Strategy and Building Teams (ft. Tripwire Media)

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Intros0:02Welcome everyone back to Creatives Grab Coffee today we have Doug Darling from Tripwire Media they are a video production agency based in Winnipeg that has a strong focus on strategic storytelling Doug welcome to the show hey thanks for having me very excited to be here yeah it's it's great it's great to finally get this all on like we're supposed to do this a couple like a week or two ago but all of us ended up getting sick at one point or another yeah all it's all good we're not going anywhere yeah yeah so Doug why don't you just give us a little background on on who you are and uh who Tripwire Media is absolutely yeah so uh we are um yeah we're a video agency based in um in

0:42Winnipeg uh we have a team of about uh 14 people and uh we uh we do work uh kind of all over Canada uh primarily in kind of three areas which is uh live action um video scripted uh live action video unscripted like short documentaries and stuff like that and then animation uh and then all the things in between primarily uh mostly corporate commercial work um and uh yeah it's been going for about 13 almost 13 years now which is crazy um and uh has just been really exciting we've redefined ourselves a few times that we have a really kind of focus on kind of the storytelling and the psychology uh of you know why are we making things uh for our audience what do they need it

1:23For who is the goal what is the audience how do we move them to that goal that kind of stuff so it's been it's been a wild trip and uh we're always just continuously trying to redefine ourselves still um and uh and um yeah get past this pandemic and back onto the streets a little more let's let's dive a little into the strategic aspect sure what you guys do because this is something that's been coming up episode after episode everyone is a lot of video production companies are shifting from from more so just providing the video content to seeing how they can be more strategic about the videos they are creating so why don't you just give us a little

2:03Um like a little uh overview on how you guys implement that in your videos yeah i mean there's a few different uh ways that we utilize strategy i mean one is obviously the strategy of actually uh the structure of of of a video that we make so is there a an arc to it is there a hook and a conflict and a journey and a resolution and a jab those kinds of things so um when we're making something we want to make sure it has structure kind of like having a blueprint to a house you don't just go and build a house you want to make sure you understand what you're building before you go in there uh we were like a lot of companies before that who used to just kind of

2:42Show up and shoot or just make things the first idea or we would actually listen to the client them telling us what they wanted to have made which is sometimes kind of like you know like someone coming in and hiring lawyers and telling the lawyers what their legal defense should be um so what we started realizing is that um uh that we weren't doing our clients justice and actually listening and understanding the need and then and then bringing them something that was probably better suited or or better fitting for them not saying that we had to change your mind every time uh and then the the other

3:13Part of it is really that strategy of of where you know where is this um you know if it's one video let's say where is it going to be in part of the larger strategy and the larger funnel of the experience or the journey of a client uh or a viewer and so um we faced again like a lot of companies you know where we would have a client come and go like hey we need everything in the kitchen

Why strategy is important3:35Sink in this this has to serve every possible uh purpose have all the information yet be emotional and tell our story and it needs to talk to all of our audiences and for the longest time we were just like yeah okay sure sounds good and we found we were kind of either making things that were uh totally off uh off track they were not connecting with the their intended audience uh they were something that maybe the client was really happy with but again it wasn't really doing anything or we were making something that was just too big and that original idea had turned into something way bigger so if you don't have that strategy you don't have that infrastructure or that framework to have defined first before you lift a camera

4:15Before you animate a frame um then um you're really uh you're just kind of throwing caution into the wind and hoping to make something um and really you know arguably wasting their money and your time so we sorry and so we kind of really started defining that uh and really realizing when you have a proper strategy um that actually it it it helps creative be better rather than the other way around is actually not uh restrictive it actually uh helps you focus and then come up with better ideas and and then put all the noise aside so that you can actually do the job that you're supposed to do yeah it's so key to be thinking like that uh when working with your clients

4:56So actually how long did it roughly take for you guys to start thinking a little bit more strategically with your clients because it took Dario and i a little a little while before we started getting that kind of mindset and type of thinking yeah like you kind of have to um i mean there's some people who obviously do it quicker some people jump in right away knowing what they know uh maybe they were trained better than me uh i i always joke that i actually started Tripwire in the the like backass like or ass backward way possible which was not spending a ton of time in the industry uh and then starting a company that's what most people do right they they they work maybe anywhere from like two to ten years in the industry they go this is

5:36I'm gonna do it a little different this is how i'm gonna do it with all the knowledge and the training that i have that's that's pretty much how we did it we just got as soon as we finished university we just we're like okay let's start our company we did and then we were i feel like we've said this before it did feel like we were two freelancers just collaborating on projects but yeah i feel like we had the exact same well there you go yeah so you know that like uh it was just like you know when i tell actually teach a uh a media entrepreneurship uh course at uh at Red River College now in Winnipeg and i joke

6:08That uh it's just a whole bunch of cautionary tales of really not what to do but what not to do uh and so um as you kind of like you know when you start you're just doing something just like kind of any um any creative uh uh venture whether it's

How to start a creative venture6:23Painting or music or something is you really kind of just start with trying to do the things that you like that you think are cool that will help you learn uh things that are different uh but then you start realizing that um that you know it's obviously not about you it's about the client and actually it's not really about the client it's actually about their client or their viewer or their audience member which is a good distinction to make and that took a little while um so i would say like kind of the first couple of years we were just uh fumbling our way through kind of learning luckily there's a lot of need

6:54For you know um this uh uh this uh skill set uh we we started in 2009 when you know we had kind of a perfect storm of uh DSLRs uh becoming a big thing um Facebook and YouTube really taking a rise and the uh need for uh or the availability of bandwidth so you could actually start sharing larger files and that kind of stuff in hd turning around so uh we were able to screw around for a while without uh going completely out of business although we had one of those almost go out of business kind of arcs in our story as well but it was probably about 2012 and 13 where i really had this kind of moment it's kind of like having little uh corners to the

7:34Stairwell of your life of your career and i had hit a corner and went hey i feel like i've been editing the same video again and again we're going and we're interviewing you know the ceo and we're getting uh video of their their employees working and some establishing shots outside and we talk about how many employees they have and blah blah blah and we're all happy about it and then it goes they throw it online and not only does it not really connect but they don't do anything with it so we kind of got frustrated with that so we decided to redefine ourselves and the two big areas in around 2015 was storytelling storytelling training the art and science of storytelling so um i really dove headfirst into news storytelling

