Creatives Grab Coffee - #107 The Art of Client Relationships (ft. Great Things Studios)

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

In this episode of Creatives Grab Coffee, Dario Nouri sits down with N’tchidjè Doumbia, founder and creative director of Great Things Studios, a Montreal-based video production company known for its cinematic commercial and corporate work.N’tchidjè shares his journey from music videos to full-scale agency operations, the growing pains of scaling, and how his company maintains creative quality while managing client expectations and large-scale productions. The conversation digs into leadership, team culture, and how the best studios evolve from purely creative shops into strategic, relationship-driven businesses.Topics Covered:00:00 – Intro & background of Great Things Studios05:00 – The shift from creative to strategic production work09:00 – Managing big clients and keeping creative control14:00 – Why relationships drive long-term agency success19:00 – How to scale a team without losing culture25:00 – Leadership lessons and defining your company vision33:00 – Balancing artistry with operational systems41:00 – Reinvesting profits into talent and technology46:00 – The creative risk of saying “no” to bad projects50:00 – Montreal’s evolving production landscapeKey Takeaways:Building a scalable studio requires structure, not just creativity.Strong client relationships are your most valuable business asset.Leadership means trusting your team and protecting creative integrity.Knowing when to say no is crucial for brand longevity.The Montreal video scene is diversifying fast, offering global opportunity.🎥 Guest:N’tchidjè Doumbia – Founder & Creative Director, Great Things Studios📍 Based in Montreal, Canada🎧 Hosts:Dario Nouri & Kyrill Lazarov — Lapse Productions, Torontohttps://www.lapseproductions.com🎙️ About Creatives Grab Coffee:Creatives Grab Coffee dives into the business of video production, featuring candid conversations with production company founders and filmmakers across the globe about scaling, leadership, and creative strategy.👇 Follow & Subscribe:Website – https://creativesgrabcoffee.comInstagram – https://instagram.com/creativesgrabcoffeeLinkedIn – https://linkedin.com/company/lapseproductionsSPONSORS:Canada Film Equipment: www.CanadaFilmEquipment.comAudio Process: www.Audioprocess.ca#CreativesGrabCoffee #videographyhacks #videography #videographer #videoproduction #businesspodcast #videoproductionpodcast #lapseproductions #videomarketing #videoproductioncompany #videoproductionservices

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, the podcast on the business of video production. Creatives Grab Coffee is hosted by Daria Nuri and Carol Lazaroff from Labs Productions. Our goal is to share knowledge and experiences from video production professionals around the world. Whether you're a freelancer looking to start your own business or a seasoned business owner aiming to scale your company, this is the show for you. Join us as we develop a community of like-minded creatives looking to learn and help each other grow. Welcome to the business of video production. Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee. Before we get started with the show, let's go over today's sponsors.

Do you have a shoot in Toronto? Do you need crew or a strong production partner to help you with your project? LAPS Productions is one of the top production companies in Toronto and your go-to video partner. With our strong creative skills and extensive network, we can help you achieve your goal. LAPS Productions is able to offer you production services, white label services, or finder fees for project handoffs. Reach out to us on our website at LAPS Productions.com to learn more. My name is Maran. Welcome to Canada Film Equipment. We are a boutique rental house based in Toronto.

We are here to help you guys out with all production sizes. Feel free to contact us to get a quote if you are a production house and you're looking for lighting, camera packages or lighting and group band packages. You can see our contact information in the link below. You're more than happy to help you guys out. Make sure you follow and subscribe to creativescrapcoffee.com. Thank you. Hey, what's up everybody? I'm Matt. Welcome to Audio Process.

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They'll be waiting for you, I'll be waiting for you, and we're all going to have a real good time. And now, let's begin the show. All right guys, welcome to another episode of Cravis Grab Coffee. Today we have Inchi from Great Things Studios. Inchi, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you, Dario, for welcoming me. Thank you. All right, well, thank you for coming on.

And again, today, Carol's not here, guys, because he's on vacation. And I actually found out that Inchi's partner was also on vacation too, so we're on the same boat. Yeah, yeah, it's the middle of the summer, you know, vacation time. Yeah, it's funny though, because when people listen to this is going to be coming out at the end of October. But yeah, we are recording this in early July.

So let's just get a little bit of a background on you. Like, how did you get into the video industry? Oh, wow, good question. Well, I mean, I mean she, producer, co-founder at Great Things Studios, and we're a video production company based in Montreal. And how we got started in the video industry, it's a funny story, because I started as a sound engineer, right? I opened my first studio at home in 2003.

It was a little home-based studio and I used to rap, me and my business partner, Jean, right? He's not here today, he's on vacation, but we used to be rappers, so we started to beat making, doing music and stuff like that. This is when I was in college while I was studying 3D animation. And I finished school around 2006 and started working in the gaming industry. And at the same time, I had my little home-based recording studio, right? I worked for in the gaming industry for a year and a half, and then one day I just came to the office and they fired 40 people. Wow.

And I was part of that batch, right? I mean, you know, during these days, 2006, 2007 was the golden age of the gaming industry in Montreal. A lot of studios from all over the world came to Montreal and built spaces. But sometime, when they have a big contract, they hire 100 of people, and when they lose or they're done with it. the contract, they let them go abruptly. So it was kind of a roller coaster in those days, and I was part of that. So I lost my job in the gaming industry, and at least I had my little home studio. So at the same time, I decided to go all in into music production. So my partner and I, we opened our first studio called Great Things Studios, the same team as we have now,

and we started doing recording, music, mixing, mastering. We worked with local artists. and international artists, local artists like Sampresian, Banyus Brown, and international artists, French rappers, La Fuynne, for instance. So we had a good run in the music industry. And some of the artists started asking us, oh, can you guys do music videos? Right?

And at the time, there was a few guys that were killing it around, that was around 2008 in music videos, guys like Justin Augustin, 16 pads that was like the two brands that I remember that were like killing it in the music video

game in Montreal so I used to refer people to them I'll go see Justin go see this guy from 16 Pats find them on on Facebook that was the beginning of Facebook also so at one day I remember one of my clients said oh can you do a music video and I said

yeah I can't do it so I just say yes but it wasn't part of officially over service I just say, yes, I can't do it. Well, what made you, instead of referring it, what make you take it on yourself? Multiple reasons, I was like, I always wanted to, from afar, I always wanted to be part of the video industry somehow. Since I worked in the video game, I always thought to myself, if I can do video games, I can do video production. Because the processes are the same.

It's in school we learn pre-production, production, production, post-production. It's the same process to do a video game than to do a video. So I just translated those knowledge into another industry. And anyways, when you study in video game, 3D animation, you have to do a bit of video production. So they teach you about video editing, how to do a script, how to configure a camera,

a camera, a bit of photography principle, and stuff like that, because you need an eye for art. You need an eye for visual when you go into the 3D world. Anyways, so I just transposed those knowledge, right? I recycled them. So that same night, I went on eBay and bought my first camera, the JVC HD 100. Do you know about this camera? I think I've seen a picture too, but it's before my time.

Yeah, yeah. It was a broadcast camera that was very popular around 2006, 2007, and it was way to overpriced in those days. I think it was like $15,000 or $20,000. Around 2000. No, I think this camera is from 2004 and 5. We'll have to Google it a bit later. But I bought it in 2009 on eBay used for 1,500,

including a Pelican case. Nice. That I still have to this day, by the way. by the way. It's a souvenir. The camera arrived and I just, I practiced on one of my friend, one of my friend was a rapper. I did a quick music video on him just to practice and then we got the gig, right? And in those days, I don't remember how much we charged, but it was for full music videos, a whole day of shoot. I think we charged like 500 bucks. Oh my God. They didn't even make the money back on the camera.

Not even, right? But I just wanted to, I mean, I was way younger and hungry, so I wanted to get into the industry. And we shot this video, and this is how we started shooting videos. 2009. And we did music videos all the way to 2014, and in 2014, we decided to transition. We can't live off music videos.

Especially in Montreal, it's a smaller market. If we were in the States, probably like Atlanta, New York, or maybe even Toronto or Vancouver, maybe. You guys are from Toronto. How was the music video industry there? I'm not too familiar with the music scene here, but I think a lot of people try to do the same thing you did. So it can't be that good.

