Using Video to Promote Your Small Business – Adam Rahn from Droi Media – Small Business Show 115

The small business show, episode number 115 for Wednesday, April 19, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the small business show. The show by, for and about small business business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Concord, California, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, man?

I'm good. How are you?

I'm good, Good, good, good. I'm enjoying a day with a lack of rain, which is highly unusual out here this year, but from what I understand, it's only going to last about 24 hours. Well, yeah, yeah, take it what you can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's cool. We've done 115. Well, we're doing our 115th, so we've really done 114, I guess to be. But I often talk. We talk about video and stuff on the show and getting your name out there and social media and everything. And one of the things that we've said over and over, video is a powerful way to connect with your customers, whether it's your business or your branding yourself and creating and sharing video content is fantastic. So today on the show, we're joined by Adam Raun from Droi Media. And Adam's been working with companies, schools, other institutions for over a decade and to create video content. Welcome to the show, Adam.

Hi. Thanks for having me.

You bet. Yeah. We're excited to hear about your business and we're. And we're interested in talking about, you know, using video with small business. So we appreciate you coming on.

It's my. My life and my hobby, so that's awesome.

When you, when you can do both, that's pretty good.

I know it's a very expensive hobby sometimes, so.

Yeah. Well, now it's. So write off.

Yeah, yeah. You have to justify. You have to start a business so you can justify it.

Yeah. I told my wife the same thing.

Of my life, man.

You got it. We've all been there. So. Hey. So let's start with a quick history of Droi media, how you got started in the business, and give us a little background.

Sure. So I'm from the sunny state of Illinois. It's great. I grew up here. I went to college in Normal, Illinois, at Illinois State University. I studied journalism here and got behind the camera, Loved it and really never looked back. And so I started freelancing in College in the 2005, 2006 maybe, and freelanced a little bit while I finished up my degree. And then after I graduated, I worked all over the country for a couple of companies and then came Back to Illinois State and Normal, got my master's degree. I like video production so much I wanted to teach it a little bit as well. So do that. I met my wife during that time and in full force started doing freelance, not full time, but really put a lot of effort into it. And during that time I got hired on at Illinois State University in the marketing and communications department doing video production for the university full time.

Got it.

And so I've been doing teaching, working for Illinois State University in freelance, kind of a three job thing for several years. And then seven or eight months ago quit to pursue freelancing full time. It's been a dream of mine since I got that first very, very meager paycheck as a college student and realized that I just bought myself some beer and pizza money and figured I could take it from there. And I have and it's been great. Like I said, I do it full time now and I love every minute of it. That's great.

That's awesome. So it sounds like, I mean, you have a lot of background in doing the actual video production and that kind of thing, but running the business full time on your own is a relatively recent. I don't know what the word I'm looking for, but you've been doing it for a while.

Yeah.

What surprised you the most? What's happened that you really didn't expect once you launched full time and went out on your own?

Sure. I think there's a couple of things and one of them is the stuff that you take for granted. You hear that you're going to have to work on your business, not in your business. 100% of the time. You're going to have to wear a lot of hats. But I think the sheer amount of how many hats you have to wear and how much time each of those takes up is something that you just don't realize until you get into it. And then being able to balance those amongst themselves and then with the rest of your life. I have to be my own accountant, my own Accord or coordinator, sorry, director, my own videographer, all these other things. And then I'm, you know, like a husband. I have cats and dogs, I'm a homeowner, so I gotta mow my yard and you know, all the adult stuff. So managing all of those things I think is something that's. I was aware that it was gonna come, but I wasn't aware of how much time management I was gonna have to like really impose upon myself to get everything done and do everything well.

Yeah, well, that's the key is making sure it's well or sometimes good enough. Right. Yeah, but, yeah, but even, even if you choose to grow the business to the point where you would hire employees to perhaps do some of those things, it's, I mean the responsibility still falls to you to make sure it's done good enough. Right. And hopefully, hopefully better than good enough. But, but yeah. So yeah, it's. Yeah, it's a balance. We hear this when we, Shannon and I have been both been through it many times over in fact. And, and, and we hear it from everybody.

It's. It's how it goes. Yeah.

Yeah. And one of the things I would suggest is to pick up a copy of the E. Myth. It's a fantastic book and it talks tremendously to just what you're discussing. And one of the things they really recommend in that book and we talk about on the show a lot is setting up an org chart. Even if your name is in every box and you can even just do a simple one in a spreadsheet or something like that because it really helps you kind of define what you do. And if you're path as a grow and like Dave said, bringing employees or contractors, anything, then you have this kind of preconceived or pre filled out thing and you can plug people in. It's really helpful.

