The Unstuck Sessions Podcast
The Unstuck Sessions
"The Unstuck Sessions" is a podcast dedicated to helping listeners get their marketing unstuck. With a focus on actionable insights and real-world strategies, Bryon and Brandi delve into various marketing challenges and provide solutions to overcome them. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a business owner, or someone looking to enhance your marketing skills, this podcast offers valuable lessons to help you navigate the ever-evolving marketing world.
The Unstuck Sessions Podcast
From Educator to Entrepreneur: Les Howard's Unveiled Success Story in Design and Marketing
Ever wondered what it takes to make a successful transition from being a teacher to running a flourishing design and marketing business? You're about to find out. Les Howard, the dynamic personality behind Les's More Productions joins us to unravel his journey, the struggles and triumphs along the way, and the lessons he picked up as he navigated the intricacies of the web and logo design world.
We dive head-first into the role technology, particularly AI, plays in marketing and communication. Les shares his insights on using AI to rewrite content, busting the misconceptions around it and emphasizing the essential need for a human touch when employing AI technology. He also talks about his approach to managing a portfolio of businesses and the importance of cross-pollination with clients. Wondering how to price your services effectively and still remain competitive? Les bring years of experience to the table, discussing pricing strategies, negotiation, and asserting business terms.
The conversation doesn't stop there. We tackle the myths around overnight success, the importance of consistency in running creative businesses, and the power of trust building. Les also discusses how he navigates the murky waters of paying with exposure and how to make networking collaborations work for your business. Trust me, if you are a creative professional or a budding entrepreneur, this episode is a goldmine of practical, hands-on advice and tips that you don’t want to miss!
Check out Les's work: https://www.lesismorepro.com/
Join The Unstuck Sessions community on Skool: https://www.skool.com/the-unstuck-sessions-3638
Need help getting Unstuck? Visit our website and book a time to speak with us: https://www.isellwords.net/
The Unstuck Sesssion YT Playlist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrPb9tu_yXOq1oy82n1ZcO5GxY5gTIpiD&si=fkOkYnRsobMDYl9A
I Sell Words YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAdq_w1U481usxR-bPnvo8g
Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isellwords/
and
Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@isellwords?lang=en
Welcome back y'all. It's Brian with the Unstuck Sessions podcast. I think we're on episode four. Today's episode, I brought back one of our favorite guests, les, from Les's More Productions. We're going to get in and talking about his journey with marketing, a creative business, and that's what it is. So you're going to listen to us nerd out about marketing and computer stuff, and hopefully we have a good time with this one. So what I'll do is I'll roll the intro and then we'll be back.
Speaker 1:All right, so for those that don't know, my guest is Les. We've done a couple of other podcasts together, so I encourage you to go check them out with what's the Business and I think I did back when I was still doing Brian Sall's words which all of these are related, but they're still different. They're different genres. You're talking about different things here, and today's episode is going to be talking about the design business. Because here's the thing Marketers, people who do marketing services we have to figure out a marketing strategy too, and it's not easy for us. Sometimes it's actually harder for us because we know some of the back end stuff and so we might get too far into the weeds with a lot of the different marketing things. So it's not easy to market our services, and so I know Les has had his specific challenges with marketing things and we want to pick his brain and figure out OK, what did you do to overcome these things? So that's what we got, les. Yes, sir.
Speaker 1:Give a quick introduction and tell us what was your inspiration to start Les's More Productions.
Speaker 2:I am Les Howard. The company that I run is Les's More Productions LC, basically majoring in web design, logo design, print media design Just about anything you could design. I try to do it. I've been doing this. I've been doing some form of this since 2002. The business started officially in 2006. Ok, and so I've been going pretty steady since then.
Speaker 2:What really got me into the business? Out of college? I was actually a teacher and I did therefore about. I graduated from Justice State University in 99 and I went right into teaching. But teaching really wasn't the thing I wanted to do. It was more of a convenience and I just did it because I felt like I needed to go ahead and get a job and I was trying. I was a little nervous For some reason and I just said I need to try to make some money, I need to do this. So I got into teaching, but it wasn't really my thing. So doing the process of teaching I was also. I was in a seat, I was in this gospel singing group and they needed a website and since I had a degree in computer science, they said, yeah, you could be on the website. So I said, yeah, ok, and so I got.
Speaker 2:I had this big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, and I had this big book. I don't know if you are familiar with Dreamweaver Yep, it's this. Yeah, it's with this what I'm trying to say. The application was Macro Media Before they joined on with Adobe. It was Macro Media, so I learned it was this big big book and I learned how to use Dreamweaver, learn how to use some other little graphics programs, and I just that's how it got started with the whole deal designing websites, designing in general and I really caught a break because one of my good friends was he's even to this day he's still a gospel producer. He knew so many people. I did a website for him and that just opened the door and he was basically introducing me to the people he knew and that's the. I know I was getting calls from all over the country.
Speaker 1:That's what's up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's the. I can go into that more if you want me to, but that's the genesis, unless it's more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I want to take this and I want to use what you said to recap a couple of the previous episodes we had, because one episode is taking accountability and the way I see it is you realize that you wanted to do something independently, but you had to take accountability. I got to go do this teaching thing to make sure that the lights are kept on and there's food on the table.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Making that accountable decision, a failure to launch thing, where sometimes you get in there and you have this broad knowledge but you don't have an application of it. And so the computer science degree it doesn't always and you can correct me if I'm wrong it doesn't exactly teach you how to build websites. So there's a lot of other stuff that you have to learn on top of that, and one of the things is you had a good book knowledge of it, but now we're getting into the application piece and you still had a learning curve to go to journey through.
Speaker 2:Yes, definitely, because in computer science, in terms of being able to code, I was shocked doing that and so many different languages I could code in. But design in particular was just a particular niche that I really we touched on it In my years at Jackson State, but you got to remember this was in the 90s because I was still a new concept, if you see what I'm saying, and so it wasn't like a whole lot of just a whole lot of websites and you didn't have things out here Wix, weebly and Squarespace that didn't exist. If you were gonna build a website, you had to learn the code, you had to learn the web offering programs and all these things. So it was a bit of a learning curve for me, but the thing is, my mind was so geared and wired towards coding and programming it wasn't that hard for me to pick up, and so I'm glad I got in when I did. I really got in on the ground floor with this thing and so I can to this day.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I still pull on those old school methods in my development when I do websites and I can get in the code and actually if something's wrong, I actually look in the code and see what I can change and correct. Most people, if they don't have that type of experience and something really goes wrong, it's nothing they can do. You showed them the code. What does that mean? Just some gibberish, right?
Speaker 1:So yeah, that's how I felt when I was trying to learn, because I taught myself some really super basic Android app design. And at first it's gibberish, but then, as you read it, because my limit, the extent of what I knew about coding was, I took I had a year of C and C, plus Okay, and so that was the extent of my knowledge with that, and then I learned, read a little bit about algorithms and stuff like that and how to program stuff like that, but then jumping in and trying to build an Android app from scratch, and then I'm like, okay, I wanna try an iOS app, and that completely just because Swift was just like what? Just couldn't get it. But it's a learning thing and being able to interpret and read the code is a skill that you learn through patience. You learn it real quick.