Transitioning from music videos out of, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fun, you know. It's fun, but does it pay the bill? Does it build a business? I'm not sure. Unless you're a very niche music video director with very funky visual, you're like south after, then you can charge whatever and work with worldwide artists. But if you're not into a very niche, very artsy, very specific style,

I think it's hard to run a business just doing music video. So we started transitioning around 2014 into the corporate world. Nice. Okay. So you get into corporate and just tell me a little bit about when you get into it 2014 you said yeah yeah which is also that was our transition years that's when we started in in video production as well because for us we were we had just graduated from Ryerson at the time and we were like let's start this business that's a film school in Toronto they have a film side but we went to business so we went to Ryerson for business yeah and what we were doing was we kind of turned it into a hobby midway through school so then we just decided to like we were doing

videos for the student groups there and we were getting paid for it so that kind of gave us like a little bit of like motivation and hope to go like hey we can make a living out of this right and luckily because of that we were also building like a portfolio that was like still in the corporate space in a way right so graduated and then we got lucky with a couple of big clients and then we just kind of went from there wow so you went straight into corporate right after school yeah yeah like we did like a music video or two but like it wasn't uh it wasn't like our main focus or anything it was always like to help a friend of ours out or something like that but for us in terms of like growing in the corporate space it was very slow and uh we kind of plateaued for a couple years too

It wasn't until the pandemic that we really took a look at how we were running our business and then kind of like restructured. And then from there, we actually started to grow and become like an official business, right? Like it was actually thanks to this podcast because we started inviting all the top people from Toronto on and just picking their brain. And then we're like, oh, okay, that's how you run a business, not how, not whatever we were doing. That's not running a business. That's just messing around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's very interesting what you're saying.

It's exactly the same path for us. From 2014 to 2020, we had a slight rise, and then we kind of plateaued. And when the pandemic started, we thought it was the end for us. I remember in March 2020, receiving a bunch of emails and phone calls to cancel shoots. I was tripping, like, I was telling my partner, Jean, bro, everyone's canceling. They want refund on down payments, or they put shoot on hold, not sure it's going to move forward. I was panicking, thinking like, oh, man, in the next 30 days, they'll ask for a refund. I mean, we lost 90% of our business from March to April 2020.

I thought it was done. We're like, okay, we're fried. We have to go back to a 9 to 5. Yeah, that was us too. We lost 100%. Like, we had nothing, like legitimately no work from when did we shut down March to August? March 25th, I will never forget that day. When the minister said, everyone go home, it's done.

Good luck. You know, you lost 100? we think we had nothing man like in hindsight what we should have done at the time was try to pivot into animation work or figure out remote like reach out to our clients and start pitching them remote earlier right because that's what other people were doing well you know what was the 10% left we had the night we lost 90% and that 10% that the trickle that trickle cash flow no it wasn't animation it was just a reminders of editing work we had from past retainers right so that was the 10% like just big projects that were not completed yet you know we had we had a very big clients a client from from Toronto as a matter of fact that we closed all the way from Montreal to Toronto we had hundreds of videos to edit for for them so that

that that kept us barely afloat for like three months April March, May, nothing. No phone call, no leads, no nothing, no. I mean, even when we try to reach people, they're like, nah, no, we're not shooting. We're not shooting. We're like, oh shit, we're done. Did you guys have a lot of overhead? Did you have like an office or anything like that? Yes, we had an office. Had an office? And I remember in that time, I had an office and a full-time editor. Oh, man. So we had to let go the editor.

And that's not a good meeting to have, right? I had to call him, you know, come see me, and then I had to say, listen, man, you know what it is. We love you, we like you. We had a great time, but we have to let you go. I mean, we lost 90% of our business. We can barely keep the lights on. You know, so that was a very hard discussion to have with,

and I really like this editor. And as a matter of fact, after the pandemic, I wanted to bring him back on board, but he found a job on another way, much bigger company. But I mean, it's just to show you the impact that he had. So we had to let the editor go. So this is what happened, March, April, May, and in June,

We had a lead coming in from the medical industry. We had a bit of experience in the medical industry, but not that much, just a bit. So this guy coming, I think I will need you guys for a bunch of series of live videos and stuff like, we're like, yeah, yeah, we do this, we do live, don't worry, we got this. The truth is we didn't have much experience in live,

but we needed clients, so we're like, yeah, let's do this. And then this thing, wow, from 2020 to 2023, it just doubled our business. Nice. That's good. So the pandemic was very like kind of a curse and a blessing. It kind of reset our business. And it restructured the whole our whole portfolio of clients. And it was a fascinating time.

So it doubled our business that we had right before the pandemic. And since then, we keep maintaining this. I mean, now 60% of our clients are, no, not 60% of our clients, 60% of our income is from the medical field. Oh, wow. So you're really, you're almost like niching down, or you niche down almost into medical then. Yeah.

Yeah. When I'm noticing it, this is what happened. We kind of niche down, yeah. Were you more varied before the pandemic? Yeah. Before the pandemic, it was very spread across multiple industries. We had a bit of medical, we had a bit of non-for-profit, we had a bit of tech, we had a bit of industrial, we had a bit of, I mean, all sorts of different industry. And after the pandemic, it became 60% medical.

And 40% a mix of other stuff. You mentioned you did the, you went through some restructuring. Like, what kind of restructuring did you go through as a result of the pandemic? It's really adding these new AV services. Oh, okay. Right? Yeah, because before the pandemic, we were strictly a boutique video production, right? So when people call us, we say, listen, we're a video production company,

and there's three types of content that we do. We either help you increase yourselves, we'll help you with recruitment, or we'll help you with training. Train your staff or train your clients on how to use your product or services. But all of this is corporate videos pre-recorded content, right? We go to your office, we shoot content, a few talking heads with the CEO, with the VP, with the employees, and we mix all of this. But what happened during the pandemic is we started to go into live. Because everything was locked at home in the medical industry, doctors in a very specific field needed to still push their content through the pandemic. So they needed this expertise on how to live stream live surgeries or live training, formation and stuff like that throughout the pandemic.

Stuff that they usually do in person, you know, like doctors or trinies, they come to them at the hospital or whatever to actually see how it's done, but during the pandemic it was less feasible. So we rebuilt our whole services around AV services, doing live production. So we went from 95% pre-recorded content during the pandemic to almost 80% of live. stuff. So we develop a big switch. It's a big switch, right? So in a few months, we had to learn a whole new workflow, how to go live, how to live switch, right? Because when you're in Adobe Premiere, you can take your time and do the perfect, perfect editing. But in live, live is live. There's no second take. If you mess up your camera switch, I mean, it's been seen by 300 people live.

Yeah. You know, so we have to learn all of this how to live switch, how to live grade, how to grade multiple cameras, fast, different lenses. The worst is different sensors, trying to match a Panasonic and a Sony. Don't try that. I didn't even think that was the thing, like being able to color grade on the go. That's pretty cool. Yeah, so we have to learn all sorts of stuff that we used to do in post, but now we have to do it in production.

Live edit, live color grade, same thing, even reframing. When you do live stuff, you can't reframe the same way than when something is pre-recorded. You have to be more subtle, pan tilt, very differently. We had to learn to work with PTZs, robot cameras. So we had to learn networking, IP stuff, how to work with IP, switch, how to configure remote cameras, and all this stuff. We had to learn a bit focused companion.

All this stuff's very fast, very fast. But it helped us to develop this expertise and get into that industry, you know. So I think it was a current. because we got very scared but a blessing because it helped us to sustain and have a better business now so what do you think is like the main lesson you learn from from that pivot main listen well always be ready to learn things are changing things are sometimes things are changing very fast abruptly and you get cut off guard imagine because sometimes i think about it

And I tell to my associate John, imagine if we didn't pivot fast into live production. Or some of the people you said that transition into animation or into whatever other parallel services you could offer during those time, you had to pivot fast. You have three to six month window to restructure your whole workflow or your whole way of thinking about something so you can hop into a new category of clients or a new industry. It's still video production. It's just a different way to do it, right? Now the new thing is AI.

Yeah, there's a, it's, I mean, we've talked about it many times on the episode. I like getting other people's takes on it because I feel like for me personally it could go either way. with AI. It could get to the point where it's just an extra tool in our toolbox. It just helps small businesses like ours just be more efficient and more productive and like better at getting work, closing projects and everything. Or it could get to the point where it could shut us out. I think it's in that stage right now. What do you think? Well, I have a lot of thought about AI. But I'm just curious, how did you guys, what happened for during the pandemic before hopping on the AI topic how did you guys maintain the same services or how

did you you guys pivot so you said it helped you to structure your business properly well so what what happened was the pandemic kind of kind of put us in a place where we had no work and we were kind of just losing our mind so we were like we need to start doing something to become productive because it was like there was nothing to do and there's only so much, you know, a call-duty war zone you can play before you're like, I've got to get my shit together, you know, like I'm a grown-ass man. What am I doing in my life? So we tried to do a podcast with a friend of ours and then we're like, yeah, we can't release this because we'll get canceled at some point. So then we're like, why don't we just focus on video production, right?