8:13And and uh started a relationship with Patrick Moreau and all those guys i ended up coaching and executive producing some stuff with them for a while uh and then the back end strategy of it even the process that we didn't have um being when we started growing to 10 11 12 it was a it was a house of cards built upside down like i just kept piling stuff on and it would be like every day like hey what what what what's the shoot we're going to like oh shoot yeah yeah you can't read my mind okay and there was no scheduling there was no input or output and depending on who was working on the project it would be different so you know we had to build our process um so that was really important and there's obviously the

8:52Production process and then the client experience process so that's been the last three years and that's really what i think is is keeping us going um and and adding that brand value that maybe some of the smaller companies can't necessarily tout um but of course there's there's pros and cons to both because i ramble a lot if you didn't know no no no hey i i mean there was so much here to unpack like yeah one was at that point where you said you almost went out of business like that i want to explore for sure but for sure going back to the ending part like you're right like systems are so key to being able to

9:26Scale and we've had other guests come on and say like you need to develop a system otherwise again you're just you're just joe schmoe working yeah gwc a guy with a camera right and like oh that's funny and uh and we actually i don't know about you guys like one of the most common questions we get by uh asked by our client usually on a first call or a second call is what is your process um and i mean you can easily

Communicating your process9:51Just go well we do uh you know pre-production and then production and post but when you can get a little deeper and really explain um you know what we would consider a unique process and walk them through that that instills confidence especially when we're trying to work with larger companies that need to know that stuff when you're working with other entrepreneurs or smaller organizations they don't really care they just go like i need a video your videos are beautiful can you make me one but when you've got a lot of people's not only money but also their role or their careers uh you know kind of riding

10:23On it they need extra confidence in that and while you're actually explaining that stuff you're also building a lot of trust um so we do a lot up front on clyde education and you know getting in front of the client and walking them through our process we actually um did a uh what is it um like we we basically sent out a survey to about 40 of our clients last year and asked what the priorities were what they care about the most and you would you would think obviously visuals and maybe price but those actually were way lower than um communication and process and experience those were the top ones yeah i feel like everybody always forgets about the client experience everybody's always so focused on how they on their processes for their video

A good process sets expectations11:05Content yeah that sometimes the way they deliver it to the client or the way they communicate with the client gets overlooked a little bit uh you know like not answering emails on time yeah or or or taking a little bit longer than expected and like you said when they ask you what your process is you can easily say pre-production production or post but you have to really dive in and explain every part of the process because no one knows what those words mean right well it's not that they don't know but you're not they don't know they they don't no they don't assume that they don't because why i have to assume they

11:39Don't yeah and you know you say things even like b-roll and they're like oh let's b-roll and you're like yeah of course why should you know necessarily what b-roll is like you should talk at the level that you would expect them to understand and and that's that's the other part actually that has saved our asses a lot more and really it's not only just the process that we have but it's the process that we expect them to follow so that we can meet their deadline so we have this saying that we go like we we move as fast as you do so when they go how long does it take i'm like well how long can you get feedback from because you'll destroy and you guys i'm sure we'll be used to this big big

12:12Rushes and then um you send out that first draft and they take three weeks to get back to you and so if you haven't set that process or those expectations or got them to agree at the beginning that hey uh for us to do our job you have to do yours and here are all the milestones uh and points of approval the goal for us is not necessarily that we always have to make that deadline the goal for us though is that if they fall behind in any way that they're the ones changing the deadline rather than us even having to go to them to change it for them um so yeah i mean that's just a a huge part of it and it's been

12:45Um really really helpful for us we're always you know we're always still kind of like tripping over it a little bit they're still it's very nuanced and it's creative and it's people you know you can't follow it to a tee as you would maybe in in something a little more um you know uh technical but uh so it needs to flex as well like if you're too rigid in it that's also a problem it's more like a guideline it's not it's not a rule uh i i was wondering so that's the expectations it sets the expectations essentially 100 if you the earlier you said it and the more you know we always like kind of just saying like you know once you if you assume something the word the moment we hear the word assume we're like like on our team we're like

13:24No no no no let's slow assume nothing that's actually going to be we're rebranding our values and that's when i want to be of the core values how detailed do you get in terms of explaining your process to the client because for us um lately we we've actually sat down and developed the whole like a to that type of process for for dealing with our clients because before yeah it was in our head but now we actually put it on paper and we detailed each of the steps that we go through like so for example for our sales process we have like like five or six steps right but like i'm wondering when you're explaining to your clients and you're setting their expectations like how detailed you get within those steps it's somewhat subjective uh to

14:12Understanding that client on that first kind of discovery call where you really try to find out what is important to them especially also what do they know so we actually built our process i i luckily my uh vp of uh creative operations worked at SAP building processes on top of already directing and you know uh and uh doping films for 30 years uh he's uh he's lived like 20 lives um but uh so we we have it like like pages upon pages of inputs and outputs we rarely show that if ever show that to a client but we can if we really want to just like kind of wow them going like this is all the work that goes on behind um so what we tend to do usually is we boil that down into either a

14:54Couple of infographics one can be like really the it's about what seven big steps from the uh the sales process or the the the you know what are we doing uh before they sign off which is actually really important to define especially in time we found out like in the last couple of years you know like so we say our general amount of time for turning around a video three months you know if we don't know much else we can do it quicker and often it takes longer but um we just kind of set that and uh and then people go great that's exactly the amount of time we need and then all of a sudden when we're ready to go we only have like we have we're already behind we couldn't figure it out we realized that from the point of a phone call to the point of a green light

15:35The average uh time of that is about four to five weeks and we went oh yeah that's that's a big part of the process that we were just

Show client milestones15:42Ignoring so i mean we we definitely will show client milestone we actually like to show where you where they have uh where a we need their input but b also like here are the levels of um of of feedback that we'll need and when you'll be notified especially so that by the time you get to you know that v1 edit or that you know like there shouldn't be any really big surprises we're really trying to make sure that they are approving all of the stuff in creative development uh rather than looking at it with uh you know their eyes actually or their their discerning eyes for the first time on a first cut second cut or getting you know the boss to look at it for the first time going oh this is all wrong or we're missing a part so um that's really helped so again

