Scaling A Business Without Losing Your Creativity with Sam Ramsden

You want to get paid, enjoy your day's day, follow your passions, and I think I lost doing what I love and doing what I'm good at by doing the thing that can pay me. My business partner left what was granted as a video tech agency. Their mandate was to try and be the uber of video production. I've always been more interested in the story's telling aspect than the building a growth agency. I think you always have to start with founder, let's say, I don't think there's any gain away. So I knew it was the most valuable place I could be for the company. It just wasn't aligned with the most valuable place for me. It's important to have someone, the solo, pre-noor life can be really tough. Whether it's a co-founder or some kind of accountability, having that really transformed what we are doing. There'll be a lot of people listening to this where they've maybe got to peak freelance and there isn't really anything beyond that unless they make that decision to start hiring people and actually say, "Do you know what? I'm going to grow a studio." What would be your advice to those people in terms of whether they should do it or whether they shouldn't? I think. I think most film production studios are usually limited by geography, but with Dojo you fix that problem. Can you just tell us a little bit about how and why you decided on the business model that you've got? The how and why are circumstantial, I think. I was running an independent bootie production company which was essentially me trying to look slightly bigger than I was and getting nice gigs and traveling around. So that was a sort of, you know, I had my favourite cameraman and we did travel to places and we're having a lovely time. But my business partner left what was sort of branded as a video tech agency and they had an interesting model which is sort of the thing we started with and tried to hone, which was having 50,000 creators around the world and going to the big brands and saying, "Work with us as your production partner and then we will source local crew for boots on the ground whenever you're producing on location content." They did pretty well and they brought on some really big clients, but the quality control was horrific. Right. And even within that mandate, you can see that there's like a low common denominator of quality control and service. They tend to route at quite a low rate and then they just get people saying, "Yeah, I'll do it for that." Yeah, that was the first sort of thought I had when I heard that business model was like, "How do you ensure that it actually looks good?" Because like most creatives are actually pretty concerned. Their main thing when you talk about scanning or growing is letting go of that creative control, finding someone who's as good as you that can basically create the same level of output. So how did you solve that problem? So our plan was to just, I tried to coin it as like the Little Bear's porridge, which is like not too hot, not too cold. So it was about having enough creators globally that you always had availability and you always had geographical location. The objective was to never fly like the main crew, maybe a director or a creative director, but the core crew for any video production should be local people who are able to get that without flying. But yeah, so it was really about finding this like middle ground of still using that kind of model where we're tapping into local creatives, but making sure that the quality was assured from the beginning. And obviously we'd sometimes have to unboard new crew. But the bar to unboarding was a lot higher than the example from that other agency. So I think it was built out of this idea that we could do that model a bit better and still make it feel like one production team even though it's many. And so that sounds like a cluster fuck to me. Like when I think about that as a concept, I think it's hard enough to make sure your own team are delivering a certain standard. Let alone one that's fully remote and kind of probably has their own style and way of doing things. So can you just talk us through a little bit like where do you start with that? A, how do you find the right people and B, how do you make sure that they actually deliver something that is of a quality that you feel proud of and that you feel you promise to that incline. Yeah, I think there's a pretty rigorous onboarding process and then briefing process within each project. So there's the onboarding of creatives and crew for any potential future job. And then there's also that all right, here's the brief, here's how we're going to sometimes it would be one project shot by three different teams in three different locations. So there may be a bringing a kit list together to make sure we're shooting on the same kind of camera profiles. There may be a lighting blueprint to make sure the mood was similar. And that's really the sort of secret source of the production team is to really know what that process is to make it as much as possible feel like one crew. Which is quite interesting because that's like evidence that creativity can be almost standardized. Did you ever feel like it got too much of a kind of factory or it got too boring or too predictable or like it took the fun out of it? No, I think there's some interesting use cases. A big one was customer stories. So we'd work with a lot of companies who, when we niched into tech and we can talk about that later, a huge part of creating social proof and part of your marketing funnel is building those customers success stories out. And I actually before we started using this model was working with Dell Technologies on their customer reference program. So I was traveling around shooting in loads of different places around Amir for their customer stories and had a great time doing it. But the interesting part of the model servicing that was well customer stories tend to come with less budget than say big brand campaigns. So how can you build a product line which is delivering affordable but high quality customer stories? And that was through localize crew with an overarching brief and us being that production partner are holding every project to account. So you niched into something very specific which was also a specific problem. Which I think from what I've kind of seen over the last 10 years is really the only way to kind of product ties and even scale. Any kind of creative output is where you have to know like, kind of this is the avatar, this is the problem we're solving for them. This is the process like it's quite predictable how we solve that problem. You probably couldn't have done that at scale in terms of well we just make video for anyone that needs video right. Yeah and it took us quite a while and I think I was probably the big roadblock to niching in. Okay. But we realized in 2019 we had the opportunity to go and pitch in New York to the