So started. What would you get canceled? What was the topics? You know, you know, when you talk with your friends, you're like, this stuff can never get out. It was like, too wild. too wild. This is fun in a group, but if this ever gets, I'm like, I'm not a comedian by profession, so I can't live on this, you know? But, but anyways, like, doing that made us go like, hey, you know what? I think we can do a podcast. Let's just do it maybe on our industry, right? So then I started reaching out to all the top companies in Toronto. Like that year we had, I think, 12 guests come on. And I literally just went through, like, I just typed in video production Toronto and I went through the first two pages and I invited everyone from there right and just listening to all these

people talk about how they run their businesses the things they've gone through and everything just that little history that's why I always like to hear a person's like history and how they got into their business and everything and just being able to chat with you with them like really made us look at what we were doing with our company laps and go like what we were doing before is like it's like two kids that didn't know what they were doing. So we really just started looking at it through a fresh pair of eyes and just, we rebuilt it from the ground up. We just laid new foundation and everything and focused on SEO, sales. I guess what we did was we turned, we adopted a mindset of constant improvement. So everything we do now is always about trying to improve whatever it is,

right? And that really... One degree here, one degree here, one degree here, one degree here, one degree here, one degree here yeah like uh i always think back to that will smith talk about how he was talking about building a wall and you don't do like you don't try to build it all in one day you just do like a brick a day and then before you know it you got the wall so i i've always tried to apply that mindset to the stuff we do and yeah we grew like we were we were stuck i'm i'm not even lying like beginning of 2020 like i was like i don't know actually beginning of 2020 was looking good because we had things that were coming lined up before that in 2019 I was like man like we plateaued for the last three years and it's like yeah I think it might get to the point where we might have to

just break this thing up because I don't think it's sustainable so we grew from that like I'm not even joking our business grew like five times that amount to what it is today just during the pandemic from pandemic and before like yeah so from that point that we were stuck at to now like we've grown five times, which is not like a crazy amount still, but like considering where we're at, that's very good. Yeah, and it just came from this podcast really. So every time we talk to someone, if there's always like every podcast we do, there's always at least one piece of advice or an idea in there somewhere.

A nugget. A nugget a goal that I'm like, I'm going to test that out. That sounds like a great idea, you know? And then I start to implement it and then implement it slowly. sometimes but eventually I get to it and then I notice improvements from it right so that's kind of what super smart yeah yeah that's kind that's why I want to keep this like just out of respect to the show I can't stop it anytime because I'm like man like if it wasn't for this podcast like I wouldn't even I don't even know if I'd still be doing video right now I'd probably be freelancing somewhere just doing that like

or I would have gotten another job right so I don't know really it really helped us get our shit together in a way but yeah like we didn't have like a moment like yours where it's like oh and you've business knew that. What really helped us is just get our shit together and then we kind of stayed to doing what we were doing before. We just perfected it in a way. What is the thing that you've seen had the biggest improvement in that 5x? What was the 2x or the 3x move? I know it's the cumulative effort of multiple stuffs. What is the one thing that you think? that was okay this is a noticeable improvement in getting more leads or getting more closing rate or what is your thing that really brought you closer to the 5x i'll give you i'll give

you i'll give you two answers for that the first one would be not uh would be overcoming my own personal barriers like mental barriers because i feel like i was my own worst enemy at times like just being lazy or not being productive so that's like the main thing uh the other more professional business answer would be uh really focusing on SEO that really changed the game for us and it was it was a slow process too like i mean i started so after we did the first season of the show at that point we're like hey you know what works coming back in again the country was starting to open up in a way so we had work coming in and we took 2021 to just apply the lessons we learned at the end because we launched a show in

September so by the time it was wrapped it was like ready to December and I was like let's just take 2021 but we didn't even think about doing a season two to be honestly we're like okay that's done let's just focus on applying what we learned to business yeah and then after that so yeah we we started I started building the website up and actually in a couple months I noticed that we had gone up from like page 55. I actually found us. We were like on page 55 at the time

for like video production Toronto and I was able to bring us up to page six in the span of three and a half months and I was like oh so SEO really does work. Okay interesting. So I start focusing on that a lot

and I checked recently so now this is July 2025 we're talking about for our listeners. Yeah. And we should be on the first page. Somehow we made it to the first page. I think that was a mix of Google Advert words and our SEO. But yeah, we're finally there after all this time. You know, like that covered

number one spot. First page being in the top 10. Oh my God. It's been it's been a dream of mine since like 2020. But you know SEO like you really have to keep an eye on it because like for example in 20 I would say around the end of 203 to all of 2024 something happened and we've really dropped in the rankings. Like I'm talking we were fluctuating in weird spots. Like we dropped from like top of page two. We went to page three. At one point we were on page four and then now we I was I don't know what I what happened differently but we were able to kind to go back up to page two this year and then recently we managed to get to page one. But yeah, like if you got to keep an eye on your SEO, I don't that could have been a mix of me creating

too many blog posts with AI copy or something must have happened. We dipped in the rankings. And you know, that affected the leads that were coming in because 2024, we weren't getting too many leads. But that's also a fault of mind because we were relying too much on the SEO. So that's also a problem. Like SEO is good, but don't rely on it 100%. It's a double edge sort. It's a double edge sort and a lot of business disappeared because of SEO, relying too much on SEO on some industries. You know, I've read an article of people having millions of visitor per month and the faucet was closed and they just got eradicated,

especially, you know, businesses who relies on ad traffic and stuff like that, you know, bloggers, vloggers, you know, people, affiliate marketing. You know, these guys who heavily rely on traffic, when Mr. Google wakes up one morning and say, oh, you know, let's change the algorithm. In six hours, you can be done. You can be gone in six hours when they push that version 98 of the algorithm. Yeah, that's why you have to have like a land, sea,

a air type of approach to your business. It's like, sure, you got the SEO and, you know, focus on social media as well, try to be active on there, try to be active on LinkedIn, reach out to past clients. That's one thing I'm focusing on this year is reaching out to past clients and seeing how we can, like, help them for this year, you know? Like reaching out the current clients that you're in talks with current projects and saying, okay, once this is done, do you have something else in mind you want to work on? like just trying to get the game plan for the year. The thing I haven't done lately that I'm actually going through right now is compiling all the past leads that came in, but that we didn't close.

See, I stupidly did not. When you go through the CRM, you see a bunch of those and you're like, what the, you got to do something with that. They said no. Two years ago doesn't mean they'll say no again this year for the next opportunity. their next purchase window, you know? I feel so dumb because I didn't track them until 20, 23, but even then, I only have like

about half of half of a year tracked for 20203 and 2024. So I have to go past, go through past emails and try to complete those lists because I'm like, those are, you never know. Like, I could, I could just set them up with a newsletter. And now they, they know that at least, hey, we do this, we do that. And then for like the amount of hours. it would take me if I can close at least one of those guys it makes it worth it yeah yeah yeah this isn't the next step for us newsletter we slept on that yeah I have a lot of email but I slept

I know I'm sitting on a potential gold mine that I'm not using you know I think newsletter is a very important steps second to SEO maybe sometime better than SEO if you have a big mailing list you I think this is, from a marketing standpoint, this is one of our next step, because I see thousands of email in my CRM, and I'm not using a newsletter. I'm supposed to do a monthly, at least monthly newsletter. Weekly is best, but you don't want to be annoying. It depends on how you do it. Well, at least a monthly newsletter to all of our current client, past clients, or past leads,

who said no is good, just to always stay. top of mind because the thing is sorry I was I was wondering about the the frequency because I was thinking of doing monthly and I'm like because I sometimes get a newsletter from clients or even other vendors and I'm like like sometimes I feel like monthly is a little too you know a little too much this is one thing I've been struggling where it's like how do you do it quarterly do you like quarter a quarterly is super safe quarterly is super safe this is no one is going to ban you or, you know, or call you, hey, you guys are annoying with this email. I mean, quarter, it is super safe, but is it enough?

I don't know. I never played that in the newsletter game. So this is something that we should do. I mean, we brought our business to a certain point. Now, what is the next move for us? Newsletter, more SEO, try newsletter, a podcast. I've been thinking about doing a podcast for years. I have different type of show concept in mind.

