welome um thank you guys for coming on Thanksgiving week I know it was a sacrifice for you to be here but you guys are in for a treat so film lab is an agency that focuses a lot on video uh uh film type work and they do great awesome work so I'm excited to have them here Mitch St is the founder in creative director for film lab he's the one that'll be doing most of the presenting but Mike will also present some Mike is the Chief Operating Officer Mitch um so has a has a a wealth of experience in Creative so as a creative entrepreneur he possesses diverse skills and experience in commercial Direction professional video production post production and business operations his blend of expertise provides um his with high vision and versatility in decision making and Leadership he has managed a team of 150 individuals he's developed strong leadership attributes such as clear communication conflict resolution high level Vision exceptional social skills and cability what you're most excited about he co-founded film or he co-founded Avenue film company in 2018 and sold it in 2020 to Route the e-commerce post production Tech Pioneer after after a little over a year of being the director of content and media for them he left and uh founded Film LA so Mike is also a part owner of film lab Mike has 18 years of leadership and management experience he began as an assistant manager at McDonald's has worked his way up so for all of you my wife always tells me you grew up on the wests side of currens and somehow you're at BYU teaching right like you can go from Humble backgrounds managing the gos to running an awesome company being creative doing a lot of cool work um Mike also moved to Costco Wholesale he had a variety of leadership roles there he led a lot of their marketing efforts uh merchandising and administration he also worked for Paul Mitchell the school overseeing schools in Idaho um Utah and Washington while still collaborating with film lab he's left that and he's full-time at film lab so let's have a warm welcome for Mitch and Mike thank you well everybody great to meet you my name is Mitch um like Ben mentioned I'm the founder and creative director a so again a little bit more about what we do is we're video production company so we get to do I think the funnest side of marketing advertising which is greatly content when we do very highly visible it's really fun so anyway I got to just like call out that I'm so stoked to be here guys like I used to attend BYU I absolutely love this place I actually had Church in this building for like a year this is where we did Sacrament meetings so this is kind of Full Circle cuz last time I was up here I was probably giving a talk for the church so kind of fun um but yeah guys big big BYU fan over here everything from the sports to the actual institution uh Sports past couple weeks have been rough obviously with football but we're hoping we can turn that around let's go get the big 12 Championship but all right let's let's go on so basically let's talk about what film lab is so we're a Salt Lake City based production company we specialized in commercial work for many kind of product based Brands that's kind of where we've found our Niche that's where we've done really well so we started in 2021 we've worked with various Brands you might recognize such as Jordan brand we worked with DJI Sephora dime the Utah Jazz clun spil lonely ghost lots of Brands like that that you might be familiar with so our company now three short years later has 13 team members and we've done over seven figures of Revenue this year kind of sweet right so we're pretty pumped about that and we've been able to kind of grow and develop a lot and what I want to say is like you guys can do this and far better so want to go in and show you guys a little bit about uh what we do and to be able to do that best we're going to watch a little video so this is our show real um this is kind of now outdated we're you know starting to work on a new one for 2025 but but you're going to be able to see a bunch of examples of work for different brands work with things like that so let's check that out real [Music] quick for oh what help there b bring home all right so I don't know if you guys saw but Mike is also a frequent flyer as far as when we need somebody Who's down to just send it and be Talent probably saw him in the Utah jab thing we've also had Mike uh run and jump through a wall for a video and his knee has still never recovered bless his heart but um it's a lot of fun like what we get to do is a lot of fun and I feel extremely fortunate to be able to do what I do and I have to give so much credit to God for being able to line up opportunities along my way and help me stumble into this realm of creativity that I never thought possible honestly growing up I actually never consider myself to be creative the most great thing I would do is make family home videos with my siblings you know I didn't really relate that to being creative but this has already been touched on so I won't talk about myself too much but I picked up a camera really for the first time in 2013 kind of dabbled with it had a good time and then I went and served a mission in Cape Town South Africa for 2 years so took a little bit of a break but then kind of continued on my way as I said started a production company sold it in 2020 and worked as the director of content media for a uniform siiz company called route here um locally and but as as is with entrepreneurs once you tasted entrepreneurship once you tasted this creative freedom the opportunity that I was able to have to work with the people that I wanted to build a team that I enjoyed and really focus on telling stories and advocating for products or brands that I believed in it was really hard for me to be in house so I knew I needed to kind of move on do my own thing so that's where started uh film lab but the most important thing you guys should know about me and I should have pictures of them up here but I don't is I've got an amazing wife named Megan she's a 11 out of 10 um so pretty lucky and then I've also got two really cute kids uh my daughter's named Olive she's age four and then my son is named Rose he's a year half old meet your wife how do I meet my wife thank you Mike yeah and also I should just say let's open this up like I'm as you guys can probably this is the most dressed up I think I've been six months so most of the time I'm wearing all black I'm on set I'm filming things so we're going to keep it casual so if you guys have questions whether in regards to story in regards to our process things like that we looked at kind of the questions that were sent over um we built kind of out this whole presentation but if there's questions that you have things that you want us to elaborate on please throw a hand up let's keep it casual let's keep it open and let's keep it collaborative so I met my wife actually while I was um going to school here and uh it was it was a great great thing but I met her she was actually a model uh for a fitness brand and I promise I was never the the photographer video guy who would head on models but this one