Creator Economy Scaling Expert Explains How to Expand

The second we were done filming, we would take the crew side and we would go over the highs and the lows from that shoot. Do you have any tricks on how to reduce the creator being the bottleneck? For those who might be getting discouraged because the job market is tough right now. On today's episode of The Gimbal Podcast, we have Josh Mattingley, one of the most respected operators in the entire creator economy. He is the CEO and co-founder of Upright Media and just listened to some of their clients. Eric, Jesser, Mr. Ballon, ZHC, Stokes Twins, Emma Chamberlain, is an incredible episode about a part of the creator economy that is misunderstood, but oh, so important. Please take me through the transformation that you take a new client on. Like where are they operationally when they first join your team and where do they end up three, six months down the line? I have one creator we're working with right now and I'll use them without mentioning them as kind of the framing for this. So this creator has two channels and two separate niches. She has been doing a great job at creating content for both of those channels by herself with one sort of like production partner. The team has basically been a bunch of freelancers, editors, thumbnail designers, et cetera, and then she'll hire freelance cam ops during filming days and such. She's reached the point now where she's been doing this for a long time and the channels starting to pick up steam, brand deal revenues coming in and she's like, okay, I want to take this to the next level and really professionalize and create the company. And so with her, we are helping her actually just establish the production systems needed. So production and management literally like where should files be stored, you know, really basic stuff like that, getting the team on Slack. What should your content calendar look like and how do you plan things? What does a work back schedule look like for somebody who's creating content on two different channels that have, you know, two actually different work loads because one is a heavier lift than the other. And so we're helping map all that out while also going and recruiting her kind of like next two hires. And then on the far end of the spectrum, we have a client where, you know, they have a very successful brand. They have been doing this for a long time. But like most creators, they started building the only way they knew how. With no real education, they just, they picked up a camera, they started filming, it worked. And then because the viewership increased and revenue increased, they hired more people, they increased their output. And now they have a 40 person company that actually never had production standards in place. And so you effectively have what I would consider a Frankenstein where, and that's not a bad thing, most creator businesses are built in some sort of Frankenstein-ish way because they're just moving, they're going fast. And they're just adding people to the team. And there's no SOPs for anything or style guides. It's all just kind of in their head. And there's a small core group of people who are doing everything that kind of can be that way for a while. But once you get to the point where you have a 40 person team and there's a bottleneck in like three people, now you need to kind of unwind some of that stuff. And so that's what we're doing for this client. And so in this kind of scope of this job is going to be a six to eight month assignment in which we're coming in and redesigning the entire org chart. We are defining or redefining the actual job descriptions for the people who are working within the business already. Some people will move to different departments. We're installing a leadership layer, which they didn't previously have. We are training the managers to better delegate the work downward, we're helping them get ahead and just with some simple planning and project management and things that I say it's simple. A lot of things are simple, but not necessarily easy. And so that's where they're at. - Is there any kind of standardization operationally across this industry or is every single relationship something bespoke? - Everything is different. (laughing) I mean, I can't say everything. I have not looked at every single channel or worked with every single creator, but it's the single most frustrating thing for most people in the business, the lack of standards. Most people get frustrated by that. And it's also weirdly the thing that I love the most because it is still the Wild West. And you still can create a company, however it works. And it's fun for me as an operator to kind of poke my head under the hood of each one of these companies to see how they're doing it. And sometimes when you don't have standards and you're just kind of winging it, some real innovative stuff can come out of that. And you can stumble across things on accident that work really well. Whereas somebody who might be tied to more traditional ways of doing things might not even think to do something in a sort of innovative way or kind of break the status quo. They're just kind of stuck in, oh, I go from A to B every single time where a creator might go, oh, I'm actually going to go from A to F to G to one. And that's weirdly better. I'll take best practices from every company that I work with. And then go, oh, that's actually pretty cool. What if we took that and married it with this other thing that we're doing. And so I kind of just look at it as grabbing a bunch of tools and putting them all in my tool belt and then pulling those tools out when needed for very specific use cases. But no, there aren't really standards right now. We are seeing that more people who are leveling up their businesses are, I think, looking a little bit more like a traditional media company and not like a big paramount or something, but more of a traditional production company, which I do think is good. You know, one thing I'll tell creators I work with who might be, you know, a lot of people right now I think have an IK about traditional. You know, it's like, oh, we're a YouTube company. It's got to be scrappy. We don't want it to be too corporate. And I go, don't you think the people who've been doing this successfully for like 120 years might actually be able to teach you something? - Right, I do some