We have a studio. We have nine cameras. Come on. We should be doing podcasts. But we're not. We're doing it for our clients, but not for us, which is funny. When you're in this industry, sometimes you do stuff for your clients

that you know deep down you should be doing for your own self. Right? But because of time, because of this, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's, it's a, strange, a strange thing. But I think newsletter is a good move. And what you said about reaching past leads who said no or just flat out stalled, I mean, no show, no answer, no whatever, these are a good potential, there's money there. There's definitely money there. Yeah, like I was thinking the ones, and this is the other thing, I wish I'd put like proper notes in

for all these leads because now I got to look through the emails and see where the conversation stop but yeah i got for the new ones for this yeah i'm putting in like follow up by this month or like just keep in touch because and then i'll put like another clickbox that'll say specific things so if the project is on pause i'll select that one that way i know because you could always reach out and say hey so i noticed that the project was on pause for a bit i'm just it could be a couple months later just follow up and say what's going on with it now and you never know again like it is a numbers game at the end of the day we just need to get that one yes and then that kind of pays for the month right exactly which CRM you guys using now so again we're not at the at a certain

scale where I felt the need to go with like HubSpot or Asana or the other ones HubSpot this is like top tier you're looking at 10k a month well like it's free to use especially at our level so I was like should I use it but then I was like I feel like we're at a stage where I can still track everything myself pretty well so I'm just using like Google Sheets. So I'm sticking at that for the time being. I know HubSpot would be better, but I just don't want to like time myself into another service currently.

And again, it's only because like at our scale, I'm not getting that many leads that I need something to help me. I can still track everything myself pretty well. Yeah, I'm using Active Campaign, which is, it's cheap. You know, a bit, maybe a bit, you get a bit more features than using Google Sheet.

It's not free. There's a free plan, but I think it's good. But then again, I'm not using it to its full potential because this CRM is meant to use the newsletter feature. This is a part of what you're paying for, but we're still not optimizing fully to that. But at least it allows me to stack all these mailing lists and then when we're ready to send our email, we can start doing it.

But we grew with our newsletter, but I know that if you want to go to the next step, you have to do new things. If you want new results, you need to try new stuff. So you do have a newsletter you do currently, right? Is that what you meant? No. Like I said, we're sitting on a potential gold mine because we have thousands of emails from our past leads and our current client. But for me, the next move, like I said, to grow, I'm thinking about should we do more SEO or should we? we do the newsletter game that we never tried to both do you do ad words as well are both and

ad words same thing yeah ad words also we tried here and there just for fun but we were never consistent of alluding a budget let's do 500 a month a thousand a month two thousand a month five thousand a month whatever we never were very consistent on ad words we're more of an organic growth type company but if you want to go to the next level you need to try new stuffs yeah like i i think i'm of the opinion you got to try everything just because yeah you don't know what's going to work right and like you don't have the spaghetti the spaghetti technique against the wall yeah that's right yeah that's true um and again like it's because it it it's the way i see it it's like so if you want to test out newsletters for like 12 months

like does that mean you're not going to try anything else like you might as well like as new newsletters will be quarterly or once every two months that's like six in a year well four to six a year right so it's like i mean you have time in between that stuff and like something like ad words is pretty easy to set up now especially with like chat gpt like i used like before there were stuff i didn't understand with adwords and i'd have to watch videos and i'd have to try to figure out like exactly what they were saying but now luckily with the chat gpt it's pretty easy to kind of like help you understand everything goes faster yeah yeah for suggestions and stuff. I used it to create the copy for some of our ads. The only thing that sucks with AdWords is just the cost, really. It's, I mean, you got to pay the rank at times,

and that's the part that really stinks. It's, it's a rent money for Google. It's rent money. You, you, you, you pay for a position. So they charge you a rent for that. You want to be first, second, third. Of course, it's a bidding system. But it's like, you, you, you, you, you're like, like you're paying rent for your position on top, right? So this is how they made a fortune. This is the core of their business model. So it's a, depending on your industry, it depends, also in the video production field,

it's expensive, but none that much. Imagine if you were an insurance company. Yeah. Or a car dealer, or you know those extremely competitive keyword. You'd be burning thousands per day to maintain those top three ad position. Lawyers, like doctors, like that. Lawyers. Those are plumbers.

Like, anything in that field is crazy expensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These guys are playing a very expensive game. And sometime you're wondering, is it a zero-sum game? you spend 100K yearly on ad words, but how much new revenue it brings in.

If you spend a hundred K to get a 100K new client, I mean, you just exchange a dollar for a four quarter. If you spend 100K to bring a million dollar new business, ah, this is good.

Return on ad spend well, fully optimized. But this is a whole other game. This is a whole other podcast. This is a whole other industry. And especially at our level, like, because we run our own businesses, like, this is just like a small part of our day. So it's like, I don't have like the time to master this topic as a whole. It's a full time. It's a full time job. Yeah. Do you do a lot of like, have you done any like cold outreach? A bit, especially in the beginning in the early years. We tried cold call. You know, that was very.

very hard trying to reach people, they say no, they hang up on you and stuff like that. That was like, damn. I mean, kudos to the call caller and the professional call call callers out there. This is like, it's probably one of the hardest, the hardest part of any starting business, trying to find your first few clients. We've done email outreach. You know, you know what's hard about it is that. Yeah.

I just had this start right now. If we cold call, we don't know what we're selling exactly. Because it's like, I'm selling video, but what kind of video? It's not specific enough, right? So that kind of makes it hard for us to like be confident what we're selling, unless you're selling the idea, right? Versus like if you're like a car salesman, it's like, you're selling a car, you have these models on the lot. You know exactly what you're going to sell. You know, there's two types of people.

There's farmers and there's closers. I'm a closer. Farmer are the cold callers, people who kick doors, call people, hey, listen, we're a video production company will help you solve problems using videos, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever, those are farmers. They find, the hunt, the hunt in the forest for the rabbit.

But then there's closers. Closers are the one who you hop on the meeting with them. You try to really understand what they're doing, what the problems are, and how you can use videos to solve business problems. I'm a closer. When I get someone on a Zoom call or on a phone call, there's 30% chance they do business with me. right because I know how to position and and sell the video proposition so 30% closing is is quite good because on some industry you're lucky if you have 5% closing yeah yeah so usually when I compete in Montreal against other video production company most companies will you know reach at least two to five companies to get quotes. So if I can get on the call or on a Zoom call with them, there's 30% percent chance I closed them. Because I've learned, but this took a while. It took a decade, you know,

to fully articulate how to sell videos. Because I always say video is a marketing asset. Yes. You know, it's not vanity. Just like SEO is important, video is important. And as my matter of fact video is part of a proper SEO strategy right if there's no SEO optimization without adding some videos here and there on your website especially these days with the AI and crawlers and stuff like that so I think it's and now I'm much better than when I started but I'm not a farmer I'm not the kind of guy who will go through 150 phone call

in the next hour trying to find someone. I really like that. I really like how you put it into Farmer and Closer. I never heard someone like that. Yeah, because it's two totally different skills, right? Kicking doors is one thing.

You need a specific personality for that. But closing, this is another, you need to be more analytical and listen way more. To what the client needs and sell them on the solution. Oh, you know, we're trying to attract talent. Oh, you have an HR issue.

This is HR marketing. Okay, so you need something to communicate culture. Why it's cool to work at your company? Why should apply to work? Why you guys are the world's best at what you do and you want to attract the world's best talent. You need a way to communicate that. You can't just put a post on LinkedIn,

job opening with a boring description and yearly salary to negotiate based on experience. You can go on Indeed and just put, no, you need to go further than that you need content to attract talent. So they see, they see. So seeing means images, right? they see how cool it is to work at your company.

So for that, you need videos. And there's a very specific type of videos that you need to achieve that. So this is a very clear problem that they have recruitment, competitiveness in the market where you need to show you're the best. So this video is a clear solution for that. Same thing for sales.

You want to increase your sales. What does that mean? You need more money at the bottom. line okay so how do you guys sell actually we have a sales department we have colors okay we have a marketing department okay but what is what is exactly the problem that you have in your sales funnel sales pipeline how do you guys sales what are the objections that you have what are the whatever so all of these requires deeper analysis to understand how you can use videos

to answer those questions. And once the client is convinced that, oh, shit, now it's much clearer what we can do with videos, now they're, now they're willing to close. Okay, I know why this, it's a $35,000 quote. Okay, I get it. Yeah. I get it. It's ROI.

I found that a lot of the times, my leads come to me saying I need a video and it needs to be about this but they don't really know if it's the right video for them so I've found that just questioning to see what the problem is and then try to question their strategy actually allows me to close them but allows me to have much higher close rates because I don't know a lot of people ask them those questions because I've had clients coming in asking for a certain type of video and by the end of the intro call I sold them on another thing because I'm like that's not really going to solve your issue like this like have you thought about this have you thought about that like what's what's the purpose of this video that's what I often ask them it's like who's this for what's the point of it and another thing you mentioned before about how videos like a marketing asset like that's also one thing that I've had to educate clients on because I've had clients ask like oh can you make this go viral and I'm like I'm like I I'm like Ferrari, I can sell you a car, but I can't make it do the fastest lap time.

