner.

So doing that allowed me to just work for myself and develop products. I've worked for multinational marketing agencies. I've worked for small boutique businesses. So this is me branching out onto my own. We identify for these larger corporations that I can get somebody to pay us maybe $2,500 a month, but getting that $15,000 a month retainer was just a little out of my reach in experience and some of the business owners that I work with out here. And when we identified that, the agency that I work with, we created a new partnership

where I can still bring clients to them. I can help businesses grow to there, though, by starting my own boutique agency and getting them off the ground, whether they're just starting trying to get to a brick and mortar or they just open their brick and mortar and trying to reach a new audience. Doing the content creation allows me to offer the deliverables that all of these businesses need for their marketing. Sometimes they might not need the agency's resources to broadcast a message, but they do need the content creation for that. So I help them strategize what's the best options for them and then we can go from there. So yeah, with successes, it kind of allows me to have now instead of a pipeline or single

businesses I'm looking for. I have a pipeline of businesses and we're able to utilize each other to 10x our business. Nice, nice. You were mentioning how unique and vibrant Las Vegas Valley is. How is being based in the entertainment capital of the world influenced your business strategies and decisions here? Well, I can start in the morning and take on a political campaign and work for, you know, we just did a CCSN voter meeting greet, basically. And, you know, I was there for four hours and I left there, went to the gym and filmed some professional fighters, sparring foot. the private footage that nobody will ever see. Go from there, come home, start designing a video or a flyer for a nonprofit, a logo for a real estate agent. All of these different industries, they all have certain things in common with the way the market is in Las Vegas,

the way things are supposed to look, smell, how even taste. It's one of those things, a Genesee qua, if you will. And for that, like our own flavor, being part of that, like watching the city grow, being here since I was 16 years old, becoming an adult out here, becoming an artist out here, a business owner out here. I've gotten to meet so many different people that I can, understanding the pulse, I guess, of the different communities out here. And even recognizing that there is multiple communities.

I mean, most people don't even know their neighbors, right? how many people live in these tickey, tacky houses, you know, on the block and they don't know nobody up the street, whereas somewhere like Oakland, somewhere in Montana, the people has been living there for 100 years, you know, like 80 years easy, four generations, three generations. And it's like, we don't have that here in abundance. So it's like you kind of have to identify who are the communities, what communities exist, and then find the people within those communities that have cinderella. for your personal business because they're out here. Yeah, you keep mentioning there's a lot of diverse communities in Las Vegas. Can you share some insights and how you're connecting with them? Yeah.

So I am the media director for Robert Taylor Twix. He's running for city councilman, War II of North Las Vegas. Between that community alone in North Las Vegas itself, it's its own ecosystem that's separate from Las Vegas, just like Henderson is and Summerlin. And for these ecosystems, you can almost at this point live in these neighborhoods and never have to leave. So depending on what your ecosystem is, it'll have those type of resources for you. So if you're going to school, for instance, there's the CCSED campuses to UNLV.

Now, around there, all of the businesses and everything are contributing to the life of the people that are in that area. So between the different areas of the city and then not just like the politics of how they're managed, but also the communities that are living in them, some are older than others. So there's a little bit more community infrastructure there where like, you know, the parks, the political figures are from those neighborhoods. The schools do community programs where they have, you know, after school programs, the nonprofits are more engaged in those communities and stuff. And their communities like north Las Vegas to the east side of Las Vegas, like off of a desert inn and eastern all the way up to like Nalus and those areas. Like a lot of those,

they're really tough neighborhoods. But the people that live within the community have now built out. My generation has now built out. successful businesses, brick and mortars, organizations, and we give back to those communities. And there's a lot of people, I like to call them community builders, because there's a lot of people out here that are really trying to do that because they're from these neighborhoods. And we didn't just move his cellar house in California for, you know, a $1.5 million and then buy a half a million dollar house. And now we're sitting on bucks just living lavish. No, we went to the high school here. We figured it out, whether it was, you know, nice,

life industries or it was, you know, working automotive services or something like that. And now we built ourselves to having our own businesses where we're getting our own brick and mortars. We're 10 to 15 years into a career of certain corporations. And with that knowledge, we're not keeping it to ourselves. We're giving it back. We're through these community programs, through these community businesses. That's one of those things that separate successes is we're not just one community. We're multiple communities because my community is built off of community builders.

