Pro Call: Business Coaching with Chris Do

What do you mean that's the bots? Okay. There we go.

I could follow those, the note taker box.

Okay. Oh, is that what that looks like? Okay. Alright. We have a question from NS Sto, new member, welcome Ernesto.

He says, I run a graphic design studio, Solo plus freelancers, but my dream job is creating original content, a dark satire series about consumer tech. I just took three months off because my design studio drove me to total burnout. In this new era, I'd like to scale my studio to just the right level to support my income needs while making time and space to relaunch my dream job. How do I create a sustainable balance between the two endeavors?

In Ernesto, Since you are new, please feel free to unmute and have a conversation with Chris.

Everyone. Thanks so much.

Hey. What's going on, Ernesto?

Okay. That was a lot of context. First of all, welcome to this group. We're gonna get through this part. There's a lot of, like, stuff before, and let's get to the crux of the question and the dilemma that you're facing right now. Can you rephrase that part of it and just zero in on question part of it?

Yeah. So the question is I'm trying to run both a graphic design business and make time and space for my original content series.

You know, right now, it's probably like an eighty twenty split or something, and I'm trying to be able to manage both of them.

There is kind of like this internal balance of how much time and energy I'm spending on each endeavor and I'm figuring that one out. But the part that is kind of more complicated for me is how I'm putting out external messaging about both these things.

It's totally different content for different audiences. It's basically graphic design services versus like dark satire or sci fi series.

And it's Ernesto, like May I just butt in Yeah. Go ahead. I think you're giving me more context.

Oh, okay. Sure. I'm looking for the dilemma. Where's the dilemma for you? Yeah. The dilemma is that I I don't know how to kind of grow both with an audience.

Right? Like, the like I'm trying to get clients for the graphic design business and I'm trying to like publish the content and grow an audience.

And so the external messaging and how I kind of put out into the world, like, hey, I'm doing these things, like, watch my thing or work with me.

That dilemma is kind of the part that's hard for me right now. Okay.

Yeah. And I'm just reentering kind of the sales game for the design studio.

So I'm, like, not even sure how to put out my messaging about. Yeah. This new era for my design studio.

So it sounds to me like you have a marketing communications problem?

Sure.

Is it something else?

I mean, there's definitely just like internally, I feel a little bit split in how I'm spending my kind of time and energy out to things.

That I feel like I'm kind of working on.

I don't know if there's any insight from you or anyone who's kind of had, like, business and then passion project and kind of managed both in your day to day.

But But, yeah, I guess, I'm I'm kind of like, I feel extra vulnerable right now since I've kind of been closed for a few months. As I go out into the world, like, I want to, like, be authentic about the things that I'm doing, but they feel kind of in conflict with each other and I don't know how to kind of, like, manifest both, I guess. Okay. Is the bigger challenge an external challenge or an internal challenge? I mean, the bigger challenge is the internal.

Okay. So that's what we wanna focus in. Yeah. Honestly. Yeah. Alright. Since your brand banking new here.

I want you to have a good experience. So I'm I'm being a little more reserved for all the old timers who are here. Like, Chris is gonna go eight in about two seconds, and I'm not. I'm not.

I didn't I'm not gonna go crazy. I did not wake up to juice violence this morning. Okay.

Everybody hears, like, on the edge of their seat, I think thinking he's gonna tear into this. I'm not everybody. I'm not. It'll be alright.

Alright? I see you smiling all of you who knows what's about to happen. Alright. The the way this works is best.

Have you ever worked with, like, a business coach before? Just curious. Yeah. I have. Yeah.

Okay. The way that you get more out of it is you you wanna keep your your answers as succinct as possible. So I'm gonna ask you to exercise this today. I'm gonna ask you a bunch of, like, probing questions and just give me the fastest possible answer.

Don't overthink it because it complicates things. Okay? Cool. Alright. So it's an internal conflict that you're having.

You're trying to run your design business, and you have a deep passion to make content, and we all have finite amount of time and resources and energy and all that kind of stuff. And so you're like, what do I do, Chris? Is that where we're at right now? Yeah.

Basically. Okay.

So does doing design work give you joy?

I'm kinda realizing it doesn't. I mean, there's some level of, like, client problem solving, but it's not like my creative spirit. Pardon? What's the l o t r?

What's the l o t? Wait. Phyllis, are you on not hot, Mike? Here. Alright. Let let's keep going here.

So I'm sorry about that. Say it one more time. Just super short, please. Yeah. It it doesn't really give me passion.

Just client problem solving does, but not, like, creative passion.

I get it. And so we're kinda in this weird space where The thing that we thought would give us a lot of fulfillment and joy, the thing that we could do men make money isn't. And therefore, we have to design another business for ourselves. Something that really gives us joy. And to be able to express ourselves without the input of clients is usually the dream of all creative people. So when you're making your content, of course, you're gonna feel really fulfilled. And if all of us could just do that, life would be fantastic.

So we have this one thing. It's called bills. And responsibilities, and we gotta deal with that. So it's constant juggle between these two.

Is that kind of where we're at with this? Yeah. Okay. See, I got it. Right?

I figured it out. Yeah. Alright. So what are we gonna do here? We could choose the a starve.

And just be passionate.

Not a great option.

Option number two, we could just lose our soul and just keep grinding away until we wake up one day and we're fifty years old and we wonder, like, David Byrne said, this is not my beautiful life. You know, this is not where we're supposed to be.

So what is the path in the middle? What do you think that is? I think you know what it is and I just need a little help from you to say it.

Yeah. I mean, I guess I see it as like a transition, like, right now, it's like an eighty twenty but my passion project gets some footing and can make some money.

But meanwhile, I gotta pay some bills. Yeah.

So the answer here is you gotta get your con your passion stuff, your content to make money for you to such a point in which it becomes a viable new future business for you. Yeah?

Mhmm. Okay. Now do you see a path forward where that passion project can actually make you money?

Not yet, but How about in a year?

Possibly. Like, Patreon level.

Okay.

Okay. And and it it is like a scripted dramatic thing that you're doing? Yeah.

And do you have a minimum viable product, something that you can create that you can get stuff going?

Yeah. Yeah. Is that going right now?

Yeah. I'm working on it.

Is it released or published yet?

No. I published some things years back.

This new era is not I'm I'm just kinda getting started on it. I see. Okay.

And ultimately looking forward now, Where was this where would this live? Where does it live on YouTube? Does it live on Vimeo? Where where does this thing live? Yeah, like Vimeo, a web property, and social snippets.

Okay. Do you imagine this getting lots of views?

Yes.

In your ideal world, how many views would it get?

Thousands.

I it's a little bit niche, but last time I did this, I ended up on good morning America.

With, like, the right press releases out.

So it's kind of like an oddity that might might have some viralness to it. It's kind of commenting on modern society like black mirror but funny -- k. -- that might have more legs. Okay.

So is your background in film?

No. It's in graphic design, but like yeah. Do you have credentials or things you've done in the film space, cinema space that would help you?

The last series that I did was live action. Yeah. This one's gonna be a little bit like AI generated.

Okay.

But your answer's no. Right?

No. I mean, I have like a network in the film industry.

Okay. You're, like, mostly self taught. This is what you want to do? Yeah. Yeah.

But the responsible part of use of the school study graphic design.

Basically. Yeah. It's kind of hilarious. Like, that was our backup plan. Most people, that's not the backup plan.

I love Yeah. Well, I mean, I thought it was Yeah. I I thought it was my passion. I thought graphic design was my passion, but I kinda realized that it's not. Mhmm. Okay. Wonderful.

Alright.

Okay. So essentially what you have to do is you have to do you're in this weird, no person's place like no man to land right now. You you have to show up and you have to grit your teeth and you gotta do the design work to get you some money.

And then every single possible free moment of your life you should be dedicating to their passion project. That's the only way this is gonna get done. But the problem with passion projects is because they're entirely self motivated, self funded, it can take a lot longer than a pro a project would if it were client motivated. You you understand what I'm saying here?

And so I I think that that you could wind up working on this for days, months and years and not actually release something. That's the danger that a lot of people fall into. I'm not saying that's you. But that's a danger of course.

Right? Mhmm. Okay. Yep. So are you disciplined enough to say, like, this is what it's going to be, come hell or high water.

I'm going to release this. And have a release schedule, I know how to promote it, I know how to talk about it, and you can do this.

Yes. I definitely am. Okay. So then I don't hear a problem. And so where's the problem?

The problem is kind of the fear of, like, this thing that's never made money for me versus this thing that has supported my family, you know, like, kind of looking at this thing that's never made money for me and thinking that that could support my family feels like really scary.

It's gonna be scary. Not gonna lie to you. Yeah. No guarantees. That's why there's these passion projects and that's why okay. Let's just let's zoom back out everybody. Let's zoom way way way back out.

Most of us live in a very rare and privileged space where we get to do something that resembles fun, where we're not actually working out in the sun, sweating, breaking her backs, doing something.

Most of America, most of the world, they don't have that kind of luxury. They show up every single day. They they sit in an hour and a half's worth of traffic. To go to a job they don't like, to do something that they lose their soul in, and then they go in home and they do that again and again five days a week. And that's why they live for the weekend. And Sunday nights, they they dread going back to work on Monday, but they do this for not months, but they do this for years.

So we're already in a pretty good place, everybody. We get to do something that resembles joy. Now for some of us, maybe we picked the wrong thing and we're gonna we're going to course correct, and that's okay. Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out what works for us. So there's a couple things that you can do. Number one, what I would do is that you suggest that you you build your design business and align it towards maybe doing the grossest thing that you can, but at least it makes you the most amount of money so that you have more free time.

Right. Just one of these things, like, Tim Robbins, one of my favorite films is Shawshank redemption. Right? Tim Robbins plays his character that was wrongfully imprisoned and it seems like the entire system was against them.

And even the person who actually killed his wife was in prison, but never confessed to the crime, something happened to him too. The warden was against him. Right? And every single day in prison, he would go into his cell, and he would take a spoonful of dirt out of the wall, until eventually years later, he dug a tunnel out.

That's you.

So Yep. You're Tim Robbins in Shawshank right now.

You know? And he tells Morgan Freeman, he gives him, like, a a note or a message and says, When I'm gone, this is where you'll come see me like seaside Bay or whatever it is. And Morgan Freeman's like ain't gonna happen, but he underestimates the fortitude and will of Tim Robbins's character.

And not only that, Tim did some crazy things, you know, along the way, but that's kinda like what you have to do.

You gotta show up. You gotta do the thing that you don't like to do until you get to do the thing that you want to do.

Yeah. And this is where you gotta just gotta put a big boy pants and they're like, it sucks. I gotta do it. I gotta responsibilities.

Right? Mhmm. Mhmm. Unless you wanna live in a cardboard box, in case the scenery on your Zoom background will look very unique on a future protocol. So we can't do that. We gotta go and do it. So I I don't know where where the conflict is then.

Yeah. I mean, it's scary. Get it.

I get it. Yeah. There's a known path forward. I would suggest you do something a little different, but I think you know what you wanna do, so I don't wanna get in there and like, oh, you should do this instead.

Well, how I mean, how do you mean? What would be your suggestion?

Okay. Your business model is built on a very old business concept. And most of the designers and directors I came up with in the nineties and the two thousands had the exact same dream that you have, which is I'm a writer. I'm going to produce serialized content, and the world's gonna love me. And eventually, I'm gonna win an Academy Award, baby. And I'll be at the podium saying, thank you, mom. Thank you for to my agent.

And then those dreams are just crushed. And I'll tell you why. Because Hollywood has only so many avenues for you to put content out there, and there are way more supply of people who want to make that than the number of opportunities.

And so it requires a combination of good luck good network and just a certain amount of talent and ambition and drive, and they pretty much just do this until they're broke.

Some of them make it and I know some of them who who have made it will actually produce feature films and I'm like, wow, it's pretty cool but I know, like, one person who's done it. I'll tell you a thousand people who haven't been able to do it. Now there are other avenues for you, What I would strongly suggest that you do is to create content for today's market to get millions of views in a couple days and not thousands of views over the lifetime of a product. You can get people to support you via Patreon, but that's a lot of work in itself. And if people here who have Patreon accounts, it's like, now you have a different master. It's not one client. You have a thousand clients who are like, here's twelve bucks every month.

