How did you get started?
Yeah.
So the way I got started was in the fall of 22, we were a generalist marketing
agency, actually doing a lot of recruitment marketing work at the time,
which is where you help employers tell their story through social media
and other types of media.
So we'd done a lot of video at that point, but all, you know, traditional
video shoots where you go on site and you capture interviews and things like that.
We had a client from LA approach us and say, well, we want to do video, but we
don't want to pay the big ticket price of having you fly out here and do a
shoot in person.
And so we thought, well, why don't if we just did a shoot remotely using a
tool we use called Riverside, we just come across it.
It's a podcasting platform, but we thought, what if we could use it for recording?
We did the shoot, took 30 minutes, asked a few questions.
He responded.
We recorded all of it and we added that into shorts.
His team posted it to Instagram and his views on videos went from an average
of about a hundred views to when people started seeing his face on the Instagram
profile in these videos, a thousand views to 5,000 views a piece in that range.
And it got me realizing like he's probably not the only entrepreneur who
doesn't have time to do video, doesn't have the budget for these big shoots,
doesn't want to do a script, just needs somebody to make time in his calendar,
ask him a few questions and then turn that into content.
And that was the start of Dialogue Video Marketing.
I love that.
And that was, as I mentioned before, I feel like that's genius because
everyone's on their computer all the time.
As you just heard, I'm listening to music and writing and making videos myself.
And I tell you that's, that's pretty much what we sit in or in front of our
telephones, there's one thing that you mentioned regarding viewers and I cannot,
I don't think I'd be doing my job to actually just allow the audience to
hear the word viewers.
What does that mean to people nowadays?
Because it pretty much, it was like a yellow pages or a go to my website,
but what does it mean to have viewers and to increase viewers?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I've never been asked that question, but viewers, when I talk about viewers,
I'm talking about your audience or your following, which is kind of a unique
thing we have in this day and age because of social media, you no longer have to go
through TV stations or ad agencies or, you know, even the yellow pages and pay a lot
of money to get a couple of people to see your ad and maybe one or two people to take
action.
You can now have a direct relationship with your buyers through your content you
put out.
And video is extremely important for that because it is the, it's called the king of
content for a reason.
It allows you to establish a connection with your audience that doesn't exist in any
other format.
And so when I say viewers, these are people that are following you directly,
learning from you directly.
This is your opportunity to teach them a lot of times as professional service
providers.
We are onboarding clients that sometimes we think, man, I wish they knew more about
XYZ in my business.
They would make for a better client.
Well, guess what video content is?
It's a way for you to basically create an entire, you know, client education program
for free that creates better clients.
You could argue for you if you do it well.
So that's what viewers are.
They're people that are learning from you, building that trust in you as a trusted
provider, service provider.
And ultimately, you're building those touch points with them over time, those video
at a time so that one day they go, you know what, I'm ready to do business with this
person.
And it happens to me and it happens to our clients all the time has had a client
last week, new client, started working, did her, you know, we'll start working with
her a little bit in February, I believe of this year.
Well, how many months is that?
It's now October, eight months, eight months to decide to work with us.
And that's because, you know, when you work in a professional services, that these
are expensive, high stakes decisions people are making.
So why not get them to know I can trust you over time?
And keep that relationship going with regular content.
We're gonna have viewers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you know, that that that phrase of no like interest you, it doesn't if and you
please correct me, it doesn't take just one video.
No, never rare.
It could happen, right?
It's like, well, if you if you try anything one time, good things could happen, right?
If you if you go and try out for something for the first time, you know, you're going
to get a spot on the team without any practice.
It is possible.
But is it realistic?
No, it's not.
Yes.
And I think the key word, too, is trust you, right?
That one video could attract you.
But it doesn't necessarily, you know, make that that into all these people that you
need to actually have a thriving, successful business and trust you long term.
It's probably just maybe that immediate.
And so when it comes to doing videos and doing it alone, what tips do you have for someone
who is attempting to do it without you?
Yeah.
So I call it the content buddy system.
Essentially, the content buddy system is this idea where, you know, you find a buddy,
colleague, friend, family member, whoever you say, hey, can we get on a call once a
week, every other week, once a month, record the call, ask each other questions about our
businesses and use that footage for content.
Even if you don't even use the video, you've got content you can use for LinkedIn posts
or blog posts or an email, maybe to your list.
So that's the easy way to do it.
I advise people to find a buddy and interview each other.
You don't even need to work with us to do that.
Now, there's some nuance to that, right?
And we've we've basically taken the content buddy system and we've taken the content
buddy system and we've productized it in our business.