creative consulting for a bunch of different thought leaders. And it's a similar situation in the sense that it is kind of like pulling on the strings in a unique way every single time. Everyone that I've worked with lives in notion, you know, that's kind of like the brain of the company. And there tends to be like a spine in notion that kind of points in a bunch of different directions. And then, you know, depending on the type of content that they're making, there's usually a long or thin pipeline. And then most of the communication for the people that I have worked with takes place on Slack. Is this sounding familiar to you, by the way? Like, this is not crazy, right? - No, that's very, very standard, I'd say. - Is there any other like tools that you see frequently used that help make operations structured and like repeatable and sustainable? - I'm kind of a money.com fanboy, which is a little bit here than notion, but it's not quite like an air table. I think air table is very big. It does so many things. And I'm not saying it's the wrong choice for the tool. It's just usually the type of creator I'm working with. It's like a notion or Monday would make a lot of sense for those people. So we also do a lot of post-production work. And we use LucidLink for kind of the cloud storage solution. You can keep your premier project in the cloud and everyone can access the premier project. So if you have a remote editing team like we do, I could be working on a video for you. I put the premier project in the cloud. All of the footage is in the cloud. The editors create proxies and they're just editing off proxies. - Are there any resources that you point people to for people who might not be able to afford working with your company quite yet or maybe they don't have the scale to do it? - It's funny, I made this joke one time. Do you know where a great place to learn about making YouTube videos is? YouTube. (laughing) I always tell people to go to YouTube. I'm like, hey, man, start there. I would say talk to people. It's a lonely journey when you're building something by yourself and it's easy to get siloed. It's easy to put your blinders on and just kind of focus on your thing but having conversations with other people and asking them what they're doing, I think is really helpful. There are tons of free tools out there that you can use or get started with. Even free trials just to like try the thing out but at the very base level, Google Man, Google has like sheets and Google Docs are fantastic. You can create a spreadsheet that is just as good of a project management tool as a Monday.com as long as you're keeping up with it. - It's funny with ops because there's been a few instances where I've been working doing my creative work and I don't realize that something is operationally inefficient until someone points it out and then gives me the solution. So when I'm asking for like tools and like YouTube is a resource, personally, my big headache is like, I don't know what I don't know until it's put on my plate and I'm like, oh, of course, why didn't we have this before? - Yeah, I mean, dude, for me, it was trial and error my whole career. I don't have education in this. I just was like, oh, I see a bunch of people making content. I think they could do it better. Let me help them do it better. I didn't realize that I needed to get a filming permit in Los Angeles at first. You know, I'm just kind of like, oh, grab a camera on you to start filming stuff until the cops show up and you're like, oh, why are the cops here? You know, like, oh, well, now I need to figure that out. And I learn from that. And I think, you know, there are so many things that you just kind of have to learn, but there's probably a video that's like YouTube operations 101 these days that you could get started with. But yeah, I don't know. I think for me, it was always the bigger the challenge, the bigger the project and the bigger the challenge that was more exciting to me. I really enjoy the complex problem solving of this whole world. And once you do it once and you can effectively create a playbook for something. then it's like, cool, let me do it again, you know, now I'm excited to jump into the next one and help the next person and that's effectively what I've done my entire career. You worked with Mr. Ballin right at the time when you were launching upright media. So obviously you have a lot of time and energy being spent into launching your own business, but that team is coming to you and saying, hey, we need help desperately. They've got a bunch of different things going on there, you know, moving very, very quickly. You decide to take them on. Tell me what it was like when you first entered and tell me what transformation you took them on. Yeah, I mean, first of all, that was crazy. That was one of my first clients on the ops consulting side and was like training with weights on because like you said, I was starting my company and so I was effectively the CEO of my own company and growing that and also effectively the interim COO for Mr. Ballin and so when I jumped in with them, there were a few initiatives that were already in motion that they just needed somebody to take over because there wasn't anyone there that could do it. So those were a national tour that was a graphic novel launch. Then we were coming up on the holiday season and so they needed to get ahead and John, Mr. Ballin also does a lot of holiday content and so it's kind of like leading up to to the end of the year. It's just a big ramp up and a lot of creators have that Q4 is the best revenue driving quarter. You got to get those holiday RPMs and I had never launched a book. I had never overseen a tour and those were two things that I actually were I was really excited to figure that out and be a part of that because like I mentioned problem solving. I just love that aspect of the job. But when you have a pretty aggressive content slate every week that really does take a lot of resources from the company, it's tough to almost focus on anything but that. It's certainly tough for the team who's getting sucked into that day to day every day. And so with them specifically, I jumped in. I basically had the department heads work alongside me to come up with a plan that would focus on the content first because the content not only was the thing that's sucking all the resources, it's