Mhmm. And then you gotta keep doing stuff right. And eventually, that'll burn you out too. Right? Right. So there's a lot of ways to make money modern world that you can grow an audience, anybody who has an audience, will be able to leverage that for money. Not today, but they will eventually win their audience is big enough and when it's deep enough.

Mhmm. And if you can create content, I'll I'll give you guys some some stats because I was hanging out with this guy, who manages a bunch of independent content creator's careers and he was telling me how the market is shifting. Alright, everybody? So this applies to everybody who's listening here. He says that TikTok has done something recently, and they're changing their their monetization model.

He said they used to pay you about two cents per thousand view c p m.

They would pay you about two cents, per thousand views. And they recently changed it to fifty cents to a dollar per thousand views. If you're doing the math, that's about twenty five to fifty times what they used to pay. And and you're like, what what? And you know that videos on TikTok can get ten million views in one night.

So that would instantly make it like ten grand or whatever the math is. Right. And they're only giving people who make content longer than one minute. Because TikToks realize they have a problem. They need advertisers, and advertisers don't want to support dancing videos. They want to support educational content.

So in order for them to lure more creators to release their content in there, they have to attract the ones that wanna teach for longer than a minute, and they're going to reward those types of people.

Okay? Right. Just one of them. Right? Now you do you know a content credit called David Dobrich?

No. Okay. He's he's like a big YouTuber or was a big YouTuber, millions of subscribers, And David Dobrich was seen, like, all over the internet when he launched just, like, I think a pizza restaurant, and there were lines down the street.

But David Dobrich has done some shady things as what the kids tell me. And so he, all of a sudden, it just disappears off all social media. And he reemerges of all places on Snapchat. Just by a show of hands, how many people here use Snapchat?

K. I like two people, maybe. Understood, kinda. Yeah. I don't know anybody that really uses Snapchat except for people who work there, and they barely even use it too.

Alright. So David Dobrich stops making content, and he goes into Snapchat and he starts to make content. And he releases two to three hundred pieces of content a day.

Eric, how do you even make two to three hundred pieces of content a day? Well, David's the kind of guy where people are interested in every little thing he does. So he takes a picture of what he's eating, He's at the gym. He's at the beach. Yeah. He just takes a picture of a flower. He's just doing whatever.

Three hundred pieces of content a day. And because Snap has, for whatever reason, a really robust ad revenue network, they may have cut a special deal with him. But I'm gonna ask you this question, Ernesto.

How much money do you think David Dobrich makes a day?

No idea.

I guess. Ten thousand. Ten thousand would be a lot of money.

He makes, like, eighty five thousand dollars a day.

God. Wow.

For doing stupid little things, and it's incredible.

I can't even imagine anybody that I know that makes ninety thousand dollars a day. Yeah. People will be thrilled to make that a year, and this kid is making it on day.

Mhmm. Okay. So he he goes out and tell me he goes, Chris, have you ever thought about creating courses on LinkedIn? I'm like, yeah, I thought about it.

They've approached me. He goes, well, you know, they're trying to get people to teach on there. I'm like, I know. I know.

They sent me a contract. So LinkedIn is trying to create business content. That is a minute long in a bunch of, like, one minute long episodes, and I know people have done it. Right?

And he says that he one of his clients has something like three hundred sixty thousand views. That's a lot of views.

Not in YouTube world. Like, if I were to have a YouTube video that had three hundred sixty thousand views, I might make five grand, maybe.

Right? So he asked me how much money you think this course creator made having three hundred sixty thousand views on LinkedIn. I'm like, dude. I don't twelve grand.

Again, how much money do you think he made or she made making this course for LinkedIn? What do you think?

Yeah. I may never think, like, full grand. Yeah. Me too. Right? It's, like, it's not a lot of views. You made two hundred and forty thousand dollars.

Wow. In six months.

Wow. So I think what you're doing is you're you're pulling up the playbook, like, it was, like, You know what? It almost feels like you were, like, walking in your backyard and you dug up something like a time capsule and you dust it off the box you open it up and it's from, like, early two thousands and it was a playbook on how to make it as a filmmaker. And, yeah, this is a really good plan. I'm gonna follow this plan. Yep.

It's an old playbook. Yeah. That's yeah. I really appreciate you throwing off my playbook.

I wish there any avenue. Oh, go ahead. I would love for you to think about serialized content that's a minute and a half long that is so hooky that each one is, like, a cliffhanger, and you can produce this once a week. That's okay.

Yeah. You know? So you have to set it up differently. So that's one model. And there's a podcast that and I'm just I don't know why I can never remember the guy's name.

I interviewed somebody who's produced three hundred films.

And he said he's only lost money in one project, and that's because those were thieves. They took the money he ran. And there's a podcast, and he talks about the business model of Hollywood and how to make films especially how to get distribution through through Netflix and the kind of money that you can make. So I see two viable alternatives for you. One is to make short form content that's designed for social for massive sharing, which you probably can make. And number two is to figure out a business model where you're making films at net six wants to buy. Preferably documentary films because those are a little bit easier to make than than fiction that you you're going to write.

Mhmm. Requires too much production. Right?

So I just want you to think about that because he said that there are directors now who can make nine, ten million dollars a year as a, like, a living wage in in terms of, like, having a steady stream of income just making documentary films for Netflix.

Now there, there are more buyers. In Hollywood, there are fewer buyers. You have Netflix. You have Amazon.

You have who you have a bunch of these people trying to buy content. Now what this is all saying is when there's a marketplace that's hungry for content, so for social, it'll be Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat, wherever else they they want content. If you're a content creator, they're going to be fighting for you because I think they've realized the same thing.

In three to five years, there will be one person who owns most of the eyeballs, and they don't wanna be number two, three, or four, or five. Mhmm. So they're willing to push the put their money in to buy the content creators, to get the audience, to create the habits that then become almost unbreakable.

Now Facebook had a stranglehold on this. YouTube used to have a stranglehold on this on the video content and all of a sudden, the game has changed.

So them fighting each other these three or four players that are fighting each other for your content puts you in a good position.

Right. Now these windows of opportunity do not last forever because once they win the war, they go right back to, like, give me two cents per thousand views. Mhmm.

Mhmm. So recalibrate, maybe pause for a second, think, how do I just adapt my idea and production level so that it's really shareable for social, but I gotta keep up with a certain amount of content being released every single week or month or whatever it is, whatever the cadence is.

Right. And put your energy towards that.

Yeah, I just have one closing question about that serialized content avenue. Do you have like further resources that you might recommend to learn more about that?

That's too broad of a question. What do you mean? Okay. Sure. Like you know, you kind of I guess, like, social strategy for, like, how to make it on TikTok kinda thing.

Like how to create serialized content that really clicks with people?

That is a deep dive into YouTube land.

Sure. Start with that. Just start asking YouTube. I don't have a resource off the top of my head.

There are many conflicting or maybe not conflicting, but there's many ideas and opinions about how to do that. Sure. Okay. So go down that rabbit hole on YouTube.

Just search that stuff like you wanna make. How to, like, grow your audience in TikTok or Instagram, whatever the platform of choice, and add the variable what it is that you wanna create. And I'm sure you're gonna see an abundance of content out there.

Then go to the deep dive and then come back and ask another question. Okay? Sounds great. Alright. Thank you so much, Chris. My pleasure. Okay.

Streak, go. Did you have a follow-up that had to do with this question?

Yes. I did. So I guess Mike question for a follow-up is is this something that everybody should be considering because like as you mentioned, there is a time in place an opportunity that's happening right now, but then me as an entrepreneur and going down multiple rabbit holes with you on this, Chris, it's like does this mean that we're chasing a new shiny objects and opportunity that's out there?

Yes and no. For Nesto, I think he has no choice.

His soul is like, I need to do this, and I'm almost willing to go into financial ruin to do it. So you can't stop the guy so he needs to just do it. Now for some of you, it's like, I'm kinda bored with my business. Let me chase the next thing. Maybe I would caution you against that and ask you, like, are you sure you're that committed?

Are you sure you have an internal crisis right now or it's just like a crisis of boredom and chasing things? And it's hard to say whether you're just having shiny object syndrome, or you're actually like, yeah, this is me being a first mover into something.

Now everybody who's listening to this. Right? If you create a vertical video, you could release it on multiple networks. You don't have to bank on TikTok saving your butt or Instagram, Reels, or YouTube shorts or any other platform.

So this is the best part of it is For the first time, I think we can come up with a universal format, and we can we can release on multiple platforms. Now if that's your strategy, you have to make sure What is the common denominator between all of these? And you're gonna see that it's usually a minute.

That's that's the common denominator. So I think TikTok is because they're vertical video only platform, they want you to release content that's longer because they're trying to steal YouTube's creators.

And for whatever reason YouTube and unless Streegel's gonna tell me like they just changed it, Chris, the videos have to be under one minute.

Because YouTube clearly is saying, we want long form and we want short form, but if it's long form, it doesn't look like a short. It doesn't look like a vertical.

And so that's the dilemma right now.

Alright? Now here's some good news for some of you, and I just found out about this recently. I was watching a video on YouTube yesterday.

The the Lumix s s mark two, I think or five s mark two Something like that. It shoots I I forget overscan or or whatever. It shoots a square video. Okay?

It's kinda weird because then you can crop it, the top and the bottom and release a wide screen format video, or you can crop it in the center and you create a vertical video. And it's only full frame camera that can do this, and it's really weird that it can do this for two thousand dollars. So that means you can shoot it for In theory, it's a six k camera. You can shoot it for Netflix and you can also shoot it for TikTok without having to go like this every time.

I was chatting with my friend Dave The Cadagie.

And he was telling me, this sucks because when you shoot a vertical video, it's unusable as a horizontal video.

And if you shoot a horizontal video and you're trying to crop there's no more head space into the video, looks like it's really tight into a person's face.

So you you bet that I'm going to be buying one of these cameras or getting one of them from Lumex pretty soon.

Because that's usually what Moe and team say, like, Chris, you need to stand farther back because we can't do anything. It's just too tight to your face.

Right? So some things that you might want to think about there. Alright. So if you can today and your content creator and you really wanna do this, and this has been your jam, and you're just looking for a new model that allows you to do this mid to mid to make content and make money. This is a pretty viable way to do it.

Now on YouTube alone, now we've been doing this for a long time, like, what is it, two thousand? We're coming up on ten years on YouTube. Right? And we make somewhere between two to three hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year just on AdSense revenue.

And we're not even the rich people who do this because there are other people who do this with a very specific niche that pays them way more than us. Like Hector Garcia is one of them. He has a fraction of our audience. He has a fraction of views, but his CPM, like, what YouTube pays them is way more than what they pay us.

Because he makes content for people who want to learn finance.

Advertisers pay a lot for that.

So there's a lot of ways here for you to go make a buck and I think it's kind of cool that we live in a time and place where these options are even available to us.

And with all these AI tools to help you write, to do voice, to build whole scenes for you, it's just your ideas now. Or maybe your curation or your taste level or something so so Drigo where do you see potential downfall for entrepreneurs who are gonna make content and see this as the next, like, gold rush.

I don't know if I see downfalls, but I know that I've been guilty in the past of popping into one of these calls here in a a great idea and then starting to pivot my business. But then I've also learned that building a great business doesn't happen overnight. It takes times and you have to constantly be working on something. So just more of like some time experienced in the past a little, you know, alarm went off from my head of like, hey, why are you not making one minute videos on LinkedIn on how to shoot, you know, video podcasts at home.

So it's just like something that has sparked an ID. Me, but then I was thinking about everyone else that's in this group right here is talented or what they do. So you know, Ernesta could be doing a quick course on graphic designer courses or the ghetto country grandmother or grandmother could be doing, you know, how to brand yourself one minute courses. So for me, it was just something that everybody in this group has that skill or knowledge that they're good enough that they could be making something, but they also, you know, wouldn't advise people to spear off their current path of business?

You know what I wanna do? I'm a take a quick poll here.

I want everyone who currently has at least published one video anywhere on social media not a dancing video, but a a piece of content where you actually try to help people learn something. I want you to raise your hand right now. Not the not the emoji ones. Like, the ones where you can actually raise your hand to speak, where is that?