It's we have a professional interviewer and who knows how to frame you and do certain
things and make you feel safe and make you feel comfortable and make you feel like you
can really be in the flow so you can share your genius.
But you don't need all that to get started.
Ultimately, you just need somebody to ask a few questions on video and you do that
regularly enough and you get in the habit of that.
You've got a decent content plan to start.
And that's it's so social media and the world of the Internet will get you to believe you
have to be overly exaggerated.
So, audience, if you just heard him, he said, find a buddy and have a conversation.
You don't need to, you know, open up doors or, you know, do a flip or jump on the bed
in order to catch attention.
It's merely just a conversation.
And so when that conversation does happen and that that that content is created, is
it to put it on all social media platforms or is there just a specific place that you
would recommend someone to start?
Yeah.
So my audience is B2B founders and the like, you know, six figure founders, seven figure
plus.
And so I'll speak to what I know what they need to be doing.
And that is primarily LinkedIn because that's where anybody in B2B is.
And it's an extremely fast growing platform.
It grew by over double digits.
I think the last two years in terms of the user base, they're now at a billion users
worldwide.
That's about one in eight people in the world have a LinkedIn profile.
So it's the place to be if you're in B2B.
You can read in B2C.
There's plenty of other platforms, but LinkedIn is the place to be to put this content.
And to add to that, please explain to them what B2B is.
And yeah, business to business.
So this is if you're selling a professional service to other services or for example,
an HVAC company would be B2C because you're selling to the end user, business to customer.
B2B would be if you were selling parts to the HVAC company.
Okay.
Thank you so much because I tell you for entrepreneurs like myself or anyone else that's
watching that has this grand big audacious idea and it's like, hey, let's learn some
language or some lingo here to sound a little bit more knowledgeable and important per se.
These are some great things because also a lot of people go on YouTube to check that
out.
Are you on YouTube as well?
I'm in all the places.
Okay.
For my methodology, and this is for all of our clients, if you create a short video,
guess what you can do with it.
You can put it everywhere, everywhere on every platform is video first.
Now Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, obviously, TikTok, obviously, and LinkedIn.
LinkedIn now has a video feed.
People aren't aware of that.
Many people aren't aware of that.
It's Instagram real style video feed.
So the nice thing is I create one piece of content for LinkedIn and then my team can
then distribute it across all the other platforms.
And that's the same thing we do for our clients.
Yes.
So in the video aspect of this and what you do for your clients, would you say that this
is the biggest challenge for entrepreneurs today?
The video part of it?
Yes.
Yeah.
Content.
The biggest challenge for entrepreneurs today.
Wow.
You know, in terms of creating content, certainly, I wouldn't call it the biggest challenge across
the board.
Okay.
What I would say is the biggest challenge for entrepreneurs today is to build that trust
quickly.
Okay.
Right.
Because what does everybody want?
Everybody wants sales, right?
Well, how do you get a sale, especially in B2B?
If someone's going to buy a $30,000 service, are they going to buy it from one time?
No, we talked about that.
They got to build that trust over time.
So how do you build that trust over time?
You bug them and say, Hey, do you want to buy?
Hey, do you want?
No, you give them value over time.
So you do content marketing and within that content marketing, that is post-production,
that is posting on LinkedIn or doing a newsletter or doing blog posts, all of these pieces of
content you're training your audience.
The single most difficult one to achieve is video.
If you're doing it the old way, the old way is you polish money and prep and scripts.
That's not the way you need to do video anymore.
In fact, I was having a conversation with a client this morning and he said somebody
DMed him on LinkedIn after he published.
This wasn't a video, but as an example of this, this idea of like polish versus unpolished,
he posted a really nice picture of himself, professional, professional picture, you know,
headshot and wrote a post to go with it.
And somebody DMed him and said, you know, I just skip over those.
That's not on brand for you.
I think if you just keep sharing real images and other real content, that's what I'm here
for because I really appreciate that perspective from you.
And that's the, that's where we're going to as a society.
We don't want polish because polish implies this veneer and this message and this,
this lack of real.
We all want real.
There's enough fake in the world, especially with AI content.
So that's where if you do video content and you do it regularly, you build that trust
factor over time and you earn that 30,000 plus dollars sale as a, as a professional
service provider or any other B2B business.
And what you just said, I'd love to, for you to reiterate, um, the, the standstill,
the polished look versus someone being authentic and genuine is really what
people are looking for.
Because as, as I have stated here on this show, I want to know the people behind the
website, right?
Because you're very polished.
All websites are very polished.
So I believe that people have that same desire is to really know the person behind
the business as well.
So that polished look is not as desirable as we used to think it was.
Right?
Correct.
There's a time and place for it.
