Creatives Grab Coffee - Breaking into New Markets (ft. Phalanx Film) | Creatives Grab Coffee 80

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

In this episode of Creatives Grab Coffee, we sit down with Samuel Hand, founder of Phalanx Film Co., to explore his entrepreneurial journey in video production. Samuel shares how he transitioned from freelancing to running a full-time business, the challenges of breaking into a new market, and the strategies he uses to secure recurring revenue. We dive into managing client relationships, handling revisions, and the power of niching down for brand clarity. Plus, Samuel discusses the inspiration behind his company’s unique name and how history influences his approach to storytelling.TIMESTAMPS0:00 - Introduction to Creatives Grab Coffee 2:19 - Guest Introduction: Meet Samuel Hand of Phalanx Film Co. 3:28 - The Challenge of Collecting Payments from Large Companies 4:50 - Transitioning from Side Hustle to Full-Time Business 7:28 - The Video Production Market in Idaho vs. North Carolina 9:40 - Subscription-Based Video Production for Small Businesses 13:36 - Handling Client Revisions and Setting Boundaries 20:00 - The Role of Contracts in Protecting Your Business 30:31 - Why Samuel Chose Entrepreneurship Over Crew Work 33:53 - Moving to a New Market and Building Local Connections 43:41 - Niching Down: Corporate vs. Wedding Video Production 49:44 - Goals for 2025: Scaling Through Recurring Revenue 57:30 - The Story Behind the Name Phalanx Film Co. 1:00:00 - Closing Thoughts and TakeawaysSPONSORS:Canada Film Equipment: www.CanadaFilmEquipment.comAudio Process: www.Audioprocess.ca🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2vHd8BdbkMQITFZmDJ0bo9🍏 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/creatives-grab-coffee/id1530864140 🎞️Produced by LAPSE PRODUCTIONS – https://www.lapseproductions.comTo learn more about the show, visit: https://www.creativesgrabcoffee.com/

Welcome to Creative Scrap Coffee, the podcast on the business of video production. Creative Scrap Coffee is hosted by Dario Nuri and Kirill Lazerov 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?

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All righty. Well, welcome, everybody, to the first episode of 2025. And today we have Samuel Han from Phalanx Film Co. Welcome. Hey guys, it's nice to be here. Thanks for having me. Thank you. And how was the how was the New Year kind of started off for you? I know we kind of talked a little bit before the episode, but like you had like a pretty interesting story. Yeah, it started with a couple shoots, but also trying to collect payment. I work with a client that I've worked with for a few years. It's a national level company, but they have local offices

and all the local offices are independently owned and operated, or at least run and operated. And so I've been doing work for one of the local offices and they still run payroll and invoicing through the national company. And the national company has been switching over their logistics software, I think. I'm not totally sure, but for whatever reason, they're like three months behind on payment. And so it's been interesting trying to figure out how do we put pressure on national to

actually pay the invoices without making life horrible for the local office? Yeah, cause it's such a weird kind of like paradox or kind of like purgatory, I guess, in a way of what it is. Payment purgatory. Payment purgatory, right? You're like, I need money from them, but I worked with you. And it's like, who do I, who do I go after?

Yeah, apparently it's not the first time that something like this has happened. I guess those are the perks of being like a five hundred million dollar national company is that you can Be late on invoices and people are afraid to sue you I Don't know but I think we'll get it sorted out. They said it'll be It should be end of the week. And if not, then we'll go to plan C. I guess Nice, which is what suing a five hundred million dollar national company? It should be end of the week and if not, then we'll go to plan C, I guess Nice

Which is what? Sowing a 500 million dollar national company? Probably sending him a letter That's all we could really do at this point, right? Just a very stern letter that's saying please pay us for what we're owed Yeah, I mean it's like I have late fees and stuff built into my contract But I don't I don't want to charge the late fees because it's like I have late fees and stuff built into my contract, but I don't, I don't want to charge the late fees because it's like, I don't want to penalize a local office. So, but technically, technically it's not the local office if the payroll is

coming from the head. So that's true. That's true. But I have a feeling that national probably wouldn't smile upon the local operator for, for that. So, I don't know. Well, on a more positive note, tell us a little bit about your company.

Sure. Well, I've been in business full-time since 2021. Prior to that, it was kind of a side gig. I think that's maybe true of a lot of people where we kind of start with it as a side thing and it kind of scales. And for me, that jumping off point was I was having trouble getting off work at my normal job

enough or like far enough in advance to take the shoots that I was getting leads for. So I was like, this doesn't make any sense. It's time to go full time with this. So at the moment, it is basically just me. My wife and I co-own the company, but I'm doing like 95% of the production stuff. And then kind of as needed for different shoots

we'll crew up if we need more crew. So just try to maintain like fairly low overhead that way. I'm looking at onboarding an editor, either as a full-time employee or as just like somebody that I keep on retainer but still have them just as a contractor. But for the most part right now, I'm kind of running and gunning it as a one-man band.

What does your wife do? Full-time, she's a nutritional therapist. Part-time, she's my PA slash whatever I ask. Jack of all trades basically. Yeah, but she's a nutritional therapist and runs an online practice primarily working with other women to support like hormonal health through nutrition. She must like videos to work with you. The reason that we aren't both doing it full time is because it's not her passion.

She'll gladly step in and help me if I need help on a shoot, but we actually had a conversation maybe six months ago where she's like, this is your thing, it's not my thing. So full send it, hire people, crew up, pay others, like do what you need to do to subcontract or like hiring crew. I'm available if you need me, but I'm not a videographer. Yeah. So if you said though she's a co-owner of the business as well, technically. Is that correct?

Yeah, I mean. Well, he's married so everything is co-owned. Oh, yeah. You should know this, Kyril. Yeah, that's true. Your stake in laps went down to 25% when you got married. Yeah, yeah, I know, right. Yeah, I mean, so three years. Sorry, no, I was gonna say you've been doing this for three years then, right? Since you started in 2021? Yeah, yeah, full time for three years and some change. So it was September of 2021. So it's been, you know, three years and a quarter, basically.