Because I wanna I wanna scan through three three pages here. There we go. Everybody's got one of those icons up. Perfect.

Just keep those icons up. I'll give it, like, thirty more seconds. Thank you everybody. I have an idea for all of you.

I just want I just wanna see how many of us are into this. Okay? Nathan, okay, Ayesha.

There's a bunch of people. Oh my god. Okay. This is telling you something. And then there's a bunch of people who have not raised their hand at all, which scares me.

Zzan, what's going on with you? Come on. Sid, come on. You guys have not released a video?

I'm shocked.

You have. Haven't you? At least one video? The threshold's pretty low here.

No, okay. Alright, Jed, I see you. Okay. Carrie, I see you, Soren. Alright. Alright. So page one is full of everyone who's raised their hands.

This is perfect. Okay. Just leave them there for a second here. Alright.

Let's get back into this. Okay. If you've released a video that you're like, it didn't do well. There's a couple things that we're gonna do here.

So I just wanna look at all of you right now. And I'm gonna apply a little heat to all of you who have not yet to raise their hand. Let's get on this plan. Okay?

Everybody. Okay. Here we go. If you release the video, what you should do is you should turn that video into a transcript because we need to see the words.

Okay? This is for everybody who who's done a speaking head video. Okay? And you can use this thing called clasp.

I'll I'll I'll put it down, or is it called GLasp? I think it's called GLasp.

And it's a plug in.

Glass over clasp. Which one? Glass. What's a g? Okay. G. Okay. There it is. So everybody right now just search on the Internet.

Glass plug in and you can get it for Chrome or Safari.

So basically any YouTube video that you've published it will pull the transcript from it. So I'm gonna show you just the laziest thing that you could do that we're gonna try this as an experiment. And if you're willing to do this with me, we want to see how well you all do.

Okay.

So It is free. The plugin is free. It doesn't cost any money. Some of these other plugins cost money.

So what you do is you just watch your YouTube video And then it doesn't have to be yours even. This is the best part of it. You just watch a YouTube video. You don't have to watch it, just go to the URL and glass will appear there and it'll it'll say generate generate transcript.

Okay? And it'll just generate the transcript for you and just like in a second it'll do it. It's amazing.

And then what you do is you select and copy all that text and you put it into a text document just to hold it.

Alright? So you have the full text now. Now the world is gonna open up for you. K. There's a couple things we're gonna go through and I'm just gonna talk through it Actually, it'd be better if I just share my screen. Let's do that.

Okay? You guys okay if we just take a detour here because a third of you raised your hands. Okay. And I'm gonna show you what I'm doing, and maybe it'll give you some ideas.

And I hope to inspire you to try this at least. Maybe you don't have to release a video or anything, but just right. Let me just log in and get all my passwords out of the way so that so that you all can't hack my account right now.

Alright. I'm gonna go share my screen. Sorry. This is, like, way nerdy and then we usually do everybody?

Where's my YouTube?

Oh my gosh.

There it is.

Alright. You guys are seeing my YouTube studio dashboard. Right?

Somebody confirm with an audio before I do this?

Yeah. Yes. Beautiful. Okay. This is what I'm doing all the time. And Drigo knows that he's gonna roll his eyes in a second.

I go to content.

Come on content.

Okay. And I'm just looking at videos that are not performing, so I look at my view count here where if it's been out and it's public and it's underperforming where I have to first believe it's a really good video for me to, like, start working on this. Okay? And so there's a video here where It's doing really well.

Like, this one here, the secret to great design. So this one has ninety thousand views, so I'm gonna click on this. I'm gonna click on the analytics. I'm gonna show you what I look at.

Okay?

And so you can see right now this video is estimated to make us four hundred and forty one dollars.

And so Julio was, like, I made, like, forty dollars or something last month or whatever. We get it. We're gonna get there. Okay?

It has ninety thousand views, and it's telling me that it's outperforming our other videos because our other videos usually get about twenty thousand views for the same amount of time. And it's really great when you start creating enough content that YouTube analytics will start comparing your videos to your other videos, which is awesome. This is only comparison you should be looking at, not comparing yourself to mister b's. So it's like four point six times higher than usual.

That's a really good thing. But the thing I care most about is this. I go to reach and I click on this thing called impressions and click through rate. Okay?

Now this will this is fairly typical of any video that's that gets dropped on your channel. Some percentage of your audience who follows you will see the video. Just a some percent. It's not a hundred percent.

It's actually a small percent. So you're gonna get this initial spike. It doesn't matter if your video's crappy if the thumbnail's bad and then the titles back because they subscribed to your channel and you're gonna get a boost. What's really important is the first twenty four forty eight hours like this this period here.

So if you see it go up and you see it drop down massively, we got a problem. Houston, we have a problem. So you're gonna see this thing constantly happening up and down up and down as it's trying to find audience. Right?

Now you'll see that it had a high point of four point four percent click through rate. What this means is out of every one hundred people, that YouTube shows this thumbnail and this title to, four and a half people basically clicked on it. It doesn't mean they watched it for very long, but at least they clicked on it, and this is the first indicator that this video is gonna work or not work. But you can see where it's ending up now, it's two point nine percent.

So that's a full one percent down from where it was. Now ideally, what we try to do is get this number higher, but for our channel, four point four percent is pretty good. If you're mister BC, he'd probably kill himself with four point four percent. His videos are designed to get like sixty or seventy percent click through rate.

And that's why he's so successful. This is the one metric you need to really pay attention to which is under reach and impressions can click through. Right? This video I'm gonna leave alone, but let's say it was in the twos, the two percent, which is a terrible number, and no one's gone this video will never go anywhere if it stays in the two percent.

Okay. There's another one here when we go to overview, I must scroll down, hopefully it works, because sometimes This is important here. So under the overview tab, if you scroll all the way at the bottom, you're gonna see something called the retention graph. This is the second most statistic for you to look at. Right? You can see the very beginning of the people who clicked through how many people stayed through within, say, thirty seconds. So it says twenty six seconds.

I have about seventy seventy percent retention means I've already lost thirty percent of my audience within the first thirty seconds.

What is this telling all of you?

Make the first thirty seconds really good. Skip all the nonsense, the long intros, the meandering, things unless you're really good at creating a a long playful tease.

So this is the death part right here because within the first thirty seconds, this could be thirty percent of your audience left.

So what you wanna see is you wanna see high retention for a long period of time, and you're looking for something else, you're looking for a spike. Every once in a while, you'll see this graph and it'll go up and down, like there's a heartbeat going on there.

So you're asking yourself, well, how could it go up? It can only go down. Like, how does your audience stay for longer? Well, what happens is they rewind it Every time they rewind it, this bumps up.

This is an important thing to pay attention to everybody because if you see a spike and I don't know which one has a spike, I can try to find one to show you. Okay? Let me try and find one. Probably one with a lot of views.

Let me try this one here. This one should work.

Okay. So, if I scroll all the way, nope, not this one.

Maybe this one. Come on, demo, please work for me.

No.

Probably a more complicated video.

Maybe I'll try branding.

Fingers crossed. Okay. Here we go. Not a great bump, but there's a bump here. You'll see, first of all, super high retention.

Right? So it is not tapering off yet, so we're still at seventy five percent within a minute, and we don't see a dramatic cliff dive here, which is what we're trying to avoid. So you get to this part and you'll see that it goes back up.

Okay. This is saying that somebody's rewinding this. So this is very valuable data, and this is what advertisers paid careful attention to when they're making ads. So Ernesto, if you're making a short form video and and people are watching it and they're watching a lot of this part, ask yourself why are they watching this part? So if you were to park your timeline here and hit play, something will will happen here that they need more information on we find that almost always it's a dense piece of information and they're rewinding and rewatching that. Or if the the the person in the video myself or my guest is saying something pro found, they rewind this part, and they listen to it again.

So you're probably thinking, Chris, why don't you just put really dense information throughout all of your video and that'll work. I don't know why I don't do that. Maybe it'll be too boring.

But usually, if I draw a graph or I bring up a a piece of data or framework, that's almost always where they rewind.

It's kind of important to keep in mind. Okay? I was talking to an ad team that was monitoring their YouTube analytics.

And they told me because they they make car commercials They found this anomaly where every time there's a car crash, people would watch that part. You know what they did?

They just put together montage of car crashes.

And the video went through the roof.

People like to see car crashes.

So pay attention to your analytic just two things you need to really pay attention to. Okay? So you go into your reach and you look at your impressions since this video has been out for a couple years. It's all over the place.

I don't know why it dips here and why it goes back up. Who knows? Maybe Marty's in the news. Something's happening, and and that's why it's getting searched or branding becomes hot for a second.

You'll also see here at the high point. I can't zoom in on it, but somewhere around here goes really high.

Right there. Seven percent.

So there's a little spike. So you kind of have to just pay attention to this. Alright? Now let's go and find an underperforming video. So I'm gonna go back and just leave this alone.

No.

What am I doing here?

Just quickly reset here.

Drigo, how do I get it not to be on views anymore?

Somewhat messed this up. Anyways, I'm gonna find a video that doesn't have a lot of views. Apparently, there's a lot of videos that have not even been released yet. Look at all those videos. My goodness.

It doesn't matter. Let me just find one here. Let's say I go to this video here.

Alright.

And I'm gonna go this video link here.

Okay. You see this Glass icon right here, transcript and summary right here, up at the top. I'm gonna click on this. When I do, it just I don't know how it does this, but it's so fast. So it has the entire transcript here for me.

Oh, this is a very short video that's why it was so fast. So what we can do is we would copy and paste all of this into a text document, or at the top here, we can open this up, view AI summary in a new tab inside of chat GPT.

This is where the fun happens. Okay? So what we can do is we can summarize the video and we can generate better titles Or we can say, rewrite this as a one minute script for reals with the intention of creating a viral video that elicits strong emotional responses.

And rewrite it in the tone of this.

So you can take your own content that's not performing well. You can take a long form piece of content that's ten or let me just get into Zoom here.

Okay? You can do something that you can take ten minutes of content. You can just chop it down to one minute episode. You can try and say, like, break this ten minute thing into ten one minute episodes and rewrite it as a script with a certain tonality with a certain objective and you can basically repurpose your own content and you would bring that script into, like, A teleprompter piece of software, and you can just record in one day within, like, forty five minutes, you should bang those one minute episodes out.

And now you're shooting for vertical, so you want to make sure the framing is right, add that your lighting list good and your audio is good and you would fix anything like your I wish I said this instead. You would fix that there and you would record this and you would publish that content under YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, under TikToks and you would just drop those things.

You could even try I I would do it also on Facebook, post it natively, and now you have five channels to distribute content to that took you almost no time.

The part that I said is crazy about this is you can take any YouTube video that's not even yours and you can do this too. You can say rewrite this in my tone or At least you have the transcript and you can work with this.

The idea is you would take a hit and make more hits from the same hit.

You notice every once in a while, a cover from a new artist reinvigorates the audience for both the new song and the old song?

That works too. Like dua lipa dua lipo lupa with Elton John song? She brought a whole new audience to Elton John, and he was super grateful. So in his last concert in America, he brings Doolipo out and she sings it and he's like, wow. This is so cool.

This is what you want to do.

You can start with anything as long as there's words to work with, And here's what I found out with ChachiPT. Like, you don't have to have a real idea. You can say and you can write improper English. You can just, like, here's my idea. I want something about aliens, da da da, I wanna be able to do this on super low budget with Talkpuppets, and I want you to write me a script and here's the conflict. And I wanna create a multi part series so each one minute episode needs to end on a cliffhanger.

Go.

It may not be perfect, but it's a lot closer to where you were without anything.

So it's not just to to check your, like, grammar or anything. It can naturally generate ideas as long as you provided enough information.

And you don't have to be perfect, which is the beautiful part of all this.

So everybody here who's published at least one video I would like for you to try to use Glass or something like that to get the transcript going and repurpose it for anything. Just try one thing and see how it does relative to your original piece of content.

Use the chat tools to generate new titles.

I always tell it generate ten titles for this video with the purpose of getting high click through rate.

Emphasize for emotional response from the audience.

