Growing While Maintaining Quality (ft. Edit Crew)

Auto-generated and lightly edited for readability. It may contain small errors. For chapter deep-links into the video, use the Timestamps section above.

Dario Nouri00:01You know, it looks like your hat has like some light on it. You know? Like light spots.

Kyrill Lazarov00:07Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's the acid look on it.

Ben Poss00:13Yeah.

Dario Nouri00:15I'm not gonna lie, it doesn't look good.

Ben Poss00:18Ooh.

Kyrill Lazarov00:20This guy, he doesn't like hats for some reason. I don't get it.

Dario Nouri00:23it looks like it was an accident you know i mean

Ben Poss00:30Oh my god, I'm done. I've had to use this camera in so long, guys. I'm sorry.

Dario Nouri00:38You know, the fact that you changed it just goes to show.

Kyrill Lazarov00:41No, I'm just like, I don't want to hear about it later. That's why. Cause you're not gonna let it.

Dario Nouri00:46Just saying, just saying, like the fact that you did it goes to show. How much did you pay for that one? Oh my God, was it more than 30? 50 bucks, 50 bucks.

Kyrill Lazarov00:52Don't worry about it.

Kyrill Lazarov00:56Maybe.

Dario Nouri01:00More. 50 bucks.

Kyrill Lazarov01:01No, that was it. Yeah, that's what they are.

Dario Nouri01:05I think we could get those at the kids section at winners.

Kyrill Lazarov01:08Whatever you say. I would love to get that.

Dario Nouri01:10Do you have one with Trek? The guy from Mon- No, I'm saying do you have one? Oh, you don't have one yet. What about the- Do you have one that says donkey on it?

Ben Poss01:13Oh man…

Kyrill Lazarov01:15No. How much longer are you gonna keep this going? You know, like, it's weak, Dario, this is weak.

Dario Nouri01:21I'm just saying I see all the anima. I'm wondering, do you have the one with Donkey on it? Where was the cutoff?

Kyrill Lazarov01:28No, that one, the patch wasn't that nice.

Dario Nouri01:30Wasn't that nice? donkey was wearing it already.

Ben Poss01:35Alright guys, my camera is rolling now. Yes sir.

Kyrill Lazarov01:38You rolling? Sweet.

Dario Nouri01:45Ben luckily I got him to change the hat so this episode isn't gonna be you know known for like having one of the worst hats in history you know

Ben Poss01:54Major shade. Wow. Heh. Heh heh heh.

Dario Nouri01:56Ha ha.

Kyrill Lazarov01:57He's just a hater.

Dario Nouri02:01I got some fashion sense, that's all I'll say. Anyways, Kyrill, I'm just joking, get ahead like Jesus. Oh my God, you're looking so sour, now I feel guilty. Anyways, is that from Kyril's hat change? Welcome back to another episode. Today we got Ben from Edit Crew. Ben, welcome to the show.

Kyrill Lazarov02:08They're like, let's go, come on. Jesus, like, let's go already.

Ben Poss02:10Heheheheheheh… Heheheheheheh… Heheheheheheh… Heheheheheheh…

Ben Poss02:27Thanks for having me, it's an honor to be here.

Dario Nouri02:29Okay, so let's get the intros out of the way. Tell us your backstory, like who you are, tell us a little bit about your company and all that jazz.

Ben Poss02:37Yeah, so I guess I'll just start from the very beginning of how I sorta got into video. You know, as a kid, my parents got me one of those little soccer mom pocket cam recorders. I don't know if you remember those. But that's when I first started shooting video just with my friends and really fell in love with it. You know fast forward a few years studied film and journalism here at the University of Iowa And then at that time too, I was just freelancing a lot shooting weddings stuff for local businesses, etc. Just freelancing around as well as I worked at the in-house marketing agency at the University of Iowa it was like a student-led agency as a videographer and that job was great because I 40 hours a week and do minimal work, but watch a ton of YouTube and just learn a lot about all things video, because you can learn everything off YouTube, as you guys know.

Dario Nouri03:36Mm-hmm.

Ben Poss03:37After that, you know, graduated, moved out to Los Angeles, worked in production for a little bit out there, freelanced around just working on different sets, mainly as a PA, camera assistant, really whatever I could do. COVID hit, but before that too I was working at an agency where we did high performance Facebook ads. So imagine you see an ad for like a pair of sneakers and you click on it and buy it. We were the ones that were like writing, producing, shooting, editing those ads for brands. So I did that for a little while. quit that job, because the full-time office life was certainly not for me. And then I began freelancing again, and then decided after a few months that I wanted to start my own business and started Edit Crew. And we are a, we're called a productized service, meaning we sell packages, like a standard package of video editing hours on a monthly basis. So yeah, now we are a team, fast forward three years now, we're a team of 57. of our team is editors, but also we have a few project managers, creative producers, we call them people who are quality controlling the video, and a few operations staff as well.

Dario Nouri04:43Wow.

Dario Nouri04:54So tell us a little bit about the organization. Because in three years you went from, was it just yourself? Did you have any partners?

Kyrill Lazarov04:55Wow.

Ben Poss05:02Yeah, it was just me.

Dario Nouri05:04How do you grow from one person to like 57 people in three years?

Kyrill Lazarov05:05Wow.

Ben Poss05:10Oh, a lot of mental breakdowns and blood, sweat and tears. Yeah, I mean, it's really for us, it was, you know, at the beginning, it's sort of just figuring out what works. So I was able to hire a video editor fairly quickly. I did go into it with the mindset of. Well, I was just so miserable at the time, like working these freelance contract gigs, being at the whims of other people, you know, trying to find a job, stuff like that. It just really wasn't suited to my personality. And I remember I had some money in my checking account, which would last me about a year if I was super frugal. So I said, screw it. If I like lose all my money, uh, trying to start this business for a year, I have a year to make it work. I'm just going to live off savings. And, um, I had that mindset going into it. So I hired fairly quickly, knowing that, you know, I wasn't really trying to make money in that first year. And I think that actually helped me because I was just in growth mode for that whole time. Yeah, I don't know if that answered your question.

Dario Nouri06:16No, like, so tell us a little bit about like how you like, I'm curious to see like what the structure is for the organization. So there's you like, like, what do you do? Like, who do you have under you? Like, what do they do? Who do they have under them? Right?

Kyrill Lazarov06:23Yeah.

Ben Poss06:31Yeah, I can talk you through the org chart a little bit. So on the base layer, we have editors, of course, video editors, that's a majority of the company. Then above them, we have what we call creative producers or creative project managers. Those are our most senior editors. They were all editors at one point who got promoted to being a quality control layer, doing internal rounds of revisions with the editors before we send the product to client. And then above them,

Dario Nouri06:33Yeah.

Ben Poss07:00project managers, or maybe some people might call them account managers, who are doing all the client communication, making sure timelines are hit, connecting all the people together that need to be connected, that sort of thing. We also have a success manager, who is kind of like a senior account manager in a way. She's responsible for the higher level touch points with clients, checking in, conflict resolution, team accountability, stuff like that. an operations manager as well. He almost functions as well as like a chief of staff, just really being the glue between this organization and the ear on the ground of what's going on. Because really the biggest challenge is we've grown, especially past like 20, 25 people. You know, up to around that point, I knew everybody in the company at least somewhat, but then once you grow past that point, it's like I might talk to them once or twice and then never talk to them again. So it's hard to know what's really going on in your own company.

Dario Nouri08:00Yeah.

Ben Poss08:03Having him as somebody who's doing a lot of check-ins with people, you know, doing the performance reviews, figuring out what's going on, managing people conflicts is great because I'm personally so, so horrible at that. I'm like a pretty bad manager and accountability type person. We also have an assistant, an operations assistant as well, and then there's me.

Kyrill Lazarov08:29Wow, what a structure. It's amazing how, as Dario mentioned, how quickly you've grown to that point. Anyone in this creative field is always struggling. A lot of companies either struggle to figure out how they can kind of scale or grow their teams, even on a one person at a time kind of basis, whereas in the span of three years, you've got 57 people. So I guess on average, you basically hire 20 people per year at that point.

