The video isn’t your real problem 🎬 Dustin Schultz

Awareness is always critical. If someone's not aware of you, even if you have a superior product, the lesser product will be purchased just because they can't find it. They don't know.

Build it and they still won't come. Build it and they still won't come.

You can have the best whatever inside of a white box, but if there's not a label on the outside of it, nobody's going to open it. I most recently hired the person I should have hired first, which was an administrative assistant. Mm-hmm. Because to me, hiring the right people to give you back your time to the things that you're best at is one of the most critical things that you can do. Don't just hire duplicates of yourself and then put you into the thing that you're not even good at anyway.

This week's Millennial Master is Dustin Schultz, founder of Union, a creative agency that spent more than a decade helping companies make better video. Dustin's point is that video is not the real problem, because a lot of businesses jump straight to production when they still haven't worked out what they're trying to say, who they're trying to reach, or where the video actually needs to go. In this episode, we talk about why expensive production won't fix unclear messaging, how to think about video across different platforms, and why you need to protect budget for distribution too. Dustin, welcome to Millennial Masters. Where are you joining us from today?

Hey, Daniel Ionescu. I know I'm trying to deceive people with the California banner in the background. Spent some time living there, but I'm in Connecticut. So East Coast, a couple hours outside of Manhattan.

Well, we're coming back to the US this time. So let's roll with it, Dustin. Because you started Union in 2011. Which seems like a lifetime ago.

Or 3, yeah.

How did you go about that? And also, when you look back, what did you misunderstand about running a creative business when you began? Because I know everybody starts with a very different idea.

Sure, sure. Yeah, so Union, at the time that I was beginning to dabble in probably like freelance projects, I was working in local news. I was splitting my time between that and a different production agency and going back and forth and then getting these little like, hey, my uncle owns this type of business and I know that you do video, could you help? And so I began to kind of cut my teeth with those little projects. I knew I wanted to land in the advertising and marketing side of video versus my experience waking up at 1:00 AM to help cut morning news. And so I left news and at the same time, the work for the agency that I was doing, you know, most of a 30 or 40-hour week work workweek freelancing really began to kind of dry up a little bit. It was around the holidays. It was just like a natural season thing that I now understand about business, but at the time did not understand seasons of business. And so those projects that I began to pick up here and there really became the way that I took care of the minuscule expenses that I had 15 years ago. And kind of becomes the point, I think, of what I misunderstood maybe about a creative business. Or really any, you know, business is that just a series of projects doesn't make a business. It just makes work to be done. And what I saw a lot of, I think because of my news background, I saw a lot of folks who left, I think because of the ability to do production, to film, to edit, and they began launching their own service of doing that for other businesses.. And I kind of watched this bell curve of them have a rise. And then as they got more and more popular or did more and more work, they were still doing it all themselves. You know, every, like sending the invoices, doing the filming, cutting the piece together. And I watched this like burnout that would happen. And then this slow kind of trickle back down to either go work somewhere else or just hate it and grind and take every project that they could. And just lose the enjoyment of the craft. And so watching that, I very—

How did you notice that? Did you notice it through the quality of their output or through conversations with peers in the industry or former colleagues?

Yeah, I would say quality. It was the quality of the output. It was the, you know, maybe the types of businesses that they were doing work for seemed to be having lower and lower budgets. There was just kind of messier and, and, uh, it, yeah, it wasn't, I knew it wasn't where I wanted to take things.

So that's when you started your own business and you realized that there's seasons in every business and there can be 2, 3 months which, which can make, you know, half of your year of income and somehow you need to manage through that.

Yeah, no, I mean, I've recognized the times now as, as an, as a, you know, creative agency owner where You know, summer, a lot of decision makers are away, you know, or end of, end of the year, it's Q4 and you either have people that are—

December is dead.

Yeah. I mean, but also you have a mix of people who are like, who are dumping their budgets because they want to make sure that they can have it for the coming year. And so we've had clients spend a lot of money. With us or by giving it to us and saying, I don't know what we're going to do with it yet, but I need to get it off my budget this year and we'll figure it out later. So it's happened many times. Also, you have clients who, you know, Q4 comes around and there's a lot of unexpected things that happen during the year and they're like, we're all out. You know, that was it. That's all I had budgeted for this year. You know, maybe in the new, in the new fiscal year. And so For me, it's been important to see those seasons within different industries and be a true partner to the folks that we're working with to understand, you know, a health and wellness company, for example, many of their clients have—

January—

used— well, so that, that'd be a place where they start up, but even Q4, those last 4 months, their end clients have used up their insurance deductibles, and now suddenly they can actually get some things maybe for free. They want to do things that insurance covers, but they have no— they've already spent up to their deductible. And so Q4 ends up being a time that people can do a little bit more kind of cosmetic-y things. And, and so we've seen a lot of health and wellness brands push during that season. Uh, yeah, every business is unique and I think supporting them means getting to know them.

So while you get to know them, because you're producing videos for them and this whole episode is about video strategy, which is big at the moment across any promotion channel. You had one big realization from my research, which was that your clients needed more help deciding what to make than actually producing it. So how, what was the tipping point when you realize, okay, I need to focus more on that? And it's basically moving into their marketing as well as producing the videos for it.

Yeah.

And do you not feel that you're taking away more responsibility for the outcome of the campaign?