The tone is professional, it's business, it's financial related or something like that, and then I'll figure it out. And you can watch many of the videos that Steph and I worked on in terms of, like, determining your voice because you might not know how to describe your tone of voice. I didn't do such a great job right now, so I'm like aware of that.

And give it a shot everybody and see what happens.

Now for some of you who are who have a heavy accent, maybe have a speech impediment. And Chris, I can't read this, this is terrible, you know, that's why my videos suck.

We'll use one of those synthetic voices.

Those are also free or a little money, and they have like five different voices to choose from. And the way that they're able to do this now Unless you're really really paying attention, it's hard to tell if a human did not read it.

And in fact there's a lot of YouTube channels right now that I think have an AI generated script with an AI generated voice over, and what they're doing is probably some young kid somewhere in a developing country just editing the videos.

And soon, then when you have to edit the videos.

If you like to report on industry news, This is a great way to make daily content.

And if you could do daily content, you might make some real money doing this.

Alright. So how does this help you with your business? I'm gonna tell you how right now. Let's say you wanna be known for logo design. Simple one. Everybody understands what logo design is. Right?

And every day, there's a logo for you to critique and talk about. Some are old that you like, classics, some are brand new launches and you wanna critique it. If you can do a daily piece of content, just sit down for an hour or so and write a piece of content using all these that are available to you and record a video and drop it every single day. You will start to see real traction and audience will start to form. AdSense money might go up. Brand deals will emerge and you're you now will have a business where you don't have to have any client tell you what to do anymore.

I think it's worth pursuing.

Couple hours each night, you can do this.

You gotta just cut out some of the junk that you're doing.

Now I know many of you live the highly optimized life, but I'm almost certain.

There's some some fat that you can trim off your schedule and say you know instead of doing that I'm a do this.

I know I have.

Okay. Any follow-up questions on this? Go ahead and drop it in the meeting chat.

And we'll just take a pause here and see if there's any questions that might come in before we move on to our next real question from Stephanie.

C j asks, do you recommend starting or creating content under your personal brand, agency name, or some other name, unique concept?

It doesn't really matter.

I would just think about what is easiest to spell and to find.

Because, ultimately, if this thing takes off, you'll forget about your other business. And this is where you'll be. So just think about that. Like, where where is the long term what what is your long term goal? What's the long term play for you?

If you use your own name, it it will be kind of difficult for you to have other people host your content. That's the challenge there. So think about that.

And Eric asks, what if there's no speaking, just action?

I don't know. I don't really focus on action videos, so I I don't really have a strong opinion there. Obviously, if you have an action video, The transcript will be nothing.

That'll be a little bit different.

And chatty BT could help you write a script that's action based that has no dialogue for for different genres. As soon as you can identify what genre you wanna work in, it can help you come up with scripts too. So that's a possibility.

Alright. I think that's it for that one. Ernesto, you have Any follow ups for Chris? Are you good?

No. I'm just processing. Really appreciate the new playbook. I'm just kinda like blowing up with ideas about, you know, kinda modernizing my strategy.

Take your take your script Take your ideas and just jam it through chat, GBT, and ask it to try to to say, imagine this as something else.

See what it comes up with. It may not give you the answer, but it may spark new ideas within you. And there's a little trick.

Go ahead.

Well, like, take a, you know, ninety second script and imagine it as a short loop or something.

Or imagine this as a thing that's performed with monkeys. I don't know. You just try weird stuff.

Imagine this as as two robots having a dialogue at a bar.

You can genre hop, you can just change the whole thing. You can you imagine this as a silent film as script.

Mhmm. I I'm not giving you good prompts right now, but I'm just trying to spark something within you. Right? Right. And and see what it comes up with.

It's really good at at a hallucinating or being creative when you give her permission to.

Yeah.

It's it's wild. I I used to I wrote many scripts back in the day, and I fed it all of those, and it generated an amazing new script for my new idea, you know, and I was kinda, like, blown away with how AI is gonna help my process this a lot.

Okay.

There's a trick that I learned from Hector Garcia who learned it from Ron Baker who who says just use the Disney thing.

Like, Ron tells people, like imagine if Disney ran your company, what would they do? How would they do it? And then what Hector did was he just asked Chachi BT.

And it's pretty wild, and I've tried it myself. It's pretty creative.

So the prompt is something like imagine if Disney ran an accounting firm.

And it writes this whole very creative thing about how the user experience would be like. Because Disney's such a well known entity that that's a good reference point for a door off of.

I'll give you an example. K? Well, I'm like, I'm not a dizzy guy, but I'm a marvel guy.

So I asked it, imagine if you're Marvel Studios and you're going to produce a personal branding course with these transformations in mind.

And I gave it a bunch of descriptions, and they went to town.

It wrote some really funny things, and I'm like, dang. Don't really want to be a marvel product, but if I were, this would be really good.

So it said something like, unmask your inner superhero. I'm like, Oh, I see where you're going with this. I could use that because it's not a reference to any copyrighted character.

Or enmash your inner superpower or something like that. Alright. Okay. Let's move on. Steph, what's the next question?

Awesome. So we have another new member with a question, Lisa Petit asks Is it better to first hire and train before a need if you can afford to for a few months or line up the work and scramble to scale to meet the new demands. Is there a better way? Lisa is here, feel free to unmute and chat with me.

This is an excellent question, Lisa. Welcome to the group. Hi. Thank you. Thanks, Chris, for your time.

Yeah. So this is the one we all have. So Lisa, I wanna ask you a question. Hopefully, you remember what we just talked about.

Just keep and sweet and we'll get a lot done.

Do you have employees currently?

I do. Yes. How many?

Do you want me to count myself or separately?

With yourself. Yes. Okay. So there's five of us total there full time. Okay.

And are you starting to feel like growing pains like you need more people?

Yeah. Exactly. We've been kinda complacent or stuck. We're profitable. We've been kind of in the same place with five people for several years now, and it it's feeling like we either just need to stay the size or get a little bit bigger.

But I am getting older And I also co own with my husband. So that's probably another thing you should probably know is we need to bring sustainability. Yeah. To the team.

Okay. So your husband is a partner in the business.

He is. Yes. He does client services, and I do creative direction. Is he one of the employees?

Yes. Okay. This is good. How long have you been in business?

Fourteen years. So we're coming up on fourteen years in October.

Okay.

There are other things I would ask you, but I'm not going to because we're in we're we're with company right now if it were a private conversation.

You know what I'm gonna ask, but I'm not gonna ask you because I'm not that, you know, I'm not that foolish. Okay. Fourteen years in business, first of all, congratulations. It's very hard to collectively go past three years. You have three additional employees. You you run a business that that's sustainable.

That is and you mentioned profitable, which is I see you as a mature business owner. That's I just had my instincts about you when you started talking and so I'm like, it's it's lining up. Everything seems to be lining up. What kind of business are you in?

We do branding and packaging design for hospitality and CPG.

For those who who don't know, CPG is consumers pack consumer packaged goods. Right? Mhmm. And -- Yes.

-- whereabouts do do you run your business? What city?

Yeah. That's it. We're in Ashville, North Carolina. So we are not in like a hotbed for people looking for creative work. We have to actively go out and, you know, do some Google ads and marketing basically to get people to hire from Nashville. And where are most of your customers based out of? Is there any kind of pattern?

Yeah. So we're forty percent still based in the Nashville region. When we started, that's where most of our contacts were. So we're trying to really flip that model and make right now, sixty percent are outside the area, but we're trying to really grow that.

Significantly. So the main clients, I would say, at this point, for us, are in North Carolina, Virginia, Michigan for whatever reason, California. They're kind of all over the US. Okay.

Alright.

Very good.

Okay. Alright. So I I'm in this dilemma, and I'm there right there with you. And there's no time when you never like, when you stop thinking about Do I build first or do I wait for demand and scramble like hell?

And it's always a balancing act. Right? So the this is always tricky because there have been times when I've done both, and it seems like neither work. I don't know why.

And it's like forever, like, you're screwed. And I'll tell you something. Exactly.

In two thousand and seven, we had our best financial year ever. I think in two thousand and seven, we we were, like, six point eight million dollars in billings. I was, like, wow. This is we're unstoppable.

And two thousand eight hits and the financial market falls apart, and everybody's scrambling. Everybody's going out of business, but we have money.

We got a lot of money.

So I, in my infinite wisdom, it's like, let's hire people.

Because one of the hardest things to do in LA is to get really good talent because good talent is in demand, except for when good talent has been laid off because the financial markets falling apart. So I mean, this is a talent play, and I'm gonna do it. My business coach at the time here is, like, Are you sure you wanna do this? I'm a care I'm a gambler. Let's go. We can figure this out. Sorry hard as CG supervisor.

The guy was very expensive.

And then we hired an art director, and we just I think we hired three people, and we increased our overhead by several hundred thousand dollars.

And the work never came.

So a year later, I'm like, Oh, I hate to do this. You're good people, but I just don't have work for you. So was that it was, like, a year experiment, and I threw probably a quarter million dollars down the drain.

So that didn't work.

Alright. Because I was trying to do a talent play and my my pocket book was on deep enough to make that work. What I what I didn't realize was we're not Amazon where we have such, like, cash reserves where you can just acquire talent and wait for the market to return.

Okay. I imagine you also don't have the pockets of Amazon either, so I would suggest not to do that. And I've been on the opposite side, which is, like, we're getting buried with work, and now my team is scrambling to find people.

And everybody that we want to work with is booked somewhere else because the way the economy works is we rise together, we fall together. And so we can't get the good people anymore. So we gotta go down to tier two, tier three, and it's like, oh, always late to this party.

And if you could, you would time this perfectly between the transition of when they're all available and right before you need them. Unfortunately, we don't have crystal balls like that.

So here's what I would suggest that you do. If there's something that's eating up a lot of your time or you feel like it's a critical part to your business, I would just work with someone on a semi permanent long term basis.

It should figure things out, but only do it one person at a time.

Don't go whole hog like I didn't hire three people thinking this is gonna be genius.

And I would look at it like, hire someone that's gonna fulfill a need you already have versus the one that you, a hundred percent, think like, oh, we'll get this kinda work, and I need to be ready for that.

That way, what you'll do is you'll have the support that you need when the demand hits you. Maybe it's in Would it be in production, like a production artist? Would it be another designer for c for CPG stuff? What what do you think is the person's gonna help team out the most right now?

And that's where it's been tricky. It's it's either gonna be another designer or possibly a project manager. Because when my husband and I take a vacation or maybe we're off basically, we have a senior designer that's able to keep keep things in place for a week.

But it doesn't feel it feels like we need probably both. And so to what you're saying, it doesn't make sense to add both at the same time. But it does feel like we need to get a little bit bigger than we are now just for general, sustainability.

If you and your husband go on vacation today, What does the company do?

The company basically has the most senior person who's already for like a week wrapped with me on what they need to accomplish, have done. And then to be completely honest, I keep I keep hours during the week. There's an hour they're allowed to reach out to me if they need and so every day I keep an hour from three to four o'clock that they have to reach out if they need to. Perfect. So I would like to answer different questions that you didn't ask. Is that okay?

Go for it. Okay. A healthy business allows the owners to leave for months at a time without ever being called.

You need to work towards that state. So let's forget about hiring now or later. Just let's just put that question to the side. You have to design yourself out of the business.

And I think it was just a few years into the business. My my wife is very much like the way you have it set up. She was the art director and designer. I was to face the now what is it?

Front of House guy. I dealt with the clients. I did creative direction. But I I quickly realized we've not gone on a single vacation because when we go on vacation, the whole company goes on vacation.

Because we had mostly, like, creative people and not project management people. And if we did, I I didn't trust them to run the business. They did not know how to run the business at that point in time. Right?

So the first thing I did, which broke my wife's heart for about two weeks, was I laid her off. I said, honey, I'm gonna retire. You're done.

And she's like, what? But I still wanna work. I'm like, do you? She goes, maybe not.

So just took about, like, a couple hours to get over it. Right? And then now we got her out of the business, which meant I need to hire someone who could lead the creative team like the way she did. And so I just started to groom the most the the person who had the most potential to be her replacement and they wind up being great.

Plus, they didn't have to argue with them. Beautiful.

