Right now, you're on one of two paths. Path one is the forgettable brand. You post content randomly, hoping that something's going to stick. People have no idea who you are or what you do, so they do not engage, and they definitely don't buy. Now, path number two is the intentional brand. This is where you own what people associate with you, and your content builds trust and moves people toward a decision. If you're on path number one right now, this course is going to get you onto path number two and save you years and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of mistakes. And if you have identified that you're on path number two, odds are you've probably hit a ceiling that you have not been able to break through. This course is going to help you smash through that ceiling and actually hit the scale that you've been wanting. This course is not just theory. It's built from real execution and my 16 years of experience in building brands online. So, here's what we're going to cover. Section one is branding. Section number two is going to be content strategy. Section number three is going to be building your team. And finally, in section four, we're going to talk about monetizing your brand. So, the first section is branding. And I think that we should start off with some definitions here so that we are on the same page and everything that we discuss moving forward is from the same understanding. I define branding as a pairing of things. I define good branding as an intentional pairing of relevant things done consistently and what you get from that is the byproduct which is brand. Brand is when the audience inherently associates those things together. Let's use the most classic example known to man. Nike and Michael Jordan. Nike entered the basketball market and they wanted to have their audience or customers associate them with athletic greatness. specifically within the basketball industry. So, what did they do? They intentionally paired themselves with greatness in basketball. Michael Jordan. I I can't think of another name that's more synonymous with victory, with winning, with greatness. Or take Gary Vaynerchuk in content. The man literally wrote a book called Crush It. I don't even remember when it came out. I think 2009. And he was talking about how people are going to make money talking about the Smurfs on YouTube. The man is synonymous with content and over time his actions done repetitively have led us to draw that association. He has intentionally paired himself with content among many other things. Or my absolute favorite that I always have to inject at any chance I get, Harley-Davidson. Harley-Davidson for many years in their marketing has intentionally paired themselves with freedom. And so what is the association that the customer base draws upon when they think of Harley-Davidson? Freedom. The open road, tearing off their suit and going out and hitting the road. And so ultimately what we are trying to do is think of what are the associations that we want our audience to inherently draw when they think of our name. And the beauty of this is it actually makes it operational for you. All you have to do is deliberately and intentionally pair yourself with the association that you want your audience to make. It takes all of the woo woo fluffy magic out of what brand is and it makes it something that you can actually do. Now, real quick, my team and I put a lot of effort into building out this course and a lot of accompanying worksheets and playbooks. So, please take advantage of them. What you're going to notice is at the bottom of the screen here, we're going to have little icons that tell you what sheet and how you can download it. I would highly encourage you, please download these sheets and follow along. Now that we know what brand and branding are, we need to define what your brand is. Now, your brand actually exists whether you define it or not. Your audience might be defining it for you. I would rather we be intentional and take control. The first step in defining your brand is defining your desired outcome. I like to work from the end goal and reverse engineer our way backwards. And so here is how I actually reverse engineer our desired outcome to today. It is called the brand journey framework. And it's just four simple questions, but I can't tell you how many people have told me how impactful this was and gave them the exact road map of how to go about building their brand. So question number one, again, like I said, we're starting from the end in mind and working our way back. So what is our desired outcome? What do we want to have happen? Question number two is, what do I have to be known for in order for that to happen? Question number three is, what do I have to do in order to be known for that? Unfortunately, building a brand isn't just about things that we say, it's about our actions. And so if we want to be known for something, in order to be known for it, we got to do the to be known for it. And then finally, the last question takes us to right now. What do I have to learn in order to do that? So if I'm going to do things in order to be known for something to then get my desired outcome, well, right now, I might not know how to do those things. And so this gives you day one exactly what to do. You need to learn these specific items and then you need to do those things and then you will become known for those things and then eventually the desired outcome occurs. If you have clarity on your outcome, this ensures that every decision you make along the way lines up with what you want to have happen. The majority of people that are building their brand online that are posting content, I promise you 99.9% of them have no idea what they're trying to accomplish with their content, with their brand. And so what they're doing is they're wandering aimlessly. There's an amazing example that I I love to share from Alice in Wonderland. There's a moment where Alice comes to a fork in the road. There's two different directions she can go. And the cat, Chester the cat, I believe is his name. And he's sitting in the tree and she says, "Which way should I go?" And he goes, "Well, where are you trying to end up?" And she says, "I don't know." And the cat responds with something so powerful. He says, "Well, then either way, we'll take you there. If you do not have a desired outcome that you are making your decisions off of, you're going to go somewhere, but it might not be the place that you want to be. Now, after you define your desired outcome, I would argue probably the most important part of defining your brand is defining your associations or the associations that you desire to have. Ask yourself, what do I want to be associated with? What do I want the audience to think of when they hear my name? Here's an example. Do you want your name to be tied to business, trustworthiness, or mental well-being? Everything you create should reinforce those associations. This is where intentionality in branding starts. Everything you create should reinforce those associations. This right here is where intentionality in branding starts. So, a very meta example here is that I am creating this course and the content that we're going to be putting out to intentionally pair Rston, my consulting firm, with value, with scaling brands, with understanding attention, with building brands that not only scale, but last and build trustworthiness within their community. This is literally what I'm doing. I'm putting together a massive course right now that is going to outline all of this and consistently pair myself with those attributes that I want you to draw upon when you hear about Rston Consulting. So, we're going to continue to create content like this talking about scaling your brand. We are intentionally pairing ourselves with the relevant thing scaling brands and we're going to do that consistently through our content. Now, we just went over what you want to be associated with. I would argue this next part is far more important and something that 99.9% of people completely ignore, which is what do you not want to be associated with? A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that brand is only about what you want to have happen. But a lot of what building a brand and a successful brand is, especially in today's saturated market where there's so many people online talking about the same subject matter as you, you can stand out by what you choose not to associate with. This is ultimately how you protect your brand. This is how you keep it from deliluding and being misinterpreted. Think of how many people you see online whose reputation probably has nothing to do with what they wanted or what their desire was. often times that is a byproduct of not being intentional with what they are not going to associate with. If you don't actively shape your associations, your audience is going to do it for you. Now, this next little example and explanation here is going to get a little technical. So, I'm actually going to read off of the screen to the right of the camera right now um so that I don't mess this up because I think it's really important and I want to make sure that we go through this exactly how I meant to. If we believe that branding is a pairing of things and that good branding is an intentional pairing of relevant things done consistently and that that then creates brand which is when the audience inherently associates those things together then we're on the same page of what brand and branding is. But what you'll notice is intentional is not a good or bad statement. Intentional doesn't mean right or good. Meaning, you could be intentional with pairing your brand, but with the wrong things done consistently. Unfortunately, what this ends up leading to is the audience drawing the association between your brand and those wrong things. Here's an example that I have to give a qualifier for. I have some pretty strong views and opinions on some of the online creators in the business education space. All love and respect to everyone. Everyone can do their own thing. This is Caleb Rston's individual opinion. Strongly believed, loosely held. There are some very scammy, sketchy in the online education space. They are untrustworthy and they make content trying to ladder up to selling some course online. If you choose to consistently appear in content with them, whether it's them inviting you on their podcast or you guys doing a collab video together, if you do that consistently, aka you intentionally pair yourself with the scam artist online, the untrustworthy character, the snake oil salesman, guess what happens if you do that consistently? Your audience will start to inherently associate you with that crowd. Is that good for trust? No, not at all. In fact, this is some of the biggest problems that you see with a lot of creators in the business education space right now. There are a lot of individuals that actually have a lot of value and a lot of good to add into the world and education and able to literally show people a whole new way to approach their business, their career. But the problem is is they go on all these podcasts with these individuals that I cannot trust. And by doing that enough times, I no longer feel that I can trust that individual. So, as much as you want to pair yourself with the right things, please, please be diligent about what you choose not to associate with. If you get a bad feeling in your gut, if you don't think that it's the right move, it's not worth the exposure. I'm going to open up the kimono here for a second. I have people right now, not a lot because I'm not that interesting, but I have a couple of people that have been asking me to come on to their podcast. And so far, I've said yes to everyone, but there are some individuals out there that I know will probably eventually reach out and ask me to come on the show. Now, if they have that kind of a brand, I will choose to not go on the show, even if it's the biggest audience that I could get in front of because ultimately awareness is not worth the trade. What are those people going to be aware of? They're going to be aware of you in light of that association. All right, we've defined our brand. So now we need to position it. Now your goal isn't to just blend in. You actually want to find what is missing in your industry and own that gap. So it might be the information that you have. It might be the philosophy you have around a certain subject matter like branding for example. Or it might be your personality and your unique take on the same information. You might just be able to reach a whole different audience that wasn't able to connect with some of the other creators in that space. Ultimately, what you are looking for is the gap of what is missing and then you fill it. Now, how do you go about finding out what is missing or how do you own that gap? Well, ask yourself these two questions. What are the people that are currently creating content in the space that I'm wanting to occupy? What are they saying that I disagree with? How can I take what has been taught for years or shared for years and bring a fresh perspective to the table? Here's a really good example. If everyone in your industry is focusing on going viral and getting lots of views and and always doing that, maybe leaning into building a long-term trustbuilt brand will stand out. That's what I'm trying to do here, right? A lot of my counterparts who I love and respect, they emphasize virality and getting views and there's a lot of benefit to that. But where I'm coming in and kind of filling the gap is there's not a lot of people online talking, especially in the form of free content like this in a way that shares with you how to build a brand that lasts. If you just emphasize views, for example, the moment the algorithm changes, nobody's going and searching for your name. On the flip side, if you build a brand that has trustworthiness and deposits a lot of goodwill into the marketplace, the moment the algorithm changes, your audience will be searching for you. And so that is a prime example of me contrasting myself with the others in the industry. That's me noticing a gap where nobody's talking about this or very few, and me wanting to fill it, not only with my unique perspectives and philosophies, my experience doing this for 16 years, but also maybe a unique and quirky personality that some people will really hate and then a tiny few of you might actually resonate with. Now, the other way to bring a fresh perspective is to share your story. So, what I would encourage you to look at is what is different about your story than everybody else's. Now the the obvious answer is everybody's story is different, right? But what is it that makes you uniquely you? That you can present all of your information, your beliefs through that lens. Ultimately, your story is your brand's