Yeah, it's a good idea. And it's one of those things that, you know, I'm very meticulous about a lot of what I do. So, you know, like I said, I knew I had researched a bunch of it. I had asked every other small business owner I could come up with, you know, what they thought of it and that thing. But so that, I mean that was probably one of the biggest surprises. And then the other one was, you know, the amount of non billable hours that you, that you have as a business owner. And not to say that, you know, I'm like going broke over here. You know, you have these ideas like I'm going to do freelance, I'm going to work four days a week doing video and then one day a week of the other stuff. And it's like a complete inverse of that. And you know, luckily it's enough to, you know, I do well enough and I think my business is successful. But that was a big surprise to me. I don't think I realized that it was going to be that much of a. I didn't think the ratio was going to be that big, to be honest.

There's a lot of work on the back End that, like you said, is tough to build. I mean, it's tough enough to build your clients in the first place, but then, you know, a lot of that stuff you just, you have to do to run to get the company going.

Right? Absolutely.

Yeah. That's cool. So, hey, before the show, you were explaining and I was reading about, you know, this concept of working backwards with your clients, which I thought was interesting on a couple of levels. Basically, not starting with the video, but connecting with and learning about the client, what their goals are, what they're trying to do. Before you even start talking about the video. I was struck that that seems like to make so much sense. But then you commented that, well, that doesn't happen that often and that's kind of one of your unique things. So explain that a little bit.

Sure. So one of the things that, I mean, other people in my industry will probably strangle me for doing this, but I'll have a client come to me and go, we have X amount of dollars and we want a 15 minute video. And in my mind, you know, that's great. If you just want a 15 minute video, I could do that for you. But what I want to know is like, what do you want from that video? So if you, you know, have got, you know, for instance, a really good example to kind of illustrate this, I guess, would be there's a gym here in town, a local gym. They, they came to me with this exact thing. They said, hey, we want a 15 minute video to highlight 15 different programs that we are implementing. And I was like, that's great, but I'm thinking of it as a consumer. And I'm going, well, if I don't care about the first one, I'm not going to sit through the next 14 of them. So working with the client and going, okay, you want to promote these things, how do we do that? And ultimately what we did is we had a few meetings and we found out that the best way to do it was going to be to break it down by the kind of like workout sort of system that they had, the workout program. So instead of a 15 minute video that highlighted each program for a minute, we broke that into 15 individual videos that were anywhere between 20 and 45 seconds long, you know, because that way you don't have to target, you know, the guy that wants to do Krav Maga on the weekends. He doesn't have to sit through like the yoga and the Pilates videos to, you know, to see this, or he doesn't have to deal with it, you can target him directly and then vice versa. You know, you don't have to show up boxing video to, you know, a mom that doesn't want to. She just wants to do yoga.

That's right.

Or, you know, or like postnatal yoga or something like that. So.

Totally makes sense.

Yeah.

I mean, and breaking up in those smaller little chunks, I mean, that's the, you know, getting people to pay attention in the first place is.

Yeah, absolutely.

But, yeah, that's really cool.

And audience retention rates are so low right now that I just. There are very few things. There are very few times that someone is going to sit through a 15 minute video listening to you talk about your, you know, forever. I know, it really is.

I mean, this shows at 11 and we've just got to cut it here. So.

Yeah. See you later. See you later. So I think that's one of the things. And so ultimately what we want to do is I asked the client, all right, well, what do you want to do with this video or these videos? And then we work backwards and that kind of determines, you know, how many videos we're going to use, maybe how long they're going to be, are there going to be multiple versions of them? And we don't, I don't do a lot of actual broadcast stuff anymore, but it kind of came from doing broadcast work early, very early on when I freelanced and, you know, I would, we, I would do a video and then it comes to the point where I have to submit it to the cable company and I haven't thought that far ahead yet. And then I've got the wrong format to give them. And then I have to go back to the client and be like, hey, I didn't shoot in 60 frames a second. I shot in a different frame rate. So we got to do this again. And it was just kind of eye opening. And I was like, well, I'm going to, we're going to look at the end and work our way backwards.

Cool, that's good. So do you think that, I mean, and you've done freelancing for a long time and do you think most small businesses should have, you know, video out there either on their website and their social media? I mean, should every business have a video?

