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If you’re aspiring to have your own video editing business then this is the episode for you. Here’s what Nate Woodbury went through to have his own video editing business and we’re hoping this could help encourage you to start yours too. Tune in to learn!
Would you like to know how to start a video editing business? I’ve done it. I can show you. -Hey, It’s Scott Christopher once again here with Nate, “Be the Hero”, Nate. Nate Woodbury. Nate, Nate. We’re talking about us we he just teased a moment ago, how to start a video editing business which you have done. So, tell us how it happened. How we do it? -Now, what I didn’t want to recommend that you also do is to offer your video editing services for free at first. -Oh, okay. -It doesn’t have to be… -You know, saying how much of a business. -Doesn’t have to be tons… Tons of those clients. But you’ve got to get a track record. You’ve got to build a portfolio. -Totally. And offer your full service. The best that you can offer for free. And you know, pick a client that is like your ideal client. Somebody that you want to work with more clients like this. Pick somebody and let them know. Be up front end and just say, “You know what? I’m wanting to launch a new video editing company or video editing service. I want more clients like you but I need to build my portfolio. Can I offer you my services for free to use in my portfolio?” -And do you find that most people will respond positively to that? -They were… I guess I’ve had one person tell me no in the past. They were real high profile and they already had somebody that are working with. That’s only reason they told me no. But the other people that I went went to for that in different scenarios, yeah, they said, “Absolutely, I’ll take it.” -And this was editing, they were corporate videos, wedding videos. I mean what do we…? What kind of work…? -Well, it’s whatever… Whatever video editing company you’re wanting to create. So if yeah, if you want to get into the service of creating wedding videos, then I would go film a couple of weddings for free. Yeah. And that’s I mean put put everything you’ve got into it. Create something amazing and epic that it’s like, “Wow, this person does agree…” -I have a new a young man a friend of one of my sons who has been doing that to put himself through college. And he drives a beautiful nice new luxury vehicle. He travels the world now because of what he’s done with a drone at these weddings. And he’s really put the time and effort into it. But it wasn’t… It wasn’t that hard. Like you say, it was just saying, “I’ll do the first three weddings for free. Here’s mine now my portfolio, I know you’re going to talk about building a portfolio. This is what I do.” And then he can charge much, much more. Yeah. -Yeah. Because when yeah you’ve got to have something to show people of what you’re capable of creating. What you’ve done before.
So, the next step is to create that portfolio. You know, if it’s video YouTube is a good place. LinkedIn is a good place. You can just showcase your videos. You can have them on your website. If people go to your website, have a little tab that says, “Portfolio.” And have a link to some type of demo reel or two different video. These different videos you’ve created for clients. Have some way of being able to show that to people on that. The next step is really to then market. You know, market that portfolio out to your target audience. You know, we talked about this a lot in other episodes about how important it is to really hone in and pick your target audience. I learned this kind of the hard way. I went real broad at first. And I thought well, I’m going to offer my services to all small businesses and I ended up loving working with some clients. Really dreading working with other clients. It was good. A great learning experience but it took me a long time to kind of figure out what that was. So, I do recommend figuring that out early on if you can. Sometimes it’s easier said than done because you think, “Oh, this is the type of client I want to work with.” But you haven’t ever worked with them before yet. So you don’t know if… Any way, because I thought that I would really love working with dentists but after working with dentists and realizing that they don’t want video marketing. They just want.. They want a website. And we’re also not going to go into depth in this video on how to market. We make a lot of videos on marketing especially how to use YouTube to market. Market your services. But once you have a portfolio, once you’ve picked your target audience, your ideal client then whatever way you use, you just got to market that portfolio to that ideal client. Okay, my next point here is to deliver beyond what is expected. I like to make expectations clear for my clients. This is how much you’re going to pay, this is how much… This is what I’m going to do to deliver. This is what you can expect. -And by the way, did you find that you were doing more sort of per project cost or was it hourly work or was it different for each client? -For me, it was it was a project. It was a project. I knew the scope of what it would take to film it, to edit it. So I told them… -That would be your bid upfront or whatever it was, yeah. It’ll be $1500 because I know I’m going to use this much time or whatever. Yeah, okay. -Alright. I have an example of a client that I went with that