Creatives Grab Coffee - Strategize Your Niche | Creatives Grab Coffee 48

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

This week, we welcome Stuart Edgeworth from Chuck Media. An Australia based video production company that focuses on Filming with Feeling. Stuart is our first guest from Australia 🇦🇺.JOIN OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT: https://www.patreon.com/CreativesGrabCoffeeProduced by LAPSE PRODUCTIONS – https://www.lapseproductions.comIn this episode, we cover the following and more:🎯 Tailor your online presence to suit certain niches, while taking on a broad range of projects🎯 Distinguishing types of projects, productions, and industries as a way of niching down(?) 🎬🎯 Curate landing pages to funnel clients towards different showcases a fine balance of showcasing your work for certain projects without deterring other new opportunities 🎥🎯 Growing pains as a rite of passage for entrepreneurship 💼 🎯Taking on annual passion projects to keep you enthused and excited❤️🎉 SUBSCRIBE 🎧✅ and FOLLOW 📲 for more episodes! https://www.creativesgrabcoffee.com/

Welcome back to another episode. Today we got Ben from Edit Crew. Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here. Okay, so let's get the intros out of the way. Tell us your backstory, like who you are. Tell us a little bit about your company and all that jazz. Yeah, so I guess I'll just start from the very beginning of how I sort of got into video. You know, as a kid, I, my parents got me one of those like little like soccer mom pocket cam recorders. I don't know if you remember those, but that's when I first started shooting video just with my friends and really fell in love with it. You know, fast forward a few years, studied film and journalism

here at the University of Iowa. And then at that time too, I was just freelancing a lot, shooting weddings, stuff for local businesses, etc. Just freelancing around, as well as I worked at the in-house marketing agency at the University of Iowa. It was like a student-led agency as a videographer. And that job was great because I, you know, got to just sit there for 40 hours a week and do minimal work, but watch a ton of YouTube and just learn a lot about all things video because you can learn everything off YouTube, as you guys know. After that, you know, graduated, moved out to Los Angeles worked in production for a little bit out there freelanced around just working on different sets mainly as a PA camera assistant really whatever I

could do COVID hit but before that too I was working at an agency where we did like high performance Facebook ads so imagine you see an ad for like a pair of sneakers and you click on it and buy it. We were the ones that were like writing, producing, shooting, editing those ads for brands. So I did that for a little while, quit that job because, you know, the full-time office life was certainly not for me. And then I began freelancing again and then decided after a few months that I wanted to start my own business and started Edit Crew. And we are a we're called a productized service, meaning we sell packages, like a standard package of video editing hours on a monthly basis. So, yeah, now we are a team. Fast forward three years now, we're a team of 57.

Most of our team is editors. But also we have a few project managers, creative producers, we call them people who are quality controlling the video and a few operations staff as well. So tell us a little bit about the organization because in three years you went from, was it just yourself? Did you have any partners? Yeah, it was just me. So how do you grow from one person to like 57 people in three years? A lot of mental breakdowns and blood, sweat and tears. Yeah, I mean, it's really for us. It was, you know, at the beginning, it's sort of just figuring out what works. So I was able to hire a video editor fairly quickly. I did go into it with the mindset of, well, I was just so miserable at the time, like working these

freelance contract gigs, being at the whims of other people, you know, trying to find a job, stuff like that. It just really wasn't suited to my personality. And I remember I had some money in my checking account, which would last me about a year if I was super fr personality. And I remember I had some money in my checking account, which would last me about a year if I was super frugal. So I said, screw it. If I like lose all my money, trying to start this business for a year, I have a year to make it work. I'm just going to live off savings. And I had that mindset going into it. So I hired fairly quickly, knowing that, you know, I wasn't really trying to make money in that first year. And I think that actually helped me because I was just in growth mode for that whole time. Yeah, I don't know if that answered your question. No, like, so tell us a little bit about like, how you like, I'm curious to see like, what the structure is for the organization. So there's you like, like, what do you do? Like, who do you have under you? Like, what are they doing? Who do they have under them? Right? Yeah, I can talk you through the

org chart a little bit. So on the base layer, we have editors, of course, video editors. That's a majority of the company. Then above them, we have what we call creative producers or creative project managers. Those are our most senior editors. They were all editors at one point who got promoted to being a quality control layer, doing internal rounds of revisions with the editors before we send the product to client. And then above them we have the project managers, or maybe some people might call them account managers, who are doing all the client communication, making sure timelines are hit, connecting all the people together that need to be connected,

that sort of thing. We also have a success manager who is kind of like a senior account manager in a way. She's responsible for the higher level touch points with clients, checking in conflict resolution, you know, team accountability, stuff like that. And then we have an operations manager as well. He almost functions as well as like a chief of staff, just really being the glue between this organization and, and the you're on the ground of what's going on, because really, the biggest challenge is we've grown, especially past like 2025 people, you know, I up to around that point, I knew everybody in the company, at least somewhat. But then once you go past that point, it's like, I might talk to them once or twice, and then never talk to them again. So it's hard to know what's really going on in your own company. So having him as somebody who's doing a lot of check-ins with people, doing the performance reviews, figuring out what's going on, managing people conflicts

is great because I'm personally so, so horrible at that. I'm like a pretty bad manager and accountability type person. We also have an assistant, an operations assistant as well and then there's me what a structure like it's it's amazing how like as dario mentioned how quickly you've grown to that point like anyone in this creative field is always like struggling a lot of companies either struggle to figure out how they can kind of scale or grow their teams even like on a one person at a time kind of basis whereas like in the span of three years you've got 57 people so like i guess on average you basically hired 20 people per year at that point like how did you determine the needs like was work coming in that frequently

that you needed a huge supply of editors right off the get-go or was it kind of like you hired editors and then were kind of like finding the work as you were kind of going? And then how did you plan for it? And how did that actually work out for you? Yeah, that's a great question. And the different stages of growth in our company have different answers to that question. So at the start, it was fairly easy to, I guess, meet bandwidth with demand because we weren't growing that fast. It was sort of like, oh, we might bring on one or two or perhaps three clients a month and we can pretty easily myself hire for that myself. we grew, you know, as we started to have an acquisition channel that works to bring on clients on a consistent basis, it was like, oh, now we have to start to sort of be very calculated about how we do this. You know, how much revenue or adding X amount of revenue means we need to

add X employees, X editors, X project managers, X this and that. Or, you know, this amount of clients of this package versus this package means we need to add this many editors. So that was something we're always tweaking. And it kind of is changing and evolving over time as we grow bigger because just the scale element kind of changes that calculation a little bit. But that's what's been great about having a an operations manager on the team as well as he's kind of the the spreadsheets numbers guru guy and and he you know he'll just whip out a big spreadsheet with like a bunch of calculations and numbers and i'm like oh that's exactly what we needed but i would have not been able to make that because i'm the type of guy that just sort of flies by feel by the seat of my pants a little bit.