16:24Yeah like it we always usually go through it in a we go through it sometimes in a discovery call and definitely put it in our pitch deck and we insist on doing our pitches of a certain uh price or higher uh we we insist kind of on doing it um online uh to walk them through it so that we can kind of really explain ourselves and again kind of ad adds value adds personality adds trust those kinds of things so it kind of serves a few purposes but um yeah that's you know we we obviously don't show them the whole you know back end of it because that's just you know it's kind of like you know trying to sell someone a car and then showing them like the uh the the electronic makeup of

17:04The motherboard or something like that they don't care they just want to know it gets them from point a to b and it looks cool exactly does it work will it achieve it will it achieve my goals yeah and well yeah i mean that's one of the things right like i try to do it i'm still not as good at it but you also like you want to find

Involve clients in the creative process17:19The pain point obviously of the the people that they're the video needs to serve so that you have a good creative idea but you also want to try and figure out the pain point of the client to go like what is what is it that you're looking for are you looking for um the lowest price are you looking for having this off your plate completely so that you need someone who you who you can trust are you looking to look good are you looking to drive sales in that way so like you can kind of figure out what those pain points are so that you're coming forward so when they're really caring about the trust of i have to make sure that the ceo is happy with this then you know we

17:52Spend a little more time maybe with process than we do about talking about like investment or ROI potential if sales is a big part exactly and one thing you mentioned was that uh uh was about the the time it takes to to go from for example a lead to actually getting the green light to move forward with the project on average how how long do you do you see it taking like two three weeks roughly or yeah um so what we try to do is um i think you get to a certain point where the the the problem actually what used to be the thing you wanted the most becomes then the problem where you get too much that comes in or at least a lot of tire kickers a lot of uh bad fits uh

18:33Those kinds of things so we actually kind of really you know there's a lot of people and i don't i don't i don't criticize it at all because it saves a lot of time there's there's no there's not one way to do it but so you know they get on a 30 minute call and they go okay i have a general idea of what you want i'll send you a quote here you go it's a one pager or two page or something like that um we really uh believe in and this actually goes against some of the the Blair Enns training that i that i have done if you guys know Pricing Creativity which is a great resource um but um um we we have a

19:05Um a vetting call so it's usually getting on a call to assess really budget timeline and fit um we're always trying to get budget and i know that's a

Vetting leads saves everyone time, including theirs19:13Hard thing to do um but when they say we don't have one i start throwing out kind of some general numbers to see you know if they either go like yeah that's cool let's move forward with that um or if they do the thing where you know it's like when you go into a store and you see that five hundred dollar pair of pants and you're like cool cool cool and you kind of like walk around for a little bit you know try to save a face and then like back out um so we kind of we save ourselves a lot of time there because we actually our pitch document is quite a several levels of process to the point where we do a discovery we understand

19:45Again the goal the audience the need uh to to at least a high level point we then uh build either a service request if it's if we're not doing the creative or a creative brief if we are that goes to our writers who then build a treatment that goes then to either our animators or our uh head of center head of production to um to scope it that comes back to me we put it into a pitch we get onto a call i'll usually make adjustments and and change some things and blah blah blah so it's a bit of a process and it's unfortunately you know not the quickest turnaround which we used to be more nimble on but it allows us to handle a more uh volume but also spend more time to make sure we're coming to them with

20:24The right thing we often find like you know sometimes our advantage is we actually landed a large client when we said it was an RFP which we usually don't answer but this one was close to me and we said you don't have the right information in here so here's what we know here's what we don't know and here's what we can quote on in ranges but and i actually say and like if anyone is coming to you with a definitive number uh and a scope they're they're they're card ahead of the horse right now they're they they haven't done they haven't listened properly because you know so often the client says we need this this this this and this and and not to be a dick but you go like do you are you sure why and

20:58You get down and you just you just guide them through like what is the purpose what is the you know what is the what do you need them to do what do you need them to feel and then when you go like oh we need we need uh people to care about our culture oh okay well then is it hearing from the ceo as an example is that the best way to get culture across or telling a story of someone who loves their job or multiple people you know those kinds of things so we usually lead them through that process uh so that they can actually almost arrive at it themselves and we're building value at the same time by doing so um so we're not we're

21:30Not ever trying to you know you know throw shade on any other organization but we're just trying to show our value versus theirs and hopefully that's something that sticks with them if it comes down to price and price alone then it kind of works out that you know we're not the cheapest we're not the most expensive but we don't we're not we're not in it just for the money we're in it for the impact and if they care only about money then it's probably going to be a problem for us collectively down the road anyway so it's it's usually when we have those vetting points uh at the beginning it it saves us all a lot of time and grief we have a similar

Choosing the right leads22:03Our process is similar to yours yours is obviously a lot more detailed but we do the same thing with the intro call like as soon as we we get they fill out the form on our website and and and it gets to us we immediately give them a call and we just have a quick 15-minute call just to introduce get introduced and then again see like a high-level overview of what they want is it even doable for us and then if it is like do they have the money and we're pretty upfront we ask like look you selected this like i make sure i ask like you selected this option is this correct and then i if it works it's like okay that that works we can go to the next step because again the worst thing you can get is a time waster right so you got to figure out

22:45Right off the bat like do you have the money for this and it's not i think a lot of creatives are afraid to ask especially early on but you get to a point where you start to get enough of them enough leads that you go like i don't have time to waste like you either have the money or you don't like it's not just that it's not just that though it's it's it's kind of also what you said Doug that uh it's the value do you both also share the same values or are you both committed to this project a lot of the time it's not so much budgetary issues when i'm talking to a lead that i disagree with them or i feel like this is not worth

23:19Our time it's more so if they're really putting in the effort for this project or they want this project to succeed i can tell if they're actually feeling it budget is usually a good way to determine if it's a good monetary kind of how do you say attribute to determine if they're doing that but sometimes they may have the money they may have this but then you can tell that they're very demanding to the point where we demand you to give us this give us this give us this exactly like this and say oh you don't want to hear how we work necessarily then i think i think we can go our separate ways at this point yeah both are right and we're assessing for both right like because there have

23:57Been times where you know one big red flag of course is like listen you guys are the you know anytime they say you guys are the experts you come i don't really want to have any involvement in it blah blah blah and then of course they always do um or if you're right if they're really demanding or they're really rude or they're really over confident and going like this is what i need and blah blah and we can kind of go like yeah it's just not a good fit we've walked away from ones where it's just almost more personality-based that are like you're gonna be a problem or we have you know if i you know to be candid like we we add a peta tax right a pain in the ass like we're like all right if

