Grow Your Video Business with Ryan Koral

What do you do when the struggles get to be too much? How do you deal with the fears and frustrations of being an entrepreneur? We have all been there, and they will happen throughout your career, but today's guest Whitney Powell has some insight and inspiration to share that will help you break free. Whitney began her career in LA after graduating from film school but soon realized that the Holly...

How often do you feel like you are overworked and underpaid? I'm sorry to say this, but you only have yourself to blame. Today on the podcast, Matt and I (Ryan) are opening up about the struggles we've faced in our businesses, both early on and more recently, and how we overcame them. We cover a lot of the info you probably never though about when you got into business in the first place including...

We all want to be big business moguls like Mark Cuban or Steven Spielberg. We all want to scale our businesses to the upper echelons. But first we have take tiny steps before the big leaps, and to do that, we need to surround ourselves with people we can lean on, rely on, and laugh with. Do you have those people? Dan and Dana of Gnarly Bay are a team of young and ambitious filmmakers that make uni...

If you're like me, and most other creative business owners, you're really good at starting projects, but not always at finishing through on them. You have a ton of amazing ideas but most of them never get acted upon, and it feels like if only you could find the time to actually implement these thoughts your business would be unstoppable. If that sounds familiar, this is completely normal. You're m...

What's the first thing you think of when I mention the word "lawyer"? It's ok, you can come out from under the bed. I know most of us creatives are easily scared off by the thought of lawyers, contracts, accounting and the like. We've all heard about hourly rates that are waaaay out of our price range, and we work with such great people that we'll never actually need a contract to enforce to prote...

Do you ever feel like if only you could convince your wedding clients to get rid of the photographer on the wedding day your job would be so much easier, and your films would come out better? As videographers, most of us have felt this way at some point. But as today's guest, Sachin Khona points out, the problem is not that there's a photographer there vying for the same angles and moments as we a...

I know as well as anyone that it's only too easy to focus on the tactical, hands on aspects of dealing with clients, chipping away at the never-ending to do list, and practicing our craft in an effort to maintain and grow our businesses. The thing is that when we do this, we often tend to get sucked in, overwhelmed, and burned out. Adrian Koehler is a performance coach who helps high-level entrepr...

If you've been hanging around Sherpa land for a while, you know how passionate we are about building teams around ourselves so that we can live the lives we want and not be overwhelmed by our work, no matter how much we love it. Jordan Bunch is an Austin-based wedding filmmaker, and host of the Wedding Film Academy Podcast, who realized early on that by hiring a team, he could free up the time to...

Have you ever heard the phrase "content is king"? It's a phrase that is sold to creatives the world over encouraging them to continue to put their best work. We're told that if we do, sooner or later, we'll catch our break and get discovered. The thing is, it's not enough. Sure we need to be putting out quality work, but our work alone, no matter how good it is, will rarely get us where we want to...

Do you ever find yourself watching TV, and when a commercial for a big national or even international brand comes on, find yourself thinking, "I could've shot that." Many of us believe we have what it takes to produce that same quality of work, but we have absolutely no idea about what it takes to break into the world of commercial advertising. If that sounds like you, do we ever have a treat for...

Quick question for you. If you wanted to take 8 weeks to volunteer in South America with limited wifi, is your business set up in a way that you could do it? If you're anything like me, and most small film companies out there, I'm guessing the answer is no, and if that's the case, then this is the perfect episode for you. Shannon Avery is the founder of Hoo Films, a California-based wedding film c...

Ok, so first off I want to share that Matt and I were called out by one of our followers a couple of weeks ago about the lack of women we have on the podcast. This was by no means an intentional decision but rather a result of us just being better networked with male filmmakers and educators. We're super appreciative of the feedback and we're going to be making a much greater effort to find talent...