Dario Nouri08:54Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov08:56how did you determine the needs? Was work coming in that frequently that you needed a huge supply of editors right off the get-go? Or was it kind of like you hired editors and then were kind of like finding the work as you were kind of going and then like, how did you plan for it and how did that actually work out for you?

Ben Poss09:18Yeah, that's a great question. And the different stages of growth in our company have different answers to that question. So at the start, it was fairly easy to, I guess, meet bandwidth with demand because we weren't growing that fast. It was sort of like, oh, we might bring on one or two or perhaps three clients a month, and we can pretty easily myself hire for that myself. But then as we grew, you know, as we started to have an acquisition channel to bring on clients on a consistent basis. It was like, oh, now we have to sort of be very calculated about how we do this. You know, how much revenue. Adding X amount of revenue means we need to add X employees, X editors, X project managers, X this and that. Or this amount of clients of this package versus this package means we need to add this many editors. So that was a something we're always tweaking and it kind of is changing and evolving over time as we grow bigger because just the scale element kind of changes that calculation a little bit. But that's what's been great about having

Kyrill Lazarov10:16Mm-hmm. Ahem.

Ben Poss10:31operations manager on the team as well is he's kind of the spreadsheets, numbers, guru guy and he'll just whip out a big spreadsheet with a bunch of calculations and numbers and I'm like, oh, that's exactly what we needed but I would not have been able to make that because I'm the type of guy that just sort of flies by feel by the seat of my pants a little bit.

Dario Nouri10:53What was the inciting incident for you guys? What was the turning point where you guys were like, okay, we gotta start hiring more and really focus on building a specific structure, like a strong structure.

Ben Poss11:08Yeah, I think, I mean, it was always in the back of my mind as we were growing larger, but at a certain point, it came down to like, I personally couldn't manage all of the managers. I think that's when I had a moment of like, oh crap, like. We need to bring on systems, processes, sort of like that boring business stuff that I think a lot of founders and entrepreneurs don't get super jazzed about because it sounds really unsexy. But the reality is at a certain point, you have to have accountability and structure and reporting and management and stuff like that because that's just sort of how human organizations best unfold at scale. But yeah, I think there was a point where we were just like growing really well. Um, acquisition was working. We were getting a consistent stream of clients and I was just like, I cannot like keep trying to grow the business and also manage like 10 people at the same time. It was just way too much.

Dario Nouri12:11But was it the, was there like a certain point where like you guys started to grow exponentially or was it like just consistent steady growth?

Ben Poss12:21I think for the first around two years it was pretty steady consistent growth. But then in the past year maybe eight, seven months we've started to have a bit more exponential growth.

Dario Nouri12:37What do you think you know what might have caused that?

Kyrill Lazarov12:37Wow.

Ben Poss12:42Yeah, definitely finding just an acquisition channel that works. We started, because my background is in higher performance Facebook ad creative, at that job I mentioned earlier, I really know how to structure a Facebook ad video and make it so people actually wanted to click through. And so once we started running that and brought on an agency to run the ads and all of that, that's when things started to click a little bit better.

Dario Nouri12:51Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dario Nouri13:00Okay.

Dario Nouri13:08You're the second guest we've had on that's mentioned Facebook ads working really well for them.

Kyrill Lazarov13:12Yeah, we've been starting to look, we've been like starting to look into that a little bit more so, or at least like it's on the list of things for us to be doing ourselves, but it definitely sounds like it's becoming more of a need now in terms of like trying to generate new clients and leads. So did you start doing that from the very beginning or how did your kind of like Facebook advertising evolve based on also your growth?

Ben Poss13:39Yeah, so at the very beginning it was super scrappy. I was just like breaking LinkedIn's terms of service and like automated spam messaging, like hundreds of people a day. If you're listening to this podcast, you probably got a message from me at one point, just given the targeting metrics of LinkedIn. So, you know, don't look back at that if you wanna connect with me. But…

Dario Nouri13:49Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe

Kyrill Lazarov13:52Hahaha.

Dario Nouri13:57Heh. Heh heh heh heh.

Kyrill Lazarov14:00Ha ha!

Dario Nouri14:03Ha ha ha

Kyrill Lazarov14:04Did he reach out to us Dario? I don't remember maybe? Hehehehe

Dario Nouri14:06I wonder now.

Ben Poss14:10Please don't look, I'm gonna be embarrassed. But it worked just to get us off the ground. Only one out of 200 people has to be receptive to it for it to work in scale. It was a bit of a spray and pay approach, which only works to a certain point. We also started running cold email. So just again.

Kyrill Lazarov14:12Ha ha ha

Dario Nouri14:31Does that actually work? Cause I get a ton of those and like they just read horribly. Like every time I see it, I'm like, oh my God. And then it's like, how did they, how did they get past the spam filter? So I'm wondering, like you have good, uh, um, what's the term? Like, did they do that work for you or what?

Kyrill Lazarov14:46Cold Outreach.

Ben Poss14:49Yeah, so great question. I mean, there's definitely more wrong ways to do cold email than there is right ways, unethical ways and ethical ways. Some people might consider emailing you out of the blue, unethical no matter what, and if you decide to do cold email, get ready to receive a ton of really, really, really mean things sent back to you. Oh yeah, the meanest things.

Dario Nouri15:13Oh people actually reply back? I'm surprised. Hehehehe Hehehehe They must have time on their hands. Hehehehe I get like 20 a day so I don't know how they're answering all of them.

Kyrill Lazarov15:16What a wow.

Ben Poss15:18Oh my goodness, the meanest things ever. Right?

Kyrill Lazarov15:21Yeah.

Ben Poss15:26Right, I think the key though is really with the copy. Like a lot of these are like, we do SEO services, we're the best, hire us, but there's nothing, there's no unique value proposition. Whereas we were being very targeted towards specifically video production companies, speaking specifically to their problems, keeping it short and tight, saying, hey, does this interest you, do you wanna learn more? And surprisingly,

Dario Nouri15:33Oh my god.

Dario Nouri15:38Yeah.

Ben Poss15:51you know, a decent amount of people were receptive to it. And we actually received a lot of emails in those days of people being like, wow, I usually just throw these in spam, but you're spoke to me for whatever reason. And like, let's hop on a call. So if it really does speak to the audience specifically, it's hard to overlook it because it just resonates too much. So that was sort of this.

Dario Nouri15:56Interesting.

Dario Nouri16:02Nice.

Dario Nouri16:10What would you say is the if we had to break down in terms of what like the percent like In terms of like advertising and cold outreach like you do mostly Facebook ads or like is it like 50-50 that and the emails

Ben Poss16:27Yeah, so these days we actually don't run any more cold email. We just found it to be a slightly less effective channel than Facebook ads. I forgot to mention on the top part of the call, we also do have a part-time salesperson and a part-time recruiter now as well. But the salesperson is doing some cold LinkedIn outreach, but way more personalized, not spammy, that sort of stuff.

Dario Nouri16:36Mm-hmm.

Kyrill Lazarov16:49Right.

Ben Poss16:53But yeah, once we transitioned to Facebook ads, it just became a bit more predictable than the cold email was. So then we stuck with that.

Dario Nouri17:03Hmm, okay.

Kyrill Lazarov17:03Yeah, it's a matter of time versus reward, like the time spent to do it versus the potential reward. And I think the cold email outreach approach is something that might work more so in the very beginning when you're just starting out, because there really is, that's the, it's the low barrier to entry to try to get new leads in the beginning, right? To create a whole Facebook advertising campaign or anything like that takes a lot of thought, prep, production and post-production as well. to make sure you get it done exactly the way you need to. And then obviously then all the ad spend, you know, it takes a while for that to actually work out. And obviously the goal is to eventually kind of transition that. Like for example, Dario and I, we operated on a completely word of mouth model, which let's be honest, it didn't really work that much. Like we weren't getting that much work to the point where we could really survive off it over time. And we realized that when the pandemic hit was like, oh, this was not a sustainable model. So then that's when we kind of started focusing more on the SEO front and that has become more of a lucrative approach for us. And now we're trying to think about.

