How Matt Added $43K In 2 Months - Master Filmmaker Review

What's going on, guys? I'm here with one of our clients, Matt from Stone Sharp Images, who added 43K to his video business in just two months working with us. What's up, Matt? How are you?

Yeah, doing great. Doing great. Stoked to be here. I'm stoked to be a testimonial for you.

Let's go.

To be honest. Yeah, to be honest, I was a little skeptical, you know, of just the whole process. Good. And. But I'm glad that you know that it paid off. Right? Yeah.

You should be skeptical. Right. There's weirdos on the Internet. I might be one of them. Who knows? Do you mind giving anybody a little bit of background on kind of yourself, your production company, your journey, just so they get to know you a little bit more?

Yeah. So my. I'll make it short. Right. But my journey started filming skateboard surf videos of me and my friends growing up. And later on in life, I realized, hey, this could actually be a career. And when I say later. I was probably 21 when I bought my first camera and started in photography. After. Quickly after that, I started traveling the world. I'd been traveling for probably the last like seven years and been working with cameras for like 10 years, but really the last six years, just up to December, which was only about six months ago now. We moved back to the US but so I've been making a lot of travel content. I have a YouTube channel called They're Happy Trails. That's a successful YouTube channel. And since coming back, my video business here in the US Just started really growing fast. And so I've been seeing your ads for a while and I just kind of knew, like, if I'm going to keep growing this, I need to have more of the business skills. Because I started this as a creative and. And I. And I was always really great at producing videos. Beautiful stuff, like, was decent at generating real leads for my clients off of them. But I was like, I need to have more processes and SOPs that I can follow and more like, I just need, like that real business guide. And this just really fit that area that, like, it was like a key that I thought that I maybe needed. But realizing now, being in it for a couple of months, that this is what I really actually needed to take where I knew I could be to the next level. Because in my past, I had a lot of feast or famine in my video business where I'd have, like, big contracts and then nothing for a little while. And I knew that needed to change. Right.

Were they Mainly one offs. Had he ever done retainers before or was this kind of the first time doing it?

Yeah, a long time ago I had the idea to try to, to try to do retainer stuff. But to be honest, because of how much I was traveling, I never really was like. And when I say traveling full time, I mean travel, right? Yeah, full time, like backpacking. For a while we were living out of buses and vans traveling all around the U.S. right. And so I never really was focused so much on like getting retainers and as much as I am now. But yes, they were mostly one off jobs. And I did a lot of live streaming during COVID which worked with the traveling cause. I would travel to racetracks and film drifting events, which was a lot of fun. Um, but yeah, then, and then, and then it'd be like nothing for a while, right? Yeah.

And had you had any sort of lead generation machine or like way to get leads or anything like that, or had it just always been word of mouth? Like what did that kind of look like?

Yeah, it always been word of mouth. I did like when I moved back here to the Sacramento area, I joined some networking groups that, that brought me some business pretty quickly. And I've always been really good with people, which is also translated to video. But I had no real consistent legion. Maybe I'd get some leads from word of mouth, but of course those would dry up after a couple of them. Right.

For sure. And I guess like what, what has been kind of the biggest eye opening piece of the program would you say? Like, what are some of the things, the big takeaways if you had to.

Really think about it, you know, honestly, I'd say probably one of the biggest takeaways that the program has given me. It's actually, it's built my confidence, which might be like a strange thing to say. Like. Cause I always had an idea about ads and that, that you know, but I never really did it for myself. Like I always. What really the biggest takeaway was I need to like be working on my business rather than just like editing content rather than just shooting and treating it more like a business. And then the confidence going into like pitching and the sales process, you know, you and your team is really like really helped me a lot and gave me some good attention actually without even me asking for it. Right. I would just post like I had a sales call and your guys would actually watch it and then they'd give me feedback on it and be like, hey, you know, you're, you're, you're pretty Good. You're already really natural with connecting with people, but you just need to implement these, like, skills. Right. So I already had good people skills, but they really brought me to the board of. Or. Or to the area of making it more skillful and. And bringing structure to it, because, like.