world's biggest venture capitalist investor in tech. Specifically they had 240 tech companies in their portfolio. They had a like hyper growth scheme putting them through all this sort of growth stage learning and incubating. And we pitched our video services to them so it was not trying to get them as a client. Yeah. And we went to New York to do it and it was potentially 240 clients not one client. Yeah. And we completely balls out that pitch. Really? And I think we pitched with a lot of holes in it the company that we needed to be not exactly what we were. And we knew what the pain points were. We didn't communicate well. We didn't ask enough questions. I learned so much from that absolute failure of a pitch and expensive one. It's a very expensive failure. And we've essentially become over the past five years, six years, been trying to become that company we needed to be back then. And part of that was understanding that niching your ICP so we went from everything to sports and tech to tech to just software. And now we're just a SaaS video production company providing three services, brand, product and customer. And you realize even within what sounds like a much smaller market, it's still a huge market. But the language you can use to speak to those ICPs is so much more precise. Why did it take such a long time? I think I was a big roadblock because I thought it would be less fun and less creative. Yeah. What were some of the other things that came up? Because this is a super common for creatives when I try and get them to do this. What else came up for you? What were some other fears or resistance? I think we had done a few cool projects. And to be fair, we still have a few legacy clients outside of that niche market. And they come back to us because we've done it for numerous years. It's so funny how people think like as soon as you make that decision, like every single client that doesn't fall within that just disappears. Because our planet Earth never wants to work with you. Yeah, so we work with Iron Man, the triathlon company. And we do a lot of their race videos. So we send Caramann and Live Editor, drone operator. We go and film the whole race. We do a live edit which is shown to all of the athletes at the end. Wow. And then we do the highlight which helps and generate participation for the next year. We've shot with them in 16 different countries across Europe, with local crews in each country. And that's actually helped us build out that sort of crew capability in Europe. But they're still client. We work them every year. Yeah. And we do. And we worry that you weren't able to do more projects like that. I was worried that kind of work would dry up. And actually, it doesn't. You're just helping yourself. You still get referrals. You still get people who just know you as good creative producers of visual storytelling. But that laser vision on what your model is built to serve best is really helpful for just getting better and better at delivering that value. So you didn't think, well, you thought that they would disappear. What were some other reasons that you had so much resistance to? We can use the word niching, but ultimately defining a really clear ICP and kind of honing in on that particular person. The reality for me personally was that I've always been as interested if not more interested in the storytelling aspect than the building a growth agency and scaling something. And so for me, it was probably the worry that we wouldn't be able to tell as many cool stories and get the opportunities to do something really cool and creative. And I think that was actually a wrong assumption, but at the time when it felt like boxing yourself into a certain little area. And I think that was just a worry. It was like, oh, I'm never gonna be creative again. - Yeah, and it's so interesting. I've found that the opposite is actually true. So before this, when I was running like a marketing agency, and then I was like DJing and doing all these different things, 'cause I had all these different interests, but then when I really niche down in the kind of business consulting space for creative studios, it's like the more specific I've been about who I help. It's almost like the more creative I can get with this solution because I'm really clear on what the problem is. Whereas I think a lot of the time with creatives, we're not really clear on what the problem is. We aren't very clear on what we can do in the creative output that we can deliver, but often if those two things don't marry up, then we're left with this gap of going, I really wanna do all this cool creative storytelling stuff, but we don't really have enough clients, or it always feels like feast or famine, or and it's because you haven't really nailed that problem. - Yeah, I think we do live in a world of like, generalists and then hyper-specialization, like people who like get deeper and deeper into, you know, when someone does a PhD on like two years in the 15th century of like medieval history, whatever, it's like that happens within the tech world, 'cause it's so complicated that you have to dig deeper and deeper into a specialization to have value. And I think we realized that when we did that a bit with say tech companies, and we started consulting with them rather than just taking a brief and trying to deliver what we thought they wanted. The results would be so much better 'cause we understood pain points and bi-personers and customer journey and all of those things instructed the creative in a way that we're almost becoming an agency doing like a deep dive strategy before we even begin. We're not necessarily trying to go the full hog and become that full service agency, but we do do quite a lot of that work as part of the desire to deliver the best products at the end. - Yeah, absolutely. I'm always interested in these kind of transitional points in people's journey. And so we can talk a little bit about where you're transitioning to at the moment, but just take me back to, I think it was 2015 and so you got fired from your job. - Well, no, so I was in TV and I was basically going from job to job and I started off wanting to do environmental documentaries and ended up doing like constructed reality, pretty low end sort of. - Okay. - Basically reality TV stuff and I was doing a lot of cast and it was like weird hours sort of going on Skype with weird people and creating TV that I would never watch. - Yeah. - So I ended up going freelance off the back of a conversation with someone at a house party at midnight saying they needed to buy in the scenes videographer for a bikini shoot. (laughing) - You're like, so like, do you have a cat? I was like, I'm a filmmaker. So do you have a camera? I was like, yeah, of course I do. And then he was like, well, here's the budget. I was like, fine, and when I got a camera the next day, 5D3. - Nice. - And went and learnt how to use it. - So did TV. - So was it more that you