Creatives Grab Coffee - Growing Your Video Production Business | Creatives Grab Coffee | Episode 35

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

Today we welcome Spencer Stanley from Vanguard Creative, a video production and photography company based out of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, a podcast on the business of video production, hosted by Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov from Lapse Productions. Our goal is to make the video production industry smaller by creating a sense of community. Whether you are a creative, an entrepreneur, or a professional, there is knowledge for you to learn. Join us as we have industry professionals from around the world share their insights on the industry and business. Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee. Welcome to Video Production. Key Takeaways:-Be Transparent in your business and who you work with. -Make sure you can afford hiring full time employees. Know when to stick with freelancers. -Hire people with purpose and don’t expand too quickly. -B2B VS B2C -When you grow your business, you outgrow your clients.

So this is your first ever podcast episode, eh? First ever podcast episode. What's it feel like? Feels good. Feels good so far. We just started, so we'll see how it feels at the end, I guess. I feel like I'm just as nervous as you are right now, even though this is our 35th one. It's the first one of the new year, though. So that's, it's new year, new podcast, I guess, kind of. Is this the first one of the new season? First one. First one. You're

guest number one. So for 35, we got Vanguard Creative. It's exciting. We have Spencer Stanley from Winnipeg, Manitoba. And all right, let's start the show. Let's go. Let's start, I guess, with a lot of people have been saying that we spend too much time on backgrounds, but I still think it's kind of important. So let's do like a quick, you know, under five minute intro on who you are. Yeah, I think it's good to get to know the person, obviously. My name is Spencer Stanley. I run Vanguard Creative, which is a Winnipeg based video production company. We specialize primarily in mostly corporate work, but a little bit of commercial work and a little bit of photography kind of here and there. I've been running that full time for I always forget because I kind of forget what year we're

in now with COVID, but I think it's been three full time years. It was pretty much since the start of the pandemic. Myself, I've been doing video for about five years. The first two, three years were very unprofessional kind of, you know, gigs here and there, making YouTube videos, fun stuff, learning how to use a camera there, making YouTube videos, fun stuff, learning how to use a camera. And then when I was in university, I graduated during the pandemic. I was there for business, a major in marketing and entrepreneurship. And I thought I was going to go into marketing, kind of have a bit of a video background because that's what I was interested in. And, you know, I had no idea what to do at the time with a pandemic starting. So I

just went full time into this and I've been doing that ever since. I haven't looked back and it's been really exciting and fun. So you've been doing video for five years, but you started the business three years ago? Five, six years. Started the business. The business was registered, I think, three years ago. I think I registered it in January of 2020, I think. I would say it's a great time to start a business. Yeah. Especially one where you have to interact with people. I then, you know, I was still in school. So it was kind of, I had a few projects here and there, but it was, I wasn't doing it full time. And then in May, I went full time into it. And I kind of told myself, you know, if I can, if I can do my first year, if in my first

year, I can have the same salary that I would have as an entry level marketing job or something like that. If I could kind of do a similar type of thing, this makes sense. And I'm going to go and try and do that. So I did that. I succeeded that. And it's kind of been, been not exponential, but growing since obviously. And during the pandemic to boot, that's pretty good. Yeah. I mean, we had good growth. We had good growth during the pandemic as well. I think a lot of people had positive growth and then some people were in a lot of trouble. You did, right? Like I tried to branch into corporate work and I got some clients that I wouldn't have even had if there wasn't a pandemic. So I shot a lot of like

annual general meetings, pre-recorded videos for that. And that gave me when I was starting a lot of, you know, just capital to be able to actually run the business. So the pandemic did help me in, in kind of a weird way. And also I think it helped me go full-time and pursue something that I really wanted to do without any, it gave me an excuse to do it really. Right. I was, I was still living at home. So it was a nice little, it was a nice little segue to kind of do this and let me do it. And I don't know if I would have done it otherwise. So I'm kind of grateful for the pandemic and what it did in a weird way. That makes sense. No, that makes a lot of sense because what it did was it forced a lot of people to really reflect and look at their businesses to

see what was working and what wasn't working. Because when you're in the mode of working in your business, you sometimes forget to work on your business. And I think the pandemic really forced everyone to actually look at their businesses as a whole and see what was working and what wasn't. Yeah, yeah. And it's funny that you mentioned that because I find I do that myself a lot of the time when it's really busy, I'm just working, you know, how did you phrase it, in the business. And then when it slows down, which typically for me, it gets kind of cyclical around this time of year, and it slows down just a little bit.