What's the market in? I was just gonna ask about the market in Idaho. Like what kind of businesses are there primarily? Yeah. So it's interesting the move. I actually moved to Idaho. My wife and I moved here last year sort of. So I was based on the East Coast, lived in North Carolina, lived in Wilmington, North Carolina, which

is known as Hollywood East. So there's a lot of big production stuff that happens there. There's lots of opportunities if you just want to be like almost like LA type situation where it's like you're just, oh, I'm a DP or I'm a shooter. Like there's a lot of work out there on productions where you don't have to run a production company. You don't have to provide end to end full service production. You can just be an operator. You can be an editor.

You can be whatever and make a living. July of 23, we moved out here and the market in Boise is definitely different. It's a smaller market for sure. and Boise is definitely different. It's a smaller market for sure and the there's absolutely demand for higher production stuff but there are a couple of large marketing agencies in the area that offer in-house video production and I think that they tend to take a lot of that high production demand. So since moving here a lot of the the larger shoots that I've done have actually been for agencies that are based elsewhere. Idaho has a wealth of natural beauty, like we're right,

we're basically in the Rockies. So I've had some opportunities to work on some pretty big productions, like we did one for Honda Powersports with some of their dirt bikes and stuff, but that was for an agency that's based in LA and London. They've got two offices. Most of my work as somebody who provides end-to-end full service production has been with small businesses since we moved out here, and I've started doing a lot more social media production as well. There just seems to be more demand for it. People want high production value, high quality content, but they're not necessarily looking for commercials or keynotes or brand story videos. They're more so looking for, we want 10 reels a month

and we want them to look like a million bucks type of situation. Do you do any subscriptions with those clients, like any retainer? Yeah, I have a couple of clients, one that I have on retainer and that's we're basically doing all of their marketing material. So they're using that both for social media, but also for main marketing channels. And then we have another client that we're onboarding right now where it's gonna be a similar situation.

The primary objective for them is just gonna be to create collateral. And then I think the form that that's going to take is a company YouTube channel, but then a lot of those assets are going to go to their marketing team and then they will cut those down into stuff for like social media and whatnot. Yeah, with smaller businesses like there's always like a growing need to kind of like figure out how can we get the most out of this one piece of content that we're creating.

Yeah, we're doing it for the YouTube channel, but is there a way that we can chop it up or put it together in a way that we could use it in other channels? Because obviously when you're a small business, you wanna make sure that every dollar you spend can go as far as it can. And obviously that's why sometimes there's a lot of tighter budgets, but with more demands and things like that. And that's why it's always tricky to kind of find like a good balance.

And did you find that like working with some of the smaller businesses is a bit challenging because of those very restrictive needs? Or have you found yourself like a system that works for you and is lucrative for your business? There's definitely client education that has to happen with the smaller businesses, especially if it's their first time working with professional production. Ironically, I have found it to be the case that a lot of the larger clients that I'm working with that are local are typically the ones that want more for less,

if that makes sense. And I think that's typically because the people who are making the asks of me that are responsible for putting together the shoots and whatnot are not the decision makers in the company. So, the interesting thing for me has been I've had a lot of success working with pretty small businesses where I'm interfacing directly with the owner or maybe like a senior level executive if you want to call them that, like a you know a 10 person company or whatever. As compared to like a 200 or 300 person company that's still technically a small company but

I'm interfacing with like a middle tier marketing manager or something like that where they're kind of handcuffed and they've been given a budget and they don't get to make a decision about what it's worth to the company. They've just been told like hey hey, here's this money. Go make this happen for this amount of dollars. Whereas working with smaller companies where I'm actually interfacing with the decision maker of the company, we can have a conversation about value, about like, okay, yep, this is expensive. And to be blunt, my goal as a video production company is not to make it cheap for you,

it's to make it valuable for you so that the money that you're spending creates ROI. Like if I can create a machine for you where you put in $1 and you get out two or three or four, then it's to your advantage to shove as much money into the machine as possible, not try to keep more money back. So that's how I've approached it

and that's where I found success. Decision maker, do you mean the actual owner or like a VP? He mentioned owner and like high level execs typically. Okay. Cause we we've had the opposite situation happen to us where when we're dealing with smaller businesses, where it's more direct with the owner. That's when we've had like a lot more back and forth. It's like, they become very undecisive and everything and it just prolongs the whole project versus when we're just dealing with like a VP or an exec or whatever. Like it's a lot more smoother in those situations.

I guess it probably has to do with like the kind of market that is in like smaller areas versus like larger areas as well. that is in like smaller areas versus like larger areas as well. Maybe because living in like a, in like a bigger city or something, there could be like more demands from like smaller businesses to try to even still make it difficult, I guess, in a way, but like in places like Idaho, it maybe there's more potential for expansion because like the competition in smaller regions is probably less. And then in bigger cities, there's more competition. So you have to try to figure out how to be as lean as possible in whatever way. I don't know.

Like it's, it's just something I'm speculating. A lot of the, when the revisions get a little crazy with the small business owners, it's usually stuff that doesn't really change. Doesn't matter. It's almost like, I guess because it's their company, they really want it to be perfect. But there's a point where you got to let go of that, right? Yeah. How do you guys handle revisions?

Do you build them in or do you build them separately? We build two stages in. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Same. And after that, we charge additional. Yeah. That's exactly what I've done. And I feel like half of the time, like they maybe use one of the revision stages and then like after that, everybody's like, ah, it looks good. You know, at least

that's been my experience. It's, it's been the, the clients who are like, Hey, this is our budget. Can you make this work? And then they like are the ones that have 57 things that they're like, this needs to be changed and this needs to be changed and then you Compare the before and after from the two videos and you're like these are 98% the exact same piece of content. Yeah Yeah, it's usually just like a minor cut or something like that It's like can you cut from the wide to the close-up specifically or once it gets into those kinds of changes? I'm like, oh no Like I'm like I just like like go like, here editor, here are the notes.