Speaker 1:So the last episode I did was about ADHD and so I'm about to have an ADHD moment. We was talking about the chat before we came on air One plug-in I wanna put you on and I can't remember the name of it. But what you can do is you can put the plug-in in and tell it what you want it to do. You say I want this application or whatever I'm working on, to do X, y and Z and you plug it in and it'll spit out the code for you.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, I've actually played around with that and chatted on GPT.
Speaker 1:What's your experience with that?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm still trying to embrace it and at this point I'm just playing around with it to see what it can do. But it's dope, to be honest, because you say, hey, I want a basic website design with a slider. You can actually tell it what you want and then it generates the code, and I'm like it saves a ton of time, whereas you don't have to try to figure all this out on your own. You just tell it what you want and it generates the code, and then from there which goes back to what I was saying earlier you can take the code they give you and then you can manipulate it to what you need to be, and so that's a huge advantage. And so, in terms of just AI in general, I'm not the mindset of just embracing it. We're going to have to.
Speaker 2:I read this story about the admin of the newspaper and they were saying it was like people were even saying back then but the newspaper is going to stop us from communicating with each other and not really connecting like we should, and it's every new event of technology or something, you always have these fears coming in with these horror stories and I said, ok, so this is all of this, nothing's new out in the sun. So the AI thing you got a lot of detractors, some people are scared of it, but it's just a thing, in my opinion, that you have to embrace and then learn how to use it for your benefit, and so that's my overall take.
Speaker 1:To build on that. I know in marketing one of the things they were talking about people still misconstrue it, though, saying digital marketing really killed snail mail for marketing and stuff like that. And it's not. Snail mail was still generating more money than anything else in the market space. People discounted, but traditional mail is still outperforming a lot of digital marketing things because there's a stickiness to it, like even printed newsletters, because I do digital newsletters for my clients.
Speaker 1:Printed newsletters they have a staying power because you could put a word puzzle or some recipes or something that's going to force them to go back and refer to that piece of material and they're going to constantly keep seeing your name. You keep adding to the 7 to 12 touch points that people need before they make a decision about interacting with a new business. And just because the new thing exists doesn't mean the whole thing goes away. Just like I've said it before, just because you buy a new dog doesn't mean that you can just stop feeding and giving water to the whole dog. You got to make sure that. You got to make sure that there's enough resources to go around to both. But it is what it is and I think people read too far into it. I use chat GPT to rewrite stuff that I've written, and so there's a couple of plug-ins now that allow it to actually interface directly with the web, and so I'll go to some blog articles, like last week I went back to an old article I wrote in 2015 about why Batman sucks. I said, all right, so rewrite this podcast episode for a live stream and focus on these points and bring in some current stuff to talk about. And I let chat GPT run loose on it, and so I did the live stream using that format last week, and so it wasn't taking anybody else's content, it was utilizing my own, just organizing the thoughts to make them a little bit cleaner and more easy to communicate.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people misconstrue what AI can do. They see this stuff on mid-journey and all this AI artwork that's coming out and I know Facebook was a washed with that not too long ago where everybody is really diving into it, and the reality of it is, if you've ever played around with Adobe, firefly or anything, those generative, those AI generative where it creates the graphics for you, you get somebody with five arms and 27 fingers, two toes. You can't do too much, you can't really utilize that stuff and it's still learning and it's only as good as the input that you put into it and I think people are in this panic about what it's going to, what it means for their careers. People are still going to need artists. People are still going to need writers. The most I can see AI doing is turning active writers into editors. Does that make sense? Where they're editing, they're doing more copy editing than they are actually doing a ton of writing, or they write it, and then you use some AI to clean up the pros a little bit and then use some tools like Ramrelied or even more, sharpen the pros on it and make it concise From a writer standpoint.
Speaker 1:Some of the stuff that's written when you just give a chat GPT raw code like raw prompts it's verbose, it doesn't sound like a person wrote it, and so you still have to edit. It is what I'm saying. That was a long, long way to say it still requires human input. We ain't at Skynet yet. The terminators ain't coming yet. Give it a couple more. Give it maybe about four more years, maybe two if we get another Trump presidency. I'm just playing. I'm just playing.
Speaker 2:But you know what One thing I would say that every advance in technology is all about efficiency. Right, that's the name of the game when you think about it. Every single advancement, because otherwise we would still be on horse and buggy. It's always somebody thinking it's got to be an easier way to do this. Right, it's got to be a better way. And so eventually, the whole necessities, the mother of invention, somebody's going to come up with it, right, and that's what happens.
Speaker 1:Because if we went back and talked to our 80s like ourselves in the 80s right now just the concept of us doing a live stream recording to an offsite place with camera we live in a Star Trek right now, like we're in the Jets man. We got phones that look like little pocket screens and we're having video chat and stuff that is so in our minds back in the 80s that was so far set in the future that we didn't even know we would be around for it. And right now we're doing it. And so the churn of technology it feels slow because we're experiencing it, but this stuff is happening and the adoption is happening in a rapid phase. It's not a bad thing. But if we forget the stuff that works and pretend like it never worked, then that's we're losing recipes.
Speaker 1:The big thing in the video game right now is they're literally video games. We grew up with that. We can't play anywhere. They don't exist anymore because you know Nintendo owns the IP and if they don't release a digital copy of it you can't access it. I know people have illegal rhymes of it, but Nintendo hit some duty. Getting hit for 30 million for it Just running is a wrong thing, and so this told you about getting trouble for creating a fake console or something.
Speaker 1:He's an intuitive and inventive young man. But yeah, he got himself in trouble with that and there's always going to be room for those stuff, because if you still have your old Nintendo and those old games and they still work, you can play them whenever you want to and no problem. But if you don't, they gone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, actually I have this. I wish I had it in this room, but I just had this little digital Nintendo emulator thing. It has 600 games on it, some games they don't have. I don't have my type of punch out. That's the one I was looking for, but I just got it. I was at this old this place called Game Exchange. They have a lot of retro gaming things in there and I bought it. It's pretty neat, though. It has a lot of games on it, but, like you said, there are some games that are lost, some of the games I was looking for. It just wasn't on there, but still it's pretty neat. Plug it in and play.
Speaker 1:And see, now we all form the sidetrack. Here's what I'll say yeah, I'm kept. I do have Mike Tyson's punch out, or I don't know if it's Mike Tyson's punch out or the regular punch out, because I can't remember. I think it is regular punch out because you fight Mr Dream at the end. I have it on my, my son's, nintendo Switch. He has it.
Speaker 2:Oh OK.
Speaker 1:He'll come out to me. He's 12. He'll come out to me. Damn, I beat the second ball Bull. I guess the big challenge is making sure that we don't think that just because new technology exists, the old technology becomes irrelevant, and stuff like that and I think that's the mistake that a lot of people fall into is oh, this thing is old and so now it's old. Not a favor, now we can just move on, all right. So I'll ask you this when it comes to less is more productions, I'll see who is your target audience.
Speaker 2:Target audience really for the most part, is established businesses. Really, I would just say, in general, established entities, and what I mean by established is you. At this point, I want to deal with people who know what they're doing. They have a budget, they have a clear goal in mind, they know why they are pursuing me or someone like me to even do a project for them. When I first got started, I pretty much deal with anybody that had a couple of nipples and I need a logo for $50. I go ahead and do it because I needed the money. But at this point, I want to deal with people who are like to say they have a budget, they know what they're doing, they have a clear objective and so primarily mine. The type of people I deal with like a lot of churches and ministries, a lot of businesses, nonprofits, things of that nature, and I like to deal with people who are, at this point, kind of established in what they're doing.