Dario Nouri18:05How's that been working for you? Oh, actually, I forgot to ask this too. What about LinkedIn? How's the SEO? And do you do also LinkedIn marketing?

Kyrill Lazarov18:07Yeah, how- Cough

Kyrill Lazarov18:13Yeah.

Ben Poss18:14Yeah, we don't. That's something… we really should do more of. We haven't really focused much on SEO because it's sort of like eating candy versus eating vegetables. Like SEO is the vegetables, but direct response, like advertising on Facebook, is candy. So it's almost like, well, we're eating candy and like we're getting customers, so why stop? But eventually you have to stop and eat your vegetables. So we will start SEO someday, but it's not something we've admittedly focused on.

Kyrill Lazarov18:36Yeah

Dario Nouri18:37Ha ha.

Kyrill Lazarov18:45So you're saying that they've been eating very healthy lately.

Dario Nouri18:46What about?

Ben Poss18:48Yes, you're looking very, very healthy and wholesome over there. And has that been mostly through the podcast for you guys? Or do you also put up blog posts? Like, what is your SEO strategy look like?

Dario Nouri18:53Try telling that to my stomach.

Kyrill Lazarov18:53Let's throw some candy in the mix.

Dario Nouri19:00We do, we do, we do, well, we started with the basics, which was restructuring our website. So we made sure everything was properly optimized for SEO. So like we had like each page, each page is specifically optimized for SEO. We do back linking throughout the pages and whatnot. And then we saw the most amount of growth actually through our blog. We didn't even put that much work into it. Podcast, not really. I mean, like for guests that come on, we do offer back linking for their guest post once it's finally published. But some of them have taken us up on it. And from that, we've seen some good, I don't even know what the term for it is, but it's boosted us up. And results is the word, yes.

Kyrill Lazarov19:49Results.

Dario Nouri19:53But yeah, mainly the blog though, I gotta say. And I noticed this because oftentimes we have leads coming in and I always ask them like how they found us and it's almost always Google search and ask them which keywords. And some of those search terms, I'm like, okay, that definitely must be related to a blog article I posted because otherwise like how else, because I also ask them like, where were we ranking? And they're like, oh, like usually first or third. I'm like, really? Okay, it's such a weird search term. Like how the hell did he even like find us?

Kyrill Lazarov19:56Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov20:08Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov20:16Yeah.

Ben Poss20:20Yeah, like video production companies that make stuffed animal product videos or really long-tailed stuff like that or… Oh.

Kyrill Lazarov20:21So blog articles.

Dario Nouri20:26No, it's always like that's a sentence. It's always like, you know, that's some weird thing. Like I can't even recall cause there's just so random. I haven't written down on an Excel file, but it's usually, I think the blog has worked for us really well, which is why we start to post more often on it starting last month. Like we're already three blogs in and GPT-4 has been really good for that. It saved us a ton of time in terms of writing the article, but you still got to like finesse it and whatnot. It's not, it's not perfect.

Kyrill Lazarov20:51Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov20:55just to get started on it. Yeah.

Dario Nouri20:56It's not perfect out the gate, but it does save you a ton of time because like I'll just ask you like, okay I'm trying to write a topic on this blah blah blah, and then it'll spit out something and I gotta fix it It's like, you know get rid of point number four. That's not relevant anymore Change it to this like I don't like how that paragraph is worded sometimes So I'll also like change it and but in terms of like, you know, sometimes If you're on WordPress, you need like a meta description and you need a description for it. So I just say like, hey, can you, based on this blog post, can you just give me like a quick, you know, 250 word description? I'll just spit that out quickly. So I've been able to shorten the amount of time it takes me to write a blog post from like, you know, two days down to like two hours. So that's, it's been really good for that. Yeah.

Ben Poss21:36That's amazing. One time we actually hired an agency, because I briefly was like, we're going to do SEO, guys. You know, one of my ideas that I just throw at the team, and they hate me for it. But.

Kyrill Lazarov21:47Hahaha

Ben Poss21:49We hired this agency out of Europe or somewhere to do it for like, I don't know, two or three hundred bucks writing this article and we got it back and it was total shit and I was like Oh, so I basically gave them chat GPT like a similar prompt and I was like, wow This is 80% as good and it was free and took 20 seconds So it's getting really kind of awesome. But like you said, it's never good straight out the gate It's really like the human touch at the end that makes chat GPT

Kyrill Lazarov21:52Ahem.

Dario Nouri22:06Yeah.

Ben Poss22:18So powerful, just streamlining that whole process.

Dario Nouri22:20Yeah, and I notice sometimes whatever you get out of it, oftentimes it doesn't have a character. For example, when I like to write stuff, I like to add a little bit of sarcasm here and there, and I'll shorten words to whatever, just to get the point across or whatever. It's got its own style versus GPT content is very, it doesn't have a style. It's just, yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov22:28Yeah.

Ben Poss22:29True.

Kyrill Lazarov22:42It's information, it's pure information, like, and that's been sourced from other parts of the internet.

Dario Nouri22:48You can make it, but Kyrill, you can say like, you know, write this more sarcastic or whatever, but it'll be like an it's not it's not fine tuned. It's like, yeah, it's it's it's like that that that thing from Interstellar was that that robot.

Kyrill Lazarov22:53But it's very over the top. It's very over the top.

Kyrill Lazarov23:02Oh, you're using the same thing I mentioned. Yeah, yeah, TARS. Yeah. Yeah, yeah

Dario Nouri23:03Tars. Oh, from the other day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Tars had character. Like this thing doesn't have character. You'd have to like finesse it a little too much with prompts in order to get it right. But at that point you might as well just fix it yourself. Right, and it's also a blog post. It's not meant to be like crazy long. Right now I have more time, I have more trouble just finding the right images and videos for the blog post than actually writing the content. Ha ha.

Ben Poss23:06Hahaha

Kyrill Lazarov23:10Yeah. Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov23:27Yeah.

Ben Poss23:27It's funny, I'm selling my car right now on Facebook Marketplace and I just was like, chat GPT, write me the most awesome description for the best car you can buy for under five grand because it really is. And I was like, okay, make it a little more funny. And like you said, it's really flat almost, but then sometimes it comes out at 200%, way too hot. Almost, it had something that was actually offensive written in there and I was like, whoa, chat GPT.

Dario Nouri23:49Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov23:55Yeah

Ben Poss23:58You can't go from giving the whole thing 10% funny to 200% funny in one line. So it's a little bit all over the place right now, but I think it'll get way better.

Dario Nouri24:07It's funny because I noticed that we're becoming very good at spotting AI generated content as well. Like I'm thinking of sometimes, like I go on Reddit a lot and some comments that I read I'm like, hmm, this sounds a little sus to me and I see people commenting on there too. It's like, are you a bot? Like, so even some emails I get from certain people I'm like, hmm, this sounds a little too, I don't know.

Kyrill Lazarov24:13Yeah.

Ben Poss24:21Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov24:25Yeah.

Ben Poss24:25Hehehehe

Kyrill Lazarov24:32You know, I'm wondering if those SEO companies that are like two, 300 bucks that people are hiring, they're probably now using chat GPT as their main source of writing it.

Dario Nouri24:39Oh, 100%. But you know what? But but you know, I was gonna I was gonna mention this for you like, you know, listeners, be very careful hiring companies to help you out with SEO, because oftentimes they could actually fuck you up very badly. In terms of yeah, and some like you, you'd have to really know, you you'd have to have a certain understanding of SEO to be able to vet them out as well.

Ben Poss24:40Oh they are. I've talked to some of them, yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov24:56very badly.

Dario Nouri25:06just to make sure, hey, these guys aren't trying to like jip me or anything like that. So I'd be very wary. Like try to understand a little bit yourself. And again, it's not difficult. It's just time consuming. But for you, you could probably hire someone in-house to work on that. And I mean, the amount of returns you'd get on it would be way worth their salary. Yeah, like if they're doing it properly, you're like, okay, this guy's worth it. Even if they are using GPT to write the articles, like there's still a lot more that goes into it.

Kyrill Lazarov25:2310 fold.

Ben Poss25:25Yeah.