also the flywheel for every other thing that we're doing. It's the marketing engine behind the book, behind the tour, behind the new merchandise that we were developing, like literally everything. And it was also, you know, as we're coming up against the tour, John's about to be gone for 13 weeks or something. And it's like, okay, that is a pretty big gap to fill with with content when you're uploading multiple times a week. So we basically put a work back plan together to figure out how we could clear the gap while John was on tour and also get him ahead enough so that he didn't have to film the second he got back from tour. That's a lot of content. And leading up to that, we were like, okay, we had, I think it was something like two or three months, which meant we had a lot to film. And when you create the work back plan, we go, all right, every day from this point to this point, John needs to film five episodes of his show, something crazy that he's, he would never do in a normal world. And we all kind of looked at each other and went, holy crap, that is just so much content. Like, I don't, I don't know if he's going to want to do it. I don't know if we want to do it. I don't know if we're going to have the staff to write all the scripts to do, you know, there's so much that goes into that. So you go, okay, well, let's just assume that that's going to happen. We work back from there. Here's how many scripts we need, fully locked, which means here's how many ideas we need by this time. And you'll work all the way back into, like, literally today. And we went, all right, like we just, we have to get this moving. We talked to John about it. And I came up with the idea that we would have mega shoot week, I called it. So rather than doing like a big, big batch, we said, what if we just did mega shoot weeks every three weeks? But those mega shoot weeks are literally for Monday to Friday, maybe even Saturday. He's in the studio. And he's recording his show and he's, sorry, recording his podcast and filming his show, you know, effectively what this is is just big time project management, you know, when you have the right people in place to understand what the goal is and you're checking in with them and holding them accountable to their deadlines and just kind of being a task master with the, with the calendar, you can actually do more than you think. So the end of my trip with the ballin team, which was fantastic, fantastic group of people, I hired their now current COO. Actually, that was my primary function throughout the entire course of the engagement was to find higher and train that person so that once I got done with all of those things, I could step away and she could take it into the future. I want to ask you about creator bottlenecks because I think that's, you know, a problem for everyone. Do you have any tricks on how to reduce the creator being the bottleneck or key man risk, as it sometimes said? To me, it boils down to a transfer of knowledge. A creator is going to be the driving force behind their brand for sure. One creator could have a channel and and be that key man and be the bottleneck and have a small team and, you know, have a good career and make good money and, you know, live a pretty cool life. But if they want to scale their company and they they have ambition to take it to higher places, in my opinion, the sooner they can translate what is in their head onto paper and help people understand how to speak that language, how to interpret what they're doing and execute their thoughts and ideas, the faster they're going to be able to get out of their own way and therefore scale. It is easier said than done for sure. Creators are always creating, they're always thinking about the next video. There's so many things that only they can do and there's only enough hours in the day. And so I would say a style guide. What is the SOP? How what does good look like? That's such an abstract thing to think about. It's very subjective. But in the creator's mind, what does good look like to them? What is a good video at X channel? And if you can define that and then train someone, whether that's somebody you literally take under your wing and they're with you every day as the creator and the creator counterpart, the faster you can find that person and get those reps in, the faster the creator can start handing stuff off to that person. And then obviously that person can then train the next person. Now there's always going to be the risk of what's a copy of a copy of a copy. But I think as long as the creator has touch points with their team throughout the course of their relationship, that's not necessarily too big of a risk. And I'd say that the upside of being able to train those people greatly outweighs continuing to be the bottom heck if your goal is to scale. I worked with Cody Sanchez's team for a while and one of the things that really impressed me about her was that she would come in and make the decisions that only Cody could make. But if a problem came up for a second time, she was able to like really identify it and she was like, okay, this is a recurring issue. So let's zoom out and figure out what is causing this issue so that doesn't come an issue a third time. That's the exact right way to do it. I'll shut up Preston who I worked for for a while, Preston of TBR. He said something me one time, which I think about all the time, which is I'm creating content, but I want to be like the rock where I'm everywhere, you know, like the contents everywhere. And everyone knows the rock. And he's got multiple brands and he's in movies and commercials and he just does everything. It's because the rock has set a standard for what the rock does and who the rock is. And then his team and the people around him know how to execute that thing. And when he walks into a room, he can do his quick promo. Cool. All right. Thanks guys. On to the next thing. And if you can actually get to that level of, I guess, creative freedom where you're able to just kind of weave in and out of the places where you want to be and live a great life and make money and, you know, have the work life balance, you can do that as long as you have the team who understands how to hit those standards. And so when I was working with Preston, we would have basically like post mortems after everything that we did. When we would film something, the