That's based on the driver. Like, who's going to be driving this car, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, the viral thing, I fixed that a long time ago. I, every time, if someone asks about can you make a video viral, I right away say, who cares if it's viral? Who are your clients? I mean, if you're selling a $500,000 machine,

for factories, what's the market size? There's probably 300 people in whole Canada who are your potential customers. So there's no way this video is gonna go viral. If the purchaser of your $500,000 machine, the market size is 300 people. Why do you want this video to be viral? It's nonsense.

your video has 46 views at the end of the year and you closed one you've made your money back you just made 500k yeah okay that video stealing that so that but yeah I mean you just spent 15k on a nice video whatever but it's a return on investment why you want it viral what's your market size it doesn't matter it's not a cat video we're doing it it's it's it's a very very very very specific content for 300 people in the whole canada don't expect viral just want make sure that these 300 people when they see it they're like oh I'm going to buy that machine from them because that other guy who sells the machine for 550,000 or 600,000 or cheaper 400,000, it's not clear.

This just sent me an 86-page PDF. It's not clear. But these guys made a video, and it's super clear how to use this machine. Let me go with that and sign that machine. It's less risks, right? So virality is good for certain industry. Not all. If you're in fashion and you release a new boxer,

you want something viral. You've probably seen the video from Dollar Shave Club. Yeah, famous one. This, for that market, consumer market, B2C, you need some type of virality. But in B2B, you don't need viral. You need other algorithmic, other way of thinking. But B2C, now you want to, now you can talk virality.

Let's do a boxer campaign. Let's do a t-shirt campaign. Let's do a new funky shoes campaign. Whatever. Now you want some aspect of virality because B2C is different from B2B. It's always about what's your market size? Who buys Boxer?

Every man on Earth. Your market size is 4 billion people. Okay, let's go viral. But who buys the 500,000 laser soldering bi-atomic machine? Who buys that? 300 people? Man, this is too niche. It's like the machine.

You know the company who does those, UV, you know, A-S-D-M. It's a German company who does machine to build processors. That's a $20 million machine. They don't need viral video for that. As a matter of fact, it's so niche, maybe they don't even need videos because they're the only one in the world doing that. They don't have competitors.

That's the only time where you can see. say, I don't need videos. Okay, fair enough. But if you're not the only one in the world, you need videos. Yeah. Let's talk about your business again. So I was wondering, like the stage you're at now, do you feel like you're plateauing again, like you were pre-pandemic or you're like a bit? We grew a lot, 21, 22, 23. Like I said, during that window, we doubled. And now it's still growing, but the curve is going like this. and then we're like oh man are we comfortable or we want more first question to ask as an entrepreneur are you comfortable or you want more that's what i was thinking because

but somehow we're never satisfied it looks yeah that's what i was thinking because it's like i mean you know in the stock market every company is always expected to grow and this or that but it's like maybe you're at a point where you're growing at a rate that's good for you. If you grow much bigger than more problems might come out if you're not ready for it. So growing is pain for sure. Yeah. So that's something I've thought about as well because I was I'm actually in the process of setting our new financial goals for the year. And I was like, man, I mean like theoretically like we're at a good point, but maybe just increasing it by this much would be better. But increasing it too much, I'm like, oh, how would that work exactly? You know,

like something I think there's like good stalling and like bad stalling too right yeah exactly there is good stalling like comfortable like by choice you're like whoa you get your feet

off the gas just a tad because you know that if we go faster than that we might break our neck or too much stress or too much it's just too much there's 24 hours in a day how much I live

for my spouse my girlfriend, my kids, my friends are you Elon Musk an alien who works 300 hours per day or you're human you have to

With the amount that guy tweets I don't think he works at all you can't tweet 400 times in a day and still work Who says him Maybe he trained Grock to tweet for him To just tweet for him, right? And now, going on AI.

You know, you mentioned the SEO drop in 2024. End of 2023, 2024. Big drop, big time drop. This? There's multiple reason. But you know that Google is on a zero-click mission, right? Yeah. So just for our listeners, do you want to elaborate on that?

Because I think it's where they basically don't want you to scroll past. They want to put all the information there and the... So zero-click. I don't pretend to be an SEO expert. There's people in the world that know way more than me. But what I've understood about zero-click, Google, since the end of 2023, they started testing with AI in the search engine. So what does that mean?

If you ask, Google is the world's biggest repository of questions. So if you ask a question to Google, where's the nearest store to buy cat food? Before AI, before chat GPT, it just lists you the top 10 pet store around you. that was 2019 right so food for my cat it lists you the top 10th uh pet store near you and the one that spent on ad words fast forward 2025 and it started in 2023 cat for my food for my cat google will pop a paragraph of Jim and I telling you, oh, you're looking for food for your cat.

Here is my two suggestion. You can go to Bubby's Love Cats or whatever name of the other store. It gives you one or two answers. That's it. While you know for a fact that there's more than 30, 40, 50 of these pet store in town, but it gives you just two.

The AI decided who's going to eat and the 48 other businesses as if it never existed. So this is what happened in 2023. They launched, the soft launched that algorithm where slowly in the United States, Canada and Europe, instead of giving you top 10 businesses, it gives you his opinion. on the answer, and then down the fold, below the fold, the businesses, after the ads. So, AI adds business. You see my finger, it went down screen. You have to scroll to see those businesses.

You have to work because now zero-click means I give you the answer right away. You don't need to click. Here is the answer. and they're perfecting that more and more they're perfecting it perfecting it perfect in it perfect in it so now the game the SEO game is how do you make the SEO talk about you that's that's the new SEO game

you know what else I noticed to some leads found us through chat chippy T so they were putting in prompts and then we came up one was interesting we came up on a blog post for MedTech video production companies. You see? I was like, okay, interesting. So render stuff.

It is a guy who did that blog post or it's an AI generated blog post. This guy's pumping 100 articles per day. So it was a company and it was one of those posts. It was clever because basically they listed like the top companies. They obviously put themselves as number one. And then here's the smart thing they did. they listed other companies as the other nine or so options that weren't in their city I'm like oh clever that's a good way to do it where you don't harm you know you're ranking within that city

either but that blog post got indexed by chat GPT so when this client was looking up options on chat GPT they came up so they clicked on it which led them to the blog post which then led them to us so I think that might be the future where your website is indexed hopefully in chat GPT and then if you've written it properly and whatnot then you might come up and hopefully I'm hoping that if you get selected by chat GPT hopefully that counts as a click and not just until the the user clicks on you does it register as a click because then that would really suck because like you know as part of their zero click mission like if your website's not getting clicks it's going to keep dropping in the rankings right

But the other issue that's going to pop up soon is that AI trained on AI generated content like becomes dumb and a lot of the content out there is starting to be like I write a lot of myself with chat GPT so like at what point that is it starts to like just crumble in on itself because it can't understand it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, AI is a beast that always needs new content, human-made content to put. perfect itself. But a lot of people use AI to produce content, so it feeds on itself as well.

So it's a mix of eating its own content and a bit of human in the loop content. So where it's going to go? It's, now we're exactly just like 2020. It's a pivot. And us as creative, what do we do? So us, Great Things Studios, what do we do? Do we keep doing what we always done? Or we learn how to leverage AI? Will AI replaces us? You see V-O-3 doing great B-Rules with sounds and stuff that looks realist. I don't know if you've seen what V-O-3 can do now.

It looked really good for the first. two days and then just like any new AI update like you look at it a couple days later a week later and you're like okay I'm starting to see a lot of the issues with it but it's still impressive yeah that it's it's almost there a couple years away maybe exactly so now it's just 18 months in VO VO2 V03 so what will happen V05 V06 you can just prompt in hey make me an action movie about that they'll give just pump you a Netflix movie with no directors no cameraman no grip just no script writer just you know the crazy thing is that what we see now a friend of mine was telling me this because he's in a similar field he works in a

similar field he was telling us that like what we get now like V-O-3 and whatever like it's like that that thing was already being beta tested like in internally at those companies, like, anywhere from 12 to 24 months ago. Yeah. So it's like, imagine what they currently have right now that they're working on, that they'll be releasing in one to two years. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy.

Exactly, because all these AI company, what is released publicly, they only release it once they figured how to... Monetize it? Quality control, yeah, yeah, quality control it. What they have in the lab is much crazier, you know, but unless they can quality control it, they don't release it. Right? Because, and this is their secret formula.

