How Braeden Added $48K In Retainers To His Video Business - Master Filmmaker Review

What's going on, guys? I'm here with one of our clients, Braden, from your story agency. Closed 48k in USD video deals and 68k in Canadian. When you do the conversion rate, which is, like you said before this, a little bit of a bonus, which is great. What's going on, man? How are you?

I'm good, Eric. How are you?

I'm doing well. If you don't mind, give us a little bit of backstory on like, a, how does it feel to have a system in place to start doing this and then B, like, give us backstory on you, kind of how you got started. All that jazz.

A. Yeah, so we started our agency about 10 years ago now, before started getting targeted by some of your ads and hearing about mf. Most of our leads came through SEO and Google Ads primarily. So it was good. I think we were doing about 55k a month, 60amonth, something like that when we came in. Issue being every single client's different. We're custom quoting every project. So from a sales perspective, I was just banging my head against the wall talking to a dentist one day, big corporation the next. Every project's different.

So is that kind of keeping you guys like at more of a ceiling because there's just complexity at that point or what was kind of the.

Yeah, it's not scalable. Right. Like, I think the cap that we hit a couple years ago was about 100k per month. Had a team in place, but we couldn't scale. Like, sales was a headache. Service delivery was all over the place. Our profit margins were different on every project we were working on. Like, it was just kind of a pain in the ass. So.

Yeah, and that was just because you were serving like everyone and anybody, basically. And like, it wasn't like that kind of conveyor belt system. When they come in, they get. It's the same kind of fulfillment. Was that kind of the issue?

Yeah, like, our website was branded as results driven video for pretty much every niche. Right. So we're ranking highly in search, but we got kind of a mix of everything coming in.

Yeah, that makes sense. And like, obviously you're in Canada. Right? Like, you're doing a lot of projects you said you're doing right now. You're targeting us for projects, right?

Yeah.

Like, I guess what's the thought process behind that? And then like, you know, maybe for other people who are in Canada who are watching this, like, maybe help explain that a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, immediate focus is obviously just the conversion rate can charge the same Prices. But right now we're making like an extra 45% just by working in the States.

And you're working primarily with law firms, lawyers, right?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Do you feel like there are enough high paying clients in Canada as well? Or how do you feel like. Because you've, you've built to 55, like. Cause I know some people might have that belief where it's like, I don't know if there's enough in Canada as well.

Right.

I guess. What would you say to that?

Yeah, so there definitely is. I mean, we've been running our business for 10 years only in Canada. I would just say as a priority out of the two. It just made sense from obviously no tax when we're working with US Clients and then just the conversion rate made a whole lot of sense. So for sure.

And then you just have remote crews going out to those types of locations to go do that. And you have different people in different areas.

That's right. So we just put a lot of focus into our contractor database, vetting high quality contacts in those areas, building out crews, making sure that the service delivery is up to our standards and then just negotiating rates based on our, on our offer that we've built up for sure, I guess.

Do you feel like the Canadian market would be like, is it harder to tap into or is it more so pretty much the same? Either.

Or it's pretty much the same. But if you are in Canada, it's absolutely a limiting belief that there's not enough clients.

We get people, sometimes they come in like, dude, I don't know. I don't know if this system that you guys have is going to work in Canada. And I'm like, I have someone from Canada right now telling us that it does.

Yeah. And obviously part of it is, I mean, we've been in the business for a while, so this was something that we overcame over time. But as a creative, you think that you're boxed into, you're doing the work, meaning it has to be local, meaning you can't go outside of your community. Otherwise you're going to be traveling and people are boxed into that mindset. But as you start to build out these systems and all the stuff that you've got incorporated and in Master Filmmaker, you start to treat it a lot more like a business. What does this look like at scale? And you start to break some of those barriers of being tied to a specific location.

Yeah. Because you're going to be capped anyways at a certain revenue level. If you have to do it all yourself anyways because you're busy. Right?

You're.

Yeah, exactly those revenue generating. Yeah, I mean like I guess what was kind of the biggest. I guess what kind of what was kind of the biggest reason you maybe chose and I like that you abbreviated it mf. I'm just going to call us mf but like I guess what was maybe one of the reasons that you decided to go forward with this program as opposed to maybe some of the other ones. Maybe I was just super annoying on Instagram all the time.