And then I start working on the business, and I'm like, I've got to do this more during the year and be a little bit more attentive to, you know, marketing and things like that. How big is your business? Is it just you running it, or do you have employees? and things like that. How big is your business? Is it just you running it or do you have employees? It's just myself. So I would consider myself kind of a solopreneur. I do hire out depending on the production, obviously. So I have a couple of different contractors that I'll work with here in the city. And I think we spoke about earlier,

I have a freelance editor that I've been using and looking to hire somebody in the year that's kind of editing and shooting so that I could been using and looking to hire somebody in the year that's kind of editing and shooting so that I could have somebody to help with. We talked about earlier, I'm kind of going into YouTube a little bit more. So help editing and filming there and then BTS and stuff like that, depending on, you know, the production size. Yeah, we're kind of in the same boat right now. Like we have a couple of freelancers that we use pretty consistently but we're not at the stage where we can hire them on actually when carol and i were going over the number numbers on what it would cost to like have like an employee it's kind of shocking

sometimes i say sometimes you see some companies like they say oh we have like 20 employees i'm like when we know that they don't actually have that many, they're just trying to boost their numbers up. And we go like, dude, if you have 20 employees, that's at least like two mil in like a year. Just an employee cost. Sorry to interrupt. I try and be transparent with that too, because I find it really, I find it kind of shady when people put a thousand employees on their website, when you know that it's an agency with maybe two, three people working in the business full time. It's not really my favorite business practice. So if you look on our website, it's just myself, even though there's different

contractors that would almost be on every single shoot that I would bring them to, but they're not full-time employees. They have their own businesses or they're doing other things. So I find it a little disingenuous, not that it's a terrible thing to do, but I find it a little somewhat disingenuous, I guess. It depends on how much they work for the business, I guess. I sometimes use that as like a benefit when I'm doing like our sales calls or whatever. Because I say like, hey, you know, we use freelancers that we know that we've shot with a lot that we've done a lot of projects with. And like the secret benefit of that is that when you hire freelancers, you're kind of getting really good people because people that are pretty good tend to just freelance because

you make more money that way, right? You make more money that way and you kind of get to pick and choose what you want to do as well. Exactly. The other big benefit is that you're hiring for that job. So in that job itself, you're getting a very tailored creative team to help execute it. Whereas there are a lot of companies where they've hired too many people and then they start taking on jobs in the volume sense and trying to just push the content out or sorry, push those employees onto the projects when they're not right for the job. And sometimes the end product suffers as well. Yeah. I find a lot of companies that do maybe

hire on or have a lot of employees like that tend to maybe disvalue their work a little bit and kind of undercut and try and do economy of scale volume because they have people that need to work, right? If I hired a DP, I wouldn't have work for him all the time, right? It wouldn't make sense to run this business in that capacity. An editor, yes, it would make sense if I had enough work where that editor was going constantly, right? And focusing on other things, maybe focusing on the company and working on the business.

But I think in our line of work too, it's just like, what would you do with 20 employees all the time unless you had a different production every day, right? There's a few companies that haven't figured out, like that we've had as guests on. And those ones always look at it and go, man, that's intense. I don't know how they do it. It's because we don't know. We just don't know.

Sometimes when a certain job comes in, some of our guests, they got their start when they've taken on really big contracts. And because of that, they had to scale up really quickly to help meet the demands of those contracts. And that's how they got their foundation. Whereas a lot of the rest of us, or sorry, the rest of us do it slowly, slow growth, kind of like what you're doing, how we're doing it and slowly trying to introduce more people within the business as well. What are some of the needs? What are some of the challenges? How do we fix that? Do we need to hire someone or can we still make it work with freelancers? Yeah. And I think that's a really good point. Like last year, for example, this year, I haven't had as many large projects that I would like to

have had that would have been able to help me grow and maybe hire somebody full-time. Like last year had two projects that I could remember that were a fairly good size. And I was like, okay, if we could do this every year, it's going to be easy to hire an editor. Maybe I could hire another AC or, you know, maybe somebody that can be a shooter role, like a DP, you have different roles like that. But this year just haven't seen that. I mean, I sent a couple of proposals on projects that would be of that size, but didn't get any of them, sadly. But it's just kind of how it rolls in the industry, I guess, as well, right? Yeah, that's the thing I hate is that there's just no consistency year to year. You just don't know. Like, even though sometimes, like for us, it's been pretty consistent the last couple of years, but I don't know, 2023 could be a bad year.

You never really know at the end of the day. Yeah. Well, that's why you have to be careful about hiring based on the jobs because you may get one massive, like we had a job last year where sure, we could have hired someone based on those numbers for the year, you know, to help us execute it. But then this year, would there be a project of that equivalent where we can justify it? So you have to make sure that there is at least somewhat of a consistency in the inbound work that can justify it. One job can be dangerous because something like the pandemic can hit and then that one job is gone.

Well, then you got to lay people off. kind of agency world and video world, there's a lot of turnover just because companies can't always maintain the employees that they've taken on for certain roles or campaigns or retainers. And then, you know, that goes because there's a pandemic and people are out of work, right? Let's talk about your section of the world and Winnipeg. It's a pretty small market, right? Like, I mean, even when I was reaching out, there there's like there's actually a lot of guys uh from winnipeg that are going to be coming on this month but like overall i would like there's like maybe 10 to 15 companies that are that i that i wanted to bring on to the show there but it's a relatively small market right so you you kind of broke into it recently like how what was that like breaking into like a it it's like a, you know,

a fish in a small pond type situation. It's definitely an interesting market. And I don't totally understand what the market would be like a Toronto. I know there'd be a lot of, you know, company saturation, but there's also a lot more work because you, your economy is a lot bigger, right? You have a lot more business in Toronto and a lot more congregation of big business in Canada, which is, you know, exciting to be in that market. Winnipeg's small. It's weird how I broke into it. Honestly, I think it was just through networking and personal connections, kind of creating a body of work and saying, hey, this is what I do, reaching out to people and then getting jobs with certain companies that had maybe a reputable brand and then saying to other companies, hey, I've worked with this credit union, this large credit union, this whatever.