Cause then at that point it's like, it's a very like specific kind of ask, you know, versus like say if a client, and clients give like feedback to the, to the contents, like, hey, is there this little section, the messaging is a little bit off, can we kind of adjust it or something? That's, that's when you can, then it's like, feels like a little bit off. Can we kind of adjust it or something like that?

That's when you can, then it's like, feels like a little bit more collaborative because then you get a good understanding of what the client is looking for and then you can kind of put your own creative spin and input with your team to really put out something even better. But then when it gets to the nitty gritty

of like super minor things that are, like you just pointed out, you know, it's like 57 small things like, oh, just slightly zoom in on this shot. And it's like 50 of those. It's like at that point, there's no creativity involved. It's just like, okay, this is just what the client needs. It's what they want. Let's let's get it.

Let's get it to them. We've gone over the two stage revision process as well, but like, yeah, if it's like a good client, like we'll do an extra one. Like we won't really charge for it. It's usually a minor thing, though. It's kind of like, like when you get to like the final stage, it's like a good client, like we'll do an extra one like we won't really charge for it It's usually a minor thing though. It's kind of like like when you get to like the final stage. It's like it's perfect It's like oh shoot. We realized this one shot. We got to swap it out for something. It's like we'll swap that out No problem. It's it's it's usually when it's like 50 different things that like you said if it's 50 of those little things that come in After the final stage, that's when we that's when we basically tack on a whole new process it's good to just have like that deadline in mind as well.

Cause then like, you know, you're coming close to the finish line and then close to the finish line, there might be a couple more asks, but even then it's like, all right, whatever, let's just, let's just close this. Let's just get this done and move on to the next one. Yeah. I find deadlines help keep clients' expectations in check as well. Like for example, if they needed a video done within like a certain time period of like two weeks,

you know that there's gonna be two rounds of revisions, likely not going over it because they need to get it to that point, right? Get it to the finish line, they need to release it. It's usually when there are projects that don't have an end date in mind and it's completely open-ended is when it takes the longest. Like we did a project last year that took months to finish

just because there was a lot of cooks in the kitchen on the client side. Like for example, picking the music took them a month. And this, I've never given this many music options to a client in my entire life. You know, usually with my instincts, I get the right song within the first three options that I send them and it's usually it's signed, sealed.

We're good to go. That was a small business owner client too. Yeah, that was a small business owner client with a big business project. You know, that's, you know what? That's a small business owner client with a big business project. You know what? That's a new class of client now that I think about it. Small business client with a big business project. Then there's a lot of nitty gritty things.

Don't get me wrong, great people to work with. There weren't any issues or anything. Small business owners are the best to work with because they really exude that passion for their work. Yeah. They're fun people. They're fun people to work with because they really exude that passion for their work. Yeah, they're fun people. They're fun people to work with because they're all unique. Yeah, just in post is what it's like. All right. It's like, when do we, how long, how many bets should we take for how long this will take?

Yeah, I started building in revision deadlines. Like, regardless of what the deadline is for the client, if it's like, you know, the kind of thing where I kind of get to have a standard post workflow, like, okay, we're going to deliver at like four to six weeks, et cetera. For them, I've started implementing like a 72 hour deadline of like, hey, and I ran this through a larger client where there are maybe multiple eyes that need to get on it because I was trying to assess how long to make that deadline be. But basically I just tell my clients like 72 hours excluding holidays and weekends,

if you can't get eyes on what I sent you within three business days, then it's probably not very important to you. And if it's not important to you, then it's not important to me. So that's worked well for me to just say like, hey, I need you to be timely with your revisions. And I usually don't enforce this. Technically I could say, hey, this is a new work order now because you've taken two weeks to get back to me

on this revision. But the thing that I've had success with in that is that by having a deadline for the client to submit their revision requests, it keeps the whole project on schedule so that they understand like, hey, if you take two weeks to get back to me on this revision, like it still takes time to make the revisions. And so we're going to do everything we can to hit the deadlines that you want with the project.

But like if you take forever to get back to me, it's going to delay final delivery. We have the same thing we have. Like after we deliver the rough draft, we go like, you know, if he can get us the, then look, it's more of a guideline for us. We say like, if you can get us the notes by 48 to 72 hours, then we can do our changes within that same timeframe. We can be on the timeline. But then, and then, and then we can hit that deadline date, but we, we always give them the disclaimer of if you guys miss this, it's kind of on you what the new deadline date is, right? Because then we might get busy with something else and yeah, we've almost never had people

actually follow the 48 to 72 hour guide. You know why? Because a lot of the clients we deal with are financial institutions. And this is why I was going to ask you, Samuel, like if you said that this has helped with some of the bigger organizations too, but like what happens if the boss that needs to lay eyes on it goes on vacation for two weeks? And then no, they can't give feedback when they're back

because the other middle person who had to give feedback also went on vacation for two weeks. Before you know it, a month has passed before everything. Yeah, I really only have one client that I work with on a regular basis where I run into that kind of issue. And fortunately, which is, this is also unfortunate. They kind of do everything at the last minute. So usually there's like pretty significant impetus

to like, we need to get this project done. And so if the big decision maker is Out of the office then typically they're under so much stress to get the project out that somebody else will make the decision and give me the information that I need which Ideally, we would not handle things that way, but at least I'm getting my revision information on time Yeah, it's it's always a tricky fine line and it always depends on the type of content you're creating. And the funniest is when there's a lot of internal content

that needs to be made, but also is very open-ended. You never really know when things are gonna finish. Sometimes you'd get a project where we have one client, we film it on the Monday and they need to have this webinar ready by Thursday. It needs to be out the door on Wednesday, ready to need to have this webinar ready by Thursday. It needs to be out the door on Wednesday, ready to go. Boom, that's one client. Then another client would be like,

we need to create this report training video and we need to get it done in two weeks. And then all of a sudden, before you know it, three, four months has passed and because feedback, it just keeps going back and forth internally on their end. And then it's like, sometimes you're left in limbo It's like alright guys, you know You follow up. It's like yeah. Yeah, and we'll get back to you. It's fine

Like and sometimes we just forget to like there's one project you brought it up yesterday. I was like, oh, I thought we finished that It's like no no no the editor was asking what happened I'm like, oh you're right And it's like, no, no, no. The editor was asking what happened. I'm like, oh, you're right. Cause we delivered like all the video content to them and it seemed like it was fine cause we didn't hear anything back. And then all of a sudden, like over the holiday break,

I started getting notifications from Frame.io. It's like, so and so commented on this video and this video. And I'm like, oh, these aren't like one or two comments. This is like 10 comments. It's like, I guess we're not done this project. That's funny. Yeah. Well, and that's, that's one thing that I recently added to contracts is because I have had clients want to go back after the fact and leave comments.

