Creatives Grab Coffee - GROWING and INVESTING in Your TEAM | Creatives Grab Coffee 45

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

JOIN OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT: https://www.patreon.com/CreativesGrabCoffeeProduced by LAPSE PRODUCTIONS – https://www.lapseproductions.comBusiness growth can come in many different ways. One of the biggest is building a team. The way to grow from this is to INVEST heavily into the people you work with. Today we welcome Rupert Rixon from Perspective Pictures. Our VERY FIRST guest form across the pond in London England. Perspective Pictures is a digital-first video production agency, based in London. Operating as a digital studio, they produce everything from long-form content to digital ads, all created by our in-house team of digital natives.❤️🎉 SUBSCRIBE 🎧✅ and FOLLOW 📲 for more episodes! https://www.creativesgrabcoffee.com/

All right, well, everyone, welcome to another episode of Creatives Grab Coffee, episode 45. And today we have our very first guest from the UK. We finally made it across the pond. We have Rupert Rixon from Perspective Pictures here with us. Rupert, thank you for coming on. Thanks for having me. It's great to make it across the pond as well.

Let's just get the background out of the way first. So just tell us a little bit about how you got into the industry and a little bit about Perspective Pictures. Yeah, for sure. So I run a video production company called Perspective or Perspective Pictures. We've been going for something like seven years now. We make all sorts of video content. We're a team of 26, 27 people. We work with big clients like Red Bull and Deliveroo and people like that, and then kind of small companies as well. We produce all sorts of stuff from big Red Bull stunts on their YouTube channel with landing planes on helipads and things like that, right down to kind of crowdfunding videos and startup social ads and things like that. My background initially was to kind of crowdfunding videos and startup social ads and you know things like that my background initially was I kind of started loads of different businesses when I was like from

the age of 12 and I started a business renting out nerf guns for kids parties and started a YouTube channel to promote that and those videos started to go viral and I was like oh this is sick filmmaking super fun and sort of followed that path um made a documentary where I skateboarded across America from LA to New York um and that was just kind of you know kept growing from there nice nice so you've been operating the business where you said uh seven years right yeah now yeah it was our seventh birthday last week nice congrats wow happy birthday thank you it's a big. It's a big one. It's a big one. Yeah, we've been doing it for roughly the same amount of time, I think, Kirill. When did we start? 2015

or something, right? The end of 2014, 2015. So about eight, nine years or so. But like we've covered in the past where essentially the first few years, we didn't really treat it like a business. It was more so like two freelancers hanging out. But we consider now Labs more so in year three at this point, since we've actually started to focus on it as a business itself. We're going by the pandemic year, so pandemic year zero. What was the transition for you guys? If you've been working together kind of like five, six years, what was the like, right, we're a company now,

what caused that and what what what different what what actual difference in practicality was that it was really just when the when the pandemic happened like it before the pandemic happened actually we noticed that we were plateauing at whatever stage we were at and uh as soon as the pandemic happened we just we had a couple of uh months of just you know we were in a weird mindset of like, there's no work coming in. What do we do? Whatever. And then we just sat down one day and we started to think about LAPS as a business and how we could grow it and what we should do to like turn it into like a growing business. Right. business right so like girl said on other episodes like the pandemic really forced us to rethink our whole business process and then from there we started networking with other businesses and it got us really thinking outside of the box and then we started applying like all the knowledge we started learning two laps and like i would say 2021 was like our first i could like we both consider

it as like our first year as a business right like we mentioned in the past it felt like before that we were really just two freelancers collaborating on projects but if even when we weren't like two freelancers it just felt like we didn't have the business knowledge that we needed to have to run a business but then after the pandemic or during the pandemic we we kind of figured that stuff out. And every year has just been compounding our knowledge and expertise year after year. So I think that was the thing that really transitioned us from being a freelancer to being a business. Right, Kiril? Yeah.

And the one thing that we noticed with every year, just to kind of start planning and trying to see what kind of milestones we could reach towards, you know, like one of the first things we're trying to aim for is to get like maybe our first one or two full time employees to join. Whereas you in seven years have managed to bring your team up to about 26, 27 people, which I'm very curious about. Like, what was it like going from just you to one person to three to then what, 26? Yeah. So it's tough. Like, you know, the more people you hire, the more problems you're going to have. Like if every person on your team has like a really difficult issue once a year that you have to deal with, you know, for me as a manager director now, that's every two weeks. So that's like a big problem that you've got to kind of take on. And sometimes those are all at the same time. So, you know, the more people you get, for me as a manager director now, that's every two weeks. That's like a big problem that you've got to kind of take on. And sometimes those are all at the same time. So, you know,

the more people you get, like it's one of the disadvantages for sure of like the agency model, like your problems and in terms of process and structure and everything, it breaks every time you sort of double in size. But from the beginning, I had like one team member who started from the very start who I sort of brought on because I just knew that I wasn't going to be someone that could sit in a room by myself and just kind of get through it I had a friend of mine who was working in a garage and I was like hey do you want to come like um 300 pounds a month or like I don't know 500 a month or whatever and you know I'm trying to build this business um and then it sort of scaled from there like and then there were different pain points so like for instance when we got to 11 people that

was probably the worst period of time because that was when I still sort of managed everybody so there wasn't this kind of clear structure of communication everything was still very open everything was like turn around in the office and speak and when you get to about seven eight people that's where that starts to become a real problem. And 11 was the peak where I was like, fuck, like this is horrendous to manage this company like this. And for me to sit down every quarter and do everyone's reviews, everything else. And then when we got to like 15 people, we sort of introduced middle management. It got so much easier because ultimately you start breaking people up into teams. And now, although we're a team of, you know, 26, we're what kind of four teams of, you know, seven or whatever it might be. So now it's much easier to manage as heads

of department. And, and yeah, so it's kind of a bit more straightforward, not to say there's not still still problems and things that still don't get harder as you grow, but your processes and everything just break every time you sort of double when you first get to seven people, it breaks and 14, it breaks and, you know and you know etc that's pretty interesting because i think a lot of the the businesses we've we've spoken to they're very uh skeletal in a way but i think that they're either skeletal to the point where it's uh under i i'm guessing under eight people or they're like past like 15 people so there's like no in between. So it's interesting to hear that at a certain point, it just becomes too hard to manage. Um, if you're just like, like you were

saying, like you were managing everyone versus like when, when you get to a certain point, then you got to bring in other people to manage other people. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And there's so many variables for that. Like there's two of you guys. So, you know, that might change that number that that looks like. And then there's also a book I'm reading at the moment by the founder of Netflix called No Rules Rules. And it's about how you need way less structure and way less structured process if you have a higher talent density. So like the more capable and the higher quality your team are, like the less intervention and the less structure and process you're going to have to apply to them.

And they talk about how like even one underperformer on their team is like, is a huge problem because that massively brings that entire team down. There's a lot of research that one poor performer isn't like just proportional to like the amount of work they have, that kind of bad behavior and stuff spreads. So even just things like talent density can have a huge impact on where you're going to feel those kind of like squeezes and pains and things like that yeah i've heard like that from some friends that some of the organizations they work at they love almost everyone on their team and everyone pulls their weight and they're doing really well but there's always like that one person that kind of just brings everything down a little bit.