secret weapon. This is what makes you unique and makes you stand out from everybody else in the crowd. Nobody else has the same come-up story or origin story that you do. An exercise to help you do this is actually to list out pivotal moments in your story, in your life, challenges you've overcome, turning points in your career, that moment where you got laid off at your job, and then all of a sudden ended up finding the next gig, and it's the greatest thing ever. And any unique experiences that have shaped your perspective. For me, working with Gary Vaynerchuk completely changed my perspective. I I had a completely different understanding of what it meant to create content online with your audience in mind first rather than making to make you look good. Share that in your content. And ultimately like stories resonate way more with people than you saying typical tropes and attributes like hardworking or innovative or hustling. Nobody gives a about that. They want to hear the story behind the hard work. For example, instead of me being like, I'm a hard worker, I would tell the story of when I was editing Gary Ve's trash talk series and how I would come in on Sunday, and start editing 12 to 14 hours a day, Sunday through Thursday, and then I would arrive in the office at 6:00 a.m. on Thursday, and I would not leave the office until 2:00 p.m. on Friday. I'm not going to do the math for you right now, but I believe that's about 32 hours straight. the story and if I went more into detail would be far more compelling than me just telling you about working hard or how I work hard. Another example is instead of Jeff Bezos talking about how resourceful he is, tell the story about how he used a door as his desk. Nothing will say resourceful more than telling that story. Share your stories. That is what your audience is going to resonate with. Now, for those of you who have made content online, the thing that you're probably very aware of is there's a lot of skepticism. There are a lot of objections that the audience has towards your content, especially if you are in the education space. Legitimately, the majority of people watching your content are thinking the entire time, why would I trust this? Does this actually work? Okay, cool. That worked for you, but does it work for me? How would it work in this scenario? Have you done this in multiple different industries? They are constantly thinking of their objections to what you have to say. And often times those objections and that skepticism appears in the comments. Here's what I would like you to do. Instead of allowing that to take place in your comments, start looking at your comment section, getting a greater understanding of the skepticism and objections that commonly occur within your audience and start addressing them in the content. Just like a great VSSL overcomes objections before a prospect hops on a sales call, treat your content the same way. Why would you not try to overcome the objections that your audience is going to have? If ultimately your goal is to educate and change the actions of your audience after they consume your content, why would you make it harder for them to do that? Let's make it easier by overcoming any objection or skepticism they're going to have about what you're saying in the content itself. If you address the skepticism and the objections proactively in your content, what you do is you build more trust and credibility. When you answer the questions before they're even asked, you remove friction, and then it makes it easier for your audience to actually change their actions and be educated. All right, the next one is don't be a robot. This is something that a lot of people making content online really struggle with, and I completely understand why. There's this weird object that you're talking into called a camera and a lens. And it's like this very freaky ordeal, right? Even right now, I am doing my best to be a human, not a robot, right? And bring my personality into this content rather than just monotone giving the information that I want to. And part of being a human is sharing not only the wins, but also the losses. Share the failures that you've had along the way and the lessons that you learned from those failures. Think about it. The friend that you have that's always sharing how great everything is and how they just keep winning eventually, one, they just become kind of annoying, right? But two, do you really believe that? Do you really believe that life is so perfect and that everything is going exactly their way? No. Imagine not knowing this individual. So from afar, your audience is going to be even more skeptical of you if all you're doing is sharing all your W's. On the flip side, if you are vulnerable and you share your losses, what you will find is a lot more people will trust you and connect with you and relate with you. I actually think that losses are more relatable than wins. And we can learn a lot more from losses than maybe we can learn from wins. And ultimately, if you share your losses and the lessons learned from them, you help your audience potentially, if they choose to take action, avoid making those same mistakes. A really good example of this is someone that I worked for uh several years ago. When I started with her, her whole audience thought that she was a robot and viewed her as not human. She just came across as like an information, you know, overload. and she was just sharing her knowledge which was a lot but it had no substance or personality to it. And so when I started working with her it was my number one goal to show her human side to take it from just information just d to like show personality right and and this individual she had an amazing personality. She was hilarious so funny quirky everything. But you would never know that just watching the content. In fact, a lot of people would meet her in real life and be like, "You're so much nicer and funnier and than I expected you to be. I actually kind of expected you to be a jerk." But like, in no way was that the case, but you wouldn't know it from the content she was making. And so, I really encourage you to do your best to bring your true self, bring your whole self into your content. Seriously, it will make you stand out. There's nobody else that's actually like you. An example for sharing your failures is in my first YouTube video, I share a failure. I share the story of how one of my main clients cut my monthly compensation in half and I had to go and fire my friends that I had hired. That was a real shot to my ego and isn't my favorite thing to share necessarily, but I think one there's a big lesson that I shared that is accompanied with that failure. But also, I think that you guys watching it probably, if you did see that video, felt a little bit closer to me because I appeared more human. That transparency ultimately builds trust way faster than somebody who is just constantly posturing and trying to show you how great they are. This next one is actually uh really tough for a lot of people to do. And I completely understand why. The point is to listen to your audience. The hard part or the difficulty in this is there's a lot of people that make content that get a decent amount of hate in their comments. They get a lot of people that are just frankly being And what I would encourage you to do is do your best to ignore those individuals. And real quick, just like an anecdote on this is if you ignore the praise, you can ignore the hate. If you get really high off of the praise when people applaud you in the comments, you're going to be very vulnerable to being very depressed when you see the hateful comments that are tearing you down. But aside from the hateful comments, the other comments that you have in your posts are actually incredible insights into how you should go about navigating your brand and the content that you create. Especially in the early days, I would encourage you to look at the individuals that know you, your friends, co-workers, and any audience that you may already have. What are they associating you with? What do they praise you for? What do they applaud you for? What do they admire in you and what keeps them wanting to either continue hanging out with you, talking to you, what keeps them coming back? What you want to do is use this feedback to refine your positioning and ultimately know what you can double down on. A really big example for me is, and this will sound weird coming out of my mouth, but please take this with like a humble tone that I hope I have here. Something very interesting that I've noticed is when I hop on Zoom calls with potential clients or with clients, like 90% of the calls end with one or more of the members on the other team mentioning how much they love my energy and personality. Again, it feels really weird for me to say this, so please hear it correctly, but I started noticing that and I realized, man, to my point earlier, I should really make sure that I bring that same personality and energy into the content that I make cuz it's who I am. It's how I actually roll. Like I I'll make a statement and then I do a little side comment on. I do that with all my friends or my family all the time. I do it on client calls, on discovery calls, anything. And so if that is something that people are resonating with and liking and giving me real time feedback on that they like that and enjoy it, why the would I not involve that in my content? And so this is using my audience and technically I wouldn't even call them my audience, but essentially they are. and using their feedback to refine how I present myself in the content, which ultimately the way I'm going to present myself is being fully me. Now, another example is if your audience really values your practical advice, your no BS, nononsense, straight to the point advice, I would really encourage you to lean into it. If you start seeing a trend emerging where people are, you know, adding more filler fluff and, you know, comfort creators, that's great, but that's not you. Don't follow a trend just because it's a trend. Stay true to who you are and what your audience appreciates most about what you are putting out. Another example of listening to your audience and actually making a very good change is there was another client that I had worked with uh a while back and they fell into this pattern of honestly getting way too intense in their content and only talking about really one subject matter. They didn't really diversify and they were just hammering one message over and over and over that the audience wasn't resonating with. It wasn't like, you know, you have your haters that are that are speaking out and stuff, but ultimately you're telling your truth. No, like the majority of the audience was giving a lot of push back. And so what this individual did is they listened to the audience. And by listening to the audience, they started to add more context. They didn't change their belief. They didn't change what they were saying. They rounded out what they were saying and gave more context as to why they were pushing this message so much. So again, listen to your audience and let it shape how you present your ideas, philosophies, and beliefs. Don't have it change your beliefs. Don't cater what you're saying just to the audience. Nobody likes that. That's what we call a politician. Nobody wants that. And now the longanticipated brand story framework. Your brand story isn't just a before and after transformation. It's a series of intentional decisions that shape how people see you. Now, I tend to believe that most story frameworks are a little too rigid to actually be practically used, especially for many different use cases. I think that what they end up doing is they assume that every brand has some dramatic aha moment, right? Some big problem that they have to solve. They assume that the founder story is the most important one. They assume that a brand's identity will never evolve. But great brands aren't built on a singular moment. They're built on consistency, distinction, and connecting with the right audience over time. So here's a storytelling framework that I believe works in all cases. Forget the problem transformation outcome framework. Okay, I believe that that is too narrow. Instead, here is the threepart brand story framework. Number one is the catalyst. This is why your brand exists. Every brand, I believe, starts because something needed to change. This isn't necessarily always a struggle. It might be an opportunity or a gap in the market. For example, and I don't know this for sure, but I can make some pretty good assumptions here. I don't think Phil Knight started Nike just to be rich. If he did, there's plenty of other businesses he could have started that had a higher likelihood of success. I believe he saw that no other companies were fulfilling the demand and meeting the needs that the market had. In order to determine what your catalyst is, I would ask yourself these three questions. What needs to change? What do you see that others don't? What's that opportunity that you see so clearly that nobody else can see? And why do you feel the need to act on it? If you answer these three questions, this is your catalyst for your brand. This is why your brand exists. Number two is the core truth. This is what makes you or your company different than everybody else in your space. A strong brand stands out. It doesn't blend in. Blending in ultimately leads to you being forgotten. A lot of people misunderstand this and there's a lot of them online right now. It doesn't mean that it's controversy for controversial sake. That's where you just get the annoyingly loud people on the internet that nobody likes. That is not what I'm saying here. What I am saying is it means having a core conviction that is different than everyone else in the market and not only having that core conviction but sharing it publicly with the world. A great example of this is actually an artist by the name of Russ. Uh Russ has some very unique views on how musicians should go about navigating their career. He is very very strong about how artists should remain independent and own the rights to their music. He believes that this allows them to have creative control but to also profit more off of their hard work. What does he do with that? He shares those beliefs in the form of his music. He literally talks about it in his music, but then also when he does interviews on podcasts or various news networks, he reinforces this and shares it heavily. So to determine your core truth, ask yourself these three questions. What do I believe that others do not? What is it about my personality that stands out? And think about this. We we talked about it earlier, but what do people compliment you on that you can lean into, that you can double down on? The example I gave earlier was that people