Ok, so to be completely honest, I don't even know how to sum up my conversation with today's guest, Dane Sanders. I left our call completely jacked up, inspired, and motivated to be better, and I have a feeling this episode is going to do the same for you. Dane spent 12 years as a professional photographer before a "leadership book [he] snuck into the photography community" took off and helped him...

We're going to try something a bit different on the podcast this week, but I think you're going to enjoy it. Since launching the Studio Sherpas podcast we've received a ton of questions both from listeners, as well as members of our Selling Like A Sherpa course, which we recently relaunched. In this episode we wanted to address some of the most common questions we get and give our take on how we a...

We've talked before on the show about how to start landing high end weddings and corporate clients, but I don't know if anyone has ever laid out the strategy in such simple terms as today's guest, Caleb Lee. Don't be fooled by Caleb's age, he's been doing this for a long time and knows a thing or two about not only filmmaking, but running a successful business. At 16 he sold his landscaping busine...

Have you ever thought about moving past the solopreneur, one person band, or maybe husband/wife duo business model and build up a team around you? Those of us who have made the leap to hiring a team often only realized that we needed one after nearly working ourselves to death trying to do it all ourselves. Part of the reason is that most of us have absolutely no idea what makes a creative team cl...

Let's face it: It can be hard being a self employed filmmaker. Not only do we have to worry about how to run our businesses better, find new leads, and keep the lights on, but we also need to continuously improve our craft and the finished products we deliver to our clients. Oh, and don't forget that many of us have families and lives outside of our work, as much as we may love it. My conversation...

We might not realize it, but a lot of us waste a huge amount of our client's time - and money - on set by being impractical in the way we approach our gigs. Dennis Abad is a Manila, Philippines based filmmaker, educator, and co-founder of Shoot Practical Videography. He and his partner founded the school after witnessing novice videographers botch jobs again and again, and deciding to do something...

So many of us work primarily as corporate or wedding filmmakers - and love what we do - but have dreams of doing more. Of pursuing passion projects and making a living from them. It can be hard to know where to start, however. How can we set up our businesses in a way that allows us to expand and grow beyond our current client base? Abraham Joffe is an incredibly talented wildlife and travel filmm...

Most of us didn't get into filmmaking in the first place to take on clients and run businesses. When we picked up a camera for the first time and were captivated by what we could do with it, it was because we ourselves had something to say. Our own story to share. The deeper into the world of film we dove however, the more we realized that it seems all but impossible to bring our passion projects...

As filmmakers, most of us spend the majority of our time thinking about how we can best tell the stories of our clients. When it comes to our own businesses however, we often neglect to think about the stories that make us unique and might help us connect with new prospects. Bill Baker is the Founder and Principal of BB & Co. Storytelling, a company that helps brands—and the leaders, teams, and or...

A few years into my video career I got a big time scare. Not one, but two filmmaker friends of mine were sued by big record labels for using unlicensed music on a couple of videos that happened to go viral. I'm ashamed to admit it now, but during my first few years making videos, I didn't even know what music licensing was, let alone pay for it. I wanted to support artists, but I couldn't afford t...

Have you ever come across a tool that makes you business run so much more smoothly that you would gladly pay 5x the price for it and still feel like it's a steal? Yeah, me too, and for me, Wipster is one of those tools. Wipster is something of a "Google Docs for video", allowing for commenting and collaborating right on top of the video, where it makes sense. You can even export those comments int...

If you're anything like me, when you first started your creative business, literally the last thing you wanted to be spending your time on was selling. For me, it was all about creating emotional films that moved people, but as I took on more work and got busier and busier I ended up spending less time shooting and more time selling. Besides the fact that I wasn't spending as much time doing what...

When most of us think about making a career shooting films, we're only able to come up with a few routes to success. Sure there are the wedding and corporate/brand film industries, but they are often crowded markets with a ton of high-quality filmmakers vying for these jobs. A lot of us dream of landing high-end commercial clients, but have no idea how to even get started. So what do we do? Brad W...