just didn't feel fulfilled in that work you were doing? - I think I had a big issue with, and I always have a bit with that sort of authority and people saying how it is and also the sort of hierarchy, especially within TV, you're like, how long you have to do at this level to be ready for that level? - Yeah. - And I just went to a director who is like 42 and he was like, I was a run of five years and I was AP for like seven years and I've only just become a director and I'm not even directing stuff, I enjoy. I was like, I can't be honest with you all that. - Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? When you see somebody who's that far ahead of you, I remember I had the same experience working in agency, talking to like a creative director because when I first started, I didn't really want to be there, but it was a really cool agency. And so in my head, I had this idea that I was going to sort of work my way up and then transition into more of a kind of creative role. And I remember sitting down with lunch, speaking to a director or a project manager was in that creative role and them telling me their journey but also them telling me what they did day to day. And I was like, I don't really want that. So where do we go from here? Because if I work my way up, I'm not even going to get the thing that I want. And so why am I even here? - Yeah. And I think it's important if you get that itch to scratch it and I was just like, you know what? The opportunity came up. I was already sort of interviewing for a few other crap jobs. I had the offer to work on TV show with a girl from Jordy Shaw who was going to try and get people who had broken up back together. - I can't. (laughing) - I can't take this job. - This is really what I'm passionate about. - So yeah, then I took that job and basically learnt to use the 5D3 created a sort of short promo BTS film for this girl. She was actually from Made in Chelsea. She launched a bikini line off the back of it. And I was like, but I learnt to edit. - You were like, I'm definitely not doing Jordy Shaw but Made in Chelsea. - Yeah, exactly. - And then off the back of that, I started working on art and then working in food and doing, you know, just growing and becoming more of a from a one man band into a director who used different DOPs and stuff. And then it was Tom who got fired from the tech agency. I was talking about. - That's why I got come to mind. - Came to me with the Iron Man opportunity. - Right, okay. - And said, I can't be involved, but there is a client Iron Man who are interested in potentially another video production service to fulfill this thing. So I got hold of them and they said, you know, we're interested in potentially looking at other production opportunities. And yeah, we sort of pitched that and then built from there. So we were built on a slightly undercover move. - Do you think if Tom hadn't come along with that opportunity, you would have grown agencies? - Yeah, all you just would have stayed. - It's a really interesting question because I, as I said, I've never been laser focused on growth and scale. And I've always been just like trying to build my own knowledge base and ability for storytelling with that's like directing or camera work or I was editing and grading. I was doing like, you know, as a lot of people do learning all of the skills within the sort of video production world. But Tom came in with the ambition and the solution. And then we started building something new from there. And I think that has been like an amazing growth story. And then it's come to a point where I've reverted back to like, oh, but I've really lost touch with that bit I had before. - Yeah. So just give, to give people some context for size, if you're happy to talk about sort of numbers and things. So when you were, let's say one man band with a few freelancers, what sort of revenue were you doing around that time? Do you remember? - I was probably at about 120K, but I was paying D.O.P.'s and I was paying soundies. And but I was doing a lot of the editing myself. I did use editors for when I was really busy. So I probably think profit wise, I was at about 60, 70K. - There must have been something within what you were doing. There must have been something that you weren't happy with in order for you to want to take that opportunity with Tom. Because if you were like, now actually this is just perfect, like this is all I want. - Yeah. - Then you probably wouldn't have gone. Or was it just because he presented the client? - I think full, full honesty. I think it was more to have a business partner. I don't think the opportunity was the main thing that excited me. I'd just been like self-driven for so long. And any time I had like an editor I'll come and work with, I just really cherished that day of like having someone to bounce ideas off. I was like, wow, I'd not sitting in my silo, just like tapping away, editing a thing or pre-producing something or trying to like come up with new ways of finding new clients or getting referrals. So it was really the main draw for me was like, oh, I can start a new thing with a actual business partner and like have that ability to bounce and create energy and have accountability as well. - Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. Like how important do you think having a co-founder is when you run a business of the size you're running at the moment? - It's important to have someone. The solo pre-no life can be really tough and there's a lot of times where you think of stuff and you're like, that's great, but because you haven't verbalized it and you haven't said someone, I'm going to do this. It's very easy when you get busy for that never to happen or just be forgotten it's like it's in the ether. Whereas I think whether it's a co-founder or some kind of accountability, having that really transformed what we are doing and he's great at just coming out with ideas whether they're good or bad. And we end up going on the London Business Growth Program and then the International Growth Program and I ended up going to LA to pitch to all the studios on a trade mission and all that happened 'cause he had seen a policy thought we should apply to this. - So would you say he's more the kind of like sales and business development, business growth and you're more the kind of like creative strategy? - Yeah, so he came from the sales team at the other agency. So he's always been in that sales world and he brought that skill set and that drive to what I was doing. And I had all of the production contacts until we brought Sophie in who had even more globally, but she's a head of production. But and I had the ability to speak to clients from a production perspective and 'cause I'd done all of the jobs when they say like, well, how'd you get great cameraman or great audio? I could speak to that 'cause I knew the technical language as well. And how big is Dojo now in terms of team and sort of revenue