And yeah, you were persistent for sure.

Which is good labeled in middle school and high school. I was just persistent, which is just another way for annoying.

I mean it's a good attribute to have in business. So transparently I was skeptical. Right. Like there's. I think there's a few other programs out there that are trying to do something similar. The biggest thing that I always look for in like a consultant or a coach or a mentor is have you actually done the thing that you're teaching? And to be honest, that was the only thing that I was looking for for we joined the program was like did you actually have a production company that was doing sizable revenue for you to be in like a position to coach people? And you did. It was transparent. You answered a lot of those questions and that was like the main thing that made us pull trigger for sure.

Yeah, well. And I just teach you guys stuff that I'm doing currently right now as well. Even with matter too. It's like with that like I think one of the. We had a conversation. You're like one of the reasons I joined too is like the same system that got me on this call with you guys. Like the same thing. I'm like it works because you're in it. It's the inception. Inception frame. But yeah, no, I, I totally understand that as well. And I guess like what I guess has there been anything that's been particularly helpful about like what we've been doing? Because we're still growing, obviously this is literally just the beginning of what we're doing. But yeah, is there anything that's been super helpful so far?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the one thing that comes to mind is you obviously we did the 40k or 48k in like direct attributable revenue from the campaigns. But that doesn't factor in all of the system optimization that we've had from all the stuff in Go High Level that you built out, the triage booking bot, the email follow ups, like even from our inbound SEO and Google Ad stuff like the show up rate's higher, the lead quality is a lot more clear on the call. We're filtering out a lot of that stuff. So I think just in terms of overall like business optimization, there was a lot more than I was expecting inside the program before we joined. Which is obviously an added bonus for us for sure.

Yeah. We try not to overwhelm you guys with too much. But there's always stuff we're testing with show rate, close rate, optimizing the funnel, making sure you guys are getting good quality appointments and whatnot.

So yeah, like changing our, our CRM was awesome. I know. Before we were on close.

Okay.

Which is good. It was great. But I think just all the integrations and stuff, we're saving money from a subscription standpoint and then also just having it all in one place has made it hell of a lot easier.

I used to do like click funnels. I'd have like Honeybook way back in the day. I'd have like texting software calendly. And I was like, dude, I hate, I hate all this stuff. It's just a pain in the ass to integrate too. Which is like being able to give you guys that is huge for us too. Cause it makes it easier for us to teach you guys. You know what I mean?

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. Anything else that we've kind of implemented that you feel like has been helpful that is worth mentioning, I guess. Or anything we've been working on.

Yeah. Obviously the email side. I had been familiar with email campaigns a couple years prior to like hearing about master filmmaker, but we've, we've gotten, I think we closed one or two projects from there already and we've got a pretty full pipeline from, from the email. So I think just dumbing it down a little bit doesn't have to be anything overly complex.

Sure.

And just having that training helped a lot.

Yeah. And I know we closed some deals obviously with the other offer we first started with and now we're tweaking some things to open it up even larger to go even larger to a larger tam, which I think is going to be super exciting as well. So obviously like getting you to the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, which is a huge priority. But I think like us opening up to this larger and larger market across either Canada, us, you know, both of those at the same time and really making sure that we're, we're hitting the nail on the head there is going to be huge for you guys, you know.

Yeah, I was, I was just going to say, like we're, I'm obviously happy we've made our money back and 20 or 30k already. I think we're just getting started too with this revised offer, tweaking a couple of things, sticking with it. I know that this is going to be a huge game changer for us.

Yeah, I'm excited, man. And last question, I guess if anyone was maybe on the fence about, let's say they're in Canada because I'm going to go with the Canada theme because I love you guys, you're awesome. But they're in Canada. Right. They're maybe thinking about booking a call and just talking with our team, I guess. What advice would you give them knowing what you know now?

Yeah. I don't think it matters what stage of the business you're at. I think you're at a huge advantage if you've just started your production company in the past couple years because this is going to save you years of headaches that we unfortunately had to go through before we had a program like this.

Me too.