What was what was like the inciting incident for you guys? It was like the turning point where you guys were like, OK, we got to start hiring more and really like focus on building a specific structure, like a strong structure. Yeah, I think. I mean, it was always in the back of my mind as we were growing larger. But at a certain point, it came down to like, I personally couldn't manage all of the managers. I think that's when I had a moment of like, oh, crap, like we need to bring on systems processes sort of like that boring business stuff that I think a lot of founders and entrepreneurs don't get super jazzed about because it sounds really unsexy but the reality is at a certain point you have to have accountability and structure and

like reporting and management and stuff like that because that's just sort of how like human organizations best unfold at scale. But yeah, I think there was a point where we were just like growing really well. Acquisition was working. We were getting a consistent stream of clients. And I was just like, I cannot like keep trying to grow the business and also manage like 10 people at the same time. It was just way too much. Was there like a certain point where like you guys started to grow exponentially or was it like just consistent, steady growth? I think for the first around two years, it was pretty steady, consistent growth. steady, consistent growth. But then in the past year, maybe eight, seven months, we've started to have a bit more exponential growth. Do you think you know what might have caused that? Yeah, definitely finding just an acquisition channel that works. Because my background is in

high performance Facebook ad creative at that job I mentioned earlier I really know how to structure a Facebook ad video and make it so people actually wanted to click through and so once we started running that and brought on an agency to run the ads and all that that's when things started to click a little bit better you're the second guest we've had on that's mentioned Facebook ads yeah working really well for. We've been like starting to look into that a little bit more so, or at least like it's on the list of things for us to be doing ourselves. But it definitely sounds like it's becoming more of a need now in terms of like trying to generate new clients and leads.

So did you start doing that from the very beginning or how did your kind of like Facebook advertising evolve based on also your growth? Yeah. So at the very beginning, it was super scrappy. I was just like breaking LinkedIn's terms of service and like automated spam messaging, like hundreds of people a day. If you're listening to this podcast, you probably got a message from me at one point just given the targeting metrics of LinkedIn. So don't look back at that if you want to connect with me. Did he reach out to us, Dario?

I don't remember, maybe. I don't wonder now. Please don't look, I'm going to be embarrassed. But it worked just to get us off the ground. Like, you know, only, you know, one out of 200 people has to be receptive to it for it to work at scale, right? It was a bit of a spray and pay approach, which only works to a certain point. We also started running cold email. So does that actually work?

Because I get a ton of those and like they just read horribly. Like every time I see it I'm like oh my god and then it's like how did they how did they get past the spam filter so I'm wondering like you have good uh um what's the term like did they work for you or what yeah so great question I mean there's definitely more wrong ways to do cold email than there is right ways um unethical ways and ethical ways uh some people might consider emailing you out of the blue unethical ways, and ethical ways. Some people might consider emailing you out of the blue unethical no matter what. And if you decide to do cold email, get ready to receive a ton of really, really, really

mean things sent back to you. Oh, people actually reply back to that? I'm surprised. Oh, yeah. The meanest things. Oh, my goodness. The meanest things ever. They must have time on their hands. Oh, yeah. The meanest things. Oh, my goodness. The meanest things ever. They must have time on their hands.

Yeah, right. I get like 20 a day, so I don't know how they're answering all of them. Right. I think the key, though, is really with the copy. A lot of these are like, we do SEO services. We're the best. Hire us. But there's no unique value proposition.

Whereas we were being very targeted towards specifically video production companies speaking specifically to their problems keeping it short and tight saying hey does this interest you do you want to learn more and surprisingly um you know a decent amount of people were receptive to it and we actually received a lot of emails in those days of people being like wow i usually just throw these in spam but yours spoke to me for whatever reason and like let's hop on a call So if it really does speak to the audience specifically, it's hard to overlook it because it just resonates too much. What would you say is, uh, the, the, if we had to break down in terms of what,

like the percent, like, um, uh, in terms of like, uh, advertising and cold outreach, like do you, do you do mostly Facebook ads or like, is it like a 50 50 that and the emails? Yeah. So these days we actually don't run any more cold email. Um, we just found it to be a slightly less effective channel than Facebook ads. I forgot to mention on the top part of the call, we also do have, um, uh, sales, a part-time salesperson and a part-time recruiter now as well. But the salesperson is doing some cold LinkedIn outreach, but way more personalized, not spammy, that sort of stuff. But yeah, once we transitioned to Facebook ads, it just became a bit more

predictable than the cold email was. So then we stuck with that. Yeah, it's a matter of time versus reward, like the time spent to do it versus the potential reward. And I think the cold email outreach approach is something that might work more so in the very beginning when you're just starting out because there really is, it's the low barrier to entry to try to get new leads in the beginning, right? To create a whole Facebook advertising campaign or anything like that it takes a lot of thought prep production and post

production as well to make sure you get it done exactly the way you need to and then obviously then all the ad spend you know it takes it takes a while for that to actually work out and and obviously the goal is to eventually kind of transition that like for example dario and i we operated on a completely word of mouth model, which. Let's be honest, it didn't really work that much. Like we weren't getting that much work to the point

where we could really survive off it over time. And we realized that when the pandemic hit, it was like, oh, this was not a sustainable model. So then that's when we kind of started focusing more

on the SEO front. And that has become more of a lucrative approach for us. And now we're trying to think. How's that been working for you? Or actually, I forgot to ask this, too. What about LinkedIn? How's the SEO front and that has become more of a lucrative approach for us. And now we're trying to think about... How's that been working for you? Or actually, I forgot to ask this too. What about LinkedIn? How's the SEO? And do you do also LinkedIn marketing? Yeah, we don't. That's something we really should do more of. We haven't really focused much on SEO because it's sort of like eating candy versus eating vegetables.