24:30We're gonna do it we're at least gonna have to make it profitable and usually you we have we have thrown up some high numbers and then they're like yeah sounds good we're like oh all right you're stuck now yeah you called my bluff but um but but uh the i i'm gonna i'm a big analogy guy and like you know i think one way to you know for anyone who's listening who really has a tough time asking about budget because i'm it's so funny i'm i'm the sales guy here and i hate talking about money i'm in i'm should not be in this position but i

Finding out the budget25:00Have to be and uh and so i you know i say it's like you know when people go well we don't know what it costs at all and i'm like okay cool but it's kind of like asking me to build you a house you know what if i can show you a shack and i can show you a mansion but if you can be in a range of where you're at and uh and and you know what your expectation is then we can at least build something for that it's we always try to make it in their benefit rather than like how much you got um and then we'll tell you what it costs exactly that um so there's ways to kind of explain that we you know always try

25:31To explain it in the best interest because we can then bring something to you that will fit in and around your budget we can either bring you options or blah blah sometimes we'll also send ranges of work that we've done just again to kind of see if they're they're down with that um um but yeah i actually learned this from like uh ryan carl from Studio Sherpas but like he asked the question is like what's the best way to get the budget ask them their budget uh and when they don't you can actually either you start putting ranges for yourself or you're not comfortable with that start going okay well where is it like are you at 10

26:03Grand 20 grand 50 grand 100 and they'll usually stop you at some point like we definitely can't go over 50 grand you go okay so i'll probably be building things under there and then you can or if they go we definitely can't go over five and you go okay well just so you know most of our things start at x and so this is probably not going to be a good fit and then what we always try to do is introduce them to a freelancer or like a strategic partner who would be happy to do that work and do it at a smaller level um so with that we don't just kind of leave them high and dry but i think you've done it enough we've done we've done it enough there's nothing worse than spending a ton of time building

26:36This concept and putting together a pitch and here you go yay and they're like oh i'm sorry we only have a thousand bucks and i'm like yeah i really should have found that out first shouldn't have i and of course they couldn't tell me and of course they always have it whether they say they don't or not they know what they're working with to a general degree it's not that they're being devious but they also don't want to necessarily give it away because you know the trust isn't necessarily there yet so building that trust and explaining why you need to know the budget is is very helpful for us we we stopped to be honest we stopped having a lot of like we they don't know

27:09Their budget type of issues as soon as we because most of our leads are coming from Google right so they have to go to our website and they have to fill out our contact form right and before we had and we had uh um not sure as one of the options for the budget and that's when we started getting like such a big influx of leads which was great at first right because we were working on our SEO we're like yeah it's working we're getting all these leads but then like 99 of them were like oh yeah i have like a thousand bucks and we went we weren't finding out until like you said like after like a call or

27:42Two and then it got to a point where we were like okay we gotta set like if you're contacting us this is the minimum it starts at so they would know right away there right and that that was like the biggest vetting uh process we've ever had was just filtering them out right on the website themselves at that point yeah and from that point on like i i would say like nine out of ten leads that we have coming to us like they they already know their budget ranges and again like once we do have that intro call with them like you st you selected this it'll start at this but what's are you we always ask like are you flexible on it like because if there's more stuff involved can you

28:21Do you have it more money for that and usually they they've almost always said yes or they either say no like this is like our absolute limit for it and it's like okay we can either work within it or we can't even then when they say their absolute limit it often is not you find that it's not all the time yeah not all the time especially when they start adding things later it's like okay that's your limit with what you asked for originally but if you're adding things okay you're gonna have to increase that limit but uh yeah by adding that that filter it also actually gets a lot i know that this this is what happens it gets all

How asking about budget benefits the client28:54The the leads thinking about it right off the get-go it's like oh i oh maybe i do have to think about uh how much i can allocate before i reach out to anybody this i haven't been asked this question because a lot of the time sometimes people think to themselves this is what i need but they don't think that far ahead in terms of what type of budget should i allocate what is a good budget to allocate these guys are saying it's usually minimum this much maybe i should talk to them to see what that typically entails so it it kind of opens the conversation also to to help uh have like educate the client a little bit more about what they should be expecting not just from us but from anyone else don't just go for a company

29:36That is a yes company we will do it for whatever we'll we'll figure it out no problem we're not going to ask questions whatever you want we'll do it it's like let us ask you a few questions to start thinking about it a little bit more in depth that's that's the distinction of a good uh production part well that's why i hate RFPs especially the ones that are they don't allow you to talk to them and it's like well then great like you're just literally basing it on arbitrary information that has been stored uh without the whole picture but yeah so just quickly question like do you guys just have like uh is it i guess i could

30:07Look at it myself but like is it a multiple choice that doesn't go lower than like let's say 10 grand or something like that or is it so well for us it's like uh there's different pricing options so it's yeah there's a 75 to 10 option there's a 10 to 15 15 to 25 and the next one is 25 plus so we have like those options right off the bat it's like okay we're catering to uh we're not doing anything under 75 yeah no it doesn't make sense right yeah and they're all just the goob factor the get out of bed yeah exactly yeah you have a lot of these acronyms yeah the goob you know it's just acronyms and uh and uh analogies over here

30:46Acronyms and films that's how that's how it is that could be a production company yeah there you go um let's talk a bit about team your team yeah because you you have a you have a very big team and i know a lot of a lot of guests are curious as to like you know how do you grow a team and and what kind of systems did you have in

Growing and benefits of a big team31:08Place for that for it to be like you know manageable and sustainable because you don't want to grow your team too fast to the point where you know you can't pay any enough people you're going to start cutting back because then you know people took a chance on you and now you got to let them go so how did you go about your hiring process and just your your team building process yeah the the way that we grew is kind of uh it was it really was in a way of like when i started getting too busy i then started hiring people for the things that either i didn't want to do or the things i didn't think i was as good at so that it would then free me up to kind of again uh you know either you know at first it was just to edit more

31:46So i or had someone help me edit and i could direct more and have someone shoot um the other you start looking at like where are my expenses going on either freelance and that kind of stuff does it make sense to bring that in-house a little more um it is you know it's the best and worst obviously having a larger team i even know like a lot of the the big production companies in LA and Toronto full-time don't have more than 10 people um and because i think we we have such a a different we're such a range of content that we make um so we don't do just big commercial and we don't do just small content it's really good to have uh people who are there ready to take in