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, whether you were the one who created it and cared about the intentions going into it, whether or not you cared about the intentions, you still kind of get left holding the bag. That video didn't perform, and your client contact's probably not going to say to their boss, like, our assumptions were wrong. They might say something like, ugh, the video company was really hard to work with. Or, you know, we, you know, whatever, I shouldn't have chosen that vendor. You know, you end up getting stuck with it. What was happening around that season was we began probably the first 5 years of the studio working almost exclusively for advertising agencies. And so what that ends up looking like is they have a, you know, a set of clients, retainer and providing all kinds of different advertising and marketing services. When it comes to the capability of video production, it can be a little more difficult to have in-house to certain calibers. And so they would then bring on somebody like us to actually to achieve the content. Now, of course, they're also marking that up. Of course, they've had a long period of conversations with the client before they ever even talk to us. And each agency has like a different level of understanding of the true ability to put together a project. It's, it's kind of like, I'll use this analogy probably a couple times, but I always liken creating a video to building a house. And so you might have a real estate agent who sells you a plot of land and says like, hey, imagine this, we could do that, we could do this. The agency sells the idea and they may, they might not have an architect on their team and they might not have a contractor on their team and they, you know, to be able to say, hey, like I see where you're going with this. What if we did this? Because this area is actually zoned in this way or whatnot. And so what we began to find was that when we worked with a company directly with their marketing team. They knew their brand better than the agency as a middleman. We got to help not overpromise and underdeliver, uh, where they said, oh, we said we would do this and we said we would do it for this budget, figure it out, you know? Um, and if you don't want the work, no problem, we'll go to the next production company to do it and we'll probably not call you again. So like some, there's some of those politics going on. And so the ability to bring our team who's like hands-on dirty with the, like, we're gonna touch the mouse to do the editing. Like our team members are gonna hold the camera and we, and we do it all the time. So to bring that knowledge right up to the beginning starting point of ideation and saying, well, you have this marketing goal or you have a marketing problem and video might be part of the solution to it. Let's help you figure out what channels to put this down. What's helped guide in terms of what are creative best practices that are going to be effective on those channels? And, you know, we've steered clients away from doing certain productions. That ended up making our budget shrink a bit because we said, hey, let's slash this piece of content because I don't think it's going to do well for you. Um, because exactly to your point, at the end of the day, we own more of the responsibility of there being results from it. And so that's always been an important part of, of our agency. And as a business owner, I recognize I have to have our team set up in a certain way to be able to provide more education to the process versus an agency who's really typically hiring video production companies. So they at least know like lingo and things like that. But honestly, I enjoy it. I enjoy teaching people kind of like about some aspects of the world.

So why do you think then that businesses or marketing departments at least assume that a more expensive production will produce a better result? Because I know that's not what you think.

And you're right, it's not, it's not what I think. And I, and I think, you know, knowing this show and the people who, who are on it in terms of being founders and, and owners, entrepreneurs, you know, I, I think there ends up being a little bit of a mixed bag of, man, if I just kind of— some people are in a space where they're like, man, if I just throw money on it, money at it, it'll fix the problem, you know. So in that case, it needs to be like really, really hyper-premium. We want it done this way. And then certainly there's people who, like, I get this, like, this agency is, is the child I raised. And so any budget that goes out from it, it feels like a little cut, you know? And so I think that's what also what a lot of founders experience too. And so you have people who kind of want to just throw money and then get upset when they weren't willing to give a little bit of time to help us have a dialogue to understand, like, what are your true goals? You know, what do you want this to do? And then those who are, who really kind of try and cut every single corner. I think all of that comes, both of those are surface issues. It actually comes back down to like one core thing with both where I think there's never really a waste of money when it comes to video, unless you don't really know what your goals are. Then that's definitely a waste because you're just spending in a direction, whether you're spending a little or you're spending a lot. You're spending in a direction that's driving you somewhere and you haven't chosen like a destination. And I'll be like, add some clarity to that. So for example, the person who wants to just throw money at a project, that might be the right thing to do if you want your brand to be known as one of the biggest in the world and you're going to have a Super Bowl ad. Budweiser is not taking, and again, I know this is an international audience, but You know, American football, the Super Bowl. That's what, what we have.

Everybody knows about that, right?

Okay. So when, when somebody throws kind of, let's call it even vanity money at buying the spot and making sure it looks premium enough, premium enough, premium enough to stand there, it's like having the biggest house on the block. When somebody drives by, they have an impression of you. Now, does Budweiser say, oh, I, I tie the sale of this bottle to that ad and have direct attribution.

No, that was never the case with—

right. It was never the intention. The intention was to establish an awareness at that level in scale. Right. So, but the— now let's go to like a super, super small example of on a product page, you know, an e-commerce company has a video on just one product page that's showing, hey, you know, here's the Owala bottle, it can kind of like, it opens in this way. And now the quality doesn't really matter as much. You want it to look good, right? And it locks and it shows like all of the little features and maybe they drop it and they can, oh, I mean, for us, it's like, oh, you can have it branded. Like each of those different things you need to do. If you have 50 SKUs of a product, you're doing 50 of those videos. Think about being Wayfair and how many of those videos live on every single piece of furniture page. So you need to have a certain level of quality or IKEA. Exactly. You need, you need to have a level of quality that it doesn't look like this water bottle's being manufactured in your uncle's basement, but you also don't need it to be a Super Bowl ad. And so like the investment really does have to match the intention. And so having a clear goal is the way that you cut, cut through that. I'm sure you've seen that in many cases.

Yeah, because I wanted to ask you next, Dustin, how often does a client ask for a video when the real problem is that they can't explain the business or the product clearly?

We sometimes call our discovery sessions therapy sessions because the ability to communicate and, you know, any business owner who's watching this, who's maybe going out for venture capital or, you know, has a farm farmers market stand and has to give a 60-second elevator pitch about their hand lotion. Like they all know, you all know that getting who you are, what you offer, why it's a benefit into a short amount of time is really hard often. And you might argue and say like, well, if you really know, it's not, you know, it's not so bad. But as business owners, we have a lot of different things going on. Tons of different distractions. Your business is evolving. You think of the amount of evolutions of clients we've had and processes we've set up over the last 15 years. And to be able to condense all of that down requires us asking a lot of questions related to, well, you're saying it's better, which is a general term. Why? And if it's not, that's also fine. Or you're saying—

I will admit that, but sure.

Right, right.

Exactly. Exactly.

So yeah, the ability to utilize video as a little bit of a mirror to say, what do we say about us? How do we want to be known? And it does lead to maybe another issue that we run into a lot of times, especially with, you know, a company that still has the founder or owner involved in like those marketing meetings. They're small enough that, you know, they have a lot more touchpoints. In investing in a video is that they're scared to not say everything they possibly can. In that one moment of communication. And it's a hard lesson to learn that if you say too much, you end up saying nothing at all.

Because someone forgot to—

exactly. You're inundated, you're firehosed. And you know, I think when I think even about this show, for example, you take the time to narrow down what is, what's the key point from this episode that if someone was to scroll through and say, you know, I was just listening to one this morning where it's like, hey, the shortcut is the long way, right? You've taken a whole episode and condensed it down into that. Like, that's not hard. Sorry, that's not easy to do. And that's what you're doing every time you're creating a video.

So how do you decide which message earns the space when every department or founders and marketing departments want everything or something included? How do you say no, or you shouldn't do this?

So there's a couple answers. I'll share like the first one, I'll share like the right answer. Right. But then there's also kind of a secret.

We also learn from mistakes here on Millennial Masters. So just saying.