size? - We are at the moment seven in-house and that's me and Tom as co-founders, Sophia's head of production, producer Eve and editor Ropeo and then your growth manager, Libby. And then we've probably got about five to 10 editors, creative directors and freelance producers who have pretty much permanent launches. - Okay. - And do you still run that model where you outsource all over the world? - Yeah. - Because we still run that model. - And so did they then find and they let manage the talent? Those other ones? - Yeah, so the producers just end to him like project managers. Project managers and producers. So they're running the budgets. they're bringing on the crew, they're making sure the creative is delivered by the creative director. There's sort of through line for the whole thing, make sure post-production quite often, it's making sure the crew are ready to deliver on brief and once the footage is uploaded, our production, post-production team are ready to see through that creative brief as well. And yeah, I mean, we've got probably 40% of our clients are US based and we do a lot of work in the US and it is sometimes just working for them in the US with US creatives, but us as the sort of production partner and then they will also use us for a sort of localization within a mere or projects when they're trying to expand into new markets within other geographies. - It's such a cool model because we live in this like global digital economy and although you have to physically be in front of someone at the moment, AI might change that but you have to physically be in front of someone to actually do to shoot that film. You've really overcome that barrier, which is what I think stops a lot of filmmakers and videography studios from growing more and getting more clients like, "Well, we'd love more clients in the US 'cause they seem to have more budget," or "We'd love to work, but we don't really want to be flying out there every month." And so it's really cool. - The interesting thing is finding out which types of companies we can really help with this model. Like which types of sort of SaaS companies are in this point where we can actually change the game for them slightly. And it is quite often for these fast growth companies who are, they've gone from having one marketing person who building out a team of 10, 15, 20. And that comes with a huge amount more demand. They may have just raised Series B, Series C. They've got to now go into that sort of brand marketing world with their creating content on different channels and really maximizing their use of that sort of content marketing and brand storytelling piece. And within that, we took a sort of wild but we identified that there's always the brand storytelling element and then because it's tech, the product and then the customer. And that's why we really nailed into understanding those three storytelling verticals. - Yeah, and I guess that's also your IP. - Yeah, that's our IP. It's just like those other things we are great at leading you through. 'Cause there's, I said before, there's a consultancy piece which because you're not an agency, it's very hard to build for. But we realize doing that as part of the sales process actually helps build trust with our clients. It's like we are doing consultancy that an agency would charge you quite a lot for. But we are main thing is we wanna get to the point where you believe that we can deliver on the brief. - It's such an important and powerful thing. But if I reckon, like you say, you're kind of doing it for free, but I think if you looked, let's say you did 10 sales conversations and two of those became clients and both of those clients were worth, I don't know, 50K or whatever. So you've got 100K's worth of revenue than in fact through whatever your profit is. If you actually broke that down into the number of hours that you spend consulting, you probably are actually getting paid just not directly from those clients that you're doing that completely. - Just not when they don't buy it. - Yeah, buying the projects. - But what's what I mean? But even if you average that out, so the eight that didn't buy, because you won those two, and whatever that is, if you spread that out across the 10 conversations you had, because you won those two, that profit margin means that you were actually getting paid for that time. You just weren't getting paid by the person you actually consulted with. You were paid by the other two that actually you ended up with. - And I do think it is definitely part of the reason we've got quite a higher conversion rate, because you're coming in with that sort of IP. And actually a lot of these teams are learning on the fly, 'cause they've been sort of put together after a round of funding. - Yeah, it's one of the things that we've seen people have with the biggest impact. So we're working with a branding agency recently and they were really struggling with that. All of their work came from referrals and word of mouth. Their sales conversions were okay, but they weren't high considering that most of it was referrals and word of mouth. And so we came up with this thing, which was basically the brand master plan, which is kind of what they did with their clients anyway, when they started first working with them. And I said, "Just bring it this side "of the sales conversation." So do the brand master plan with people that have, they were like, "That's mad, that's like two grounds worth "or three thousand euros worth it." And I said, "Just do it." And from that, they did eight or whatever, and got however many. And that was like an extra hundred thousand worth of revenue on their bottom line, just because they bought something that they were doing after the sale to, before the sale, basically. - And it's interesting you see people doing this, say for LinkedIn as well, if people are trying to build their personal brand, the people I see doing really well have some IP and they give it away on LinkedIn and they say, "Hey, I've got a sales framework." - Just common framework, but like, some people, they will just like build a sort of crappy little framework on chat GPT and just sort of send it out to boost some vanity metrics. But other people will be like, "I believe in my framework." And I think this will help the people who are in my community. And if I give it away, quite a lot of these people may go off and use it and find it useful, but actually not have the time to implement it properly. And therefore, will come back to me, 'cause I'm the person they got the value from. So if you actually have a valuable framework, then using it as lead magnet is actually a great idea. And I think that's kind of what we've done with this consultancy piece before signing a brief. And like, we understand a lot of the pain points in like brand storytelling for SaaS companies. So why don't we use that as part of the discovery process and then see if it lands? - So if you look back at