I just had to shoot my shot she was just cute she was fun she was like cheering everybody else on she was just really warm and I just loved that so thought she was the dest thing I'd ever seen asked her out and hung out with her every day since then and it's been awesome we got married in the Pro Center Temple and uh Life's good so I can't complain but I'm going to now introduce and let him introduce himself my creative other half the other side of this business which is Mike so put a hand up for Mike all right how's it going everyone uh Mitch and I did not coordinate outfits I just want I just want everyone to know when we met this morning I said okay you have to take that off cuz I got Gar so you can't take this um okay well a little bit about me so like Mitch said with with film lab I I kind of come from more of an Ops marketing um Financial background uh I have no clue how Camp works even even though you just saw me snap a couple photos um that that camera comes pre-edited it's a really fun camera so if you want to get into it you don't have to edit anything snaps a photo it's fantastic so uh but Film LA has been a ton of ton of fun my my background again is more on the on the history Ben mentioned I started at uh at McDonald's just uh just like Donald Trump just kidding I actually started at Subway and got fired but that's a story time so from there ran to Costco who all love Costco in here if you don't you will when you get older it's a fantastic place I there for seven years um it's it's an absolute Mammoth it's a ton of fun it's one of those corporations that is so revolutionary of how they do things and a lot of people don't even understand the length they go to take care of their members it's really really cool um and then from there I went to Paul Mitchell um I had ownership in seven different Paul Mitchell campuses including the Provo one down down the street actually uh built and designed that building that currently now um and ab loved my time there you would never think a a 300 lb bald guy would know the hair industry but it was a lot of fun um worked there for seven years and then I've been been with film lab a little over two now um a little bit more on me is I've been married for 13 and 1 12 years um I've got four kids 119 119 6 and three two girls two boys so I was really really lucky on that front um and I'm super grateful to uh to be just part of this experience that we're doing at film lab again we're still pretty young but we're having a ton of fun and been able to work with a lot of really cool Brands and we're going to dive into a little bit more of that story a little bit later I'm Miss man what we're doing now yeah you guys are going to love how Mike met his wife I actually knew his wife before he did but we we'll get into that later so I want to talk about where we started you know from small and simple things from humble beginnings that was very much the definition of how film lab came to be but there's just a couple of guys in a dream one of those guys wasn't even Mike at that time uh we had when we started we had no camera gear we had very few connections and we were in this saturated market so I'm talking about kind of the story yeah you don't you don't need to hear all this but you know as has already been addressed I had another production company after dropping out of school for I know I do not recommend a guys finish school it's awesome but uh dropped out of school and decided to go to the School of Hard KN which was entrepreneurship so you learn one way or another and you do it either by working with great professors and in school or you do it by failing and getting into financial debt and having a lot of stress and I chose the ladder so um so started Avenue film Co in 2018 and kind of just like grinded it out project by project really really happy to put in a significant amount of effort it was a painful experience but we were able to learn a lot and I'm really grateful for it and right when we started hitting our Peak guys I mean you know for us back then this was a big deal but we had lined up four different $100,000 retainers over the course of a year and 400 Grand locked in for a small company and there were like eight of us we were pumped and that was all happening in March of 2020 and it was supposed to start all of them April 1st of 2020 well we all know what happened right later in March and uh it kind of ruined a lot of people's plans including mine um Co H it was a very very painful experience because what happened was I had brought on all my friends you know I I was still very new entrepreneur so and my my network and circle was small obviously I dropped out of school I started this thing I had a bunch of my really close friends working with me and now I'm getting call after call from our clients hey things aren't working out looks like the world's shutting down we're not going to be able to start on this retainer we're going to have to cancel our contracts with you guys one by one I'm getting these calls boom boom boom boom and I'm talking to our finance guy it was it was me and a friend who were kind of sharing that and I we were looking at it we're like we don't have any money and so we had to split up I'm like okay you call so and so and so and so and I'll call these people and we got to tell them that we can they don't have to work anymore and we can pay them one more time and then they're on their own cuz we're out of money and we can't paray El so I had to turn to my wife who we' only been married for you know 9 10 months and say hey I'm sorry to say this but you know Avenue is going out of business CO's saidit I don't know what else to do and it's either pay ourselves or pay our people and these people bet on us so we're going to have to just live off credit cards for a little while so that's what we did I had to call my friends and these people who put a massive amount of trust in me who would move from other more secure job options and opportunities and took a beted on me and this Vision that we had with Avenue filmco and then only you know several short months later had to call them and say sorry guys it's not working out I've got no more money so it was a very very painful experience very very hard process and we went from a team of eight thriving in a thriving business back down to just a few of us very very core um luckily though with Co we know that e-commerce really started picking up people were sitting at home you know either playing Call of Duty which I played a lot of Call of Duty war zone still do um and uh or they were online shopping and so with that e-commerce started taking off one of our clients was named route they reached out to us they ended up buying our company I went in house and was able to play the role of director of content for about a year but as I said I felt this draw to entrepreneurship felt this draw that we could do something more and so that's where I left again with my old business partner whose name was Jackson AIT and we started um film lab it was a really really great experience but with that and the thing I want to kind of highlight here is with entrepreneurship the best