And it's like, if you go a week after, I'm going to assume you're happy with the video. Like, if I don't hear from you for multiple weeks after delivering a proof. I guess it's great. Like, I guess you're happy with the video. Like if I don't hear from you for multiple weeks after delivering a proof, I guess it's great. Like I guess you're happy. You're leaving money on the table though. Just leave the door open. It's like, sure, more revisions. Yeah, it'll be this much and then just charge for it.

Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying. So it's like, if you go two weeks and you don't give me any feedback, I'm going to assume after 72 hours that you were happy with it. Because a lot of times with the larger organizations that are moving pretty fast, like sometimes I might not hear like, yep, this is great. We're good. Like they just take it. They start using it.

And I'm like, oh, okay, I guess, I guess you're happy. So if after 72 hours, I haven't heard anything. And then two weeks later you come back and you say, Hey, we need revisions on this. Well, that's a new work order. Typically. Yeah. That's a, that's a good way to kind of like keep them, to try to nudge them a little bit to kind of like complete it

and like get the feedback. Cause it's not good knowing that like, okay, is this project still going or not? You know, like, do we still have to be somewhat on standby? Especially if you're hiring other people, that's when it can be a little bit tricky. So like if you hire an editor who's only available for like, because this actually has happened

in the past too where we would work with them for this one project, they do all the rough cuts, and then they say they're gonna take two weeks to get back to you, then they take longer, then all of a sudden the editor is, like had another project lined up a month or two later, but it wasn't in the plan. It's like now you're in another predicament

where essentially you have to still pay the editor, but then you have to take on the work yourself either internally or hire someone else to do it, right? So these systems are good to help businesses like yours and ours plan things out and so that we also aren't overpaying. You can protect yourself in the contract as well. Like I have some terms in there that say if we go past the deadline, some costs and like production or post might change

because some people might not be available. We might not be available anymore. So I do put in those protections in there just in case because you never know. Some things do get delayed quite a bit. because you never know some things do get delayed quite a bit So you never know? Yeah, as you guys structure your contracts into you Do all that yourself. Do you have counsel that helps you with your contracts? So we when we started I Applied our company to the Ryerson formerly known as Ryerson. It was my old our old University. They had a law clinic, right? Formerly known as Ryerson. It was my old our old university. They had a law clinic, right?

And in the last year of the business and law program They kind of work with a small business and they create a bunch of documents for them be it articles of incorporation Contracts and whatever so we were able to get like one of the big law firms to create our contract and then over the years It's gone through revisions with like clients, legal divisions and whatever, like they might look through stuff and say, Oh, you got to change this or whatever. And then I looked through it. If it looks fine, we just keep it in there.

So it's gone through like 10 years of like back and forth to it, like multiple like legal departments and yeah, we've also fed it into chat GPT to see if we should add some stuff and whatnot. So yeah Yeah, chat GPT new law firm. Yeah Did a pretty good job Helping small businesses get started and since 2022. Yeah. Yeah My process has been similar with like especially with the larger corporate corporate clients that have In-house legal teams and they send back a redlined version.

I'm like, I like this wording. I'm going to include this. I'm going to keep, I'm just going to keep this and put my name on it. Exactly. Yeah. You want to laugh? I had a call with a lead yesterday. So they're basically like an agency or whatever and it's in the real estate space.

So they got back to me, they're like, oh, we sent your contract over to the client. And then they were like complaining that it was like the most, like so many pages of stuff. And like, there were like terms that weren't applicable to the project. And I was like, it's just boilerplate stuff. Like, it's like, I don't know.

Like they mentioned something about the weather. And I was like, we're not shooting outside. So it's not really relevant. It's not an issue. Yeah, I told that I was like we got a sign of contract though I'm not doing it without it so I was like just like I said in the evil like just tell them to have their legal department check it and if There's anything they don't like Like we can just look at it. Look at it. And if it's if it's fine to remove or change we'll do it If not, then yeah

Then we'll talk about it then yeah that's funny I don't think I've heard that kind of complaint before I was the first time I told that I was like I've never I've only heard compliments from clients because they always go like oh you guys cover like everything I was like oh yeah it's gonna protect us in you right like like ours is pretty in-depth we even have like an NDA built into it sometimes they go like oh like we need you to sign an NDA I was like already ahead of you on that. It's in the contract. Nice. So how does that affect you guys with your portfolio? Cause I've read into that

quite a bit with like NDAs where it's, it's been that kind of thing where, especially working with larger agencies where it's like, Hey, you know, NDA is cool. Like obviously we're not going to disclose confidential information, but like, I would still like to be able to use this this footage in a reel or in like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have we have a term there. Yeah, that's that's there. So that's actually the one that if we're going to get some pushback on is probably that section of the contract where. But I feel like sometimes they don't read it well enough because I say,

like, we're allowed to publicly show it on our website if it's public. Right. So, I feel like they don't read that part because that's a pushback I've gotten on it. It's like, oh no, we want to make sure you get permission to show it. And I'm like, okay, sure, whatever, like we'll do that. But if it's public, it's out there in the wild, right? So. Right, right, it's no longer confidential.