So I find leaders within other communities, whether you have 15 people, 25 people, you're into this type of music, you're into this type of thing. We just acquired recently what's it called? So really big right now is the women's

football, flag football. And the house getting behind it. So all of these high school girls are training at a very high level. And so now there's a whole infrastructure of industry that's being built off of that. Coaches, DJs, vendors, brands and lifestyle stuff that are all going to now videographers and production. Now that there's a whole ecosystem for this and there's proper funding for this because they want to see these young ladies do really well. So it's like now that spawns a whole new

industry. So if you're in one of those things like you do vend, like you do production or whatever. Now you can look into a new vertical that has been on tap. And these communities are built for that. Like, you know, they're hiring within. One of the girls that was on the team, the coach hires the father to DJ the events. Another girl on the team has a father has a food cart. Now he's vending at the event, you know, just stuff like that. And just understanding these infrastructures, like even the voting situations out here in our community, we're so disenfranchised from the political parties and everything that we don't think our vote counts where most people are focused on national elections. If you don't even pay attention to who your

state assembly is, who's running the district in your school or who's the head of the school district, who's your city councilman for your district, like all of these things. If you're not paying attention to these things, you're not ever going to really make any real change. Right. But once you start understanding those people and then those people who they're attached to, then along the lines, you're both starting to make change. But until you care about your little island that you live on, it's really not going to, you're not going to really see all of these things. You're just going to be inside your house. You're going to go to your work, casino job, or wherever you are, and you're just going to come home. Your kids are going to go to school. You're going to complain about these things, but not really take no actionable causes because the efforts of. being part of a community does take more because most people aren't from here.

So they don't even know where to start. Absolutely. Absolutely. Let alone finding a community for women's flag football. I'm sure most of the Valley hasn't heard about it yet. But it exists and it's flourishing. That's wonderful. Yeah, yeah.

So I'm sure networking's been a crucial part of your business growth. Can you share some tips on building meaningful connections within the Las Vegas business? Join B&I. I love it. Not a paid sponsorship, not a paid ad, but I do highly recommend it. And be engaging in it. Don't be scared. Don't just go there thinking, okay, I paid my fee.

Now everybody's going to give me business. No, you have to do your one to ones. You have to take the effort to build within people in different chapters as well as your own chapter. Understand the theory of power teams. If you truly try to make a profit, all of those things, in B&I and do your C EUs. Yeah.

You know, because you'll learn. You get game from that and you're able to apply them into your daily business and your daily life. And once you start doing that, you'll see results. That's the first thing is B&I. The second thing is get out of your shell.

If you walk into a place and you feel comfortable, the first thing you do is go to the people you know, you're doing it wrong. Get uncomfortable. Go to the people you. you don't know. You can't get yourself confidently, knowing what you like, knowing what you need, knowing what you offer.

Yeah. And you'll get your conversions. That's amazing advice. I love it. Being a successful business owner, I know you have a vision for 412 creative and successes. So what are your current goals and aspirations for these endeavors? Continue to grow the successes brand, of course. that is my first and foremost outside of the campaigning right now for another three, four months or so it is.

But after that, it's just really the long-term goals for successes. I see that it's going to become a political action group. I see it's going to be a nonprofit. It has for-profit businesses already. We're building out a sales team. We have a production events consistently. We have a production team for videography, photography, any production service. services needs. So yeah, we have all of these resources plus the business owners that are

already incorporated into us that are part of the board, our chairman, to all the way down to just our volunteers. Like every single business owner has a resource that we're using. We just dubbed one of our voiceover people as the voice of successes. Now she's out there being able to market. Her stuff is being marketed for her. And we already have lanes for her to capitalize on, like, putting her with connections for politicians because they need the voiceover videos. Like, little things like that. Like, if we can identify a use for you, come on board. I have the same within the community.

My plate is already soulful. So I don't mind if somebody comes and eats off of this plate. The plate is big enough for all of us. And at this point, if you were to make a connection and I didn't hear from you, ever, gain and you made millions of dollars off of that connection. Successes wouldn't care no different. It wouldn't affect us no more until you pour into the community. That's when we'll expect something when you make a commitment to us. But outside of that, like, we're here for you. You know, we have tons of resources and the resources just keep growing. As far as a 412 creative,

the clients are just going to get more important, bigger. Budgets are getting larger as we speak. I still work at a program for small businesses. I still work at a program for nonprofits and micro schools and stuff like that to be able to get top quality content for writeoff fees and small pay for labor and stuff of that nature. But, yeah, targeting larger campaigns, larger clients, whether it's in the fight world, whether it's in any sport industry or any corporate industry. We have people that can service these things within our, or not just community within my company. Yeah. Wonderful.

So finally, reflecting on your journey, what's one piece of advice that you would give to somebody in business here in Las Vegas? Your reputation is worth more than your wealth. Yeah. Your connections, who you are as a person, is a stronger attachment than any small monetization. And they will lead to greater monetizations as you build more connections. Definitely.

Well, thank you so much, Art, for being on business networking influencers podcast. Can you share with the listeners how to get connected with you or successes or 412 creative real quick? Yep. You can follow me on Instagram at You Love Art. That's Y-O-U-L-V-E-A-R-T. You can look up the website, I-A-M-A-R-T-S-A-E-N-Z. That's I-M-R-S-A-E-N-Z. And from there, all of the successes stuff is all easy access.

Perfect. Thank you so much for being on business. business networking influencers. Log in next week to hear our next episode. And that's all for today. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. Have a good one, guys.

Bye. Bye. Thank you for tuning in to the business networking influencers podcast. We hope you gained valuable insights and strategies to elevate your business and networking game. Don't forget to subscribe for more episodes filled with expert advice and inspiration. Until next time, keep connecting. keep growing and keep influencing.