Networking at Scale: The Power of Video | Chris Weiher
28 Jan 2025 · 38 min
In this episode of The Profitable Creative, host Christian Brim interviews Chris Weir, founder of Cleaver Creative, about building a B2B video production business that leverages LinkedIn and YouTube. Weir shares the origin of his company’s name, his early freelance journey, and how he identified a gap in high‑quality B2B video content on LinkedIn. He introduces the concept of "networking at scale"—using video to extend personal connections and generate organic reach. The conversation moves into operational tactics: hiring a virtual assistant from the Philippines, expanding a remote team, and institutionalising weekly training videos that are turned into checklists with AI tools. Weir explains his hiring economics, citing a 2:1 labor‑efficiency ratio and Profit First profit targets (30‑50%). He stresses a consultative sales approach over "pill‑mill" marketing, and discusses the importance of deep client understanding. The episode also covers content repurposing through recorded mastermind sessions, the power of authentic LinkedIn vlogging, and future plans to broaden services while maintaining a focus on storytelling. Throughout, both hosts emphasize financial discipline, the need for clear profit metrics, and the responsibility that comes with powerful video storytelling.
Chapters
We have a client and they do really great work with really big companies and make big changes. And they have a mastermind now. So they do a monthly mastermind where they get CI professionals all to kind of come to this one hour and they all talk about things that are going on in continuous improvement and Six Sigma and stuff like that. And like, that's a really kind of a fun model that I would love to replicate with other consultants and go, look at like you do something really, really well. You can put out a few ads, bring in 10 or 20 people monthly that are in your space that actually want to learn from you. You want to learn from each other, build a small community, and then guess what? If you record that, you've got an hour's worth of content you can chop up in different ways and share on social. And then you also can like potentially work with these people.
Hey creative, are you ready to discuss profits, the money, the ways to make it happen? The Profitable Creative Podcast is for you, the creative, how you define it. Videographers, photographers, entrepreneurs, marketing agencies, you get it. CEO of Core Group and author Christian Brim interviews industry experts, creative entrepreneurs, and professionals alike who strive to be creative and make money at the same time. Sound like you? Tune in now. It's time for profit.
Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Shout out to our one listener in Wheaton, Illinois. Good morning, Wheaton. Joining me today is Chris Weir. From Cleaver Creative.
Welcome, Chris. Thank you, Christian. And, uh, interesting you bring up Wheaton, Illinois. I'm originally from Downers Grove, Illinois, right, uh, down the street from Wheaton, Illinois.
Well, that is odd.
Maybe it's like an old neighbor or something.
I have a list of single download, uh, cities, and, uh, that was just one I picked off the list, so who knows.
Shout out to Wheaton.
Yes. Where is Wheaton? I've never been to Wheaton.
Uh, they are both western suburbs of Chicago, about 40 minutes west of Chicago.
The only place in Illinois besides Chicago and the suburbs I've been is Champaign, uh, which is a lovely city. I like— uh, it was nice.
Went to college there.
Nice.
We got a lot of commonalities going on.
You told me before the show, but I think the listeners need to, to hear this, uh, how do you come up with the name Cleaver Creative, which As most people do, I misread it the first time and thought it was clever, creative, which made more sense. But Cleaver, tell us more.
Yeah, well, I mean, there is that alliterative connection too. I thought, well, that's kind of fun. But as I was saying before we started recording, my dad was a butcher for 30 years and his dad was a butcher for probably 30 or 40 years. And so growing up, I worked in the butcher shop in downtown Downers Grove. And I always thought that the image of a cleaver was a very strong, cool image at the time when I was getting my degree in Champaign, Illinois. I was like considering film and I was like, well, that could be kind of cool for cutting film, the image of a cleaver coming. Yes. So, um, when I started my company, I was like, that, that could work. And, uh, it's worked out pretty good.
The image that comes to mind with the cleaver is Three Blind Mice. I don't, I don't know, I That, yeah, it's, it comes up there.