Dario Nouri25:32So as long as they're taking care of that, like again, it works really like once you have your SEO figured out and you're on the front page for a lot of search terms, like it pays for itself very quickly. But yeah, if you get the wrong company, they could screw you over. And if you get, you know, blacklisted by Google, good luck, good luck to you.

Ben Poss25:43Yeah.

Ben Poss25:51Yeah, it's over for you. And that's something I've wanted to do in our company, probably next quarter.

Kyrill Lazarov25:51Yeah.

Ben Poss25:56Because the way we sort of run our cycles of projects and initiatives is via the book traction the EOS method. I don't know if you're familiar with that. But it's basically just a operating system for your business. So each team member has certain rocks or projects each quarter that they're working on. And you're only allowed to have I think it's like somewhere between two and four. And of course, me I'm always like, oh, we can do that and that and that and that. And I always think I can do it. only four of them and you know inevitably only three of them end up ever getting done so next next quarter it's SEO for sure.

Dario Nouri26:35Don't wait. I would, I would get it started right away. Cause like, it, it, it still takes a while for the results to come in. So it's like, I guess that's another thing I would tell you too. It's like don't expect overnight success unless you know, like God loves you or something.

Kyrill Lazarov26:35Well that's-

Kyrill Lazarov26:43Yeah.

Ben Poss26:46Right.

Kyrill Lazarov26:47Yeah

Ben Poss26:49Hahaha. God doesn't love me.

Kyrill Lazarov26:50That's the first filter actually for a lot of these SEO, that's actually the first filter for a lot of these SEO companies that are trying to sell you on it, is that they promise you fast returns within like, next day or within a week or two weeks or anything like that. That's already a red flag right there, don't hire them. If they say it's gonna take at least six months to a year, okay, they actually, they might know what they're talking about. Ha ha ha.

Dario Nouri27:11But yeah, and actually they'll know what they're talking about if they say, you know, it might take six months to a year, it might take 10 years. It's just too random, right? Because you could be doing everything right and still, right? The other thing I would say, too, is if they say, oh, we need extra budget to hire guests to do guest blogs or anything like that or purchase backlinks, that is a sign of bullshit right there. So.

Ben Poss27:11Right?

Ben Poss27:24Totally.

Kyrill Lazarov27:37Yeah, yeah.

Dario Nouri27:41You should probably just hire your own guy.

Ben Poss27:43Yeah, there's a lot of amateurs and fraudsters in the SEO agency space for sure.

Dario Nouri27:47Ton, ton. Yeah, I won't. Sarah, go ahead, Carol.

Kyrill Lazarov27:50I just wanna quickly touch in before we continue. Are we at the 30, I think we're at the 30 minute mark on your camera.

Ben Poss27:57Should we reset it?

Kyrill Lazarov27:58Yeah, just in case. Yeah. It's a good break in the topic right there. That's why.

Dario Nouri27:59Let's just do it quickly.

Ben Poss28:00Cool, brief intermission.

Dario Nouri28:04Yeah. Heh heh heh.

Ben Poss28:09We're good.

Dario Nouri28:13Okay, sweet. I want to go back to like the size of your business and how big you guys, you guys grew in the span of three years. I'm wondering like, what are some tips you would give to other business owners that are looking for that kind of like big expansion? Like, were some of the, like, I'm wondering, did you deal with any issues? Like, did you have any bumps on the road in terms of like growing the team so big?

Ben Poss28:39Yeah, so many. Nothing like horribly catastrophic, honestly, but a lot of bumps. I think when you're committed to growth like we have been. Sometimes it's harder to ensure quality. And that's really hard to say out loud because especially as creative people, the quality is the one thing that we live for. We live for that good shot. We live for that snappy edit, that thing that just looks good and delivers the value. But when you're committed to growth, we have been as well, sometimes you have to be willing to accept a small error rate in order to just keep moving fast because you don't want to have clients knocking and be like, ah, sorry, we can't take you on, which we have had to do at times. We've had to have a wait list of three, four, five weeks, which just kills me. But there is some level of quality we have to always uphold. But at the same time, when you're hiring, we've had months where we hired 10 people, maybe eight editors, and it's like, statistically, one or maybe two of them probably aren't gonna end up being the best, and we might have to let them go. tough balance to strike because we do have quality control procedures in place internally to make sure that the end product is at least at some baseline level of quality. But it is hard to ensure that quality at scale consistently, which we're always striving to do. And then there's of course the hard times of having to fire people. One time last summer actually we had a big drop off in business all of a sudden. I think our revenue dropped like 25 or 30 percent in about six weeks. We just had a ton of drop off for no reason, maybe because of all the recession scariness going on. And we did have to… Hmm.

Dario Nouri30:26Oh my god.

Kyrill Lazarov30:26Whoa.

Dario Nouri30:33Oh, six months, yeah, that was the interest rate. Hikes, no? Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov30:35Yep.

Ben Poss30:37Yeah, and we did have to let go of, I think, eight people at that time, which was really tough because we had never… It had always been kind of like positive, rah rah hoo ha, up to that point. And then all of a sudden it was like, boom, like reality check really quick. And I think it shocked the team. And, you know, when you do layoffs like that, or you have a big shakeup like that, there's some level of fear that gets injected into the organization. And the big question is like, how do you maintain the culture? How do you maintain stability?

Dario Nouri30:40Ahem.

Dario Nouri30:45Ahem.

Ben Poss31:08but still do what needs to be done as a business in situations like that and Luckily we were able to hire a few of them back like just four or five weeks later because you know things bounce back fairly quickly Which is kind of nuts, but you know obviously You know there's some sort of like whoa unshakiness that happens in situations like that that you have to learn to navigate

Dario Nouri31:31Were they contracted or were they salaried? Oh, they're full-time people.

Kyrill Lazarov31:35Like full time. That's what I was gonna ask next in terms of like your team. Is it like fully remote the way you operate or do you have like a base of operations where some people come in or like, especially like when you're working with, dealing with like workplace culture, like usually it's a lot easier with people internally, but everyone's like, a lot of editors work remotely. So I was curious how your business model works in that sense.

Ben Poss31:36They're full-time people.

Ben Poss32:01Yeah, we're a hundred percent distributed remote team. We're also very international. So our team is based across eight or nine countries, primarily across Latin America, a couple of staff in Europe, a couple here in the States. And…

Kyrill Lazarov32:10Wow.

Ben Poss32:17Yeah, it is, in terms of maintaining culture remotely, it is a different game than in person because you don't have as much of that water cooler conversation. So you have to foster other ways to have culture in the team. So it comes down to little things. There's one side of it which is the little things of like fun Slack channels with like memes and celebrating people's wins and life achievements and stuff like that so people feel seen. Because if people feel, don't feel seen,

Kyrill Lazarov32:42Nice.

Ben Poss32:47in a company but in life that's not a good thing of course. Also just fostering connection between the editors. I mean, like the most powerful asset of Edit Crew is the fact that we have like 40 some editors who do this all day every day and live and breathe this. So the knowledge transfer that happens between them, I'm always looking for like, how can we capture that? How can we build that into what we're doing? You know, how can we be on top of the trends and the softwares and what's happening? And just having such a large base of editors allows us to do that. So scheduling, you know, meetings where, you know, We can just have a few employees chit chat for a while about a certain topic, just so they get to know each other a little bit. So you have some familiar faces in the company, because for anyone that's joined a remote company, working remote, it can be a little bit intimidating to just show up day one and have like maybe one or two Zoom meetings, but then there's like a hundred people that you've never met and maybe won't meet that are just little profile icons that you're supposed to be working with. So fostering that face-to-face time helps to just get over that initial hump. as well.

Dario Nouri33:56You guys can also probably do like movie nights or game nights, something like that over Discord. That could probably help.

Ben Poss34:03Yeah, I think like, if I had to guess, I would say like 75% of our editors are gamers. So I think they sometimes like join in and game with each other and stuff like that, yeah.

Dario Nouri34:10Nice Warzone.

Kyrill Lazarov34:15That's cool. Should do company tournaments or something like that, you know, and then like, like, so like pick like one game that most editors are very familiar with, you know, make a tournament out of it with like a grand prize at the end or something like that, or like with some smaller prizes. And I think you guys can, and even like record it in some way, you guys can use that as marketing material as well in some form, like who knows?