Then I was thinking, what do I gotta do to get myself out of this? Well, I need somebody to bid projects, your project manager, someone to deal with all the client stuff. So I hired a producer or or you would call him a project manager or an executive producer, and we brought him in, and I went through a couple of them before I found the right one. It's gonna happen. And this person, I trusted to be able to do the bids for more money than I would ask for.

Which is really tricky. Her name was Elizabeth, and she helped us to grow the company. And so with Elizabeth in charge, I could disappear for a while.

And I could disappear for a couple of weeks at a time and the company would still be okay. It got to a point where about five years in, I could be for three months and not even have anyone call me.

And I think you need to get to that place.

Now what this will look like is which one of you too are easier to replace?

Just as an idea and you would start to hire that person, and you groom them. Let's just pretend it's your husband.

We're gonna replace your husband. We're gonna hire somebody to do his role. He's gonna train that person. He's gonna handpick that person. And at a certain point, then he's just checking in from time to time, and now he only works because he wants to.

As soon as you have that person in place, now you have rock solid. Now you're going to find someone else to replace you.

Now no one person is going to be able to replace you because if you're the backbone of the business, you're going to need multiple people to replace you.

That's why I have a senior executive producer type, and I also have a creative fracture because that's who I am. I run the business and understand the creative and I'm also front facing or client facing. So usually it takes two or three people to replace you and that's okay. For some of you, it sound really scary because it sounds like a lot of money that's going out.

What you're doing is you're buying your own free time and you're making sure It's like it's a key person to insurance. It's something weird to happen to you. You need surgery for two months. Whatever it is, when you're out and you can't work, the business needs to run without you for a period of time.

And it will run without you. It won't do as well, but it'll still run for a period of time.

Because I found that as as I disappear away from the business for months or years, it starts to steadily decline.

Because what people do is they just repeat the playbook over and over, but the market changes and they don't change with it. And that's why your leadership is needed.

So that's what I would do. So gut feeling, who's easier to replace you or your husband?

You're right. My my husband in situation in this particular situation is. And that would definitely be doable. I think the NetGo back to the original question of do we go ahead and make, you know, a project manager or kind of you know, project director play now when we have about six months reserved to be able to do that?

Or do we, again, line up the work? And you know, scramble and, you know because that's the other thing too is when you scramble, not only are you training, you're also having to do the work, which means you're also working around the clock because you're trying to do two things at once, and then the team feels that stress, and that also isn't great for retention and culture, all of that kind of stuff. So I think that that's what I'm trying to do. Figure out is do I just go ahead and take that risk right now?

I think I would. Six months is good runway. I would say that if you have three to four months of runway, you have little to play with.

What I would do is not make any long term commitment. I would just try a couple people out, bring somebody in, say, look, we're gonna work with you for a couple of days. We're gonna see how it goes. We have no projects to put you on right now, but it's mostly for my husband to get a feel for what you bring to the table.

And hopefully within that period of time, you can test them on a few things, Jack. We're getting a good feeling about this. So I wouldn't make any long term commitment. Try them out.

You have good vibes, super smart person, bring something new to the table. Takes direction really what has a good temperament. We trust them enough to put them in front of clients because that's what your husband does. Right?

Mhmm. So they have to have good communication skills, they have to have just good social etiquette, all that kind of stuff. And then then you get a feel for it. And then the team needs to understand that there's a transition period and your husband's on a train this person until this person has the confidence of the team.

I know this about people just in general. They don't like change. It doesn't matter if it's good change or bad change, it just don't like change at all. Any kind of change is so to freak out.

Okay? Yeah. So we just wanna make sure that there's a good transition period if they wind up being the one.

K. Okay?

That's helpful. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Now here here will be this will be the next critical thing as you get to seven, eight, nine people. You're gonna need redundancy.

So you have two people in critical positions so that one person doesn't have too much leverage on you. And I'll just give you a brief preview of what I mean. Right? So we've we have an executive producer who essentially runs the business, bids the jobs, manages the team, and make sure we're profitable.

That person essentially has their business in the palm of their hands so that we want more money. I want a different deal. What are you gonna do? Mhmm.

Because you're like, I can't do that job anymore, and I don't wanna do that job. So I will continue to agree, and they have a lot of leverage over you. And my producer did have that over me for a while and he'd created a, like, a semi bitter resentful relationship.

And then I hired another producer who was a senior producer, and they thought this was great. So they they took a bunch of things off their plate, But the senior producer, I was grooming them to see if they could replace the other person. And when they got to a point in which they could replace the other person, that person has no more leverage over me now.

And so I almost always have two of those kinds of people so that when one person's like Like, I'm sorry, it doesn't work anymore for me. New person comes in, I have another person come in, and it just keeps going on like that.

So there's also Yeah. That Yeah. That was actually gonna be my follow-up question, but I also wanted to be respectful of time was because that's why I feel like I need to hire another designer is to bring greater right now, with the the two other folks that are designing, it just feels like they're both are filling different needs and are having greater leverage. And I want to encourage them to stay, but retention is also an issue too.

I think a lot of owners are seeing resumes, you know, that were five years here, seven years there going to like I mean, I just went through a hiring back in the spring and I saw people who've been in the business for five years and they've already had, like, eight jobs, like, just, you know, six months, nine months, one month. Like, the retention in general is is an issue on top of that. So Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you for your thought on that. So on the design side, it's much easier to deal with because you should have an internship program.

Local universities and colleges. People are always looking for work and some experience. I think you also need to be realistic. Most employees don't stay there forever three to five years is a good amount of time. So when they're starting to hit the five year mark, you're like, I better have another person because, eventually, what they wanna do is they need to quit to find a higher paying job.

That's how people move up in the world. Right? Yep. So they either move up in your company or they move out, so sometimes there's no room to move up.

So be prepared for that.

Okay. Alrighty. Great. I think Drigo has something he wants to say. Thanks, Lisa.

Thank you.

So follow-up question to this, Chris. You mentioned that you went through a couple of them in the beginning. Why do you think the first ones that you went through failed?

When you when you said I went through a couple of them, what are thems? Them as you looking for executive producers or executive pretty much that road that Elizabeth filled. You said you went through a couple of them before you found her. Why do you think the first ones failed?

Okay. As as you're a new company, you attract new talent. As you're an older and more mature company, you attract older and more mature people. And your network expands the longer you've been in business.

In the very beginning, I didn't even know I needed a producer because I was doing that work myself. And then I come to the realization, there are people who do this. I'm like, oh my gosh. And so you ask around, and you get the floaters, the people who are looking for work who don't have the experience because you don't have experience, and so you meet each other at a convenient point in time.

And so the first producers that I brought in did not know how to produce the bids the way that I later on found that this is how you need to do them. They were looking to me for direction And I'm like, oh, I thought you were the one who knew how to do this. So it's like the dumb leading the blind or something like that is like, we we can't help each other. Right?

And so I like, why why don't you get it? I'm like, well, because I'm new.

So I went through a bunch of them.

And and some of them and and this is really tricky and and hopefully you guys can hear me when I say this. I have a very specific perspective and way that I carry myself.

I'm confident I don't go with their groveling for business. I'm not gonna be somebody's whipping boy, Right? I'm just not going to be. And so oftentimes when we hire someone who is representing me in the business, I need to have them act as confident as I am because otherwise, is not going to work. And so when you hire young people, they're like, well, Chris.

Yeah. So they asked to for this to be like half the budget. What should I do? I'm like, get out of here.

Yeah. I'm here.

Why are you why are you coming me with this problem?

And so I would try to coach them up a little bit. And, eventually, I'm like, I can't explain this to you anymore. So what they do is they don't have that strength of character that will, that fortitude, they don't have that self esteem or self confidence that I have. And so they're they're misrepresenting us as a company.

So when I finally found someone and she happened to be older, I think she was older than me. She went in like, we're gonna bid this at seventy five thousand bucks, and I was like, oh, that's for forty. I'm already liking where this is going.

And she's like, they asked for three. I gave them two.

I'm like, yeah, I think this is gonna work. And that's how you know Drigo. Right? So when you're young in your business, you attract young people in their experience, and that's what happens. Now here's the thing. Here's how I found her, by the way. This might be a clue for some of you.

So I was freelancing or doing independent contracting work for another company.

And when I worked with them, there are this woman, Elizabeth, was giving me less money than I asked for, but she didn't make me feel bad about it.

So eventually I was like, I wonder if I could steal her.

Because I looked at it from the client's point of view, if she can beat me my prices down and not make me feel like I hate you, she got communication skills.

She can say harsh things without assigning harsh.

She was a good communicator and she was really good at negotiations.

She got what she wanted, which was pretty awesome. So I want that person on my team. So, eventually, I started snooping around. I'm like, buddy, Chads. Would you consider, you know, I don't know, joining a little upstart coming like ours? She goes, I'd love to. I hate this company.

And that was the beginning of a multi year relationship.

It was awesome, and we made a lot of money. Oh my god. They would make a lot of money.

It was a period of time which I made more money like profit wise than I've ever made. We're probably running at eighty five percent net profit. It was ridiculous.

Ridiculous. I was like, what am what is all this cash doing around here? Because we got the right people. It also happened to be at the right place, right time because that did not last forever.

Alright, Drigo. Did I help you?

Yes, it did. Okay. Good follow-up question. Guys, give me give me thirty seconds. I need to get some water.

I'll be right back. So, Steph, if you wanna queue up whoever's next, I would just have them ask the question, but I'll be right back. Okay? I just need to get some water.

Sure. CJ Harris, are you available to chat? I see you are here.

I'm here.

Let me find you and pin you.

So I'll have you ask the question to grips.

Okay.

Alright. I'm back. Sorry about that.

Alright. CJ is up.

Alright. Hi, Chris.

I see Jay. Hi.

Question.

What are your thoughts on the best practices for partnering successfully with other agencies who either come to us, they either want us to be the lead agency, on a project or they wanna white label our services.

I'm reluctant to take this on because I don't wanna distract from what we're trying to build, and also wanna be able to show work in my polio.

Okay.

Are you familiar with the concept of the fluid agency?

No. Okay. I want you to write this down, fluid agency.

It's an interesting concept and it was an an idea championed by a woman in advertising.

And she said that small boutiques have certain advantages and large conglomerates have advantages. But maybe this is hybrid thing that works best to serve everyone. And the concept is something like this where you basically hold on to senior management, key strategist, people that are, like, leaders and visionaries, but you don't hold on to anybody that's, like, production.

So you have the agility of a small boutique, and then now you don't have people. So what what they do is they have a large network of pre vetted vendors to do very specific things. So there's people to do typography or to do packaging or to make motion graphics.

And they're vetted in advance.

So when they get a project, the senior management people, the strategist, the creative directors, they're able to lead the project for the client and offer them best in class talent while not having to carry the bloat of the staff in the overhead.

It's a good idea as a concept.

Don't know how that works in real life. But we, for a period of time, work like that.

So winds up being a kind of expensive for us because all the people are management people.

It also means we don't have a lot of, say, people in production. And so every time we get a project, we're constantly booking people.

Because in a in an ideal world, all the contractors that you wanna work with have a company, have capacity so that whenever you call they can do work for you. That's how it works in an ideal world. It doesn't work like that in real life because people get busy. And so then we don't have people to do the work, and we can't find who we want, so we're stuck there.

Okay? Now let's tackle this one part at a time. Being a white label, everybody understands white label. Right?

When they bring you in, Nobody knows who you are, you never mentioned, and you probably can't even show the work as your own work. It's a little tricky. So you're doing this for the money. And you're doing this because you can't generate your own leads.

There will be a time when you need to do this and there'll be a time when you resent doing this because it comes with a very specific thing. Now there are several people who are, say, like, in development, like, they build websites or apps. They could care less who has the relationship with the client. All they wanna do is feed the machine.

They have an army of developers, and they need to make stuff. And so when you get a project and you need an app built, they're white labeled because you don't want any issues about client poaching and any of that stuff and you want to appear bigger than you are. You say do you white label.

Sometimes you are the person getting white labels, sometimes you're asking other people to do that. And they'll be happy to do that because you'll pay them two hundred fifty thousand dollars. You'll make four hundred and fifty, everybody's happy.