Yes. Which, which is, you know, a key part of, I think, putting something out there, learning from it, evolving. And that's why, you know, kind of continued content You know, it should go up into the right. Sometimes people get spooked and they drop off when the first thing doesn't go exactly right. And they're like, ah, well, I'm just going to do only billboards now because video doesn't work for me. But to answer your question, the honing in of like, what is that right message is often the right answer is, well, let's go back to your goals. Who are you trying to talk to? And if they could walk away knowing one thing about your business, what would you want them to know? And then what do you want them to do? It might be that you just want them to know something like the Budweiser example. You might just want them to, when they walk into, we call it a package store, a liquor store, when, when they walk in, they think, oh, well, they're the king of beers. Like that's the, that's the big one. Right. You might just want them to know something. You might want them to click something. You might want them to sign up for a free something. And so whatever the creative, We'll kind of call it that way. Just the message, both audio-wise, but also visual story, like what's being communicated. The creative lines up with that goal of somebody goes, oh, I see myself in that. I really clearly understand who this is for and I understand what they're about and I know what they want me to do. Like how do I get one step closer? Or we would maybe call as business owners say, we've moved them one step further down the customer journey.

The funnel.

Right, sure. And I think, so that's like the right answer. The interesting thing we all know and experience are that businesses are filled with humans and humans have a lot more going on than just doing the right thing to achieve the right result for the business. They have a boss that might be the one who thinks doing this video is really important and because they're retiring next year and they finally want to do that one little cool marketing piece. And now they've asked their subordinate to say, hey, let's make this. And so the actual like ROI is like, we want it to improve the business, but the actual— and you might have heard, you know, I'm sure heard this term before, people listening for this term before— the actual job to be done is our contact wants to impress their boss who's retiring and wants to have something to say at the barbecue.

Uh, yeah, we put that spot on, you know, and wants to be with a chance to be in the next promotion. Yeah.

Yeah. I get it.

So you mentioned this, the platforms and one singular video, then when you started in 2011, still TV advertising. Was the big thing and there were smartphone cameras. We had the iPhone back at that point, but it was nowhere near the quality that it could, it can do today and film with it. So there was a lot less, but also the distribution method. We had YouTube, but we didn't have TikTok. We, Instagram was, we didn't have any of the reels back then and Facebook had very little video. At that point because mobile data was still in its early days. So when the distribution changed to this paid distribution digitally, and I'm curious to hear how, where, and if TV still plays a role in your clients' marketing. I'm wondering what do founders misunderstand when they ask for one video that then you can just cut and arrange for every platform?

Sure. Sure. Every platform. I mean, if you think about what you experience as an audience member, we're all audience members of content. Mm-hmm. What you experience on each platform, you have different expectations. So if you go to TikTok, you're going to expect to see a certain production quality, a certain kind of type of story happen, a certain type of—

lack of polish.

Often, yeah, often the kind of that authentic creator content. It's, it's like years, years ago, one of the main things I did this was documentaries. You know, you forgave poor video, and you traded it to say, but that was what was captured in the moment, right? That was the thing that was happening behind the scenes. I don't care what it was shot on. I'm engaged in the story. And so I think TikTok does that really well. Instagram, like, does that well, you know, a little bit more polished. You expect maybe a little more polish on Instagram than TikTok, but you're looking—

I think you expect a lot more polish because a lot of the videos posted on Instagram are by influencers, celebrities, etc., where everything is dialed up to the next level versus the more authentic user content. And even the original Instagram had the filters to make the poor quality smartphone camera photos look better.

Yeah, it's, yeah, it's always been intended to be more artistic. And you know, how many times do you have the thumbnail that your whole grid made to look beautiful, even if the content underneath, once you click through, is much more raw and organic, right? There's still certainly that level of presentation and, you know, the expectation there exists in that fashion. Now, you do see people take that exact like UGC creator content and move it over to let's say like what I think is the main version of linear TV. Let's call it like linear TV, which was, you know, something you now basically watch in like a waiting room or at like a sports bar or something. Now you have placements within streaming, you know, Hulu with ads or things like that.

Netflix has some ads, Amazon, Amazon Video has ads, and of course, even the online streaming from the traditional broadcasters online.

Yeah, I think the placements of those— now there's, there you do bridge a little bit from content creator into that space, but most of the time brands want something more polished. That aligns with a bit of the quality of, you know, you're watching So the Summer I Turned Pretty or whatever, and suddenly you're going into an ad, you want to be able to kind of keep up with that and meet the audience where they're at. You know, if someone's scrolling on TikTok before bed or, you know, just doom scrolling into the night, you're meeting them there in a certain way, right? Because they're having, they're having an experience. And you're meeting them there. If they're watching a show, you want to hook them into still being entertained by your ad. If you're watching a comedy, you want to maybe put something funny there. If they're watching something emotional, you want to meet them in that same place. And so the— that's the, that's the issue with saying we're going to make one piece of content and just chop it to death and put it everywhere, which is, you know, people who kind of pushed that idea big time, you know, like Gary Vaynerchuk, Alex Hormozi, folks like that. There's, there's truth to it, but it's more for chop it up a million times to push it down a channel. So you have consistent flow of content.

And that's what I want to ask. Then how can you decide which channel to focus on and go specific to that because from what you are telling me, it's not the best idea to film one clip and then chop it up for Instagram, TikTok, and say YouTube, the three main ones. But you wanna focus maybe just on YouTube and then possibly what you can have on YouTube, you can also have maybe on some linear type of TV.

Mm-hmm.

But certainly what you do for the vertical video is not gonna be the same as, anything in landscape or widescreen.

Sure, sure. And I think you do an awesome job of that. You could probably do a masterclass on it yourself. The, I, I think of it like two ways. There's, there's the person who's gonna be leading and creating the content. Mm-hmm. What do they know well and what are even their natural skill sets? And then there's the, where is the audience that your product or service needs to engage with? You know, because if you're selling bedpans on TikTok, you probably want to be on Facebook instead, just audience-wise, right? Like, I'll use that.

Well, I don't know. I've seen, I've seen a lot of things on TikTok too. It's quite popular. Nevertheless, yeah.

But it might jump out to you because it surprises, right? It might feel misplaced. Whereas if you use, if you want to use the most broad of where is the most of my audience base. Somebody who's using Facebook might be, is very broad, right? It's a lot of people who are like, they're in their community and they're using Marketplace. They're, you know, they're enjoying seeing and sharing photos of their grandkids or, you know, their kid who just graduated. And so they're a middle-aged person who likes to communicate.

Why is there a social platform which that still does that? I'm not sure there is still one that does that. Sure.