on Zoom calls, client calls and stuff like that would mention that they love my energy and my personality. So what am I doing in my content in building my brand? Leaning into that and really trying to highlight and bring my somewhat quirky and weird personality into the content. And number three, why would the audience care about this? How does this impact them? What value does it bring for them? If you answer these three questions, you'll have your core truth. And number three, the proof. This is how you reinforce your identity over and over and over. I believe that your brand is not what you say, it's what you do and prove over and over again. Strong brands don't just have one past success story. They have an ongoing pattern of credibility. Another Gary example is that he doesn't just talk about volume of content and the importance of it. He's proved it for like 15 plus years. And he reinforces the credibility of this statement by talking about what he's done not only for his personal brand, but all the brands that Vayner Media works with for the Super Bowl campaigns, for example. The majority of their Super Bowl campaigns are determined off of high volume social content that they do throughout the year to test learnings, see what the audience resonates with, and that's what they run with on the Super Bowl. And he shares those stories. So, he is reinforcing the credibility over and over and over. So, three questions to ask yourself are, how does every piece of content I make reinforce the associations I want people to make with me? What case studies or examples can I share that establish my credibility? And number three, if someone hears your name, what's the first thing that they think of? So, here's a fun example using myself, the catalyst. I saw brands trying to scale via just views and impressions, but struggling to actually build trust with their audience. It wasn't that the problem was the content. The problem was they were lacking clarity on the big picture strategy and what they wanted to have happen with their brand. The core truth is that I believe that a strong brand is built by the intentional pairing of relevant things done consistently, not just getting virality and getting a ton of views and impressions. And the proof is that I've built many different brands that scale businesses to millions and millions of dollars in revenue. And I show you how to do it completely for free via my content. So you can build your brand story in three very simple steps. It's not rocket science. It's not the complicated that a lot of my counterparts make it to be so that they can sell you some course. The catalyst. What do you see that others do not? The core truth. What do you believe that others might not believe? And the proof. How do you continually reinforce that identity every single day? Not only through what you're saying, but through your actions. If you nail these, your brand won't just have a story. Your brand will have loyalty. All right. Now, for something that a lot of people struggle with, which is picking your topic. Like, what are we going to talk about here? And this is a question that I get from many people. I've gotten this question hundreds, if not thousands of times over the last couple of years. And there's a lot of different opinions online about what or how you go about picking your topics. I have kind of a nuanced uh belief on this and view on it and it's one that changes and evolves over time. I encourage you to start narrow. I personally believe that early trust is built off of being great at one specific thing and talking about that same specific thing. We all have that friend who is the best at everything. And we know that they're not good at any of it. By them talking all about how great they are at all these different subjects and all these different skills. We pretty much assume that they're not good at any of them. Contrary to that is the friend who only talks about woodworking and how they love carving this beautiful chair or putting together this amazing desk for their parents or whatever. The person who is obsessed around one thing and speaks about that at nauseium is the individual who we believe has credibility and is actually good at what they're talking about. They have expertise. A great example of this is that when Gary started making content online forever ago, I mean, he was super early. I think 2006, 2007 on YouTube, he was the wine guy. He made content around wine. That's what he knew super well. Now, at the time, he also understood business and marketing, but he didn't talk about that. He built his base and credibility off of a subject matter that he was worldclass at. Over time, he began to expand that, right? He began to speak to the different business practices and marketing techniques that he used to build his dad's wine and liquor store. But in the beginning, all of his content for the first several years on YouTube was wine library TV where he was tasting and giving reviews on various wines. And then what you started to see is he would start to pop up at South by Southwest and start talking more about marketing. And then one day all of a sudden this amazing speech gets dropped on YouTube accompanied with a book called Crush It where he informed everyone of his beliefs on marketing and utilizing this new crazy thing called social media. And so what you see there is Gary started very narrow and as his experience and knowledge expanded, so did the subject matter that he covered in his content. Again, if you try to talk about everything in the beginning, you will dilute the power of what you're speaking to. So what you're going to notice is I'm not going to sit here talking about business tactics. I'm not going to talk about sales techniques. You're not going to hear me referencing customer success techniques and strategies cuz that's not my wheelhouse. That's not my expertise. My expertise is on scaling brands and using organic content strategy to accomplish that. And so that's what you're going to hear me talk about. But what may happen is over the next couple of years as I gain more experience in other areas, you might watch my brand and my subject matter and topics evolve. Now, the natural question that I imagine is coming up for you right now is, well, how do I know when it is the right time to expand? I feel like maybe right now I'm at that point. Or on the flip side, I'm so far from ever expanding. Like, I want to only talk about this subject matter for the rest of my life. One, you should actually know what you're talking about before you talk about it. So, if you haven't actually gotten to a point of excellence and world class, then I don't know that I would talk about this new subject matter. I don't I don't think I would bring it into the table because what value are you going to be providing the audience by sharing something that you don't really know much about? Now, another thing that you can look at is once you're known for a specific topic and you get consistent engagement and positive feedback from the audience on that, then you can consider to start to expand. I would encourage you to take on adjacent topics, not something that is completely different. For example, I'm not going to be talking about brand strategy and organic content strategy and then next week start talking about breath work. that would be completely offthe-wall and make no sense, right? So, there would be too much of a jump for my audience to trust me on this new subject matter because there's nothing about what I've been talking about right now that would give me credibility for this new subject matter. to use Gary as the same example when he was talking about wine and building the brand and the company online. By him doing that and gaining success with the company, it gave him credibility to speak into marketing and to share those strategies because he had demonstrated them in actual use. He put those strategies that he shared with us to practice to build his business and that gave him credibility to jump into the next section or the next topic in his career. Another one is look at your audience and what they're asking for. If you start noticing that they're asking for additional information on something that you don't really cover that much, but you've maybe hinted at or or has been displayed in a minor way in your content, well, maybe that is time for you to start speaking to that subject matter. For example, if all of you watching this started asking me a ton about my Harley-Davidson and all the little uh intricacies of all the upgrades that I've made and the performance and the handling and how I go on long road trips, I would gladly answer those questions. Now, when thinking about expanding, uh I would encourage you to do it strategically. So, let's walk through what that looks like. A great example of a company that went about expanding their product line is Amazon. Amazon started by selling books, right? And now they sell obviously a lot more than just books. I mean, if we look at what I'm wearing right now, about 3/4 of everything I have on was purchased off of Amazon. But ultimately, even though Amazon has expanded to all these various different products, they haven't lost their core identity with books. And I would argue them acquiring Audible was actually a big step in re-engaging that audience. They now have what I probably believe is the biggest audiobook platform out there. And so they returned or reinforced rather than returned, they reinforced their roots by doing that. So in expanding, never lose sight of your core identity and where you started. For another example, to keep running with the Gary Vee example, that man continues to this day to bring back Wine Library TV on occasions. He still brings wine into his content here and there. He pays ode and homage to the OG Gary Vee. Another great example, similar to Amazon and Gary of returning to your roots is Crayola. As of February 2025, when we're filming this, Crayola announced that they're bringing back eight discontinued colors that they had uh taken off the market. Some of them, you know, as most recently as 2017, some of them go back to like 1990. one, bringing it back is a nostalgic play and that's obviously going to resonate with a lot of the uh audience, a lot of the parents honestly that have kids now like we grew up I grew up with Crayola and my generation is of the age we're like we have kids now and so uh there's definitely a good play there. But I think what this shows is a company and a brand can evolve and and add new product lines, add new things in and change over time. But I do believe there is a lot of power in always holding to your core, to your root. And that doesn't necessarily mean that every year, every day, every month, you have to do that. But it is good and I think it means a lot to the day one and OG members or audience or customers of yours for you to return to that. Uh, another example actually that that I'll generalize because a lot of creators do this is if you're a creator or a musician, the content or music you were making day one in the early days, that's what a lot of your day one fans fell in love with. And like brands, a lot of musicians and artists and creators evolve and they evolve what they create, right? We all know, I mean, I'm really big into hardcore music as an example. And I can't tell you actually a prime example of this, just thought of right now, is Knock Loose. In the hardcore space, Knocked Loose started as a hardcore band. They had that like grungy local basement sound, but Knock Loose has blown the up. And as they continue to get bigger, they have haters that call them sellouts and all this stuff. Well, the cool thing that Knock Loose does at their shows is they still play their original tracks. They still play the gospel and that slaps every single time. And it allows for us Day One fans to have that nostalgic feeling and make sure that we still feel attached to not only what the band has evolved into, but where the band came from. So, a takeaway here for those of you that have a more established brand is maybe consider bringing back like a nostalgic play, like return to your roots a little bit. If you had a different content format style that you used to do, or like the musician example, if you had an earlier, more raw sound, maybe consider releasing a project that taps into that nostalgic play. Nostalgia is a very big winner amongst humans. A pro tip on this is to expand in layers, not leaps. So don't do anything massive. Every jump, every new topic you add should really feel natural to your audience. Again, like the example I gave earlier, it shouldn't feel like talking about brand and organic content strategy and then going to breath work. Like it should be if I wanted to get to breath work, I should probably inch my way over to that point rather than having just a complete black and white change. Now, based on the niche you're in and your desired associations, that's what's going to inform the topics that you want to explore and expand on. Now, a key reminder in this, and this is where a lot of you are potentially going to get hung up, so this is why I'm saying this, don't think of it as a rule when you're picking these topics. These are guidelines that you can follow that make it easier for you to create content, but don't make it an absolute rule. As much as I was saying that it'd be weird for me to make content around brand organic content strategy and then immediately jump to breath work. Sure, that might be really abrupt and kind of like gnarly for the audience, but ultimately our goal is to do this for a long time. And so if that is something that you do want to talk about, it. Just jump and do it. By no means are these rules to follow. These are guidelines to help you and make this easier for you. Not something that you have to overthink 24/7. In fact, I'm going to double down on this real quick because I think a lot of people sit down with a brand strategist or whatever and they build out these content pillars and then they always say, "Well, if it doesn't fall within the content pillar, we can't talk about it." But here's the thing. When Trevor and I sat down and identified what we were going to be talking about in our content, we didn't necessarily say Harley-Davidson's, but as you can probably tell if you're at this point in the video, I reference Harley a lot. and I want to make content around my Harleyies as well. Is it one of my content pillars? No, it's not. But if I want to make a video about my Harley, I'm going to do it because I enjoy it. And I think that what it does do is it rounds out my brand and makes me more interesting. I'm not just somebody who cares about brand and organic content. I also love my motorcycle and love to travel on it. I love to customize it. This is what will make you interesting and will cause you to actually stand out