thing you can do is stay Nimble think quickly and just execute over and over and over don't get caught in your head about what what am I going to do how do I make this perfect plan because that's what I did wrong with with Avenue the first time it was all about execution I think we put together our first show real in an afternoon I made our website on Squarespace was as Scrappy as you could possibly imagine and then we posted all we posted it we texted all of our friends a link and said hey can you share this can you go you know show us some love on on Google my business things like that and it was Scrappy but the second time around I started having all these high gr expectations myself well think about what we did think about where we came from now I need to do it even better I need make it even bigger so we went invested $10,000 into our um our logo our branding our side we went and we started coming up with this whole social media strategy and everything that we wanted to do it was probably the greatest mistake that I have made with film lab ever because what happened was we basically posted and said Film LA coming soon and then for the next N9 months it sat there because we wanted to be perfect we overthought the entire process because we had some sort of expectations that we needed to live up to which was such a joke so as such our opportunities were slow nobody knew about what we were doing and things started to get very very very stressful and I just left behind a very very cushy job well and was offered and making more money than I'd ever thought I would as a creative but I felt this draw to ENT entrepreneurship again and so I'm I'm turning my wife and she's there looking at me like I know what you turned down to and uh you said we said you were going to be doing something amazing here and uh you're not you haven't even launched your business because you want it to be all perfect how about you get off your butt and start posting and start practicing some Faith you know because Faith requires action and at this time I was taking no action I was kind of just hoping that it would all work out and wanted to lay it every everything out make everything perfect and so because of all that because of me sitting on my heels my business partner at the time really started struggling he started kind of taking more and more time off he started being a little more disconnected and it was because of the massive amounts of pressure I mean when you got employees when you've got people who are sitting there relying on you you're starting to just feel all this pressure and uh at some point it just started feeling better for him to be able to take a step back now it was during this time that I kind of just started realizing what my mistake was one nobody knew what I was doing they knew I'd left route to start some small film lab but what was that I wasn't talking to anybody about it I wasn't really out there publicizing it and so I decided to learn from my mistakes and I started sharing content on social media I started reaching out to people and getting advice and during this time and during this kind of General crisis is where I started having Financial questions because believe it or not this guy was in charge of our finances which I can tell you if if I still was I'd probably be in federal prison because I didn't know what I was doing like it was a terrible mistake and so it was around this time that I actually decided to post on social media and ask for some help and some Financial advice and that's where our boy Mike comes back into the picture so Mike take from here to perfect so with a little more background to that too so I've known Mitch for 15 years my my wife was his family's Nanny growing up okay so when my wife and I were dating I'd go over there to like hang out I'm 6 years old with the Mitch um I'd go over there to hang out and him and I just stayed in contact you know throughout throughout the years and so to show you some of the importance of posting on social media is when he posted that that Financial question asking for help I reached out to him and said said hey let's let's connect and so when him and I connected on it we were talking about it about Film LA just where they're at and at this point with Paul Mitchell um you know I grew I helped grow that from one campus to um five at that time from like a like a $2 million company to probably a $9 million company and um when him and I talked he's like hey this is where I need help could you could you kind of look at our books give us some financial analysis essentially and present it to me and Jackson um and just kind of give us some recommendations of like the best next actions of what to take and kind of where we're at as a company and so when we did that we met um presented everything to to him and Jackson and that same conversation and Jackson we're like hey could you could you come on um and we'll give you some Equity help us out just super part-time because again at this point I I had four kids I was living in Idaho and Meridian and right next to boy at the time um and can you just work a couple hours a week give us some guidance and support of kind of next best actions and obviously I uh I I said yes that's where I'm here today and after after doing that um after we all kind of agreed of like hey this is what the the future is going to look like um I asked them both if we could do an exercise and I wanted them to play play along with it and they both agreed to and said okay so you guys are both buyed and there's two positions at film lab there's the CEO position and the COO position which ones do you guys want to apply to because one of the things I noticed with with working with them a little bit is if if no if everyone's in charge no one's in charge right and and Mitch was doing a majority of of of that work and and having to work with Jackson to make decisions too and so after we did that exercise Mitch was like I'll apply to the CEO role and I was like Jackson do you have any problems with that and he said no Jackson's like I'll apply to the cooo role and and I applied the CFO all and after we did that we identified the top five responsibilities of that role and how it how it infused with film in deciding of okay this is what your role is this is what you play and these are top five responsibilities of like what your daily tasks are weekly tasks quarterly tasks and how we're going to move forward and how we're going to build this comp and that was I think a the probably one of the most pivotal moments for film lab of being able to like transition that to have us beat where we are today so again if you if you are ever thinking of starting your own company just really identify what you want to do and who you want to do it with so that makes the biggest difference so um it was great and I I have to emphasize that Jackson was probably one of the best business partners I could have ever asked for he was my he was my creative other how we we kind of grew up in the film making world together we collaborated all the time he was such an incredible human but as we were growing and as we were scaling we started