Speaker 1:I see and I know that you have a cup, so it's, you got the web design and the logos and digital flyers and things along those lines. Do you view that as because it's going to get into a little bit more complex conversation here Do you view that as separate businesses under one banner, or are they all tied together for you?
Speaker 2:You said separate businesses under one banner Are you referring to? I'm trying to figure out how to answer that question because I know for I can elect all of my clients. Okay, go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 1:So what I mean by that is I'll talk about CM, I'll talk about Coach Mo Athletics, I'll talk about ISO words. So one of the things I came across and this is something I've listened, I've heard other people mention and I just really had time to sit down and think about it Every new service I provide requires different marketing. It requires a different kind of person. They may be a different place in their business journey and sometimes they cross pollinate, sometimes they don't, and so I've started viewing different services as separate businesses within what I provide, and it's also helped me narrow down stuff, limit it up that doesn't necessarily serve me or things I don't want to pursue, because I've realized every time I start a new venture within CMA or a new service within CMA or ISO words, I have to allocate time and resources and marketing dollars to push that thing.
Speaker 1:Okay, that makes sense yeah.
Speaker 2:I got you now.
Speaker 1:My frame of reference is a little bit different and I know I mentioned I probably threw out some Hormozie quotes, because he talks about that too, and he just talks about how he turned his vision into a business that acquires other businesses and manages a portfolio of businesses, as opposed to being the direct owner of all the different businesses he had that were in disparate fields. Like I said, when you look at it, do you view it like as all interrelated services? Do the clients frequently? Do your flyer clients or your website clients cross over to the logo side and do the logo side crossover into the flyers? Does it cross, pollinate or are these separate people?
Speaker 2:Gotcha, yeah, they definitely cross over. In fact, most of the percentage of my clients need just about every facet of my business. They will need web design, they will need the logo, but they need business cars, they need flyers, they need the whole gamut and so, in fact, for a lot of my clients, that is the selling point, because they don't want to deal with a whole lot of different people.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:They really deal with somebody, that's somewhat of a one stop shot, and so it's a lot easier for them. And so, from my perspective, of course I still do most of the work, but my thing is, I take it on, even if it's something that I don't have time to do. I still take it on because I know somebody, and I heard Chris Dose say something the one time when he said you sell what you can do, I sell what the world can do, and so that really helped me out in praying my thinking, and so what he meant by that was it doesn't matter what you ask me to do, I know somebody who can do it. It doesn't matter, I would just be the conduit, I would be the go between the measure that's done by measure, everybody gets paid, blah, blah, blah, but it will float through me, and so that's my approach now. And but to answer your question originally, yes, it cross pollinate definitely, and so for a lot of my clients, I do everything for them.
Speaker 1:One of the things I read and this kind of changed my view of how, because for a long time I struggled with I sell words, because initially it started out as me just being a copywriter, like just writing words itself for people. That's where the concept came from I sell words, I will write your man, I'll write your social media posts. I've even go, I've even ghost written books for people and I'll start out as just writing. And then early on, I got pushed back from a designer. I respected her and I still do. She's done a lot in terms of production. I think she was involved with the Broadway version of the Lion King and the some of the set production and stuff like that and some of the visual elements of that. And when I spoke with her, she's I don't know anybody that needs a copywriter. I don't even know any copywriters existed.
Speaker 1:And since, seeing that as a challenge, let me get first. I'm like, oh shit, I got to figure out something else to do. And so I was like all right, I know how to do video work and all the end. So I started adding on a bunch of other things in my bag and I kicked myself for it, because I'm like all the gurus and everything tell you you need to laser, focus on this one thing and get really good at this one thing. And this was really recently. I saw a quote and it's the full context of the quote. You heard the jack of all trades, master of none. Quote. The full context is jack of all trades, master of none, but still better than a master of one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so it stuck with me like, okay, it's not a bad thing that I know how to do all these different things and I may be able to address multiple issues just by being myself without having to go outside. And so go outside of what I offer I can. Yeah, you need this written, cool. If you need a video shot, yeah, I can do that too.
Speaker 2:And, if you don't mind, see, the other advantage is, particularly with what I do, is it allows me to create brand consistency. So if I create the logo, I have a certain style. If the client likes that style, let's say I create the logo and then they take the logo and give it to somebody else to put it on the flyer or something. It may not have the same feel, but if they come to me and they say, let us, I need a logo, I need two flyers under the website business card, okay, it's going to all be consistent because I have a style and I'm going to be able to design it across the board in a similar fashion. And so that's the other part that it's hard for me to say I'm just going to do one thing and in my opinion, really, what the things that I do? It's all. It's just, it's all related. Anyway, in my opinion it's just, it's so close.
Speaker 2:I don't see myself. I just don't see myself just sticking just to websites or just say I'm the logo guy. I do know people who do that, so all they do. I know guys who only do websites for particular types of business. That's just how niche they are. We only do websites and it's only going to be for nonprofits or only going to be for churches, and they do well with that and I think there's an advantage to that as well. But for me, my philosophy is more. I like that one-stop-shop deal, but that's me. I don't know if it's right or wrong but it works for you, it's right.
Speaker 1:And I went back and forth with it because I'm like, okay, I need to figure out one thing, one industry that I want to dominate and just completely own that industry. And my mind literally doesn't work like that, like my mind does not process things like that, because I instantly start seeing all the different angles and opportunities that are available and it's very, it's almost to the point where it prevents me from being productive, because I'm trying to force it me to think in the straight line and only focus on this one thing. My mind doesn't work like that. If I'm reading a book, I 'd normally have one book I'm reading when I'm listening to an audio book, and then that's contextual, so I might have another one I'm listening to at this time.
Speaker 1:Right now, my daughter and I, when I take her to school, there's this audio book we listen to Save the Cat Writes a Novel, and it's talking about novel writing for young adults. So it's a young. There's one to Save the Cat Writes a Novel, and then there's Save the Cat Writes, a Young Adult Novel. We listened to the first one last school year and this year we're listening to Writes, a Young Adult Novel, and so I will listen to that, but then I'll switch off to listen to the Alex Ramose book, or I'll switch off to listen to all these other, these other books, based on the context of where I'm at, and so just focusing on that one thing doesn't work, because my mind operates in different, is it? My mindset is different in different contexts, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I'm just saying wait, when I'm listening to someone speak, I have to do something else while they're speaking. If I'm literally listening to a speak, I am doing something, or I may be on my phone at the same time picking up everything they're saying, but if you say less, you have to sit there and don't do anything else that listen to them speak. That's gonna be a problem for me, because my mind is, you know, it's doing five different things at one time, and so I guess I'll come down to the different learning parameters and the way people receive information. But for me, I have to. I'm the same as you you have to have something else going on, and at the same time, I'm getting everything that you want me to get from. I'm not ignoring you, I got you.
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's one of those things for when you're in the creative space. Novelty is the thing that kind of creates that dopamine. You can need the novelty and just saying this is just ugh. You mean the same thing. I know people their dream is to go out and find a gig where they just go in and just put in the eight hours and go home and that's cool. I would never one thing about. I never push business ownership or entrepreneurship as a solution to people, because I know that it's not for a lot of people and a lot of people that think they want to be entrepreneurs Once they get into it and realize it ain't sweet, they don't have a taste for it, and so I wouldn't push that as a solution. But that's what makes them happy Having a job where you just do the same thing every single day and clock out and go home and every two weeks you have a nice huge check in your account Guarantee. Yeah, that's for them and that's great. I would encourage them to follow that every day of the week.