And then if there's that little bit of negativity there or lack of morale from them, it just kind of brings everybody's morale down. So it's really key to bring in people that actually like all kind of like, you know, pull their own weight and everybody's pushing together for the same common goal. Right. The thing that I'm curious about also is like what made you go the route of uh growing like to a full-time team because as dario mentioned a lot of production companies keep to a skeletal team because it allows them to be a little bit more nimble depending on the projects that come in like what was the part that made you realize okay from well it's sorry kyle to add on to that it's also because there's a lot of uncertainty in our year to years as well right like i guess after your question kyle maybe we can ask like

how did you get to the point where your your cash inflow was so stable at the scale you're at right like that would be an interesting topic to explore but yeah kyle go ahead yeah i think that kind of you're kind of like pretty much answering the uh asking the question where i was going to say like what was the the thing that made you realize you needed to go from the freelancer model to the full-time employee model which i guess is that in terms of like more certainty aspect yeah absolutely so um we can talk about cash flow because cash flow is still painful at times but is a horrendous beast that every business owner at some point probably has to wrestle with and you know we've had some a lot of rough times with cash flow, but generally, you know, we're still here, we're still going and

we've grown a lot and now we're profitable. But when it comes to why in-house, for me, there's a huge competitive advantage there because one, you're able to make higher margin if you're able to consistently bring in work, which is kind of displaces the problem somewhere else. Two, the like reliability of people that are in-house but also being able to train them up a lot so we provide a huge amount of training for our team in terms of digital platforms and you know um yeah basically digital and online in areas that maybe a lot of filmmakers or editors or whatever wouldn't have as kind of stronger knowledge um so we're able to output better stuff and it also then means we can be much more collaborative with our clients so like you know clients get to know our team they kind of grow

they build good relationships with them uh they know that we're all in-house it's a part of what we pitch and we bring the clients into every stage of the process so the creative team that do the pitching and the ideation they'll work with them obviously they'll then come out to the shoots most of the time but then also we invite them into the edit session once we have like a v1 we then like really bring them into the process and don't try and like shut them out and try and get them to just leave us alone um so we really bring them in and get them really involved and that's been a massive part as to what's made our um product more addictive it's made it more interesting it's made it more exciting people like working with the same people and it just it means that we can turn things around quickly we can do it reliably you know when there's phases

where there's not enough like the industry gets really busy and there's not enough freelancers and people are kind of squabbling over things or whatever like we can turn stuff if a client calls us up like if we have the capability the capacity we can turn it around tomorrow do you know i mean which means we can do things quickly collaboratively um at a higher margin so there's so many benefits to it but there is this one massive problem which is uh maintaining like a consistent flow of work and you know and to do that you have to really nail the marketing of the of the kind of production company the branding and the product to make sure that you're just consistently firing out you know know, bangers basically. Yeah. Like that's always like a big challenge when you're, when you're operating in the freelancer model where sometimes a client would say like, Hey,

so this is the project we have. This is the deadline. Is it doable? It says, and then we always have to say, okay, sure. Let's see. Let's see who we can bring in for that. So then I actually, you know what, Kiril, I actually don't find that to be such a such a big issue for us i think it's more so maybe not anymore do you know what i noticed being a big issue now is that uh we've developed this good relationship with the client and then they're like okay we have this smaller project the budget is smaller and like you know timeline is whatever can you do it and then i start to look at the details and i'm like oh i know they can't afford it at this because when we get brought on it's more so for like the big budget stuff right

versus this is like okay like we have an upcoming project they were asked like because we've started doing more manufacturing work and they're like oh yeah we just acquired this new company can you come in for a half day we just need a 60 second video just outlining what this is so the sales team would know what it is right it's like okay well something like that we would normally charge seven to ten thousand for but i know i can tell that they budgeted a couple thousand for this and if we had like in-house people i would just go like yeah sure just go grab half of the footage come back and we'll just edit it for us the cost would be like half of that if we had the house right like we could make a still pretty good margin at whatever and we don't lose them to someone else

that would take that on so that's that's the trouble i'm finding now and the benefit that i guess someone like rupert has with that big in-house team is that okay if a client just needs like two hours of footage capture and then we just go edit like quick 30 second thing. He can do it for us. It's like, okay, well, I can't hire a DP at like 1500 a day just to shoot like two hours of stuff, right? I'm not gonna I don't need him for the whole day. But he would just pick up the project if it is a full day gig, right? So it's getting tricky. Now I'm noticing you're talking more so about the long term relationships that you've that we've developed with clients where we do we've done a lot of project for projects for them in the past like like big and medium and then sometimes they

just have very small needs that you know you would like to help them out with because you know you're their trusted video partner at that point I was more so kind of like also talking about like sometimes when newer people come in you know like say we're already busy with a lot of people a lot of clients all of our resources are tied. And then another lead comes in asking for a project. Okay, let's see who might potentially be available. Not everyone is always available. Whereas Rupert, you said because of your own in-house team, like almost all the time, you're going to be able to take on more work depending on the needs, right? Yeah, there's a cap to that, of course, like with anything but

but generally speaking you know we we try and almost never say no to clients we always try and make it happen like you say because there's that i used to mention that there's that kind of opportunity cost as to you know if you say no then it's not that oh no you miss out on that small piece of work whatever it might not be the end of the world but that means that then they're going and speaking to other suppliers they're building relationships with other suppliers and that you know that that can be problematic right so so yeah we try and we absolutely try our best not to say no and to be as accommodating as we can be while also not you know fucking ourselves over what was the like uh like inciting incident for you guys to go from you know like just uh starting out production company to like getting to the point where you're like okay

now we're we're we're on the scene we can we can take on bigger projects more projects i can hire more staff like what was what was that moment for you guys so we raised investment uh a few years ago well like four or five years ago now actually the first round of investment so we raised 150 000 pounds there's a scheme in the uk called scis which is a seed enterprise investment scheme something like that and it basically is like obscene tax incentives for investors to invest in high-risk startups so it's like if you invested 100k in us you would get 50K back in taxes like straight away. And if the business failed, you get 30K on top. So you only risk 20% of your capital.

And if we pay dividends, if we're profitable, you don't pay any taxes on those dividends. So it's like a scheme that the British government has to encourage high risk investment. And we raised 150K like that on that scheme. And it was super straightforward and it was phenomenal. So that was a huge moment for us to be like, you know, fucking hell, we've got 150 grand here. Like what can we do with that? What does that mean for us? Like we didn't want to spend it on kit. We wanted to scale a team, scale our marketing efforts, all that kind of thing. And we did. It's funny, you say the word scheme,

Um, and we did. It's funny, you say the word scheme, uh, but here in, in, in Canada, the word scheme, you usually kind of like coincides with the word scam, but you were talking about it in such a positive way. It's like, I would love to be schemed and scammed a little bit, you know? Well, maybe it is a scam, who knows? But, uh, no, in the, in our context, not, but you know, also scheming is a thing in the UK like we say that as well like I feel like scheming you're that's what I mean right I did you guys use any of that money on your website because I gotta say like I really really loved your website thanks man when I when I first came across it it's funny because a couple months like when we're first getting into redesigning our website, like your website was exactly what I had in mind.

But I have nowhere close to the amount of skill you would need to pull that off. Yeah. Well, most of that we built in-house, to be honest. It's one of the beauties of like having the talent in-house is like you end up working on internal tasks and, you know, working on our own stuff when we have that availability. tasks and you know working on our own stuff um when we have that availability and after we had this big push where like during covid um i was like right well we're gonna struggle to scale our revenue we maybe grow our revenues like 30 during covid but it was like it was rough um so i was like cool what can we do during this period of time because this is going to be over and then there's going to be a big boom again I'm sure and whatever so how can we scale for that so first of all we hired really like key

people um we were like cool let's go out and hire some like bigger players head of creative those kinds of roles traditionally a lot more expensive and they were a lot cheaper and we got much better kind of applicants because people were looking for jobs so we did that two we took on an office which is like a 5,000 square foot office that can see everyone. We have our own studio here and everything else. And again, we signed a five-year lease during COVID, like when the rates were so, so, so much lower. And then we spent the time during COVID renovating the office and stripping it out and building ourselves. And then the final thing was we rebranded. So we redid our website, we redid our showreels, we redid our logo, like everything.