I think there was also a, uh, it was a French film that featured a prominent butcher who was wielding a cleaver. I'm trying to think of who. It'll probably come to me later on in the show, but it's a, it's a pretty Edward Scissorhands.
No, that was, he was a barber. Sorry. All right, so tell us the story of Cleaver Creative. How did it come to be?
In 2011, I was working for another production company. And they were, they were still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis, and got laid off and had just gotten married. And my wife at the time was like, so, you know, what are you going to do for your next job? I was like, I don't think I want to do another job. And she's like, Nice. Okay, great. That sounds awesome.
I married a psychopath.
Great.
Thank you.
Yeah, super. I was like, no, I think I'm just going to do my own thing. And so I started freelancing and built a small team. And then I started at a startup about a year later, and that kind of fed what we were doing with Cleaver and did a lot of animation work. And then about 4 years ago, started creating content on LinkedIn. And saw that as a pretty big opportunity for video content because at the time people were posting like GIFs and goofy stuff on there. But I was like, there is no video content really on LinkedIn at the time. So I started making videos there and very quickly it was apparent that like, okay, B2B video here is a whole new space to play in. Yeah.
And so is that what you specialize or focus on is B2B for the LinkedIn platform or just B2B in general?
That is a piece of it. Yeah. So I would say B2B is the, is the main group of companies that we work with. We don't really do any B2C stuff. And it's become kind of a combination between content on LinkedIn and content on YouTube. And sometimes that stuff, you know, is intermixable. But yeah, it's those two platforms are the primary place now.
And so who, who is your ideal or target customer?
Usually a company that is, I would say, at least 5 to 10 employees, possibly more, depending on the content that we're making for them. We've also done, you know, a lot of work for big companies like Accenture in Chicago and done big sales videos and things like that. But as the landscape has been changing, more companies have built more bigger in-house departments specifically for video. And so I think there's an interesting place to play in with smaller businesses now that also need like a production arm, but perhaps don't really want to have a full-time production staff employed. So we're finding like a neat niche between that area of, you know, 5 employees, usually the minimum, and then up to 10, 20, 50 maybe, uh, at the larger sizes.
We have a lot of videographer clients, and, uh, a lot of conversation in that space is around intent of the video. And I've had conversations on this show about people coming to marketers, uh, which I'm, I'm loosely lumping you in there for the purposes of this discussion, but they come and they say, well, we need video. That's about the extent of it. Like, they're not real sure why they need video. It's like, everybody else is doing it, I see a lot of it, I, I, I need it. What do you see when people come to you? Do, do they have a clear idea of, of why they want video?
They Oftentimes do. I sometimes agree with them and sometimes I don't. That was actually the very first video I made for LinkedIn was why you need to be making video on LinkedIn. And for a smaller business where the business owner is oftentimes the largest single asset of that company, video should be kind of a no-brainer because essentially you are the face of your company. You're getting out, you're having meetings with clients, and video allows you to meet them before you've met them, and they can make a decision about, do I like, know, and trust you through your video content, right? So essentially, I call it networking at scale. Okay. You know, that's, that's the greatest part I would say about LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts right now is that you get a really far organic reach. And particularly in LinkedIn, if you are a small business, if you are doing B2B work, a lot of your work is going to be coming from your existing network or a network that you're building. And so it's the same reason why people go to networking events. It's like you go to a networking event, you don't immediately jump on a table and start going like, hey, buy from me. Well, you can. You can. You can, but, uh, it's not recommended. But you, you shake hands and you have coffee and you, and you go there for 6 months, and 6 months or a year later someone goes, hey, you know what, I need to introduce you to somebody and, uh, they need what you do, right? And the same is true with, I think, um, creating video content for that space.
I like that phrase you said, networking. Say it again, you had a phrase. Networking.
I call it networking at scale.