I mean, I've definitely heard the conversation related to this isn't really like social media anymore, as more as it is curated media for you. Right. So, but if you look at kind of just the baselines of audience, because obviously you want to shoot or fit, you want to cast your line where the most fish that like what's on your hook are. And so, yeah, I think that's kind of just the the general idea of if you know how you want your brand to be positioned and you know where your, your audience potentially is and you focus on that one channel really hard for a while and get a flow operas— like, I mean, it's like anything in business. You need to make it operational so that it becomes just a machine to work. Usually in my opinion, before jumping over to then the next channel and do the same thing, figure out what's working there and then get it moving and then push.

So how do you pick when you're a smaller business and you can only, you have only budget for one or two video channels because it's not only production, but it's also the distribution of that video. You have to pay for it. I'm assuming the organic reach is just as non-existent as a typical person posting on any of these platforms unless they had millions and millions of followers back in the heyday and then somehow maintained them, but which ones would be, what would be a safe bet for any smaller businesses?

Hmm. It's a, it all depends on the type of business. It depends if they are, if geography is important to them, like, do they have a brick and mortar location that they need to be focused in a certain category? It brings you all the way back to kind of just general marketing questions. And I'd be, I'd be curious for Millennial Masters, just because I don't know the full backend. History, did you prioritize like audio and Spotify even before video, or did you prioritize YouTube first?

I prioritized video. My main distribution and hosting of those videos is on my website, which is also hosted by Substack, which then distributes it to YouTube the moment it's published, also on Spotify. Audio and also on Apple Podcasts as audio, and then I have to manually upload the video onto Spotify, and then Apple will also introduce or is introducing now the video version of podcast that you will be able to have in. So my website was the central place where you could have the written articles, the full video podcast, and then YouTube was initially a distribution channel, which grew on to become the main distribution channel for the podcast itself versus the written stuff that I do. And because for me, it's such a clear product in terms of what I'm doing. I have at least one-on-one chats with people. It's always going to be one or two talking heads having at it regardless of the platform that I'm doing. I'm not promoting something especially or differently, but in the first year of doing Millennial Masters, for example, I was distributing all the vertical video clips onto both Facebook and Instagram. And after a year of doing that, the growth was minimal in, on those particular channels that I already had and owned. So I then focused my attention on distributing those clips mainly onto LinkedIn and YouTube and also Substack Notes, which is a different growth lever attached to Substack. It's a bit like a Twitter in its good era when interesting people said interesting things and you can post links. And it was like that, that, that, that's where Substack is now. And LinkedIn had a period on which it prioritized video and you had a video tab for maybe like a month and then it quickly disappeared and the videos don't do much for reach there as well. So I'm not prioritizing that either. There's only basically Substack where I'm putting the videos and YouTube. YouTube has become the main— everybody appears to have left YouTube to become the main distribution method. On TikTok, I didn't think it was the right audience. I know everybody uses TikTok to a certain extent, but I didn't feel they would go to TikTok for this type of content.

Sure. Yeah. And in the switch from like the meta platforms to LinkedIn and to YouTube, you found that was at least like a bigger trigger of growth.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. And it makes sense. And I think that is often the journey that most people take is there is that you're kind of guessing where people live, but it is educated guesses, right? Even like you said, like, ah, TikTok, I don't think this is where people are going to go. The person who's the business owner who wants to be educated is either Googling a question and then YouTube is coming up like in the feed of those answers. And now Millennial Masters gets to be a part of those answers or Maybe they're, uh, in, in that would, that kind of encompasses, I think, all like business owners. And then you have probably more so B2B business owners in general, but across the board as well on LinkedIn who, they are like, they want to get ahead. Like they want to be, they need to beat the competition. They see what you're sharing. And again, I think as business owners, we're like ferocious for like information and content and improvement. Because you realize that's how you stay alive. And, and that's the place where they've gone there to improve in business, find you, and, and latch on, you know, so it makes perfect sense.

I think that's the difference between what they call personal branding, whether it's, or founder-led content, as if we would call it that, versus advertising material.

Yeah.

Which is not tied to the founder itself. Very, very little. So where do you stand on this? Do you advise for the smaller businesses for the founder to be involved and become the face of the product? Or do you advise for founders to maybe hide behind the brand itself?

Sure.

And there's two, two, two big camps on this one. So this is a loaded question. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I'll take, I'll take the bait. I, I really do believe there's a, there's a really great book. By David Gerhardt, who called, called Founder Brand, where he talks a lot about that. He talks about his experience within a company. I believe it was Drift at the time and how he, as kind of their marketer and media-focused person, helped their CEO really become a personality. It also matters. I'll answer this kind of twofold. One, you often became a business owner because you want to kind of live by your own rules and have a life that you wanted to have. And so if being the—

no, that, that was the intention that everybody thought the intention. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. You wanted it to be— you, you wanted to control it versus it control you to a degree of success or not. If, if part of your ideal life is not to be in front of the camera every week or for a day to create content for a month, like if that's not what you want, then it shouldn't be what you build your business to be driven off of. Right? So it kind of takes a step back into like, how do you want to live your life? But I will say, people connect with people. At the end of the day, even when it comes down to—

That's what all the brand marketing people on Millennial Masters have said. Even if you don't like it, you still have to put yourself out there somehow.

Yeah. If I like, if I see a great— I guess we'll keep using the water bottle. If I see a great water bottle advertisement, I was like, oh, that looks like it has really great features. But if, as a Millennial Marketers fan, if I see you promoting it, like it, it's just true. And it always has been that like Shaq uses Icy Hot, it'll probably work for me too. I'm closer to being like Shaquille O'Neal. Again, forgive using American references still, but it's—

everybody will know who Shaquille O'Neal is.

Okay. So that's kind of that, that ends up being the idea. So I would answer it both from the, if you own a landscaping company and you just really enjoy meeting with clients and imagining what could be for their space, and then your team comes in and executes it. If you have the personality to pick up a phone every time you show up and before you meet with the client, you record yourself saying like, hey, I'm at this lawn, I'm seeing this, looks like they have a problem here. I would love to do something like this. And you begin to begin something that aligns with what the client's doing, which is imagining their yard better. And you show how you imagine the yard. That, that, that's amazing. But if you're not the person to do that and you're like, oh, I just like to show up and, you know, kind of do my thing. What I would then recommend for you to do is take the same message, but just tell it to somebody who on your team would be willing to do that. And say, hey, you know, we just showed up. We're thinking about doing something like this. Here's what, here's what we do. We're going to point out, you know, and then even put it back to the audience you're speaking to. Like, what would you do? Drop it in the comments, you know, whatever. But create that face of humanity versus how many small businesses are just using text-based Canva, you know, templates to just fill their Instagram feed like they're putting up posters at the local supermarket. And it's just, it's not what it's made for. It doesn't engage people in the same way. We go to—

So if it's not you, the founder, you need to find the star in the company to take on that facing role.