from your competitors. So the key here is don't be rigid. Stay flexible. So if you're trying to figure this out, here's three questions that might help you. First question is, what am I genuinely passionate about discussing? If you can't tell by now, I'm very passionate about brand strategy. It probably comes through in my tone here. That's what you want to talk about. You want to talk about something that you're going to want to talk about because when you do that passion comes through and people will connect with it and they will probably feel like you are more convicted about what you are saying and believe you more and actually take action on what you are saying rather than just sitting and listening. Number two is what will resonate with my audience most right now. So for me, for example, when I talk about brand strategy, something that is definitely a need in the audience that I have is organic content strategy. I'm going to talk far less over the next year about my paid media strategy because that's something that a lot of people that I have spoken to over the last 5 years need less help on. They have more experience in that. On the contrary, a lot of people look at organic content on social as like this like blackbox magical mysterious thing that they do not understand. And so that's why a lot of the content that we're going to put out this year is going to be around organic content strategy. And I would argue number three is the most important of the three questions. What will cause my audience to change their actions the most? Like I've said multiple times in this video, what you don't want when you're making educational content is for people to just be passively consuming and do nothing about it. You want them to take action. So, what can I speak to and how can I speak about it in a way that makes it easy for my audience to then listen and take action on what I am saying. So to make sure that we're not getting confused here, I just want to real quick emphasize. I'm not saying talk about one thing. I don't want you to talk about just one thing. I want you to emphasize your one thing. So if we're looking at a pie, 80% of the pie should be that one main thing you want to be known for. But use the other 20% to round yourself out, to round your company out, and be more human. This is how other people will relate to you. Here's an example. Look at your significant other or a friend of yours, right? If you talk about one thing to them all the time, 24/7, guess what? They're probably going to hate you. They're going to get bored of you. And even more so, you are probably going to hate you and get bored of yourself. Sure, it's totally okay to spend 80% of your time talking about that one thing. 80% of what I'm talking about here is brand strategy and I'm going to continue doing that. But the other 20 I am going to utilize to round me out and make me more human. I like to call this interest stacking. Here's a really good example. All of us probably at one point in our life started at a normal job and day one the only thing we have in common with our co-workers is that we work for this organization. But as you start to get more comfortable, you probably tend to reveal a few more things about yourself, interests you have. Let's say, for example, uh you reveal the fact that you're a huge Kendrick Lamar fan, and this is during the great Kendrick and Drake beef. And somebody else on your team, Sarah, also is like, I love Kendrick as well. Suddenly, you go from having one thing in common, we both work for this company, to having two things in common. We work for this company and we both love Kendrick Lamar. What ends up happening there is you become work homies, work friends, right? It becomes more than just co-workers. And as you start to learn more things that you have in common with each other, you may go from being work friends to friends. Even to the point where once you move on from the organization, you're still friends. I think of the same exact principle in building your brand online. The more interests and things that you find interesting that you talk about in your content, you give your audience more at bats to connect with you because they're like, I also like that thing. And how unique that there's this intersection of somebody who loves human optimization and making their body healthier, but they're also a complete computer science nerd. That is a very interesting intersection. So, what you want to do is actually give your audience more at bats. So again, spend 80% of your time talking about the core subject, the core topic. Ideally, this is something that is in line with your offers that you have and drives revenue and profitability for yourself or your company. And then the other 20% talk about your interests. Give your audience at bats to connect with you. An example that I love to use for this, whether we love him or we hate him, is Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan does an incredible job about talking about all the different interests that he has, right? conspiracy theories, politics, human optimization, hunting, UFC, comedy. I mean, the list goes on and on. And so, if you're interested in one of those things, you might be interested in his podcast. If you're interested in two, three, or four of those things, you're probably a super fan. The only way people would know that they are a super fan or become a super fan though is if he talks about those things. If he just stuck to MMA and comedy, there'd be far less at bats for his audience to become obsessed. All right, we are on to content. So, we've covered branding and what brand is and we've gone pretty in-depth on that. And that is laying the groundwork and giving us the direction that we are now going to take with our content. I like to think of it as we've established our brand and now content is what we will do to amplify the brand. And one thing I want to give you as kind of a qualifier or a statement upfront that will influence everything that we talk about from here on out is that I like to build a content strategy in the same way that a great personal trainer designs a great training program for their clients. A great example is right now I am gonna start getting back into lifting and if I were to go into the gym and immediately start working on Ronnie Coleman's training routine, well, I'd be I would probably injure myself and I definitely wouldn't stick with it. And so, every good personal trainer knows that the best fitness routine or best training routine is one that you are going to stick with for a long time. We get the most results the longer we stick with it. Content is the exact same way. A lot of people make the mistake of trying to do what Mr. Beast does or what Gary Vee does or what all these different creators online that you see are doing. Some of them go really high volume. Some of them go extremely high production. That is a great goal to aspire to, but do not start off that way. You will burn out quick and you won't stick with it. And so everything that we design and we talk about, I want you to take and determine what do I feel like I can actually consistently stick with so that I get the results I'm looking for. So with that in mind, we are now going to start by choosing our content medium. This is the type of content, the style of content that you are going to emphasize. Now, I want to be very clear before we go into it. I think you should do all of these, but what I want you to determine is what is going to be your 80%. What are you going to lean into the most? Picking the right content medium is about playing to your strengths while ensuring long-term sustainability. You want to be able to do this for a very long time, like I said at the top. So, we have four different mediums that we're going to be discussing here. We have written content, we have video content, audio content, and graphic/design content. And so, we're going to start with written content first. Now, written typically is best for LinkedIn, uh, Twitter X, whatever you want to call it, Facebook, email, newsletters, ebooks, articles, those kinds of things. Honestly, the the best version of this is somebody who feels they are capable of taking high value information, maybe even really dense information and concepts and being able to articulate it in a written format that is concise and high value per sentence. When I'm thinking about video content, I'm thinking about value per second. I would like to think about value per word or value per sentence. When it's coming to written, it's February 2025 when we're filming this. Right now, LinkedIn is, in my opinion, the hottest platform to be on. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a creator, a musician, an artist, whatever you are, LinkedIn is actually the platform that is super underrated because everyone assumes it's just business people talking about their careers, but it's not. We're at the point now where the homie is posting a photo of him and his family in the minivan going on a road trip and then the next post is some career update. And so we're actually at the point now where LinkedIn is no longer just a resume and job status update psych. It is a social media platform, however you want to call it, interest media, social media, whatever. it is now getting to the point where it has matured and so people are behaving the way that they used to on Facebook back in like 2013 2014 and the beauty of it is right now if you comment on somebody's post all of their connections see it and so it's actually got true virality and I'm emphasizing this right now we'll touch on LinkedIn a lot more later but written content is murdering on LinkedIn if you understand how to package and format your written post if you get the hook Right? It's incredible right now. And so, uh, if you feel you have the skill set to do written, well, this is a great moment in time for you. Now, if you're wondering if this is going to be a good medium for you to pick, well, here's a couple of questions that you can ask yourself. Do you enjoy sitting down and writing or even journaling? Are you already doing this? Right? Like, do you have a habit of every morning or every night before you go to bed, you're already journaling? Well, you might already have maybe 70% of the skills required and also you might have 100% of the interest in the medium required to do it. A really crucial question that I think a lot of people don't ask themselves and never evaluate the written content off of is, can you write this down, this concept, and have it make sense without saying it out loud? Some of the worst LinkedIn posts, you can tell they're bad because the person who wrote it has to explain what they're saying in the written. If you have to explain it or add commentary, it is not a good post and you should throw it in the trash. And then once you have a post written or an article written, do you like the idea of refining it, editing it, reviewing it? I'll tell you, when I work on a LinkedIn post, I probably do about 10 different versions minimum of it where I reread it, write it. I mean, I just go back and forth, back and forth on it. And so I think something very similar to what we'll talk about here in uh video content as an editor, you have to be comfortable watching the same moment hundreds of times, right? Every editor watching heard that big time. Well, it's the same with editing written content. And so you need to be comfortable with doing that. That's how you can evaluate whether or not written content is going to be a good medium for you to emphasize. The next one is video content. Video content is the highest leverage medium that you can engage in. With video, you get the main video that you filmed. Let's say it's a long form like this. Well, we can also pull short form clips from it. We can also extract the audio and make that a podcast. We can also take the transcript and then take little quotes out of the transcript that were punchy or piffy and put those out on threads, Twitter, uh, Facebook status update as an image with the copy on it. There's a lot you can do. You can then take the transcript and use it as your starting point to write LinkedIn posts if you want or articles or a newsletter. So video is the highest leverage because you put the effort of filming this and then you're able to redistribute or repurpose that content for so many different mediums for so many different platforms. But like I said at the top, if you right now watching this shudder at the idea of being on camera and it sounds like awful, well, I would encourage you don't do it yet. Again, we want to be doing this for a very, very long time. And so, we want to create a system that we enjoy and we look forward to, not something that we dread and get anxiety when we see it on the calendar. Now, video content includes everything, right? This is YouTube long form, YouTube short form, Tik Tok, Instagram, LinkedIn video tab, Facebook reels, Spotify video. Now, like everything is pretty much pushing video these days. And so again, not only are you able to repurpose it in so many ways, but you're able to feed so many different platforms the type of content or the medium of content that they are asking for. Now, if you're wondering who is video best for, well, honestly, it's really if you feel comfortable being in front of the camera, if you feel like you have the ability to articulate fairly clearly, I mean, look at me. I'm not necessarily the best on camera or anything, but like that's what we're doing here. So, if you feel that or you're not feeling like you're an absolute natural at it, but you're willing to improve and work on it in real time in public like myself, then okay, cool. I would highly encourage you to take on video, you get so much more out of it. One thing that I left out is you can also extract stills from the video. So, you can also use those for social posts. I mean, the amount that you can get for the amount you put in is limitless. Couple of questions that you can ask yourself when evaluating if video is your medium are, are you comfortable on camera or are you at least willing to try and improve in public over time? Can you handle uh negative feedback from people calling out your lack of abilities to articulate or uh be entertaining on camera? If so, do it. Do you get excited about visuals and grabbing attention? Okay, video is probably a good one for you. If not, maybe it's down the road. And the last question is, can you speak concisely without rambling? Or again, if you can't, but you're comfortable learning on the job, learning in public, then okay, cool. Let's tackle it. Let's do it. The reason why we have this last question is because one of the things that I've noticed in a lot of talent that I filmed with over the years is that when you are extremely knowledgeable on a subject matter, something happens when you start