Yeah. Yeah. Obviously internal stuff with confidential information and things like that, you're not gonna be putting it out there. And that's where the NDA kind of plays into it. And then just put that little stipulation saying, any public materials that you put out, we will do this. Or you could even say with like anything that private, we will

reach out if we can use something right or something. No, I think we don't even include that because if it's I know we don't, but I'm saying we don't because it's like if you want, if it's private stuff, that's not public. We're like.

It's clearly private. Why would we like showcase like private stuff? But the public one always like makes me scratch my head because I'm like, it's already out in the wild. Like it's if anything it'll help you get more views so yeah I don't know some people are I found it really depends on like a client by client basis some clients like do not care the

standard verbiage that I have in my contract because like we have a we have a client wall basically on the website where it's like these are some of our clients not all of them but you know our our language is like, we may use any of the stuff we shoot in portfolio, client's name image likeness may appear alongside media and like 99% of people are just like, yep, that's fine. And then there's always a client that's like, we want to see every single thing that you are thinking about putting out, even if it's a deliverable, before you do it.

I'm like, okay, but whatever, yeah. I have, it's actually one curious thing, because you mentioned you first were in the East Coast working and you already jumped into the industry there, and then you moved to Idaho. What made you decide to kind of go the entrepreneurial route where you start your own business versus working in another company or working as crew on bigger productions and things like that? What drove you into this particular direction? Yeah, that's a good question.

Actually, before I answer that real quick, on my end, my camera looks really hot. Does it look overexposed to you? No, no, looks fine. Yeah, it looks fine. Cool. Yeah, that's a good question. I think for me, I'm drawn to the entrepreneurial stuff temperamentally.

Video production, media production broadly happens to be the forum in which that is taking place. Like, there are other business ventures happens to be the forum in which that is taking place. Like there are other business ventures that my wife and I are working on. Like she owns her nutritional consulting company. So I guess you could consider that an entrepreneurial venture. You own 50%, right? I own 50%.

Yeah. We're working with another business partner right now on some real estate stuff. So like, for me, entrepreneurship goes beyond video production and media production, but it's something that I'm passionate about. And so it's just kind of like a synergy of the two. Compared to working on productions for larger organizations or like crewing There's not a whole lot of opportunity with that in

Idaho Unless you unless you already have pretty good connections I know a couple of guys who are pretty much just full-time DPS They have you know grip vans and they're they're making a living as DP slash colorist like that that pretty typical combo but one of them in particular and the guy who's like making a lot of money doing it is flying to LA like twice a month so I think for me I like having something that's mine I don't mind shooting for other people and I take crew gigs when they're available.

Production Hub has been a great resource out here. That's how a lot of the larger agency shoots that I've done have come across my inbox. But I think the short answer to your question is I like having something that's mine and this is just a skill set that I have so it makes sense for me to build something that's mine and this is just a skillset that I have. So it makes sense for me to build something that's in the production space. Yeah, no, I find a lot of parallels to the same thing as you mentioned where it's like you like collaborating with other people.

You like working on other projects and networking because that's one of the big things about freelancing as well is that you get to meet other people and build out your network. But it's good to also have something that is your own that you could work on, that you can grow. And it definitely will survive longer over the long term as a result.

Cause you know, when you think about it, if you're just freelancing throughout your whole career, you build a lot of reputation and everything and a lot of good networking connections. But that is what you have to rely on. You don't have like a business that you can kind of like fall back to and everything and a lot of good networking connections, but that is what you have to rely on. You don't have like a business that you can kind of like fall back to or anything like that. It's very different, different challenge.

Yeah, and it was interesting moving, you know, from one market to another. Like 2023 for that reason was like a pretty slow year, but having a couple of larger corporate contracts in place to where like, you know, they have a need somewhere They're gonna fly me out. It's not dependent upon me being in one local market Specifically was basically what meant that I was able to make that move successfully So you're ready. Had like a client in Idaho To port you over from North Carolina

No, no like a client in Idaho to port you over from North Carolina? No, no. We had, um, I did have something lined up that I thought was going to happen. We were supposed to be shooting a reality, uh, TV show in the real estate space, like we were going to film a pilot and like do a whole thing. Um, and, and then that fell apart. Um, so that was concerning because we'd already made the move when that happened. But what made it possible or I would say what made it something that we were comfortable doing was having a couple of larger corporate accounts for whom location doesn't matter

because they're going to fly you where they want you. So, you know, just basically rolling through on money that we'd set aside, knowing that it was gonna be a slower year combined with enough corporate income that's not location dependent to where we could slowly build up local business. And now I'm at the point where like most of my business is local again, as you would expect.

That's not bad for two, or like a year to be able to expand that quickly in, in Idaho. Like whenever you're, that's like one thing that Dara and I've talked about before. It's like, if we moved to another city or anything like that, you essentially have to start from scratch when you're there. Right. Obviously you have your portfolio, which is, which is a great starting point. It's not like you as if you started from zero, right? But you have, you start from zero in terms of your local connections

and network and things like that. And luckily, as you said though, you had yourself some good corporate clients that can keep you going that are all remote based. And I think that's one thing that helps a lot of us, even as small business owners, you know, keep going because of that remote type style, right? And that's why there's also no need for an office space or anything like that

or anything that really adds to the overhead, which is one thing that's nice about our business, right? But yeah, like especially now, like you have to try to figure out how to be as lean as possible and work with those types of clients. Though you can kind of scale up and down because bringing, like you were, cause you mentioned you were thinking about onboarding an editor at one point, right? Yeah. Like right now you're basically doing all the editing at this point. Yeah. Unless I get really busy, in which case I'm connected with some people and I can offload a project here or

there, but for the most part, yes. Yeah. That's, that's probably like the best approach to keep going until further. Obviously, unless you're basically, how do you say, getting burnt out from it. But once you start billing in for the editor in your client projects and things like that, there's really no need to bring someone in full time.

Because Dario and I have tried to crunch the numbers many times to figure out if we do need to bring on an editor full time now, but it, it just doesn't make sense. What's all right. Not yet. Yeah, not yet. It just doesn't make sense at this point. You know, I guess it'll really just depend on the type of work.