If it's, yeah, if it's not you, I would say find your stars with an S because certainly, you know, in the beginning it's much harder. There won't be as many people, but yeah, there won't be as many people there. Certainly. And there's caveats to all of this in, in there's grind phases at every stage of business, but you also, because I think the hesitation the business owner might think in the back of their mind is like, well, what happens when this person leaves? Right? Or what happens if something goes wrong and I have to, I have to fire them, you know? And suddenly a face changes, which, whatever, it happens. But if you have a few people doing it, you know, you're, you're spreading out that need amongst other people. You're establishing that like, oh, there's a bunch of people in this, in this team that think in this way and It's almost, they have a great little community. We have some friends that own a couple coffee shops and they do this really, really well. They have a few of their different, like the person who runs their coffee program, like some of their baristas, everyone kind of participates a bit. And you almost never see the people who I know are the founders, but it's, again, coffee shop, it's a community vibe. And to that, to the initial point, it really depends on your type of business. You know, do you need to have a clear point of view, like the, like the landscaper that you want to trust designs your space to look in a way that you like, or is it a coffee shop where the community is a, is a critical aspect and you're helping portray that through your media?

Okay. So you created the videos, the campaign, you focused on one or two platforms, or you did the dreaded thing of one shot? Chopped up to multiple platforms, whichever one it is. Sometimes you have to roll with the clients. I understand that. But when does brand awareness become an excuse for work that hasn't produced anything useful? So you can just say that I paid this much and I promoted it, but then you can't really track anything back, which goes back to the olden days of the pre, say, 2015 days of video advertising to a certain extent, while these metrics that the video distribution platforms have are pretty much made up. And there's been studies that can be referenced. For example, they say that up to, I think it was like between 5,000 and 10,000 views of a YouTube video would be equated to one view on traditional television in terms of the value spot.

Okay.

So this whole brand awareness while I was in the business and the idea that you do want to have the brand recall and be in front of people and be memorable, at what point it becomes something to hide behind?

Ooh, that is a, it's a very interesting question. I almost, I don't want to sound like I'm dodging it because at some degree, if you're trying to hide behind it, it feels like there's more factors going on. It feels like you're— it comes back to businesses are filled with humans and you are maybe saying, hey, we're just creating all of this awareness level content because you're checked out from the company and you just want to make the fun stuff and you can run out that budget for as long as you can until you're fired. Right. So, so, so there's some, there's some of that. The Awareness is always, is always critical. If someone's not aware of you, even if you have a superior product, the lesser product will be purchased. It's just, you know, just because they can't find it. They don't know, you know? And so—

Build it and they still won't come. Google that. It's one of the latest pieces on Millennial Masters written. So build it and they still won't come. Yeah.

You like, you can have the best whatever. Inside of a white box, but if there's not a label on the outside of it, nobody's going to open it for the thing that they, you're looking for. And so I prefer to think about, you know, like we said, the customer funnel, just the journey that your customer goes on from being aware of who you are to your nurturing the process to the final decision. Where can you place video along that journey? To expedite the process, to grow trust at different phases. You know, for example, a doctor's office, you know, let's say, say, you know, could have— say we're going to lead with actually a little bit of a funny brand. You know, we're going to be really personable. We're going to have our doctors do funny TikToks and whatnot, right? Very like just top of funnel awareness because the person who needs medical attention. And again, the US is a, you know, healthcare system is very different, right? It's very financially driven. You can do advertising. I know that's not the same case everywhere, but it's a, it's, I use it as an example because it's a, it's a high trust requirement for someone for you to say, oh, I'm going to have you do something to my body. And so if the doctors are just doing the TikToks, then you never get down to the, oh wow. Like I've really learned from them. And I've grown trust in them in a longer form piece, right? All the way down to maybe you're at, you're able to choose, say you're able to choose your provider from a clinic and maybe they each have a little bio video that is very just dry. It's just about them and where they come from. And you've met them for 30 seconds now and you've made a decision based on that. Right. So you're like, did, did the, did the TikTok fail? Like, no, it got them in the door. And so that's where I think attribution is so difficult because while like funnels have been this major thing for a long time, people bop around like all the time. And especially now with like AI and search and the ability to have like a frequently asked questions page queried by Gemini and bringing that to the forefront, suddenly you're actually finding out about a company within like to their bottommost page that you thought was going to be right before a close. And they've learned, oh, these guys are kind of experts. Now I'm going to follow them on Instagram, which you thought was more top of funnel, and you're going to follow them for 6 months.

Oh, whichever apps you use for your video content. You, some, some people do it on YouTube. Some people do it on TikTok, whichever one it is. Right.

So, and then, I mean, if I could end with just the one last part with the, like, if we go all the way to premium content, suddenly you're at a restaurant and you can see the TVs on the bar, uh, like above the bar, and suddenly an ad for that brand that you got queried through Gemini, brought to their FAQ page, have followed them on Instagram, have been considering buying their thing, and then you saw it placed there. That might be the final nail in the coffin, but how do you ever actually pull attribution to that sale from that? You wouldn't. You'd probably say, then they went, picked up their phone, and Googled it, and clicked through the direct link, and then made a purchase. And you'd say—

Or maybe they clicked through a Google AdWords link, which is another argument that I've made that it, it could be looked at as a racket, but having to purchase your own keywords against other people's brands and businesses. But the idea is that it— that's what I was thinking right now, as you were saying this, you end up going on Google, you might end clicking on a sponsored ad or a sponsored result or the direct one. And you will never know which one was of one of those 7 to 11 touchpoints they say in the advertising industry that you would have with a brand before they do it. So quickly on that, with the number of touchpoints, how long would you have to run a campaign in order to get that many touchpoints and convince a potential customer?

Part of it depends on the product and service you're selling because some of it's, you know, it's just so low cost that, you know, someone is looking to buy business cards at the moment and they just do, right? It's a quick sale like that. You can imagine a company like ours where, you know, no matter how you do video, it's never cheap to make, right? So it's like an expense. It's a, it's a bigger decision, you know, especially us who focus a bit more on like what we'll call premium. Like premium content, our sales cycles, often we have a conversation with somebody and we're doing a project with them like 18 months later. So that's my, that's my nurture cycle. If, you know, speaking as a business owner is that we might have some level of touchpoint and I need to stay, you know, back of mind at least for 18 months to be the decision when suddenly they're like, hey, we're ready to go from, and this is what we often hear. You know, we've done a lot of creator content. We're pushing Meta really well. We're ready to make the jump to streaming ads, but we need to be able to control the story more than you can with creator content. We needed to feel like it's supposed to look like it's there. And we had a client, Complete Sleep, who came to us. They had done exactly that, maximized Meta in every way. We're doing really, really good. And they wanted to test what if we put premium looking content across Meta as ads. And we were going to go to OTT, over the top, which is streaming. So that's like Hulu, Prime, things like that. To come back to the attribution aspect, once we launched, about a month later, they looked back, not at the data directly from, from just the, the, the ads themselves, but saw that actually their organic search had jumped by 150% after the launch of that campaign.