Dario Nouri34:19Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben Poss34:20Oh…

Dario Nouri34:29Nice, yeah yeah. gift cards.

Dario Nouri34:37I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

Ben Poss34:38Oh, that's a great idea. I love that idea, actually. That's awesome. In the early days, we used to do some Kahoot-type games together when the team was much smaller. But yeah, those don't work as well now that we're at the size that we are.

Dario Nouri34:52Ha ha ha.

Kyrill Lazarov34:55I was also gonna ask, since you have editors all over the country, how do you typically go about finding the right talent or that kind of talent, and then vetting them out at that point?

Dario Nouri35:06finding and vetting.

Ben Poss35:08Yeah, great question. I mean, in terms of the process of how we find them, we're not doing anything too revolutionary outside of job boards and stuff like that. But in terms of the internal process, we have it super dialed now. We have a standard list of interview questions that we ask. Each question is meant to tease out, is this person good with that? Do they know how to this and that? Are they gonna be the type of good worker, good team member, good collaborator that can do this and that? And then when they come on, and of course they have to have good work samples and portfolio. When they come on, we do have a standardized onboarding process as well. So we have some of our more senior editors and creative project, just walk them through our entire process. We have a SOP, a standard operating procedure, called the how to be a kick-ass editor at Edit Crew guide. And it's like a 50 page document that goes over like everything you have to know, like with the back of your hand in order to be an editor at Edit Crew, not just from like quality perspective, but just the process that we have internally specifically. And then it's a matter of just getting them integrated

Dario Nouri36:08Oh my god.

Ben Poss36:23and following up with them, especially in that first month, month and a half. Really being careful to look at their videos. Are they doing a good job? Are they working well with the team? How are they communicating? So we have processes in place as well where more senior team members will be checking in with them on a bi-weekly or sorry, weekly or twice weekly basis for the first four to six weeks just to make sure they're really assimilating well. Not only that they're doing good work for the company, working here and because we want to make it a place where editors and people in general want to work. I would be like remiss if I knew that like I created a hostile work environment so we're always trying to find ways to just make that transition into the team easier and I think fostering that welcoming attitude and getting them connected with different faces in the company really helps with that.

Kyrill Lazarov36:55Mm-hmm.

Dario Nouri37:05Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov37:18That's really great how you're putting that much energy early on to really see how, not only that they're doing great work with the company, but that it's a good environment for them that just kind of meshes with everyone. Because I know a lot of companies do like three to six month like trial period, not trial periods, but like probation, probation periods. Yeah. Which it takes a long time to really kind of like figure those things out. But I guess you guys are focusing on seeing if you can do it in under two months.

Dario Nouri37:37Probation?

Kyrill Lazarov37:48to see if that's like a good fit for everyone. Is that correct? And usually you don't have to go beyond that.

Ben Poss37:54Yeah, I mean, really? Like in their contract, we have, of course, a disclaimer. It's like, hey, if you really suck with the next timeframe, well, part ways, no worries. But… Really the idea is like after a week, maybe two, you're hitting the ground running because also one of our main value props is one to two business day turnarounds on first draft, 24 hours on revisions. So there's not a lot of time to be like twiddling your thumbs, it's like, all right, man, we got these turnarounds and let's do it, you know? So you kind of, it can be a trial by fire in that way, but I think…

Kyrill Lazarov38:09Wow.

Dario Nouri38:15Yeah, they need to.

Dario Nouri38:27It makes sense because it makes total sense because you're hiring someone that essentially is a freelancer doing that role and you're basically saying, okay, now your salary doing the exact same thing. So they should be able to hit the ground running because they've already been doing that.

Kyrill Lazarov38:41And you set the expectations already. It's like, this is the job, this is what we do. They went through the hiring process, and once they hire, they know what's expected of them. They know what they signed on for. They can't be just like, oh, I'll get it to you next week or something. It's like, you know that this job is required for this. We don't want people who are gonna take one to two weeks or whatever that standard is for them. If you're coming on, you know that the expectation is we need to have two, three day turnarounds.

Dario Nouri38:55Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov39:09for these projects because that's the nature of the work. And if that doesn't work, then why did you apply essentially, right?

Dario Nouri39:15Yeah, I mean, imagine if you hire on a DP and you're like, I'll give you like six months to figure out if you can shoot good footage for us. It's like, no, you're a DP already. You should already know all this stuff. I shouldn't be teaching you.

Ben Poss39:25Yeah

Kyrill Lazarov39:28Yeah, or it's like you're hiring a DP for an interview and then he doesn't bring lights. And he's like, we're doing an interview. You should know what's needed for this. We need lighting. Hehehehe.

Dario Nouri39:35Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Ben Poss39:35Hehehehe

Ben Poss39:40Yeah, totally.

Kyrill Lazarov39:43What kind of made you go into like the post kind of direction for your business? Cause a lot of video companies when they jump into it, they wanna do, you know, like the whole shebang, the pre-production, the production and the post-production. What made, what was the kind of rationale or like the things that happened that made you think, you know what, I wanna focus on high volume, quick turnaround post-production and that's the niche I'm gonna focus on. Cause that's a very specific niche.

Dario Nouri39:54Yeah.

Dario Nouri40:11Mm-hmm.

Kyrill Lazarov40:11that you've decided to take on. Like what was your thought process behind that?

Ben Poss40:16Yeah, I'm really glad you asked that because this is one of my favorite topics to talk about, which is sort of the done for you agency. Well, it's a spectrum. Imagine a spectrum. On one end, you have the totally high touch done for you stuff, Nike Super Bowl ad commercial. big jobs with really high touch client service, stuff like that, which I think is probably more of what maybe a lot of the listeners of your show are doing very involved client work. And then on the other side, you have a productized services, it's called, which is what our business model is, where we offer a service, but you buy it as a product. We package up our service in two packages that you can say, hey, take it or leave it, basically.

Dario Nouri40:45Yeah.

Ben Poss41:06What kind of made me want to do this more is I was doing my old job that I mentioned, the agency job, we made Facebook ads, and also freelancing. I just really, man, sometimes I just don't like to be told what to do, to be honest. That's just my personality type. I don't like taking all these commands. I really like to have control of my own schedule during the day. That's the biggest thing for me, is just time freedom. And when you're doing a lot of high touch client services, it doesn't always allow for that. And I do see the appeal in that side of things because you get to have really cool creative collaboration, work on really cool jobs, do really high quality stuff. But for me in my life personally, I just wanted more time freedom, right? Like I wanted to be able to make money more on my terms and have the process be simple and not so high touch with the clients because while I do love our clients, they're great people. We work with a lot of very cool companies. Like I don't wanna talk with them on the phone every week. I just don't, that's not my happy place. So, you know, our model is more based around, well now we do talk on the phone with them here and there

Dario Nouri42:10Okay.

Dario Nouri42:14hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

Ben Poss42:16but I don't do it, right? Like… Ha ha ha!

Kyrill Lazarov42:17He loves you guys, okay? Like to all of Ben's clients, it's not that he doesn't like you, okay? Let's just put that disclaimer out there. Don't take it the wrong way. It's like distant cousins, right? It's like I like to see them like once in a while but not every day.

Ben Poss42:26I love you from a distance. Yeah you see me at Thanksgiving.

Dario Nouri42:36I get it, you need your social battery to recharge after a while. I'm the same.

Kyrill Lazarov42:39Exactly.

Ben Poss42:40And now we do, we used to be so low touch, like I was so allergic to even hopping on an onboarding call in the early days, which is like embarrassing to say now. But these days, our success manager, project managers, that's their job to like hop on the calls if there's problems. But the whole idea behind Edit Crew was like, like imagine you have to hire a freelancer.

Dario Nouri42:47Hahahaha, allergic.

Kyrill Lazarov42:51Thanks for watching!