So we redid our website, we redid our showreels, we redid our logo, like everything. So the idea being we did a new like company ad, which is this like main ad with me, like speaking that we run on like Facebook and Instagram and stuff. And we, we then sort of like, as we were coming out of COVID then relaunched the brand with this kind of like new team, new processes, new branding, new office, and just went sort of hard at it. And we doubled our revenue that year year on year um which was like crazy for us kira i don't know if you saw his branding but it's on point it it it perfectly encapsulates like creative fun high quality that's like the vibe i get from watching

it and it's it's really well done i gotta give you props on that front thanks very much man thank you it's very hard to hit a lot of those to to hit a lot of those points as a, as a production company, because a lot of, a lot of companies always like try to focus on the quality. That is like, usually what like the biggest thing that people are pushing for is like, look at the quality of our work, the quality of our work, the quality of our work. But then, but it's really hard to kind of showcase the people behind it, you know, and what kind of energy and vibe everything is, because creating videos should be fun, right? It's not always like a super serious thing at times, you know, like obviously, yeah, everyone wants to be serious and get good professional work.

But why not have fun at the same time while doing it? And that's what we got is a vibe with your branding, especially that video that you guys put out, like kind of encompassing your business. No, absolutely. I love the Last Supper picture they have. Yeah, that was so good. It's so funny. I love it. I get a lot of shit for that,

for making myself Jesus, obviously. But, you know, that wasn't actually my choice. That was a producer that sat me down. Oh my God. But yeah, there's a, I think it's super important. Like, you know, you guys mentioned you're a manufacturing client, right? We work with a lot of industries,

you know, as I'm sure you guys do, that aren't super, super exciting, that aren't super creative and everyone is creative. I really believe that everyone's born creative and then we kind of lose it a little bit as time goes on. So like, I see like working with us should be like a really enjoyable experience that you might pay for just as an experience. Like we need to be super communicative, like super friendly, like everyone you worked with needs to be like really energetic, positive and fun. And like, it should be like a creative exploration where they get really involved they get to like explore you know whatever it should be like the best part of

all of the things that that person has at the time on their list of responsibilities working with us should be like the most fun thing that should be like the number one thing they look forward to they want to get into the office now like i'm excited to like hop on an email with perspective today like we're gonna have a bit of a laugh like I'm gonna come up with some ideas with them like it's gonna be like fun whereas like there's a lot of narrative sometimes in the industry that's like about clients that can be a bit snooty in my opinion where it's like let's shut them out like what do they know whatever like for sure they're not fluent in like the design language or the creative language of like video like for sure

but we're meant to enable them in that sense so I think that creative language of like video like for sure but we're meant to enable them in that sense so I think that it should be like super fun that's like the number one thing for me because like how many video production companies are there there's literally millions of us around the world that people that watch YouTube went out and bought a camera got a bit better and better and better at it and could shoot cinematic nice footage and kind of structure a narrative together so yeah it's gonna be fun right yeah the key is to figure out how to stand out from the rest of the crowd you know like you said everyone can everyone can shoot good quality videos now at this point the barriers to entry are almost non-existent at this

point now how do you make yourself stand out you know like one of the simplest ways is figure out a way to be enjoyable to work with 100 100 i want to talk about the the bulk uh shooting thing you offer can you tell us a bit more about that because as soon as i saw that on your website i'm like how do you shoot 100 pieces of content in like a day like yeah i was curious about that too it's a myth it's a little lie for those of you that don't know like rupa actually you know what rupa why don't you tell the audience like a bit, like what it is? Yeah, for sure.

Our bulk shooting scheme. So basically, basically we have this thing where we offer to clients where we might set up a shoot. There might be two to three days. We'll, and we'll just shoot a absolute metric ton of content. That might be like social ads, retargeting ads,

brand videos. We'll take the top still might be like social ads, retargeting ads, brand videos. We'll take the top stills, like brand photos, whatever. And sometimes with some clients, we'll output like well over 300 deliverables with them. They might be translated into different languages. There might be part animation. There might be different versions where we're running different introductions

to split test and run across socials. You know, there might be like, sometimes there's just like, there might be like sometimes there's just like um there might be like 30 different pieces of content and then they're all being reformatted into like four or five different formats well that's like 120 pieces of content there and then it's being split into four different languages well that's like 500 pieces of content so yeah so so that's kind of how it tends to work it's like maximizing because the shoot days are like a pretty expensive bit, right? Once you're hiring like an actor and locations and everything else.

And to me, it always felt so wasteful, like turning up, spending hours perfecting a shot, like getting it right and then being like, cool, now we'll move on to the next scene. And it's like you film like three or four scenes in a day. Whereas like for some clients, you know, for some stuff like the high-end stuff that's super important sometimes we might spend five days filming one 60 second advert but for some clients it's just not necessary that level of like finesse and production value and and time and it's like cool well actually we could shoot like 50 times the number of deliverables in like three days if we just if we if we kind of smash out and structure a certain way um so that's something we do for for specific clients and you know which means they they might spend 20 30k and fill up their content calendar for the year yeah that's

definitely an interesting way to kind of maximizing value from certain aspects because you're you're right like a lot of the times we're planning for maybe say like a one video deliverable you know that's going to be like a 60 second ad that they're going to promote on their social media channels. But now the question is starting to become, how do we create more content for the client? Also where it also works within budget, you know, it's also, you're not getting screwed over on doing too much work at the end of the day. And sometimes it is as simple as just creating the same piece of content, but maybe even in different formats or the one I was curious about was all the different languages that you do like are you are you doing like voiceover or just like subtitles that you're getting translated depends depends on the client sometimes um yeah

sometimes it's vo sometimes the subtitle sometimes it might be an animated video with dynamic text so then just gets translated um so it really depends oh wow and do you guys outsource for that or is that all internal oh no they got a big they got a oh for the different languages right yeah every person on the team speaks a different language so we can cover 26 we're not very good at talking to each other but it's fine it works out um it depends so we do have some different like people that speak different languages here and people that work on the team might speak spanish german you know whatever else um but generally speaking it just depends on yeah if there's a language we don't have in house for someone we'll outsource

it to a freelancer he'll do the translation for us or sometimes a client translates it for us so that's happened before yeah no we've we've had that happen in the past where they're where they've needed like for different uh different languages mostly like here in in canada we get the need for english and french at the very most but even french as often. So most of the time we just get English, but it makes sense for you because you're in Europe and they, a lot of the companies that are based there need to be able to hit different targets on based on what's close by. Yeah. Like every country is basically like a three hour drive distance where if we drive three hours, we'll still won't get to Ottawa or Montreal in our area yeah no absolutely absolutely but um yeah and that yeah we do a lot our two

biggest clients are both outside of the UK how do you manage like with different countries like that like all all the time well so sometimes we'll work with like local teams so we're doing a project um around sustainability that's like all over the so we're doing a project um around sustainability that's like all over the world we're producing like hundreds of films a year for them and they're you know literally north america south america japan you know all across asia all across europe um and a lot of the times we work with local teams where we might find like a local videographer to film something if it's relatively straightforward um or we'll fly out but it just depends on the budget and everything else and you know so you're doing a sustainability project and flying all over the world doesn't seem like the smartest thing to do

so yeah that's kind of counterintuitive there exactly so like promoting sustainable values but we do offset like our carbon emissions and stuff like that but it's not it's just not the same it's just hiring a local team just not going there right so so yeah so we kind of varies depends on the project and the needs and how difficult it is that we're filming because if we can avoid going there then cool it's gonna be a bit easier uh let's talk a bit about what the market is like in in london because we're we're here in toronto we've spoken to other people in different cities across Toronto North Carolina uh Seattle but you're the first from London so what's what's the scene like over there first peek into that into that world yeah it's good I think um London is like obviously there's a lot of really amazing creative generally that comes out of London there's a lot of big

creative agencies here um there's a lot of like music like music artists that come from London and from the UK and stuff so for us like internationally having that London badge is like people are keen to work with us still if that makes sense going internationally and that that's kind of helped us again with international clients in terms of the market here like immediately like I think it's I think it's pretty good at the moment you know we're in we're definitely we're in a recession or whatever that means but the thing that I have noticed and I don't know if you guys have this in in Canada or what the kind of main macro factors are but now we're getting a bit bigger when stuff is happening in the news we are feeling that happen like COVID was the first time that happened where we were like you know you see something on the

news and it's like business is a disaster and we actually feel like that. Whereas before it'd be like, because we were tripling in size every year, it's like, well, we might grow 10% less because the economy hasn't grown as much. But we're not really noticing the changes in the economy. that whenever there's uncertainty in the market, everyone holds back their budgets to the last possible moment. So they're like, oh shit, like the recession's coming, things aren't looking good, blah, blah, blah. And then they just like, hold on. And they're like, ah, and then they all at the same time go, shit, our financial year is about to end.