32:28Extra work and i think a lot of it actually came from me not being able to say no very well uh so it was you know i know a couple of other companies here in Winnipeg who you know the owner is still the dop or the director there's maybe three or four people in support and they just pick and choose uh the work that they do which is sometimes i really go like that's that's the sweet spot um but i just i really like you know the core of my essence i like to help people so i have a tough time saying no uh to to helping organizations and colleagues out and so i just kept adding more people um and then the burden of that of course is filling the overhead and filling the work and sometimes you have to say yes to work that i kind of say keeps the lights on but it also allows us to act

33:10Really really quickly um when you know we we try to get our clients to plan as quick as or as long as possible but there is just always going to be rush jobs there's always going to be things that are needed and the fact that i've got you know a team ready to go for the most part or at least that uh work is being done um and that they're able to help me find the team um is really helpful so it also kind of frees me up a little bit more i you know doing it over 10 years one of my goals was to take a little bit of a back seat i actually am not on set that much anymore i don't really edit that much anymore and as as much as i miss that to a certain degree i also have a young family i like having some free time and so i've kind of tried to build

33:51It in a way that um there's a little more balance versus the 14 15 16 hours that you were doing every day and the weekends that were gone and all that kind of stuff so um it kind of comes based on need uh i've only had to let people go uh from uh from a sales uh perspective once and that was the pandemic so um you know so far so good but we probably we're now really kind of going like anything to add on top of it i was i was trying to scale the 25 before the pandemic and realizing that you know in Winnipeg it's a pretty small market uh we have work outside of it but unlike say like the GTA where you can't find work in Toronto well you

34:30Can find it in you know 10 other cities around it um there's really there's it's a landlocked island in Winnipeg so we're kind of hitting a little bit of a uh a ceiling here and it's tougher to expand out uh being that there's just not as much business so we know that we we still hire you know we still hire quite a few freelancers um especially when we're crewing up when you know we don't have in-house grips and you know sound guys and stuff like that um but uh we want to kind of keep it to the core team that we know we need in-house that benefits us by having it in-house and then um knowing that we're able to

35:02Scale with work uh only on contracts and and and you know kind of uh day-to-day uh freelance so that's we're kind of we're kind of at this sweet spot have been for probably the last couple years and probably don't intend on really going much higher than that unless something huge changes or we get some sort of like two-year contract with a ton of content and it makes sense to hire another project manager or hire another editor or those kinds of things do you foresee yourself like optimizing your team structure going forward then like since you're already at the limit you see maybe like okay trimming the fat

35:32Off a little bit yeah i mean i always have to look at that um i actually just like literally the other day i'm like i gotta re-look at our structure and you know you're supposed to build your structure without anyone in mind that's really hard to do because you're dealing with lives i could easily build it in a way that maybe makes one or two people obsolete um but then you see the value that they bring as well um but you're right i do need to i built i have a very odd structure to be honest because i a lot of my training kind of came up in um in in agency work and i didn't have a lot of experience in uh production houses or anything like that so i actually went and visited Sandwich Video in LA and we compared our

36:16Our structures and he's like yeah yours is crazy and i'm like yeah it's a little weird we have a full accounts division most production companies don't have accounts they have you know producers uh who obviously are client liaisons and then they kind of you know run the team it's usually kind of like a two-prong we have a three-prong system which is um you know kind of divided into you know sales and accounts and client experience and then a director of operations who manages really the creative and the production so it's it's a little odd uh i could you know it works fine as is i might look at maybe

36:49Uh putting that together a little bit more or going a little more traditional um but we'll see and then we're looking at getting more into original work just to throw a wrench into everything so that'll be fun too uh i'm i'm okay so if you're uh for for companies that are just starting out or that are looking at

Building out your team37:07Developing their teams further how would you recommend that they go about it because you already have like like you said like a three-prong approach but let's say your company like like uh like like our company where it's carol and i that are running it and in the future we want to start adding like a team to it how would you recommend we go about it yeah i mean i i i don't have a business degree even though i did teach media entrepreneurship um the way i kind of look at it is what is you know what is holding you guys back from from from a enjoying the work that you do and b building and increasing the work so if if it's like well i hate i hate the sales side of it or i hate the client

37:47Side of it great get get a client relations person or or someone who can really drive business or a producer who's really good with people uh and then you're focused on the creative i myself kind of got more and more out of the creative as i tried to get better people i'm still the executive creative director but i wanted to find better shooters and better animators uh than me because i was just kind of a jack of all trades master of none um and uh and so i always just kept finding the stuff and then you know by the time we were about four i'm like wow i have to manage all this i have to there's kind of HR components financial components so i

38:19Then hired an office manager to kind of run that stuff for me and again it freed me up to do the stuff that i love um so

The hardest hire is the first hire38:26I don't think there's one any right way uh to do it i will say though the hardest hire is the first hire because it's the first time you're really committing to a very large expense and you're not sure if it's going to work or not you can always start someone on a three-month contract although you know when you hire someone full-time that you actually have legally three months to uh you know you can you can um uh let it go or or part ways within three months for no reason but there's there's ways to go about it we we did it incorrectly our first hire was like a guy uh who we hired him for 40 hours of freelance a week guaranteed uh

39:00That is technically illegal um but you know you can get away with it for a while we never got busted but you know you need to be paying into CPP and yeah and all that kind of jazz so yeah i always like it's it's it's a it might not be the the best but it feels like a simple approach is find the things you don't like doing find the things you want to spend more time doing and then find someone to supplement that uh and then see how that goes now i'm wondering oh sorry go ahead i was just gonna say now i'm wondering if we had a long project that was maybe say a full month and we hired the same freelancer for every single day would

39:33Would that technically be illegal then as well i think it's something like um you know if they work 30 hours a week you know for a certain amount of time um and i mean like obviously it's like you know there's you know you hire a dop for a film obviously well maybe they actually do get higher i don't know the the HR yeah the legal stuff behind it i always defer to to all the other people who who know way better but it also then comes down to you can also do it in a form of investment so it's like hey we want to do more of this type of work so we know that if we're going to you know if you set your goals and going like we want to build this amount of business we know that if we get that we're going to need