second we were done filming, we would take the crew aside and we would go over the highs and the lows from that shoot. And we would always take one thing that we learned from that shoot and apply it to the next shoot with the goal being that if we just got 1% better every day, we're heading in the right direction. And to the point that you just made with Cody, we never want to make the same mistake twice. And so I actually saw that in practice worked very, very well. And then I as the VP of production would work on keeping all of those kind of like rules codified into a document that, you know, we would use for onboarding. So that the next person who came into the company fresh off the street would get this document and then get their onboarding. And like, here's how we do things. You know, it's a historical document that hopefully lets people learn from the past. But I love that that point. I want to talk about onboarding and hiring because a lot of the stuff that you've touched on and the stuff that's happened in this conversation, you know, scaling is not something, I mean, it would be exceptionally hard to do it alone, right? So finding the right talent seems extremely important, especially finding the right talent at the top. You're talking about like CEO, COOs of, you know, these media companies that are earning millions of dollars. Where are you looking for these types of people? Yeah, I'm looking for these people everywhere. Creative people, I'm looking for them in different spots than I would the business side. And executives, we're looking for in different ways than we are the other two. So a creative person, we might actually think about going on to Twitter. We might think about discord groups and communities even like, hey, can somebody add me to a WhatsApp group? that has a bunch of creative producers in it, just so I can start, you know, getting my name out there and like introducing myself and building relationships or like, hey, so and so, do you know a creative strategist who might be looking for work? Like, let me know, send them my way. LinkedIn is great for the business side recruiting. I would even say for production and people who are in management roles, leadership roles, executive roles, the sea level search is interesting because most people who have made it to the sea suite are probably in a sea suite position right now and they're working away and, you know, adding value to the companies that they're at. And so, usually it's a series of conversations where somebody goes, oh, hey, I hear so and so's about to start looking for their next thing or they have left, but they haven't announced it on LinkedIn yet. Or, hey, I know this person who is a VP or EVP at a company and I truly believe that they're ready for that leap into the sea suite or they're ready to own maybe they're going to be a GM of a company within a bigger organization, like a GM of its own business unit. It's a lot of relationships. I know that's not like the most exciting answer, but it just is, you know, when you're in it long enough and you've worked with and talked to enough people and have gone to networking events and go to conventions and for me, I put content out on LinkedIn and Instagram and stuff. There's just a feedback loop that kind of naturally starts happening there and, you know, I have been fortunate that even when there is somebody who's about to make a leap or they know someone who's going to take a jump, people will just kind of put it on my radar. So it's a bit of a hack for me personally. There's no shortage of good opportunities. The creator economy continues to grow. More and more creators continue to need leadership. - For all roles, sea suite level roles all the way down to assistant editors is Hollywood a good or bad place to look for talent? - So I have a keynote all about this. My strong opinion is that, like I just said, there's so many opportunities in the creator economy right now, things are only getting bigger and there is a deficit of talent everywhere. We need more people in the creator economy to handle the level of growth that is happening right now. Every channel is fighting for the same resources right now and they're all going after the same people and it's very interesting. You know, when you have to think outside of the box, you go, yeah, well, the immediate next thought is traditional and I think a lot of people kind of have the ik when it comes to hiring traditional people in their companies. I personally believe that you can rewire somebody's brain to think more creator first and if you can do that and that the person coming from the traditional side is coachable, can come in with no ego, is ready to learn and like hungry to learn something new and has a track record of creating cool things, producing exciting projects. I think that's absolutely worth exploring. My keynote, it's for the traditional people. It's called from Hollywood studio to studio apartment. Welcome to the creator economy. And I literally, I've given this talk at several different events. Every time I do it, somebody comes up to me afterwards both from digital side and traditional side to kind of thank me for you know, shining a light on some of these things because you have two different conversations happening right now. You have creators who might be looking down at traditional. You have traditional who might be looking down at creators because it's like, well, YouTube is like small screen. It's like, dude, what are you talking about? YouTube is like, the future is here, man. And if you don't see that, you're gonna get left in the dust. And so what I'm trying to do is just bridge the gap and help people communicate on the same wavelength because I think there are a lot of missed opportunities that are right under our noses. It sounds like if you are someone who's working in either traditional or in the creator economy and you want to grow your career. If you want to be seen, make yourself seen. So you were mentioning joining, you know, being a part of Discord communities or being active on Twitter or LinkedIn in your case, that sounds like it could be really helpful like getting your work out there being proactive about it. And then if you want to find those people, the people who are actually doing it are in those same places so you're making those connections there. Absolutely. If anyone's looking for a job. Just