We need to spend some money on video because we've not spent any money and we're going to lose our budget next year. And it turns out everything was fine anyway. And all the clients try and all buy stuff at the same time, is a bit nuts so um or some of them will just pay us for a project they'll just pay us like an invoice and then they'll just want us to hold on to it and then later on then well they'll ring us up six months later and be like yo you know that 50k we sent you can we do something with that now i've come to collect which is a dream for cash

for us i'm great times um but yeah so so i think the market's pretty good you know we're at a size now where we're certainly feeling like the impacts of like macroeconomics which isn't something i've ever really thought i'd have to think about in my life um and but generally it's pretty good talent is is great here it's really easy to get like great editors great videographers you know all that sort of stuff um you know while in China like the number one thing that kids want to be when they grow up is an astronaut still and there's all the you know people there's so many people going to engineering uh in the UK the number one or I believe it's the US even the number one thing kids want to be when they grow up is youtubers so lots of people that learn how to video edit and

and film albeit to the detriment of our engineering capabilities um but yeah so so generally pretty good you know how was that compared to to canada does that sound pretty familiar or are things different now it's similar like i think um we're not what you were saying about like being affected by the actual the the the macroeconomic uh changes i think we're starting to notice that ourselves as well. Because up until now, even if the economy was bad, we were still growing because we were small. But I've noticed, for example, in the last month and a half,

the amount of leads that came in decreased drastically. And that's obviously due to all the layoffs and the interest rate hikes and everything and like several other production companies i've spoken to in canada have said the same thing as well because at first i was like oh i wonder if it's just us maybe like something i don't know like because we're like it's like on page two right now that's why like people are still sticking to page one on google that's the reason but everyone else i spoke to there said yeah the amount of leads that came down like that would come in or has decreased but we still have a lot of work with our current clients and the other guys i spoke to

they're in the same boat too so we're we're in the same same boat but in terms of like the scene here like um there's a lot of work to go around because there's a lot of companies, a lot of different industries, I would say. There's not too many. It's not like if you go to the middle of Canada, it'd be more like agricultural industry or whatnot. Oil and gas here, it's very diversified, I would say. I mean, maybe leaning a bit more on financial maybe, but not even. Again, it's pretty diversified here in Toronto. There's a ton of different industries and there's a ton of work out there too. There's not any one dominant industry, I would say, in Toronto. It really depends and it really

depends on the circle that you're in. What might be dominant for you might be what might be very minuscule for another organization. The one thing you did mention that kind of, I think, will give everybody hope on this front was that you were mentioning that a lot of companies are holding on to their marketing budgets because, you know, they don't know what's going on right now with the world. But they all have fiscal years that end and they need to spend those eventually. So if they're not spending it this month or next month, they're going to do it later. And one thing we noticed that's always been like the trend here in Toronto year over year is that everyone comes in to do video work in August, September, October. Like those three months are massively busy all the time. And I think a lot of companies have their fiscal years ending around that time.

February 2. February 2. February 2 is when a lot are like recently i noticed this but but i noticed at least even when we were working like from the very beginning like august september that's when it got really busy constantly so you know if they're not spending as much now there's going to be more that come eventually so everyone keep the hope alive you know like the money will come eventually also now it might seem counterintuitive but now is a great time to scale right like if there's a lot like if there's a lot of people whenever like

the demand for work drops in the industry then loads of freelancers decide oh shit i've got to go get a job now or i want to i want something more stable or whatever and then suddenly the labor market massively increases and like the cost of labor goes down and the quality of labor goes up so like if you know that you're going to be suddenly getting really busy in august hire somebody in june spend a month training them making so you're sure you're super happy with them and then when the tide comes back in you've built like a massive fucking sandcastle whereas like if you don't do that and then then you suddenly try and hire people for instance for us because we whenever the demand increases we have to hire more people in-house.

Like, that's a nightmare. We've then got to spend like a month training someone, and that takes extra effort to train them in the first place. So initially you have even less time. And if you've done that when there's a massive hike in required output, then you're really going to struggle. So, yeah, when the tide's out, like, build a load of stuff, build a load of shit, and then when the tide comes back in, then you'll be then you'll have the sickest sandcastle on the beach.

I don't know, I'm so proud of that metaphor. It's changed my whole life. I'm going to use that again. It's like the buy low, sell high approach. Literally. The buy low, sell high approach of hiring talent. Literally, it is the buy low, 100%, 100%. It's exactly the same thing.

Yeah, I can imagine during those busy times, when all that output is coming in, you won't have the time to sit down with a new employee and really train them. You have to try to probably put them through the ringer and just let them get the work done. But yeah, it's a very smart move that you mentioned that it's good when these smaller times where it's not as busy, that would be the time to hire. But then there's also that paradox. But you're not having as much cash flow at that point. Are you going to be able to afford to hire people at that point? You know, it's like a paradox that you just have to kind of, I guess, over time, you will figure out how to kind of swallow it a little bit, right?

Yeah, it's scary. It's really scary. Like I, most of our growth, a lot of our growth in the early days, I would attribute to just how aggressive I was with cash flow. Like we would operate with like a two to three week runway. And I'd be like, sometimes I'd be like, shit, if we don't sell something in the next week, like I'm not gonna be able to pay salaries at the end of the month. Like whenever we hit zero on the bank account,

I'd be like, cool, let's go spend some money. We've got an eight grand overdraft. That means we've got like, the fact we're on zero means we've got money to go spend and like invest in the company. And I was was just putting everything I was earning like very little money I was just putting everything that we earned like back into the business as aggressively as possible like during the worst periods of time like I'd be waking up at like one o'clock in the morning and I'd be looking at my cash flow spreadsheet like oh my god this is so stressful

like I'm so worried about how we're gonna get through the next few weeks but we always managed it like sometimes like I would have to sit down and be like cool we've not got any work for later this month I'm going to do two weeks of telesales and I would just sit on the phone for like two weeks all day every day ringing companies um to generate the business so yeah it it's it's really difficult to to have that mindset I think. And it causes challenges and stress elsewhere. And I think that just being the age I was and as naive as I was, it made me a lot more capable of dealing with the situation. I'm not sure I could do it now. But yeah, I think it's a really good thing to do if you can kind of like sail the sea,

if you can kind of weather the storm. That's what I'm looking for. If you can kind of weather the storm. That's the mindset you got to have if you want to do like aggressive growth like how you did because for me like just thinking about that had me stressed like i like to know i have a backup i even told kieran like look we want to grow we got to make sure we got the cash in the account there's that but what you're doing is like that people like you tend to grow massive companies because it's like that that's what you got to do right you got to take those they're taking the risk yeah we're we're trying to be a little bit on the safer side because of that it's a slow slow burn

slow growth um but actually i was curious because you mentioned that you you did a lot of aggressive like outbound lead generation you know like trying to call up companies and things like that. Like, do you find a lot of success with that in that approach? Or like, how do you go about finding new business? So at the time it was okay. It was just more so that, um, strategizing back in the day would be like, right. Does this thing cost money? One side would be like, yes. And it'd be like, cool. Well, we can't do it then. Cause we don't have any money. And the other side will be no. And it'd be like, cool can't do it then because we don't have any money and the other side will be no and it'd be like cool well we can do that so like one of the things I did is I spent like two days ringing up every single like marketing conference that was happening that year and I went around and I said look um if you don't sell all of your conference booths uh like I know like it always looks really shit when you sell out a conference and then you don't

sell all of your booths and there's just an empty booth. Like we're a super fun company. Like we're already young. We've got absolutely no money, but we've got some kind of fancy looking camera equipment that we can come put down in a booth. And all you have to do is just give me 24 hours notice. Like if you ring me up 24 hours before and say, I have an empty booth, you can have it. I'll make your free video for the conference.