And I feel like that gives me a little bit of credibility to the work that I did. And then I've grown in there. I wish I could niche down a little bit more, but I don't think the market's big enough to sustain niching down more. I'd love to just do commercial work. Right. But there's only so many commercials that are going to be produced here in Manitoba and there's already a certain amount of competition for that work. Right. So it's, it's a really weird market. And honestly, to answer your question, I don't think I've figured it out yet.

I know Manitoba in general, there's a lot of agribusiness. So people that work in that space in terms of marketing, maybe less video production, but marketing do really well. Like we have, there's a really big marketing agency that is just pretty much agribusiness because that's kind of a big part of our economy. But I haven't completely, sorry. I was just going to say, that's probably the main customer profile because the one thing that we're always curious about is what are the biggest customers or the most, what is it?

No, not the biggest customers, but the most type of customer that is within that market. You know what I mean? The agribusiness, I think. Exactly. Yeah. There's a couple other different businesses in terms of manufacturing and stuff, but in the video world, there's a lot of government work as well.

So tourism work, obviously the federal government gives a lot of money to tourism work. So that gets pushed out. I would say that's a really big part of the video production market. And then also, different government work like our MPI stuff like that. They do a lot of work as well. So it's kind of a mixed bag, I find. I'm sure somebody else might have a better,

with a little bit more experience in the market, might have a better definition of exactly kind of what it is, but I'm just kind of still figuring that out. But that's pretty much the path that it would be for someone like you in your position where you're trying to break into the industry, because that's how it was for us trying to do whatever jobs you could along the way uh start to kind of figure out what types of work you connect with or the types of clients you're starting to just so happen to get connected with and that's the type of work you're going to end up doing you're almost at the mercy of what opportunities uh come by your way right it's not like you can just say,

I'm going to be a commercial director tomorrow. Then all of a sudden, that's the only work you're going to do. You have to build up to it over time, right? It'd be nice, but it's not feasible. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. You got a lot of agribusiness over there. here we have a lot of like for us it's a lot of uh financial health care tech we got a lot of that those those are the three main industries yeah we we like at least for us that's what we mainly focus on do you guys primarily work in the toronto area or do you kind of branch out to ontario in general uh no no so we do gta which is like toronto plus like mississauga marca richmond hill surrounding yeah surrounding areas around toronto uh a lot of our work is in downtown toronto but

you know it's like there's a lot of companies tend to have offices in mississauga or whatnot so we tend to drive out there and whatnot yeah Yeah, no, that makes sense. Mississauga is a pretty big area as well. How's the freelancer scene over there? You know, it's, it's, it's pretty good. It kind of depends. I have, you know, if I find somebody that I like to work with, I just tend to work with them a lot of the time. So I don't branch out too much unless I'm looking for a specific role. But there are quite a bit of freelancers and kind of solo videographers in the market as well. Not as many as I was aware with kind of before I started doing more, you know, higher end production work, but it's there. Yeah, for us here, it's kind of, for us, it's the same. There's, I mean, there's a ton here in Toronto, right?

Yeah. No, Toronto is always finding good for us, it's the same. There's, I mean, there's a ton here in Toronto, right? Yeah. The tricky part is always finding good ones. That's always the tricky part. Finding good ones and people that you want to work with, people that are kind of fun to hang out with and that you like, you know, having a conversation with and then do good work at the same time. Yeah. Kiril, I rudely interrupted you. So what were you about to ask? did you so who were you about to ask i was actually uh one one of the conversations i wanted to kind of get to is uh you mentioned you're also starting a youtube channel which in a way it's also its own business so in a way as it's hard enough to run a business by yourself but to also do a youtube channel that's a business in and of itself and the way dario and i look at

for example uh lapsections and also Creatives Grab Coffee, that's two businesses we're essentially running. So how has that been? How long have you been doing it and what have you learned so far? So the main reason that I got into video in the first place is because I've always been really interested in YouTube. I don't watch much Netflix. I don't watch much Prime, whatever. You're not missing much. I know. There's certain shows that I love like Yellowstone or Jack Ryan or recently the terminalist stuff like that. But I mostly just watch YouTube videos. And when I have a new, I find that I have hobbies all the time. So when

I get a new hobby, I just get deep into a YouTube niche and just watch a bunch of that. So I've been watching YouTube for a long time. And originally the reason, the reason that I bought my first camera was to start making YouTube videos. So I traveled and stuff like that. And I did it, but I find that at the end of the day, like what I'd really like to do is just focus more on YouTube, but it has been hard, you know, running a full-time production business. And then also trying to do this side hustle that doesn't really make a ton of money. It makes a little bit of money, but it's not enough to be sustainable. And it's been a struggle to kind of allocate time and do that really properly. I'd like to release a video every week, but it rarely happens if I'm really busy with production work. So I find that when I'm busy with work, I kind of put it to the

side. And then when work slows down a little bit, I focus on that more. And it's not a great process. I would like to, like I said, hire somebody that could help edit and film things so that it's not just myself at the helm of everything, right? Like with the business, I'm doing the marketing, the accounting, the business work, then a lot of the producing, the DPAing, production work, some of the editing. So it's hard to kind of find a balance. One thing that can help you with that is, I mean, you said you mostly are doing kind of like camera tutorial videos, how-to videos and things like that. Have you thought to yourself, who is your target market with that? Yeah, I've had a tough time kind of defining on what I want