realizing that the goals of Life were different Jackson um wanted to have you know a work life balance he wanted good mental health and apparently I wanted the opposite of those things and so he he kind of over time the pressure continued build where finally he just said one day I just kind of pull him I was like do you want to be here like are are you okay is there anything like do we need to talk about something he's like honestly I think I need to tap out and um it always happens during October which is my birthday month so I'm never really excited for my birthday cuz yeah I don't know why but e-commerce and video becomes more important than never prepping for Black Friday as well as it just seems like there's always some crisis with our company that happens that so Jackson my business partner and some person that I've been collaborating with for almost 5 years decided to bow out and it was a very difficult time but luckily like Mike said he had this conversation with me where he needed to identify Mitch what are your strengths what are Jackson's strengths how can I support and we were able to kind of work through that exercise and so when this happened and Jackson this person who had been honestly in a lot of ways my you know security blanket somebody that i' been through all this stuff with when he decided he needed to step away at this point I'd identified what am I actually good at what am I comfortable with doing what decisions am I able to make and so when Jackson left instead of now always having this 50/50 partner which is what we were at the time we had to be on the same page with everything now I had a very significant control over everything that was happening Mike was still and Idaho doing some part-time work for us I now had the opport opportunity to make the decisions that I knew I needed to and this is actually a time where I needed to be very honest with myself and realized that I was underprepared and under equipped but luckily I knew that I could rely on God and ask for his help and so I spent a lot of time praying I spent a lot of time looking at what I've done to get to this point and figuring out what is it that I need to do to take it to the next and I believe that I received a lot of inspiration now a couple of the things that was inspired to do was one start a YouTube channel it sounds funny I know it sounds so you know modern day but that's what I felt like I needed to do I needed to let people know and see inside the process of building our company and so we started a mini documentary series called lab tapes and so it's just kind of this behind the- scenes experience of hey here's the struggle and we talk about everything from losing client footage and needing to call them and say hey we really something cards got corrupted we met messed up we need to refilm this entire thing to trying to figure out how to get a stronger internet signal in a room down the hall you know so we really kind of walked through a whole list of things and as we started doing that we started deciding to post almost every day on Instagram on LinkedIn on socials and really getting out there and letting people know who we are it's crazy how things started turning around now I was able to kind of do that and execute on that for about 6 months and Mike basically kind of came to a head with his partners and his experience at Paul Mitchell and he decided to step away and beyond that he also decided to take a bet on film lab and to come over full-time and he reached out to me he said I'm I'm prepared to go fulltime and I'm over here like whoa I don't know number one if we can afford you you're an important guy right uh you've also got four kids and your wife is basically my sister I don't I don't know if you want to make a bet on me here but he did and what was really cool is he was still living Idaho and um I'm going to just brag about this real quick cuz I don't know if he'll tell us the whole story but he would drive down Sunday night from Idaho he spend the night at his mothers and then for the next 5 days he would work full-time at filmland and then Friday evening he would drive back up to Idaho and spend the weekend with his family he did that non-stop for 6 weeks I even remember one day where he called me he like hey dude my house is on the market and I was like whoa Mike I don't even know if we we're like if we can afford this is this going to work out like are going to be able to pull this off and said dude I Believe In This I Believe in Us I believe that God has lined things up and that everything happens for a reason and so he bet on us and uh luckily it's paid off and so here we are and where we are where we're at now is we're a thriving business you know still still just like any small business things are things are unknown there's a lot of unknowns there's things that we're trying to figure out along the way but we've made a lot of progress where now we've been able to work with some incredible Brands we've been been able to make a lot of friendships and relationships and we've also been able to work together a lot which has been just an incredible experience work with one of your best friends in the world so kind of want to just talk a little bit about what it's like building film lab so number one it's scary we have self funded this entire company which means when times are tough we don't get paid which means when we're getting a client's getting after us we're the ones who are ultimately responsible it's been scary but it has absolutely paid off and it's become extremely fulfilling as well it's really beautiful to be able to look at something and be able to just kind of see your fingerprints all over it to know what I do every day is having a very direct impact on this business and on the clients and the people that we work with and so that's really cool and beyond that the whole experience is just exciting to be able to kind of think about the next steps of our growth how we want to expand our team we're kind of strategizing every day where we wake up excited to go to war and that's kind of what what it is and what I want to emphasize guys is like I think there are a lot of ways traditionally that we're taught to be able to go out there and get experiences and I think there are a lot of ways that you can define success now for me what I wanted is I wanted to do something that I believed in and be able to have high impact and I want want you guys to know it doesn't take anything special to be an entrepreneur it doesn't actually take anything you don't have to be innately creative to be an incredible creative as well the thing that I found is most common between all the people that I see who have been successful and that I get to rub shoulders with and work with is tenacity if you are able to be tenacious which is to stick with something think of a bulldog right who bites onto something and won't let it go that is what me and Mike are and that's what I believe a lot of you also have if you're willing to commit to something and to stick with it through the good times and the bad you're going to just Outlast all of your conf comption and that's what's