Speaker 1:For me it doesn't the sameness, and even the jobs I had before I worked group homes with kids that had major behavioral issues Every day was a different adventure. Walking in, you didn't know what you were coming into on a day-to-day basis and that suited my personality just fine. Then I went into case management and I loved the aspects of case management where I'm out there meeting families and in the streets even trying to figure out where my kid that ran away went, or going to the courthouse to try to keep this other kid from going to jail. That was entertaining for me. The stuff that sucked was the other stuff where I got to clock in, sit down, write this paperwork, do all this other stuff, and that was hard for me. And so I like jobs that even before I went independent I liked jobs where I didn't quite know what to expect on a day-to-day basis. That's what kept me engaged with it the moment it became.
Speaker 1:This is predictable, even when I was managing my own, like the two times I had when I was a residential director. That's still an adventure, because not only are you dealing with kid issues but you're dealing with staff acting like kid issues. And these two staff are fine. They ain't getting along. They beefing or whatever fighting over. They got the same boyfriend. They just found out and I thought they beefing with each other and stuff Like addressing those kind of issues was engaging and entertaining for me and that's what kept me in the game. But that, for creative brains, that novelty is the thing that gives you dopamine. For other people, consistency and knowing where their money's coming from and knowing it's not really based on how many clients they get this month it is the thing that gives them dopamine and peace, and I get it and that's why, like I said, I run entrepreneurship podcast. I have a service that teaches people how to launch their businesses and things along those lines. I don't push this entrepreneurship life on anybody because it ain't for everybody.
Speaker 2:Man, it's definitely not sweet. It turns out. If this is your passion, if you have a passion for a particular business or a thing, I would say, go for it. But I've never told people this is easy, and this is not me trying to pump myself up, I'm just saying it's not easy. And if you get joy and just clocking in, clocking out, man, by all means do that For me.
Speaker 2:I just I tried it, like I taught high school for seven years and it just wasn't for me. I just I had a good rapport with my students I think a lot of them as I learned how to do them, learn how to teach and really deal with kids. It was cool. And I have some, even now they're grown and all this stuff who still shout me out and talk about some of the things that I've taught them, really helped them in life and all that and that was great. But it just wasn't for me. You see what I'm saying, and so I'd rather because, for example, even being on this podcast right now, if I had a regular day job, I couldn't do it, at least during this time of the day. I probably couldn't do it Because I probably wouldn't be getting off work to five or six o'clock in the afternoon, and so, just being able to have the freedom to adjust my schedules, I need to do some of the things I want to do. I love it.
Speaker 1:And that's the trade-off Point. I'm looking at the camera now because I'm talking to the person that thinks they want to be entrepreneur because they saw a video on YouTube, and who's telling them that they can make $20,000 in this month by quitting a job and starting dropshipping stuff from China, or quitting a job and flipping stuff on Amazon. I've done both of those things. I had a job when I was doing that and once I got my hands into it, I'm like huh, it seems like it looks like fun and it's glamorous, but, man, you get tired of going into stores and finding stuff to buy and then scanning it and seeing if it'll sell on Amazon, and then taking it home and packing it up and shipping it out to Amazon and then waiting for it to sell. That's not fun, unless you absolutely love doing that and going to all the thrift stores and going to Ross finding them Jordans that shouldn't be on sale. Unless you absolutely love it, I wouldn't advise you to stop your 9 to 5. You can have it as a side hustle, of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Very few things where I would just say, oh, you need to get 100%, just give up your job and go chase this thing, because, again, this world ain't for everybody. So we're going to get into it. We're going to get into a little bit of that piece of it because we're going to talk about, we're going to do this and then we're going to take a quick break. So we want to talk about challenges that you've had with your marketing, with less is more productions, and first thing is dealing with competition, and I have a specific view on competition. But have you had to deal with competition in your space and people trying to undercut you and stuff like that?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's competition, man. That's a true, because, especially when our first guy started off is there's always somebody trying to undercut what you're doing. So, in terms of pricing, Right.
Speaker 2:And so I used to be involved in that race to the bottom situation where you know, it's almost like I became like a mini Walmart, except I didn't really have the capacity of a Walmart. That makes sense. That makes sense. Low prices yeah, I guess I could do it for 70. Yeah, I got a cousin. He said he could do it for 65. Ok, I could do it for 60. And you get into that situation. And I think I've said this to you before.
Speaker 2:But one thing that changed my mind when I heard Magic Johnson say that it takes him just as much work to make a million dollars as it does for him to make 100 million. It just doesn't matter. So when someone calls him, of course he's on that level someone calls him with a million dollar deal, he doesn't take the call. If you call Magic Johnson about a business deal, he's dealing in a nine figure. That's why, everything you see him, do you know he's buying the Washington Commanders or he's on that level. He's not on the level of.
Speaker 2:I just want. If he's going to buy, if he's going to get involved in a let's say he wanted to buy some Dunkin' Donuts, he's not going to buy two, right, he's going to buy 100. Everything he's doing, he's doing his eight, nine figure deals, and so that's from a relative standpoint. That's the level of that. That's the way I think now, but when I first got started it was the challenge was trying to deal with other people who were cheaper than me. Now here's, but here's the thing I realized too, and the one advantage I do have is that I do not sell a product, and what I mean is if I sell a Chevy and somebody else got the same Chevy, yeah, ok, you may have to seek a value on that price, it's the same exact car. I'm selling art. That's the way I look at it.
Speaker 2:And so I have a niche. My niche is the style in which I design everything that I do, and once I realized that, that kind of gave me a little out, a little niche, a little way of saying, ok, yeah, you could go with the cheaper guy, but let's actually compare the design. You need a flyer. He designed fly, look at his fly and I look at mine. And that's because of that subjectivity that gives me an advantage In some cases.
Speaker 2:Now, in some cases, the other guy may be better, ok, cool, but I like that game, I think, because I could work on my skill and get better and better. When it goes into the whole new ocean strategy, I'm not going to compete with everybody trying to go low prices. I'm going to set my price and then I'm going to get better at what I do. What I'm trying to do is be one of the dopest designers that you know. That's what I'm trying to do and that's where I am with. That's my whole philosophy at this point, and so that's how I'm able to really be honest, stay in business and keep doing what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:And I think it hits a couple of things. First, magic If you're watching this, you will also have a couple of them stray million dollar deals.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:At me and Les, we'll take it.
Speaker 2:We will take it.
Speaker 1:Contact information down here. Toss us some of these million dollar deals, bro. We want them and we will give you. I will shut everything else down just to work on that million dollar deal a couple of weeks or a couple of months, however long it takes. But the other thing is that what you're mentioning goes into the concept of pricing strategy and we're having this conversation online Because me and Les just don't. We is not just the podcast that we speak, we interact in other places and there's a video clip.
Speaker 1:I posted a meat meal at a shoe convention or whatnot, and so he's sitting there talking to a dude and he's sitting there talking to the dude who had the shoes. And dude had shoes like hey, the shoe's going to cost you $500. And meat made a production out of it. He had his people coordinate in the whole nine and he thought he's giving a lesson to this dude. And no shade to me If you watching. No shade to me, hope you watching, got our fingers crossed. But basically the concept was he's like I'm giving you game If you take some, if you knock $100 off these shoes, then I can do a commercial for you, and then I give you and then you can not only have the commercial and the endorsement, but then you have the sale too and dudes now just giving my $500 and I'll be good, and the concept was my take on. It was dude's already in a viral video of meat meal and he still got paid full price for them shoes. If he got on camera given a discount to the shoes, that sends the message that those shoes aren't worth what he's charging for them and he'll have everybody and their mom lining up to get the meat meal discount and you'll never be able to charge full freight for them shoes.