You know, I have like a. I want to say yes because I want them to hire me to do it. Yeah, that's right. But that's my answer. But no, honestly, I don't think that every business, I don't think every business or every small business needs video Much like social media, it's just a tool that you can use to market yourself or to educate your consumers or that sort of thing. So you just might not need it. Not every business needs Twitter or Instagram. If you run a welding company, unless you weld some really cool stuff, you're not going to need Instagram to show a bunch of, you know, sweaty guys behind the scenes with sparks.

Well, I think it speaks to your questioning of that, you know, what are you really trying to achieve?

Right.

I mean, yeah, absolutely. Just don't need to do it just to have it. But if you really are trying to connect with a certain demographic or client base in a certain manner, you know, might. Might be a good solution for you or might not.

Yeah, and the big part of that, that I, you know, I've had to turn away jobs because I'm just like, I don't think you have a good enough idea is because the idea is just not there. People come and they want. They're like, we need a video. And I go, well, why? What do you want to do? And they're like, because we need a video. You know, it's just, yeah, there's the thoughts. Not there. And, you know, I'd love to accept their money, but ultimately what's going to happen is, you know, like, any kind of anything that someone buys or gets, if it doesn't work out, I'm the one that, you know.

Yeah, that's a. You're avoiding a disaster by telling them, no, thank you.

Absolutely. Yes, that's correct.

And I think they'll respect you more for it and it ultimately will lead to more business.

Yeah, I hope so.

Yeah. Yeah, it should. I have the same issue where it's tough sometimes to turn away the dollar, but, yes, it is. In the long run, it really pays off.

I agree. Absolutely.

So let's talk about marketing. You know, you're getting going. You freelance forever. You probably have a good reputation. You're hanging out in, you know, online forums and stuff, doing things. What other kind of marketing are you doing to grow your business?

So probably for me, the biggest business generator I've ever had has been word of mouth. So I'll do a video for someone, it'll get shown locally, and someone will go, hey, that looks really good. Who shot that for you? Or who did that for you? Who did the editing, whatever. And then my name gets passed along. That's been probably the single best thing I've ever, you know, market. And I don't. I don't technically market myself. When that happens.

You're not. You're not sticking your logo or something in the corner of other of the videos you produce, right?

I mean, no, never. I almost never do that. Yeah. And I know a lot of people that do, and it's. If it works for them, it works for them. Sure, I would rather have them word of mouth, but I network a lot. I mean, I'm like a shameless self promoter. When I go to events, I, you know, have business cards, I hand them out and I talk business, man. Yeah, I just. I want to. I want people to know that I do video so that even if, you know, even if it's, you know, five days or five years from now, they're like, hey, we're gonna do a video this year. I think we're ready for it. And they're like, yeah, I remember I met the guy this one time, and they have my business card or they have my name and. And I'm lucky enough that I work in a pretty small community in the grand, you know, scheme of, you know, how big communities are in the world.

Right.

That I'm fairly well connected. And it's, you know, finding kind of the key players, people through the chamber of commerce, you know, some of the other local organizations, and getting to know them is really the biggest part, because then they're the ones that pass along. They're like, hell, yeah, I do know a video guy. You should. You should look them up, you know, rather than me trying to go in and cold call every small business in the community. That's not going to work because again, they might not need video in the first place. And I mean, it's great, and it's nice to meet people that way, but I just don't. In my mind, that does not work out as well.

It's a waste of time. You may get one. I mean, if you don't have anything better to do, maybe it's not a waste of time because you might get something out of it. But all else being equal, there's a lot more avenues that I would exhaust before saying, all right, let me just pick up the phone and essentially dial random numbers, you know?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, this. And if I'm doing that, I might as well well just not even use my local community. I might as well just start with, like, Fortune 500 companies.

Yeah, that's right.

You know, that's right.

Because at least if you hit, you've got, you know, potentially a lifetime's worth of. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. It may take you a lifetime, but you may, once you get it, you know. But yeah, becoming the expert in your community, I think is a really great takeaway and being a resource for those people that are asking, you know, like. And again, you're the guy they're going to call. And even if they don't turn into a revenue event at that particular time.

Right.

Someone that you really give some solid advice to, even telling them, man, maybe you don't need this at this time. Maybe an explainer video is something better. One of those whiteboard explainer things that's a customer or that's another referral I would imagine you're going to get, and you're building that trust in the community.

Yeah, I try to do that as much as possible. So even if I have to meet someone over a cup of coffee and tell them how to download a video. Yeah, that's cool. In my mind, everyone should know how to do in 2017. But then they're like, oh, that guy helped me with a video one time.