look at your LinkedIn page 'cause every other post seems to be hiring somebody. - I mean, dude, we are hiring like crazy. There are so many companies looking for really quality talent and for those who might be getting discouraged because the job market is tough right now. Just put your work out there. Keep going. Use the downtime to create something and put out into the world. You know, I always encourage traditional editors to, if they don't have a job right now, go on YouTube. Teach yourself how to get better at After Effects. Try one additional thing and level that one thing up and then use that and start putting that work out there and people will start to notice that. - When is the right time for a creator team to consider calling a bright media? - You know, I'd say call us whenever. I love having conversations with people. For us, it's when you're serious about taking that next step. I know it's cost prohibitive for some people to bring in a consultant. The thing that we do, though, is we're building and we will always leave our clients in a materially better spot for them to continue to grow and make more money. The ROI on the investment with a company like Gars is real and we have years and years of experience literally inside the creator economy building it, trailblazing and I'm so excited to do that for more people. I wish I could help everybody. I think about the creator middle class a lot and the people who don't necessarily have the resources that some of the top creators have and I'm trying to figure out how to help more of those folks whether that's a smaller product or something that they can engage with us on but we do post-production and our rates are very good so it's like we can help somebody take the editing off their plate. So the creator can think more high level and cast the vision for their company or start another project or literally just write videos so they don't have to worry about editing or giving notes on the videos. When it comes to the op side, I'd say, hey, do you have a couple of months at least to really dig into your business? Are you ready to figure out how to professionalize it? Also, do you want to? A lot of people think they want to scale because it sounds sexy. Yeah, cool, I'm gonna scale my company but if you're not ready to actually strap it and do the work, that's okay. Don't, you know, I'd say like literally, just don't. Like, continue at a pace that's comfortable for you and then if and when you're ready to do it, go for it but it's not for everybody and it's okay to realize that. I always think with consultants, I've done consulting myself and I've hired consultants. It's always an expensive expense because if you're not paying enough for consultants, you probably don't need them like if they're too cheap, you know, you probably already know the knowledge that they have but for me, I'm looking for a business consultant right now and I'm like, oh, they're so expensive but that's kind of the point because they're paying them to teach you very, very specifically. And so it's kind of like a worthy expense. That's how I think about it. Totally and for me, I've got a big team. You know, I've got a team of 12 full-time people. We have about 40 contractors that work with us. If you think about the money being spent relative to the value added and the amount of people that automatically become an extension of your team for a period of time, it's actually like quite affordable. Don't engage with a consultant if you don't know what you want out of the relationship. I can advise. I can say, hey, I think you should do XYZ but it's your business. You have to run it forever. I don't and so if you come in with a very specific goal, hey, Josh, I'm trying to increase my output from two videos a month to four videos a month and I'd like to create a roadmap so that I can launch a new channel in 2027. Amazing. I know exactly what to do. I know exactly how to get started. I will give you the configuration of the team that I think you need. I will create the roadmap with you. I will create deadlines for each of the gates. Me and my team will hit every single one of our targets. And when we get done, you will have all of those things and you'll be set up for success in the future. On the flip side, if someone says, hey, we have a couple of problems I'd like you to solve. Can you just check this thing out and I get in and we check that thing out. And that thing actually is a problem because of the upstream effect that was happening over here or the Downstream effect that was happening over here. And I point at those problems and now you're asking me to kind of like fight all these fires with no definition of what success looks like, no defined outcome for the engagement. That's gonna be a tough position for everybody because we don't know what success looks like. And then also the creator might be left with, hey, I paid you to come in and help, but we don't feel like we got that value. It's like, well, we probably shouldn't have been there to begin with in that case. - Okay, Josh, my last question to you is this. Who is a creator that's on your radar right now that's doing something really impressive and deserves a shout out? - Okay, you know who I'm actually gonna say? I wanna look him up really quick. Okay, his name is Mr. Wobbles. All right, Mr. Wobbles on Instagram. He creates music and he does it in like an improvisational way. He's an incredible musician. I think the dude deserves some sort of like record deal. Somebody like, find this man production opportunities within the music industry because he's super talented, funny dude, and he's like the guy that I go to if I'm just like, if I need a good pick me up is Mr. Wobbles. - Nice, nice, that's a good recommendation. Do you know him by chance? - I don't, but his name's Austin, And Austin, if you're watching this man, I'd love to be in touch. We'll make the connection with Mr. Wilms, yeah. Let's go. Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode. If you're new here, please consider subscribing or leaving us a review on the audio platforms that helps us as a very new show. If you want to check out another episode, just look through our library. It's starting to build up. We're at like 40 episodes now. And we have a new one coming out every single Thursday. So thank you for being here. And I will see you then. (soft music)