happened over the past 5 six seven years I've had many other friends and competitors startup production companies agencies around me people that we've been able to associate with and then guess what times get a little bit hard and they bow out and they go try something else some of my friends in starting this three years ago one of my really incredible friends actually he's extremely talented in the past three years he's had seven different careers maybe I shouldn't say careers but job opportunities whether it was in- house as a producer to go moving to Texas and doing something other big starting other businesses getting into clothing all this stuff and what's interesting is you know he he uh maybe six seven eight months ago was talking like I just don't know what the difference between you and me is I'm like really if I look at it you're smarter than me you know you've got better connections than me but the only thing is is I've actually just stopped with it and so that's what I really want to drive home guys is there really isn't anything special about most of the people that you look up to um other than the fact that maybe they just they just can endure pain a little bit longer than most people and they're willing to be tenacious so that's been another really cool experience with being able to build film lab is I'm getting in the room with some big dogs we've worked with celebrities like Sarah Highland we've worked with large you know professional basketball players we've worked with CEOs of massive companies all over and you know what they're all just people there's really nothing that unique about them other than the fact that they pick something they Stu with it so uh basically what we would did to grow and I think this is really important because obviously you guys are into marketing and marketing and advertising ourselves and telling our own story has really been the background to our success I think there are a lot of other people who are actually more talented than us who maybe been have better connections than us but very few have actually told their story better than we have so we have a podcast I post very regularly on social media on LinkedIn on Instagram things like that um obviously we started that YouTube series which we're now you know 24 episodes into we're dropping a new one today so check it out but um it's been it's been a really incredible experience so as we've told our story and as we've done the idea of building in public we've been able to kind of pull back the curtain again and walk through people through the process we talk about our big audacious goals and hold ourselves accountable and there's it's funny how God and the community around us have have conspired for us to succeed and have been a huge huge part of that so so that's been really really big for us um I'm going to let Mike talk a little bit about how networking has also made a big difference for us as well so with networking to kind of just be very straight to it um the older I get I'm 36 so just so you guys know I feel super old sometimes especially especially being here but to give you like some real life advice about networking the older you get it's all about who you know and I'm sorry cuz life's not fair like it it really is all about who you know so take every opportunity that you get to meet somebody to connect with someone on social or LinkedIn um we we have a lot of a lot of fans that that will just DM us and be like hey can you guys help me with this and we'll always have a quick 5 10minute conversation with them if they want to stop by and see the the studio we always let them stop by and see the studio so it is so critical to just show up and talk to people get to know know them because you never know five years down the road you might be looking for a job or looking for your next opportunity um that's going to come from the people that you know and that has to be more than family I would probably say so so at film lab we we actually spend zero to get a new lead every single one of our clients come from repeat clients or referrals that's how we that's our blood that's our bloodline like that's how we live and that's because we show up we talk to people and I mean even we had a client email us this morning D beauty that we do we do a lot with and that was the client Mitch talked about we lost was it like like 50 gigs or a couple terabytes of footage like we did this whole campaign Forum the files got corrupted um luckily I was still to at the time so Mitch had to make that call um to tell to tell the client that we that we messed up but they're still working with us because we owned it we corrected it um and we wanted to make it right so again if you one of the things you just want to take away from don't underestimate anybody get curious learn from them and connect yeah I I I don't even know why I brought up the dime thing because it's still one of the most tremenda experiences of my life calling them and saying hey so I know you flew in that model from New York and I know you did this and this and this but yeah our red just corrupted all the files and there's nothing we can do so we'll pay for the talent we'll pay for this again I'm so sorry it was it was horrible but another thing we did that I think is really important that I do want to highlight is our product was good right if we made great work and let that speak for itself there's this idea within film this this idea of show don't tell right and so and I think that's actually similar in marketing and advertising right you need to learn how to trust your audience you don't want to have to baby step and hold somebody's hand through an entire story through the entire process you need to be able to show it and then let them draw their own conclusions and so that's what we were able to do we showcased our work we showcased our product we put it everywhere where people could see and the end result was people said oh okay they're pretty good at what they do I believe in them and so we started positioning ourselves in individuals Minds as the people who do video in Utah now it's it's helped us a lot so let's talk a little bit about the kind of work that we do we do kind of four main pieces of work um we do a lot of branding campaigns so these are meant to kind of help build up the community's perception of the brand as a whole right so we focus on kind of the ethos or their mission or their purpose of the brand and we focus on strong messaging and things that evoke emotion so so these kind of pieces when when Brands come to us for a brand building campaign it's not hey we want to be able to get this much return on our at spend or we want this kind of an Roi what they're really focused on is we want people to know us and Associate us with this feeling or this Mission or this message right it's it's something deeper these are honestly my favorite kind of campaigns to do um and and I think there's a lot of great brands that that do that um and I think Nike is an incredible example that we've all seen right is this whole idea that everyone can be an athlete and so sometimes you won't even know it's Nike commercial until