when you were a One Man Band, versus what you're doing with Dojo now, what are some of the advantages of having a small studio versus being a One Man Band? And what are some of the things that you don't enjoy or you wish you had more of? - The advantages are definitely the freedom. I remember during the second COVID, which was November 2020. And we had probably been working together me and Tom for a couple of years by that point in the new iteration of Dojo. And I had already, I was getting more involved in the creative back then, but it was definitely owing towards the model we're going with, which is just like, you know, we are founder-led sales and the rest is delivered by the production team. I'm never really on set. So I'm a laptop manager and COVID sucks. So I went to Canary Islands and I spent like a couple of months out there lunchtime on the beach, clock off at half-four-go surfing. - Yeah. - So if you're talking about advantages, that was definitely a big one, 'cause I wasn't like, "Worry now is gonna be, "need to be on set in three days' time." And fly quickly, it sort of enabled that digital nomad thing. - Yeah. - But also the ambition, right? Like, there is a plateau to independent sort of freelance creative. Like, obviously the better you get, the higher your rate can be, but you're constantly chasing new projects while you're working and killing yourself on the current project. You're always having to do your absolute best work so you get repeat customers. And that should be how it is. And that's why our model works, 'cause all of our creatives are always trying to do their best work. Where sometimes in-house creatives can get a bit. - That loads of, yeah. - So the benefit was the scale and the ambition as well, and having a business partner who is all about growth and delivering scalability with the thing we're building. - And what did that allow you to do? Why was that important for you personally? - Well, it is something that I think anyone wants if off is the ability to do the same thing while increasing what you're earning. And that is what scale was providing, was doing the same amount of hours a day, but creating something that was generating more revenue, generating more profits and generating more value for the stakeholders within the business, which is me, Tom, and Sophie has a stake as well. So that's the exciting thing, building something, thinking, "Would we ever exit this business?" What, like speaking to business mentors who we brought on and them talking about, "Well, if you can get to this, "e bit, dar, then here's your multiplier, "and you start looking at that." And being like, "Wow, an exit would be interesting "if we managed to grow three X in the next few years." So all of that stuff, it's like business building stuff. But when you say the sort of the downsides, I think all of that is great when it's absolutely flying and you're like, "Everything I'm doing is going towards "this sort of dream of building a business, "maybe exiting, maybe just building valuable "and I'm a big builder." When you have the tough moments, you're suddenly like, "Oh, I'm not enjoying my day to day." And now I've lost sight of that vision of why I'm grinding every day and not necessarily doing what I love. And that's when you can stop being like, "Oh, I would actually really love to be telling stories "and being on set and doing the things I used to do "because back then I didn't necessarily care "about growing 2X every year." So I think that was it. It's that sort of alignment versus ambition. - Yeah. - Sort of contrast or balance. - What would you say to Younger Sam? If you think about before you actually made that decision to go freelance and you kind of explained the road ahead, there'll be a lot of people listening to this who are in that position where they've maybe got to kind of peak freelance and there isn't really anything beyond that unless they make that decision to start hiring people and actually say, "Gener what, I'm gonna grow a studio." What would be your advice to those people in terms of whether they should do it or whether they shouldn't? How do you think people should decide? - I mean, there's a massively overused Japanese concept called "Ikigai." And it's overused 'cause it actually makes a lot of-- - It's also overused 'cause I put it in my first book and nobody saw it and I was really popular. - Well, you made it overused when popularizing it. It's essentially that balance I'm talking about of like you wanna get paid and you ideally maybe wanna grow value out of something. You enjoy your day-to-day follow your passions and do something you're actually gonna perform really well at and I think the ambition of the potential thing can sometimes blind side you to the other things like doing what you love and doing what you're good at. And I think I lost doing what I love doing what I'm good at. by doing the thing that can pay me. 'Cause I don't love sales, especially the type of sales we did within Dojo, quite a lot of volume, quite a lot of outreach and a complicated pipeline and never meeting the actual person or delivering the actual product to that person was a big part of it. And doing what I'm good at, I'm not actually much of a salesman in that respect, but I can do sales in a certain way, but not in the way that Dojo required. So I think I would say, as long as you're checking in on that, every day, just checking in those three things and balance them. And we have it for projects as well. We have a fun, fame and fortune like Triangle, which you try and assess every project with before and then we check whether we were right afterwards. - That's cool. Can you talk us through that real quick? - Yeah, so the idea is, and this is, we worked with a businessman or called Adam Holmes. He works in the Red Bull Agency and then he went and built his own production company and ex-ded that production company called Brother. And we've been working with him for a while and we were checking him being like, "How do you ever say no to a project?" This is a few years ago when we were basically never saying no. And he's like, "Oh, we have this great system. "It's the 3Fs and you have a Triangle "and you score each one out of two." And it's basically a litmus test for looking at your pipeline and being like, "Right, if there are any zeros, "then I'd get rid of those." - Right. - Like, so fun, fame, fortune out of two, you're basically saying, "Are we all gonna enjoy working this project? "Is it gonna fill us with energy?" 