Each of these company open AI, entropy, Tesla, alphabet, all these big four players who owns Gemini, GROC, chat, GPT, Claude. The secret source is the quality control. The AI hallucinate. The AI does crazy stuff. How do you make sure its output

makes sense and doesn't bring us a lawsuit? Once they fix these two things, look, they release a new version. Yeah. So they probably already have V-O-4, but they're not releasing it because now it can create some crazy stuff that

needs to be censored right so until the figure how to control the beast okay now let's do version four and then version three same thing for a gpt3 gpt4 Gemini 2.5 pro whatever it is cloud sonnet four whatever you call it it's the secret sauce is quality insurance yeah you know I mean in terms of like our field I think events are probably a safe bet to try to do more of those. You have the AV stuff. So you're probably on a good path with that. Because you can't really like when it's,

if a client wants something live or at an event, you can't generate that in a system. They want to see like the real life stuff, you know? Yeah, you're on a good thinking process on that. And we thought that internally that, oh, I think AV is safe. But AV will still be transformed. Right? Because who are the big, big, big players in AV in Canada, right?

You have Solo Tech and Encore, right? So those are the big international brands, you know, big trucks. They come in, 40 guys bringing big mixers, big cameras and stuff they do, Beyonce at the Bell Center, whatever, big events, right? But what will happen in five to ten years? cameraman, for instance, when you know how to work with PTZs, before you needed a crew of 12 guys in the venue to run a show, in five years, you can do the same thing with four guys. So you will have one guy at the desk controlling six cameras instead of six cameramen. because of AI, because of how it'll perfect itself.

Face tracking, body tracking, automated pan tilt, and all this stuff. So even here it will transform. So who will get the job? The guy at the desk who knows how to operate the joystick and stuff like that, who knows a bit about networking. but the old school cameraman what happened to these guys in the next five years

you know so it's all these questions that we have to ask ourselves and because it's the in every industry there will be transformation yeah it's kind of like how like the industrial revolution

like changed the job lands scape like this is going to do the same thing but instead of like with the with the blue collar workers is going to be a white collar workers so that's the interesting shift that's going to happen but yeah i don't know like my my my uh my out there theory with AI is that ultimately it's going to get to a point where there's just and this is like my conspiracy theory with it there's just not enough jobs for people so we just need to cut down the population that's like my my theory with it yeah yeah That's the doom, the dude, yeah.

There's just won't be enough jobs, right? Yeah. There's two camps. There's this camp. We need to cut down on population. And there's the utop. Yeah. And there's the utopist who think, oh, we won't need to work.

You know, you can lay down in the couch and have a robot putting grapes in your mouth. Like Julius Caesar, right? no one will need to work. It'll be peace and love in the world. Paradise. So there's these two extreme people who think like, oh man, don't worry. Everything's going to be fine. And there's the extreme where, oh man, Terminator is coming. Skynet is coming. Get ready. You know, so what, where are we between that? The other idea is that, you know, well, Musk has that other company with the chip. What do you call that one? Neurlink.

Yeah, neurolink. I think that's the other possibility, too. It's like to keep up with the machines. Like you just need to become a cyborg so that you can like figure something out. Because it's like, but that's a problem. You need money for that. Well, yeah, that, well, there's a solution for that. How much will be that implant?

Lifelong loans. That's probably where we're going to go. And then you know what if you can't. What if you can't upgrade your chip, then you can't get newer jobs? Like, who knows where it's going to go? It's super interesting, but kind of scary. You need to write the next season of Black Mirror. No, there's this movie called Ghost in the Shell.

And there's a TV, there's an anime thing. Yeah, that's a Japanese anime, right? Yeah, yeah. So I remember, like, some of them can't upgrade their brains anymore because they don't have enough money. So they're still running like old operating system and whatever. I'm like, oh, man, that's a dark way to look at the future. But probably going to happen. Yeah, that's an old anime.

I have to look it up again. I think there was messages in those, in those anim now have to go back to it. That's deep. Yeah. That's very deep. But, you know, I think as of now, you know, 2025, I think, yeah, I think the best way is to leverage AI as a tool. and make sure you facilitate your jobs. I mean, I remember back then when clients...

I mean, a few years ago, when clients used to ask for close captioning, we were like, oh, man, close captioning. Subtitles. Subtitles. Clothes captions. Subtitle were like, oh, man, this is a heck of a job. Yeah. But now when they ask for it, we're like, okay, sure. Sure.

No problem. Because, you know, with some two... you can go so fast and you just fly it through the work you know so it it really helped us in a lot of different fields so it it accelerates but at the same time it commoditize our work so we have to be careful with that because people have still have that magic thinking and I have clients calling me and say oh can you guys can't you just guys guys do it with AI Yeah, yeah.

Some clients start to catch up on that and ask, oh, can you just do it with AI? It'll be much cheaper. The younger ones, the younger ones are starting to ask that stuff. Like they've been experimenting on their own and I'm like, eh, all right. It'll be much cheaper. Just do AI and you charge us a fifth. And we're like, damn.

So now they know, you know, yeah, they're already, the mind is already shifting. So we're like, okay, that's a problem. So now they think we can do everything with AI, and then it should be a fifth of the price. Okay, so how do you juggle with this? And this is where you have to educate the clients on, listen, AI or not,

you still need a human in the loop. These things are not 100%, right? So even though you think you can run your one-hour video through an AI, and chop it up in 20 clips. Out of these 20 clips, I mean, 10 of them are weird. Like, I wouldn't have cut it this way.

So you still need to validate. You still need to verify, and all of this is time consuming. Yeah. This is what I said early. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Go ahead.

Yeah, that's what I said the formula is in quality insurance. Because as of now, human is still the best quality insurance until when. I think for us, like, yeah, keeping ahead of the curve is good because the sooner we can apply it to our businesses, the more we can figure out ways to cut costs on our end. And then again, you can kind of translate that into savings for the client to still keep a competitive position with your clients. Because, you know, like if you get too expensive, they'll just start shopping around. I don't if it's outside of their budget, it is what it is.

But yeah, that's, I think as business owners, it's really helpful. If I don't have to bring on, like, an audio operator, a makeup artist to a shoot, that already cuts down the budget quite a bit. Sure, I lose my markup on them, but at least I close the project, right? Maybe I can do more projects in the year as a result of that. So that's how I've been seeing it lately. Now, what do you do? Let's say you're 20 people operation, right?

You have 20 people on staff. That's a big payroll every Tuesday, right? But then you have AI. You're the CEO, and you're like, oh, man, I got to leverage AI. How can I save on cost? Are you, like, firing half your crew because you can double the throughput of your editor, double the throughput of your scriptwriter, double... I mean, it's a very hard position to be in now because of the human nature of this.

I mean, it's your family, these 20 people at this point. So what do you do? Do you look at it strictly from a business standpoint? Oh, man, I can, I don't need 20 people anymore. Ten people can do the job of 40. Wow. Do you do that? Or are you like, nah, no, no, let's keep it old school.

Let's keep it old school and sell it for a more expensive, ultra-luxury, human-made content. Will the 100% human-made stamp be something at some point? Because we're so tired of AI-generated stuff that at some point, human-made content makes a comeback. You know, this imperfection that human makes it more valuable. Will the 100% human-made content will be super valuable in in in in 2030? Maybe maybe that's a new market Human-meat content 50k I should privately ask them all people that came on that have like 20 plus staff

It's like what would you do in that situation? Yeah, I'm not in that situation. I mean we're we're we're a small business I'm assuming like I mean the ones we've spoken to like they've had moments where I guess because of the pandemic or other situations they did drop down in team size and then they managed to get back up but like from what I from what I saw and hurt it's tough to be at that level where you got that much staff it's like you need like the overhead is insane I don't know like I would never put myself in that position it's just not worth it to me but yeah yeah it's I mean hey every Thursday you need 20 paycheck to get out you you you better need the proper cash flow there that's the thing and in our industry it's so random too like you could you could i've spoken to all manners of companies a lot of them don't know three months out what's

what the next thing is going to be and it's like man i don't like if it's just me and my business partner i can live with that but if i have like people relying on me like like 20 people i i wouldn't be sleeping at night i'd go like how am i going to do this yeah it works if out of these 25 of them are salesman. You need people hunting. Yeah. Hunt for you. Yes, you need hunters. At this, 20 people, you need sellers. There's no way you will sleep at night, not knowing you have at least two or three people doing full-time sales because you need to pay those, the payroll. Right? So it's, I think we're in a fascinating time. No one knows. Here's the No one knows. You can ask Elon Musk, even this guy who is deep in the trenches, even him doesn't know what's going to happen in 2030. Unless they know and they don't want to say it. But there's people that were saying, oh, you know, it's similar to like when they went from film to digital. I'm like, well, the difference is that the camera couldn't still couldn't replace you at the time. We're in a position where the camera can literally just replace you at this point. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's bigger than that.

It's bigger than going film to digital. Because now the brains are being replaced. Imagine being a script writer today. Where your clients can say, oh, man, I can't just ask Claude or chat GPT for a script. Imagine being a script writer, a full-time script writer in 2025. How do you... How do you sell the plus value of brain-made content?