Ben Poss43:04whether it be someone you've worked with before or never worked with. Like you're probably gonna have to email them or call them, hop on the call, okay how are you getting them the details, a very unstructured email, maybe you're using Frame.io to do reviews but maybe you're just typing notes in the body of an email or something. It's very loose and slow and like painful. And I'm somebody who like if something is not efficient, I'm like mad. It's one of my worst personality traits. Like if something is not efficient, I'm just like, oh, like it should be done that way

Kyrill Lazarov43:34Hahaha

Ben Poss43:34be done already and so with Edit Crew it was like okay how do we get away for people to submit a you know I sound like I'm like advertising but I promise I'm not trying to like how do you

Kyrill Lazarov43:45I was going to say he's selling us right now Dario, he's low-key selling us.

Dario Nouri43:45Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha.

Ben Poss43:50But the real question was, how do we get it? So you don't have to talk to a person. You can do five minutes of work, submit the ticket, and then just get a video back. And also, we don't have to talk to you because that slows the process down. And our real value prop is speed. So anything we can do to increase the speed of what we're doing is better. And so I love human beings. They're great. But talking long form in a conversation, every time you have to do a project, that's just not going to work if your main value proposition speed.

Kyrill Lazarov44:21Yeah, it all depends on the type of content that you're doing. And I think from what I saw on your website, a lot of the projects you're doing are very kind of like boilerplate, like standardized types of videos that a lot of people will need similar kind of things. Like, for example, the podcasting world is probably been a huge boom for you guys at this point where, you know, it's a typical thing. Several people just like this talking on camera, cut back between a few of them, you know. an intro, outro, things like that, and they need them done quickly so that they can start posting, you know, maybe little shorts and things like that. That might work, but like you said, it's not like the kind of like corporate video projects where there are very specific messages that need to be filmed with very specific B-roll. There's a lot of creative, a lot of sign-off, and a lot of input from a lot of people that needs to go into that. That's not the kind of market you guys are targeting, right? So it's more so very, or at least that's what I'm assuming. Like, I'm not sure, like, if you guys have been kind of like tackling some more, like,

Ben Poss45:19Um.

Kyrill Lazarov45:21creative type projects as well with this approach? Okay.

Ben Poss45:23Yeah, we do actually. And I think that's one thing that does differentiate us in the productized service space is like a lot of them are really focused on. like YouTubers, content creators, you know, sort of like solo video creator type people. And I think one thing we do well is we, or like, hey, we can actually like build a story for you. And while we're still not doing, like I said, the Nike commercial or like a feature film or something like that, the ability to craft a story, I think in whatever you do is just so, so vital. I mean, humans are storytellers. A story is obviously way more engaging to listen to than anything else. So that's something we try to bring to the table as well.

Kyrill Lazarov45:38Mm-hmm.

Kyrill Lazarov45:47Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov46:02Okay, that's cool. Because that's what I wanted to clarify.

Dario Nouri46:02I think that that it makes yeah, it makes sense, Carol, because he's got that whole team structure in place. I think these those other companies that focus on YouTuber content or podcasts, it's much simpler and you don't need that much involvement in it versus with his because he's got such a team structure. You can dive into more complicated storytelling, right?

Kyrill Lazarov46:09Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov46:25Yeah, at least like diving into it a bit more in that sense and then being able to adjust it as you go. That was the other thing I was curious about. It was like, how does it go in terms of like revision process if there are needs for that? Cause I doubt that you're never gonna get any requests for revisions on even on quick content. Like how does that process typically work for you guys?

Ben Poss46:47Yeah, it's pretty simple. We just send them a message with a Frame.io review link. As soon as they leave comments, we're notified and we start the revision process.

Kyrill Lazarov46:55Okay, okay

Dario Nouri46:56Do you guys have like a time limit on how many revisions can come in?

Ben Poss47:03We'll do each round in 24 hours or less, but there's no limit on the number. of rounds of revisions will do, which I mean, it doesn't matter to us. Like, of course we want to get it done as fast as possible. But if we have a client that like keeps changing their mind about stuff, it's no sweat off our back because we have that productized model where we're just selling a certain number of hours per week. So it's like, hey, if you want to do 100 rounds of revisions this week, we totally can. I mean, we're just selling blocks of hours. Essentially, we're not selling it like project per project, where if, you know, if it was a project basis

Dario Nouri47:09Oh no? Okay.

Kyrill Lazarov47:10Oh well.

Dario Nouri47:23Oh, right, right, right, right.

Kyrill Lazarov47:24Right.

Ben Poss47:37we're doing a hundred rounds of revisions, like each time we do a revision round, that's basically lowering our profit margin.

Dario Nouri47:44What are the hours that you offer them per week? There's two packages, right? On the website you have two, Pat.

Kyrill Lazarov47:44Yeah.

Ben Poss47:50Right, we do a 15 hours of editing per week package and a 40 hours per week one sold on a monthly basis. Yeah.

Dario Nouri47:57Okay. So it's like part-time and full-time then I guess if you want to break it down. Yeah. Okay. Interesting

Kyrill Lazarov47:58Okay.

Ben Poss48:01Right.

Kyrill Lazarov48:03Oh yeah, like the 40 hour one, you're basically assigning an editor to that account full-time almost in a way, right? Wow. So you're basically, in terms of trying to find client work, you have to have editors there of basically each handling almost an entire, it's like literally that personal editor is there for that client almost in a way kind of, right?

Dario Nouri48:07full time.

Ben Poss48:09Right? Yeah.

Dario Nouri48:25But here's the beauty of his process, Kyrill, because they're all following the exact same process, that 50 page document, he could easily also just swap them out too, right? If one of them becomes unavailable, they're all following the same method, so.

Kyrill Lazarov48:35Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov48:39That's interesting, yeah.

Ben Poss48:39Right, and that's part of the problem of hiring contractors on a freelance part-time basis. It's always like, hey, I'm not available for two weeks, and you're like, damn it, that deadline's like tomorrow. So that's part of the thing that's nice too. And it is tough to randomly like switch editors on a dime between clients, which we do have to do sometimes, of course, but.

Dario Nouri48:42They all got their different style. Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov48:45Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov48:49Oh yeah.

Dario Nouri48:50Yeah.

Ben Poss48:59having the processes internally and like the client documents and we have these things called client one sheets, which basically goes over all the stuff the client likes and doesn't like, their preferences, tendencies, et cetera. So that if we do have to do that, it's just a seamless transition or as seamless as it has to be or can be, as opposed to it being sort of like ad hoc scrambly.

Kyrill Lazarov49:19Wow.

Dario Nouri49:23I have a question. This is the thing I'm curious about. So like, let's say, can potential clients have like a more in-depth discussion of their workload? What you guys, like can someone get in touch with you and say, hey, I am so-and-so video production company. I'm estimating these projects for this month. Let's say it's like three promo videos. These are going to be the details for it based on a past project. Like, are you guys able to take this workload on at the 48 at the 40 hour pricing plan? Or like, because I'm wondering if like they have more workload than you guys can offer for that package, like what happens in that case?

Ben Poss50:06Yeah, we've had quite a few clients who will just sign up for multiple full-time editors. So we'll just scale their team up to like four or five, six full-time editors. For example, if they need to, you know, scale up or down, depending on the month or project that they have coming in.

Dario Nouri50:16I see. Okay.

Dario Nouri50:21Oh, so you guys can adjust on a month to month basis as well, right? Let's say one month, it's like, yeah, the light month, so I just need maybe the first package. And then next month, it's like, OK, I need the higher up package plus extra as well. So you guys can do custom plans then, right? Interesting. OK.

Kyrill Lazarov50:22Okay.

Ben Poss50:39Right, yeah. It's not as much custom as it is like stacking our existing packages on top of each other. And of course if a client comes to us and says, hey, we want five editors, we're gonna be a little bit more willing to do some of that higher touch client service with them because the stakes are higher for both them and us if they have, are bringing us a lot of business like that.

Dario Nouri50:47Right.

Kyrill Lazarov50:47Right?

Kyrill Lazarov50:58Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov51:02Yeah, it's good.

Dario Nouri51:02That's good then. It's basically like you guys are a post house that can also that has productized their services, but then can also still turn into a more personalized one for specific clients as well. So that's that's pretty interesting. That's an interesting concept.

Ben Poss51:15Right? Da-da.