talking about it. I call it bunny brain. I get it all the time. I start saying something and then my brain fires off this next idea and it's like this little rabbit trail that I end up following and it can cause you to ramble and it can cause you to veer off topic. And if you find yourself doing that, that is not necessarily a reason to not do video content. That just means you need to have a better editor that can help make sure that the content stays focused. Now, the next one is audio content. And this is mainly podcast. That's really what I would want you to think about when you're thinking about audio content. And really, it's exactly the same as video except for you remove the discomfort of staring into this lens, this eternal black abyss that you just have no idea what the reaction is on the other side. Because the majority of you don't have an amazing cameraman behind it like Trevor who is nodding and giving me affirmation that what I'm saying is good. So, it is freaky to sit in front of a camera, stare into the lens, and talk. It's a lot easier to just have a mic in front of you and just riff. And so I would recommend if the idea of video is exciting and terrifying at the same time, maybe consider for a period of time starting with a podcast. And what I have found is when people do this, they very quickly realize, oh, I might be able to do this video thing. It's not that bad making content after all. And so it allows you to see yourself in a very similar scenario and recognize that it's not that terrifying, not that freaky, it's actually very high reward. Maybe I could do the same thing with video. So if video was something that seemed interesting to you, but you get a lot of anxiety and fear that pops up in your mind and your body when you think about it, then I would strongly consider starting with a podcast. Three questions to ask yourself here are, do you feel confident speaking without a visual element? If you decide to do a podcast, that's amazing. What we are missing is a sensory input. There is no visuals for the viewer to be able to help understand what you are saying. And so, if you're explaining a really in-depth complicated concept, you have no visual aid to help illustrate what you are saying. And so you have to use your words to be able to articulate and paint the picture for your audience. This is more difficult. And so it's not like podcasting is just easier than video. I think a lot of people actually underestimate what goes into a top podcast. They think, well, I mean, it doesn't require any visuals, so that makes it a lot easier. But that means that your descriptions and the way you articulate your information has to be even more clear. The next question is, do you enjoy deeper conversations or deeper dives into one specific subject? I find that I prefer longer form podcasts personally and I think that if you look at the top charts, yes, there are short episodes and and shows that don't do like hour plus long podcasts, but I would say the majority of the top 100 are a little bit longer than 20 minutes, for example. And so if you feel comfortable being able to go deep on a subject matter for that long, I think this would be a great medium for you. And the last one is, does your voice have enough energy and clarity to keep people engaged? A lot of people would hear this and think, well, I don't have that interesting sounding of a voice. Well, I disagree. I think one the cadence in which you speak. If you've noticed sometimes when I talk I talk really fast then I slow down. I talk louder and then I bring it down. I'm always trying to emphasize certain things. And so when you go on a fast pattern and then slow down, for example, it allows the audience to understand you're trying to emphasize something. It's a pattern interrupt. So there's a lot of different techniques. There's a million creators on YouTube here that can show you how to be more engaging with how you communicate. But I actually want to take a slightly different approach to this. Throughout this course, I've mentioned kind of my life philosophy, which is taking whatever is given to you and using it as your advantage, even if it was viewed as a disadvantage by most people. If you have a monotone voice, I would actually lean into that and I would make that your bit. Again, what a lot of people would view as a disadvantage or a weakness, I think you can make that your thing. Honestly, some of my favorite podcasts and comedians are very monotone and sarcastic, and I think that that makes for a very interesting show. So, again, whatever you see right now as the reason why you shouldn't do it, I would argue is probably the very reason why you should do it. Now, the last medium is visual/graphic content. What this looks like is infographics, carousels, PDFs that you upload to LinkedIn as a carousel. That's kind of the hack there. Or anything that is designheavy. Now, a lot of people are going to hear this and think, "Well, that's just for designers. I'm not I'm not a designer." Well, one, there's a million tools out there that can take a complete novice with design and make them look like, you know, fairly intermediate. There's Canva, there's Figma, there's all these Adobe programs with AI and how it's evolving right now. I mean, we're almost at the point where like, you know, my grandma could design a really dope carousel for Instagram. Like, it's not that difficult. Okay, the real thing here is it's not necessarily you designing it. You might have a designer that you work with. It doesn't always have to be you implementing it, but I think a lot of people that are going to resonate with this are individuals who don't like video content, but want to be able to explain and articulate their thoughts utilizing not just words, but visuals. Something that's working really well right now in February 2025 on Instagram is carousels. Carousels are murdering. And I think the simpler the better. And this is where you compare a visual and written word. So instead of just having to explain things through a blog post or a LinkedIn post, you have two different ways to be able to explain the concept. Three questions to ask yourself uh if you're considering visual or graphic content, are you good at or curious about tools like I mentioned, Canva, Adobe, Figma, any of those? Number two, can you simplify complex concepts into a visual? Tiny little side note, an amazing example of this is an Instagram account. I believe it's called Visualize Value. This individual, whoever they are, I'm I don't know them, does an amazing job of taking pretty highlevel complex concepts and making them into unbelievably simple and very easy to understand visuals. And I think the audience really appreciates the way that they are able to do that. And third, uh, do you enjoy the process of making content look great, looking polished? This is not necessary. Uh, you could literally draw on a piece of paper, take a photo of it, and upload it. That's actually, as a side note, something that is currently working really well online is drawing something or creating something physical in the real world, taking a photo of it, and uploading it. You can do whatever you want here. But if you do have a a love for refining visuals, this might be an interesting medium for you to explore. All right, so we've chosen our medium or mediums that we feel comfortable creating in. Now, some of you might choose all four of those. That's what I'm doing. I highly encourage it. If you feel like you have either the team around you, bandwidth, or skill set, or ideally all three, then yeah, by all means, use all four of them. I just wanted to give you the opportunity to choose one of them if the idea of doing all four feels overwhelming in the beginning because again, we're not trying to jump to Ronnie Coleman's training routine. We're not trying to jump to Mr. Beast's content output, okay? We're trying to do one thing at a time to start to gain momentum and stick with this for a long time. So, now that we've picked our medium or mediums, it's time to choose our platforms. What I recommend people do is prioritize two to three platforms. I don't want you trying to crush across all the different platforms. I know a lot of people out there talk about post everywhere, post all the time, and that's a strategy and that's fine. I would actually discourage you from doing that. I think that you gain a lot more by picking, let's say, two platforms that you're going to learn heavily and really emphasize original content for making content specific for that platform. More on that in a little bit. The reason why I say two or three rather than one is you want to avoid single channel, single platform risk. Here's a prime example that we just recently went through. Again, we're filming this in February 2025. Just a month ago, we had this wonderful 12-h hour period where Tik Tok completely disappeared in the US. Nobody could download it. They couldn't access it or anything. Guess what happened? Complete terror. Everyone was freaking the out, or I should say everyone whose business or income was tied solely to Tik Tok. And more than likely, they were the individuals who found a lot of success on Tik Tok and then never chose to build on other platforms to diversify their reach. And by doing that, they were unbelievably vulnerable. Now, I'm not saying that I think that the US government is going to start like banning all of these apps. I do not think that. But what I do know is that algorithms change. The way that platforms behave and serve your content to your audience is always changing. I mean, if you were to look at how many tweaks Instagram makes to their algorithm and the way that content is served, it's insane. And the real real is that it's changing all the time for different people. You and I are getting different updates at different times. You have features available to you that I do not have and vice versa. And so, I really encourage you, don't try and post on all the different platforms. What I would encourage you to do though is make sure that you aren't tied to one single platform. Now, what I do like to do is uh I'm a Lord of the Rings nerd, so I like this analogy. I like the Eye of Sauron approach. I do like to of my two or three that I'm prioritizing, put more emphasis or more priority and resources towards one at a time, but I try to rotate between, let's say I pick three, I try to rotate between those three. And so I think of the other two on maintenance mode while I'm focused on YouTube, let's say. And then maybe I get YouTube into maintenance mode and I move over to LinkedIn. Now, how am I going about this? Because we're at a very wild time in my life where I am starting to create content. As you can tell right now, this is the first time in my life where I have started to make consistent content for myself, not for the talent I'm working with. And so if you were to look at my social media profiles right now, you would probably see that YouTube, Tik Tok, X, Threads, all these different platforms, I have less than like 4,000 followers on all of them. Most of them less than 2,000. And then on Instagram, I have like 68,000 followers. And so if you were assuming that I would start on Instagram, that's a very fair assumption. But actually, what I've done is I've picked four platforms that I'm going to prioritize. Now, I am recommending that you do two or three. I've been in this game for 16 years. So, there's a little bit of a discrepancy there. I want to make sure that that's very clear. Do more of what I say in this, not as much of what I do. So, what I actually did is when we first started making content, I started with LinkedIn. And the reason why is because I believed that the majority of my potential clients were on LinkedIn more than Instagram. I also felt more comfortable with LinkedIn and Instagram. And so, those were the two platforms I started with. So, we started on LinkedIn, made a couple posts, and then we did a post on Instagram. And I would encourage you to do the same. Start where you feel comfortable. A lot of people really push the whole get out of your comfort zone. No, that Not in the beginning. In the beginning, you want to build the habit of doing it. Like I remember when I was really into powerlifting, a lot of times when my buddies wanted to get into lifting and were trying to figure out how, I would tell them, go to the gym for 10 minutes 5 days a week. If you just build the habit of driving to the gym, you're going to do it. That's usually the issue. And it's the same here. Build the habit of making and posting your content. Make it as easy as possible. Now, what we are going to do is we're starting to expand. So, like we're doing right now, we're filming long form YouTube content. And so, we're going to expand from just LinkedIn and Instagram to YouTube and a podcast. And the reason why I want to do that is I believe that short form content is amazing to drive awareness. And I think it's super powerful and very effective to get brand recognition. I view long form as the place where conversion actually happens. This is where we're able to truly demonstrate our excellence and expertise. Okay? So, for you, if you're watching this and you're considering uh whether or not to do long form or short form content, well, short form has a lower barrier to entry. So, it allows you to start to get the repetitions in and like I said earlier, build that habit. But eventually, I would encourage you to implement one or two long form styles. either YouTube long form video or long form podcasts, ideally both like I'm doing. And the reason why is because the more time somebody spends with you, one, the more they're going to see your expertise and your knowledge, but two, there is this whole sunk cost fallacy. And the way it works is the more time somebody spends with you, the more willing they are to actually act on an offer that you present them. For the very few of you watching this that have bought a Harley-Davidson or probably any other vehicle, I just only buy Harley's. Their finance team has this very interesting tactic that they do. They have you fill out all this paperwork and then they literally, I guarantee they get the information. They run your credit. They get all that within seconds and they make you sit there for like 10 or 15 minutes just talking to the sales associate. Then what they do is they take you on a tour through the whole dealership. And all they're trying to do is get you to invest more time in the dealership so that you feel like, well, I don't want to waste my time now. I might as well do this transaction. There's obviously a lot more that goes into it. But I view long form content the same. The more time your audience spends with you, the more likely they are to transact or convert on your offer. So what is the point here? Start where you're comfortable. If you're already active