So it's like win, win, win, win for you. And cool. We get free booth. And then lo and behold, like four days we moved to london one of these conferences rang me up and was like we've got an eight thousand pound booth for you you can have it free we'd love a video um and just someone to fill the space and i was like sick and we got our first big we only got one client from that conference of like three days of collecting like 200 business cards um but that client was really significant for us and they were like a footsie 100 company in the uk um you know and they had sort of proper budgets and all the rest of it and they were a big part of that kind of fit like kind of stage

of growth um so little things like that like running out to networking events like doing a lot of outbound sales calls all that sort of Like that worked, but it's so hours and hours intensive. And it's something that, in my opinion, only really works well if you're the founder or if you're one of the people running the business because people want to speak to you and are excited to speak to you. But if so-and-so sales exec calls you and they're like, hey, I just want to grab five minutes of your time and just whatever, like people just aren't nearly as interested, I think. So, you know, there are companies that build off the back of that,

off the back of that approach. And I'm, you know, I'm sure that there's, you could have great success with it. But for us, the more time went on, the only sort of scalable option was like paid advertising and SEO and, you know, more organic stuff. So that's what we sort of focus on. And that's what generates most of focus on. And that's what generates most of our new businesses, Facebook and Instagram advertising. Oh, Facebook too, huh? Yeah. I mean, I would think it was dead, but apparently not. Is it? Oh, so it must be big then in the UK still? Because basically here, I mean, I don't know, like... Well, what kind of businesses, what kind of leads are you getting through that?

What are the type of businesses? What kind of businesses, what kind of leads are you getting through? That's true. What are the type of businesses? We won Red Bull through like a Facebook, Instagram advert. We've won like BuzzFeed, like big clients for it. Yeah, big clients and small companies as well. Wow. So we've won huge budget stuff that's like 150k plus.

And, you know, but most of it is like 5 to 6k budget stuff. Yeah. And it's all inbound. And it's like you said, it's not as time intensive on the front end, more so on the back end that it's time intensive. But it kind of is a snowball effect. Like once you've put in some of the work, you can kind of sit back

and then it'll kind of continue to do the work essentially at that point. Whereas if you have to do things in person, it's kind of like, uh, it's kind of like, um, selling your time for hour and selling your time for money in a sense versus like creating the value with your time. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And it sets a different precedent because it's like, if you go knock on someone's door and you said, I want to sell you some video content, they are going to know that, that, you know, you've come to them. So immediately they want a great deal. They want to back you down video content. They are going to know that, you know, you've come to them. So immediately they want a great deal.

They want to back you down on price, everything else. But if a company rings us up and they just saw our Facebook, Instagram ad, a lot of the time we're not competing or pitching against other companies because they've come to us and we tell them, like, this is the price, the price is the price, you know, this is how we work. And they're way more excited to work with us because they've seen us from afar. They've chosen us, whatever, rather than us. Like all the work that's involved going to all these doors, knocking on the doors, getting in the house, like building that relationship, trying not to be fucked over too much in the process and battered down on price too much.

And yeah, it's so much. And then you have to chase them all the time in terms of as leads, whereas like leads will come to us, like they'll chase us and then they'll be keen to close really quickly sometimes within like two days. So yeah, it's different. Would you say that like comparing SEO to like paid advertising, which one would you say brings in more leads for you, the SEO or the paid advertising? Paid advertising, but I don't think that. Oh, okay. I think we are the best at paid advertising of any of our competitors in the country.

And the type of ads we run perform at a very high level. Whereas SEO, we do well. We do well. We're front page and everything else. We're not the number one on SEO. Our site isn't like soup, like, like all about the SEO. Um, so I think that it would be hard to say. I think that if we were the best in the UK at SEO and we were best in the UK at paid ads, I might be able to kind of compare them more, but it's just that we've performed well as a business at the, at the paid ad side. What about you guys? You mentioned SEO before.

You guys are on page one, right? For London? Yeah, yeah. That's how you found us, right? I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think you guys are one of the top ones. I mean, I'll double check,

but I think you guys were on page one. Yeah, I think we're third. Yeah, it depends on the key terms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you guys are ranking pretty well. Interesting. Yeah, for us, we haven't done paid uh advertising on on on meta platforms we've done it on on google adwords and then i also paid for us on

um those directory websites like clutch and upcity but i noticed that like we weren't really getting like leads coming in through there was still through google so i stopped it on on obsidian clutch but on on google adwords i don't know if we were getting a lot coming through there like i think we were just getting them more so organically because every time i'd ask them how they found us it was always for some like odd like key search search term like something completely unrelated yeah it was completely unrelated to what like they they should have been looking for and somehow we were always ranking number one i like i don't have the list in front of me but but most of our stuff was uh we did a big so once we relaunched the business in 2021 i'd say we went from like 90 referrals to like probably 90% SEO and then 10% referrals. Most of our work is like a lot of the work that we have now

is like from current clients and retained clients. And that's the one thing I like about this industry is that every new client or lead, every client that you sign has the potential to be something more long-term, you know? And like, obviously like sometimes you have to change through clients over time, you know, so that not only they can grow and then move on to something else,

but also you can grow, you know? It's funny because I think most of our clients are all new from like post-2021. Like, I don't think we have any clients currently. Some stragglers. Some smaller stragglers. A lot of it is actually like people that worked at different companies and then moved on to other organizations.

So it's kind of like new client, but same people. And that's where I think that 10% referral that Dario was talking about kind of comes in. But I don't think... I think if you're growing as a company, you shouldn't be having the same clients from like five to 10 years ago because you're not as a company you shouldn't be having the same clients from like five to ten years ago because you're not that same company anymore like and they're also not that same

client maybe after you get to a certain stage like you know like that graph where it's like it's like a curve yeah then you're like but probably after a certain point because you've by then you've already established your style and like who you are and and your branding so yeah oh i forgot to mention also we i also stopped our google adwords lately because i was like i didn't i didn't think we were getting too too many leads through that because everyone i spoke to that was a lead like it was never like oh we clicked on an ad it was always like more so organic so wait a minute you said like you said that like for about a month or two months we

haven't been getting any leads coming in does that because you quit the google ads no no no no it was it was it was after that it was after that yeah yeah i'm just joking no our thing now is um we're gonna we're focusing more on on on seo creating more content and i think i like your idea of the facebook and instagram ads. So that's giving me an idea that I will discuss with you later today. The problem is, is that like Google AdWords is the lowest, like there's no barrier to entry whatsoever. It's like video production, London, like, Oh, 60, 70 pounds a click fine like any like any video production company in the country that wants leads has thought to maybe put themselves to the top of google via

paying for it and it's like and i just think that the how competitive it is to be there and the amount you have to pay to get into that slot versus like how much you can actually showcase as a brand like it's a bit of text we make high quality videos like like what can you really put in like a log line that no one's ever put before when it comes to video production like the only benefit of it is that they they they put google google puts it in such a way where you almost confuse it with an organic link yeah at times yeah that's the weird thing they're very good at tricking you into going like oh i'm about to wait a minute that's a that's a paid ad you know