Kyrill Lazarov51:18How often do you see that kind of happening or is it kind of like more so the one editor per client kind of model for you guys?

Ben Poss51:26It's mostly, most of our clients just sign up with one package. We do have a handful that have multiple or who sometimes jump between multiple and one, depending on their workload or the season or things like that.

Kyrill Lazarov51:37Mm-hmm. Oh yeah, because you could basically change it every month, right? It's not like you sign up, it's not like the, it's not like the stock footage sites where it's like you sign up for a year and this is what the plan is forever. It's like maybe one month you might need 40 hours a week, then another month you might need 15 hours a week, but then if there's another one where it's like, this is the work we need, oh, that's gonna be like 60 hours a week, then you guys will adjust for that. Yeah.

Dario Nouri51:41Yeah.

Dario Nouri51:45for the year, yeah.

Ben Poss51:49Right.

Dario Nouri51:57It makes sense for his because he's got labor involved, right? So versus those, they just have assets involved. So they don't.

Kyrill Lazarov52:01Yeah, yeah, this is this, it's a smart approach. I think that's, yeah, cause things change and different clients come in, like there's sometimes there's some turnover as well. You sign on like four clients, you maybe lose two or like they move on or something like that. And you have to have a flexible business model for that as well.

Dario Nouri52:10Yeah.

Dario Nouri52:22What do you find people choosing most of the time? The 15 hour package or the 48 hour package?

Ben Poss52:22Right.

Ben Poss52:28It's a pretty even split. It kind of oscillates back and forth, but for the most part it's an even split between them. Yeah.

Dario Nouri52:37interesting. I was gonna ask something. God damn it. What was it? Oh, AI tools. Has that been a are you worried about that? Going forward into the future? Like you think that's gonna affect your business a bit?

Kyrill Lazarov52:37Okay.

Ben Poss52:52I think it could. At this point in time, there's nothing so compelling that's like, AI is going to put us out of business. There are certainly AI tools that we're beginning to look at more closely to integrate into our existing workflow. Because like you said, Dario, earlier about the writing the blog posts, you know, AI can get you to a certain point, but the human touch has to be put on at the end. And I think that's what a lot of these editing tools that are out there right now are. I mean, there's not so many compelling video editing AI tools anyway.

Kyrill Lazarov53:08Right.

Ben Poss53:24There are a few that are good for like subtitling for example, and we'll integrate those into our process but in the short term, I'm not super worried about AI like putting us out of business or anything. I think it's always a Dance with technology of how can we continue to use it? maybe in five years our offer looks totally different because AI tools have gotten so good that we have to do something radically different to stay relevant but for the time being we're We're okay.

Kyrill Lazarov53:56There's actually one, I think Dario mentioned it at the beginning before we started the podcast, was Adobe Podcast, actually, which is essentially like one where you get it for the Adobe software and say you put like three podcasts, like our podcast on it, right? Three different angles to cut between and it automatically goes through it and chops it up based on who is talking. Yeah, AutoPod, this one's AutoPod, yeah, sorry. This one's AutoPod.

Dario Nouri54:16No, wasn't that… that was AutoPod, wasn't it? AutoPod.

Ben Poss54:21Oh, cool.

Kyrill Lazarov54:22So it chops up the footage based on who's talking. So it saves a lot of, maybe a few hours even, in time where you have to go through it. Maybe obviously you'll have to still watch it to make sure it's clean, but the act of cutting it, adjusting it, and then cleaning it up as you go might take a while, whereas if you could just do a quick watch through. So there's that. There's also the Adobe Pod, I think it was called, right?

Dario Nouri54:46No, that's for audio. But I think the key thing with those things is that they're tools that are just going to help speed up the work. Because it's like, OK, even for AutoPod, great. If you just shaved off a couple of hours off your workflow, then that just means that now you can take on more work. As soon as I saw that, that was the first thing I thought of. I'm like, OK, great. Now instead of waiting so long to get the deliverables,

Kyrill Lazarov54:48That's for the audio, yeah. They're tools. Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov55:04That's what I mean, like, if…

Dario Nouri55:12from our editor. Now we can get it back quicker, which means we can post more often, right?

Kyrill Lazarov55:17Yeah, it all depends on what the content is. That's why I was asking Ben if you'd know them because maybe they could be useful for you and your editors to save some more time so you can take on more work or even help service those clients a little bit better.

Ben Poss55:30Yeah, I hadn't heard of that. I'm honestly, after this, gonna probably tell someone to go look into that. Because, yeah, it sounds awesome.

Kyrill Lazarov55:37Yeah.

Dario Nouri55:37It works pretty well. It works pretty good, like surprisingly pretty well. But yeah, even with those other tools with the, like you're talking about like audio and whatnot, like subtitling, you could probably just get the API for OpenAI's whisper, I believe it's called, and it could probably just implement something. I mean, you have the backing to be able to do that for us. Like, I don't have the technical knowledge, so we're not touching that just yet.

Kyrill Lazarov56:03Yeah.

Ben Poss56:03Hmm. Yeah, I've always actually imagined like in the future, I've actually had this as a product idea, like imagine your like typical corporate video, interviews, stitched with B roll over top, that sort of thing. I think that's within the scope of what AI could do, honestly.

Dario Nouri56:06Uh…

Dario Nouri56:18Mm-hmm.

Ben Poss56:23which is so much of like, that would cover, that technology would cover so much of the existing like corporate video out there. I think it's totally possible. I think it's a long way off before it could get really good but I don't think it's outside of the realm of technology to think like, hey, this interview, put it into thematic buckets as such and then put those thematic buckets, you know, here, here and here with like the relevant B-roll. They're talking about a car, for example, it's a car commercial, put the shot of the engine there.

Kyrill Lazarov56:35Yeah.

Ben Poss56:53that stuff. I mean, I don't know anything about AI, but it sounds like it could be done.

Dario Nouri56:57You can kind of figure that out now because what you would have to do is just export the transcript. Oh, the, okay.

Kyrill Lazarov57:03Yeah, I was about to mention, I think he has to go in.

Ben Poss57:06Yeah

Kyrill Lazarov57:10Sweet, sweet. I was just going to mention it.

Dario Nouri57:10Okay, so I so so you can actually kind of do that now all you have to do is just export the transcript from the video. Let's say it's an interview video, right? Once you have like, I don't know, maybe the clean one or whatnot, you can export that or you can even get the raw transcript, put it put it through GPT and say, hey, I need you to create like a one minute promo video using excerpts from this interview. Right. And I could probably pick out stuff once you have it you. And then you could maybe even say include the timestamps. So you already have kind of the rough structure for the video. And then once you have the rough structure, you can say, hey, what are some B-roll images I can include for this video I'm creating? Here is the script. And maybe it could work like that. Yeah, we're using G.

Kyrill Lazarov57:37Yeah.

Ben Poss57:51Yeah. Are you guys using any AI tools in any of the projects you're doing lately?

Kyrill Lazarov57:52The only.

Kyrill Lazarov57:56Not at the moment.

Dario Nouri57:58Well, no, we're using it. We're using GPT-4 for a lot of the content, like the writing aspects and whatnot. But again, it still has to be, yeah, it helps clean it up. Like for example, like we have this manufacturing video we're shooting this week and basically I had the client kind of give me like bulleted points for the entire process that we're gonna be filming, right?

Kyrill Lazarov58:04Yeah, it helps clean it up. Yeah, it helps.

Dario Nouri58:20And then I fed the bulleted points through GPT. And I said, hey, oh, I told you, hey, I'm creating this video. I'm going to be sending you a bunch of stuff. I need you to help me create a script based on these bullet points, right? Because it's going to be a voiceover for this video. Video is going to be about this. You've got to give it the right prompts. I'm not going to go through all of them here, because I don't have them in front of me. But basically, then I would get the voiceover from the bulleted points. But I still needed to clean it up a little bit. It wasn't perfect. So it's not quite there yet, but it will be soon. But again, the only thing it did is that it helped speed up our process in terms of actually creating the script. And then the other cool thing is once you have the finished one, you could feed it back into it and say, what are your thoughts on this? How does it sound based on everything we've talked about so far? What do you think? So we are using it in that regard. We're using it in the blog creations. And then I guess that's it for now. Like,

Kyrill Lazarov58:56Get started, gets it started. Yeah.