Everybody's happy in theory.

But they also know that they cannot show the work. They can't talk about it. Because that messes up your business model.

So when you do it, make sure you're doing it at a profit, and then that's not your long term business plan.

Unless you wanna become a production company.

And and that's okay if you do, but usually you need to be somewhere where labor is really cheap and you have an abundance of resources in labor, and that usually is in developing countries, like maybe it's Eastern Europe, parts of India, parts of Asia, Latin America, you can do that. If you don't live one of those markets, probably not a good idea for you to approach it this way.

So we only do white label because we need the money and we need to make sure it's a short term solution not a long term plan.

Okay? Now the next part is people who want you to take the lead, they're basically saying, we want to be white labeled.

Essentially, because we know you you can get clients, and it's very hard for us to get clients, and we like the way you think and the way that you work.

That that works for you because now they're a resource for you and you just need to vet them and run through the process how they bid, how they do work, and you just kinda kick the tires and you just make sure everything's working.

Is there anything more to this that you're considering in terms like taking the lead?

Yeah. Like, how far into your process do you let in the other agencies? So let's say if I'm teaming up with another agency on a larger project, Right? So it helps us build out our capacity and what we can bid for, but I guess I'm just struggling with the actual, like, project management of it? How do we work together?

How do we make decisions? Do we have a separate partnership agreement?

Do we take, you know, do they Are they able to, I guess, take credit for the work as well? We take credit, so it's a joint partnership.

So I'm just kinda wondering about that aspect of it. Yeah.

Those are things you obviously need to work out in advance because it gets really, really tricky. What's going to happen is you're going to share a portfolio and if they're super aggressive, they're gonna use that portfolio to go after this exact same client that you work with. Same client. Right. And we do most work. So most of the thing Like, in one that I'm thinking about, we'll be doing most of the thought, leadership, the strategy, and the production.

And so I'm trying to figure out, like, like, what do you like? And what the heck are they doing?

Well, they brought us to lead.

And they have some strategy. Chops his will.

Yeah. So this is what's gonna happen. In the marketplace, there are going to be all different kinds of players that are necessary for a healthy ecosystem.

There are people who have deep a deep network, lots of contacts so they can get work and they procure work easily. But they can't make the work. Then people could make their work and they're really good at doing things but they don't know how to get work.

So the two of you need to team up. And it makes sense. But typically, the person who gets the leads don't put themselves as the company who can do the work.

They're usually in the sales and marketing space. Right? And they can do that. So we have sales reps.

They never pretend like they can do the work and so the lines of labor are kind of very clear, the division of labor here. So what they do is they say we represent this company and they do this work. They never say, this is the work that we do. It would make no sense and they'd be misrepresenting themselves and get into all kinds of trouble because they don't know how to actually produce that work.

Where it gets really complicated is, say, they're a sales rep and they're like, you know, we give away eighty percent of the budget to a production company and they took over.

Why would we do that? Then they start getting these greedy ideas like, you know what? We'll work with somebody, and we'll say we're its joint venture.

And when we say that, then now we have access to the work too.

So eventually they start to build their own in house team and then they no longer need you.

So again, we get back into it's a relationship of mutual convenience and both you have knives behind your back, basically.

You're thinking, I'm gonna take this lead from you, but I'm going after the client myself later on.

And they're saying we're gonna bring his lead to you and we're gonna go after production work after this. Good luck.

So it's not evil. It's not bad. Just realize it's human nature to want more than what we have, and we we desire to grow. And If you say, like, we need the lead right now and they're getting us access to Nike or somebody, we gotta just bite the bullet and say, we'll both have to it and hopefully we're better at the market game than they are long term.

So all things come to risk reward, what are you risking and what what is it that you hope to gain.

And if the gain is greater than the risk, you should do the deal. The odds are in your favor.

That's If not, don't don't do the deal. Okay?

Yeah. So in a case like this, they may want access to the work and if you want the work, you you have to agree to certain things.

You can say, like, look, you have access to work. We have no problem because I would not go into relationship where you already hate the person. That's a bad relationship be in with. But, like, we're super appreciative that you can bring to work. Yeah. It makes sense since you're doing some of the strategy and we are too. Do you think we can include a clause in here where we're both credited and it's very clear.

So on our website it'll say co strategy team and it will say that's that's all they can say because you don't wanna say, like, we brought the lead. It doesn't make any sense. And then when they show the work on their website, it's strategy, design and production from your team.

Right. It's not much because people rarely read titles like that. Right? Project descriptions?

They just see the work and it's good work. They hire them.

So it then tells you what's really important, being able to do the work or having the relationship with the client.

And you already know the answer to that question.

Whoever's closest the client makes the money. Right.

So sometimes it's a necessary evil for you to do this so that you can have that door open for you.

Okay. Is there anything else you wanna know? No. That's that's it.

Okay. Do you have a chat GPT account?

I do. Ask it.

I want to structure a deal memo between a company who can bring us work, I'm concerned about x y and z. How do I protect myself yet, get this work because I do need it?

Have you tried that before?

No. But I will do that. I do it right now, and we will circle back with you. And if you type in the right words, you're gonna be amazed.

Okay. You really will. I want all of you to make this habit of asking chat really thoughtful questions because it's really good when you ask it a good the rule of of any AI software, whether it's words or images, crap in crap out. Ask it ambiguous rambling questions that gives you ambiguous rambling answers. Ask it super specific questions that are full of objectives and self awareness and challenges mindset or limiting beliefs, it will help you through this. Alright.

Stepff, who's next?

How are we doing on time?

I'm doing okay. It's more energy. Let me just double check here. I think I have another thing I gotta do here.

But I'm okay. Let's let's do another one. Hey, Nicholas. Do you wanna ask your question to Chris? When you put in the q and a box?

Okay.

Hey everybody. So If you go back with the existing experience, what are the three most important business things you would recommend to go from hundred k to one million.

You're you're asking for my personal thing?

Maybe because we don't have that kind of experience yet.

Okay. If I were to go back in time, what is it that the two or three things that I did to get us to a million?

Yeah. But like, or would would be something you would recommend right now from your experience.

Okay. I can tell you what I did. It's not gonna work for you, so I wanna work on you right now. Okay?

Tell me a little bit more about what you're going through, and and then I probably can give you what the two or three things that you need to do. Okay. So I found myself very important that Snish Town is very good for me.

I also found out, like, delegating easily, much easier, like with more trust or something like that is good for me.

And I'm also thinking that content creation or It's part of designing myself out of business. You mentioned this, it's also very, very important for me, but maybe I'm missing something, and it's very hard for me to focus on everything So to to make it simpler even one most important thing, where should I focus?

Okay.

I just remembered something before we ran out of time here. Sorry. Just side note, everybody. I don't know if you all know this, but we're having a meetup in Los Angeles our Santa Monica studio, everyone's invited.

I'll I'll take care of food while hanging out you get to know each other. We might talk about some business stuff. Maybe I'll make you do something physical. I'm not sure.

Don't spit out your water. Don't spit out your water. Everybody is okay. We might do something physical. I don't know. But I'm inviting all of you There's only twenty five people or so who have RSVP'd.

You win to spend a day together, people have flown across the country for an hour meetup and I don't know why our own pro group won't come out. So we have more than fifty people in the business boot camp. So there's a good chance that those fifty people in the business boot camp are gonna hang out the next day so you get to know people who are a little bit ahead of you in their career. Just putting it out there.

You can make it, I'd love to see you. Alright. Alright. And if you if the too many people are, so he then told me I have to rent another space, so we'll see where that goes.

Alright. Let's get back to Nicholas's question. Okay? So Nicholas, he he wants to figure out or some tips on how to grow his his business.

Right? And he said delegating content creation.

Let me ask you a couple of questions. Nicholas is a boot camp person too. Right, Nicholas?

Yep. No. Okay.

Remind me again what you do and the average price and what you do it for.

Well, we're doing digital marketing in terms of we are doing more consulting rather than advertisement right now, and we are doing also let's call it digital transformation.

Yeah. What is that?

Well well, it's it's a huge process.

But what we do usually mostly try to, as a consultant, work, to change their mindset in terms of how to start thinking digitally, and how to run corrected advertisements or how to use your digital assist to use it in the right way. Because what let me explain in one word. They are trying to use digital assets, but they are still thinking analog way. No?

So we try to teach them how to use it in the correct way. Okay. We are doing it for financial institutions, and average consulting fees starting from fifty k, something like that. Oh, okay.

You're doing great then.

Yeah. Maybe.

So what do you need my help for? If your average engagement is fifty k starting, you're doing great to So you need twenty clients to get to a million. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. But it's it's very hard for me to work twenty clients simultaneously. Right. So Is it just you or is it more more people than you?

For consulting, it involves me everywhere. So -- Yeah. -- it's me plus two people. Okay.

I get it.

Is there somebody else that you can bring on who can do what you do? To alleviate some of the workload?

I can. But we can. And are you considering this?

Yeah. And when I mentioned delegation that's a part, I had some trust issues in the past because I was afraid that something might go on, but right now I'm doing a project without touching anything, and I think it started bad, but it's ending perfectly.

Okay.

Alright. I'm gonna answer also another question that you didn't ask, and I think a lot of people can benefit from this. Okay? When you're the key person in in your business, you got to design yourself out of your own business.

And so we have an unrealistic expectation that we hire somebody and pay them a lot less than we pay ourselves. And they're gonna be just as good if not better than us. We can already see that's gonna be a problem. Like, where does that exist?

Somebody just as good as you Imagine if I can hire another version of myself, I'm like, I'm gonna pay you, you know, x dollars and they're like, why would I take that money from you? I've already started my own business because that's who I'm trying to get, somebody just like me. Who doesn't wanna work for people like me. Problem.

Right? That makes sense. So here's how you generally do this. You bring in somebody who has a lot of potential.

They're smart. They're they're like, all the things that you need to be, like, even tempered, they're curious, they're self starters, They ask really good questions, and they know how to roll up their sleeves and get the work done. They will not be you, though. And what you need to do is you need to, like, groom them. So back in the day before there were, like, formal schools, we apprenticed for a master, and the master taught us their craft.

What the master did was they would break their craft down into, like, five components. So if you're a blacksmith, this is just how you tend the fire. How you know it's hot enough. This is how you form basic shapes. And so you just give them one task to do and then they master that task and then you give them another task. And eventually, they're really close to being who you are.

And they do need to bring some core skills like They have an eye for craftsmanship or they they're confident or something that they need to bring that which you cannot teach.

You you need to bring somebody who is very moldable and coachable but has the basic building blocks. Otherwise, you'll give them all of your knowledge and they won't be able to go very far. They're just not of the right intellect or the emotional maturity or whatever it is.

So you train them to think and do things just like you.

So for example, when you're consulting what you would do is you would just say, just shadow me. Don't say anything. Just take lots of notes. And every time we finish a meeting, we'll have a discussion, and I'll tell you what I said, why I said it, and I'll answer your specific questions.

And after a while, you'll see that they're they're really paying attention so the next time you feel more confident you're like, well, I want you to answer any questions as it relates to this part of the thing, like running Facebook ads. Let's say that's what it is. And so they're very good at that. It's only time the client asks a question about Facebook ads, you look at them, and then they give answer.

And then they grow in confidence in your mind, like, okay, this is good. This is good. You're doing really good. And you're right now, one should be able to answer questions about this other thing, about taking analog assets and making them digital.

So now they're handling two fifths of the things that you want to do. And when they get to the tipping point, which are like, you're doing pretty good. Now I will be the silent observer.

And you'll run the meeting. And I'll watch you. And you've that couple times, like, do you're doing great?

And then you can back out of it and it'll run well.

So you said that you had brought somebody on and you just left them alone and it didn't start great because we think we can just do no training, no teaching, we put them in and they can do it. You want them to do it your way, not just anyway.

And that's the key. I've done this many times and how I was able to groom like somebody literally as an intern, straight out of school, and to become a creative director who did all the new business calls for me. Then this multiple times.

Exact same process.

You bring in people, you spot the ones with potential.

And for each one of us, it's gonna be a little bit different. Like, I'm looking for a person with really good communication skills, someone who's got a deep knowledge for design and art history. Someone who can talk at a high level game but also knows how to get stuff done they're not just be s'ing.