40:13A person to support whether it's a you know a a a videographer or it's an editor or whatever and you can kind of build it so they will come as an option as well i've done that successfully a couple of times we really wanted to do more animation we needed to be able to supplement it so we we really bolsta bolstered up our animation i've also hired and failed and being okay with failure is a big big part it's also again something i teach in the course it's just like be okay with it we try to do strategy for video as a service i hired a guy that uh you know was not cheap uh to build it and we didn't really make a dollar off it he worked on it for three quarters of a year it wasn't doing what it needed to

40:54Do there was a you know and so i just had to kind of i had to kind of chop it off and and and rebuild uh and re re group with myself and my team and go okay now what are we gonna do and being okay like hey yeah we lost money but that's part of it i actually have a massive drone hanging an effigy in our hallway it was one of the first ones in the city it's one of those big massive quadricopters that you had to be like a skilled rc pilot to fly and you know it was 30 thousand dollars after everything and uh and um and you know rather than kind of like you know trash it off a space style we kind of hang it up there to kind of remind ourselves that you can

41:28Get past failures and failures just part of it what let's look at let's look at work like how do you how

Developing workplace culture41:36Do you how are you um developing work culture like because you do want your employees to be like happy working at your company right so what do you do to kind of make them happy or make them literally uh work there yeah we literally actually just had a half day retreat where we sent everyone to an indoor beach facility to play a bunch of games um so that's a part of it culture is you know some people go like crazy on it and and then some people don't do anything and i think there's somewhere kind of in the middle especially as a small company um you know you need to uh make sure that um so uh sorry there's a handful of things that we do is a uh i do check-ins with

42:18Everyone every quarter whether they report to me or not um that's really you know there's value and just being able to have those candid conversations it doesn't mean i can you know i'll take the information then send it to whoever they're kind of direct report is um so that's really good we do a monday morning meeting um and a uh so that's where we kind of go through a few things maybe uh you know go over some sort of process or do a little bit of education and then we have a thursday afternoon wind down it used to be on fridays but then kind of with pandemic and and even summer and stuff like that it was tough to make everyone

42:51Kind of meet on the end of a friday um and so that's where we watch a video that we did and we actually kind of use it as a case study and we walk through it we kind of you know cathartically talk about the challenges we had the successes that we had and um i think it really puts everyone in a good head space aside from that you know just trying to have fun where we can um trying to keep things relatively light uh even our kind of our conversational tone uh for the brand is you know online to be really kind of friendly and not too professional um so i think that kind of helps and then of course we we become remote uh sorry uh uh hybrid um and we're finding the balance in the value of being able to work from home

43:30Sometimes in the value about being here to work with people to uh um collaborate uh you know to have those uh those creative meetings where you feed off of one another um that's really really valuable so we're trying to figure that out i actually had a a town hall like a week ago being that we are uh our lease is coming up on this place we have way too much space especially for now uh that we uh you know we're not here all the time and i'm like what do you guys want like you know what helps and um i found out that actually people do like coming downtown i thought if we found somewhere that was easier to commute to um might be better or you know they're like they see so much value about being in the exchange district which is kind of like this old

44:09Neighborhood with lots of restaurants and stuff that it made me reconsider what i'm gonna do um and so being able to listen to them and have those meetings while still being a leader and making the decisions not based on what they want uh has been really helpful so i'm always trying it's not easy it's tough to be happy and uh and energetic when you're not on the inside but that's part of leadership has remote working like changed

How remote work has affected team collaboration44:34The sorry has has remote working uh changed like the collaboration or creativity of your teams or have you found that it made no difference um i think that i mean one of the great things about uh about being remote is it does make things a little more intentional and so your time together is a little more intentional uh and that we're okay getting on a call no matter where everyone is especially when people were available kind of all the time so there was a more connectivity as well as like we had already gotten onto teams prior to this but then we really obviously started using it for communication uh and so we you know it really helps make sure that

45:16Everyone's on the same page versus you know what used to be more just conversations and things would happen without maybe being kind of written down people were missed uh decisions were made when not everyone was being considered so that's that's really been great you know you're we're pretty task based here so like and we're small enough to go like if someone's really the bed um or or you know screwing the pooch here a little bit um you'll notice right and uh and we don't even do really any uh crazy time tracking but like we you know they quote time we have deadlines all this kind of stuff um so i i think it's actually helped uh especially when we've got people who

45:55Like you know our writer who busses 45 minutes each way he can now do the same thing he does at home and that even being private and being able to be focused is really helpful one of the challenges prior as well is like when there's enough of us here people can walk in through your you know you can lose your day just have having kind of random casual meetings of people coming in hey can i talk to you about this blah blah so it's a lot more intentional when you're talking online and then the flip side though is again yeah being able like i hate creative meetings online um that like what oh did you oh sorry you yeah okay no your turn like it's really hard versus like when we're at a wipe or going yeah yeah yeah okay and what else like you're just you're talking over each other in a really good

46:34Way so um having that balance has been really helpful and the two days a week and three days optional uh has so far been really successful for us and we're hoping uh we're we're really not looking at changing that anytime soon have you um like because carol and i is just it's just us two right now and anytime we have conflicts we're able to settle them pretty quickly i'm just

Dealing with team conflicts46:59Wondering when you're dealing with a team as big as yours have you had to deal with any conflicts uh conflict resolutions like how did you go about those does that even happen at all or oh all the time man oh it's uh it you know i mean like uh all of us uh didn't get into this most of us didn't get into this to manage people uh it is it is tough um and i i don't want to slight anybody who's here but everyone has a need and when you have a lot of people like they're they're trying to you know build their own careers their own work all this kind of stuff there's going to be disagreements and then how is it

47:31Being handled um there are a lot more meetings that need to happen like with me and my vp we meet once a week for an hour to talk about any challenges we're having we need to make sure that we're also following the process we're not i'm not circumventing him he you know other people aren't circumventing other people uh and uh and now we're nipping it in the bud and that we're having you know some some good discussion so it is it is a big part of it like any organization or any you know of our size or any family for that matter uh there's going to be disagreements there's going to be problems um you know and the other part

48:02That really sucks about this is when the problem is too much you really have to let someone go i remember my dad said it was the worst part of his job when when he was working in the financial world and i was so scared to start a company or even add people because i i knew that one day i would have to you know let someone go and that just that that scared the crap out of me and it still is the worst thing to do um but when you do it it's usually better for all parties it's good for obviously your well-being because you're losing sleep over it it's better for them in the long run because obviously they're not happy or doing what needs to be done and it's good for your team because obviously