The only thing you can say is what I will produce is not trained on past content. It'll be new. But what new means when in fact you're new is inspired by the past. Human brains almost work like AI. So it's a very complicated era we'll live in. It's a very complicated era. It's going to be interesting. That's why they went on strike two years ago.

They saw it coming. They can't stop it, though. Yeah, I know the writer's strike. They can't stop it, though. You can't stop tech. It's coming. You just, again, interesting times. We'll see how it goes.

If you're a full-time writer now, it would be interesting to interview a writer, someone who does full-time scripting. So, listen, man, what happened in the last 24 months? How did you pivot or adapt? Did you embrace AI to just quadruple your throughput? Or you're trying to fight against the unfightable? fight against the machine you know it's interesting but yeah I mean this is where we are you know it's we will leverage AI as much as we can to help to

lower our accelerate stuff you know and it's yeah we're thinking about doing a newsletter and stuff like that it's cool because it looks like we're pretty much in the same company size I think you guys might be a little bigger. So for us, it's just Carol and myself and we use freelancers whenever we need. You said you're three business partners? Yeah, we're three. Do you have any employees?

Oh, so you're the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. You know, so it's, I mean, three, the two co-founders, one full-time editor, and all our other freelancers. Oh, so you have also the third one's the editor, right? exactly oh okay okay so three three on the full-time payroll right and all the 12 others are freelancers gotcha okay yeah some of them we hire some of them we hire them so often sometimes we're like ah man we should we should we should we

should just hire him full-time you know but it's you know again it's a balance because like you said it's a roller coaster you never know you know you let's say you hire a full-time cameraman. That's risky because you need to make sure you have shoots every multiple times per week for multiple months. How can you guarantee that? When you're a small team and you don't have a full-time salesman. Yeah, that's why like if you, if anyone ever hires someone, it's usually like like a,

What do they call them? Not production planner. What do you call them? Forget the name. Words for hire? No, no, no. Like, well, some of the people we spoke to, some of their first hires were either editor or a,

not production assistant. What's the other one? Production planner. Is that the term? I'm going to go with a project manager. Project manager. Yeah, yeah, project manager. Like, semi-producers, semi-whatever.

Yeah, yeah. Because, but yeah, like, you've got to be so flexible when you're in our industry. Like, you don't know you're month to month. Like, I mean, for us, not going on what doesn't happen, but we could have a six-month stretch of nothing. No, we've been lucky enough not to have that in many, many years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it could happen.

You just don't know. That's why, like, for us, like, I've, this year, I've also, like, we also started a wedding company because I was like, let me try to get some more safer income. Yeah, we did. it the opposite most people start with the wedding company and then they yeah and they go corporate yeah yeah for me i because we we always freelanced for it and then one of the companies i was shooting for closed and i lost a lot of like side income like that and i was like when i just like do my own things so i don't have to rely on it i just looked at it as a business i know there's a lot of ego in this industry about that

stuff like i don't give a shit for me it was strictly like a new business to do because i want it to start something new right yeah so did that and it's going pretty well and i just look at it as a good okay, it's safe, but it's still video. Like, I'm already thinking of, like, something else I could start that'll be, like, in a different field. Just so, you know, something ever happens, I can at least have something else

to keep me going, right? That's super smart. But, you know, and wedding, just like Avey, this is going to take a while for a robot to go shoot weddings. That was the other thing I was thinking of. I'm like, they're never going to get any idea to do it. Yeah, it's kind of an umbrella type.

type industry where it's safe for a while for at least two decades before there's a there's a Tesla robot coming with a camera and starting shooting I did see a I did see a video that it was like some like marketing gimmick thing where they had I think it was for some celebrity they they had them in a car and then they had like a Tesla bot holding a camera but it was obviously being operated by someone else and I was pretending to shoot a video and everything. I'm like, uh, okay. I mean, I guess that's coming too, but I think that'll be just in like specific situations. Like, I don't know, like you need to film something in a negative 40 environment. Well, just send out the robot. You know, you don't have to send

out someone and let them suffer. Yeah, yeah. This is like edge case. Edge cases. But this is super smart. Opening the wedding. And I've never heard of that. It's the first time I heard someone going from corporate and also opening a a sister company for wedding. This is super. I was like, it's a smart move. It's a smart move.

I was like, I was like, I was like, I don't see myself stopping freelancing for it for a while because the money is good. I'm like, it's a day out of my week. And I was like, well, we could. I didn't want to risk having like the other like the other guys I shoot for like potentially clothes or whatever. So I was like, let me just have it. Let me just own it.

So then I don't have to rely on someone else. And I'm like, it'll scratch the itch I've been having about starting a new business. And at the same time, I'm like, it's a side business. If it's making money, why not, right? I got all this like skill and talent with it. I'm like, I might as well put it to use. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the wedding industry is, you know, there is a craftmanship to it.

It's a romantic. It's not something that you can like blasts. with AI and synthesized stuff. It's really based on a nice storytelling of one of the best day of your life. It's that little short film of one of the best day of your life. So it has, this is, that's a good move. I haven't heard of that. It's very, I think you aren't to something now.

Yeah, and it's been pretty well. Like, we already got to 10 weddings for the year. My goal is to just get it to 20 and then just cap it at that because, again, we're running laps as our main company. I was like, we could do 20 and not have it affect our lives too much. And then now I'm getting a niche to start something else. So my girlfriend's an artist. I was thinking, let me help her run an e-commerce store. And then once I figure out how to get that going, I can just apply that to any type of e-commerce because they're all same strategy, right?

for it so i was like yeah yeah yeah it's like my new plan yeah that that that that that's good you you when if you have an e-commerce and your boyfriend's a cinematographer this is a very good edge you know because for b2c yes because for b2c you you need a bit of that virality spice that we discussed a bit earlier right i mean if it's a b2c um e-commerce you know yeah so yeah fast fascinating topics. I can talk about these stuff for hours. Me too. Especially AI, because this is big for everyone. That's the thing.

It's not big for creatives, only it's big for everyone, every industry. Even people who went, you know, when we were kids, our parents wanted us to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, Can you imagine that even these jobs can be replaced by AI? Yeah, I know, right? Lawyers especially, that was the big one that like... I mean, lawyers, come on. So easy to replace now.

This is law interpretation and knowing by a heart a bunch of stuff. You can train an AI agent to be a lawyer and have it 95% up there. And just how- I think closer to 99 because law is all, it's all rules. So they've, you just feed it to the thing and say, I find loopholes in this law. Like, they could easily figure it out. Like, so what you do? You're a lawyer. You make 175K a year.

You have a good job. But you see AI can do the same thing and give you an answer in 36 second of thinking instead of you charging. 450 per hour. Dude, we used it recently. We were working on our, what do you call it? Our partnership agreement, which is really, because we're incorporated, it's called a unanimous shareholder agreement, USA. And we did it all through ChatsyPT.

I actually, I was curious. So I inquired to some law firms and I said, I have the document ready. I just need you, I just need a, have like a lawyer. review it. They quoted me like 5K. I'm like I'm not spending like 5k. I'm like I'm a small business. Where am I going to get 5K from for this? Like I'd rather get a new lens or two. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they're trying to rack in as fast as possible before the end. But it's I mean, it's coming. I'm listen man, you'll you'll just have to go, I don't know, contracts, contracts.com. I.O. And you have a crazy AI long.

agent that just pumps contract for $20. Yeah. It's coming. So the first guy doing that, a nice AI agent that pumps contract in multiple languages for 1995, it's going to make a killing. And at the same time kill half the lawyer's career, if not three quarters. So it's a very fascinating time. we're living in because everyone's on on on the some people ignore it they think it's just

the hype some people are paranoid they're going they're they're they're they're stressing out too much and in between these two there's all of us who are observing trying to optimize play with it a bit and you know programmers people are you have 16 years old kid vibe coding apps and making a million dollar in six months. You know what's interesting? We're in an interesting spot. They never learn to code. We're in an interesting spot because we're a mix of white and blue collar in a way, right?

The white collar jobs are 100% in trouble because they could easily be replaced. Ours, because there's still the physical component, we've got to go in, document and everything. We're still kind of safe, but the safest one is definitely like blue collar. Like if you're a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter, you're good. Yeah, yeah. This is good for 20, 30 years. Yeah. You know, because you're going under a faucet, weird angles and do this.