Speaker 1:What happens when you get into the negotiations on prices with people and or you lead with the discount and as a discount you don't necessarily you don't want to make, you feel like you have to make. You're saying this service isn't worth what I'm charging for. And sometimes if you price even if you give people top flight services, but they feel like they're underpaid for them there's a psychological thing where they're like they'll start picking into part and start finding problems with the discount service, whereas if they would have paid 10 times what they paid or five or 10 times what they paid for that service. There's a other psychological element where they will optimize the situation in their mind and say, no, this is exactly what I asked for. And they're rationalizing because of how much they paid for it. And so the price thing is a subtle signal about the value of what you're offering Either be the cheapest price or be the most expensive. You don't want to be third cheapest option. And so when you give that discount and this is for my fledgling business owners who didn't take my advice earlier and keep their day jobs if you out here and trying to figure out how to set your price, you want to be reassuringly expensive for what you do and I stole that from Ty Turner from Flashfield Academy. But they're reassuringly expensive because if they pay enough, they see the value in it and they don't have much to pick apart.
Speaker 1:If they feel like they got your services on discount, there's always something wrong with it. How many times have you had a flawless meal from McDonald's in your mind? Now, if you would have paid, if you got that same McDonald's meal at a high-end restaurant and paid five, 10 times what you paid at McDonald's, that little quarter pounder was not that meal. Last time I checked the meals is expensive now, so that little quarter pounder meal that you got. That started out as $8, $9 is now $90. You would have optimized it and said, man, the fries were amazing, and you know what I'm saying. You would have optimized because you had to rationalize how much you spent on that thing.
Speaker 1:So the wisdom we put in there is stand firm on your pricing. And you want people to say, man, that's expensive, yeah, it is, because that's giving you high-quality work. But if you're like, oh, it is, man, let me see how much I can knock it down Now they're going to start questioning the quality of work that you're putting in. The only people that I've seen that actually appreciate when somebody does something for free or barters for something, is somebody that's. I'm not going to say the only person, because there's plenty of people do it, but business owners have a taste for that, where you're like, ok, we're bartering for services, or you see the value in the discount and you're getting a lot of value out of the thing you didn't pay a lot for. Most people ain't wired like that. Let's keep it up.
Speaker 2:All right, go ahead. If I could say one more thing about that too and my take on it the reason I pushed back when people tried to lower my price. I don't like what other people try to dictate my pricing and really I have a thing about people trying to tell me what to do. Maybe, maybe that's just a thing. But my thing is this because they have been times where I'm in a situation I say you know what, man, I'm gonna give you a hundred dollars off. I just, it's a. I can feel. I can feel that if I take off something, this may be beneficial to both of us.
Speaker 2:But a lot of times, if I don't feel it and you come now, it's one thing. It's one thing to request. You have the right to request Right. Once I say, man, I'm not feeling it, okay, I'm like I don't want to get in the back and forward with you about the way I price myself. You, at this point, you're gonna buy or you're gonna go and go with somebody. If you got a cousin that can do it for cheaper, then go to your cousin. Why did you come in the first place? Exactly?
Speaker 2:I just wanted and I just wanted to throw that out there. That's just my little pet pee. Can I say one more thing? Here's the other thing. What you said was correct. When you set yourself as the guy who's the cheapest in town guy, what happens is they tell their friends he's the cheapest in town. Now you're gonna get a whole lot of people that are just like them. Now you spend your time on clients who all want the 50% discount Tell, and you become the Clarence, the Clarence REC guy, so to speak.
Speaker 1:That's true and that's one of the things we've talked about is don't pay me with exposure, because all that does is exposes me to more people who don't pay. That's the concept is, and in the creative services you still have to build a portfolio and sometimes you do have to take pro bono or work, but you're taking it because you are deciding that's what you're going to do, not because somebody came and said, hey, do this for me for free and I'll show it to a thousand people. That doesn't. That doesn't work. Going back to what you're saying, I don't I got I was talking to my barber about this yesterday. I think part of that. I don't like people telling me what to do. I think that's why I don't like necessarily shopping traditionally for cars. Like I avoid going to the car dealership like the plague. I hate it. Last little dude I think I traumatized him out of business because I'm dead serious, because I came in with my notebook and said this is how much I'm going to pay for this car. I have cash on hand. Do not, don't send me back to the finance person. I'm not going to sit here and wait. If you keep me waiting more than 45 minutes, you're going to lose this sale.
Speaker 1:And they started playing and I think he was new. He started playing the auto dealer game where draws that little cross and puts the numbers in there and makes the numbers do what he wants them to do. Math, don't really add up, math, don't really math. Then he broke my rule. I said amen, I'm not here to play around with you. This is the car I want. This is how much this car is worth. This is how much I'm going to pay for it. I'm not going to pay. I'm not going to pay a penny more. I have my. I have the money in the bank to buy it right now. And he started playing that how about we give you the car and let you test drive and tell you home and you leave your car here. I said I ain't got time for this.
Speaker 2:I'm going to get to wow.
Speaker 1:And I got up and walked out and I mean, like a bitter ex is calling me, blowing my phone up, trying to reach me, I got this other car. Nah, bro, you blew the chance. I dictated the terms on what I wanted to do business and you didn't want to do business on the terms, and so it's fine. I don't expect you to bend what you do to my will, but understand that I'm not going to do business your way. I'm going to do it my own. You and the other side is.
Speaker 1:The power dynamic shifted because the dealership called me to try to buy back my car. I'm happy with my car. My joints paid off. I ain't in no agreement or nothing. I had the car outright and they call me in.
Speaker 1:Oh, we got another vehicle that you are cool, looked at it like that's a nice car. I ain't paying that much for it, bro. How much you want to pay? This is how much. I now hear my rules. I ain't going to play this game with you. I'm not going to do the car. We spend eight hours at the car dealership game where I'm sitting in this chair. I think I threw them off because the first thing I do when you walk in is they offer you something to drink. That's the company. Well, they try to get you comfortable. It's also a reciprocal thing, because if they give you refreshments like a free bottle of water or a soda that cost them 25 cents to produce, they're hoping that you reciprocate by buying a $20,000 car or a car with an interest rate on it. They're hoping that you reciprocate by doing that, and it's really special.
Speaker 2:It works. Yeah, that's what I was about to say, that reciprocity thing. It works, man, they give like you say, they give you a candy bar. Hey, we got, we got a refreshments on here and you like, okay, great, okay, now let me buy this $50,000 container for it.
Speaker 1:I threw him off of this game because he's going to get you something to drink Now. I got my water here, I'm cool. And then he saw that all the things he was trying wasn't working, because I'm like, no, I'm not doing it, I'm not going to sit here, I'm not going to, it's not, it's not, it's like the. All you got to do is take the puppy home for a night and see how you feel about the puppy overnight, and then you take the puppy home and then the puppy never comes back. You keep the puppy. I'm not taking this car home, bro, I ain't going to sit here and fall in love with this car and get used to acclimat and see myself driving this car. Man, I did the test. Until this car is purchased, it's going to sit at, the is going to sit up here and I'm going to keep driving my car because I'm not going to acclimate myself to it and that's it.