the very end you see the solution and that's it but really it's about this message of self-improvement about growth about lifting each other up encouraging each other things like that right trying to become your ultimate best self and that's how Nike wants to be Associated that is their brand um now moving on when we're not working on those campaigns obviously we're doing social media campaigns so social media as you guys know this is this is the future right I mean if you're getting it a market you're getting advertising and you're trying to stick to way too traditional stuff and you're not focusing on social media then you're in trouble and I can tell you as as a business owner who didn't focus on social media whether it was products that we're making or videos we're making for our clients or stuff we're doing for ourselves it really put us in a tough spot so social media is very important so content specifically designed for either organic or paid Distribution on social media so this is vertical focused and mostly Community or sales Centric right so this is usually the stuff that people you know you see the ugc ads hey so and so I love this product you guys should buy it it's at a discount right now blah blah blah right it's usually trying to have them take some sort of an action um beyond that we've got podcast production in 2D and 3D I'm going to let Mike talk about that and before I talk about that I just want to talk a little bit more about branding um like Mitch Mitch mentioned when when Film LA started like brand brand new he invested 10,000 to building the film lab brand to getting their correct website getting all the logos like we have a whole sandbox of just awesome content that we can pull out whenever we want to just talk about the brand and one of the coolest compliments we get like when we did the uh 50-year anniversary jazz Utah Jazz video last year uh so if you went to a jazz game they played it before every single game that was a video that we did um when we when we built that and the jazz came to us to to build it for him they they said we want this to look like Film LA produced him so that was like one of the coolest like compliments and a huge compliment to Mitch to the brand that he's built here that's just how important it is and branding is more than just an individual business like it's it's who you are as a person so just wanted to add that uh podcasting who listens to podcast okay do you want to throw out which one do you listen to just um crime junkie crime junkie okay anyone else want throw it down lab Lab okay anyone else search engine search engine that's a good one money by okay be friends anyone else morning Brew it's like a Qui yep that's a good one go ahead this is okay nice perfect so oh goe I just remember one how I built this yeah that's a good one too so I mean probably 85 90% of you raised your going SS um podcasting is relatively new but it's a massive massive industry the this last presidential election you really saw a big swing of people going on a podcast and talking about it and all the analytics will show that it made a big difference on people who they decided and who they wanted to vote for so podcasting we so obviously being a production company just by Nature we've got all the audio gear we got all the camera gear and luckily Mitch's younger brother tal Mitch was already doing podcasting on his own and then we said hey why don't you why don't you come into film lab and we'll just build the podcast ins side uh film and now we've got a little over 10 10 different clients we have two podcast Studios with Draper and we have clients that will just come in record we take care of all the copyright thumbnails producing posting it sharing it cutting up to to social Clips so there's there's just a lot of different ones that just never know who's who's listening here plays a huge huge role it's I was reading something earlier that talk about next next year it's predicted to be over four4 billion industry just podcast by itself pretty well um okay 2D and 3D animation in that animation is is pretty wild and if you guys see a lot of the things today obviously um it's produced by by 2D or 3D and AI everyone's probably getting a little a little weird on AI and what it's going to do but obviously that's that's also the feature as well what we're going to be able to build and produce and we're we're launching Volume 2 is what we're calling it for film lab on uh December 3rd right next week I think I have it up there so keep an eye we we've actually been doing a lot of 2D 3D work we haven't been posting a ton about it just because again we want to have enough enough content to have a really good launch and so we've made a a kind of a recap hype reel similar to what we watched earlier of all the work that we've been doing there's some there's some pretty awesome stuff so you another reason to subscribe to our YouTube All Right Moving on I'm going to go really quickly because we're running out of time me and Mike can be a little long-winded so I apologize but what's it like to work with big Brands like I said we worked with Jordan um for NBA alar weekend here we also worked with them with Jason Tatum and the Boston Celtics for the launch of his new shoe things like that so number one if you cannot articulate your vision and your process then you probably won't get the work and the way that we do that is we do it by creating pitch decks right we walk them through the process of our our thought process in the ideation so here's how we look at your brand here's how we look at this problem and here's how we're going to go about solving it for you here's kind of the stepbystep process of what we're going to do and being able to articulate that is extremely important because I've lost to people who maybe weren't as talented or maybe weren't as well equipped but they were better able to articulate their Vision to the client and they were better able to convince the client that they are a safe bet that they're going to do a great job so if you're not able to articulate it you won't get the word um beyond that you need to have the confidence and examples of work to actually get you in the door so one confidence to be able to be willing to walk through that door but then also you got to be able to back it up if you can't do the work then you're just not going to get in the door and then three great communication is going to help you run more projects again almost even more important than the actual product is being able to communicate how you're going to be able to pull that off so um I'm not going to go too into this but we did work with Jordan Brown like I said I got an opportunity from a friend who reached out and said hey Jordan needs somebody to shoot for you for them in NBA Allstar Weekend I said all right we're totally in obviously who wouldn't want a chance to work with them right um and they hit us up about two different projects the first project was NBA allar weekend and I was I was nervous I was overwhelmed because this is a huge brand that I've looked up to for forever right and so they said okay here's our plan here's how we want