Networking at Scale, I like that. Because I, you know, I've been on LinkedIn a long time and it has become very spammy. Uh, many times as an entrepreneur I said I wish someone would create an alternative to LinkedIn because it feels like I am constantly having to ignore or accept requests to connect And I filter those pretty hard, but it shocks me how many people try to take me to bed immediately and start hitting up my messages about like, hey, you need this, right? And it's like, no, dude, I didn't connect with you to hear your pitch. You know, you seemed interesting and we had some commonality, you know?
Yes, I would say it's— the platform has really changed a lot, especially in the past 4 or 5 years. And it has like people, you know, make that say, oh, it's becoming like Facebook and kind of is sort of becoming like Facebook. The main difference is that, yeah, I think people have more to lose there. So they still are more cautious than they would be on Facebook. It's tricky navigating some of that. I think like you say, like curating your network and being very specific about who you connect with and why. Can be advantageous as opposed to just like, I think there was a while there where people were like, oh, I got 10,000 connections. It's like, yeah, LinkedIn does not care. They're not going to push your post further because you have 10,000 connections. They're still going to test it out with a small group. If it performs well, they're going to push it out further. But like people thought it was going to be like TikTok and be like, oh my God, I got 10,000 connections.
Today's episode of The Profitable Creative is brought to you by Core Group. Are you tired of doing it all yourself? Do you feel like you have no plan? Let Core Group guide you to build the business of your dreams. Core Group, your go-to accountant for creatives.
It's fascinating to me. I did this post as a joke, but then I realized that it probably ran afoul of the algorithm because I took a picture. I have Canadian geese in the yard at my office and they're a nuisance. And I took a picture of Canadian geese and I railed about the illegal immigrants, about how they're here. They all they do is eat and poop and they're annoying, right? But it was a picture of these Canadian geese. And my last, my last line was, go back to Canada. And I mean, looking at the analytics of the post, I mean, it was just crickets, right? And so then I reposted it saying LinkedIn is suppressing my post. Uh, I don't know how long I'm going to go on this, this diatribe, but it is interesting where the algorithm, which we all know— I mean, we all know that it, it curates it based upon what they want us to see. How do you work in that framework of not really knowing? I mean, I guess you can test about what's going to perform, what's not going to perform. Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now.
My advice on this is very simple, and I think people can really overcomplicate it quite a bit, um, by going, oh well, you got to like make sure you got your target demographic, and it's like, yeah, you do. Like, that's just the basics of business. Like, you have to know who are you trying to really sell to, you know, all these different things. So you do need to know those things. But I think people get caught up with that feeling. I certainly do sometimes when you post something like, oh, I only got, you know, 10 likes, or maybe no likes, right? Right. Basically, my advice is, if you care about it, post it. If you genuinely care about what you're saying, put it out there, and you will attract people who feel the same way. That is my general advice.
I'm pretty passionate about geese. Yeah.
It's like, yeah, as long as you care about what you're talking about, talk about it. And people who, who agree with you will hear what you're saying. They'd be like, I think that is true. And I like this person. I like what they have to say. That's kind of interesting. And it's oftentimes the post that you least expect is going to be big. Like you just cannot predict it. And the advantage, you know, sometimes it can feel like maybe a little bit embarrassing when you do a swing and a miss. And you think, oh, people saw that. It's like the advantage to the algorithm not working is that not that many people did see it. Like there, you know, you get a post with 3,000 views, that means 3,000 people kind of liked it or had something to say about it or had a take on it. If you get a post with 10, that means guess what? Only 10 people saw that and you're kind of, you're spared that embarrassment.
I think it was like 2 or 3 views. No, that's great, right? Yeah, I mean, the geese are not important to a lot of people, I guess, on LinkedIn.
They are annoying though.
I'm going to pivot here for a second. So, uh, it sounds like you have had a couple of businesses where you've, you've had, uh, built a team, and a lot of businesses never get over that hump of, of hiring, uh, their first employee. Talk about that journey and, and that decision to scale.