to do because I also find I lose interest in certain hobbies and then I pick them back up and lose interest. So it's hard to stay motivated on making videos about cameras when I'm, you know, doing video production all day. Like it's like the last thing I want to do after getting home from work is touch another camera and talk about one. Right. So I, I feel like my target market is pretty much people like me who are into video use Sony cameras possibly, um, and are in a similar kind of stage

in their video production journey, uh, maybe a little bit lower kind of starting out as well. Yeah. The reason I ask is because like, when you start to define those things, it helps you get a little bit more motivated with that. Like what helped us a lot with creatives grab coffee was really figuring out what the purpose of the show was and just kind of sticking to that. And essentially because of that, it allowed us to kind of get into, um, the habit of creating more, more and more consistent content. So once I think you've, cause you said you still haven't a hundred percent figured out what you want to do with it. And that's why it's hard to do things consistently. Right. And, um, and I do need to kind of make those, uh, you know, target market or some people call them avatars, the people that

you think are watching your content. Um, it would be a lot easier, but I've just, I have so many different interests that it was always hard for me to define a single niche or a target market and then make videos specifically to that. Like I have so many other interests and hobbies outside of cameras that I think it would have almost been smart to start a YouTube channel in a different genre and try and stand out with my camera work in that genre. Cause in, in this, you know, this area, there's so many really talented people that are definitely better than me or more experienced in the kind of video scene as well. Right. Like Peter McKinnon, you have people like that. I want to go back to the video production business. Since we're early into the new year, I just want to know what were some of your challenges? What were some of the challenges that you faced in 2022?

That's a good question. I think the biggest biggest challenge and it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier is just, uh, consistency in the business. It goes from what I would say a little too slow for my liking to way too much for my liking where I can't handle everything on my own. Um, so then I kind of hire freelance for that, or I would like to hire full-time, but then it slows down again. So keeping consistency within the business and keeping consistent cashflow would be, um, something that I think every person in this industry struggles with a lot, not everybody, but some people have kind of cracked the code. Um, I, I would say that's one of the biggest hurdles.

And I know this brings me into another topic I was just looking over there that I wanted to bring up, and it was kind of the retainer model and seeing if you guys have looked at that at all. I mean, it's come up on previous episodes. I know some people have cracked the code for it. Personally for us, I think we've sat down a ton of times to try to figure out what we could do in terms of retainer. But it just, I don't know, it whole plan is on a on a much higher up level

than you know we're normally exposed to to be able to say hey like let's try to do this and that and i don't think it's just i don't i don't think we ever get that involved with what our clients business is to be able to to provide something like that the retainer model works a little bit more with the marketing and advertising agency model. Because they... Typically, as video production... As video creators, we come in once the strategy is usually already kind of figured out. And a lot of...

Some of our guests are basically agency model type companies. And they're working with the clients consistently where they do website production photo production uh graphic design video that doesn't mean they're running the running camp they're running campaigns so they kind of go like okay we're going to run this type of campaign for you and it's going to include all these other assets and we're like most of the time they're also pushing that stuff in there right but for us like we're very we're highly specialized we're a highly specialized business like yeah like a single video can cost anywhere from five to ten thousand yeah of course involve a ton of work like a month's worth of work like in terms of retainer it's

there's too much too many things that that need to happen for it to be it's tough for the type of video production that we're doing i think yeah yeah if we did like something that was more simpler like if we go like you know we're in the business of creating like you know we do about short form video or something like that five yeah five to fifteen tiktok videos for each client every month then you could work out some type of retainer model where that makes sense right yeah i actually saw on your website um that you are kind of adopted also the package content model. And that is, I was actually curious what made you kind of like go into that direction? Because it sounds like you also do video, photo, specialized custom packages, and then you're having these more specific packages. Like what were your thought processes behind that?

So I'd say my main revenue model is the exact same as you guys specialize video content, um, one-off projects, but I, I did have this problem. So I, I decided to maybe try and go into this, this realm of short form, uh, content creation in this on a more retainer level for the Winnipeg market and see if that worked. Um, I've done different retainer work before in like the beverage industry. And I found that really interesting. Um, but I haven't, I haven't pushed it too much. So I just, I kind of created that one day and I haven't, uh, I haven't gone too deep into that yet as something that I want to push my, the, most of the revenue comes from one-off video projects. Same as you guys. We started offering photography services late last year. And we try to pitch it with every video project now. But a lot of our clients have been very happy that we now offer that. Really?

Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, the people we use are really good. And they know that we provide good video content. So they kind of trusted us. They trusted you with kind of trusted us yeah and we trusted our photography uh team yeah and they they delivered on that and so it's been working fine but a lot of them have been very happy about that and it hasn't been kind of like it hasn't been in conjunction with the video project itself it's mostly been like oh okay like separate from that project we have this other event coming up okay we don't really need video for it but we do need that project, we have this other event coming up. We don't really

need video for it, but we do need photography or we have headshots that we need to do. Obviously, there's no video component to that. So we just need photography for that. But it's been an extra service that, you know, keeps the client happy, keeps us happy, keeps the other photography studio with some more consistent business. Well, the other big thing is that we're still being that problem solver in their eyes, because even though we're not physically the ones doing the video work, we have vetted and found talent that can help on the photo side and solving a big problem for them, which is like, hey, we need someone on this day in two weeks. Is there potentially someone you know? It's like, yes, we have about five, six different photographers that we can reach out to

and we can have one of them come in and just handle that. And then we're still the face with our client so that they don't have to talk to any new people. They don't have to try to build new relationships. It's a much easier process for them. And this is why a lot of bigger agencies typically get a lot of bigger clients because they are those problem solvers for those larger companies because they're still just want to go to one person. Yeah, they don't want to, they don't want to have to deal with a bunch of different freelancers, a bunch of different payment structures, et cetera. They just want to deal with one person and they want to make everything easier. I've also offered photography pretty much since the start of the company. I would say the

main, our main business like you is video production. I do photography myself, but then most of the time I'll hire that out as well. Uh, depending on kind of the production, there are some jobs. Like we recently did a campaign with Porsche Canada and the Porsche center Winnipeg here where they wanted video and photo on the same day because they only had the client for one day that we were, we were focusing on. So I would hire a photographer specifically for that to work with us um on the shoot somebody that i work with quite often and he's i work with him a lot as well so he's kind of you know a bit of a director and dp at the same time if you need help yeah that's a common that's a common format as well where sometimes clients want to try to kill two birds with one stone especially when they have people coming in, which are only available for that day. And yep, we all know it's not the most ideal environment to try to do photo

and video side by side, but it is what it is. You have to make it work. And when it comes to, or like when you were asking about the retainer model, I feel the only, it really depends on the type of opportunity and the type of business that it's in. I feel more so in the product world, that might be a little bit more viable from a video production standpoint, because those clients are constantly needing to pump out content to sell high volume products. Yeah. High volume and products. Whereas if you're working with B2B companies, the retainer model is not going to work for those companies because they have very specific messages and content that they need to produce every now and then.

But it's not like they need something on a weekly basis. No, 100%. And I was going to ask you too, I keep having these things, but I don't want to interrupt. So I'm holding them and I forget them. Would your main clients be a business reaching out to you with a marketing department themselves? Or do you guys work with a lot of marketing agencies that have a pool of clients? No, we, our main business is direct to client. Yeah. Okay. We don't, we have maybe I would say two agencies, two to three agencies that yeah, we work with. Not ad agencies, just marketing agencies. Do you find with those businesses, do they generally come back often or are they kind of one-offs? Maybe they need a video once a year and when they need that video, they're going to reach back out to you because you've

built a relationship. We've been going through a lot of growth lately. So in a way, it's like we're shedding skin and some of those might be older clients that we've kind of outgrown them in terms of budget or just whatever they need. Like we've just kind of outgrown that. So it's still kind of early to say. I would say that since the start of the pandemic, we've done like a 90 plus percent client turnover. Our pre-pandemic clients, would say there's like like a handful like under five that stayed with us and since then we've had like a complete new roster of clients and do those new clients come back or are they coming back for multiple videos a year is it kind

of yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i would say a good chunk of them are just because clients usually don't leave you for someone else unless you've either changed your pricing by more than what they can pay, more than what they can afford, or your quality has dropped significantly, or the experience has just gone downhill, or they've just had a turnover of staff, right? Yeah, that happens too which is not always the worst but it's not always the worst thing though it's no i would say it's actually pretty good because that person now goes to another company and they'll always remember you so we've had that happen as well where they go work somewhere else that's good and they bring us along with them yeah uh whether the other company wants to keep us or not it's kind of okay it happens right you can't really, that's kind of out of your control. So yeah, I had that happen with one of my bigger clients. And then I had to build a relationship with them again, with the new person, which worked out fine, but it was one of the bigger clients. So at first I was a little worried. But think of it, that's the easiest sell because you've already, you already have a track

record right there for them to see, and they can see the quality of work you did. It shouldn't be something too scary of a thing. It's like, oh no, they changed their head of marketing. They're not going to hire me anymore. It's like, they don't give them a reason not to. This is a company that works with multiple different video production companies and spreads it out though. Like they do a lot of video work. So building a relationship with that one person is really important.

Because I feel like they'll have preferential treatment depending on. they're not going to pick the same video production company every time. So I feel like that it kind of makes sense to have a good relationship. It's honestly out of your control after a certain point. That's what I've noticed. Like I used to get like a little bummed out about that as well. And then you just realize like, look, they're either going to like you or not, or they have someone else that they want to bring. As long as you did your best, like that's it, right? Like you can't cry about every sale you lose.