Yeah, you need a very specialized training that is very hard to reproduce for a robot for now. So these guys are good for our lifetime at least in the next. one I don't know but yeah it's true video it's about you know like the blue color part is it's your your wedding video thing this is a blue color part you don't need much scripting you know you do your call sheet okay the man is gonna be here in the morning the woman's gonna be there in the morning you need you okay I send a cameraman here and not the camera grabbing bureaus then we're going to the reception and stuff okay you know a bit of

but it's pretty much copy paste from one gig to the other and it's it's physical you have to go and shoot the wedding yeah and there's so many variables too that like you can't you can't just send a machine to do it there's like too many things and you got to be personable to a machine's cold can't like yeah break the ice find different angles like yeah yeah yeah it's a this is this is a very good i think you should do an episode on that the wedding video industry in the day of AI. This is a super cool topic, how it's umbrella. You know, because, yeah, I mean, the, the,

and the client is super stressed, right? So you have to have that people skill, proper people skill during, yeah, calm them down and stuff like that. Crazy stuff's happened. And you're here with your camera crew. So, you know, they want it to be perfect, but nothing in life is perfect, but you have to capture that. And, you know, so it's pretty cool, you know. As an side business, I think it was like the right call.

And right now it really is at the point where it doesn't take up too much time either. I put in a little bit of time earlier in the year just because I had to get it off the ground, a lot of networking and whatnot. But now it's, again, it's at the point where I'm like, okay, I got time. Let me figure out. let me get a new hobby let me let me figure out this e-commerce stuff with my girlfriend get that off the ground and then see yeah that's i like to challenge myself so i i always need you like something to do but e-commerce is you know it's it's in the era you know if you have a good marketing strategy

you can make it killing and it's scalable yeah that's the difference between like e-commerce and what we do is that we do you can't really scale it that's why like all their companies are always capped monetarily. Yeah, video production is hard to scale because it's human-based. So it's like having 10 guys, 20 guys. This is how you scale. You need to hire more payroll.

Payroll, payroll, payroll, payroll, payroll. The only way to scale creative agency is through cash flow. You need to pump more money and grow the crew. So it's scalable, but it's hard to scale. but but there's always like a hard cap it's not like like if I sell a water bottle I can get it to the point where I can become a billion dollar plus company you can't get a video company to get to that scale unless you're like one of the movie one of the movie giants you know that's that's the only unless you're Disney right but if you're just selling corporate videos like even if you do all the work for Toronto it's not it's not going to be a billion bucks you know no no no no no and that's that's That's a very good point. There's a limit.

And I'm curious, who's the biggest corporate video production company in the world? What's there? That's, I'm curious about that. I should look into it, but it's probably, they always get absorbed by a hundred head? I don't know, but they always get, once they get big enough, they probably get absorbed by a marketing agency or an ad agency. And then they become like part of that and it becomes a bit bigger. but yeah, I wonder. Probably one in China

because they have like a billion plus people there so even if like that's a big market now. Huge. Huge. 1.2 billion people that means a lot of businesses there.

It's a different type of business, a different mindset. They have a different perspective on marketing than us. But now it's getting more and more like us. If you see companies like DJI, damn, their communication is

impeccable. I'm actually planning on reaching out to some production companies in China and bring them on the podcast. Oh, do that. Yeah, I had to ask our makeup artist. I was like, because she's Chinese, I was like, how do I find them? Because I was like, they don't have Google there.

So I was like, where do I even look? Dario, you have to do that. And I think it will be a world premiere. I've never seen an interview. Interview with Chinese entrepreneurs from China are very, very rich. rare. I'm so excited. I'm going to do it. My goals this year is just just get one. I just want to know what it's like over there. Yeah. This will be like probably a world premiere. Never

never seen that. A video production company from China, this is super cool. You got to do this. There's got to be a ton there. Like just think about like 1.2 billion people. There's a ton of production companies over there for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you do this, this will be like a very special one. Yeah. Because they have a different mentality, different. It's, it's, it'll be interesting to discuss marketing or videos with, between America and Asia, how they, how they proceed there, how are they, even doing business there is different. The way you close deals is different. The way you have to communicate is, I don't know. Yeah. It's like, it's like when you, when you go see a client is like you have to bring a gift whatever when they give the business card you have to

take it with two hands all right it's i mean it's a whole other business etiquette yeah that's going to be a special episode i'm hoping i can get one in by the end of the year i only have like three or four more slots open for guests so i'm hoping i want to do Dubai for sure this year and china those are like the last two on my list well we'll see where it goes so that's your third or second season we're currently on the fifth so you're part of the fifth yeah wow so I have three more for the fifth season you're good during a sixth one yeah I was thinking of I was thinking of capping the yeah yeah I'm doing another one next year I'm gonna do another one I'm gonna keep it going I mean you said it's 5x your

business you can't stop now I that's the thing I had a respect for what it did and I I like talking to people at the end of the day. Like, I was doing weekly episodes before, and that was starting to become a bit too much work. But now I'm just doing every other week and it's become a lot more manageable. So, yeah, I think I'm going to continue it another year. It's fun.

I enjoy doing it. Because, you know, we have some podcasts that we do for clients, and usually there's two reasons for podcasts. This is what I noticed. first one they want to build an audience and monetize that audience that's the long and hard way

that's the that's the marathon this is the Joe Rogan strategy where you have to podcast for a decade and then Spotify calls you hey man how much you want I'll buy that audience 100 million

yeah so this is the typical building an audience, monetize that audience or get sponsors, whatever. And the second reason people do podcasts, it's networking. They're not trying to build an audience. They're not trying to have two millions listening a month. They just want to network. And know people get to know people more that will introduce them to other.

And it's networking. It just builds a network and stuff. And this becomes, after a while, it brings more opportunities, more. Just like you said, you spoke with all the entrepreneurs. They gave you nuggets. You applied those nuggets. And poop. You five X.

This is amazing. This is the ROI of your podcast. Yeah. And we've gotten work out of it too. Like people were saying, oh, you should try to monetize it and stuff. I'm like, we're too niche. Like, our audience isn't big. Like, the audience we do have, I'm kind of impressed with because I'm like, it's literally

other people like me. And there's not, there's many of us out there, but not that many in comparison to other things, right? Other videographers. Yeah. And like, I mean, we've gotten work out of this too because, like, there's been people that have had shoots in Toronto and they know about us, so they reach out to us. And then we've had shoots in their cities.

And we use them, you know? Like, so we've gotten work, we've been able to like monetize it in, different ways. And again, the knowledge alone has been, I can't put a dollar. Actually, I could put a dollar figure on that. I won't publicly say it. But yeah, like it's five X, like you said. You know? Yeah. And it's you and we get to know each other. So now I know you guys. If I have a gig in Toronto and stuff like that, I know, I'm going to call Dario because he's the one I spoke with for more than an hour. Yeah. I know him now somehow, you know? So it's, this is the power of podcasting, it's networking.

Yeah. And even for our listeners, now they know you in Montreal. So if they ever have a shoot there, reach out to Inche. You just right there. You heard them on the podcast. He's a smart dude. Exactly. You know, so it's, oh, man, it's amazing. Now it inspires me to even start my podcast also on different, all sorts of different topics. But yours, I like it. The interview, other video production company, this is so dope. And at some point, if you find a common problem of all video production company, you know there's a company who sells this problem, this is a way to monetize. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I don't know if, even something as dumb as a camera. Let's say, I don't know, Canon or Blackmagic releases a new camera and stuff. We're all videographers. We won the new camera. And two-day sponsors is, blah, blah, blah, blah. This new camera was released, full frame, auto focus, blah, blah, blah, low light capabilities. We might be getting actually a, I won't say which one, but we're in talks right now to get another sponsor who sells equipment.

They might be coming on soon, so. If the audience is videographer, even though it's niche, it's perfect. And the fact that it's niche is even better for them, because it's ultra targeted potential clients. So even though the market size is smaller, it's worth more. And we discussed that earlier. You know? So it's super niche. There's a lot of opportunity there.

Inchey, where can people find you? Well, it's easy to find us, Great Things Studios. You Google it. It might zero-click you into who is Great Things Studios. If you scroll down, you will see our website. little bit more. You know, just scroll a bit, you know, give us a click. And our website is

514Gt.com. You know, Great Things Studios, Video Production Company based in Montreal. Or you can type Great Things Studios in Instagram. You will see some of our behind the scenes there. And this is pretty much where we push our content. We should do a bit more of LinkedIn

so we might start doing this a bit more LinkedIn in the next few months. But this is where we're at. Our website, Instagram. or LinkedIn. Perfect. Perfect. Well, Inchi, thank you so much for coming on.

I really enjoyed this episode. Very casual. Went over an hour for sure, but when you're having hot... Yes, I don't even know how long it got. It's been like an hour and a half, but it was a good conversation. Why stop it early, you know? Yeah, exactly. Thank you.

Thank you. It was a real pleasure. Thank you for inviting me on the show. And hopefully, we'll meet again. Sounds good. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Creatives Grab Coffee. Please make sure to follow and engage with us on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and your favorite podcast app.

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