48:35They're most likely pulling uh uh the extra weight off this person who is who's not uh putting in their uh their full commitment so yeah it's uh it's it's it's it's nice to have i do have an office manager slash HR person who handles a lot of this stuff so again it's one of those like i don't like dealing with this that much i want to be kind of more on the the vision and the the building and working uh you hear the term working on the business rather than in the business um so i i have people to help with that and to help mediate that partially because i have a huge aversion to conflict which again is not a great uh uh trait for for a leader but

49:13Actually is a common one um so it's it's you know trying to head things on without letting them go for too long um but also uh you know making sure that you're not reactive and that you know i i just hear about like just terrible bosses or just people who just force their opinions and their ways through it and it's it's my way or the highway kind of so that doesn't work either that you're not gonna build any culture when they just feel like they're being told what to do and they're showing up and you know clocking in clocking out you have to go with the assumption of it being also like a collaborative approach

How to collaborate with your team properly49:44With the people you work with you can't you can't be the judge jury and executioner because why did you even bring them in in the first place you brought them in because they they have a skill uh and a mindset that you don't and they add value and always you have to remember that and obviously yeah you may have the final decision at times but if you got to make them feel that they're also collaborating with you even if it's just a freelancer that you're working with you brought them in because they're going to help you with this project so it's it's good to be yeah it's one of the hardest things i've had to learn because when you're at smaller like you know at the beginning like you are

50:18Calling all the shots and then you hire these people and for some people it's like in your mind you're just like no now you're just doing you're helping me facilitate what i need to have done but they're not going to find value in that and i you know often as we started growing like you know i'd say what do you guys think i think we should do blah blah blah and then you're like well great you just took the air out of the room uh by by basically putting your idea out there and they're like you want them to contradict that idea there's like uh Simon Sinek talks about leader speak last right um so um you know trying not to take over trying not to be

50:50The one who talks all the time and i talk a lot is has been a real exercise and letting you know even being like okay with things that i don't necessarily think is a great idea when it makes sense going like let's go with this let's try this giving them the the space and the breath to do that um the other thing by the way that really is we're really trying to build is um um we've learned about kind of there's like this uh a pie chart of of needs for employees especially millennials and one of them is really kind of extracurricular impact that they have and so we're trying to we're doing something called 12 months of giving where we do

51:22Something different that is involved and is measurable for a charity a different charity every month um and uh so that's been some really good team building um really kind of puts things in perspective for us as well when we're helping you know either people who um you know like Habitat for Humanity or people who need blood and like that kind of stuff and we're trying to come up with the even bigger uh charitable uh initiative that could we can really own ourselves but that's you know something that i'm hoping will really round out um the value because people people want to come to work now it's not like it used

51:53To be people want to come to work and know that they're making some sort of a difference and making some sort of an impact that there's some value it's not just that i show up to do my job and then i leave and then i i never think about it again people won't stick around for that so you have to be able to communicate vision um where are we going where are we headed and what are you know and so they know what they're working for so when you guys hire someone have a good idea of what they are actually contributing to if you share a vision story of beyond like yeah you're editing pixels and putting words together it's like no if you do this you're gonna help grow a company you're

52:25Gonna help people's lives be better uh like our clients you know depending on what the the goal of your clients is you're gonna help them reach that goal when they know that kind of stuff what they're working towards there's just they work harder they work better and and they care more and they show up uh with you know better attitude better energy um so i i often have to remind myself to you know a to have a good goal and good vision set out because i've been you know some guys have come to me before like you know we really don't know what we're working towards we know we're just showing up every day and making content i'm like yeah i haven't been

52:56Communicating the vision very well so i've been trying to really do that a lot more and it's weird because yeah again you're just in your head and like when you're a solopreneur you're just going forward and you know everyone get out of my way and then you need to actually now take a step back and let other people uh do stuff i think it was Richard Branson who like really says like you know uh you have to listen to everyone who works for you um because if you don't um you're you're screwed and there's a um a book called Scaling Up that you really your goal is to be the dumbest in the room not the smartest in the room uh and

53:28If you're the dumbest in the room you've really done your job because that means you've got people way better than you uh doing work that you couldn't do yourself

Recommended books & resources53:36Man okay for for all of our listeners why don't you recommend some books for us because you're very recommended like a couple it seems like you have a list and i'm definitely interested in reading a lot of the books you've been reading so um there are uh and i'll try and i'm not great at recall my memory sucks but actually you can probably see in the background there's a binder right there it's uh it's called Pricing Creativity by Blair Enns Blair Enns uh is a if you haven't heard of him uh he's actually from originally from Winnipeg but he he is a consultant for agencies um and he really uh teaches people how

54:13To have proper conversations about sales so if you're looking to have a better approach to sales um he is amazing he also has a podcast not to talk about other podcasts here oh that's fine called Two Bobs with david c baker and i have learned so much from those podcasts um checking out they don't have books but Muse Storytelling or um Studio Sherpas really great training solutions one's based on storytelling other ones a little more sales based and how to kind of run your small organization so there's some really great help there um if you guys know who Terry O'Reilly is um he has a uh he he has a uh a cbc show uh called um um

54:54Uh Under the Influence and uh he had he's written a couple of books i'm trying to remember it's not his most recent book but it's another book where i really got inspired a lot about the client experience and storytelling and all that kind of stuff so that's actually a book i hand to a lot of people when they start here um and yeah um i'm trying to think of yeah there's a lot of books that i've half read it's my adhd i'm like i'm like i kind of have a good idea with it um for anyone who's listening who has maybe like anywhere from like 8 to 12 people uh there's a great book called Rocket Fuel where you can really understand how you can be the visionary and then you need a

55:32Secondary person called an integrator who's really your operations person um yeah those are the ones that come to the top of my head i also read the Dave Grohl book recently which has nothing to do with this but it was a really great read so if if you want something um just really fun i i haven't finished the book in a long time i finished that on vacation the other day or the other week so that was great okay well we we have a long reading list hey carol long reading list indeed yeah uh i have heard of two two other books which is Start With Why which is Simon Sinek and i we use the golden circle all the time i don't haven't read the book but i've heard really good things and there's another one for uh solopreneurs and