Because who clicks the ad on the TV?

Right. You can't, you can't.

I just, well, you, you, I mean, on a smart TV, you will see it through, you know, the YouTube app or the, here we have say BBC iPlayer, whatever, MBC there. You can, it does have a CTA and if you tap and it will open that. On YouTube itself, you have an option to open it on the phone, but I still never ever use that. So I would just Google the product. Yeah. I would just Google the program or sorry, the product or the service that I would see and then the attribution will go through that.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's the consumer behavior of you might have even a QR code on your ad, right? To put up and someone scans and like, so it's a little bit trackable there, but at the same time they're like, oh, you know, a client of ours that just started streaming, Haya Kids multivitamins, right? The parent who's sitting there, they're like, oh, I don't want to get up to get a little closer. They're just going to Google it. And so you would give attribution to—

or they search it straight on Amazon if that's the case. Yeah.

Right. 100%. Exactly.

Okay. So we've touched on a lot of touchpoints here. I think people get a pretty good idea now of where they should be angling with their advertising, video advertising. So I want to talk, Dustin, about AI. It's the big elephant in the room. Everybody's saying that it's going to replace their job or part of their job to a certain extent, but so far AI has not been great at videos, at producing videos. You can maybe have these kind of like spinning motion products for a presentation, things like that. It can cut a lot of the work, but then again, you're not the type of agency that would do that. So at Union and creative agencies like yours, What part of video production has AI already changed?

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've actually been asked to share on this a lot, and I use this kind of example. We'll go back to the building a house, because I think if you think about how video is created, it's really helpful to understanding where AI plays a role, because there isn't a— as of June 2026, I can't speak for June 2027, but June 2026, there is not a I write a paragraph into, you know, whatever your AI platform of choice is, hit enter, and a full commercial comes out that's usable. Like, it does not, it does not exist right now. We stay on top of this as a video agency. We're very kind of medium agnostic, I would say. We do testimonial campaigns, brand campaigns with actors and actresses, and, you know, everything in between. So we can be kind of a one-stop shop. So that's why we're very aware of what's happening with AI. In fact, we use, like, there's a lot of people who theorize about it. We have clients that pay us, you know, it'll be, we'll do a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of generative AI video this year itself. So like, we know the, there's three—

But you make it look the cinematic or the, to fit with the other type of work that you would do for that business.

Yeah. And the reality is every new media, because that's the interesting thing about AI is it's two things. It's not a new camera that came out. It's a new tool and it's a new medium because it doesn't fully look like animation. It doesn't fully look like live action. It kind of becomes its own little like, that's AI. And it got a lot of like slop, slop, slop thrown at it. But slow, but people, people, um, don't like change and they slowly adapt. To things. And so that's like just an interesting journey to be on, where I myself saw a company that was only producing AI ads, a big, big company in the US. The first time I saw it, I was like, oh wow, they did an out-of-house AI ad, that's really surprising. The second time I saw it, I was like, they did it again, that's surprising. The third time I thought maybe they're only doing AI ads. And by about the fifth, sixth, seventh time I had stopped being shocked by it and actually went back to paying attention to the message that was trying to be communicated. And I do think audiences in general might take a similar journey to sit down. So within creating creative content, here's how I see AI playing out right now. Like building a house, you need a blueprint. We'll call that kind of like a concept. Uh, you need a plan, a strategy. You use— an architect needs to make that. Then you need the materials to construct with. You need like wood and concrete and all of that kind of stuff. That's just footage or like all of the pieces that you pull together in an editor to create something, music, audio, all of that. Right. And then lastly, you need the ability to assemble them. That's all it is, is that you need an idea and a strategy. You need a blue, which is a blueprint. You need a material to put together, which is the content. And then you need someone, the ability to assemble it together. In strategy, I do think AI helps expedite things a lot because—

That's exactly what I was going to ask.

Okay.

Where is it genuinely saving time and where is it producing stuff that works cheap and unforgettable? So you can, people could think wrongly that you use AI to actually generate videos or characters in a video, but you use it a lot for ideation, for concepts. For backgrounds and so forth, right?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, backgrounds as an example, the ability to, in that final assembly stage, make a tweak where you just kind of can mask something out. I mean, how many of us have used Canva just to be able to make a quick little change that like was mind-blowing, or it's in Photoshop now, those capabilities. In the ideation phase, if you're working by yourself or you're having to come up with ideas by yourself, suddenly you have a partner. To do it with, and they're just mediocre, to be honest, right? They're the, they're, they're, AI is the culmination of everything that's super, super good and super, super bad and meets in the middle. And so you can come up with a bunch of ideas, upload it for feedback, and have that bounce back and forth and create basically like a synthetic ideation partner. But as a human, you still have to play a role. Like you're the only one who actually has taste. You're the only one who's had human experiences before. The ability to create a storyboard from text to prompt very fast. It is a good, good capability. The ability to—

It's very good at prompting itself to, to do this sort of stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. You can, you can create visualizations of your idea faster. That may not be to the caliber of what the final product will be. But when you are needing to communicate to a client who's signing the check for something and you're helping them get as close as possible to understanding what the final product is going to be, what the final video is going to be, that's really helpful. We, there is obviously text to video or photo to video prompting, which we use. I mean, we've built full campaigns out of it and I think one of the best use cases is maybe kind of a mix of, we'll talk kind of really tactical, is that when you're doing a filming day for something, there's only so much, so many hours in a day, right? Right. So if you need to set up and budget, right, which, which go hand in hand. And if you said, hey, we need 45 minutes to set up outside of this house to capture what we call an establishing shot of a home to, so that when somebody sees the inside of the house interaction, they know, oh, I'm in a home. Instead of that 45 minutes, and especially if there's no people involved, you just need a realistic exterior of a home that you see for 2 seconds. Could you prompt, prompt it? And suddenly you just bought back 45 minutes to an hour of actual production time. And, and you're not weather dependent, right? So these are like the ways that we make the whole process better. By not saying, hey, we just prompted a whole commercial, we said, oh, we just bought ourselves an hour of time, less dependent on the weather. Now we're going to use that hour to actually make the bulk of the content even stronger. So that's kind of that middle pillar, right? The, to have, getting the material to work with. And then, you know, lastly, the, the ability to assemble. Right now, that's almost exclusively human. You know, there are great platforms like, you know, we'll use Riverside, Todd FM, obviously you as well, the ability to get from a podcast interview to at least a jumpstart on clips for vertical video is good and getting better. And so I don't know if the human will ever have to not be at least the last 5% of it. You know, we've done some of those.