on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Tik Tok, wherever, then I would just use that to start. Again, we want to build the muscle and the habit of making and posting content. And I emphasize posting because a lot of you make and then it sits on your photo album on your phone and you never actually put it out. The next question that I would ask yourself when trying to figure out which platform do I feel most comfortable on is where do you naturally spend the most of your time? Like if you spend a lot of time scrolling on Tik Tok, you probably understand what content does well on Tik Tok. And if you go from just doom scrolling to literally consuming the same but with a more strategic mindset and thinking, okay, why did I like watching this video? And you start taking notes on that, you're going to keep track of best practices that then you can start to implement into your own content. The third question is where is your audience? Back to the exercise we did the brand journey framework, right? We created our desired outcome and then we reverse engineered from there to today. Well, based on what our desired outcome is, who are we needing to reach in order for that to occur? And where do we believe it's a hypothesis that they exist or they live the most? For me, we're building a consulting firm where we work with entrepreneurs, creators, entertainers to help build their brands. And a lot of them happen to be on LinkedIn very actively. And so that's why we started with LinkedIn as our platform of choice because it was a hypothesis of mine that we had more qualified potential leads existing on LinkedIn than let's say Instagram for example. And then the finally I would ask yourself are they on Tik Tok for quick engaging content or are they on YouTube for more long- for deep dives into one specific subject matter or are they around on LinkedIn trying to be one of those thought leaders right now. Basically, you want to make an educated guess on where you think your audience is and then test it, monitor it. Are you getting actual leads? Are people reaching out to you inquiring about what you do? If not, there's two potential options. One, your content sucks and nobody gives a Two, maybe you picked the wrong platform. Now, once we've determined what medium we like, what platform we're going to want to work on, okay, cool. We now have a good understanding and baseline of what we are skilled at. Once you realize that, double the down on it. If you decided you're going to do video and written, but man, your video content is just not performing and your written is going really well, I would encourage you not to eliminate video, but reduce the amount of effort you put towards your video content and increase the amount for the written content. There are special moments in time and when you are popping on a platform, that is not the time in my opinion to go about trying to level up other skill sets. That is the time where you double down and you pour gas on the thing that you are actually good at and can consistently put out that your audience deems as high quality and high value. Now, on the flip side, if you're confident on video and you feel like you're able to articulate your thoughts, you're entertaining, engaging, well, then double down on either short form or long form video. Again, it's whatever you feel you are best at, you should be leaning into that heavily. And like I said earlier, if you prefer audio, start a podcast. you'll eventually, I think, get to a point where you feel comfortable doing video and then you're doing a higher leverage activity. The next thing is look at your results and don't listen to your ego. I'm just going to be unbelievably vulnerable and transparent here. I have been seeing the footage from this course and I actually feel like I look fat as this. I feel like I've gained weight. I would encourage you to push past some of that ego some of those insecurities. I understand why they're there. I get it. Trust me. But if you are gaining traction and getting engagement in your content and people are resonating with it, who gives a how you think you look? More than likely, people aren't even thinking about that. Like the real real is I'm sure none of you even thought of that. Maybe you did, but probably didn't until I just said it. And so now I just, you know, brought that to your attention. If I allowed my ego to dictate what we did, we would probably not release any of the content we've made so far. And so what I would encourage you to do is look and track your metrics. Look at the engagement. Look at the results you're getting. And stop listening to that little demon on your shoulder that keeps telling you how weird your voice sounds, how fat you look, how tired you look, how weird you sound, what whatever it is, whatever that inner up voice is, that is not what is propelling you towards your goals. Another thing that I would really encourage you to focus on is that a small correct audience that is engaged is so much more powerful than having a massive audience of people that have no idea what the you're doing and could give a about it. For example, if you were to look at my Instagram page, I have 68,000 followers. Nowadays, that's nothing. But back when Instagram first started, that was a lot. But those followers are not engaged with me. I got them like 10 years ago off of my landscape photography. And so a lot of you watching this probably have 500 to a thousand followers, but those followers might actually be very engaged in your subject matter and very interested in the offer you have. Whereas if you look at mine, all of them follow me or the majority of them followed me for Pacific Northwest landscape photography that I was doing 10 years ago. And so now I'm going to have to go through the process of converting people to my new content and I'm going to lose a shitload of people. And so there's so many creators online that have these massive I know many people with millions of followers that make very little off of their social media content. I also know a lot of people that have less than 10,000 followers that are making millions of dollars a year off of their following. Why? Because those 5,000 people that follow them are their target audience, their potential customers. So again, don't look at your ego of the inflated numbers, the the big follower count, so that when your friends see it, they're really impressed. No, who gives a about that? You want to make sure that you are growing and acquiring the correct audience. So please do not be discouraged if you don't have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. There are plenty of people out there with less than 10,000 that are making more money than you could ever dream of. Now another thing is you want to track the performance on the platform. That is an indicator that you are making content that the platform prefers and so people will see it and engage with it. And ultimately this is probably especially for the people early on in their soloreneur or business days or a creator. This is how people are aware of your offer. Okay? So it's important for you to play the game. But what I would really encourage you to do is actually pay more attention to conversions. So, if you are a musician, are more people streaming your music? If you have a clothing brand, are more people buying your hoodies? If you're a video editor, are more people hiring you for various gigs? If you're an investor, are more companies coming to you for investment opportunities rather than you having to reach out to them? Because time and time again, what I have seen people do and it's a huge mistake is they build their whole brand and content based on performing well on Tik Tok, Instagram or YouTube and they never build it based on actually converting to sales or to streams. This is a huge mistake because unless I have this completely incorrect, the majority of you probably watching this aren't just trying to be famous for famous sake. You're trying to drive awareness that leads to a desired outcome. And if you don't optimize around the desired outcome, what you end up doing is you're going to waste one, two, maybe three years and lots of money and time chasing some vanity metric that doesn't actually improve your bottom line. The key here is not to think of it as one or the other. It's both. You need to make sure that you are paying close attention to how you're performing on the platform so that they can see your and become aware of what you have to offer. But then also make sure you are optimizing your content that leads to action. I would rather have 30 40% less likes and views and subscribers or followers, but have that audience convert at a higher percentage than have millions of followers and have a very low percentage of conversion. That's my personal preference because again, we're not making this content here for me to become famous. That is in no way the goal at all. I actually really hope that doesn't ever happen. My goal is purely to become known with my potential customers. And that's it. I don't need everybody to know who I am. And so, make sure that you are mapping and building out your strategy and optimizing your content for the correct thing. All right. Now, we're going to determine your posting cadence. This is a big debate, big question that a lot of people have. I get it. Honestly, I probably got this question at least 300 times in the last year. No joke. And it's a debate that occurs heavily online and a lot of different top creators that you should look up to have differing opinions here. And so I'm going to share with you my philosophy here. Before we dive into the framework for determining your posting cadence and then another framework for how to increase the volume and increase your cadence, I want to give you my overarching philosophy on quality versus quantity. The great debate has existed probably for the last eight years online. And I think that a lot of people that enter this debate don't actually define what these two things mean and what they are and what their purpose is. So quantity is something that a lot of people have overindexed on. I'll say, okay, they believe that you post a high volume of content in order to gain the most impressions and show up everywhere, having your face in front of people all the time. And that's a beautiful byproduct that occurs from posting a high volume of content. But I actually view volume of content as a tool in what I call the accordion method. The way I like to think of it is I don't know what quality is and neither do you. We sit around ideulating on a piece of content and we'll say something like this is a highquality piece and that ultimately is a subjective opinion. That is you subjectively saying this is high quality. But we don't give a about what you think. We care about what your audience thinks. Your audience is who determines what quality is, not you. And we use volume to acquire that data quicker. If you were to post 10 videos over 30 days, okay, that's one video every 3 days. Cool. If you were to take the same amount of videos and post them in a week, you're going to gain insights faster. And what insights am I talking about? What your audience is resonating with. What are they liking more? What are they commenting on more? what's getting more views. Those are indicators of your audience signaling to you, the creator, hey, I call this higher quality content. Quality does not have anything to do with the fancy that we're trying to do here, the lights, the camera, right? Like the the set that you're working on. No, that. That has nothing to do with quality. Think about this. Some of the most viral videos, most viewed and engaged with videos ever online are filmed at night in the dark on a cell phone. Like, they're grainy. You can barely tell what's going on, right? Quality is a subjective thing. And because it's subjective, I would rather have the audience determine what it is rather than me pontificating on what I think quality is. So again, you post high quantity, high volume content to get the learnings on what your audience says is quality and then what I believe you do is you compress the accordion and that's when you start to put more effort per piece of content. We're going to get into that in a little bit here. I don't want to spoil the mana right now, but that's my overarching philosophy and kind of the the shade the lens that you can view the rest of this section through. So now that we understand what quality and quantity are, we are going to determine our posting cadence. What I would encourage you to do is first start with the highest leverage platform. Okay, what do I mean by the highest leverage platform? Well, one, what are you getting the most results from? Where are you getting your leads? Where are you getting the majority of your engagement? Right? What is performing well by the platform standards and by conversion standards? And number two, what platform allows you to create one piece of content that then you're able to repurpose into many different pieces of content? Typically, what this looks like is a long form piece of content, aka this course, right? A YouTube video is going to provide you so much ability to be able to, like I said at the top, clip moments, so you can get shorts, uh, you're able to pull the transcript, get quotes, use that transcript to then make a LinkedIn post. You can extract the audio for a podcast. You can then pull stills from the video to use in social posts. It's a very high leverage medium and platform. Now, please again, I really pushed this in the last section and I'm going to just continue reinforcing it. If you are tracking conversions, which you should, conversions offplatform, if you notice that there's one or two platforms that are leading to a lot more conversions offplatform, please double, triple, quadruple down on those platforms. On one of the teams that I was running, we learned when actually looking at the data that YouTube was our number one lead provider, Instagram was number two, and LinkedIn was number three. But here's the very interesting thing. That was by absolute. But if you look at percentage of audience that is actually converting, LinkedIn was number one by a mile, it was a way smaller audience because it was a platform that we took on and started really optimizing for way later than YouTube and Instagram. So what we realized is we should allocate far more resources to LinkedIn. If it has a higher percentage of qualified leads coming from it, all we have to do is increase the amount of impressions we're getting and in theory that will be the number one platform, not just by percentage, but by absolute leads. We discovered this at a time when LinkedIn was just starting to emerge as like the next big platform. And so we actually as a team had kind of devalued it. We viewed it as an afterthought. It wasn't