'Cause it's fun, it's creative, whatever. Or it's with great people. Famous like, when we share this, if we can share this, how much is it gonna reach out to our community? Could we win an award for it? And then fortune is obviously like, what's the profit margin? How much are we making on this? What's the future potential of this client to spend? And those three together, you know, hardly ever have a six. You shouldn't do any zeros. And you'll find you have a lot of like, twos and threes, but you should focus on the fours and fives and maybe start getting rid of the ones as well. Why is it out of two rather than say out of five? - We decided out of two because if we did it out of one at first and then people were like, "Oh, well, it's not a one, but it's not a zero." So why would we not have like 10? - Two complicated, I think. - Okay. - Yeah, I think you basically just want to have as few tiers as possible, while also having the flexibility to be like, well, this is kind of in the middle. If it's a 111, then it's like a zero, then it's like none of those. If it's a one, it's like, yeah, if it's a two, it's like, wow, I would give us so much fame. - Yeah. - So much, like they're paying a million, but actually we can't share the project and I don't know how much fun we'd have on it. So that's gonna be a two for fortune. So I think you tend to have mostly two, threes and fours once you add all six up, three up to three. - And so what's your cutoff? Zero obviously and one as well, a lot. - The zero, like it depends where you're at 'cause we obviously we have like monthly revenue targets and if we're like at 50%, come the last week of the month, we're probably taking a one, but we did decide we'd never take a zero. And that also we had a minimum project budget which we started sticking to about two years ago which really helped us in the sales process as well. From the very first call, you could be like, well, we work on projects from 5K up and it's now 10K up. It's just like, you know, that's the bar and you can stop a lot of pointless conversations by starting without quite early on. - Yeah, if they're just like, I'm just saying, - I don't want to say how do you like it? - I think you like it. - 1500 quid. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - We're free lots. - Yeah, go on, Fiber. - Yeah, find me 10 years ago. - Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you're kind of checking in with yourself around this Ike guy. You've got the fun, fame, fortune for actual projects but it talks me more about you personally 'cause you've obviously been through this journey a few times. The first one was when you were employed and you were working on stuff for Jordy Shore and stuff and you're like, this isn't really for me. Then you had your free lance business and sounds like there wasn't really a lot wrong there but there was just this opportunity where you thought, "Oh, I don't just want to be on my own anymore." I actually want someone to bounce ideas off of. There's this guy that's come along that has this energy and this desire for growth and he's got actual projects and he's got a background that supports this. So that was more of a kind of opportunity rather than I'm not doing what I want. We're kind of talking to me about where you're at now in terms of I guess the Ike guy and where having a studio and positioning yourself in the way that you've positioned it has left you personally in terms of that kind of fulfillment and what you love and what you feel like you're good at. - Yeah, so I think I checked in with Tom and Sophie a few times over the past two years. Just being like, look, it may have even been three years ago that I said, we have a good cadence of directors meeting so we just all check in with each other, ask the right questions, talk about where we're at, whether the company's going, all that kind of stuff. And I just said, I can do this for a bit longer but I can't do it forever because it's just not what I enjoy and why I'm doing this. If I could do this in the like financial services industry and make three or four times the amount of money and I'd be doing the same thing day to day. - Yeah, yeah. - What's the point? So I checked in and then a year goes by and then I'll check in again as well. I still not much saying. And then I think I got to a point of realizing that I needed to have some kind of like final conversation to look at the opportunities for me to just get back a certain amount of what I enjoy doing into my day to day role. Tom was really receptive to that. He understood that to be honest, Dojo probably had become the thing it needed to be. And he was the natural person for that to suit because he loves selling, he loves growing, he's very ambitious. He doesn't really care about who delivers the actual product whereas I really do and I really want to be involved. So we talked about it for a while and it was lucky that probably the third time I'd been like, I really need to look at what my role is because it is still just Foundled Sales and it's I'm a salesperson and I'm never really touching the deliverables with the product. And we're just through Tom's sort of industry managed to have a creative partnership with London Techweek where we did a pitch booth and therefore had a stand and it's first time having like proper an activation, a big event like that. And we were running the pitch booth which was for founders to pitch their businesses and then all of the videos would be circulated to the investor network at London Techweek and we had 30 slots through three days and we had about 200 people apply for it. - Wow. - And we realized you know, this is like getting that face time for a founder and the idea of being able to do your pitch or tell your story or say why you've built this thing which is like takes a lot of passion and courage and commitment was a really valuable service and off the back of that we did a couple of webinars talking about the differentiation between like telling your brand story and for an early stage tech company telling a founder story and what a founder like personal brand how that could show up in like video format for their storytelling and building their personal brand. And then that kind of just started sort of creating this idea that we could actually create something that Dojo can provide with that 10-gram minimum spend of a more repeated storytelling service that would be more of a retainer model just a video first founder storytelling engine. And we talked about that for ages and started doing some market research speaking to loads of people and it like everyone was like, yeah, this is great idea. We're not the only people who have thought about it but we certainly have a lot of the connection points to speak to that direct ICP and I was like, great, I'll do it and I'll be the person who delivers it and that sort of has led me to now potentially launching, well, definitely launching the new product under a new name in January. And so that's like a offshoot of Dojo but you're taking the lead on that both from a sales and delivery perspective. - Yeah. - Okay. - So we've really just gone like right. We've built a sort of bit of a stupidly complicated corporate structure where we have a holding company that owns both Dojo films and this new entity and I've actually taken my old company I used to run Dojo films out of dormancy to create this