And like you said, if you start automating it a little bit more where you have some people on retainer, similar projects, similar clientele and deliverables, then you can probably start crunching more specific numbers. All right, now it makes sense to bring someone in, but especially when it fluctuates all the time, it really doesn't make sense to bring on full time. Yeah, I think for me, as I've looked at what's the next step,

what's gonna allow for scale, it's me being able to shoot more. Because I don't get burned out shooting typically. When I get burned out, it's burnt out on post. And so if I can offload post to somebody that I trust and have an ongoing relationship with Probably, you know, I'm not necessarily inclined to bring them in house just because of like that means I have to pay them every single month and it also means that

At least in the US there are some obligations that you have to work in a play that you do not have toward a contractor in terms of like Benefits right exactly so in terms of like... Benefits. Right, exactly. So for me, figuring out like, what do I want to offload, what do I not, so that I can go from shooting, you know, six days a month to shooting 10 days a month, and not being burnt out trying to juggle that with the extra post that you get when you shoot four more days. Are you doing a lot of sales?

What do you mean by that question? I was thinking, cause you moved to Idaho and you market and then within a year you were able to kind of find your footing. Like, did you do a lot of outbound sales, like cold calling? So I have tried cold outreach, either like calls, emails, LinkedIn, networking, that kind of thing. I haven't had a whole lot of success with that. Pretty difficult to cold call somebody and just be like, Hey, do you want to spend

like four figures or more on production? Maybe five, maybe five. Yeah. Maybe 10. Yeah. Like that's a, that's a hard ask. Uh, and so for me, the networking that I found to be most effective, there were a few things. One was networking really well with the other creatives in my area, just to like be like,

hey, I'm here. You know, if you need extra assistance, I'm available. This is my skill set. But also to just try to get a feel for like what was the kind of business that was occurring in the area. So I think that that was kind of a helpful two-way connection where I got some information from them. I'm a resource to them if they want it. So that was good.

And then traditional marketing channels, unlike I think a lot of creatives, because I went to business school rather than like film school or some other creative degree. Yes. That's how I've approached my company. And so like the thing that got my company off the ground in North Carolina was like paying for leads, like traditional advertising.

And then here, once things reached a certain point, I started putting money into Google ads, not a ton ton like 500 bucks a month but just enough to where like, you know there aren't very many other people in the area who are doing that and so it's enough to get me toward the top of Google most of the time and I think I am gonna switch to different marketing channels and start Pursuing more on like Facebook and Instagram just because the ad buys are significantly cheaper But Google ads has absolutely paid for itself. I mean, like if you if you throw $500 a month

at Google, that's $6,000 a year. So if you get one decently sized corporate production, it pays for itself for the years. That's that's been my experience. Yeah, we've done Google ads in the in the past We might try it again at some point this year, but we've always focused a lot on like the type of sales we were doing was all like positive intent stuff because if it's like SEO, if it's Google Ads, it's people that are already searching for your services in a way, right? This year we do want to focus a bit more on negative intent leads, people that aren't maybe looking for video. So we haven't really sat down and discussed how we're going to go about it, but we have

some industries in mind that we do want to target. That's going to be our game plan. Because the cold, the outreach is not just a matter of cold calling, cold emailing or cold messaging on LinkedIn. It's about knowing how to network more in person even, and just like meeting different people, right? It's kind of like planting seeds in your relationships in different ways, because then you never know

where projects and work can come from. Cause that like a lot of, like a good amount can still come from that and it always will. And so like if you start getting into more networks and different groups of organizations or different circles of people, if you can break out into those, then you can unleash even more potential clientele because then you do good work for one person, then they'll recommend you to other people that they know. And yeah, it's just a matter of like being able to put yourself more out there.

Like the last few years, as Dario mentioned, we've been focusing more on what kind of inbound sales. We went from referrals to like inbound from like, again, positive intent stuff. But I think like if we want to grow and take that next big step, we definitely have to do more sales, more outbound stuff. Because then you can figure out what type of work you want to grow and take that next big step, we definitely have to, we have to do more sales, more, more outbound stuff. Cause then you can figure out what type of work you want to do. Because when you're working, focusing on inbound, you're pretty much at the mercy of everyone that's coming in and don't get us wrong. We love the people that we work with.

And, but then we, I started noticing a pattern where it's like a lot of, a lot of financial based clientele, which is great, you know, it pays the bills. But at the same time, when I'm going over our content over the year to see kind of like what we can put together, you know, as like a reel or something like that, it's like, oh, wow, a lot of this content is very much the same. It's very similar, you know, person talking heads, talking to a teleprompter, you know, and like, don't get me wrong, that's content that a lot of people need, but it's like, okay, how can we diversify? How can we find other projects to work on? Because one thing I was actually also curious, I wanted to ask you about was I noticed that you also do weddings, am I correct? Or was it just corporate? Oh, you

used to do weddings. Yeah. i only asked because i saw that like on your youtube channel you had posted some weddings recently on there yeah so that's why i was curious about we did two in 2024 just like referral based so i would say like through like through the spring of 23 it was like actually part of the business of like, okay, we're gonna do weddings And then from that point it was like I think I think we just put on really pivot into corporate stuff primarily in commercial work And so we were still taking a couple here and there by referral For people we know but not stragglers, okay

I was just I was just curious about that because then that's a I would have like a whole other set Of questions. I'm curious about is like how do you run those two technically different businesses at the same time, right? Yeah, for a while we had two websites and that was how like it was basically just categorized It was like we have a wedding website and we have a corporate website And the the decision is to switch and niche down how to do with a couple things one is I just Significantly prefer corporate work. I think it's broadly speaking cleaner. It's easier.

It's well, it's not necessarily easier, but it's less emotional. And so like managing expectations is easier. You can make a ton of money doing weddings. I, my first year in business, like period, I did almost exclusively weddings and made like a lot of money. It was, it was a good year, right? But I was burnt out all the time and it was stressful. And it's just like a lot to manage those expectations.