I still tinker with all of them manually. Even the AI stuff doesn't get it right, but yeah.

Exactly. And sometimes, you know, sometimes you'll get a clip that's, it's 50% of the way there and other times you'll get it like, wow, that's pretty good. About 90%. Like I need to change these things. Obviously it's not ready to ship. Like you said, you tweak all of them.

It saved you a good chunk of time. Yeah, absolutely. So that's— is there, where would be a part in a client project where you would refuse to use AI?

That comes down to a little bit of like the morality of manipulation of individuals without their consent. So for example, like a voiceover artist who's been hired to and has not given consent for the manipulation of their voice. If the client said, hey, let's change this line, let's upload their voice sample, let's have them say this, let's export it and include it in. That's like, from an artistic standpoint, I'm unbothered by it, to be frank. But from a, that was a human who's doing a job and did not give you the rights to utilize their voice as the prompt engine to generate something from, that to me is wrong. And I wouldn't do that. I'd say we're gonna have to—

Is this something that's becoming baked into these contracts for the voiceovers and other people involved in the production.

Yeah. And they are mixing in some of the platforms that provide those, you know, kind of crowdsourced voiceover solutions. They're navigating that too. I think they are giving people the option to opt into or even submit their voice so that they can resell that voice based on that person. They never need to do the recording, you know. So yeah, I mean, to be honest, it's a little bit of the Wild West. Still with, with AI.

Early days.

Yeah.

Okay, Dustin, I want to go through some quick practical questions now. Think of them like quickfire for founders, small and growing businesses. So if in your first year or when you just launch a business, you have $5,000 to spend on video, where would you put it?

I would do founder-led content. You know, it's, it scratches all of the itches of, of the founder can probably communicate the offer best. You are personalizing the brand. Humans buy from humans, like we both said, and they aren't going to probably be fired. So it is a consistent person. So I would say, I would say that. And then if you have 25,000 instead of 5,000, I would say what you have more than enough to create a baseline of what we already just said. And then I would add on top of it, it's a little bit business, but a little bit business dependent, but I would say begin to maybe investigate a little bit of paid placements to, you know, hone in on a couple different key problems that someone is looking to overcome, their customers looking to overcome, and create short little ads related to the like, hey, if you're experiencing this, we have a solution that does this, and this is the outcome. Right? Like very clear clarity. You're, you know, you're not focused just on like blasting awareness of your brand name, whereas no one knows why they would go to you. Focus on why they would go to you, but you have the ability to create something a little more intentional and maybe put a little bit of paid dollars behind it.

So at what point would you say a freelancer is enough versus a business generally needing an agency?

A freelancer is enough if you have a good in-house marketing person who knows what they're talking about, who can bring strategy to the table, who understands the the world, or if you're small, but as an owner, your superpower is marketing and sales, you know, you can have ideas and you have like an executional partner.

Mm-hmm.

You know, sometimes you have a freelancer, especially in the social media world where they actually know like a lot about the strategy of social media and they can kind of help you, help you get there. And so that would be kind of like a freelance thing for sure. But once you get to the point where your marketer has a lot going on. You know, we tend to work with companies that have marketing teams of, you know, 5, 10, 25 people.

And they don't only do that, they do events and a range of other things that are tacked on to marketing. Let's not, you know, without talking about search engine optimization and being in charge of the website and many other hats.

Yeah, they'll be able to communicate to you well, typically at that stage, like, so this is now we've kind of pivoted to agency, right? Where where things are honed in enough that you can actually give a little bit more autonomy to somebody who you're not handing them a script necessarily. You're saying, this is what we're looking to achieve. This is who we're talking to. This is our key point. And they'll bring you like finished script ideas back. They'll pitch you ideas, things like that. And part of the difference is a freelancer, from, from how they have to work, they've closed you as a client and they're off to find their next paycheck while working on your thing, right? So they just need to execute, get it done, get to the next thing. Whereas like an agency has a little bit more of like, like I'll meet with people just on my time to—

a longer view.

Huh?

A longer view. An agency has a longer view of the project.

Exactly. Because, because on the other side of this wall, I have one of like our, our in-house director is also editing a piece of content. And then the wall past that, we have our lead editor who's working on something else. So, so things are being made. I can actually give you more of my time, more of my brain. And so that's, that would be one of the big differences.

And what part of the budget should be protected for distribution only?

Ooh, it's a good question. It's always the question. It all depends on what you wanna say. I mean, if you remember, you—

everybody's gonna ask that.

Yeah, years, years ago, there was that coin— was it Coinbase, I think— ad played during the Super Bowl. It was just the, it was just the screensaver icon bouncing around as a QR code. It's super duper cheap creative, right? But it's super, super high cost placement. The point there was awareness. People were going to talk about it. So there was earned media. Then there was also the ability to click, and I don't even know what landing page it drove you to. But you landed somewhere. And so, so that's an example of like, maybe you want to push more out, but also at the same time, if you have a pretty targeted audience, you can make sure each of your dollars gets a really good piece of content to a really clear audience. And that would be an effective use of your dollars.

And if it would be putting a number on it, I don't know.

Yeah, I'd almost rather put a percentage. And it's super, it's super hard to do. People will, people will tell you different things, but I've experienced like kind of 50/50. I've experienced where they really just wanted something low cost. Let's call it like 10% creative, 90%, maybe we'll call it reach, a little bit channel dependent as well. You know, is, is something like going to be a piece of content that can live organically and promoted? And so it'll still maintain organic after the promotion's over. So there's nuance to it.

But organic reach now is pretty much dead, isn't it?

I mean, I think, I do think the algorithms do a pretty good job of helping me find the next version of something that's similar to what I recently watched. So if you have a clear point and opinion, you know, I think if you're generally blasting, you know, all over the place, but I think if somebody is like a small business owner,, you know, or a business owner, a leader, you know, for them to find Millennial Masters, like it will at some point get fed to them.

So the idea is that what you were saying earlier, focusing and narrowing down on particular aspects that your product or service, the pain points that it addresses, it also helps with way better targeted distribution and making the most of your money that you invest on that side.