new thing. And then we've just got clear leadership separation where this home is gonna be day-to-day running Dojo I'm gonna be running the new brand show up and I couldn't talk about why we decided to rebrand in terms of sales messaging and just a very clear ICP for each company. Hopefully we're adding new value and a new potential sales funnel from one company to the other complimentary services as well. So we're hoping it will add value to the overall group. - What was some of your fears? Why don't you think you made that move earlier? - For what Dojo films needed, knew what it needed of me. And so I would every now and then be like, I really wanna work on this project at the top of the year. Yeah sure, get your hands dirty on that one. And I'd really enjoy it and I'd go and set and be the interviewer 'cause that's what I did for quite a few years beforehand. And I'd just get a taste of it and I'd sort of, but that would be enough. It would be like the week after it'd be like, you've really formed behind the things like KPI and like where's your funnel? Why haven't you got many discovery calls in the calendar and I'll be like, I was on set. - Yeah, is there any reason that you didn't like bring in a salesperson to replace you since you'd done that Founder Led Sales for so long? - Well we have now. So we tried rather than in house salesperson, which Tom having been in sales for a few different companies said is notoriously hard to find someone who's good. I think we instead tried to load a different sort of marketing and sales taps and suppliers. So we'd just called it just turning different taps on. So we did like PPC on like Google Ads we did different sort of campaigns, a lot of LinkedIn activity. We've just tried a load of things, like email marketing, different supplies for that. We then set up our own email marketing. We were kind of trying lots of different sales systems rather than bringing in a sales person. But now we have brought in that person with my transition going into selling and delivering a new product outside of Dojo. Do you think that the fact that you've got delivery in this new thing will make up for the fact that you don't really feel like a sales person and like sales isn't your ultimate passion? Yeah, no, it's interesting because I think I've really enjoyed some of the sales I've done at Dojo films, but normally it's when I've met the person and I've actually been involved in delivering the project or campaign. And I worked with a company, a day-sense company. We were helping with delivering some brand campaign and then social activation underneath and was quite involved in how that looked in the structure of it and which supplies we used and like I was just far more involved in that and got to know the people and met them in person. And I loved it and like I enjoyed the prospecting phase of that because I knew that I was also going to be delivering what was delivered at the end and I feel attached to the value of what we're delivering. Whereas I feel like I maybe unexpectedly a bit of a sort of control freak or slightly CD about the product that we deliver because sometimes I find it really hard to sell a thing and pass it on. Yeah, it's really hard. I think you have to be a certain type of person to enjoy that. I think you have to be like, I don't know what you have to be, but I'm not like that. Like I really struggled. So when we grew out business and I had a head coach and I had like a community manager and stuff and just kind of doing the founder, led sales or even got to a point where my head coach was doing our sales and I basically wasn't, not wasn't doing anything. I was doing the IP and the systems and stuff to make sure that all the team were actually working, but feeling disjointed and seeing someone get on boarded and pay you money and then like further down the line three months, this isn't working. That's not working. I'm like, I just couldn't help but want to get involved again and fix everything. And I think, I don't know, there's someone to put in as they don't. They're like, oh, well, we haven't got the right people. We haven't got the right systems. And so they're quite happy to go to work on the systems or the people. Whereas I kind of feel inclined to just actually like, I think it was 2020. I think it was 24 when I did, we've actually just released our 2025 wrap video, which is like a sort of show real thing. But I remember watching the 2024 one being like, I haven't seen half of this. I haven't even seen the final deliverables for some of the projects we're delivering to clients. I don't always see the ones for the counts that I worked on, but some of the stuff clients Tom had brought in, I may not know who the lead contact is for that client and I may not have seen some of the projects we've delivered to them. And it may be, oh, the great, this is what scale is. But Tom enjoys that. He might seize it as a really cool fact that he hasn't seen half the stuff we're producing. Yeah. Because that means we're producing loads of stuff. Whereas for me, it was like, I went to him and was like, part of my role. I'd love to actually have some kind of like creative review and optimization for all of our clients where I could deliver them like, here's what we've produced. Because that would mean part of my role would be to watch every single piece of content we produce for a client. Feed back on it, say, here's what we could do better next year. But I think for Tom, that was like, well, that's loads of time you'll be doing all that. Yeah, it's like a nice to have. Yeah. Why do you think Tom put you, or why did you guys agree on you having a sales role from the beginning if you feel like that isn't necessarily your zone of genius? To be honest, I think it's just the most effective role for the founder to have at some point. I think you always have to start with founder, let's say. Yeah. I don't think there's any getting away from that. And it's just the most powerful way of doing that sort of discovery to customer process is just, I built this thing and I know exactly what value it can provide to you. And I can react to your questions in the most effective and compelling way. Yeah. All of those things. It just wasn't aligned with the most valuable place for me to be operating. It's interesting that you're still keeping it in your role. There must be something about it that you do enjoy. And I guess that goes back to you enjoy it if you can see the deliverables and you can see the, I guess it's about impact, isn't it? You can see the impact that that sale actually made on their bottom line or whatever they're trying to achieve versus you make a sale. You see the transaction happen, but you have no idea what the end result was. I think the one thing I'd change, we get shop up and running and we can bring in some kind of sales function would be the meetings booker and maybe the discovery sort of qualification process to some extent. Yeah. So