will illustrate 2 points here. I did this video for free. This is one of the first ones that I did. And I over delivered beyond what she was expecting. So she put on a really big event downtown Salt Lake City. She invited me to come and film and get some b-roll footage of her speaking on the stage. And so, I knew how to do that and I was real excited to be able to make a video. She was expecting to really in that case, just get a lot of raw footage. But I went I went above and beyond. I got some amazing B-roll footage. I followed her around with the glidecam I got some shots behind the audience where it blurred their heads and focused on her up on stage. I also did something that she wasn’t expecting as well. I took a lot of the participants from her event out into the hallway and I got testimonials talking about what they had learned. I went towards the end of the event so they could talk about what they had learned from her, their experience their kind of like their, Ahas of how they’re going to change or how they are now changed having attended this event. So, I took all the b-roll footage. I mixed it together with a lot of the testimonials. I mixed together with music and I delivered that video and she was just like, “Wow, you did all this for me for free?” She, was really impressed. It obviously was a great.. A great showcase that I didn’t you know cut corners on. And I was able to show that video to other potential clients who then hired me to do the same thing for them. -That’s beautiful. Yeah, it’s a great example. -Thank you. And you only had to do it once for free? -I think I did that one for free. At the time I thought I wanted to do more dentist, so I did a dentist video for free. -But yeah. But yes. But those are like different categories, yeah.- And then after that, yeah I was able to charge. For this point, I’ve put create and experience for your customer. And to really understand what I’m talking about, you’ve got to definitely need the book or the audio book. The E-myth Revisited. Such a good book. He talks about systems and creating systems to run your business. An example of what I mean by a system is like a McDonald’s franchise. If I were to own a McDonald’s, I wouldn’t be the one in there flipping the burgers. I would just own that system. And I had hire high school students to come in and be the ones to flip the burgers and run the the registers and whatnot. -Right. So when you’re creating your video editing business, you really want to systematize things so that it’s a business more than just creating a job for yourself. But when you’re doing that, focus on the experience that your client has. I’ll give you another example of a new system that I’m creating that makes a better experience for my clients. We do a lot of keyword research around here. And I use Google Docs. So my my team will do keyword research, will organize it all into a spreadsheet that really makes sense to me and my team. And I try and explain it to my clients. And they’re like, “Okay, I go to this tab and I… Okay, I scroll over here.”Bbut then by the time that you know, the next month comes around that I have to reorient them.
So, what we’ve done now is we’ve created a separate spreadsheet that’s just for our clients to view. We still have our our spreadsheet that we understand that has a lot more data. But we just pull out the parts that are most important for our clients to see and we put it here. So when they log in, they just see what they need to and it’s a much better experience for them, they’re happier. That’s what I’m talking about with creating a better client experience. Creating systems that will have your customer in mind so they really enjoy working with you. And they there’s also things that I’m working on to really help my clients feel pampered that they really feel, “Wow, I really like working with Nate. This feels… This feels good, this was fun. I feel taken care of.” And of course, if you want to create a video editing company like I have, then you need to hire people in the Philippines. We’ve talked in other episodes, you’ll find out up there of why specifically the Philippines. -Yes, that does sound random. You know, just to call of a sudden go. And our final point, hire Filipinos. That’s like the people editing this video, you guys know. You guys know. I just returned from a trip to the Philippines. Met my team for the first time. Totally amazing. But again, that that’s a topic for another video. The biggest reason is when you outsource, it frees up your time but also hiring somebody in the Philippines it’s cost-effective. I can hire somebody in the Philippines for about one tenth of hiring somebody here in Utah. And so when… -You still get the quality that you need. -Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. You don’t want to sacrifice on quality. That that’s not the point. But if you can get the same quality, a much more efficient price, then you have no profit margins that you can have a successful video editing business. That’s how I did it. I mean that was simple but that’s really the steps that I followed and if I would have had this outline. I probably could have got things off a little bit smoother start. But that’s how you’d create a video editing business. So give it a thumbs up. If you liked these tips, if you have any other tips you think will be helpful for our audience here, share them in the comments below. We’ll see you tomorrow.