Yeah, because you need people who are, who are having such a clear awareness of the problem that you solve when you don't have much that it's almost kind of the problem that a lot of SaaS companies have is you land— I'd done a LinkedIn post about this. You could kind of find it. It was the business, it was an ad I'd seen in an airport and it was basically said like the SaaS, it was the business platform for every business's every need or something like that. And I was like, Man, if you're for everybody, you're for nobody. And, and like, just, I, I, I don't know that that can actually exist. I don't know why I would need you. It makes no sense. Versus you might have 99% of people walk by something that says The Video Agency's Platform for Project Management. And if I walk by that, you know, you might have most people ignore it, but the people who it catches actually buy from you.

So in this case, what is one question that clients rarely ask you and they should? Hmm.

What's a— that's a really good question. What should clients ask me? It's funny. I, uh, the question most people ask is at the end, if we haven't kind of gotten there, is like, how much does it cost? But we don't typically get there because I usually ask What, what kind of level of investment are you interested in doing to help achieve this goal? Because then we can help provide solutions kind of anywhere along the scale of what your budget is, right? You might have a low-cost problem or, or let's maybe call it a low-cost customer. And so, but you want to hammer it a lot. And so you understand.

You want volume versus, yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. And so, yeah, I would say in terms of a question most clients don't get to ask, typically they never get to the stage of asking me what the budget is because I'm already engaged with them in terms of, you know, what would solving this problem, how would it affect the business? How would it affect your marketing goals? You know, if you just have your own owned P&L.

Okay. Tons of useful tips here, but I want to get a bit reflective now as we prepare to wrap up this chat, Dustin, because I'm wondering, in your 15 years in business now, what was the hardest decision you've made while building Union?

I mean, there have been times I've had to lay people off, let them go, you know, notably for kind of like cultural reasons. And that was really difficult because I am an optimist and I hope the best for people. And I maybe think like, like I'm I'm perceiving this wrong or whatnot, but, but, uh, in, in like probably every owner, I've had the experience of saying, I just kept somebody on for 3, 6 months too long. And I should have just kind of trusted my gut and it kept me up at night too many nights. And that was probably one of the hardest things, the people.

And what has running a creative company cost you personally?

You know, I've gotten better at understanding, I guess this brings us full circle, the seasons of it, right? And because we don't typically have retainers, because creative can be pretty subjective, because businesses tend to cut marketing lines before they, or budgets before they cut other things, which I never think is a good idea, right? We end up being like kind of on the receiving end of that at times. And so that has been, you know, I grew up from the side of being the creative. And now I'm a business owner and I didn't, you know, go to business school. I just learned it, you know, from watching the interviews with folks like yourself or just how to, how to grow in that way.

And I'm only doing this after I've done the business and I've been through the same process because I've studied media and done the, had to learn the business side as I went along.

So it's, it's, it's, it's that I think is that the things I didn't know when it comes to financial projections and we have a staff that has needs benefits and, and in a 401k or, you know, a retirement plan, we'll call it like pension, wherever you, wherever you're from. Right. And so like those things, you know, were, had to be learned and they, and they kept me up. And, and at the same time, when you're leading a creative team, they're looking to do creative work. And sometimes the work that we're doing for some of our folks, the need that's being served, isn't the top of funnel, super interesting ad. Sometimes it's the middle of the funnel explainer stuff where they don't get that kind of like creative fulfillment all the time. And so you're, you're managing the culture of creatives and you're managing and you're learning the business from the ground up.

And something that we haven't mentioned up until this point is that you also have Emmy Award winning campaigns. So I'm wondering, have they changed anything for the business? And if so, what?

There's the, the award show, let's even call it circuit of, you know, whether it's, you know, whatever it is, it does establish a level of credibility and at least peer-reviewed stamp of approval that you've accomplished something. It's on par with being able to have, you know, accomplished work for you know, really big name brands. The fact that somebody sees, hey, they were, you know, they got hired by so-and-so. It becomes akin to a referral, you know, slash testimonial. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so those kind of things all come together. You know, the Emmys themselves are, you know, within especially, you know, the US, they're a little flashier than some of the awards because A lot of them do get tied into, you know, major TV and things like that. Ours are more on the commercial side of things in the commercial world. And one was for an ESPN documentary series that we had done a full motion graphics package for. And so it was a little bit more on the entertainment side, but, but yeah, notoriety helps breed trust. And when you're buying high-ticket things like premium video, trust is critical.

18 months in advance?

18 months in advance. Yeah. Cause if you, if you spend $100,000 on something that you did not properly vet out the vendor for, like, that might be your job. And we very much recognize that about the people who choose Aira.

Well, in this case, Dustin, finally, my question for you is, what advice would you give the version of yourself starting Union back in 2011? Much more fresh face.

Well, I most recently hired the person I should have hired first, which was an administrative assistant. Because my— I kind of have said this so far. I have this— I have an entrepreneurial brain, I have a creative brain, I have a start something and then kind of get bored with it halfway through brain. To have maybe early on brought on the, like, the yin to my yang of the person who, like, loves a checklist can execute on an idea, has autonomy to solve things without me needing to know. You know, I was on vacation a few weeks ago and only later realized that she had solved this major invoice issue and never even told me that it was solved or that it became an issue or was solved. Like didn't even ask for the credit.

Otherwise it would've consumed your entire vacation if it was.

Yeah, exactly. And so to me, hiring like the right people to give you back your time to the things that you're best at is one of the most critical things that you can do. Don't just hire duplicates of yourself and then put you into the thing that you're not even good at anyway.

Something that one of my previous guests, Gary Das, described it as the $10 or the £10 tasks, allowing you to focus on the big ticket items and the direction of the business. So in your case, it would be the administration and smaller tasks, which would free up your time and it won't bury you into worrying about things that you shouldn't really do.

Exactly. Exactly. That's what I would have told 21-year-old Dustin.

Well, that's a really good closing point for this episode, Dustin, because Regardless of whichever stage of business you are, there has been something super useful for people to take into their business and strategy, whether they're doing video or maybe it's not time to do video yet, and depending on their budget. And I think one of the biggest reminders that I want to put at the end of this episode is that from my experience as well in the advertising side of a media business is that you must not forget about the distribution budget. For whatever you create. I'm not saying people should cut their production budget, but they should consider the distribution budget from the beginning because it will not get organic pickup just on its own. Yeah. So thank you so much, Dustin, for coming on Millennial Masters, and I'm sure we'll be in touch again and have a few more discussions, especially with what AI is going to be moving into.

I'm here for it. Thanks, Daniel.

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