Like SEO is the vegetables, but direct response like advertising on Facebook is candy. So it's almost like, well, we're eating candy and like we're getting customers, so why stop? But eventually you have to stop and eat your vegetables. So we will start SEO someday, but it's not something we've admittedly focused on. So you're saying that Dara and I have been eating very healthy lately. Yes. You're looking very, very healthy and wholesome over there. Try telling that to my stomach. And has that been mostly through the podcast for you guys?

Or do you also put up blog posts? Like what does your SEO strategy look like? We do. We do. Well, we started with the basics, which was restructuring our website. So we made sure everything was properly, um, optimized for SEO. So like we had like each page, each page is specifically optimized for SEO. We do back linking throughout the pages and whatnot. And then we saw the most amount of growth actually through our blog. We didn't even put that much work into it. A podcast, not really. I mean, like for guests that come on, we do offer back linking for their guest post once it's finally published. But some of them have taken us up on it.

And from that, we've seen some good... I don't even know what the term for it is, but it's boosted us up. Results. Results. And results is the word, yes. But yeah, mainly the blog, though, I got to say. And I noticed this because oftentimes we have leads coming in and I always ask them how they found us.

And it's almost always Google search and ask them which keywords. And some of the search terms, I'm like, okay, that definitely must be related to a blog article I posted. Because like how else because i also asked them like where were we ranking and they're like oh like usually first or third i'm like really okay it's such a weird search term like how the hell did you even like find this like video production companies that make stuffed animal product videos or really long tail no it's always like that's a sentence it's always like you know it's some weird thing's a sentence it's always like you know it's some weird thing like i can't even recall because there's just so random i haven't written

down on an excel file but uh it's usually i think the blog has worked for us really well which is why we start to post more often on it um starting last month like we're already three blogs in and uh gpt4 has been really good for that it saved us a ton of time in terms of writing the article. But you still got to like finesse it. Just to get started on it. It's not perfect out the gate, but it does save you a ton of time because like I'll just ask it like, yeah, I'm trying to write a topic on this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it'll spit out something and I got to fix it.

It's like, you know, get rid of point number four. That's not relevant anymore. Change it to this. Like I don't like how that paragraph is worded sometimes. So I'll also like change it. And but in terms of like, you know, sometimes if you're on WordPress, you need like a meta description and you need a description for it. So I just say like, hey, can you based on this blog post, can you just give me like

a quick, you know, 250 word description? We'll just spit that out quickly. So I've been able to shorten the amount of time it takes me to write a blog post from like, you know, two days down to like two hours. That's amazing. So that's been really good for that. One time we actually hired an agency

because I briefly was like, we're going to do SEO guys. You know, one of my like ideas that I just throw at the team and they hate me for it. But we hired this agency out of Europe or somewhere to do it for like, I don't know, two or 300 bucks writing this article. And we got it back and it was total shit. And I was like, oh, so I basically gave then chat GPT like a similar prompt. And I was like, wow, this is 80% as good. And it was free and took 20 seconds. So it's getting really kind of awesome. But like

you said, it's never good straight out the gate. It's really like the human touch at the end that makes chat GBT so powerful, just streamlining that whole process. And I noticed like sometimes like whatever you get out of it, oftentimes it doesn't have like a character. Like for example, when I like to write stuff, I like to add like a little bit of sarcasm here doesn't have like a character like for example when i like to write stuff i like to add like a little bit of sarcasm here and there and like like i'll shorten words to like whatever just to get the point across or whatever right it's it's got like its own style like versus gpt content is very un like it doesn't have information it's pure information like and and it's that's been sourced from other parts of the internet you can make it but carol

you can say like you know write this more sarcastic or whatever but it'll be like it's very over the top it's not fine tuned it's like yeah it's it's it's like that that that thing from interstellar what was that uh that robot uh oh uh oh you're using the same thing i mentioned yeah yeah tars yeah but tars had character like this this thing doesn't have character you'd have to like finesse it a little too much with prompts in order to get it right. But at that point, you might as well just fix it yourself, right? And it's also a blog post. It's not meant to be like crazy long.

Right now, I have more time. I have more trouble just finding the right images and videos for the blog post than actually writing the content. Yeah, it's funny. I'm selling my car right now on Facebook Marketplace. And I just was like Chad GPT write me the most awesome description for like the best car you can buy for under five grand because it really is um and it and I was like okay you make it a little more funny

and like you said it's really like flat almost but then sometimes it comes out like at 200% way too hot like almost like it hadn't something that was like actually offensive written in there. And I was like, Whoa, like you can't go from giving, you know, the whole thing 10% funny to 200% funny and one line. So it's a little bit all over the place right now, but I think it'll get way better. It's funny because I noticed that we're, we're becoming very good at spotting ai generated content as well like i'm thinking of sometimes like i i go on reddit a lot and some comments that i read i'm like this uh this sounds a little sus to me i see people commenting on

there too it's like are you a bot like so even some emails i get from from certain people i'm like hmm this sounds a little too i don't know i'm wondering if those seo companies that are like two three hundred bucks that people are hiring they're probably now using chat gpt as their main source oh 100 but you know what i was going to mention this for you like and you know listeners uh be very careful hiring companies to help you out with seo because oftentimes they could actually fuck you up very badly, very badly in terms of. Yeah. Yeah. And some like you'd have to really know you'd have to have a certain understanding of SEO to be able to vet them out as well, just to make sure, hey, these guys aren't trying to like jip me or anything like that. So