our number one priority. But the moment that we looked at the data, bing bing bing, track your data. The moment we did that, we saw massive returns. All of a sudden, LinkedIn became something that we were putting. I mean, we were spending probably 20 $30,000 a month just on LinkedIn organic content alone. The next one is actually going further or deeper on what we started this section off on, which is volume for speed and learnings, not just reach. I encourage you in the early days to increase whatever volume you think you need to do right now, increase it. Okay? And the reason why I said it up top, but I'm going to reinforce it and emphasize it again. You want to know what your audience deems as quality. And you want to know that as soon as possible. And so what I would encourage you to do is increase the frequency in which you post. A great example of this is a previous team that I ran. We started our YouTube efforts by posting three videos a week. Then we increased it to five. Now, were these highly optimized YouTube videos? No. I wouldn't even call them edited. They were just trimmed. There was no editing being applied. And there was definitely no graphics or any intentionality to how we crafted the intro, the packaging, nothing. What we were doing though is not trying to optimize because we weren't at that phase yet. We were at the learning acquisition phase. We were trying to understand what is the audience resonating with the most. What are the questions they're asking? How are they engaging and behaving with this content? What this allows you to do is then determine what they're with and do more of that. And when I say do more of that, I don't necessarily mean more volume. I mean putting more effort per piece. So let's say you were posting five YouTube videos a week. That's a lot. What if you took the effort that you put and the time and resources you put into five videos a week into one? And that one video was based off of the knowledge and insights that you now have of what your audience has said to you is quality. Sounds like you might be getting some traction and actually start growing and getting subscribers and views. It's crazy and it actually works. Quality is not your personal preference. Quality is determined by your audience. Plain and simple. One of the biggest traps I see a lot of you making is that you are making the decision for your audience. Maybe you have a piece of content that you've been sitting on and you think, "Ah, this isn't high quality enough and you're just not posting it. You're not putting it out there and you're making the subjective decision that this is not worth your audience's time and they're not going to get value out of it." But how do you know if you don't put it out? Especially in the beginning. I understand mature creators, you get to a point when you are a content creator where you do actually be able like you know this is not going to hit. Like we can't even post this. Nobody's going to give a about this. That does happen. But in the early days, you don't have a clue. You don't know anything about your audience or what they want. You have your perception of what you think they want, but more than likely, it's not that accurate. And so, I encourage you, stop guessing. Stop making the decision for them and allow them to tell you what they want. And the last point in determining your content cadence or your upload cadence is avoid the perfect post trap. I like to say that perfect is the enemy of posted. If you're struggling to post daily, yes, me too. I agree with you. Most people can't post daily. That is kind of like an absurd level to just immediately jump into. And so, I would encourage you, visit the idea of posting three times per week. Visit the idea of posting once a week, once every other week. Look at what we're doing. We're probably going to be posting one long form video on YouTube a month, maybe every three weeks or so. But we're putting more effort per piece rather than high volume. Now, Caleb, I thought you just said do high volume in the beginning in order to learn what the audience resonates with. Well, I have a little bit of a leg up. And I'll give you kind of like an insight into that just so that you understand that I'm not bullshitting you. In the last year, I met with over 2,000 businesses and consistently ran question and answer sessions with them. I did a roundt session with literally 2,000 business owners. And I know what the common questions were. I have a very good pulse on what people are wanting to hear from me based on what they would ask me at these Q&As's. I also have been in the industry for a very long time. And so, not only do I know what people are wanting, I also know what they need. I know what the majority of the industry is currently saying. Half of these on YouTube are telling you a lot of around how to grow your brand or how to scale your organic content. and I've seen it long enough that now I'm at a point where I'm a little bit fed up and that's why I'm putting this content out for you. I would encourage you unless you have those insights, unless you've met with 2,000 different individuals that map towards your ideal customer, then I would probably start with high volume. But again, if high volume means one post every other week in the beginning because that's all you can do, then do that. whatever you can actually put out consistently, please start with that. Don't try and jump to the Ronnie Coleman method and squat 800 lb when you've never squatted 135. And the last point to that is again, stop aiming for perfection, speed wins. So, for example, we're filming this course, right? And we've invested a good amount of money into this and a lot of effort and we have been very intentional with all the little elements, right? like uh the set, the lighting, uh the framing, the way that we're shooting this on three different cameras, the audio, like all this right? We're trying to be very cognizant of all of it. But there's been semis that go by. There's been police officers that are, you know, woo woo, the sirens going by. There's all kinds of And it's not perfect. And we could stop every single time and we could potentially even decide this isn't the right space. Uh maybe we should have filmed in something that was more uh audio friendly. But guess what? Perfect is the enemy of Postit. And so we are still going to capture this, put it together, and we are going to post it. And what have we been doing every night after we finish filming? We've been going home and figuring out what we would do differently and how we're going to improve on the next version of this. So, what I would encourage you to do is instead of letting all the different problems or issues you see with the content you're working on right now and using that as a reason to not post, that. Post it and take note of what you're going to do on future pieces that you make. So, we've determined our posting cadence and we're at a point now where we've been doing it consistently. Congratulations. Good for you. That's awesome. A lot of people give up after like a week or two. And so if you've made it even like 2 or 3 months of posting, you are in the top 1%. So congrats. You're awesome. I'm proud of you. And I want you to do more. And by more, I mean I want you to increase your volume. And here's how we're going to do it. One, you are going to leverage a content pillar approach. I want you to identify your pillar content. Typically, this is more long form content. Okay? So, think like a YouTube video, long form, a deep dive uh thread. Maybe it's a long form written post on LinkedIn or it's a newsletter that you send out to your email list. Then what you're going to do is you're going to do what I affectionately call mining. You're going to go through your long- form content and mine for the gold. If it's a newsletter, what you're looking for is bite-sized chunks that are self-contained. So, this is a paragraph that you have in your newsletter that you could extract and pull and it would make sense and be valuable in and of itself without the other context. You're also probably going to find maybe a quote or two that you could pull from that. Okay? And then you could probably also do a version where you take the entire newsletter and you summarize it in call it five or six sentences. So, a medium form post on YouTube. If you have a long form YouTube video, well, what you're going to have is an editor or editors that go through and they're mining for the gold. They're going to find the moments and extract them that they know are going to perform well and resonate with your audience. Typically, you're looking for a powerful moment that maybe is a slightly contrarian view or is a nuanced take on an already discussed subject. For example, my quality versus quantity moment. I almost guarantee Trevor is going to clip that moment and we'll post it on Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube short, all that because that's going to be a moment that will do well for our audience. Now, this is nothing new. I like to call it the waterfall distribution model. But ultimately, I got to pay homage to the actual man who came up with this. This is the OG Gary Vee. He came up with the content framework and how he extracts thousands of posts from one long form piece of content. And he's been doing this since I want to say like 2015, 2016, right? Like originally it started with releasing Daily V and then clipping moments from that and posting them on Instagram before reals, Tik Tok, any of that was a thing. And so here's what I recommend you do. Take your high value content. Let's use a YouTube video for example. And what you're going to do is you are going to break this down into short form clips. You're going to extract quotes that you can put out on threads and X. You're gonna take the transcript and find a moment that you can rewrite into a LinkedIn post. You're gonna then take that LinkedIn post and post it on Facebook as well. Then one of the shorts that you clipped from that YouTube video that you post on Instagram, use the LinkedIn post as your caption for that post. Okay? Do you see how literally in the moment right now, I'm not looking at notes. I'm literally coming up with this in the moment because there is so much that you can extract from a YouTube long form video. I haven't even gotten to carousels yet. Now, what I want you to do is take the different sections from your YouTube video and make two carousel slides per section. Now, you got to simplify. You can't have a fuckload of text. In fact, the best practice is to have one very basic, very easy to understand image followed by one, two sentences at most per slide. And so diving even deeper on it, you want to make sure that the first two slides in your carousel are taken from the hook that you made for the YouTube video. So reinterpret the hook that you made for the YouTube video into the carousel opening two slides. The reason why is because when it's served immediately, they're seeing the first uh tile, the first slide. But if they didn't engage with it, Instagram gives you a second atbat. How nice of them. They're going to serve the carousel again to your followers, but it's going to be on slide number two. So, you want to ensure that you have a hook for one and two. Now, another thing to note is uh this is not a rule, it's an observation. Often times, listicles tend to, at least as of February 2025, they do better in carousel form. So, if you have a video that is 10 things I learned about investing in my 30s, okay, cool. That's going to be an amazing amazing carousel. However, if you have like a really complex deep dive on a subject matter that is like not in any way made for the lay listener or viewer, then I would probably consider maybe just taking one section of that video and then expanding that into a carousel rather than trying to compress an entire video. So, when I say taking a YouTube video, please try to stick more towards listicles when you're doing this. Otherwise, you're going to want to just take one section of the YouTube video and turn that into the carousel. So, in this example, I couldn't even keep track of how many different pieces of content I just listed out. It's easily over 10 pieces of content that we just created off of one video that you filmed. Insane amounts of output for what you put in, aka very high leverage activity. Now, the next thing that you're going to want to do is scale by platform, not all at once. First, we picked our medium. Then, we picked our platforms. Then, we determined our posting cadence. Cool. We've been doing that consistently for a while now on two or three platforms that we determined were our highest priority platforms. Now that I of Sauron approach that I mentioned earlier is really going to come in handy. Do not try to scale up all three or two platforms that you are emphasizing at once. If you do this, you won't do any of them well. And so just like I mentioned with the Sauron approach, what you're going to do is let's say for example your top three, you go LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram. All right, LinkedIn being number one, we're going to attack increasing volume there first. So, what does that look like? Well, you make sure that YouTube and Instagram are on maintenance mode. They're not going to go down, but they're not going to be growing. That is not your emphasis right now. You want those just consistently putting out enough content to keep the current audience engaged. If you grow, amazing. That's a wonderful little surprise, but that is not our goal. Maintain focus on LinkedIn. And when we're focusing on LinkedIn and scaling this up, you have two different ways to scale it up. In my opinion, you can either literally increase the volume of posts you do or you can increase the amount of effort you put per post. As of February 2025, I actually would encourage you instead of just increasing the volume, I would start with increasing the amount of effort you put per post. So let's say for example, you were posting five times a week on LinkedIn. I actually would encourage you as of right now, and this is way different than what I would have said a year ago. I'm very much on the higher effort per piece of content train right now. And so I would take the effort you put into five pieces and put it into three. I am finding you get far more out of a very, very extensive and high value piece of content than you do off of medium value content at a high volume. Here's an example. There was an individual that I worked with. They loved volume and they wanted to post a minimum of four videos a month on YouTube. Now, when we did that, those videos would average around 250,000 views a video, which is really great for most people, but according to our standards, that was actually lower than what we were looking for. Add all of that up together, and