you to approach it here's the song we want you to use the type of shots we want you to get and we followed that to the letter and the whole post- production editing process was such a pain I mean back and forth back and forth we were trying to do exactly what they asked and they never really seemed satisfied but at the end we got a product that they were okay with now they hit us up about a second project which was in Boston with Jason Tatum for the launch of his shoe and we said okay this time let's do it a little bit differently we now have worked with them once I feel like they do trust us let's take this into our own hands and let's have some creative confidence about it so me and the guy that we film I filmed it with we talked through the types of shots we wanted to get we talked about different editing techniques we looked at a complete different song than they showed us and we said we're going to do this the way that we think it should be done and you know what happened when we delivered the first round of uh first version of them they freaked out they absolutely lost it to have Jordan brand and their team be freaking out excited over the project that you just put out it meant a lot and what that taught me is how important it is to have creative confidence when you have a client where somebody coming to you they are asking for your expertise they're not just asking for a copy and paste they're not asking you to do exactly what they said they're looking for your creative interpretation they're looking for you to push things to the next level that's not well that's why they're not taking care of it them El right and from that project we are able to get reached out to by the Utah Jazz which we obviously shot their 50th anniversary video which was really cool so you never know where the opportunities are going to come from um so really quickly on the creative side of marketing I believe it's the most enjoyable part of marketing you get to create the experience now also the Creator economy is projected to be worth 528 billion by 2030 and this is just referencing social now a lot of the creat Creator economy is right influencers things like that but there is so much of that money that also goes into the production into the strategy into the implementation of this so I mean look at that's half a trillion dollars guys this is ridiculous this is absolutely the picture and again what you do has high impact and visibility when you're on the Creator side of marting so um I'm going to let Mike really quickly talk about how we run this business and then I think we want to dive into a Q&A to be able to answer any questions that you guys might have so I'll let him talk a little bit about this so how we're running it today is we we fall back on systems so you want to identify what what's most important in your your product how do you sell it how does it perform how do you can redo it um so again I have a quote there business is nothing more than just a series of small tasks down in a timely manner and if you think of it in that format it makes it pretty straightforward and quick to what you need to do um building a good team it's all about the people uh quote from a quote from John Paul Borio success unshared is failure I I'm here with Film LA today because I believe in Mitch I believe him as a person as a father as a friend and as a brother he is amazing and I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for him but I was excited to leave my really cushy company job because it was the opportunity to work work with someone that I look up to some I want to build something really really cool with and obviously we've took a beted in ourselves and and you want to get that right that right person in that trench with you and when I say the right person it's not someone that always agrees with you you got to have someone that disagrees with you in a professional friendly manner because you want the best idea to win and sometimes that best idea comes from someone else and so as long as you can continue to remain professional and have that really awesome like let's make Film LA awesome kind like collaboration that's what it's all about you want someone to go to battle with with you shoulder to- shoulder in that trench every single day so it's all about the people um knowing everyone knows their part we kind of talked about this again but again if you are running a company you want to identify their top five responsibilities of their what their role is what their duties are and just make sure that they're doing taking care of that every single day because again a business is nothing more than a bunch of small tasks done in as timely man all right so um I got a whole slide here and what we can do if it would be helpful we can share kind of this slide um with Ben you can distribute it but uh talking through why high quality video actually matters what kind of an impact it has um but basically I believe it helps build grand it helps you stand out from your competition it increases sales and it streamlines your processes so um got a whole bunch of reasons that we can break down here that um you guys could be able to look over at another time um but wanted to kind of open up to you guys to see if you have any questions whether it be about entrepreneurship whether it be about how to run a business um the creative side of video production um communicating strategizing with clients whatever it might be kind of want to just open it up to you guys and see if you had any particular questions so 10 minutes for questions probably about about three questions so if you got a burning question love to hear it this one just kind came to mind so let say you guys are based out of Salt Lake currently right now there's also if I'm mistaken there's a pop you're kind of on Center Street is that what is there a benefits like having your I don't know if your base in two locations I don't know if Provo is also considered your home base what's the the process that's not actually not us I think that's the find lab and so I know I know but everybody does think that and so just a little bit of backstory we chose the name film lab because it's obviously that's where you process de and develop roles of film we said film lab because we're like this is something that everybody's going to think they've heard of before and so it's going to make us seem a little bit bigger than we actually are so you know focusing on brand a little bit but sorry I no you're good you're good great great question though is your work mainly like Project based or do you go off a retainers and if so like how does that work with your revenue and like injections and all that cool um I'll let Mike probably talk a little bit more about this because this is definitely his Arena right now uh it's a combination of both um for us it's a I would probably say it's a majority of one-offs but again those clients are to come back to work with us within four to six months we do have several clients on retainer where we just produce content for them every single month the the part where it's a little more difficult for us is we don't focus on any of the