Speaker 1:Threw him off his game. But the story I'm trying to convey is, as the business owner, I get to dictate the terms of what we do business and how we do business and a lot of people that are on the consumer side, specifically when you're in the creative industry and you're providing artwork, like you are, they want to come in and try to haggle with you because they feel like they got you. He needs clients, he needs this business. Well, that's not always exactly the case. I'm choosing to do business with you, but I can also choose not to do business with you, and I can choose not to do it on your own, not to do it on your terms. They got to be terms that are agreeable to me and a lot of early business owners, early stage business owners either they're not at that stage yet or they can be at that stage. They just don't feel comfortable enough asserting themselves and saying, nah, I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 2:It's all in me. It's not the easiest thing to do to say you know what my price is, my price, this is how I do business, blah, blah, blah. But if you can get over that hurdle, man, it's beneficial, because it, in my opinion, it hurts more to do it for the cheap and on the long run man that I've been in that situation several times. It hurts, man, because now that very client that you sold you know that you're doing this thing for $100, whatever they are on you like crazy, right, they're acting like this is a $10,000 price. This ain't quite right. Keep me at the yellow, a little bit more yellow, oh my goodness. And so then that $100 disappears in a day.
Speaker 2:Right Now you feel like you're doing the work for free and I'm trying to, and I'm still not quite there. But I want to get to the point for all of my clients where, when they call me, there's no issue, I don't feel enough and what I mean is I've charged them enough money where, call me anytime, email me anytime, I didn't charge you enough, let's go. But I'm saying but that feeling you have, we're like, oh my goodness, that means you didn't charge them enough. You see what I'm saying and that's my opinion.
Speaker 1:And my thing is and then we'll take a break after this my take on this is and I'm talking about personal experience Every time I've actually chased a client and compromised my vision or compromised my price, I've always regretted it, always. It's always been something I ended up regretting where I'm like I didn't charge them enough or I chased them down and did business on their terms and practically beg for their business. I always regretted it because they never quite value the level of effort that I was actually putting in to it. I'm writing something, I'm putting my heart and soul into that thing. I'm writing, I'm creating. If I'm doing a service for you, I'm putting my heart and soul into it and I'm going to try to give you my absolute best.
Speaker 1:And sometimes, when you make that compromise, they're already predisposed to think but they're willing to come off. They're willing to come off their square so easily. They're going to take shortcuts with my stuff and you turn into that. That's where we're at, and so that's the challenge. What we're going to do is I got a few more questions to ask Les we're going to take a quick pause for the calls to break things up, and then we'll be right back. All right, we're back with Les, we got a couple of more things and then we're going to wrap up here. We've talked about challenges and the market through Les's eyes, and so what we want to get into is a little bit more in the weeds, talking about marketing strategies and the importance of testimonials and all the other stuff. Les, what kind of marketing strategies have you used to grow Les's more productions? Lc.
Speaker 2:One thing I want to do is I'm not sure if we clearly define what marketing is.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And so I do want to touch on that a little bit, if you don't mind. What a lot of people do these days? They advertise. Advertising is a subset of marketing. It's not fully marketing, and so basically, my take on marketing is I am trying to solve a problem and the money and the response that I want to get from that part is a byproduct.
Speaker 2:The money is going to come, but one thing I'm learning and I think I heard this on a Chris Doe podcast once but basically people are inherently out for themselves. People are not out here looking for eye sale words or Les is more production to give money to. They're not trying to give us money. What they are trying to do is to solve a problem. I am having problems with copyright, I have a problem with graphics, blah, blah, blah. Can you help me solve this problem? We say yes, and then we say okay, but in order to solve this problem, this is how much we expect to be compensated for, and so my overall strategy in marketing at this point is to really focus on the client and solving their problem, and if I can do that effectively, I'm going to get the results that I'm looking for, because I used to one of the things I used to do when I would market my business and I still do a lot of stuff on social media, but I would put my prices on there. I would come out with different deals and I would put the price in. The problem with that is that's when you start to become a commodity. You got this price and then people start to nitpick at the price. That's what you bring to them from the forefront hey, the price is the most important thing. And then they say, what if I could give a little cheaper? But now my approach is I'm asking questions, I'm trying to diagnose the whole situation. Okay, what do you really need? Why do you need it? Okay, and then I write a prescription. I say, okay, this is what we can do based on what you told me, and this is how I can make this. And once they have the ease of mind okay, man, this problem can be solved Then it's not. They're going to have an end, even if your price is high. In their mind they're going to say, hey, do I really want to pay this? I think I do, because I really want this problem solved and do I feel like taking out the time to find somebody else and they may not even be able to do it. And then, on top of that, I have case studies. I can simply just direct them to my website and literally show them hundreds of examples. So stuff I did just like they want me to do for them. I have really thousands of examples over the years and I hope I'm answering your question, but this is basically my approach to marketing.
Speaker 2:Now I'm really trying to get out of the commodity space. I'm really trying to be that guy. I want to be that recommended guy, and it happens a lot, you see, on Facebook. I'm looking for such and such guy who could do business. If your name is the name that comes up, that means you have created some type of reputation for yourself that people could trust you and say, hey man, yeah, go to Brian for this, go to Les for this. And that's what I'm really trying to do is continue to build my brand, build the reputation, not be the lowest guy, lowest price in town guy. But I want to market in a way where this guy is so dope and now I pay double for what he's bringing in for us. I've been double there, and so that's my marketing approach right now.
Speaker 1:And to build on what you were saying, my role as a marketing strategy is to consult and coach whatever the definition, depending on the context is my goal. My job is to help you find the people that have that specific problem that you solve. So to me, that's the art of marketing is finding the market, finding the people that have that specific problem that needs solved and have the money to pay for that problem to be solved with your method. And so that's it. It all. It does relate and I think a lot of times people get so caught up in just the advertising piece, the old school janky promoters. We're going to go. We're going to go lay all these flyers down. We're going to print off 150 flyers and put them on cars everywhere. That's great, but if you're really trying to get a crowd of 300 people, then you need to have 3000 flyers to lay out somewhere. You got to think bigger than just what the little bit of you're doing. And that's how I view it. I see it as a from a 10,000 foot view. Where can I find this subsegment of people that have this specific problem and where do they congregate online? And how many different places can I find? How many trends can I identify from dealing with that group. So I know that they have a proclivity for this or they like this, and so now I can start tracking them and finding them and stuff, and I think I'm getting a little bit tangential. But I think that's why a lot of business owners struggle when they do the advertising piece on social media, because social media sites intentionally make it really super easy for you to click a button and put money in and boost a post or boost, promote whatever you're doing, but they don't tell you the back end tools that you need to really fine tune and sharpen that and reach a broader audience. They don't necessarily target the ad for you when you create it and so they're not going to show it to people that have the problem that you're trying to solve. They're going to show it to everybody. You're going to waste, you're going to burn through your budget a lot faster, and so I get yeah, it is. It's about figuring out who needs you to solve their problem, and that's really what the marketing piece is and that's what creating products and services is really about. There are a lot of people who have great business ideas but they don't really solve anybody's problem, so they don't, they don't, they don't exist. It's hard to get business to them.