So I think it came from, I was following a podcast called the Passive Income Podcast with Pat Flynn. I don't know if you've ever heard it or anything. It was very popular, you know, 10, 15 years ago when podcasts were just starting to kind of to blow up. And his advice was like, if you're going to get an employee, make your first employee a virtual assistant. And he recommended looking in the Philippines for someone. And he even recommended a company, I think it's called Virtual Staff Finder, to help find a VA, right? So when I first got my first couple big projects, I was like, okay, I think I'm going to give this a shot and see what it's like. And, and Joe, who is my VA, she's been working with me since, yeah, like 11 years now. Nice. And it's just worked out fantastically. Just very hardworking person, very dedicated. And over the years, she's moved into different roles and I've hired different people for different projects, but she's always been a core part of it. And now that we've been doing some of these smaller videos, we've built up like kind of a bigger team in the Philippines of, of editors and stuff like that. And producers and, you know, kind of like this, this little organic thing. So I guess that would be my, still my general advice. I'm actually kind of surprised to some extent, like, a couple of my clients do very well but they don't have a virtual assistant. And I'm like, oh, just like, say, I mean, as I'm sure you know, saving an hour a day of doing something tedious can give you an hour's worth of sales time. And so if you can just carve out these chunks of time and figure out really what do you not need to be doing, it can be a total game changer for people.
Yeah, I think that's the low-hanging fruit is is getting stuff off your plate that you don't like to do. What about when you're hiring people to do things that you used to do? What's that been like?
That's a trick. I think it's easier than most people think. I read a book a couple years ago called Clockwork by Michael Michalowicz that I really liked.
I was just about to say at the beginning of the episode that your voice sounds a lot like Mike. We just had him on the show a couple of episodes ago, but your voice is like, if I didn't see, I don't know that I'd be able to tell you two apart.
That's really funny. Wow. Well, I do feel like I have kind of a unique voice. Sometimes I think it's a little bit too Chicago up in my nose, but that's funny. Anyway, in the book, maybe you took— I'm sure, I'm guessing you've read it. I have. Okay. So for the listeners, I don't know if you guys talked about it in the episode, but he talks a lot about taking that chunk of time, taking 20 minutes per week initially and using that for training. And we didn't really do that until a couple of years ago. And now we've kind of done that on steroids. So now everybody on the team, and now it's up to like 12 people, couple full-time and then freelancers, are encouraged to work on a training video every single week, either up updating existing training or creating something new. And that at scale is so powerful because then you have everything documented, especially now with ChatGPT. It's so easy to take that video, the transcript, put it in ChatGPT and say, turn this into a checklist. Makes a beautiful checklist. And you just go, first you go here, then you go here, then you post the video over here, you name it this way. And when— so when people submit videos for review, it becomes very easy for us to go, this is wrong, and there's a checklist that you can follow. I don't even have to tell you what you did wrong, but I can tell it's wrong, and here's the checklist to go and check and figure it out. So that to me was the biggest thing as far as outsourcing was that book, and actually carving out some time every week for training, I think is really, really valuable.
Did you have any mental block getting over of like, people aren't going to do it to my standard or to my timeliness or, you know, the way I do it?
I think that was the thing that I learned with my initial team when we were doing some of these bigger, higher-end animation videos, was the difference between hiring an After Effects animator who could deliver something above my standards versus somebody who is trying to meet my standards. And I think that is the key, is that they sort of say, you know, if you're cast— if you're directing a movie, 50% of the work is casting. The same is true with hiring. It's like 50% of the work is getting the right person in the right place. You can have an editor who is trying to meet your standards and it's just not there because they haven't been editing as long and they just may not have the right aesthetic choices. Or you can have someone who's just been doing it for long enough, knows how to take care of their clients, knows how to do the work. And every time you get something from them, you're like, wow, this is amazing. So I think that's it more than anything is like, yeah, to some extent, like you can have the same training and, and if it's not the right person in the right spot, that you're going to get a different result, you know?