No doubt.
You want your president to show up with pomp and regalia to the podium to make a speech.
We all want that.
It'd be weird if he showed up in a sweatshirt and he's like, Hey guys, this is, you know,
let's just talk.
It would be weird.
There are situations for that, uh, that call for that, but more and more that is less
relevant because we associate pomp and circumstance and polish with fake.
Yeah.
So if you want to connect with your audience, you got to ditch that polish.
Not every time there's very unique circumstances when it's real and good, but you want to
ditch as much of that as possible.
If you really want to connect with your audience and you speak about helping businesses that
are six figure, seven figure in my mind, right.
And maybe in the audience's mind, you would think that they often have to be polished.
So the content in which you help them create is pretty much authentic and organic and genuine
as anything else.
Correct?
Yeah, absolutely.
We're just using their cell phones to do these recordings.
We don't do have one client locally.
Every other client is remote.
And so we just use their cell phone selfie camera to shoot these videos.
We get 4k footage and then we edit it.
And, uh, we might add a little bit of B roll, which is that, you know, when someone's
talking, it switches to that, you know, some other footage happening, switches back to
them talking that kind of footage.
Uh, we had captions, we had any kind of animations and sound effects and music if needed,
but ultimately the video is just them sharing value.
That's the core of what people want is value.
That's real.
That's actionable, not hoity toity ideas with this polished veneer.
Yes.
And I think that it's, uh, for myself, when I started video and you would get the,
the average or the other videos that were polished were because they had people doing
video outside for them, right?
It's not the cell phone.
And I've heard this thing and maybe other people have is that the platforms are now
being able to tell if these videos have been, have gone through a ton of, um, editing,
right?
To a point where it's no longer authentic or genuine.
Is there some truth to that?
That's a great question.
I don't know anything about that, but I would not be surprised.
These algorithms are more and more increasingly getting stricter on the type of content they're
letting through for their audiences.
So I would not be surprised by that.
Yeah.
And I, and I, and interesting enough is when I posted something and I realized that I had
to edit it a whole bunch of times, I think I might've gotten maybe about 15 views versus
me just uploading something randomly with my eyes closed posting and ghosting.
And I feel like I got more views posting and ghosting than I did with me trying to tailor
it to the needs.
And I think that that's one thing, um, you know, we've talked about a lot of trust and,
and learning, having people to learn who you really truly are so they can trust you when
recommending your business or actually taking action to get the business is we, we really
need to start trusting individuals and making sure with whom we want to do business with
is very genuine and authentic, right?
Um, not much.
I won't say nothing in life is free, but not much is free.
And no one wants to just spend their money for something they could have done on their
own.
So I truly still find extreme value in what you do.
And I'm still often very surprised.
So when it comes to your business, what are your goals for the next six to 12 months in
your business?
Yeah.
Six to 12 months would be to double the size of the business, um, extract myself from a
lot of the operations right now.
We have about, oh, I want to say 12 clients, 10 clients.
We just onwarded a few, so I haven't done the reason, but, um, still a very small
agency, but growing.
Yeah.
And part of that growth is learning to extract myself from doing everything myself.
Yes.
Uh, and, and really finding the right team.
So even this morning I was emailing our newest producer, giving her some direction and
asking, are you okay doing this?
And, and then hired our newest editor a couple of weeks ago.
So we've got a team of editors, team of producers and, um, getting really good at, you
know, so we can scale, right?
So I'm the bottleneck for my business.
So the next six to 12 months is really getting the team in a place where they're ready.
Um, and, and able to handle more work so I can focus on sales and marketing, double
size the business.
Um, one of my other goals for next year, I haven't yet cemented it, but it's a fun
one.
It's, it's one I did for the first time for this last year, 2024.
One of the goals for 2024 was take five whole weeks of vacation, one week at a time.
And that was a good one.
Cause I, I realized I'd been working professionally since 2010 and I never
taken more than I think two weeks.
I don't think I've even ever took two weeks at a time, right?
Cause I worked corporate for eight years and then I went on my own in 2018.
But I realized my daughter was born in the fall of 23.
And I realized I took three weeks off and the world didn't explode.
And I was like, wait a second.
Why haven't I done this before?
This is ridiculous.
I shouldn't have to wait till I'm retired to take time off.
So my goal for 23 was five weeks.
So it'll be bigger goal for 24.
And with that, I'll also do as a side benefit is prove how well I've built my
team, if they can handle things without me.
So we'll see, let's see how that goes.
So a couple of things like that are goals.
Otherwise there's probably a couple others I'm going to be aiming for here.
It's, you know, it's goal setting time.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned into Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time
and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.