Speaker 1:The other day I was driving by a matter of fact, I was driving by a little strip mall in Omaha and there was this clothing store. I'm not going to put them out on blast, but the first time I drove by I'm about a year ago. I'm like, wow, I've never heard of that and ain't nobody going in there and they're going to be gone in a year. And lo and behold, I drove by and they were gone in a year and the problem was they created their own. They had an idea for a cool, catchy sounding little name and that's what they ran with.
Speaker 1:But there's no demand for that name. They didn't build up anything around that name. There's no anybody clamoring for their gear, and so it just it. There's no market for it. Is what I'm saying. A couple of people saw it and thought it was cool and nobody bought it, and that's what the problem is. There's a lot of people out here who don't really have a defined problem or defined market in mind when they create a product service and then it ends up tanking, and so I understand what you're talking about with the problem solving piece of it.
Speaker 2:I get it. And then and people need to know, even when you talk about the business that you saw, even if you have a, even if you can solve the problem for people, they need to know you exist. So another strategy is consistently being consistent. And now I'm still. I still haven't really gotten into the content creation part. As far as YouTube and video, which that's like my weak point. That's something I want to get into.
Speaker 2:But every successful, let's say, youtube I ever heard the one thing they say is you got to post all every day, stay consistent. And I was even. I even heard MKBHD talk about he posted something like he started posting when he was like 13, 14 years old, right, and he had already posted 300 videos before anybody before you even had 5000 subscribers. He didn't nobody really knew who he was and he had already posted that many videos and then at some point it popped off. But imagine that you had to post, and I think you're doing it now, right, where you're in the space of cause, I see you posting all the time and that's what it takes to be successful.
Speaker 2:You have to post so much stuff in order to eventually get make it get to the point where people notice oh okay, brian's out here doing some things, and then what happens is all your older videos end up having a long tail and people start going back to stuff. You know that you did before, but it takes that much effort. You're not just going to put out one video, or put out one, in my case, develop one website to spend. Oh okay, now I'm Bill Gates or whatever. It's not going to happen, right.
Speaker 1:It's the myth. One thing is it takes a long time to be overnight success and sometimes even I'm posting out stuff is the view count is. Especially on YouTube, the view count is abysmal. It's not going anywhere, but I know that it's consistent, and so if I can consistently reach 50, 60, 70, 120, 130, 400 people consistently, eventually it'll start building upon itself, and so I constantly post, but most of my views come from like TikTok or Instagram or whatever. But it takes a long time.
Speaker 1:You got to keep chopping and I think one of the things and it's a recent, it's not a recent manifestation in culture is the myth of this viral celebrity. A lot of these viral celebrities have been out there, a lot of these viral content creators, for either they've been out a long time and you're just now discovering them, or they just they finally had the one video that cracked the code and exploded, but you go and they have a whole library of stuff that never exploded, or they are truly that one hit person and since they have no library, they are quickly forgotten about, since there's other content to go through. And the consistency piece is this whether you post once a day, whether you post once a week, whether you post once a month, whether you post once every two months. You got to post. You have to run the schedule and consistently post stuff and it's going to take a long time because your first videos, your first podcasts, your first website, your first photo, your first photo shoot it's going to suck, it's going to be bad and that's okay. The only way you learn is by doing it and having it bad. Even now in the car I'm driving here and I'm like I'm going to go back and remaster the first two episodes of this podcast because the audio isn't anywhere where I want it to be and I had to figure out where it got screwed up in my price. And so I'm like I'm going to go about because I'm planning my weekend out. I got some client work to do and then I got to remaster two episodes of this podcast because the audio isn't where I want it to be. You learn it's an evolving thing and the only way that I can have the knowledge, go back and remastered is by actually doing it and putting it out there and realizing, okay, I'm not happy with how this turned out and I figure out what happened and reverse engineer from there.
Speaker 1:But some people are really expecting to be this overnight thing and I think TikTok has really exacerbated this where people don't have valuable content or they have the one video that connects and then they spend all this time trying to chase that one popular video and then they make a bunch of other subpar videos, trying to duplicate things, discussing what they're doing, as opposed to having a bunch of related videos that are probably equal in content but are different. Does that make sense? Yeah, they don't have a library of stuff that shows what they're able to do, and so I get what you're saying. And people are expecting their business just to hit overnight. Most businesses don't hit overnight. Most well funded startups fail.
Speaker 1:I was watching something. I was watching something, I think, how business works or whatnot. They're talking about the Forbes 30 under 30, which sounds impressive, getting on it, but when you realize that's actually 600 people every year, the 30 under 30 piece doesn't really make a lot of sense. We're talking about what percentage was a high percentage of the people in the 30 under 30, they ended up going to jail because they ended up cutting corners in their growth track with business, and so that viral this myth of the viral celebrity, I think hurts a lot of people because they aren't accustomed to the concept of you have to put in a lot of work and see no return for a long time. To be an overnight, so be overnight success.
Speaker 2:This is a taste, man. It's weird, but it's that's the way it goes. Something else I want to point out too when, in terms of gaining trust with clients and things of that nature, a lot of times you know you're not going to be able to get a, your clients don't necessarily initially, they don't necessarily trust you, but they do trust the person that told them about you. You see, the whole word of mouth thing is I've gotten a lot of business through social media just by clients sharing my posts, yep, on their page, and anytime somebody do that for me, man, that's to me, that's love, because you don't, you do not have to share anything that I do. But some I have. I actually have fans, yeah, I look at. There are people who I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:Every single time I post something, whether it's on the Facebook, whatever they like, love or share, the post I'm talking about every single time, every time I post something, is the same group of people, and those are the people that really they're really keeping it business because, because they know other people and eventually some of those say, hey, man, I just send this post.
Speaker 2:You know that you've been sharing this guy, what about them? And then they, they were to get to talk and they're calling you and you got another client, and so for me I think that's effective too, where you build enough trust with people that they are willing to quote, unquote, testify about you. And that's a big deal, because a lot of one of the biggest hurdles for clients is finding somebody they can trust and don't feel like they're going to rip them off or some kind of scam. Sometimes they just have that comfort of knowing okay, I got this guy for this thing and they're going to do a good job and I can pay them. That's it for a lot of clients, that we do them right, man, they'll stick with you for a decade, and that's we talked about. Paying with exposure earlier.
Speaker 1:That's how you pay somebody with exposure, where you show their work. You're not expecting anything in return. You're just doing it because you believe in what they're doing and you want to tell people how great they are. That's how you pay people to exposure. Pay them with exposure isn't give me your services for free and then I'll tell people about you. No, I paid for these services. I think they're high value. Take a look and see the kind of work that, the kind of work they done. Have you considered putting that into your workflow, like requesting, where you informally request a testimony or even directly ask for a testimony or share the work I've done for you?
Speaker 2:I've done something like that before, but that's probably something I need to cook more for you, something I need to cook more focus on. That's a good what you just said. That that's a good idea to reinforce that, because people talk about YouTube, youtubers do it all the time Share, subscribe, blah, blah, blah. They do it all the time Because sometimes and I've actually heard a YouTuber say that at one point he wasn't saying that little tag, share, subscribe, whatever and his numbers went down and when he started back just saying a little tag, share, subscribe, like blah, blah, blah, it just everything went back up. So sometimes you do have to mention, because sometimes people just don't think about they have to remind them hey, share my stuff, like it, and they'll do it.