I do think that's the part of the Dojo sales process I didn't enjoy. It's like the outreach and you never really know whether someone is a good prospect for you until you've talked to them. No. Yeah. You can have a really good sort of system for disqualifying lots of people and not just pissing off people for no reason, but you still probably need that first discovery call to ask the right question. Be like, yeah, I really think you could benefit from our service. And once I'm there, I quite enjoy that process. Yeah. But I hate the chaos and inefficiency and time wasted and rejection. Tom, he enjoys a bit of rejection. I hate it. So all of that stuff is stuff I don't mind. But within show up, I think, I've got a really linear business model of onboarding clients, three clients a month. I've got quite a big list of people out who I know would at least be interested if the cost was right for the product for the service. So it's not that stressful sales process. It's just having a load of conversations, maybe even giving people a tester of the product and being like, hey, look, if you think that could be good for you, then let's have a conversation. For me, that's a much different sales process to what I've been doing previously. Yeah. Because especially with the volume as well, you do have to have a lot of those initial conversations. And it's like from touchpoint number one, even if it's an inbound, so someone downloads a lead magnet or puts in an inquiry, you still have to have to follow up the schedule of the call, like sometimes if they rearrange. And so it's all really just kind of like admin and logistics. I think it's, and that's why you have like setters and closets. I think it's kind of two different roles really for sure. Yeah. Sam, is there anything that we haven't spoken about today that you think would be valuable for people to hear? The takeaway from me just exploring the journey I've been through is that it's that desire to both be completely fulfilled with what you're doing and also be fulfilled in what value you're creating, whether that is just financial or whether it's security or whether it's working the right place or whatever that is. There's the balance there that unchecked can get blink of vision and buy us to one side or the other. And I do think as a creative, if you build a system where you are checking in a bit like that fun, fame, fortune, triangle for projects, but for yourself. Yeah. You could work that system on yourself and just check in. And weirdly, we actually did that when we first started out me and Tom, because during COVID, we are loads of times. But we were like finding all these sort of like business, heuristics for how to like check in on yourself and make sure you've like built like a five year plan and a 30 year vision for where you want to be all that kind of stuff. But I'd say it's more important to do it less in depth, not like what where do you want to be in 30 years, but more often. And if you can do it once a month or even once a week, just to be like, oh, like I really enjoyed doing this, maybe I can find opportunities to do a bit more of that in my day to day or week to week. Yeah. We do like a 90 day review without clients as a minimum. And it's always like, what can you celebrate for the last 90 days? Like what was amazing? What lessons did you learn? You know, what do you need to do more of? What do you need to stop doing? What do you need to continue doing? Kind of a bit of a, just a whole analysis. And it's crazy because people have to be like, that's obvious, isn't it? But when you actually write it down, a, I forgot I even did that project or, oh, that's interesting when I wrote that down. What was it about that that I really enjoyed? And then you can look at kind of like your personal values and what you want more of and what you want less of. And even like for me, I've realized that because freedom is such an important thing for me, I've realized it's not that I don't like coaching people. It's just that I don't like this idea of having to be on specific calls at specific times. And so like some of my mentors will run like a weekly call, which is basically their kind of like sales pipeline. So like the guy we had on yesterday does like LinkedIn for breakfast every Monday morning. And it generates him loads of leads. But I said to him, I was like, man, the idea of showing up at that time every Monday morning, especially with traveling, sometimes there might be in a different time zone. And now I've got to be there at like nine p.m. at night is just hell to me. And so for me, freedom is about being able to support people, but in more of a like an asynchronous way where I still know that I can help them and support them. And there will still be some things that are regular, but it's like, I'm coming into something like once a month, for example, rather than every single week, I have to be on this call or I've got all these one to one's booked because that's not freedom for me. So I think it's like working out what are those important things for you? Freedom, finance, like whatever it is. And then but what does that actually mean? Like what needs to happen in order for you to feel free and when don't you feel free? Like what all the times you don't feel free and then looking at those lists? Yeah. And I think that is so accountable just for the individual. And there's a whole load of different personalities. You release a podcast episode recently exploring that sort of what makes you stressed and have you built a business that makes you stressed. Yeah. And is the wrong business for your personality type? And the earlier someone can check in like we've both been through a bunch of stuff that has enabled us to get some level of a understanding of our personality type, right? I mean, when I talk on this focus, I feel like I'm not fully there yet, but I'm sort of getting a few things in check with what I need from my day to day. But I do think it is the more you can work that out and then understand how to facilitate it, the better you're gonna be as a wealth creator as well as a creative. - Yeah, 100% man, absolutely. Where can people connect with you, where can they find out more about what you do if they've enjoyed listening to this podcast? - I am a LinkedIner. And I'm pretty much off every other platform now, actually, I've just, I'm just, bend it all off, 'cause just do one thing well. And also LinkedIn doesn't make you sort of dooms grow like the platform. - Yeah, just want something to offer bridge as much as I've had less time lost to the East. - Yeah, me too. You don't get sucked into it. But there's still just a nut. - They're probably working. - Yeah, they probably are. (laughs) - And yeah, like check out, check out, show up.london for the new thing and dojofilm.co.uk for the original OG. - Yeah, yeah. Put the links in the description below. Nice, thanks for being a guest, Sam. Cheers, mate. Thanks for having me off.