Yeah. And that, that brings to mind a book. I don't remember the author, Who Not How. But the principle is, is that it is the who, then they can figure out the how, as opposed to trying to figure out the solution to the problem and then finding somebody to do that. And for me, that was kind of revelatory because I like to solve problems. And so I tend to want to solve the problems rather than find somebody better at solving that particular problem than I am. And letting them do it. So I don't know if you've run into that.
100%. Yeah. Like, there's one thing I've learned. I think it's that like, I'm not really very good at doing anything. Yes. I am pretty good at working with people. Yes. I'm pretty good at working with clients. I'm pretty good at working with my team and going, I like this, but maybe we do it this way, et cetera, et cetera. But I've tried a bunch of stuff and messed a lot of it up. Like being like, oh, we're going to do Google ads now. And I'm going to, I'm going to learn them all. And I'm going to figure it out. And like, spend a bunch of time, spend a fair amount of money doing it and be like, never really mastered it. You know what? I would rather have somebody else who really, that is what they do and say, let me work with you and tell you, tell me why it's working, why it's not working. What can we do to They'll kind of get you what you need. So I think that's a big learning curve just in general for people, but definitely for entrepreneurs. It's like, um, figuring out really what your superpower is, is so much a part of it. And then trying to get so many other people to do what they can do better than you can, and then get the hell out of the way. Yeah.
Yeah. Yes. Yes. That's been my—
if you have the budget for it, which is another question oftentimes.
That actually leads me to my, my next question is when you look at the economics of building a team, what— how do you justify— how do you get— what's the thought process about hiring? What do you pay them? Can you afford them?
Those kind of things, right? I mean, typically— so this would be interesting to hear your take on this. Wait, is that— Profit First is also Michael Michalowicz's book too?
It is.
Oh, funny. Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's—
I, I wrote that one.
You wrote that?
You co-wrote it? I know I wrote it. He did the foreword. Uh, Profit First for Creatives is, is my baby. It came out, uh, March of this year, 2023.
Oh my gosh. Okay.
Okay. I'm gonna send you a copy when we're done, but that's— yeah, you, you, you beat me to it.
So fantastic. That's awesome. But yeah, so I, I typically look for like a 30% profit, um, that I want to be setting aside. To then do things with in the future. Depending on where we've been in different years, that has ranged, you know, to up to 50% to, you know, there was a year where we lost money. But that's usually my goal. That's what I'm trying to hit is that number.
Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy, and if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. I did a presentation a few weeks ago to a group of videographers, and one of the topics— it was a small group, so it was more like a workshop— and we were talking about hiring people, you know, whether it's an employee or an independent contractor, it doesn't matter. The economics are the same. And the standard that I use, and I talk about in the book, is professional services. I mean, it's different for every business, but professional services, I think the minimum that target that you should have is 2 to 1. And that's, you know, essentially saying if you're hiring somebody and you're going to pay them $50,000, they're going to make you another $100,000. Now, that's not just gross sales. If there's, if there's any, uh, direct costs, uh, involved with the project or the work, that comes off first. And, and then that net amount, the gross, the gross profit, you need to be earning 2 to 1. That concept has really transformed my business I got the idea from author Greg Crabtree. He wrote the book Simple Numbers and Simple Numbers 2.0, and I make fun of him every time I see him that the book is in fact not simple. It's short, but it's, it's thick. It is deep. And one of the key concepts he talks about is this labor efficiency and how in most businesses That's where most of our leverage is and most of our decision-making is, is around people. And having that target of 2 to 1 keeps you from— what it's done for us is it keeps us, uh, kind of put guardrails around us, like say, okay, do we need to hire somebody or not? Well, our labor efficiency is this. If, if we add that salary, are we going to be able to make that much more money?
It's interesting because it's like, for most of my team, they are working on our client work. But most of the stuff that we're doing now is content creation. So it's not necessarily creating ads, but it's like helping companies figure out what content should they be making to bring people in organically. But yeah, I would say that makes a lot of sense as far as hiring on someone full-time. You're looking you're looking to, to make sure that you're going to be almost guaranteed that, that return.