There's not that many types of those types of people running out there, but there's enough of them that you can groom and then, great. You're you're awesome.

Nicholas, what do you think?

That's exactly what I think and I'll add two points there.

One that when I started niched down, I thought it was solving my position problem.

I found out that it's solving more operational problem and communication part of the positioning problem, and that was amazing because I can easily say why we need to hire and why we need to work.

And second thing that designing myself the biggest win I had in boot camp was that I found out that me, myself, and the company is not the same, So I should out of the bottleneck for my company, so that should let my company to do its work without me even.

That that's the ultimate goal. Right? So I'm on the right track. Yeah. You're on the right track. What you wanna do is you wanna get parameters that you need to have controls.

I think is it Robert Kiyosaki the guy wrote Rich Dad Pordat? He described financial investments as a car. You need something to steer it?

You need something to pump the brakes. You need something to be able to accelerate it by stepping on the gas and you need to decide to go forward or to go backwards and that's kind of it. So what when you find people to replace you you need to have some controls to steer it steering wheel to pump the brakes and to step on the accelerator.

Make sense.

Right? So it's like more of this, please, less of that. I noticed you're doing this with the client. I would prefer you do it this way instead.

So those are the controls that you need. So a lot of times people's like, you don't have drive, take my car, take take the Porsche, go take the four hour, go out and drive, and they they get into car right here. What happened? Well, you didn't give them any control.

Like, you don't have any control over this. You can't just expect them to jump in and run the whole thing.

So we just do it gradually and they're able to do it.

You got this.

Yes. Thank you. Okay. Excellent.

So if I think I have energy for one more question, can we pick something that's a little lighter? Something fun?

We've got one more. Well, we've got one from there's one that is from an anonymous participant and one from someone who has their name there. Which one would you like? Well, which one sounds like I would have more fun answering.

Would you rather talk about networking or publishing your book?

Oh, yay. Both fun topics.

Is he in the chat says book.

Book. We're getting book. We'll do the book. Alright. What do we wanna know in the book?

So the question is what was the cost to get your book published? And then there's part of the question where I'm not quite sure, and so if this was your question, please unmute and clarify it says, what are the qualifications needed one for one to get in touch with them, maybe to get your book published by a publisher is my Okay. We can talk about this. This is a fun topic.

Let's do this. Alright. Yay. I strongly encourage each and every single one of you to write a book.

If nothing else establishes your thought leadership and people say it's the the modern day business card, nobody hands a business card anymore.

Excuse me, but if you write a book, it's pretty cool, and you can use the book for lots of different things.

So let's go over this. Okay? Let's let's go over the idea of writing a book. Writing a book is one of the most painful things you're going to be able to do because as Blair N says, you can't unpublish a book.

And so there are things that you might read later that make you cringe and that's why people don't like to write books.

Okay. And especially I'm assume most of you are like visual processors. It's like you're not sitting there, like, words on my thing, man.

We got into design because we don't have to use words. That's the whole point of it. Right? We're creative in nonliterary ways.

But I think the really cool thing is you can probably and I know some of you are gonna bristle at this can probably use chat to help you to write outline to come up with book title ideas. I don't want you to use it to write the book for you because you still need to be the author of this book.

Maybe you're a research geek and you can just write about a lot of the data that you've seen and talk about that. Those tend to do really well, a deep research on a single topic.

Maybe you're like me and and you want to write a series of short ideas and it's easy to read that way.

Just a bunch of loose ideas put together, and that can work for you. Maybe you're a workbook kind of person where you ask lots of questions and leave space for people to write in. But I would strongly encourage you to do this.

And there's really no reason why you can't do it anymore. Now two paths, the the path of, like, let's get a publisher because the publisher brings a lot of cache.

A a reputable publisher, of course.

Like McGraw Hill, I think, the reputable or penguin books. Whoever it is that you love who's published books from people that you like, I wanna be on the same labels then. The problem is a new author and even if you're an established author, the percentage in which you get will be very very low.

And you're like, oh my god, I sold a million copies. Well, you didn't make that money.

So here's typically how it works. A new author, they're gonna offer you anywhere between seven to thirteen percent. If you're a more established person, they might give you fifteen.

But I don't think it goes much beyond that.

They they will give you an advance if you want one and the advance might be fifteen grand but it goes against your lifetime earnings.

So into they won't pay you a dollar in your royalty until you they that you earn back the advance. So it's like they gave you free money. It's just they believe in you and they're they're going to to take out time. Where a book publisher gives you things other than the label, the imprint is they have an editor.

They will guide you through the process and they have designers to design the book for you so that you can just focus on the writing part.

And everybody who has written a books is having a great editor is the most important thing. They're smart, they're objective, and they give you the kind of feedback that no one else can give you. So it might be worthwhile just to do that deal to have that. The good parts of by having a book publisher is you don't have to deal with anything at that point. And some of them if it's a bright kind of book can get you into airports and introduce your name and your concepts to lots of people you don't have access to.

I've seen this trend now happen where where people write books as a call to action for them to go get on their email list or something. I don't feel great about this myself, but I see too many people doing it for for me not to mention it. So where they will say, look, This is the book and here are some resources and tools only for people who read this book, download these resources. But when you go to download them, they never truly free because they want your email and then they start hitting you in the inbox immediately.

I wish they just had the resource and allowed me to download and didn't bother me after that point. I should be able to opt in versus having to opt out.

That's the problem.

Okay?

Now I can forgive this if the tools and resources were so amazing that I'm like, oh my god. I'm getting another two hundred dollars of value. Go and hit my inbox. I don't care.

I don't care, and it's fine.

So that's that's the the whole book publisher route.

If you self publish, you got no money, you got no editor, You're just gonna do it yourself, but you get the lion's share of the money. So whereas if you have a runaway hit and you sell, say, a million copies a million copies with a publisher and you make two dollars a book, that's two million dollars. But if you sell a hundred thousand copies self published and you make twenty five dollars, well, you do the math.

That's the balance. Now, our friend, Michael Bunghastanyur, When he tried to publish his first book, no one would want to publish to, like, this is not a book that we want. So, like, fine. I just published it myself.

K. He rewrote that book many times.

It eventually publishes himself and he sold over a million copies of the book now.

And if you do the math, even at four dollars in profit, he's made four million dollars, which is a lot for a writer to make.

He since then has tried to self publish many books under his own imprint box of crowns.

In his latest book is not self published anymore. It's published by somebody else now.

Kind of surprised me.

But maybe it doesn't. I think what Michael is doing is trying to get another hit. And I think having published many other books that are not hits, he's trying to figure out maybe it's me. So I'm just doing deductive reasoning here. The reason why he went with the publisher is because he thinks maybe the publisher can do something he cannot. So he's willing to experiment to see if it if will work that way. I just think it's very hard to write two hit books, two hit songs, very difficult to do.

Now if you want to work with our our book company, they're called print ninja. I think they're based out of Hong Kong. They're really good printing company.

They'll do whatever you want.

But what will happen is, and if you listen to David c Baker and Blair ends on the two baht podcast, is most of you will sit with a warehouse full of books that are unsold.

That's the problem.

Right? You might print five or ten thousand books. It's not easy to sell five or ten thousand books.

So there's a couple things I would recommend that you do. Number one is I would pre sell the books first.

And we did a kickstarter campaign. We were trying to raise thirty grand. I think we got it to, like, eighty seven grand, so we're we're now going to write the book.

Deami write the book at that point.

So the books were pre sold. And that initial batch we sold out, so we went to print more, and we ran into a new problem. The new problem is The books damage easily because of the way we want the books to look. Black and black is murder.

It's got a satin soft touch, and it's got a hot foil stamp, and those things are not friendly to bad shipping.

So we made a horrible mistake. We did not get the book shrink wrapped.

We we we we went towards designed in aesthetics versus durability.

And most books that I get through Amazon are banged up in one way or the other, but I just don't care because those books are not quote unquote like design books.

They're basically one color on you know off white paper with with the dust jacket, and that's it. That's what I buy. So who cares if the corners banged up? But people will buy our book complain because it's, like, there's scratch on the cover or it got dinged that the corner was not right, and they returned them to Amazon enough times in which Amazon's we're not selling your books anymore.

The mistake that we made was we took the boxes in which the the the books came to us, but it came on a pallet. Okay? It came on a pallet so they're not gonna get damaged.

And my office managers just sent those books in the original boxes one box at a time. And so when they arrived at Amazon, I think they were already damaged.

And so when Amazon then repackaged them in bad packaging, so now we have double damage. And so we got a bunch of books back that were damaged.

That sucked, because they're they're not sellable, not in the pristine thing.

So now I have to sell all of my books and ship them out myself because the only way we can ensure that they arrive okay is to ship them out in, like, Very durable packaging. So if you ordered a book from us, you'll see that it comes in a lot more packaging than it should, but it has to be sent that way. In the future, what I would do is to begin with not doing such precious design such that people who buy the book won't even care.

Some people quite literally buy two books, one to save and one to read. Good for book sales, but it's just saying it's just too fragile.

And it seemed like it's some kind of art book, and I I probably should not do that next time.

And next time, what I would do is I would also have a shrink-wrap I hate the idea of excessive packaging, but to send a book to someone and then only get it sent back as such. It's even greater environmental damage than it is to put some plastic around it.

It's a lesser of two evils, unfortunately.

And so now what I have to do is I have to go and hire a company to shrink-wrap all these books, which is very expensive to do at this point.

But that's the only way I can sell them through Amazon again. The other thing that's very tricky about Amazon is it's a very archaic and complicated system to get their barcode put into your book. And once you commit to it, you can't change it until you sell that book.

So be careful about that. Just make sure you read it very carefully so that you don't have to wind making stickers and putting them over your book. Hence why in many bookstores you see stickers over books, the barcode has to be right.

Lots of problems there. Right? Now Amazon, I think will take thirty percent of your book sales.

Forty percent is a lot.

So you're like, well, why would I do that? Well, they take care of everything else.

And they discount your books too. So now you're selling the books for less and they're taking forty percent of the sales and if there's ever a problem, they want you to take care of it.

But what they do do for you is you get on that Amazon list and you get the reviews, and that's very important for selling your book.

And to reach a broader audience.

So the mistake that we made initially is we sent the books and they arrived fine, and they kept asking us to send them more books more books more books until we sent them a bunch of books. That's where we we messed up.

Now the other thing that you can do which a lot of authors do is they do print on demand.

This gets rid of the inventory problem.

It gets rid of the warehousing problem, but it adds a new problem. Print on demand quality sucks.

You ever received a print on demand book, it's not that good.

I don't know how they do these print on demand things, but it's not as durable. But you know what? If you make a book, that doesn't need to be that durable that isn't precious, it'll be fine.

So Daniel Presley, he does this. He is he he does a print on demand thing. So when he's going to an event and he needs a lot of books, he'll just order five hundred books at a time. He gets a better price. It's sent to his warehouse and then he distributes it from there.

If it's one z twosies, he just has whoever makes them ship them directly and it's all very easy for him. But he uses the books as a lead gen tool. It's a different concept there. He's using it to build thought leadership to become a key person of influence.

He's not printing the books to make money.

In fact, when he launched his last book, he said, give me your address. I will send you the book for free including the shipping.

And there's no gimmick he's not trying to get you an email funnel nothing, because the book itself is part of the funnel.

Okay. What else can you use the book for? Well, here's the cool thing. Sometimes I'm asked to speak and ask for a speaker's fee and whoever it is says we can't afford that.

And then they give me some other number. I'm like, I don't like that number. They're like, what if we buy some of your books?

So there's some flexibility here. It's workaround. So let's just say they paid me like six grand and they buy Let's say my rate was ten. They'll buy three thousand dollars worth of books. They didn't give me the full ten grand, but they want some additional value so they want the book and they're gonna give the books away for free.

I guess they win and I win because they were only gonna give me six. They buy three thousand dollars worth of books, a bunch of people who weren't gonna buy the book, get the book for free, courtesy of them, I think it's a win win.

Okay.

See you later, Devin.