like since you now uh rupert have focused a lot on um like paid advertising for a lot of your content like how did you go about finding the right type of content to create for that type of those types of advertisements like uh how did what was like the the process for you yeah sure so um we were so years ago um we were running out of money again um we spent a lot of this investment money and um we were trying to work out how to generate business at scale um when i went for lunch with one of my investors and they said look have you tried facebook ads i was like no that seems mental um and he was like well honestly like give it a go i'll teach you how to do it and i was like okay sick i'll give it a go it's your money i suppose in a weird way um so i did that and we

just smashed together like a really crappy ad in like two hours me speaking directly to camera basically just bitching about like the production industry and how we're different and why we're different and why everything just doesn't isn't optimized for digital and social and everything else so I just had a mini rant on camera uh posted that to Facebook and ran that as an ad and very quickly we started to get leads and I was like oh my god this is so sick like overnight we're generating a load of leads so I was like well imagine if we like put real effort in and we like made like a really cool artsy ad so then we made this really artistic ad um and ran that on Facebook and that did terribly that cost like three times the amount and the the leads were awful so I was like okay right well

it's clear that like me speaking directly has hit a nerve and the way in which I'm presenting this problem and the way in which I'm speaking about um really works for us so I was like cool what if I do this but in a much more interesting setting and we really go out of our way so we rented a tank and I sit on top of a tank while it was like running over a car like we did all like I sat in like a drift car as it's like spinning around, like all this kind of stuff. And I basically just said the same thing. Um, and that flew like, and the better the advert got, the better the quality of the lead that would come to us. And the better the kind of projects we were getting in the higher budgets we were getting. So since then, just every single year, um, we've re done that advert or every other year we sort of redo that advert and the most

recent one like we rented two planes and i stand on top of one of the other one of the planes and then the videographer stands on the other plane and they fly together in unison and then the videographer is filming me like ranting on top of a plane he's the tom cruise of video production every year he tops it off with a new stunt i'm just taller i'm really scared of heights so it's like next time it's at the burj khalifa right 100 i'd love every second of that being stood on top of that really tall building um but yeah so that and that that's worked really well for us so that's kind of the main thing and like other video production companies have tried to do similar stuff here and then all the comments are like oh nice idea from perspective pictures you got here so like nice you know so we've really

like owned that space and like i said just the longer the ads have gone on the weirder they've got from like me being pulled behind a court like a horse while the horse like gallops in snow and i'm like skiing behind it and just like the weirdest shit like the better basically there's like a scene imitation is the greatest form of flattery very true one of my favorite scenes in the most recent ad is me like pregnant and i'm like sat in a hospital ward pregnant and i'm holding hands with someone that's the client and the ultrasound is a video exporting that's one of my favorite what was that schwarzenegger movie where he gets pregnant uh oh man i forget but yeah i know i know what you mean it's it's really great what you've done you've basically found your your idea and your and you're kind of like brand in a way and then

you're just basically re-executing it and finding new ideas for the same kind of core skeleton at the end of the day it's not like you're you're creating new idea like sorry that's not maybe not the right word it's like it's not like you're trying to create with completely new concepts for your ads all the time but you basically have uh the structured concept and you're just finding new ways to interpret it and then you know kind of improve on it and one-up it in a way every year so i i think that's that's like a key thing for a lot of companies to think about is like what signature style that's what key thing for a lot of companies to think about. Signature style. That's what he found.

Yeah. What makes your signature concept, your signature story? And then how do you just simply keep retelling it and keep executing on it? Yeah, it's just refining. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. The script is almost still, even five years later, almost unchanged from that initial thing. It's like, hey, we're digital first, we can do things quickly, our team are all in house, blah, blah,

blah, blah, like, but it's the it's the execution that's changed. Have you tried LinkedIn advertising? Yeah, we've tried LinkedIn. It just doesn't work quite as well as Facebook and Instagram. The traffic's just more expensive. But again, I think it's well worth giving it a go. LinkedIn is a much easier platform, I think, to run ads on because it's like, again, it's so simple. But I think that's part of the problem

is that the easier it is to execute well on that platform, the more other companies like us are already operating on there. And then that makes the bidding higher and it makes it more competitive and you less memorable when you market at people. But yeah, LinkedIn is- It's crazy expensive on there and then that makes the bidding higher and it makes it more competitive and you less memorable when you market at people um but yeah it's crazy expensive on there yeah the traffic is like five times the cost of what it costs us on facebook instagram and cost per lead is like

twice as much and the quality is probably about the same if not a little bit lower definitely something for everyone to think about i guess one last thing before we we uh we we end slate it is uh I just like you mentioned a lot about like you've been in a lot of high stress situations throughout the growth of your company a lot of sleepless nights I just want to know like how did you get through those moments like what tips do you have for that yeah for sure I think um if it's not difficult then you're not moving forward you're not like growing right like that's like if it was easy then everyone would do it and you know everyone would be millionaires and everyone would have my sales it's not that that's what drives me but

you know that it's it's super super competitive what we do right there's a everybody has a mate at a company that runs a video production company or does video so it is hard it's a hard industry like I think when I start another company I'm going to go into like a way less sexy industry that's like I'm going to go into like cleaning products or something and just like fucking kill it in that because like it's so competitive to want to run a video production company as I'm sure you guys know um and the fact that we all still exist is crazy. But, um, I think that the most difficult thing for me was like, when you see success stories, you don't see how many times that was close to being a disaster story as it were. Like there are so many times that we literally nearly collapsed as a business or, you know, we thought maybe it wasn't going to work or I thought maybe I was going to give up.

And I think the thing that I would say to people is like, just because you feel like that doesn't mean you should give up and doesn't mean it won't be a success. Right. It's like, and that was the thing for me is I was like, I remember sitting there like, do you think like Mark Zuckerberg in the early days had like cashflow problems? And like, actually, is my business is never going to be a success because it's struggling now um and that's absolutely not the case I'm I don't know if he had I'm sure he has he has all sorts of problems the old lizard man but like it doesn't say the fact that your business is you're struggling with it it just

means you might not have gotten it right yet it doesn't mean that it's never going to be right and I think just perseverance is like the number one thing, resilience and perseverance, just keeping on trying and trying and trying and refining for as long as you can. Um, you know, until you, it starts to kind of get a little bit easier and a little bit easier and, but it gets harder again, then it gets a bit easier again. And you know, then you earn more money and you're like, this is mental. And then it gets harder again. That's kind of my thoughts on it. What about you guys? It's funny that you mentioned that. Cause it's, it's like that saying where you never know just how close you are to just kind of getting it just right you know you can try 985 times and you may quit but maybe it was the 986th time that is like kind of

like the breakthrough for you so like you said you have to keep pushing no matter what and uh and then it'll come eventually right yeah absolutely like if you've if you're like refining and creating like something which is worthwhile and like you know eventually it will become good enough that people will pay you for that thing or that skill or that product you just have to keep working at it to make something better and listen to that kind of client feedback and what people think of it and how people are interpreting it and pick up on those little like nuggets of someone you know like you saying like earlier like oh you guys seem really fun and it's like oh cool maybe with like the fun ones you know maybe that's something really double down on whatever so it's like just like refining like iterating listening to that feedback like keep

pushing through it um you know and and worse comes to worse you could always go get a normal job at the end of it but you know it's like throw everything you can at trying it and then if it works out amazing and if it doesn't well you gave it everything so that's kind of my feeling on it but I mean you what's for you guys in terms of the journey what's been the most difficult period you've had is it was it sort of like COVID was that the hardest period of time to get going like when were you closest to like giving up never we never we never really gave up i don't think we've had i don't think we've had like a moment like that just yet i think we're still in the process of that rapid growth and again i can sit like we