And I think the timeframe is, is different, but I think 18 months is the absolute max. Like if you don't have a clear path of how you're going to make money on this person in the next 12 to 18 months, I'd really look at whether you need to hire them or not, because a lot of times what happens is you need to hire somebody because you've got some other inefficiency, or maybe you've got a bad employee that you really just need to replace them. And one of the things that I have found is that a certain amount of profit and a certain amount of success can hide a lot of problems, right? You don't realize that you've got problems, uh, until later when something else happens. But these numbers and these metrics help, help you kind of get a 30,000-foot view of are you on the right path?
Yeah, I think that is probably true for a lot of companies. It's like when things are going well, it's very easy to start to become inefficient and start to have more waste and not be tracking like where you're actually making your money because you're like, well, we got to get this stuff out the door. We got to meet these deadlines and money's coming in, money's going out. Yeah.
Yes, and a lot of entrepreneurs, and I was— I count myself among them, just grow, grow, grow, and you end up working more and making less money. And it's like, that's not a sustainable thing. If you're going to grow, you need to make money at it, and it should increase the bottom line. You know, sometimes there's a lag, and that, that's totally fine, but having a realistic expectation that If I'm making this investment in whatever thing, it could be equipment, it could be people, but can I increase my profit, my gross profit first and my bottom line second within the next 12 to 18 months? And if I can't, I need to really be sure I'm on the right path.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think there's, especially in the creative field, I was just talking, I went over to her friends for Thanksgiving brunch yesterday, and, uh, um, his sister was working for a company that does kids' classes, creative kids' classes. And, uh, she was saying, well, the person, uh, she's got a lot of ideas and she's— there's people signing up for the classes, but she's kind of over here and she's kind of over there. And the last thing that I wanted to do, uh, in college was take a business class, right? I just want to like make stuff and like, right, make some money., you know, and learning those lessons around what your margin should be and how to make those decisions, I think often gets put on the back burner for creatives because it's just like, well, that's not the fun part. And right, it's not the fun part, but it, it becomes more fun when it's working. And you're like, yeah, oh, I actually do know these numbers. Yes. Okay. I can look and see in 6 months, like, what is our bank account going to look like? What is our revenue going to look like? All these things. So it's a tricky thing to enjoy.
Well, I mean, as a business owner, you wear a lot of hats and you got to know a little bit about a lot of things. And I don't particularly like marketing, but I've got to know enough about it as a business owner. And same thing with how to manage people and, uh, legal concerns. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff that you have to know, and, you know, ignoring the fact that you don't know it doesn't eliminate the need. It just pushes it further down the road until you have— until your business is going to make you learn it, right?
You have to sit down and be like, sit down with your accountant, and they go, you should have learned this, uh, 3 years ago.
Yeah, exactly. So, uh, where, where Where are you? Where is Cleaver Creative in 3 years? What's, what are your plans?
That's a great question. We are, we've been spending most of this year building the team and building that new set of training and internal processes. So I would like to keep, keep that, that moving. And it may be a combination of, of things. It may be a combination of services. Right now we really are focused on that organic content creation, but I could easily see us taking some of that and moving with some of our clients and say, let's actually maybe start doing some more conventional marketing. We have a client who is an industrial engineer and he's got a team of 5 people and they do really great work with really big companies and make big changes and they have a mastermind now. So they do a monthly mastermind where they get CI professionals all to kind of come to this one hour and they all talk about things that are going on in continuous improvement and Six Sigma and stuff like that. I mean, that's a really kind of a fun model that I would love to replicate with other consultants and go, look, like you do something really, really well. You can put out a few ads, bring in 10 or 20 people monthly. That are in your space that actually want to learn from you. You want to learn from each other, build a small community. And then guess what? If you record that, you've got an hour's worth of content you can chop up in different ways and share on social. And then you also can like potentially work with these people, right? So it's like, it's a very kind of interesting place in that B2B space that I think is pretty untapped. Like when you talk about that feed on, on LinkedIn, Yeah, there is a lot of stuff there, but there's not a lot of super high-quality, in-depth content on, you know, continuous improvement and industrial engineering.