Yeah. Well, that's good. So just to kind of keep going with that, what type of industries are the companies in that they're doing multiple videos per year? And what would those videos be like in genre kind of? what would those videos be like in in genre kind of so i would say let's start with finance the finance industry we're starting to get a lot of you know uh pay the bills types of projects so like annual meetings i don't mind them they're easy and they pay well um annual meetings end of year reports uh quarterly reports you you know, quarterly reports are very common with a lot of companies because also a lot of these financial businesses, they, not all of

them are experienced in doing video work. So they're also trying to dip their toes into it. It's going to be a slower process where they're not going to dive right in with the biggest possible project right off the bat. They're going to start simple and slow. And that's how you build long-term relationships. You know, small successes can lead to bigger successes down the road. Yeah. No, that makes sense. And that would be a really good type of clientele to have somebody that needs multiple videos, like an AGM every year, maybe they want a corporate explainer and then maybe they want some commercial work as well for, you know, brand awareness or whatever. so the financial industry is definitely a good industry for video

yeah and then um i would say for the other ones it's typical stuff like for our tech uh industry it's a lot of explainer stuff like stuff for either industry's good too yeah yeah um i find a lot with clients that i get kind of on a once a year basis or a turnover basis here in Winnipeg, they either want a corporate explainer or they're doing some specific thing, but then they don't necessarily need video for anything going forward. They might use it here and there, but it's not going to really benefit them. Uh, they're not going to get a return on their investment a lot of the time for maybe a marketing video or something like that to do it multiple times. You know what I mean? It's kind of

like a once and done. So finding clients like that, especially in the financial sector, I find is really interesting. Well, it depends. It depends on the type of clients and the size of the business at that point, right? So this is where you have to also think about what type of clientele you want to work with. Yes, absolutely. At one point, we were working with a lot of those types of clients as well, where a lot of one offs, they might need just some kind of basic explainer, which it's fine to do that once in a while. But then there's no sustainability in the long term, you know, with that. Like you said, it's a once in a while, once a year, maybe once every two years, this person is going to come to you. And so Dario and I, what we did was we started to think about what different criteria are we

looking for? Like what type of companies or sizes of companies are we trying to, to target? And that that's kind of like how our shift kind of went. And no, that's, that's, that's not how it went. Well, it's, we just mainly looked for no but like the the no what we did was we basically just uh vetted vetted the the lead a bit better that's what i mean yeah that's what i mean no but we didn't we don't we don't we don't really choose like who we

work like in terms of like okay you have to be of this size or that it's like look as long as you can pay you kind of know what you're doing on the strategy end we can kind of feel out that this is going to be a good experience for both of us. We'll take you on. We don't kind of like pick and choose. When I'm saying size, Dario, I'm not specifically meaning about the size of the company, like how many locations or how many employees, but in terms of the size of like other things, like you just mentioned, the strategy, the budget, the focus, right? Like some of those clients that are doing one-offs, maybe in their eyes, they're not really finding video as that much of an important tool that they need. And those are the kind of clients you might want to vet out over time.

You want to work with people that see video as a need or as something that is valuable. And that's where the best work comes out of. 100%. Yeah. There are those, though, that need like a couple of pieces. That's normal. Just because they do it. Yeah. Because again, there's always like a baseline as a business that you need to have. Sometimes like it's understandable that you're not going to push

like 50 pieces of video content out there. Like you just need the basics. You need your website landing video, like something else to accompany that. And you're pretty much good as a business. Yeah. That's also fine. I find a lot of small to medium sized businesses here in Winnipeg specifically kind of only look at that. They're just like, you know, they don't think about the strategy as much. They think, okay, we need a video because we need a video and we're going to do these two videos and then leave that for a bit until we want to refresh that. Right. Um, but I think it is beneficial to find clients, uh, that are going to be consistently coming back. And I've struggled with maybe

finding those specifically in this, this market. How do you find them? What do you do to get your clients? Uh, I don't do a lot of cold outreach. Uh, so it would be a lot of word of mouth, either good referrals from other, you know, past people that I've worked with or people in the industry. And then inbound via Google is a really big one. We talked about SEO before. Uh, I've been, since that conversation that put the fire under my butt to kind of, you know, pay a lot more attention to my SEO. So I've been working on that. And then Google ads, like pay-per-click Google ads, uh, a little bit of Instagram. I spend probably my most amount of time for marketing in the business on Instagram, yet it does not, I don't think it provides the best ROI in terms of the time invested. I feel like Google has been my biggest lead of inbound clients.

But a lot of the clients that I've kind of done repetitive work with, I feel like are from word of mouth, just doing a good job, kind of building a connection and then being referred to. I know that's not marketing, but it's a good way to kind of get leads. We've had like nothing come in from social media at all. Like nothing. Do you guys put a lot of effort into it? Like, obviously, this is kind of social media. I mean, this is a lot of effort into it? Like, obviously, this is kind of social media. I mean, this is a lot of work, right? This is just mainly for ourselves and like for our own personal networking. But I don't know.

Like, I think a lot of our clients are leads. They're kind of like the company gatekeepers. They're probably of the generation that aren't going to check out for vendors through social media. They're primarily going to use like search engines, right? So most of our luck comes from there. That's why, because when you're B2B, you're not typically looking for B2B type of vendors on social media all the time, because a lot of social media is polluted, well, not polluted, social media is polluted well not polluted but um what's the right word um saturated is completely saturated with b2c exactly selling products um services that are related to products or maybe we should maybe we should focus more on linkedin though i was thinking about that

i think linkedin is a better platform for b2b 100 A hundred percent. And I make all these posts for Instagram and I put all this, I don't put a ton of time in, I should put more, but I put quite a bit of time into Instagram creating specific content for that on the Vanguard account. And I don't post it enough onto LinkedIn.