That's right. Very cool. As you're building your business and service providers like yourself, scheduling and communicating with your clients, it's just a critical part of being successful. What do you use and what tools have you found to be the most effective for you to manage that part of the business?

Sure. And that's a great question because it's something that I think a lot of us small business owners struggle with. If you just do a Google search and search for time management or tools or spreadsheet tools or anything like that, you're going to get tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of results. For every good app that's going to help you manage your money or manage your time or be a good calendar or something like that, there's hundreds of bad ones, really. I'm a very basic guy. When I go to a client meeting, I've got a notepad and a pen or a pencil. I take notes, pretty exhaustive notes. And my wife actually runs my business with me. She helps do coordinating and script writing and stuff. And we'll get out of a meeting and she's taken like six more pages of notes than I have. And I honestly find that that's probably one of the best things that I ever do is take notes and write all this stuff down. So I have records of it and I can look back and reference it two weeks down the road, six weeks down the road, several weeks down the road when the project's going on, and then digitally emailing. There are certain times that I'll text Or call with clients. Phone calls probably more so than text, but as my clients are more and more tech savvy, I find that some of them text. So that'll do it. And then Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive is another one. Those are really good. So I've got spreadsheets and Word docs and stuff in. I was a pretty early adopter of Google Drive, I think, and I just made a really good effort to learn them as best as I could and to tailor them to what I needed to do. So finding a cost of doing business spreadsheet and then modifying it to do what I needed to reflect my business. I've got price quote templates that I can use and I can go in and when I open it, it'll auto fill the current date and then all I have to do is type in a couple of spots in the document with pricing and like client name and then I can just send them a link, I can share it with them directly from that page.

So you're doing all your quoting and invoicing from spreadsheets. You're not using an accounting package to manage that part of it?

I have not as of yet. As of tax day earlier this week, I might be changing my tune on that. I think I just got, I just did my taxes through like TurboTax and I think they gave me like the QuickBooks self employed for free.

Sure. You can import, yeah, you can import those spreadsheets right in there, the quotes and that kind of stuff. So, you know, you could put that. So, so let me ask you a question, especially from a creative side. Tell me what happens when you spend a lot of time and effort into creating this thing and you show it to the client and they don't like it.

And then, you know, you come home and you cry a little bit.

Swear in the car as you leave the customer. I mean that's got to happen or it's going to happen at some point. And I'm just curious on the, you know how, because that's a kind of a stress management thing right there, I would imagine.

Oh yeah, it's, you know, I think with most things you gotta like leave your ego at the door. And you know, I, you know, one of the great things, you know, I talked about working backwards with the client. Sort of one of the best things that I found that that does is it reduces that uncertainty at the end of it. Whereas if they go, hey, I want a XYZ video and then I produce it for them. We haven't worked through all of these steps necessarily. And then I give it to them and they're like, well, this isn't what we talked about at all. Or we had different thoughts on it, you know, whatever the case. So I've tried to work it so that I really like mitigate that uncertainty or that they're not going to like what I do. It does happen. I had, you know, I'd come up, there was a client I had and I'm gonna keep from mentioning any of them, my actual clients, but, you know, I had a client that, you know, they wanted a couple of videos done. So we did this and then they came back and the director at the organization got involved. And it turned out that they didn't like what me and the other marketing people had come up with. So then we had to essentially redo it. And I mean, it was one of those ones where I finished it and I was like, this is good. I really like this. This might go up website or, you know, on my YouTube channel. And then ultimately what we end up with is something that's not as creative in my mind, it's not as poignant. But at the end of the day, there's certain, like, there are certain battles I'm not going to fight. And if a director is pushing to have a video a certain way, you know, I'll give you my creative opinion, but I'm not going to say no. You know, in the grand scheme, once I'm already 75 or 90% of the way through.

Yeah, eat. I get it.

Yeah. And every once in a while I'll go back and I'll do, you know, I'll just do my own version of the commercial. Sometimes if it's like, if it's a good piece, if I'm like, you know, in that case, in this case, I really liked it. So I'm gonna go back after the project's done, edit it, and then put it up on the Internet as like a spec kind of the director's cut. Director's cut, yeah. And then with the director's reel underneath it, I'm just gonna be swearing about the client. That's good, but it's tough. I mean, I, I like all of us, I'm sure we put a lot of. You put a lot of thought into your business and then someone, you know, kind of tears it down and you just, you gotta be thick skinned.