And so that was the primary reason to niche down. But then also I feel like it does kind of dilute the brand a little bit. I think if you have two completely separate companies that don't share a name, like if there's completely, if there's absolutely no crossover between anything and so it's like if somebody ends up on one website, they're not gonna see the other website and vice versa.

If they run the same Google search, you're not gonna show up in both Google searches. Like that's fine. But especially if you have the kind of thing where it's like, oh, we're a corporate slash wedding slash like blah, blah, blah. Then what we found was with corporate clients in particular, there was some trust building that had to happen

to prove that we were actually professionals and knew what we were doing. Yeah, no, that's a common thing and that's one of the biggest mistakes. I see a lot of newer businesses that are coming into it. They wanna show that they can do everything and then sometimes they don't realize that by showing that you're kind of turning away some clients

because you don't know, and a lot of the time, high quality clients because they have very specific needs, they're looking for very specific experts, and they're looking for people who know what they're doing. You know, like if people go onto our website now, LAPS, and they see the work that we do there, it's like, okay, they're very targeted in like the financial and tech sectors and software sectors

in terms of like the work that they're doing, we know that they can do what we're doing, right? But if then all of a sudden we start posting recently all these weddings that we're doing, they're gonna get confused. It's like, what, I thought you guys do corporate. It's like, yeah, but we also, having to have that conversation with a client is not good

because then you're not portraying your business well. You're not branding yourself very well. And if you are, if you, there's nothing wrong with doing both types of work, but yes, like you said, keep them as separate brands, separate organizations, so that you have certain clients held to go there and certain clients held to go there.

Like if you look at some of the biggest billionaires or owners in the world, like they have different businesses for different things, you know, it's not like, it's not like Best Buy who's are... You should have just used Elon Musk or something. Elon Musk, I was going to say. I don't know why you went to Best Buy. But the problem is Elon Musk though, it's like, we all know that it's Elon Musk.

So that's not a good example is what I'm saying. There's Tesla, there's SpaceX. Yeah, but everyone knows it's Elon Musk. That's the thing, right? The thing that unifies them is, I think, the personal brand. So we're living in kind of like a weird age where you have your brands, but then you also have your personal brand

that's separate and in large part, like a lot of these companies that are, to your point, unrelated, like Tesla and SpaceX have zero crossover. Tesla and the Boring Company, or like SpaceX and the boring company, like there's zero correlation between them whatsoever. But the thing that unifies them is like Elon Musk's personal brand. That's why I didn't want to use that as an example, because that's not what I was going for.

I was going for like, say like the big companies, like say BlackRock, for example, that owns like all these different companies, like major brands, but you don't look at like say Coke and Pepsi and then think of like Black Rock, you know, like you think of that brand, right? So that's kind of what I was trying to kind of portray. It's like, what kind of a beverage company also makes burgers, you know, I mean,

you know what I mean, right? Like how you talk here. This whole metaphor is really evolving into something different, but you guys get the message. What are your goals for 2025? Yeah, primarily increasing monthly recurring revenue. That's the main focus. And then- It's like everyone's like focus. Make money. Yeah, but specifically the recurring revenue, just because like, I would say it last year was like my first foray into like actually seriously having a business model that can run off of it versus it just being like a nice sprinkle

of like, yep, we have a little bit of extra money that comes in every month. And it's the same every month, but it's like, no, this is like a significant portion of, of like gross revenue. Uh, and so just expanding to the point where like, in terms of running operations and payroll could be a hundred percent paid for by monthly recurring revenue is where I would like to be. And then those larger corporate productions, larger commercial productions that come along are just, you know, nice to have, but not need to have.

Uh, like bonuses. Yeah, that's, that's very much where I would like to be. And I think that's within reach. We're talking, like I said, we're onboarding somebody right now that gets us like 90% of the way there once we add that into what we already have. So it would just be a matter of finding

like one to two more retainers. And I think that's achievable. Yeah. And then the that's achievable. Yeah. And then the second thing would be figuring out a system to manage and like, let, let me shoot more and edit less. Like I was saying earlier. If you want to do that, it might like, well, it's not just editor. It's even like project manager in a way, right? If you're wanting to do less of like the, the outbound work or like, uh, the client

relations and things like that, you might, it might be good to think of having someone else that can help you with that aspect. You want to do less like client facing stuff? I don't mind interfacing with clients. I'm just saying I want to shoot, shoot more and spend less time behind the computer like tweaking knobs And I think another part of that that I didn't mention is

Optimizing my like leads strategy. So like right now, you know, like I said paying and I'm fine with that but One thing that we're adding into the mix is blogging for like SEO and domain authority because it's like, you know, the main purpose with the Google ads is to show up near the top on Google. Well, you can do that by paying, you can also do it organically. And so if we can do both, then that frees up those marketing dollars to maybe go into other channels. So within a couple of months, I'm thinking probably like once I've built up a little bit of a base of content blog wise, switching those dollars out of Google ads and into probably like Instagram ads and just kind of seeing what happens

with return on ad spend there. I mean, if you're getting a lot of small business owners anyways, I guess Instagram and Facebook would be good channels for you to utilize, right? Yeah. And I think the advantage with something like an Instagram ad is that it's kind of a two for one because you're getting in front of your target audience,

but you also get to show them a little bit of what you do if you're producing your own ads because it's content. Whereas like Google is just like, hopefully I wrote this headline in a way that they want to click on it. And you're creating content for yourself too, right? So it's like these ads that and promo materials that you're creating, you can also showcase it on your Instagram channel.

And that is basically like a home base for your clients to see it's like, oh, here's an ad, let's see this, this company goes to the Instagram. It's like, that intrigues me. Let's check out the website and reach out to them. You know, it's, like I said, here's an ad. Let's see this this company goes to the Instagram. It's like that intrigues me Let's check out the website and reach out to them You know, it's like you said, it's there's several tiers to really adding value for the content that you're creating You know, yeah, like when you think about it, we should be doing more Instagram, you know It's more value for us as business owners to be putting Content out there like that rather than as you said just creating good headlines All the time.