consider our our true big like true true launch like back in 21 so if we're only in the third year in considering so i don't think we've been tested to that to like your extent just yet but i think we're getting close to the point where those moments will probably come up in our future what do you think you're i i think um i think we haven't gotten to the point we've been so stressed uh or uh stretched thin that we that you know like things might collapse because of how nimble we've kept it and I think that's kind of been in a way the one thing that's kind of kept us going so that if difficult times do come you know have come around we haven't felt it as a result whereas you Rupert have an office you have a team you have people you have more responsibilities than than uh than Dario and I have,

right? So that's probably why we haven't gotten to that kind of point. I mean, I would say that the pandemic definitely was a period of uncertainty because up until that point, as we mentioned, we only treated the business as if it was just two freelancers working together. We had no idea what was really going on. We had no idea where things were going to go from that point. And I think as we started to reevaluate things, as we started the podcast and started to talk to more people and understand what it really meant to be a business, it kind of shifted our mindset. And I think our next biggest thing is to make a big risky leap into something, but we're trying to be smart about it. And I think that's where we'll start to kind of feel those,

those, those points of pain. But I, I think we'll have to wait until that point before we could really feel something. If the more Darren, I keep it lean like we are now, I feel like we won't feel as many of those challenges and pains that other

companies might do. But I think the second we get an office or a space for ourselves the second we start hiring people that's when these potential uh challenges are going to start arising so we're just we're trying to prepare and i'm worried that we might be trying to over prepare a little bit too but yeah you know i agree it takes i think i think uh there's going to be a period where Daria and I realize that it's time to make some big leaps because like you said, Rupert, if it's not easy, if it's too easy, you're not going to be growing. If you don't take those risks at some point in your business,

you're not going to be able to move up. Actually, the funny thing is, remember Daria when we invested in 360 video back in the day day i would say that was a pretty risky move back then but it wasn't like to the scale of a business you know what i just remembered carol uh we did have actually like a moment of like big self-doubt like i think it must have been around 2017 or so because again we were like still we didn't know what the hell we were doing okay so we were just literally just two freelancers like running this business at the time and i i remember like kiel you were the one that was you were really stressed out at the time because like we'd meet like pretty often and i remember you at one point where like you're like we got to figure this out like we're

not getting anything like we had a very slow period it was a couple months like basically no work and you were getting very stressed out and me like i was just goofy saying like whatever it'll like sort itself out but like then i started to think about it too i'm like what if this thing doesn't doesn't work out should i go back to the bank work at the bank again yeah because we had just graduated from university and do you remember that night yeah yeah i remember i remember i remember because we had several nights where we had like some very serious discussions like what is gonna happen like because just things weren't weren't advancing well enough right like i can be honest and say maybe the business was making maybe 40 to 50k a year for a couple of years the only thing that was keeping us personally afloat

was the fact that we were freelancing doing other things and also not having as many of our own personal costs that's why you know to be honest rupert like laps as a business technically shouldn't really exist if you look at everything by the numbers and face value because it was never sustainable until maybe last year it actually 21 you know i would say 20 21 22 23 like that's what we started focusing on it no but even 2020 remember like september to november we basically made more than we did in 2019 because every business opened that's true i don't know how it was in the uk but over here they like they shut everything down it was brutal yeah i am so like we we had like no how was it over there actually how was the government over there they completely botch everything like they did here oh yeah i mean you know in fairness i think to any government it was no one really knew what

was going on and was just throwing shit around weren't they but but yeah i mean it was it was pretty chaotic here we were the longest closed province in the world do you remember really like everyone else yeah everyone else was open ontario still had up its ass like it was wild man that's nuts and like we they opened up briefly from like september to november in 2020 so we got a lot a lot of work in at that point and then they closed everything down again yeah they opened up in like like mid 2021 was when we were able to actually start working again and that's why i was saying dario that i feel like 2022 was actually where the sustainable aspect of the business where cash flow was actually starting to come in consistently leads

we're starting to be more consistent we did a lot of the legwork and groundwork in 2020 and 2021 to kind of get it to that point so now after like maybe like a year two years of sustainability this is where we can actually start making calculated risks uh within the business and figuring out how to push and grow but you know i think it's like we take it month by month and see where it goes what is it that you guys want to where do you want to get to what's the what do you guys want to achieve because i suppose that's then sets up the response right what's like do you want to build a company and sell it do you want to like build a company and maximize profits do you want to just like keep the team relatively small and make stuff that you guys are really passionate

about like what's the what is it you guys want to achieve i think our goal for i think our goal right now is keep the team pretty skeletal and also maximize profit. I think that'll probably change as we speak to more people, get different takes on it, and also we experience different stages of the business. We might decide to go in a different direction. But I think probably Carol and I should sit down one of these days and plan things out. But yeah, what would you say in that case then? Keeping things skeletal and trying to maximize profit?

Yeah, that's kind of like the main point right now, just to kind of like get us to that consistent, sustainable level is what we're trying to kind of get. And then we can evolve to the next one. Yeah. So I think that in terms of, um, in terms of promise is profit is the, in this, in these earlier stages is the enemy of growth. Like the more, if, if somebody gives, gives you a thousand pounds, right. What could you guys do with that? Could it be spending money on marketing? Could it be spending money on equipment? Could it be investing in new team members that you train? Could it be getting office space? Like there's still so much stuff that's uncharted in terms of what you can invest in. And by like, if you really believe that you're going to build like a

scale like a growing business and you have a growing business like every time you take a thousand pounds out of that business you're taking two thousand pounds away from yourself next year and four thousand pounds a year after and eight thousand pounds a year after that so it's like if you want to build like a skeletal team and just like maximize profit, I think that's great. There's other production companies that I have like relationships with in London who will be like a team of four producers, five producers.

They'll do like X number of projects and they'll make like a big profit each year. And they're just sort of happy with working on projects that they have. And their overheads are pretty low right so they've got the flexibility like if they want to go off and like traveling for three months or whatever they can just kind of close their doors and go do that and then come back if they really want to um whereas if you want to build something higher margin in the longer term something that might be saleable something that's gonna run if you guys don't turn up to work, if I didn't come into work all next week, like stuff would still happen.

We would still scale, like there'll still be new business coming in. There'll be a team behind that, like, you know, and if you want to, if you want to get to that stage where something sort of runs itself and you have something that might be saleable as a business and something that, you know, going to that sort of stage then investing reinvesting money so maximizing profit i might be misappropriating what you mean by that but like taking profit and then reinvesting it constantly in the business is is going to be the the way to do that but it just depends on on what you guys want but now it's like a good time i think anyway to take risks because there's a lot of like i said there's a lot of people in the market there's a lot of employment like and if it all goes like tits up and you guys fuck it you can

always just go back to where you are now right you can strip it right back again there's you know it'd be very stressful but there's nothing stopping you doing that and refining it down to these clients you have but um but yeah i'm big believer in investing i look at you and i go man that guy's already like in a really good spot. Like what, what are your like next steps? Like where do you want to go from there from where you're at right now? So we're looking at like, um, there's a few things. One, we're looking at like diversifying a little bit into like other products and other

sort of things in the space that, that, you know, we'll, we'll be announcing at some stage. Um, but I think there are some big opportunities that aren't just in production but also I don't want to become like an agency that does like paid social and stuff like that I very much want to stay in like production and like own the space and do this really well um two is just like bringing on bigger and better more exciting clients and like continuing to do that like you know we're not a bolts factory where we just make bolts and then whoever buys them it doesn't matter like we become our clients that's an unavoidable reality of this industry like you know the clients we win is what like you know employees are going to spend like all day every day working on here right so winning and holding on to the best the most exciting clients the

clients have the budget and the drive to do exciting stuff you know and continuing to grow on that that's really really important and then for me like I want to spend the next sort of two year three years like continuing to scale the business um and then look at some stage at selling it and that's something I'm very open with you know in terms of the team the team will have like um like equity in the business or promised equity so they're part of like a profit share scheme so they would all benefit from that as well um yeah and I'd like to to look at an exit further on down the line where we might sell to like an ad agency or you know whoever um and then i'll go do something else for a bit i don't know go on holiday for a bit like something separate from video or or what's still in the video field

maybe yeah i don't really know to be. There's a few areas that interest me. Like I'm really interested generally in like entrepreneurship and like starting another business. And I've got like a property business on the side that I do. So I'm interested in sort of scaling that and the commercials involved in that.