I'd be I'd be very wary, like try to understand a little bit yourself and again it's not difficult it's just time consuming but for you you could probably hire someone in-house to work on that and i mean the amount of returns you'd get on it would be tenfold way worth their salary yeah like i mean if they're doing it properly you're like okay this guy's worth it you know even even if they are using gpt to write the articles like there's still a lot more that goes into it so as long as they're taking care of that, like, again, it works really like once once you have your SEO figured out and you're on the front page for a lot of search terms, like it pays for itself very quickly. But yeah, if you get the wrong company, they could screw you over. And if you get, you know,

blacklisted by Google, good luck. And that's something I've wanted to do in our company, probably next quarter, because the way we sort of run our cycles of projects initiatives is via the book traction, the EOS method. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's basically just a operating system for your business. So each team member has certain rocks or projects each quarter that they're working on and you're only allowed to have i think it's like somewhere between two and four and of course to me i'm always like ah well we can do that and that and that and that and i always think i can do it even if i put like only four of them and you know inevitably only three of them end up ever getting

done so next next quarter it's seo for sure don't wait i would i would get it start right get it started right get it started right away because like i it it still takes a while for the results to come in so it's like i guess that's another thing i would tell you too it's like don't expect overnight success unless you know like god loves you or something god doesn't love me it's actually the first filter for a lot of these seo companies that are trying to sell you on it is if they promise you fast returns within like next day or within a week or two weeks or anything like that. That's already a red flag right there.

Don't hire them. If they say it's going to take at least six months to a year. OK, they actually they might know what they're talking about. But yeah, actually, they'll know what they're talking about if they say, you know, it might might take six months to a year. It might take 10 years. We just it just it's too random. Right. Because you could be doing everything right and still.

Right. The other thing I would say, too, is if they say, oh, we need extra budget to hire, do guest blogs or anything like that or purchase backlinks. That is a sign of bullshit right there. So you should probably just hire your own guy. Yeah. A lot of a lot of amateurs and fraudsters in the SEO agency space for sure. Uh, I want to go back to like the size of your business and how big you guys,

you guys grew in, in the span of three years. I'm wondering like what, what are some tips you would give to other business owners that are looking for that kind of like big expansion? Like what were some of the uh like i'm wondering like did you deal with any issues like did you have any uh bumps on the road in terms of like growing the team so big yeah so many um nothing like horribly catastrophic honestly but

a lot of a lot of bumps um i think when you're you're committed to growth like we have been, sometimes it's harder to ensure quality. And that's really hard to say out loud because especially as creative people, like the quality is the one thing that we live for. Like we live for that good shot. We live for that snappy edit, that thing that just looks good and like delivers the value. But when you're committed to growth, like we have been as well, sometimes you have to be willing to accept a small error rate in order to just keep moving fast because you don't want to have clients knocking at your door and be like, ah, sorry, we can't take you on, which we have had to do at times. We've had to have a wait list of, you know, three, four or five weeks, which just kills me. But, you know, there is some level of quality we have to always uphold. But at the same

time, when you're hiring, you know, we've had months where we hired 10 people, you know, maybe eight editors, and it's like, you know, statistically, like one or maybe two of them probably aren't going to be end up being the best and we might have to let them go so that's always a tough balance to strike because you know we do have quality control procedures in place internally to make sure that the end product is at least at some baseline level of quality but it is hard to ensure that quality at scale consistently, which, you know, we're always striving to do. And then there's, of course, the hard times of having to fire people. Or one time last summer, actually, we had a big drop off in business all of a sudden. I think our revenue dropped like 25 or 30 percent in about six weeks.

We just had a ton of drop off for no reason maybe because of all the like recession scariness going on and we did have six months yeah that was the interest rate yeah like snow yeah and we did have to let go of i think eight people at that time which was really tough because we had never it had always been kind of like positive rah rah hoo ha up to that point and then all of a sudden it was like boom boom, like reality check really quick. And I think it shocked the team. And, you know, when you do layoffs like that, or you have a big shakeup like that, there's some level of fear that gets injected into the organization. And the big question is like, how do you maintain the culture? How do you maintain stability, but still do what needs to be done as a business in situations like that? And luckily we were able to hire a few of them back, like just

four or five weeks later, because, you know, things bounce back fairly quickly, which is kind of nuts. But, you know, obviously, uh, the, the, you know, there's some sort of like, whoa, unshakiness that happens in situations like that, that you have to learn to navigate. Were they, uh, were they, uh, contracted uh contracted or were they uh like full-time they're they're full-time people that's that's what i was gonna ask next in terms of like your team is it like fully remote the way you operate or do you have like a base of operations where some people come in or like especially like when you're working with dealing with like workplace culture like usually it's a lot easier with people in internally but everyone's like a lot of editors work remotely so

i was curious how your business model works in that in that sense yeah we're a hundred percent distributed remote team uh we're also very international so our team is based across eight or nine countries primarily across latin America, a couple of staff in Europe, a couple here in the States. And yeah, it is in terms of maintaining culture remotely, it is a different game than in person because you don't have as much of that water cooler conversation. So you have to foster other ways to have culture in the team. So it comes down to little thing, or there's one side of it, which is the little things of like, fun Slack channels with like memes and celebrating people's wins and life achievements and stuff like that. So people feel seen, because if people feel

don't feel seen, you know, not even just in a company, but in life, that's not a good thing, of course. Also, just fostering connection between the editors um i mean like the most powerful asset of edit crew is the fact that we have like 40 some editors who do this all day every day and live and breathe this so the knowledge transfer that happens between them i'm always looking for like how can we capture that how can we build that into what we're doing um you know how can we be on? How can we build that into what we're doing? You know, how can we be on top of the trends and the softwares and what's happening? And just having such a large base of editors

allows us to do that. So scheduling, you know, meetings where, you know, we can just have a few employees chit chat for a while about a certain topic, just so they get to know each other a little bit. So you have some familiar faces in the company. Because for anyone that's joined a remote company working remote, it can be a little bit intimidating to just show up day one and have like maybe one or two Zoom meetings, but then there's like 100 people that you've never met and maybe won't meet

that are just little profile icons that you're supposed to be working with. So fostering that face to face time helps to just get over that initial hump as well you guys can also probably do like movie nights or game nights something like that over discord yeah i think like if i had to guess i would say like 75 of our editors are gamers so i think they sometimes uh like join in a game with each other and stuff like that. Yeah. Should do company tournaments or something like that, you know?