You can be really good at talking to somebody, but if you don't have the right structure or you don't know where you're going right. In the conversation, then it can kind of come off the rails. But I love that. I love that. I think it was Evan who's been kind of taking a look at some of your stuff, and. Yeah, I mean, we love looking at that stuff and giving you guys feedback because, like, there's. There's always room for improvement with everybody, including myself. And it's, like, it's good to see if we can push some things forward and just make those more smooth, you know?

Yep. Yeah, exactly. And another thing is just running ads and how easy it actually is to like, make my own ads and just, like, get them up and get leads coming in.

Because you made ads for other people for, like, way back when, right?

Yeah, yeah, I made it from other people. I just never did it for myself. I don't know why. And actually making them for myself was easier than any of my other clients, to be honest. Yeah.

Yeah. It's fun. It's a fun game, too, because then you can test different creative. You figure out which one's bringing in good leads, good calls.

Right.

And then you can kind of tweak those and make changes as needed. Which is. Which is huge.

Yeah.

And I guess, like, kind of a weird question, but, like, where do you feel like you might have been if you hadn't taken the leap into the program? Cause I know you said you were skeptical.

Right.

I know you said, like, you know, and there's a lot of programs out there, and some of them are good, some of them are bad. Right. So it's. It's fair to be skeptical, but I guess, like, where do you feel like you might have been if you hadn't made the uncomfortable decision to, like, make the jump and, like, bet on yourself?

You know, maybe. Because I've always been, like, a researcher, and I've always loved learning. Right. So maybe I would have found a lot of this stuff eventually. Yep. But what I. And what I mean by that is, I don't know. I probably would have found it at some point, but it would have been a lot longer and a lot less organized. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, like, I mean, I've paid mentors.

All the time to just shortcut because I just want it quicker.

Yeah.

Figure it out.

But yeah, you know, Exactly. It was a shortcut, and it was. It was a shortcut that was worth paying for. Does that make sense? Yeah. Well.

And. And you've put in the work. Right. It's all credit to you. You're doing the work, You're. You're implementing. You're taking the things like. Cause look, we can give you all the information, all the tools, but if you do nothing with it, then obviously it's not going to result in anything. But you've taken that, you've implemented quickly, you've done the work, and. And obviously you have fruits of that labor, which is huge, which we love to see.

Yeah. Yeah.

And last question. I guess if maybe anybody's, like, skeptical, like, you were right on the fence, now you're kind of on the other side, I guess. What advice would you give somebody who maybe is in the same shoes as you before you joined is skeptical?

Right.

I guess. What advice would you give them around even just booking a call and kind of speaking with them?

Yeah. If. If someone is, like, on the fence about it and they. They maybe feel like it's a good. Like it could be a good direction, but maybe the cost is holding them back or something like this. You know, to be honest, I've spent more money on sillier things. Really. And at the time, which really, this is what made me go over the fence on it was how serious am I about actually building my video business and am I willing to do what it takes to grow it the way that I think it can be to produce the income for my family and I. Right. So, yeah, it was a risk because I. I didn't know if it was really going to work. Right. Even though I watch testimonials and everything, I just had to have like, yeah, this could be me too, and believe that it could work. And it has. And you guys have a great process that I followed the great calls and, like, as soon as I joined, I felt pretty well taken care of. But just to not know exactly what was on the other side was scary. But just taking that leap and that risk was the payoff. Right. And just knowing that it could work for me. Yeah.

And last thing I'll kind of end with is like, it's that mindset which you've clearly adapted, where it's like, how can I make this work? Not will this work?

Right. Yeah.

Because, like, I think everything, to an extent works. It's. How are you going to work it to make it work for you?

Right? Absolutely. Yeah.

I appreciate your time, man. I'm excited to do another one of these when we're at multiple hundreds of thousands and we're just scaling up from there. And it's been awesome to see your growth, man.

Yeah. Thanks, Eric.

Absolutely. Appreciate your time.