56:12Start you know startups and stuff like that or smaller companies called Profit First um which i've heard quite a bit about um and it's been recommended by several colleagues which really talks about like how to manage your money and how to like you know when when a lot of us start we really just like we're just trying to make sure that we're not in debt but then you have to go like well what are you paying yourself and you're just taking money you know from whatever is available well no you should be kind of more treated like an employee and then there's a value to you you should be entitled to a certain amount of money for for doing what you do because i i would argue you can do it for

56:44Passionate reasons only for only so much time if you want to have a certain balance uh and quality of life and i'm not saying you have to be rolling in the dollars and stuff like that but it's good to understand that profit isn't a dirty word uh and if you profit you can do everything from actually maybe you know uh be a little more comfortable to reinvesting in your company to hiring more people you know there's there's uh you know getting more gear all that kind of stuff so um it's a good um you know financial illiteracy is a is a thing that i had to learn as someone who was basically in credit card debt when i started this company and knew nothing

57:16About money i had to really learn about you know everything from operations to you know like finance i'm not by no means a financial advisor i really still don't know most about it but at least i understand kind of how to look at a spreadsheet and understand that hey yeah okay here's where my costs are here's where i can save money and here's where my profit margins are so that's important stuff it helps at least to have that mindset yeah we started trading ourselves like employees i think starting last year we're like hey man like yeah we got to pay ourselves like a a consistent salary and everything and from we started we became financially literate i would say last year it's the right thing to do because

57:57Otherwise you you are just kind of living like you're going to treat like a business you got to be like a business owner so it's it's definitely good to think like that um sorry i was just i was just saying it i was just saying that it just helps change the mindset as well when you're working because if you're not getting if you're not also paying yourself and you're technically not making money the motivation sometimes can also waver at times and that is one thing yeah that's right it's a budgeted item rather than you're just trying to like hopefully we have some money left so i can pay my bills this next month it's like no i have i have a guaranteed amount and we have to budget along that we know how much business or how little business we need to take as a result we

58:36Need you have overhead you should have overhead exactly yeah so that's uh that's an important part okay Doug so we're just past the one hour mark this has been a very informative one i really enjoyed it yeah

Outro58:51But before we end off we always ask this to all the guests uh why don't you tell us where you came up with the name Tripwire Media oh it's not that sexy uh actually i had a business partner at the start he had started a uh an audio production company called Tripwire Productions and then he asked me to join and we started Tripwire Media Group uh being that a media group uh sounds like a bigger deal than two people and uh he just liked the sound the phonetic sound of Tripwire you know the hard t and the soft w uh it's uh you know it was it was just purely an aesthetic thing because i yeah it's kind of like it's a devious uh

59:30Thing like a trip wire in and obviously in like the jungle or something it's very good you got your client yeah yeah there's no uh you know even part of me when we rebranded uh in uh 2013 i'd consider changing the name and there's just enough brand awareness that it didn't make sense so it's like a band name right it just after a while at least for me doesn't really it just sticks have that meaning it's like you know like Pearl Jam or you know uh Stone Temple Pilots like it's just like i know i just dated myself there but um you know they just they they lose the meaning the literal meaning that they might mean um so yeah that's where

1:00:03It comes from so you had a business partner before like is he still around or no i bought him out in 2012 he decided to move on to some other things i have a business partner now kind of more of a a small minority shareholder who owns a agency and so we became strategic partners he's now become one of like kind of my best friends and best advisors but you know he's not working in the business so it's been really helpful to have advice to have someone to bounce off it and we both have the same you know goals in a certain way and he's actually a very different person uh in a business sense and that is also really helpful for me i've never wanted to run a company by myself like solely so i've always had someone involved at some point uh that has a kind of you

1:00:44Know a stake in the game so having you guys you know with each other is really helpful but you know business coaching or business advisors or something like that i've found very very helpful i'm always trying to learn and i always admit what i don't know i try to be as humble as possible and there's a lot of things that i don't know that's really interesting that's really interesting because we there's there's been a couple of quite a few guests that did have partners at the very beginning and they found out right at that point if it worked out or not and they usually bought the other person out so yes it's

1:01:15Pretty interesting you know yeah i mean it it it ended as well as it could but i mean i i tell people all the time if you're going into business with a partner don't just focus on the honeymoon part of it um go like go through the what could go wrong like basically the the equivalent of like a prenup where you just go um you know uh pros and cons what is you know what are and what are the things you want what are the things i want what i had found out with with david was he actually like within the first year tried to start another company and uh and that took a lot of his time and he's like well i've always i'm an entrepreneur i was gonna start other companies i'm like oh okay and that really caused a divide in where we

1:01:55Thought our priorities were i thought it was him and i going hard you know on this and he was already kind of um separating himself towards other things and no fault there to him it was just we never had that conversation we're just like hey we're gonna kick ass and uh take uh do lots of work and make money and we never had those more serious conversations of what if this happens what if this goes wrong and do we align uh the other thing i would also say too is usually is like you know make sure that you don't have someone who's exactly the same as you or has all the same abilities you it's good when you have someone who's really complimentary to you uh who does things better than you

1:02:27Or different than you or that you don't do at all i hope i didn't just call you guys out if you guys are exactly the same no no no no no we think we think the same but we yeah that's good our skill sets are are different yeah that's what i mean yeah yeah exactly so yeah i mean any any any possibility of me moving within any organization either you know sorry i'm making a strategic partnership or emerge or anything like that i will have that big long list of let's let's go through this what why is this good why is this bad what could go wrong so that we don't find out later on and most a lot of people don't do that and that's usually why they they they split it's it's no

1:03:06Different than a marriage um it really is and aside from there's way less sex usually um and uh and but like it you go through all the same kind of things and there's that honeymoon and then there's reality sinks in and uh if you weren't aligned you found out you were in a line you did this too quick or you did this uh too uh uh optimistically it could definitely come crashing on you and now you're legally bound to one another which makes it really hard to just split and then it can ours was a clean split thank god it could have gotten really bad though yeah i can only imagine like i mean luckily with joel and i we've been doing

1:03:39This since 2014 so if if you guys crash and burn we would have known by now you're over the hump if you're good now you're probably good for a while for sure probably okay well Doug thank you so much for coming on the show like thank you i really enjoyed this episode it was focusing on a different aspect of the video production business which was more so like the employee side pricing we haven't touched on those topics too much lately but i really enjoyed it like i want to bring you back on next time focus a little more on the strategy aspect of things i think happy to come back i'm an open book i usually sometimes do a fault

1:04:17Amazing okay all right thank you so much Doug thank you take care