Yeah. Pick like one game that most editors are very familiar with, you know, make a tournament out of it with like a grand prize at the end or something like that. Or like with some smaller prizes. And I think you guys can, and even like record it in some way, you guys can use that as marketing material as well in some form. Oh, that's a great idea. Who knows?

I love that idea, actually. That's awesome. In the early days, we used to do some Kahoot-type games together when the team was much smaller. But yeah, those don't work as well now that we're at the size that we are. I was also going to ask, since you have editors all over the country, how do you typically go about finding the right talent and then vetting them out at that point? Yeah, great question. I mean, in terms of the process of how we find them, we're not doing anything too revolutionary

outside of job boards and stuff like that. But in terms of the internal process, we have it super dialed now. We have a standard list of interview questions that we ask. Each question is meant to tease out, you know, is this person good with that? Do they know how to this and that? Are they going to be the type of good worker, you know, good team member, good collaborator that can do this and that? And then when they come on, and of course,

they have to have good work samples in portfolio when they come on we do have a standardized onboarding process as well so we have some of our more senior editors and creative project creative producers walk them through our entire process we have a sop a standard operating procedure called the uh how to be a kick-ass editor at edit crew guide and it's like a 50 page document that goes over like everything you have to know like with the back of your hand in order to be an editor at a crew not just from like a quality perspective but just the process that we have internally specifically and then it's a matter of just getting them integrated and following up with them, especially in that first month, month and a half.

Really being careful to look at their videos. Are they doing a good job? Are they working well with the team? How are they communicating? So we have processes in place as well where more senior team members will be checking in with them on a bi-weekly or sorry weekly or twice weekly basis for the first four to six weeks just to make sure they're really

assimilating well not only that you know they're doing good work for the company but they're also happy working here and because we we want to make it a place where editors and people in general want to work I would be like remiss if I knew that I created a hostile work environment. So we're always trying to find ways to just make that transition into the team easier. And I think fostering that welcoming attitude and getting them connected with different faces in the company really helps with that. That's really great how you're putting that much energy early on to to really see how not only that they're they're doing great work uh with the company but that it's a good environment for them

that just kind of meshes with everyone because i know a lot of companies do like three to six month like trial period not trial periods but like probation probation probation periods yeah um which it takes a long time to really kind of like figure those things out but i i guess you're you guys are focusing on seeing if you can do it in under two months to see if that's like a good fit for everyone is that correct and usually you don't have to go beyond that yeah i mean really like in their contract we have of course disclaimer it's like hey if you really suck with the next time frame we'll part ways no worries but really the idea is like after a week maybe two you're hitting the ground running because also one of our main value props is one to two business day

turnarounds on first draft 24 hours on revisions yeah so there's not a lot of time to be like twiddling your thumbs it's like all right man we got these turnarounds and and let's do it you know so you kind of it can be a trial by fire in that way. But I think- I mean, it makes total sense because you're hiring someone that essentially is a freelancer doing that role. And you're basically saying, okay, now your salary doing the exact same thing. So they should be able to hit the ground running because they've already been doing that. And you set the expectations already. It's like, this is the job. This is what we do. They went through the hiring process. And once they hire, they know what's expected of them. They know what they signed on for. They can't be just like, oh, like I'll get it to you next week or something. It's like, you know that we, this job is required for this. Like we don't want people who are going to take like one to two weeks or whatever that standard is for them you know like you're you need if you're coming on you know that the expectation is we need to have like two three day turnarounds for these projects because that's that's the

nature of the work and if that doesn't work then why did you apply essentially right yeah i mean imagine if you you hire on a dp and you're like i'll give you like six months to figure out if you can shoot good good footage for us it's like no you're a dp already you should already know all this stuff i shouldn't be teaching or it's like you're hiring a dp for an interview and then he doesn't bring lights and he's like we're doing an interview you should know what's what's needed for this we need lighting what kind of made you go into like the the post um kind of direction for your business because a lot of uh video companies when they jump into it they want to do you know like the whole shebang the pre-production the production and the post-production. What made,

what was the kind of rationale or like things that happened that made you think, you know what, I want to focus on high volume, quick turnaround, post-production, and that's the niche I'm going to focus on? Because that's a very specific niche that you've decided to take on. Like, what was your thought process behind that? Yeah, I'm really glad you asked that because this is one of my favorite topics to talk about, which is sort of the done-for-you agency. Well, it's a spectrum. Imagine a spectrum. On one end, you have the totally high-touch, done-for-you stuff, Nike, Super Bowl ad commercial, big jobs with really high touch client service, stuff like that, which I think is probably more of what maybe a lot of the listeners of your show

are doing very involved client work. And then on the other side, you have a like productized services, it's called, which is what our business model is, where we offer a service, but you buy it as a product, we package up our service in two packages that you can say, hey, you know, take it or leave it basically. And, you know, what, what kind of made me want to do this more is I was doing what my old job that I mentioned, the agency job, we made Facebook ads and also freelancing. I just really, man, I'm just, sometimes I just don't like to be told what to do, to be honest. That's just my personality type. I don't like taking all these commands.

I really like to have control over my own schedule during the day. That's the biggest thing for me. It's just time freedom. And when you're doing a lot of high touch client services, it doesn't always allow for that. And I do see the appeal in that side of things, because you get to have really cool creative collaboration, work on really cool jobs, do really high quality stuff. But for me, in my life, personally, I just wanted more time freedom, right? Like I wanted to be able to make money more on my terms and have the process be simple and not so high touch with the clients. Because while I do love our clients, they're

great people. We work with a lot of very cool companies. Like I don't want to talk with them on the phone every week. I just don't, that's not my happy place. So, you know, our model is more based around, well, now we do, we do talk on the phone with them here and there depending on their needs but i don't do it he loves you guys okay like to all to all offense clients it's not that he doesn't like you okay let's just put that disclaimer out there don't take it the wrong way it's like distant cousins right it's like i like to see them like once in a while but not every day i get i get it you need your show your social battery to recharge after a while i I'm the same.