ad spend side so like if you're looking for someone to handle your SEO your ad your meta like we don't do any of that where most agencies do do the backend side so I can say hey this commercial I made for you made you gave you x amount of Ras gave you this much revenue so it's easy to convince them to say you need to do this again next month where we we don't handle that so it's really you love this project it looked really good so you want to do it again um but again people like working with us we give them the results that they're looking for so that's where the retainer s's a little harder to pitch but I mean if someone works with us again within four to 6 months then you can almost call it a retainer um and sometimes it's actually worked out in our benefit like I feel like if we had them on a monthly retainer we wouldn't have gotten as much for this project or that project they're do for us and I will just to add to that really quickly I will say we are now pivoting to starting to do more social content for that very purpose because we're able to get in the door with these brands at a $5,000 a month $10,000 a month $122,000 a month engagement and when they're thinking about their next big quarterly campaign well we're already in the door we're already working with them regular early so they want to kind of turn to us with the larger campaigns as well but we have been primarily oneof but now we're trying to Pivot to get a little more suit stability and security I love I personally I resonate deeply with the ability to create and tell a story me earlier you mentioned um how the first time around we were kind of focusing on having it be perfect in in every way and I feel like I struggle with that how have you overcome that idea of like perfectionism in everything to be right that's a great question thank you so uh it's it's the plague of every person who's creative is you know what its potential could be right and and so you're constantly comparing that to the version of what you're working on to the version of what you have in your head but what I found is nobody notices like like truly nobody actually really does notice and with people's attention span these days I mean sometimes I would put in days or weeks on our projects and you imagine imagine somebody scrolling right now they look see the first 10 seconds double tap and move on and that's what happened and so I started realizing that it's better to get it 85 90% of the way there and get it done instead of spending the time on that last 15 or 10% to make it perfect it's the law of diminishing returns and it really got to the point where again it just wasn't making enough of an impact and so as I started practicing that putting in practice because it is practice because you're having to put yourself out there and still be maybe even a little bit unsure about the end product or your work but I as I found when we were sharing four or five times the amount of projects or videos as our competitors I mean we we we frankly drowning them out by the pure volume of what we're putting out because they were just too busy tweaking so it's more from experience and that's what's made the biggest difference and also I'd say it's just creative confidence that comes over time so just keep exec Che keep sticking with it and you're going to get more comfortable putting it out there drawing on your experience working with podcasts I would love to tell me what do you think sets apart you know those few podcasts that are very successful from the rest what are a few principles you notice that he worked with podcast and posts um what makes a really good podcast that's that's a great question so um Mike do you have something to say I got something to say um probably the biggest thing is consistency um 98% of podcast don't make it past episode like eight so being consistent on not only episode one but on episode 100 and I think also just talking about things that are controversial or like in the news updating things and and you can take any podcast in any type of directions but I would I would have as many social and media Clips as well um most all of our clients do their video podcasting and we cut it up for them as well just posting those on YouTube and on social so that's those are the few things I'd focus on for that than yes sir so you guys stories you guys have dealt with a lot of pressure throughout our lives both personal and with this business right I want to know how you guys deal with that pressure and heal you way to really motivate you to do your best with your work that's that's a great question and I'm I'm still currently trying to figure that out um I for a long time used to think that you know the the sacrifice you know and able to justify um all the sacrif sacrifices I was making by the potential end result and my life was very out of balance I gained weight I felt sick I wasn't spending time with my family and my wife I felt very disconnected from God and you know what I'm I'm currently in the middle of reconnecting and realigning with all those things what I can tell you is it's the incremental extra growth I was able to make in our business by spending the late hours or doing those things wasn't worth the sacrifice of my health um my relationships um with both my family and God so what I can tell you is I'm figuring that out still but what I can say is as I prioritize my health as I prioritize a little more structure being an entrepreneur and being a creative those are two very all consuming identity consuming uh roles that I play and as I made that my entire identity everything else suffer and so just remembering that there are things that are more important than work that you know being being a husband being a father being a child of God being somebody who's trying to be healthy and and growing has has been really instrumental and when I did do that I definitely suffered I'll just add one one quote that changed my life so if there's one thing you learned from M probably have't be this um but I've learned life's not about doing things perfectly it's about doing things intentionally and and I try to live like Jesus and Jesus's intentions are always to help someone else to support someone else and when those when you're focusing on that everything else just Falls Place well I can't say anything better than that so guys thank you so much for having us out allowing us to talk about our experiences appreciate you all thank you all for coming on your Thanksgiving week you guys are awesome um let's give another round of applause for Mitch and Mike one thing that would be really helpful for your LinkedIn is to so we're all going to come up B micro okay with it get a picture of all of us up here I encourage you to post it to LinkedIn tag Film LA but share something that you learned from what they taught today that kind of content will really help you br on the C Market so leave your backpacks laptops and things come up for a picture real quick and then you can go enjoy your Thanksgiving week he start sh show what is your name is that my line is that your line like awesome now do a fun pose guys like a cheering I [Music] hey