Speaker 1:That's a good prompt for me. Like, share and subscribe to the podcast for the unstuck sessions. If you like these kind of conversations, hit me up at mail, at I sell words as m a l, at I sell wordsnet. I'll scroll it in here in a little bit or you'll find it in the show notes if you want to be a guest or you have any input or any questions that I can answer on the podcast.
Speaker 1:The idea I think, les, is you want to trade on those good feelings Like when you solve a problem for somebody, they feel good about what you've done for them, and so now you're trading on those good endorphins that you've given them and say, okay, so if you really what I did, then tell somebody about me, spread the word, and it's that trading of okay, I've done this thing for you and you're happy and pleased with the service.
Speaker 1:Now go tell people about me and bring more people like you, because invariably they're going to bring people that have their similar interests or whatnot into the fold, which is exactly what you want. So that's how you use testimonials and things like that, and though the fact that somebody does business with you that does cross that line of you can step away and not have to work as hard to gain their trust because somebody they trust recommended you. I like that. All right, we're going to briefly hit networking collaborations and then we're going to talk about the future of Les is more productions with collaborations. We talked a little bit about it off air. Have you had any really great collaborations or anything or networking with other businesses and tell me how it's benefited the growth of your business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've had to. I'm, I've done some what I call ghost designing for other companies. So, basically, what as a ghost design what that is it's almost like any other, whether you're a ghost writer or whatever. You don't necessarily get the recognition for the work you do, but you do the work. It's an agree upon term where, hey, I pay you this, you design whatever, and they get all the credit for the bigger project that they're working on and you just did your piece on it. And I've done a few of those and the advantage One of the things that's had me out is when you're working with somebody else, you get to see their process or how they work and you pick up some.
Speaker 2:You pick up some things from that. I don't claim to know everything myself, I don't claim to be the best, and sometimes you get in a situation where you are working with somebody else who's a little better than you, have a bigger platform and you able to see they actually kind of showing you some of the trace, some of the trade secrets. When you're working with them sometimes and they may not try to do that, but it's just a little bit of a worker with them they say, okay, we need this done like this blah blah blah and you pick up. So what I try to do is just learn what I can learn from them. Get my money and get out, but that's but that's some of the benefits of working with somebody else. So I've had some collaborations of that sort and it's been been pretty good for me. Good, and yeah, from the business side.
Speaker 1:Plus it's steady work and you get to soak up all that free game from other people doing the same thing and I know they've called it white label services and things along the way, plenty of different names for it from when we talked about a little bit and I know it's an avenue that you're looking into possibly like networking groups and things along those lines of work. There's a benefit in being in the right kind of business networking groups because then you have that consistency, you can build trust. People see you frequently and you can build trust and you can build trust and you can build trust and you can build trust and you can build trust and you can build trust. And then you can get into like design work or marketing services and stuff like that. There is a benefit in being in the right kind of business networking groups because then you have that consistency, you can build trust. People see you frequently and they really get a sense of your philosophy, your design philosophy, and then they get to determine on whether they want to do business with you. And so those are the other networking options that are out there and for us locally around here there's center sphere and there's a couple of other groups that are out there.
Speaker 1:But I know nationally there's a lot of different kind of business to business networking groups and I think that there'd be a benefit for you to check them out, but I know that just for in general, for business owners, that's a good place to go to soak up game from some established people and some made. You might even be in the room with some major players and you may be able to set up time to sit down and talk with them and learn some stuff. What Alex Hormozzi puts it down puts it as paying down your ignorance debt. So when you start a business, you have a lot of debt. You have your cost related debt with actual cash and stuff, and then there's an ignorance related debt that you have to pay down before you start being successful and it allows you to pay down that ignorance debt.
Speaker 2:I like that.
Speaker 1:All right, let's see All right. So what do you have coming up for? Less is more productions. What can we expect in the future from you?
Speaker 2:In the future. I really want to get, I really want to do more video production, video editing. One one service that I'm really getting to design flyers. But I have this thing called enhanced flyers that I'm doing now and so basically it's almost the same flyers on but not has animation, has sound video included, so it's a little bit more interactive. Okay, so it's a little. It's just a doper way to present the same flyer design and so specifically, that's one of the new things I'm doing. Overall, I'm just trying to grow man. I have a son who's 14 he'd be 15 soon and he has me I would allow things and by him being a younger demographic, he has his pulse on what's new. Okay, he's quick to tell me was lame.
Speaker 1:They always are.
Speaker 2:It's just all of a sudden I became. I'm the old guy who doesn't know anything, but he so he kind of keeps.
Speaker 2:he can't put me on game with a lot of things that's going on now and so I want to grow in that space and really stay relevant in my business. And one thing I wanted to mention earlier the name. When I was trying to figure out what I want to name my business, I purposely named it. Less is more productions, it's still less is more designs, or because I didn't want to put myself in a box, I want to produce. So at some point, let's say, I stopped doing website so I can still keep the same name. Whatever I can, maybe I can do some, start doing some CD.
Speaker 2:I work for major studio, movie studio. Come back and still be less is more than that, and so I wouldn't have to change my name and things. I want to keep things open and just continue to learn and grow and add more services to what I do. And, like I said I've said this before, I tell my wife this one time I want us to go to a movie. It might be a Marvel movie. You see my logo because they because all of these big, all of these big studio company they deal with, set big, self contract their work to. We see all those names. They deal with 100, literally hundreds of companies to make these various tech companies maybe VFX, work, cgi they hire outside companies for this work and if you're good, they're, how are you? And so I just say, hey, one day we'll go to move, you go to movie you just see the LP up there and that's a very I know that's very broad future thing. But that's like my, it's like a big picture dream situation.
Speaker 1:I think, yeah, I like that and I think your pathway might be those enhanced flyers. If you could really beef up, the media knows that could turn into something that can create that future for you. So I'm excited to see what you got coming. I got some ideas that we can talk about offline for the workers out there. They're looking to vote, but I think that's great. So how can people reach you?
Speaker 2:I'm, of course. You see my website lessons more pro calm. I am also on IG is lessons more photos. You can search me on Facebook. I recently got on threads. I'm still trying to figure out how I want to navigate that. I'm pretty much just whatever I'm putting on ID I put on threads because it's their cousins and soon, oh, I'm also on tip top. Just search lessons, more productions, you'll find me, and so I'm out there.
Speaker 1:And soon.
Speaker 2:I'll be. I will be a YouTube content created. Just look at. All right let me know.
Speaker 1:Let me know how I can help out with that.
Speaker 2:Yes sir, we definitely need to talk.
Speaker 1:So you know how to reach less. I really appreciate the time, bro. We got to do this again. I just got to figure out what the next topics going to be and I'll probably bring you on for the Batman when I do Batman slander on learning, while dad my other channel where I get to talk about book stuff we're gonna have a good time with that one. I really appreciate your time again, like share and subscribe. Make sure that you share.
Speaker 1:This was of a business owner or somebody that's considering business or somebody that you think this can help out, because that's the real way that are going to show value or you're going to convert, confer our value to them, show it to somebody who needs it and maybe this is going to help them get through a tough time or maybe help them solve some problems that they may be having. And, like I said, if you have any topics you want us to discuss or you or anything that we discussed in this episode that you want me and less to go deeper into, shoot me an email and then we will sit down and put together the episode for you. So I appreciate y'all's time and attention to this. Again, this is the unstuck sessions and we're hoping you get unstuck here. So thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you later. Peace.