So I think one of my new year's resolutions is trying to do LinkedIn. I've never loved LinkedIn as a platform. Like I don't go and scroll on there personally, you know, like I would on Instagram because it is really, a lot of time it's people trying to sell you stuff. Right. And I, I don't want to be pushy and salesy with people, but I think if you're, you kind of have to, but you have to a certain degree. Yeah. You don't have to be, I mean, you don't always have to sell something. Sometimes you could just offer knowledge, advice, tips.

Yeah, add value to people's lives. That's the best way to do it, right? Get under their radar. And then if they're in the market for something, they'll reach out to you if you feel like you're the person to go to in that industry. Well, think of it like this also.

You said you don't typically find yourself scrolling through LinkedIn or anything like that. A lot of us like to do that on Instagram or TikTok or whatever, but your clients, they're on LinkedIn and they're scrolling through there. And because of that, I've gotten a little bit in the habit

of just going through LinkedIn myself, trying to interact with other people within my network to just try to be present. Sometimes being present is not just posting content. It's actually interacting with the other people within your network because you're also showing interest in their work and what they're doing.

And I think a lot of people tend to overlook that. It's that, hey, here, look at me, me. Look, this is what I'm doing. But the people that I see the most consistently on LinkedIn and are getting a lot of engagement are people that comment and post, sorry, comment like other people's posts and just engage them. They just simply engage with them.

Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point. I don't know how those people have so much time because I know who you're talking about and they're always on it. Like I see them commenting, liking every posting constantly. They must be getting a lot of business or something positive from it. But I don't understand, like there's a lot of people that have maybe a corporate nine to five job

and they're on LinkedIn all the time. All the time. It's not necessarily, depending on what they're doing, is that really bringing any value to them in terms of inbound leads or something? Or do they just love the platform? I think they must love it because it's like... It's a mix.

I think it's a mix. And I think people also feed off of other people's positive energies and they like to see other people within their network succeeding. And then, you know, being there to celebrate that, you know, it, it, it makes everybody feel good. And I think that's where the community aspect kind of comes out of. And that's also a little bit of what we want to do with creators grab coffee. You know, we're celebrating everyone that we bring into, that we bring onto the podcast. You know, there's so much value here and there's so many people that have different experiences. Let's connect everyone together. You know, everyone can learn from each other. Yeah. My counterpoint to

that is that on LinkedIn, it just feels like people are very fake. That's the vibe I get out of it all the time. Some of them. I get that vibe sometimes too. You're so fake, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I try and not be.

Like I said, I like to be kind of open and transparent. And I don't want to be super fake and lie about how many employees or this, this, this. But... Yeah. Be genuine. Be authentic. Be genuine. Don't fake it.

Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like even coming back to YouTube, a lot of people that have success on YouTube are the ones that are really just themselves. They act like themselves. I mean, maybe that's not totally true. You have people that are outlandish as well, like the Paul brothers or something like that.

But a lot of people that are genuinely themselves and not acting for the camera are the people that have a lot of success because people can kind of relate to them and connect with them on a different level. Right. Be the, be the Mr. Beast of LinkedIn. That is, I don't have the answer for that for today or the, or the money. That guy is pure energy. I just, it's, it's wild how much energy that guy has. Yeah. He's doing a lot of crazy things. Uh, okay. So what are the challenges that you have?

Other challenges? I would say that that's primarily my main one. Um, so how are you going to overcome the consistent, how am I going to overcome that? Did you, do you have anything planned? Do you have anything planned? Like any strategies? Yeah, I have some strategies that I've been trying to implement. Uh, one of them being SEO to, to kind of, you know, just generate more leads there because I found that a really positive way to, to get more leads coming in and then kind of try and put aside some of the things that weren't working on my business. Like Instagram. I just, I don't think it's, it's my favorite platform, but I don't think it's really positive for B2B like we talked about.

Um, I would like to hire somebody to, to focus less time on editing so I could focus more on the business. And then also just, you know, structure the company so that maybe I'm DPing a lot less. And I hire certain people to kind of fill those roles so that again, I can work on the business and kind of maybe produce the project instead of just DP and then edit it. So trying to hire for more roles and kind of take a step back so that I'm not doing so much. I think that's a way that I'm going to scale the business a little bit more.

That's really going to change a lot of things for you. Because we were in the same boat where we would kind of take on the grunt work in a way, right? But once you start budgeting for that and then just saying, hey, listen, like once you figure out your hard costs of saying like, look, on a project, I need to have at least one PA, one DP, and one producer director, which will be you, right? So three-person crew and this is going to cost me this much right then you can set that as like kind of your minimum budget once you factor in also pre-production and post and that'll really like change things because then you'll start to get clients that can afford that kind of pricing and then that's how that's how you scale up your business really and i try and do that right now. And I've been trying to do that.

But also, I find there is a lot, you know, I go back into the market and, you know, somebody, an old client reaches out for something where it's maybe just they want a one person crew to film an event video or something like this. And I say yes to it when it's not necessarily what I want to do going forward. So I think kind of sifting out that work and figuring out, you know, only taking on work that's going to be really beneficial for the business and growing the business and the work that I'd like to do going forward, be something that I've kind of planned to do, you know, it makes sense. It honestly makes sense. Because it's hard to say no, it's hard to say no to past clients. Yeah. past clients because I know, Dario, I'm just trying

to relate here. I'm just saying that for a lot of people, it is hard to say no to past clients where they have certain requests and things like that. But as time goes, and as Dario mentioned before, once you start to outgrow that level that you were at many years ago, it's time, it becomes more and more time to understand when it is, when you should start saying no. And when you figure that out, then you know, you're, you're starting to actually grow. Once you start saying no to them, they'll either say, okay, cool. That's it. Move on. Or sometimes they'll actually get more budget and come back to you. Exactly. I find that, find that when I'm busy and when I have work, I say no a lot more or I charge a lot more depending or not charge a lot more, but charge what the project would be worth. Right.