But also I like love like the craft, like I love filmmaking. I love making documentaries and I would quite like to, you know, look at just doing that full-time and just becoming like a director and focusing on that so um it really it really kind of depends I'm pretty open I'm very much like about the path of least resistance so I know that there's like a thousand things I could probably really enjoy doing but it just depends on how

things ravel and come together and then I'll choose the path of least resistance what for what I think I can kind of get furthest in or will enjoy the most based on what opportunities invented like offered to me or whatever so yeah I'm kind of down for anything really I'll come work at your guy's company in Canada that'd be nice really okay yeah maybe he'll maybe he'll be one of our next hires yeah there you go that'd be nice I'll have a great time I could be your um CFO or something no I'd be I'd be a terrible CFO I could be your like commercial i'll be a head of sales i'll be us i'll be good sales hey listen if you come on in sales i feel like we'll probably sell the company in like a year or two after that uh okay last question uh how did you come up with the name

or what does the name mean or whatnot oh it's so awful the name um so i made a video when i was like so so still running these, this like, I had this business renting out Nerf guns for kids parties, my mom. One of the things we did to promote that, as I said earlier, was like, make YouTube videos. And some of those YouTube videos went viral. And I made a video called like Nerf War the movie, which was, you know, huge. you know huge um and uh so we made that um and I was sat on the sofa and I was like oh like um I want to like make it look like a professional production and have like a movie intro like you know Fox Entertainment or whatever um and I thought like oh like I like first of all perspective like I love perspective like I was like obsessed with like whoa everybody sees the world differently we all have different perspectives like the world isn't black perspective, like I love perspective. Like I was like obsessed with like, whoa, everybody sees the world differently. We all have different perspectives. Like the world isn't black and white, like it's gray. Like we all live different realities, whatever, you know, classic, like 16 year old existential crisis kind of vibes. And I thought, cool, right. Perspective is a great point. And then I also just really liked Martin Scorsese, Scorsese, however you say it with an accent. Um, and they, I saw him

speaking about like, Oh, my next picture. I was like, Oh, that's so cool. Why don't I see legend? So I just thought I'd put the two together, like perspective pictures, but fucking disaster of a name. Like it's so pointless. It makes everybody do stills. I like it. It's not bad. Like I actually almost hate the name. I'd quite like to drop pictures and maybe just be perspective, like that cool moment in the... No, it's good. I like it. Yeah. Well, thank you. I'm glad you like it. I've come around to it, but it is definitely a bit misleading

given that we're not a photography company. Maybe because I watch a lot of movies, like Pictures for me works also as a production company. Yeah. Well, there you go. All photography businesses don't use the word pictures in it so i think you have that going for you they always say so and so photography this and this photography no one says so and so pictures right it almost sounds amateur for a photographer though yeah which is funny for video for video your boutique if your name is with the word pictures in it if it's photography

yeah you're just you're just a schmoe yeahmo all right that what about your guy's name how did you come up with yours oh yeah we have a funny story on that too so we came up with it because at the time i was working on this very dumb short film and the name for that was laps because i thought it looked cool and uh we needed to start up the company i was like oh you know it sounds cool and then we could just add productions at the end because media doesn't work and all the other film lapse films doesn't work either it just sounds odd but last productions worked and then for years we were like we were like we got to figure out a meaning to this because everyone's going to ask us and then we we won't have a good answer and almost almost no one asked us. And then just recently we came up with like,

we turned it into like an acronym. So it stands for Lasting Amazing Pictures, Sounds and Experiences. So if a client really asks us what it is, like that's the story we give them, you know? Yeah. And even like some of the marketing material that we like created for it and i'm like oh my

god that actually looks so legit like do you want to know how i came up with that one it was it was i distinctly remember it was uh uh 2021 like january 1st like i got home from kiro's party drunk i'm about i'm lying in bed i'm about to pass out and then it just came to me i'm like what could it stand for i'm like oh what if it's an acronym i'm like what could i put thoughts lasting lasting amazing picture sounds and experiences i was like oh that's really good i was like i'll tell kyrill tomorrow morning and i'm like will i remember this tomorrow morning you're gonna forget right probably not i got the memory i was like i haven't got a memory of a goldfish this is a bad idea i should write it down and thank god i did did you write it down on an app or did you write it down on a piece of paper

i did on google keep but thank god for phones otherwise we would have still been back at square one with that name you should screenshot that keep and put that on the uh on the wall in the office that's a nice that's a nice i should oh that's that's that's not a bad i like that i like that's not a bad idea i like that. I like that. It's not a bad idea. And like what you said that you do with your office, uh, with your space

where you basically like put a lot of like pictures, memories and milestones and things like that on the walls. And like, and like, I've,

I've thought about like what our ideal space would be eventually. And I've thought about doing things like that too. It's like, you got to make the space your own and that's kind

of like the fun of having your own studio, your own space. So yeah, that, that'll, that screenshot will definitely be framed and put up there as well there you go it works great because it's like as well like a client will come in you'll like meet and greet them chat to them and you'll be like cool do you want a cup of tea or whatever you guys would say in canada maybe tea as well um and then like then they'll be like yeah cool and then like you have to leave them, right? You have to like, there's a process where you have to leave them for a bit.

So you then, I then disappear and make them tea or whatever. And then they're stood somewhere. But if they're stood next to a wall that's like covered in like little memories and like moments, by the time you come back, without a doubt, they'll be like, hey, what's this thing you did over here? Like, what was that about? And then you've got like a talking point and it kind of helps break the ice further and they get to know you a little bit more and whatever so it's like there's a nice like moment there when you have like a wall of memories but ours has got

like newspaper clippings from a long way across america like old posters old currency like like passes when we got into buildings like there's a note on the wall where i was drunk in thailand and i like similar to you was like, Oh, I want to write down my goals for next year for the business. And I wrote all the goals. Like I want us to do a hundred thousand pounds in revenue. That'll be crazy. And I wrote it all down on like this like little hotel notepad.

Um, and I've got that stuck on the wall. Um, and that's like, so it's like nose of nice little like moments and stuff that you can kind of look back on like, oh, that was nice. And you can talk to someone. Display your stories, essentially. Display and frame your stories. You know, it's always going to be a talking point because it also shows your growth. And I feel like clients like to resonate with companies that have a story too.

Yeah, absolutely. Building like culture and building narrative. Like it's something that's hard to do when you're only like a few years old but I think it's really important to to try and do that because it creates it like you're trying to create almost like heritage right around like you as a brand which when you're you know you've existed for six months might be McDonald's wrappers from like a big night out but you know that was a good night nonetheless so enjoy it well Rupert thanks for joining us uh on the show man like i we really appreciate you sharing your perspective on uh on the industry and uh see it works it works for you

guys no thank you very much for having me it was uh it was a good time hopefully you'll be able to cut something together from all my ramblings oh they're good ramblings don't worry all right thank you rupert thanks rupert thanks so much guys i'll chat soon i'll hit you up when i'm in canada and hit me up if you come to london 100 i'll definitely be there eventually like i have family that lives in london so i'll definitely hit you up there oh perfect well i'll give you an office door and we'll go out some we'll go out and get pissed get drinks i don't you guys don't say pissed do you that's not that's not canadian we don't but i understand that we use. We use it in a different context. Getting pissed is just being angry.