And now we do. We used to be so low touch. I was so allergic to even hopping on an onboarding call in the early days, which is embarrassing to say now. But these days, our success manager, project managers, that's their job to hop on the calls if there's problems. But the whole idea behind edit crew was like, imagine you have to hire a freelancer, whether it be someone you've worked with before or never worked with. You're probably gonna have to email them or call them, hop on the call. Okay, how are you getting the details? A very unstructured email. Maybe you're using Frame.io to do reviews, but maybe you're just typing notes in the body of an email or something it's very loose and slow and like painful and i'm somebody who like if something is not efficient i'm like mad it's one of my worst personality traits like if something is not efficient i'm just like oh like it should be done that that way and we'd all be done already

and so with edit crew it was like okay how we get a way for people to submit a, you know, I sound like I'm like advertising, but I promise I'm not trying to. I was going to say, he's selling us right now, Dario. He's locally selling us. But the real question was like, how do we get it? So like, you don't have to talk to a person. You can do five minutes of work, submit the ticket, and then just get a video back. And also, we don't have to talk to you because that slows the process down. And our real value prop is speed. So anything we can do to

increase the speed of what we're doing is better. And so I love human beings. They're great. But talking long form on a conversation every time you have to do a project, that's just not going to work if your main value proposition is speed. Yeah, it all depends on the type of content that you're doing. And I think from what I saw on your website, a lot of the projects you're doing are very kind of like boilerplate, like standardized types of videos that a lot of people will need similar kind of things. For example, the podcasting world has probably been a huge boom for you guys at this point where, you know, it's, it's a typical thing. Several people just like this talking on camera, cut back between a few of them, you know, uh, um, an intro outro, things like that. And they need them done quickly so that they can start posting, you know, maybe little

shorts and things like that. That might work. But like you said, it's not like the kind of like corporate video projects where there are very specific messages that need to be filmed with very specific B-roll. There's a lot of creative, a lot of sign off and a lot of input from a lot of people that needs to go into that. That's not the kind of market you guys are targeting, right? So it's more so very, or at least that's what I'm assuming. Like, I'm not sure like if you guys have been kind of like tackling some more like, like creative type projects as well with this with this approach yeah we do actually and I think that's one thing that does differentiate us in the productized service space is like a lot of them are really focused on like youtubers content creators uh you know sort of like solo

video creator type people and I think one thing we do well is we were like, hey, we can actually like build a story for you. And while we're still not doing, like I said, the Nike commercial or like a feature film or something like that, the ability to craft a story, I think in whatever you do is just so, so vital. I mean, humans are storytellers. A story is obviously way more engaging to listen to than anything else. So that's something we try to bring to the table as well. Okay, that's cool. Because that's what I wanted to clarify. Yeah, it makes sense, Kiril, because he's got that whole team structure in place. I think these those other companies that focus on YouTuber content or podcasts, it's much simpler, and you don't need that much involvement

in it versus with his because he's got such a team structure you can dive into more complicated storytelling right yeah at least like uh at least uh like diving into it a bit more in that sense and then being able to adjust it as you go that was the other thing i was curious about is like how does it go in terms of like revision process if there are needs for that because i i doubt that you're never gonna get any requests for for revisions on even on quick content. Like how does that process typically work for you guys? Yeah, it's pretty simple.

We just send them a message with a frame IO review link. As soon as they leave comments, we're notified and we start the revision process. Do you guys have like a time limit on how many revisions can come in? We'll do each round in 24 hours or less, but there's no limit on the number of rounds of revisions we'll do, which I mean, it doesn't matter to us. Like, of course we want to get it done as fast as possible.

But if we have a client that like keeps changing their mind about stuff, it's no sweat off our back because we have that productized model where we're just selling a certain number of hours per week. So it's like, hey, if you want to do 100 rounds of revisions this week, we totally can. I mean, we're just selling blocks of hours, essentially. We're not selling it like project per project, where if it was a project basis and we're doing 100 rounds of revisions,

like each time we do a revision round, that's basically lowering our profit margin. What are the hours that you offer then per week there's two packages right on the website you have two packs right we do a 15 hours of editing per week package and a 40 hours per week one sold on a monthly basis okay yeah there's like part-time and full-time then i guess right if you want to break it down yeah oh yeah like the the 40 hour one you're You're basically assigning an editor to that account. Full-time. Full-time, almost that way, right?

Wow. Yeah. So you're basically, in terms of trying to find client work, you have to have editors there basically each handling almost an entire... It's like literally that personal editor is there for that client almost in a way, kind of, right? Here's the beauty of his process kiro because they're all uh following the exact same process that 50 page document he could easily

also just swap them out too right one of them becomes unavailable they're all following the same method right and that's part of the problem of hiring contractors on a freelance part-time basis they all got the different style it's always like, hey, I'm not available for two weeks. And you're like, damn it, that deadline's like tomorrow. So that's part of the thing that's nice too. And it is tough to randomly like switch editors on a dime between clients, which we do have to do sometimes, of course. But having the processes internally and like the client documents, and we have these things called client one sheets, which basically goes over all the

stuff the client likes and doesn't like their preferences, tendencies, et cetera. So that if we do have to do that, it's just a seamless transition or as seamless as it has to be or can be, as opposed to it being sort of like ad hoc scrambly. I have a question. This is the thing I'm curious about. So like, let's say, can potential clients have like a more in-depth discussion of their workload with you guys? Like, can someone get in touch with you and say, hey, I'm so-and-so video production company. I'm estimating these projects for this month. Let's say it's like three promo videos. These are going to be the details for it based on a