That works. So we've done that too and you'll see that a lot of speakers will bring their book to a speaking event and they'll give everyone a copy. Because they realize the more people that have their book in their hands, the better their business is going to be.

Okay. Any thoughts on books? Anybody else have experienced either with a publisher or self publishing they wanna share? I'm happy to hear that. Just raise your digital hand and we'll get you up.

Sorry. He's wondering how many books you've sold so far. Do you know?

I wish I knew.

I I think we did two printings of the book.

So the first one was probably like one printing.

Well, the first one, I think, we printed exactly how many copies we needed to fill fulfill the Kickstarter thing. Let's just say it was a thousand. I don't remember. And then I think we ordered ten thousand bucks. We're we still have ten thousand bucks. I mean, not literally ten thousand, but we still have thousands of books. And my wife's up, we have to sell these books because we wanna reprint them in a way that's much more durable.

And so I I would say that's not more than not more than six thousand books sold.

Would you say one thousand books is like a good starting point if you have a book and you wanna self publish without breaking the bank or having to rent out a warehouse to store all your books? Yeah. I think even five hundred. Five hundred to a thousand is usually the the the minimum order quantity, the mock, or the mooc.

Right? Yeah, I was looking at print ninja and it says that they allow for lower quantities because the more books you print less is cost per book, but then where where you gonna put all those books if they don't sell. Yeah. So the ideal thing Cari is to pre sell your book.

To write some portion of it, to market it, to talk about it, and to build up interest in it. There's a lot of ways to market your book today that don't require you to have a book and have a, you know, a garage full of books that become a liability for you because Mildew, rodents, all kinds of stuff happen, right, with books. You don't want that. And so try to presale.

So here's what I would do. Write a good portion of your book and start teasing out the book like a page here, a page there. Concepts, just share as much as possible and then people want to buy the book just as a keepsake. People still I mean, I'm one of those people, still feel really good about having a physical tangible thing in our hands.

That's tactile.

Okay. So it can be tricky. So I think we've probably not sold five thousand books at this point. And it's challenging because we have a lot of fans and friends in Europe and Asia, and shipping the books over there is just a nightmare.

I can't tell you how times we get books back because the person who wrote the address didn't write it correctly.

So I pay for shipping there. I get it back. It's not in good shape. I gotta pay for it again. It's just a ridiculous thing.

Okay.

Phyllis, go ahead.

I was just gonna say if you are doing print on demand with Amazon.

If you use their ISBN number, you cannot do anything about it. But if you get your ISBN numbers through Boker, then say if you want to change that book type, say if you put it in as paperback versus EPU. You can actually change that on book or you can change it because maybe because Amazon doesn't require ebooks to have a IS N number and you actually accidentally put it on there, you can take it off and now reuse it for an actual paperback or something like that. And then like I said, but if you use Amazon's ISBN number, because they will give you one for free. They will always be the person that printed your book. And so when it comes up, It'll have that on there.

For anybody that's in the US, make sure that you send your print copies to the library of congress. So if your your book ever ends up in the library, that's the only way they will put it on the shelf because they don't wanna have to type in all that information themselves.

And There was one more thing I want to tell you guys now. I can't remember what it is, but that's enough. I'm done.

Yeah. I just wanted to reflect on something that Yeah. I didn't sell all our books. And my wife's like, are you sure you wanna buy that many books? Yeah. We'll sell them.

Look who was right on that one.

Right? Because I was like, well, the price goes down significantly when you get into the ten thousand copies. Right? Or five thousand copies.

And I did not anticipate. Everything was going great until our our whole book selling thing hit a brick wall with the the whole you had to fix the packaging of this.

And so what Amazon and my team proposed was we would prepackage all our books prior to sending them to Amazon. I was like, what an environmental disaster this is?

Everything I was trying to avoid. Now we're, like, right in it.

So I can move Have a sales update.

I'm sorry for me to cut you off. Go ahead. Monica, Andrew sent me. Monica says Monica is our office manager. Sixty six hundred physical books sold and five thousand digital copies.

Oh, that's better than I thought. But I was not surprised. I thought you wasn't like that news. That's a while let him tell you.

And this just ain't breaking news for wolf blitzer CNN. Okay. So I said five thousand copies, so it's not that far off. So we still have thirty seven thirty four hundred or whatever copies to sell, which is a freaking lot of books y'all.

It is a lot of books. And the thing about books is they're heavy. So I put them in my luggage. Right? So here's a mistake that we made.

When we're touring Europe, we would bring books. And Amy at the luggage was ridiculous, everybody. It was just ridiculous because it's so freaking heavy. And so constantly she was doing, like, weight distribution and management, So every city we would have a local person help us because we would ship the books there.

Sometimes it got there, sometimes it didn't. And then now we have to lug them around and hope in a blind sale, basically, how many people attend the workshop would buy the book? I'm thinking nobody's gonna buy the book to buy the posters. Everybody bought the book.

Sometimes we didn't have enough. And then nobody bought the posters.

I we sold, like, four posters.

You know the Internet? They lied to you all the time. You know how I started doing that AI generated posters for the tour? Like, dude, dope. Printer's I'm here to take my money, you know, cash emoji cash emoji.

We are bringing these freaking posters with us From City City and they're very damage prone, they're very fragile because we want the posters to be pristine.

I exaggerate a little bit, but, like, sometimes we sold, like, ten.

Like, ten. What a money pit that was?

Until we ran into problems. Then I go to Dubai.

And I'm really like, where's the book? I have one copy of the book. Amy's not part of this tour. We didn't anticipate going to Dubai. That's the place I would've bought the books.

I had zero books. I had one, and I'm like, Jason, you forgot who to give it to.

That was no fun. Okay. Let's go to Tim. Tim, what's going on? Hey, just a follow-up question, Chris.

It said something earlier and also ties in with this. You mentioned earlier about personal brand or building influence and I think if I heard you correctly, you said it's probably better to build your business brand than would be your personal brand. And I think there was something along that lines. Is is that do you remember that a little bit earlier?

As far as building And that hold on a lot. We feed back.

And I think you want to speak to the side of your mic because I'm getting a lot of plosys from you, in my ears.

Okay. So do I believe that you should build your personal brand or your business brand? I think it's very hard to build a business brand in.

Because a business brand has no personality. A business brand just wants more work. They wants more clients and customers, whereas I as a person have a lot of personality, and I have a lot of opinions, and I'm not afraid to share them.

For me, my own personal challenge is when I ran my service design company, I didn't know how to write for that company.

It was very difficult. It came out super corporate and people did not engage with it at all.

Mininess are writing as myself with my points of view with a little bit of my attitude.

It's harder to catch, and then people now want to hire us. It's kinda weird that way. So I think if you're going to, like, business brand or personal brand, In terms like really building it and creating content and writing and sharing your thought leadership, it's better for you to show up as you. And if you look at someone with, like, Brian Collins, who does this at the highest level, He with we are Collins. So if you wanna check out their branding, our user customer design experience firm. You'll see that when Brian speaks and writes, he just writes us Brian.

And he shares all kinds of things about history, about design, social perspectives commentary, and he's not too worried. He doesn't write we are call ins and we believe this.

Right? That's his agency. But whenever he speaks he tells you every time he goes and does a keynote, he picks up a new client.

So whenever possible, try to watch Brian Collins talk and try to analyze and understand what he's doing.

So he has this this crazy ability to speak at a level which hits designers but basically the CEO is above them.

It's kinda weird.

Right? He usually uses a lot of literary and cultural references about his three, and so he gives you like this, like, sage wisdom.

That hits the CEOs, but he brings it down and he says something that's very popular and then designers are like, yeah, Brian, you're our champion.

I see very few people being able to do this.

So whenever possible, seek out some of his content and watch it.

He's he's spoken a lot so you should be able to find a video of him somewhere. And just analyze the heck out of it. Actually, ask Chachi BT to help you.

Grab the transcript, break it down, and figure it out.

Thanks, Chris. He's Okay. You're welcome. He's fascinated by lots of things in history and fashion and design.

And he reads a lot too and he has some kind of like visual photographic memory.

So he's able to dig deep. So he's the designer's designer.

He understands, like, different cuts of typefaces and why they made this and why that's an inferior typeface. That's for all the designers, but he can bring it back to, like, global business objectives.

So all of you if you want more business.

You gotta get out there, establish your thought leadership. Around your personal brand about around who you are, and understand strategically you're speaking to not only the people that are just like you, but the people who hire people like you.

If you can do that, land land that, dismount, you'll be, smell like roses.

Mix metaphors.

Okay. I think we're we're done here. Right, Steph?

Yep. We have another call in two weeks where we're visiting the irresistible offer.

And you can find the link to that inside of the pro calendar already. And if you are in the biggest area, Chris, you're gonna be here next week. Right?

Next week already?

Is it next week or is it a week after? Let me check my calendar. I haven't written my Oh, wait. Maybe it is two weeks. A lot. You scared me.

I I woke you up.

Maybe it is a look after. Where is this? I I don't know your schedule like you do. No. It is next week.

Oh, you're welcome.

Yeah. They want my deck. I'm like, I'm not I don't have a debt, guys. I'm working on it still, everybody. Yeah. I'll be in Las Vegas, Los wages next week towards the end of the week, the Ford event.

I said, right. Yeah. Okay. Good to see everybody. If you're brand new here, welcome. I see a lot of familiar faces.

So I'll just go down the roll call here. Of course, we just talked to Tim.

The two my two teammates here, Andres and Stephanie, their address is a new background. He he's he's living in the purple void right now, something very geometric going on, maybe a redesign of his space. Always good to see Phyllis, my my ghetto country brand mother here, Cari, who I've seen in real life and her husband.

In real life. Yes. Sebastian. Of course. Sebastian. Yes. He's here. Ernesto, welcome. And we saw you CJ.

Hello. Hello. Mike Melanie. Melanie, you you're here. Sometimes you're not here. How's life? What's going on?

What's shaking, begging? What's going on with you? Things are good? Things are great. Things are great.

I can't complain. It was so nice to see so many faces I missed you guys have just been, you know, in in the real world doing things. But I'm gonna I'm glad you mentioned the thing happening in LA when it come. Good.

Melanie, why have we not crossed paths so far given that you're out in the world too?

I don't know. I don't know what's going on. But I've been thinking about you, so I think we need to cross paths. Yeah. There's a there's a moment for a selfie somewhere, and we we needed to make that happen. Okay?

Okay. So hello, Matt, Stefan, Tanya, who I also met in real life. Not in the UK where Sure have been, but we did meet. So it's all good.

Isabelle. Hello. Hello, Nathan. Nathan, you've been around the block here with us for quite some time.

Good to see your face, my friend. Susan, which I spent too much time with, I think.

A little bit too much. Right?

Go ahead. Put put your take take yourself off mute for a second. I wanna share something about you.

Okay. What do we what do we know about Germans and their appetite and their diet? What do we know about Germans? Anything?

What do you mean?

I don't pretend with me.

You and Cassie with your finite limited palette. It's like, we went to an Italian restaurant. They couldn't order anything. I'm like, let's split this.

Like, no. We don't eat that. How about this? Nope. We don't like that either. What are we doing?

We split appetizers.

Shashito peppers, that was it.

That was it. If it's not a schnitzel or Shashito peppers, that's all we can do. Okay. Well, just messing around with you. It was lovely to hang out with you. Are you recovered from meeting?

Mostly. Yes. Mostly? Okay. Next time I I wear a walking shoes. Yes.

Yes. Okay. So my my reputation is true. I do walk fast, everybody, relatively speaking, not as fast as a speed walker, but Keza, yeah, you guys are walking too fast.

What is going on here? And we did walk around a lot though. It's New York. That's what you do.

Eric, seeing you, Mike, Kevin, Kimberly, Parchell. Parchell. Hello?

Carrie MacGregor. Hello, Sono, Avarro. Hello.

Shoot. I think now I've lost my place in here. Where is it? Ellen Kevin Snowshaker, whatever.

Get out of here. Oh, now it's all the robots in here. All the robots here. Vladimir nack, Chinchilla, I I think that's it.

Lovely seeing you. We'll see you guys in a couple weeks. Hopefully, I've seen you in Las Vegas, maybe in LA, see you in real life somewhere real soon. Take care, everybody.

Bye bye.

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