We had this conversation last week on the show with actually somebody that runs a. And she runs her own HR business. But it doesn't matter. Like you said, it doesn't matter what you do it. In the end, if you are in the business of serving your clients, you can advise them all you want and you should, and then it's up to them to make the decision as to how much, if any of your advice to take.

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.

And then, and you know, when you shift from the, the creative or the, the advice giver to the grunt at that point. Right. I mean, not to minimize what we all do, but there is that point where it's like, okay, I've already, I've now given you everything I can. You tell me what to do and I'm just going to go ahead and do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

So, okay, so what's in store for the future? I mean, are you creating a lifestyle business that can have lots of flexibility and freedom, or do you plan on bringing in more people and managing employees to take on more projects and reach more customers? What's your thought?

I'm sure with most people you try to come up with a five year plan and then you get about a year into it and it changes entirely. You know, I've wanted to do freelance for a long time and now that I'm into it, I really enjoy it. I have found, like with kind of the networking of stuff, that my local community and some of the surrounding towns are the best place for me to work at this minute. I'm very open to working in other markets. If someone from Seattle or Detroit or Kansas City calls and wants some video production and, you know, they can pay for, you know, it's better for me to go work than some local guy, you know, guy or girl, then I'll do that. You know, I wouldn't mind expanding slowly, but my big focus is just in Illinois right now. It's, you know, it's been my home. It's where I've got the biggest foothold. And I mean, really, I just want to keep carving my niche into this area. And I think trying to expand all over the place would just stretch me too thin, too fast, you know. And I have a really good friend of mine I went to school with and he lives in Chicago, you know, just a couple hours north of me. And I'll go up there and work with him on occasion and vice versa. But for me to try to get jobs in Chicago, I have to be ready to drive two, three hours up there the next day. Or I just, you know, it's very tough. I mean, every, you know, even we're two hours apart and our Industries in our communities are just so different. Like, it's so much faster paced up.

There than it is here.

So for right now, what I want to do is I want to get to the point where I'm so busy that I would have to consider maybe hiring out someone else or hiring out an employee or moving to a bigger market to better suit my skill set at that point.

I like something you said there. You said as we're talking about future planning, you said you're working to carve a deeper niche. It seems counterintuitive, but it's not. That's the right. I mean, for many businesses, that's the right thing to do.

Yeah, I agree.

Dig right in.

Yeah. I mean, you can't be that guy, you know, that business that goes, you know, I want to service the healthcare industry, the flight industry, the, you know, the. Yeah. You know, the whatever industry I, you know, and I have. I'm. The video production stuff that I do is pretty broad if you look at it. You know, I've got hospitals, municipalities, trucking companies, and a couple other, you know, golf courses, things like that as my clients. And I'm trying to hone in a little bit, but I'm also. My market is so small that for me to hone in on just, you know, let's say hospitals is. I'm going to run out of clients real quick. You know, I've got two or three of them in my community and that's it. So, you know, if I. If I lived in a bigger city or, you know, a bigger. A much larger metropolitan area of any kind, I might have that opportunity. But I just, I really want to focus on, you know, Illinois. Illinois is my niche right now.

I think that's a great idea. And I think that, you know, like Dave mentioned, and also it goes back to becoming the expert in your community, and that will help you build that niche and you'll be able to focus. And, you know, the more you broaden out, they also, the more pressure you're going to get on price and the more competitive it's going to be. And so I encourage you to really mine that niche that you have where you're at. I think that's great.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you.

Well, I've learned a lot about video stuff here, and we really appreciate you coming on, talking about your business and how you use video in your small business, and we'd love for you to come back sometime, tell us how it's going.

Yeah, why don't we get something on the books?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Dave, you have any more questions for.

I don't. No. Yeah, you are. It has been a long time since I've heard the.

The.

The town. Normal, Illinois. I played a club there. I'm a drummer too, and I played a club there called. I. I doubt it's still there. This was back in the mid-90s called the Stadium. Of all the things. It was this tiny little club, but.

I don't know if it is. I'm sorry to say that, Dave.

No, I don't think it. I can't imagine it would be.

That's great. Well, Adam, we wish you the best and again, we appreciate all your insight and. And what's the best way folks to get a hold of you there?

Just droimedia.com D R O I media.com youm can find me on all the major social networks. YouTube channel or droi mediagmail.com you can always reach me.

Awesome.

Thanks so much for coming on the show, man.

No problem. Thank you guys for having me. It's been a pleasure and have a good day. Thanks, you too.

Hey, folks, find us BusinessShow Co Facebook is our small business support group. We'll see you there. Everybody keep on living the charm life. We'll see you next week.

Take it easy.