I think you're on to something. I think that that definitely is, is a need, whether LinkedIn's the platform or not. I mean, YouTube, whatever. But I think the key to really good profitable growth is to go deeper, uh, rather than to expand what you're doing necessarily, like adding services. Like in your case, you, you know, adding, adding pay-per-click and AdWords, you know, does that make sense? I think to me it makes much more sense to dive deeper with the clients that are already paying you and you already have that relationship. It's much easier to sell something to them. And especially in the marketing space, there's a lot of confusion around among small business owners about what marketing they actually need and what actually works. And I don't find that marketers in general go deep enough with their clients to understand their business, asking questions and trying to solve their revenue problem really is what it is. And there are all kinds of components, right? And that's the confusion is like, well, do I need to do this? Do I need to do that? I mean, I don't know. Unfortunately, it seems like there's a lot of marketers that don't ask those questions and they're happy to sell you something. And it's like, well, is that really what I need? Okay, I'm going to come up with a new phrase. They're the pill mills of marketing. So like, you know, I need my narcotics, so I know the doctor that's going to prescribe it to me. So I go and I get it from them and no one ever asks any questions. Like, do you really need this? Should you be taking it?
Right.
That's kind of the attitude of, well, yeah, if you'll buy it, I'll sell it, but really not asking, do you need it?
Yeah. No, I really enjoy working in that more consultative way with folks to be like, what are you, what do you really want to do in the next 5 years? Like, are you looking to grow? Are you looking to kind of keep at the same pace that you're going? Like, what do you want to accomplish? And then figuring out. Figure out the package or the strategy that works for that, that client within our wheelhouse. Like, I've seen a lot of people on LinkedIn who started making videos, maybe they started as a video production company, they started doing, you know, photo posts and text posts, and they got really good at social media. And then like, well, now I'm a social media company. I'm like, I don't want to be a social media company, right? I want to be a video company that does things with video, and that might be content creation. It could be ads potentially, but really it is like, I don't want to just be your go-to advertising company. Like, well, we will build your website and we'll do a— and we'll do photo posts. Then we do this and we do SEO and we— that's not for me.
Yes, 100%. I think the power of your business and all videographers really is, is the storytelling component. Like nothing. Nothing beats it. And it's, it's very powerful when it's used right. It's obnoxious when it's not.
Yes, it can be used for like good or evil.
That's right. And with much great, with much power comes much responsibility.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It has been interesting because I've been creating a vlog now on LinkedIn for, for those 4 years and, uh, um, it's effort, you know, it takes a lot of energy, but it's like you cannot replace Uh, the authenticity of someone just hearing you speak your mind and go, this is what I believe in.
Yes. So how do folks find you if they want to learn more about Cleaver Creative?
They can go to our website cleavercreates.com, or they can find me on LinkedIn and, uh, just search for my name, uh, Chris, C-H-R-I-S, Weir, W-E-I-R, are three pronouns, we, I, her, is a way to think about that.
Or for our German-speaking audiences, it's Chris Weier.
Weier.
Weier. Ja, jawohl. Thank you, Chris, for your time. We'll have all of those links in our show notes, but thank you for your time and your experience sharing, your candor. I appreciate it.
My pleasure. This was a blast. I really enjoyed it. The only thing that we missed was the whiskey and the cigar.
Well, uh, we can do that when we meet. Uh, absolutely. Um, listeners, if you like what you heard, please rate the, the podcast, subscribe to the podcast, share the podcast. Uh, if you want to hear something different than me and Chris, uh, shoot us a message and let us know what you'd like to hear. Until then, ta-ta for now.
And that's a wrap for today's episode of The Profitable Creative. Until next time, you money lovers. And don't forget, Profit First for Creatives is live via Amazon. Link below.