past project like are you guys able to take this workload on at the 48 at the 40 hour pricing plan or like because i'm wondering if like they have more workload than you guys can offer for that package like what what happens in that case? Yeah, we've had quite a few clients who will just sign up for multiple full-time editors. So we'll just scale their team up to like four or five, six full-time editors, for example, if they need to, you know, scale up or down depending on the month or project that they have coming in. Oh, so you guys can adjust on a month-to-month basis as well, right? Right. Like let's say one month it's like okay the light month so i just need maybe the the first package and then next month it's like okay i need the the higher up package plus extra as well so you guys can do like custom plans then right

yeah it's not as much custom as it is like stacking our existing packages on top of each other and of course if a client comes to us and says, hey, we want five editors, we're going to be a little bit more willing to do some of that higher touch client service with them because the stakes are higher for both them and us if they are bringing us a lot of business like that. That's good then. It's basically like you guys are a post house that has product ties to their services,

but then can also still turn into a more personalized one for specific clients as well. So that's pretty interesting. How often do you see that kind of happening or is it kind of like more so the one editor per client kind of model for you guys? It's mostly, most of our clients just sign up with one package. We do have a handful that have multiple or who sometimes jump between multiple and one depending on their workload or the season or things like that. Oh yeah, because you could basically change it every month, right? It's not like you sign up.

It's not like the stock footage sites where it's like you sign up for a year and this is what the plan is like forever. It's like maybe one month you might need 40 hours a week. Then another month you might need 15 hours a week. But then if there's another one where it's like this is the work we need, oh, that's going to be like 60 hours a week.

Then you guys will adjust for that. It makes sense for his because he's got labor involved, right? Yeah. Versus those, they just have assets involved. Yeah, this is a smart approach. Yeah, because things change

and different clients come in. Like sometimes there's some turnover as well. You sign on like four clients, you maybe lose two or like they move on or something like that. And you have to have a flexible business model for that as well. What do you find people choosing most of the time?

The 15 hour package or the 40 hour package? It's a pretty even split. It kind of oscillates back and forth. But for the most part, it's an even split between them. AI tools. Are you worried about that going forward into the future? Do you think that's going to affect your business a bit? I think it could. At this point in time, there's nothing so compelling that's like, AI is going to put us out of business. There are certainly AI tools that we're beginning to look at more closely to integrate into our existing workflow. Because like you said, Dario, earlier about writing the blog posts, you know, AI can get you to a certain point, but the human touch has to be put on at the end. And I think that's what

a lot of these editing tools that are out there right now are. I mean, there's not so many compelling video editing AI tools anyway. There are a few that are good for like subtitling, for example, and we'll integrate those into our process. But in the short term, I'm not super worried about AI like putting us out of business or anything. I think it's always a dance with technology of how can we continue to use it?

Maybe in five years, our offer looks totally different because AI tools have gotten so good that we have to do something radically different to stay relevant. But for the time being, we're okay. There's actually one, I think Dario mentioned it at the beginning before we started the podcast, was Adobe Podcast, actually, which is essentially where you you get it for the adobe software and say you put like three pod like a like our podcast on it right three different angles uh to cut between and it automatically goes through it and chops it up based on who is talking no wasn't that that was auto yeah autopod this one's autopod yeah sorry autopod this one's autopod so it chops up the

the footage based on who's talking so it it saves a lot of like maybe like a few hours even in time where you have to go through it like it may be obviously you have to still watch it to make sure it's clean but you know the act of like cutting it adjusting it and then like cleaning it up like as you go might take a while whereas if you could just do like a quick watch through so there's that there's also the um adobe pod uh i think it was called right no that's that's that's for that's for audio. That's for the audio, yeah. I think the key thing with those things is that-

They're tools. They're just going to help. They're tools that are just going to help speed up the work because it's like, okay, even for AutoPod, great. If you just shaved off a couple of hours off your workflow, then that just means that now you can take on more work, right? As soon as I saw that, that was the first thing I thought of. I'm like, okay, great.

Now, instead of waiting so long to get the the the deliverables from from our editor now we could get it get it back quicker which means we can post more often right it all depends on what the content is that's why i was asking ben if you know them because like maybe they could be useful for for you and your editors to you know save some more time so you can take on more work or even like help service those clients a little bit better. Yeah, I hadn't heard of that. I'm honestly, after this, going to probably tell someone to go look into that

because, yeah, it sounds awesome. It works surprisingly pretty well. But yeah, even with those other tools with the subtitling, you could probably just get the API for OpenAI's Whisper, I believe it's called. And it could probably just implement something. I mean, you have the backing to be able to do that for us. I don't have the technical knowledge, so we're not touching that just yet.

Yeah, I've always actually imagined like in the future, I've actually had this as a product idea. Like imagine you're like typical corporate video interviews stitched with B-roll over top, that sort of thing. I think that's within the scope of what AI couldn't do, honestly, which is so much of like that would cover, that technology would cover so much of the existing like corporate video out there.

I think it's totally possible. I think it's a long way off before it can get really good, but I don't think it's outside of the realm of technology to think like, hey, this interview, put it into thematic buckets as such, and then put those thematic buckets here, here, and here with the relevant B-roll. They're talking about a car, for example. It's a car commercial. Put the shot of the engine there. I think that stuff, I mean, I don't know anything about AI, but it sounds like it can be done. So you can actually kind of do that. Now, all you have to do is just export the transcript from the video. Let's say it's an interview video, right? Once you have like, I don't know, maybe the clean one or whatnot, you could export that,

or you could even get the raw transcript, put it put it through GPT and say, Hey, I need you to create like a one minute promo video using excerpts from this interview right and i could probably pick out stuff once you have it you and then you could maybe even say include the time stamps so you already have kind of the rough structure for the video and then once you have the rough structure you can say hey what are some b-roll images i can include for this video i'm creating here is the script are you guys using any ai tools in in any of the projects you're doing lately um we're yeah we're using gp no we're using it we're using gpt4 for a lot of the the content like the the writing aspects and

what helps clean it up it still has to be yeah it helps clean it up like for for example like we have this manufacturing video we're shooting this week. And basically, I had the client kind of give me like bulleted points for the entire process that we're going to be filming. Right. And then I kind of fed the bulleted points through GPT. And I said, hey, oh, I told you, hey, I'm creating this video. I'm going to be sending you a bunch of stuff. I need you to kind of help me create a script based on these bullet points. Right.