Ben Poss58:58Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov59:08Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov59:16Yeah.

Dario Nouri59:16just technical, just stuff that just takes up a lot of our time, stuff like that. I'm not using it in emails, to be honest with you. I know some people are. For me, I've actually noticed that my emails, they're getting more casual, because I wanna make it seem like I'm actually answering them versus like, it's actually me, you could tell, because that's.

Ben Poss59:20Like the in-between stuff, yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov59:21Startup time, basically.

Kyrill Lazarov59:34It's actually Dario. In his joking sarcastic way.

Ben Poss59:36Just an excuse to not capitalize your sentences.

Dario Nouri59:40Yeah, yeah. And also, like, I think I've mentioned this before, but I am treating them more like text messages in a way, because I'm tired of this whole formality with it. I'm not putting best after the first one. You know it's me, like, we're chatting back and forth. I'm not writing you. This isn't… I'm in World War II sending you a… sending a letter… sending a letter to my loved one, you know, like… It's been months since I've seen you. And hi, it's a PS. PS, don't forget to close the door. Like, I don't know.

Kyrill Lazarov59:40Yeah, yeah. Ha ha.

Kyrill Lazarov59:45Yeah.

Ben Poss59:54I feel called out.

Ben Poss59:58Hehehehe

Kyrill Lazarov01:00:00Sincerely, in highest regards, Dario.

Ben Poss01:00:03Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov01:00:09Oh, like one thing I wanted to mention, if we do feed like the interviews transcripts through chat GPT, it may give you a good, like some good talking points and everything. The only thing that it won't be able to do is understand how it was delivered from the person who did the interview. You know, like did they say it in a good way or did they stumble a lot or did they do this? You know, like it may not know that, but it can at the very least give you a good, it's all starting points. This, yeah.

Dario Nouri01:00:37Well, you might, well, that's why you might have to, that's why like maybe feeding the raw one in could be good to give you a starting point. Like let's say you got a big interview, it was unscripted, right? And then you got to sort through it. You could say maybe just pick out the best parts from it and then you kind of go through it. You might even, you should probably put it in the, should probably put it in the prompt. Just keep in mind, I don't know if they grunted or whatever, or if that take wasn't good. So just highlight it multiple times, if it was said multiple times, even just slightly. It's all in the prompts.

Kyrill Lazarov01:00:46Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov01:00:52You still have to, yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov01:01:05Yeah, exactly.

Dario Nouri01:01:06Which means that like, even if you do end up using these tools, like you can't just, if you, if you're not someone that uses them often, you will still need the people that are using them often to use them because they're, they know how to use them properly. Like there's still prompts that you need to do and things you got to look out for.

Ben Poss01:01:23100%. Yeah.

Dario Nouri01:01:26Ben, I'm just curious, where are most of your clients based in? Because they're mostly video production companies, right? Those are your clients?

Ben Poss01:01:33Right. A majority here in North America, US and Canada.

Dario Nouri01:01:38Okay, a lot from Toronto or?

Ben Poss01:01:41A few, a few actually. I don't know if we currently do but in the past we've definitely had a few from Toronto

Dario Nouri01:01:42Oh really, okay.

Kyrill Lazarov01:01:47I saw he has Viva Media. They're an old, they're a past guest on the show.

Dario Nouri01:01:47okay interesting okay Viva was uh was past guest yeah yeah

Ben Poss01:01:50Yeah.

Ben Poss01:01:54Oh, no way. I don't think they're a client of ours anymore, but we did work with them for a little while. Yeah.

Dario Nouri01:01:59Matt what happened? You gotta say using Ben again. If he's listening to this. Yeah.

Kyrill Lazarov01:01:59Oh, okay.

Ben Poss01:02:02Hahaha!

Kyrill Lazarov01:02:06Hahaha Hahaha Yeah, we'll sign up the episode right after Hahaha

Dario Nouri01:02:12Okay, alright, well, I guess for those that have made it to this point, Ben, do you want to let them know where to go and how to get in touch with you?

Ben Poss01:02:23Sure, yeah, we're just at editcrew.com. If you're curious to know more about what we do, the website will direct you towards what to do if that's your thing. Otherwise, if you just wanna say hey or whatever, you can always shoot me an email. I'm ben at editcrew.com. Feel free to introduce yourself and say what's up.

Kyrill Lazarov01:02:43Nice. One last thing I also wanted to ask, like if there's any like important like business advice that you would like to put out there, like by all means, like go for it.

Ben Poss01:02:55Sure, I think… Specifically with a lot of video production companies because I've had the pleasure of talking to like hundreds of them on sales calls Throughout the past few years. I think a big hurdle I see with a lot of them is just Not making the time for growth like a lot of people say that it's in their plans to grow or I really want to grow and do this and that and You know, but but none of them are making time for it Like they don't actually have a process for growth So I would say if you want to grow definitely set aside to reach out for new business and things like that, because it has to be a built-in process of your business. If you're just relying on only word of mouth forever, then if you have a really robust referral base, that can work, but usually only at scale, or if you're a larger company. So I would say don't be afraid to really carve out the time for that, and outsource everything else, or get everything else off your plate. That's not growing the business, if that is your main goal. of people that's editing or maybe it's you want to hire someone who can shoot or be on set to produce or whatever so yeah that would be my my main thing

Dario Nouri01:04:09My mentor told me something really interesting this week or last week. He told me that your business is always at either one of two stages. It's either growing or it's dying. It's never in the middle.

Kyrill Lazarov01:04:09Love it.

Ben Poss01:04:21That is so true.

Kyrill Lazarov01:04:24Yeah, it's like a piece of advice that just clicks in. And I think the way you mentioned it, Ben, you have to schedule in growth. You have to schedule in the time to actually make the business work. Yeah, you can schedule time for the business, but what does that mean necessarily, right? It was like, which author was it that had this mantra where every single day he sits down and writes 50 pages, no matter what? Yeah, Stephen King, yeah.

Ben Poss01:04:25That is so true.

Dario Nouri01:04:50Stephen King.

Kyrill Lazarov01:04:52no matter what he sits down and writes 50 pages so that he's always progressing forward, no matter what it is, whereas there are other authors that just wait for inspiration. Or it's like, as a business owner, you have to schedule in the growth. You can't just wait for it to just happen. You have to put in the time.

Dario Nouri01:05:07Someone tell that to J.R.R. Martin.

Ben Poss01:05:07100%.

Kyrill Lazarov01:05:11That's where those two debate between that. There was a famous interview between the two and then George R.R. Martin was just like, I just need to ask you, how the hell do you write so many goddamn books? He was asking him that. And it was just a very funny conversation to see between the two authors. So if you ever never seen it, like check it out.

Dario Nouri01:05:15Yeah.

Dario Nouri01:05:19Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Ben Poss01:05:21Hahaha!

Dario Nouri01:05:29Yeah. All right. Well, Ben, thank you so much for coming on. This is very good episode. I liked it. I liked it. I like what you're doing. It's very interesting.

Kyrill Lazarov01:05:31Anyways.

Kyrill Lazarov01:05:37Yeah.

Ben Poss01:05:37Yeah, thank you guys. Thanks, I appreciate it.

Kyrill Lazarov01:05:40Yeah, definitely something that's needed for this industry. Someone there to help everyone in a way, right?

Dario Nouri01:05:48Yeah.

Ben Poss01:05:48Yeah, and I'm honored to have been asked on your podcast. This is my first ever podcast appearance, so I hope I didn't bomb too hard. Ha ha ha ha.

Dario Nouri01:05:53Hey nice. First of many. First of many.

Kyrill Lazarov01:05:54Oh wow.

Ben Poss01:05:58Yeah, I'll credit it all to you if I get on anymore.

Kyrill Lazarov01:05:59Yep.

Dario Nouri01:06:02amazing alright thanks man

Kyrill Lazarov01:06:04Thanks. All right. Take care, bud.

Ben Poss01:06:07Cool, bye guys, thanks.