It's more work. Like that's, if I'm being a hundred percent honest, like that's what's held me back. So it's like, oh dang, like, you know, it's going to take, you know, probably a day a month to like edit the stuff that I want to roll out over the course of a month. But it's like, it's a day a month. Like that's doable. That's actually not bad. If you could do a day a month to get all the content that you

need out there. That's not too bad. Yeah. I mean, if we're talking organic posting schedule, then no. Like if you're trying to post like three to five times a week, then you probably need more times. But if you're just running promoted posts, like if you're posting once a week and you're boosting it and throwing it, you know, throwing a hundred dollars a week at ad spend.

Yeah. I think you could produce four reasonably compelling Instagram ads in a day. Yeah, that's actually something that we need to be looking into a bit more this year as well. That is also on the to-do list. There's, you know, I find that to-do list always keeps evolving.

You know, it's like, it's like hoeing up and then like a client project comes up and then everything just keeps getting shifted. And then by the time you get to the things you need to do, it's like, oh damn, I haven't had the chance to do this yet. But that's part of the grind, right? Yeah. What about you guys?

You have, you have discrete goals set out? We're in the process of writing them out right now. Yesterday we were looking at like the financials and we're like, okay, so let's look at expenses. And we kind of analyzed everything from last year. And I think we're at a stage in our business where we're pretty streamlined with how we spend our dollars and whatnot. So I guess no changes there. Obviously gross, we would do want to increase our gross this year, which is why we want to do more outbound stuff because relying on stuff that comes in from Google and whatnot, like all it takes is like an algorithm change and then that can totally like mess up your numbers and whatever.

So yeah, which we kind of experienced like you're talking about SEO and blogging. Like we did a lot of that and our blog gets a lot of hits but somehow we kept dropping in the rankings last year and haven't had time to look into it but yeah we're just gonna focus more on outbound stuff just to include like again we're looking for the same thing like monthly recurring revenue we do have some big clients and we would love to get a couple more like those guys and then we'll be set for the year, right? So we're kind of in a similar position Yeah, like one of the biggest challenge of like why a lot of people

Try to move away from the referral based model is because you are just sitting there waiting for people, you know To reach out to you But now with seo the difference is you're just sitting around but waiting for strangers to reach out to you, right? Is the same the same thing you're doing, you're waiting around. And like one of the things that we've talked about is that it would be nice to try to do something proactive too because then you feel like you're also trying to kind of like at least go for some of the stuff that you wanna do.

And then that way, you know, like it's got a good, healthy mix of everything. You know, if like say SEO is like 40% or 50% of your, your lead generation, great. And then like 20% is proactive, you know, sales, outbound work, and then 30% is referral based. It's nice to get, to dip your toes in a different areas. Right?

Cause if you just put all your eggs in one basket, it's as a business owner, it's not the smartest thing in the longterm. No, yeah. And I think the thing for me about monthly recurring revenue is it's like I've run my business for the last three years without it. So it's not critical.

Like you can rely on inbound leads. But the thing that it does for you is it gives you the freedom to try different marketing strategies to see what works to bring in inbound leads without it being like, hey, if this doesn't work. I'm not eating Yeah

exactly Yeah, I think I think we're in very similar places as far as strategy and I think I think with like the blogging and whatnot for me Again, that's another thing you got to put time into but with tools like chat GPT It's like if you create a really robust, good outline, like you can utilize those tools to help you create the actual content and then refine it without it being a huge creative task for you. It speeds it up immensely, but then you'll like, you'll look at it a couple of months later and it reads like an AI article.

Yeah. Even if you have to go back, you'll have to go back periodically and just fix it. And then they always release like new models too, which do improve it. Like, yeah, like again, you can, it does speed it up. You do have to go back and fix stuff. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So we kind of already hit the rough one hour mark. But before we end off on the episode,

how did you come up with the name Phalanx? Phalanx, yeah. Yeah. So it's a reference to the Macedonian phalanx. Shoot, sorry. I'll start that over. I totally just kicked my mic stand. Try that again.

It's a reference to the Macedonian phalanx, which is a battle formation that the ancient Macedonians used, which maybe comes on a little strong if somebody gets the historical reference, but the reason that I chose the name, there are actually two. Number one is because it's alliteration with film, like, Feynman's film. It just sounds okay. The second reason is because I think that there are a lot of companies out there who are pouring tons of money into their marketing. And they're working with creatives who really know what they're doing. And they're getting really good content.

But the return on investment is just not there. I've seen that in the dental space, that's where I do a lot of work in like healthcare and dental where, you know, they're paying 30, $40,000 to produce a TV campaign and the ads are good, but they're not working. And I think a lot of that has to do with, we talk about ourselves in the video space

as visual storytellers a lot. And you can be a really good visual storyteller, but if you're telling the wrong story or telling the right story to the wrong people, like your client isn't gonna get ROI. So the reason behind Phalanx is like, that was the Macedonians like strategic formation when they were in a tight spot and they needed to like make something happen they used the Phalanx and so the idea is

like yes we create high quality content our videos look good they sound good the storytelling is good and that's kind of like ground zero if you're a video production company all those boxes should be checked but we're also going to work with you on the strategic side to make sure that you're telling the right story to the right audience. Nice. Uh, I like the, I like the story behind that. I was also going to ask, um, are you Macedonian? Cause it's a very specific, it's a very specific, uh, a very specific thing

that you picked out, uh, you don't hear that every day. It's just, I, when I was a kid, I was super into history. I thought I was gonna be a historian. I was like, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna be a history professor. And then at some point I decided I didn't wanna do that. But there's just a bunch of stuff that lives rent free in my head. And that's one of those facts, I guess.

Nice. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Samuel, thank you for joining us on this episode, man. And we really appreciate you sharing your background in your story and we got some we got some new Some new ideas floating around in this episode, which I'm really happy about Yeah, I really appreciate you guys having me on and reaching out. It's great to connect with you guys And I'm excited about what you're doing

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