Yeah, exactly. You've obviously went through it before starting it. So. Yeah. For anybody listening to this that's just starting, make the investment work, close a couple projects, put it on credit if you need to, it is worth it and it's going to save you a lot of time and headaches. And then if you're already established but you're dealing with a lot of the issues that we were custom quoting. No scalability, can't delegate the sales or build your, your systems and your processes. It's going to help you with that as well.

Yeah. And last thing, because you reminded me at the end there, I wanted to touch on the building the packages in a way where it's scalable. Like.

Yeah.

Maybe talk about the difference of what you've done before because I talk to a lot of production companies that are doing, you know, a million, two million. They're thinking about, they, they do everything custom quoted but they're doing a million, two million a year. Right. I talked to one of those the other day and they're like, I don't know if I want to push into the productized service side because I'm doing a million. Two, two million a year. But like my margins are not very good. Yeah, it's very labor intensive. It takes a ton of time. Like maybe talk about the mindset switch of what you've seen switching over to more of a productized type service.

Yeah, I mean like we were chatting about yesterday, you can't, you can't scale it unless you have super preset margins, the same deliverables, because scale means you're delegating sales. So you need to bring on setters. You need to bring on closers that have a process that they've been trained on. And it's very. We went through this a couple years ago. I tried to bring on a closer because I was like, man, I'm sick of being on sales calls. I've been doing this for six years. And his close rate was horrendous because he's talking to a different avatar every time he jumps on the call. It's very difficult to systemize that. So I would just say you absolutely do need to niche and build out an offer if you want to grow past that 1 to 2 million dollars per year mark. If you just want to stay within that range and focus on doing a.

Bit of everything, be more custom, be very like every single thing we're doing is different, then I. Yeah, I think that's fine as well.

You can if that's what you want to focus on from like, you know, a passion standpoint and like, you enjoy working on those projects.

I'm here to make money, though, and grow, make an impact.

We, I think this is why it took us so long because me and my partner were like, we love that stuff. We wanted to do like car commercials and like crazy creative product ads and stuff like that. But you start to realize when you're doing one to two million dollars a year, you're not actually the one working on the projects in the creative stuff. And the business side is super stressful and annoying because the fulfillment is completely.

Different every single time.

Yes.

That's the thing is like, obviously the fulfillment is going to be different when you have different clients, but it needs to be within like we say a container where it's the same process that you can then again train somebody else on. Because, like, that's what I've learned too, because I've. I have five closers right now. I have four setters. And so like, you can't. On the sales side, it's impossible to train somebody if every project is different. And then on the fulfillment side, it's impossible to keep people who know what they're doing at a high level. If every project is completely different and like it, it can work. But it takes so much damn time to like fulfill on it that it's not. Inputs equals outputs and you can't grow it as quickly.

Yeah. And one of you just triggered one of the biggest pain points that I think I had before, which is another reason I'm like something needs to change is the billing. Right. So when you're working with these big corporate companies and some local service businesses and mid sized businesses, all of them have different accounting procedures. So it's like some might need wire transfer, some are going to be net 30 or net 60, and some you're going to have credit card information for. So we were like chasing invoices, we had cash flow issues. I was banging my head against the wall for so long, like trying to figure out how we can fix it. And I think with once you have an offer that people are coming to you for the value that you're offering, they're not looking at other competitors. It's a lot easier to charge recurring billing and justify it without having to worry about all that stuff.

Yeah, exactly. Because it's just, I mean if you wanted to get to a certain revenue, it's just multiply that many monthly clients by that much. You put them on a recurring billing system.

Yeah.

Build every month. It's simple. It's like. Because when you get to the point where you have that many clients, it is really, really difficult. If there's one tiny piece of complexity at tiny scale, it becomes huge when you blow up. And I've learned that the hard way too.

Just. Yeah. And I just, I had a smile on my face when we closed the first like 6 month, 5k per month retainer through this offer because I just knew I'm not going to have to worry about the billing. Like funds are hitting our account every month and I'm like, this is what the direction that we need to keep going in.

Yeah, I love it. Well, I'm going to get, I'm going to let you get back to closing deals. I appreciate your time. I love the conversation. We'll do another, another one of these when you're doing 3, 4 million a year. Crushing it. And I appreciate it, man.

Yeah.