Because I need to include it's going to be voiceover for this video video is going to be about this you got to give it the right prom so i'm not going to go through all of them here because i don't have them in front of me uh but basically then i would get like the voiceover from the bulleted points but i still needed to to clean it up a little bit it wasn't perfect so it's not it's not quite there yet but it will be soon. But again, the only thing it did is that it helped speed up our process in terms of actually creating the script. Right. So and then the other cool thing is you can once you have the finished one, you could feed it back into it and say, well, what are your thoughts on this? How does it sound based on everything

we've talked about so far? Like, what do you think? So we are using it in that regard we're using it in the blog creations uh and then i guess that's it for now like just just technical just stuff that like just takes up a lot of our time startup stuff like that i i'm not using it i'm not using it in emails to be honest with you i know some people are for me i've actually noticed that my emails like they're getting more casual because i want to make it seem like i'm i'm actually answering versus like it's actually me like you could tell because that's just an excuse to not capitalize your sentences yeah yeah and also like i think i've mentioned this before but i am treating them more like text messages in a way because i'm tired of this whole formality with

it i'm not putting best after the first one you know it's me like we're chatting back and forth i'm not writing you this isn't i'm in i'm in world war ii sending you sending a letter sending a letter to my loved one you know like sincerely in in highest regards dario p.s don't forget to close the door like like i don't know one thing i wanted to mention uh um if you do feed like the interviews transcripts through chat gpt it may give you a good uh like some good talking points and everything the only thing that it won't be able to do is uh understand how it was delivered from the person who did the interview you know like did they say it in a in a good way or did they stumble a lot or did they do this you know like

it may not know that but it can at the very least give you a good it's all starting points this that's why like maybe feeding the raw one in could be good to give you a starting point like let's say you got a big interview it was unscripted right and then you got to sort through it you could say maybe just pick out the best parts from it and then you kind of go through it you might even still have you should probably put it in the should probably put it in the prompt just keep in mind i don't know if they grunted or whatever or if that that take wasn't good so just highlight it multiple times if it was said multiple times even just like slightly you just it's all in the prompts which means that like even if you do end up using these tools like you can't just if you if you're not someone that uses them often you will still need the people that are

using them often to use them because they're they know how to use them properly like there's still prompts that you need to do and things you got to look out for 100 uh ben i'm just curious uh where are most of your clients based in in terms of because they're mostly video production companies right those are your clients right majority uh here in north america us and canada aada a lot from toronto or um a few a few actually i don't know if we currently do but in the past we've definitely had a few from toronto i saw he has viva media oh okay viva was uh was past guest oh no way i don't think they're a client of ours anymore but we did work with them for a little while oh okay matt what happened you gotta you gotta start using ben again If he's listening to this.

We'll send him the episode right after. I guess for those that have made it to this point, Ben, do you want to let them know where to go and how to get in touch with you? Sure. We're just at editcrew.com. If you're curious to know more about what we do, the website will direct you towards what to do if that's your thing. Otherwise, if you just want to say hey or whatever, you can always shoot me an email. I'm ben at editcrew.com. Feel free to introduce yourself and say what's up. Nice. One last thing I also wanted to ask, if there's any like important like business advice that you would like to put out there, like by all means, like go for it.

Sure. I think specifically with a lot of video production companies, because I've had the pleasure of talking to like hundreds of them on sales calls throughout the past few years. I think a big hurdle I see with a lot of them is just not making the time for growth. Like a lot of people say that it's in their plans to grow, or I really want to grow and do this and that. And, you know, but but none of them are making time for it, like they don't actually have a process for growth. So I would say if you want to grow, definitely set aside time in your week to reach out for new business and things like that. Because it has to be a built in process of your business. If you're just relying on only word of mouth forever, then you know, if you have a really robust referral base that can work, but usually only at scale, or if you're a larger company, so

I would say don't be afraid to really carve out the time for that. And like outsource everything else, or get everything else off your plate, that's not growing the business if that is your main goal. For a lot of people that's editing or maybe it's you want to hire someone who can shoot or be on set to produce or whatever. So yeah, that would be my main thing. Love it. My mentor told me something really interesting this week or last week. He told me that your business is always at either one of two stages. It's either growing or it's dying. That is so true. It's never in the middle. It's like a piece of advice that just clicks in. And I think the way you mentioned it, Ben, you have to schedule in growth. You have to, you have to, you have to schedule in the time

to actually like make the business work. Like, yeah, you can schedule time for the business, but like, what does that mean necessarily? Right. Uh, it was like, um, uh, which author was it, uh, that had that, this mantra where like every single day he sits down and writes 50 pages, no matter what. Stephen King. Yeah. Stephen King. Yeah. No matter what he sits down and writes 50 pages so that he's always progressing forward, no matter what it is. Whereas there are other authors that just wait for inspiration.

Or it's like, as a business owner, you have to schedule in the growth. You can't just wait for it to just happen. You have to put in the time. Someone tell that to J.R.R. Martin. Well, that's where those two debate between them. There was a famous interview between the two. And then George R.R. Martin was just like,

I just need to ask you, how the hell do you write so many goddamn books? He was asking him that. And it was just a very funny conversation to see between the two authors. So if you've never seen it, check it out. Well, Ben, thank you so much for coming on. Good episode. I liked it.

I like what you're doing. It's very interesting. Thanks. I appreciate it. Definitely something that's needed for this interesting. Thanks. I appreciate it. Definitely something that's needed for this industry. You know, someone, someone there to help, help everyone in a way, right? Yeah. And I'm honored to have been asked on your podcast. This is my first ever podcast appearance. So I hope I didn't bomb too hard. Oh, wow.

First of many. Yeah. I'll, I'll credit it all to you. All right. Take care, Ben. Thanks, Ben. Cool. Bye guys. Thanks.