Instead of kind of working within their budget, I say no, like we're only going to do this with a three to four person crew. It's going to be this much. That's just the way that this should be, you know, handled. But then when, you know, we get into this feast and famine kind of mindset and things slow down a little bit, that's when I'm a little bit more susceptible to taking on a project that I probably shouldn't in terms of that. Right. Because at the end of the day, the business has expenses and, you know, you have to pay the bills. So there has to be revenue coming in. So if I was busy all the time, 12 months of the year, there was, there was work solidly coming in that it would be a lot easier to say, no, I'm very okay with saying no, it's not like I need to make all of the money. You know what I mean? I, I can easily say no and just work on what I like to do.

It just kind of depends on, on what's coming in. Yeah. When there's not as much work coming in, that's when it's hardest to say no, because it's right there. And you could say, you can say no, but then it's like, oh, well now I don't have any income, but being a mature business and knowing the opportunities that are coming in, even in those slower times, you will understand that it's more valuable for you to work on the business instead of taking on that smaller job. Because as you mentioned, you're doing a lot of it right now where if you were to take on that smaller project, the pre-production, you shot it, you edit it, before you know it, two to three weeks are gone. And that would have been time that would have been more valuable for you to work on the business, to bring in more leads that paid a lot more. So I totally agree. Yeah. And I think the, the biggest thing for us was when we just almost a hundred percent outsourced our editing and that freed up the most amount of time. Start with that. Anything kills you. Like it just,

it sucks up so much time, especially if you, if you have a client that needs a lot of revisions and you're kind of going down that rabbit hole. Uh, the biggest thing, and I did hire like start, uh, having somebody edit most of my work, but then also there there's a lot of people don't like kind of giving up, uh, what makes their project special. I've talked to a lot of different people in the, you know, in the industry and they say, I just, I can't kind of outsource that because editing is what makes the project kind of unique to us or whatever, right? Maybe they like color grading or anything, but I find that if I can give the project to somebody to just do at least cut it up, find the best B roll, edit the interviews, whatever it is, depending on the project.

And then you take it to that last 30%, they do 70%, you do 30%, whatever it is, that saves so much time. And it just, it lets you focus on the business, work on the business or be out there filming more. Yeah. I mean, it all depends on the type of clients. It all depends on the type of clients, the types of projects, see what works for you. It's a, it's an ongoing process. You're never going to just figure it out right off the bat. It's always ongoing. Yeah. Okay. Last two minutes of the pod. Okay. Tell us how you came up with the name Vanguard Creative. Oh, I kind of just tried to figure out names for a few weeks. Couldn't think of anything. I hated everything. Nothing really stuck. And then I saw Vanguard and there's a lot of other companies that

use Vanguard. Obviously, you probably have seen them in the financial sector, but I really like the name. I bought some of their ETFs. Yeah, I do too. Your own? No, not my own. It's a different company. But I really like the name and I liked what it kind of meant

and I'd have to Google exactly what it meant, but I think it's like a group of people going off in a new path or something like that. I don't know, but I think it's like a group of people going off in, uh, a new path or something like that. I don't know, but I found it really interesting and I thought it aligned with what I was doing. Um, I, I tried to start the name Stanley and co, but it was too close to Morgan Stanley and co, uh, so they wouldn't let me register it. Uh, so I wasted like a hundred dollars trying to register the name there. But so I ended up on Vanguard Creative and I don't know, I like the name. I don't like how many other businesses use the name, but I'm sure I just noticed that because it's the name that I picked. So, so I don't think

it's just like, I think you just noticed the name. It's like, if you buy a Civic, you see Civics everywhere. Right. It's kind of one of those things. Yeah. I don't really have a process for anybody coming up with a name. It's hard. Yeah. Everyone has a different way that it happens. Yeah. The one thing I would say to that is that the name doesn't really matter as long as it's not something stupid. It's more the brand behind the name.

And you shouldn't focus as much time on the name. You should just pick something that works and then focus on building a brand around that. Yeah. Okay. Well, great. Thank you for coming on spencer i think this was a pretty cool start to season three it was good thanks for having me on guys and it's the first podcast ever so hopefully i behaved myself and i did well no you were great okay so what was your what was your youtube channel so people can check it out it's just my name spencer stanley if you're into cameras and stuff check it out if you like sony's or whatever wherever else you got on there tech nerds uh i reviewed different office products as well like this desk this chair those have been

well performing videos so kind of home office desk setup sony cameras audio, all that stuff. Cool. And if a listener has a video project out in Winnipeg, be sure to reach out to Spencer over at VanguardCreative.ca. What's your website? VanguardCreative.ca. Cool. Yeah. That's it. Awesome.

Thanks, Spencer, for jumping on. Awesome. Thanks, guys.