that's a million views a month. I would argue that one video a month that gets a million views is way more valuable for both the audience and yourself than the four videos that get 250,000 views. Well, Caleb, where did you come to that conclusion? It's the same collective views. Ah, it's the same number of views. It's not the same number of eyeballs. Meaning the video that got a million views had a high percentage of those views be new audience. These are people that have never consumed your content or rarely consumed your content before. Now the videos that got 250,000 more than 60 to 70% of the views were from the current audience. And there's nothing wrong with nurturing your current audience. I want to make sure that that's clear. But can you see a massive discrepancy here? It's very clear to me that the millionview video once per month has a disproportionate amount of value compared to four 250,000 view videos a month. I believe that this is why Mr. Beast Jimmy Donaldson went with this method. When he was posting content on YouTube, he wasn't trying to post a video every 3 days. He wasn't trying to post a video every week. He was posting a video every 4 to 8 weeks. There was times where he would go two months in between posting a video. Why? because he was putting so many resources and so much effort into each piece. Because what he knew is rather than the majority of YouTubers who are trying to put out a video every week, if he put all that effort into a video every six weeks, way more people were going to see it, way more people were going to enjoy it and share it with others because it was such a crazy concept and crazy execution of that concept. And so I'm actually on the lower volume, higher effort per piece train. And the reason why I'm saying lower volume and not higher quality is again quality is subjective. Now over time you get to a point where you know what your audience deems as quality. So you could use the term higher quality content. I just don't like to say it because I don't want to confuse you and make you think that I know what quality is. I don't. You do. So back to LinkedIn. What I want you to do is focus on putting more effort per piece of content you do. Now what do you do more of? Well, if we've been doing five posts a week, for example, we have a pretty good insight on what topics and what kind of structure or formats people on the platform are resonating with and preferring. So, one, we can just do less of the other and more of that. But here's another little hack for you. Look at the top 10% performing content. Take the last 90 days, for example, or if you've only been posting for 30 days, take the last 30 days. Whatever amount of time that you can do up to 90 days. And what I want you to do is identify your top 10% content. And then what I want you to do is study the out of it. And what you're looking for is not all these different things that you think could have been the reason why it performed well. What you're looking for is what occurred in all of these pieces of content that I can then replicate and put into every piece I do moving forward. If it exists in only one or two, then it's kind of a crapshoot. But if you identify, and usually you're only going to find one, maybe two things. If you identify those one or two things, you raise the probability of your future content performing better than average. And so what you're doing is you're always learning and optimizing off of your top content, not your general content. A lot of people look at everything they're making and they try and extract learnings from it. But why would you want to learn from the bottom 10% or the bottom 20%. I want to always be looking at the top tier performance and how can I replicate these scenarios, these conditions that led to it performing so well. And again, please increase the volume because you see that that platform, that channel is driving more conversions. Again, whatever conversions look like for you. If that's email newsletter signups, if that's more streams to your music, if that's more downloads on your short film on Amazon Prime, whatever it is, I want you to optimize for conversions first. And another question that I get a lot of times is like, if my content isn't performing well, well, what do I do? Well, you do what I just said. Even if your content isn't performing super well, there is some content that's performing better than others. And so look at the top 10% and study what that is. And I would encourage you to do this on a monthly basis. If you just stick with what the original core findings, okay, cool. You're just optimizing on that. But if every month you re-evaluate the top 10%, you're always going to be lading up. You're always improving off of your best work and learning from your best work rather than sticking with the learnings that you had 6 months ago. So the next thing that we're going to focus on is making your content sustainable. Like we said at the top, this only matters if we stick with it for a long time. That's when we start to get the actual returns on our investment. And so, first off, I want to just say you need to be playing for the long term. If you hate video, you're not going to stick with it. So, don't do video. Eventually, after making content, maybe as an audio only format or a design focus or potentially even doing written, you may get comfortable with the idea of putting yourself out there online, getting feedback, and being okay with that feedback. In which case, maybe you'll get more comfortable with the idea of doing video. But if that idea or that concept of filming a video like this with a camera here, camera here, camera there, that sounds freaky to most people, I wouldn't push yourself to do it. Again, I want you to ease into this so that it's something that you can do for a very long time. Content creation should be sustainable for years, not months. Now, the next thing is to build a simple content machine. What do I mean by that? Well, we're not Mr. Beast on day one. And so, what you need to do is set a baseline of what you are wanting to accomplish. Let's say it's one video every two weeks for YouTube. And maybe it's posting three shorts a week on Instagram and YouTube Shorts. Cool. That's simple. Now, what we can do is consistently do that. And if we do it for 2 or 3 months, then what we can do is raise the bar and increase the volume that we want to make. Some people find batching content to be highly effective for them. Some people will literally block a 12-hour day and film three or four YouTube videos, some shorts, and a couple podcasts. And if that works for you, amazing. What I have observed, again, not a rule, just an observation, is for a lot of individuals, this puts a lot of pressure on the day. And if you find yourself feeling that pressure a lot of times, again, what I have observed is that that causes poor performance on the day of filming because they feel so much pressure they get anxiety, they end up getting sick or all these crazy things start popping up rather than having it be more of a low pressure environment where maybe you film a video here, a video there. The the thing that you need to do is make sure you are aligning your strategy with your calendar and your schedule. What do you have available to you? Do you have time to be able to film it throughout the week or do you have to batch? If you're in a scenario where you have to batch content, what I would recommend is ensuring that the team you're working with is a team that can make the environment conducive for you to deliver your best content. Which leads me to the next point, which is remove yourself from the execution. And we're going to go really deep on this one. Out of all of these different points within the make it sustainable section here, this is where we're going to spend the majority of the time. If you can afford it or as soon as you can afford it, please invest in building a team. Now, I'm going to go really in depth on this in the next chapter or the next section of this course here uh where we literally talk only about team. But if you have the capital, if you have the resources to do it, I encourage you to invest in this immediately. Now, this might look like hiring freelancers in the beginning or agencies that you work with, something that's a little bit more minimal on the upfront cost and allows you to test and make sure that you're getting a positive ROI. So then you can reinvest and redeploy capital into furthering and building out your team. Now, about the team, something that I have observed is that filming content is hard for the talent. Why is it hard? Well, there's high pressure, right? We're wondering, uh, how is this going to perform? Am I going to be able to deliver this and make a great piece of content off of it? Yeah, sure. That's the natural. But then there's also these like crazy questions that pop up. When you're staring into the camera lens and you're saying all this you're wondering, is this actually interesting? Is it valuable? Are people going to actually learn and change their actions based on what I'm sharing? Are they enjoying this? Is this boring? These are all natural questions that come up. And so that happens during the film session. Then oftentimes, and I'm sure if you're listening to this or watching this and you've filmed content, you're resonating with what I'm saying. You drive home. And on the drive home, you're like, "Fuck, I I could have done so much better. That was not very good." And you're going through all of these like inner critic, like a inner critic monologue that you're having with yourself. Here's how I solve this issue. I make sure that the team that is around the film session that is around the content creation makes it easier for you, not harder for you. What do I mean? Well, I have an entire playbook on how to go about creating an environment to make your talent feel comfortable. So, for those of you who are building your brand and trying to get a team around you, this playbook will be gold. For those of you that are the content creators behind the scenes that are trying to improve how you capture content with your talent, this will be gold. And I'm going to walk you through it just a little bit at a high level, but again, I would encourage you download it, study it, study it, study it. I believe that it is not the content creator's job to create the right environment. It's the team's job. And so, it starts, in my opinion, with the videographer. Now, to solve the problem of you wondering if what you're saying is interesting, what you need is a videographer who gives you visual feedback as you are filming. So, what I started to notice that I just naturally would do when I was filming with talent is I would nod my head when they were saying something good. Now, as what they were saying escalated, it got better and better and better. The intensity in which I nodded my head would increase. And it sounds funny, but every single person I've ever filmed with actually commented on this and would tell me how much it reinforced what they were saying. They knew, "Oh, okay. This is a good moment. I'm going to go deeper on this." And so what you're doing is you are giving them real time feedback because the difficulty with creating content is the feedback loop. It can be fairly quick with social media, of course, but it's still pretty extended. We're going to film this video and this course will not drop for a minimum of 6 weeks. I mean, that is the earliest it'll drop from when we filmed it. So, I won't get any feedback from you, the audience, which is who I care about the most, for 6 weeks minimum, probably more like two months. But what I am getting is Trevor behind the camera, is nodding his head or when I say something that he thought was really good, he's putting a thumbs up and letting me know that's some good One, maybe I'm going to double down and go further on it and dive deeper, but two, I just know that what I'm saying isn't boring as This is incredibly empowering and enabling for the talent that you are working with. It literally changes the way that they deliver their message. These are all tactics that ladder up to the principle of making a conducive environment to capture great content. Okay? So, they all all the tactics flow out of this principle. And one of them is when they're done saying something great, when you take a break, when a take is over, go up and give them a fist pound or a high five. I've been doing it my whole career. I've been the guy behind the scenes doing it. And now I am in front of the camera in this like very like intimidating environment. And every time that we take a break, Trevor's coming up and giving me a fist pound and saying that was great and then calling out one or two things that I said that he thought really stood out. I've been doing it for years, but as somebody who is now on the receiving end of it, I can't tell you how effective this is. It's unbelievable because one, it keeps my momentum going. I'm tired. Like we've been filming this for a long time. I'm exhausted. It literally gives me energy. And I would see it with talent that I've worked with where I I remember I would see them their energy starting to fade and then I behind the camera would just increase my energy. Even if I was exhaust, I'd be like, "All right, I'm going to figure it out." And they match that. And so what you want is you want a team around you that is trying to make your environment or the environment you're filming in the easiest possible for you to communicate the message you have within you to your audience. The 2.0 version of this is not only are they giving you dabs, giving you praise when you're doing a good job, they are also thinking through the frame of a skeptic. They're thinking through all of the objections that your audience is going to have when they consume the content. And just like a good video sales letter, a VSSL on your website overcomes sales objections that maybe the prospect would bring to the salesperson on the call, you're overcoming those in the video before they even get on the call. And I like to think of really welldone content as accomplishing the same thing. What we're doing after each section here is Trevor and I are sitting down and going, "Okay, what are some areas that we could like poke holes in? What what context do we need it? What questions can we answer for you guys before you even ask it?" Because ultimately, I believe if you do that, you are going to build greater trust with the audience. You make it easier for them to trust what you are saying and then take action on it. One more tactic on this because I think it's really helpful and then the rest I'm going to leave for you to study in the playbook is once the film session is done, 15 to 20 minutes after, I always would send a message to whoever I filmed with telling them how great I thought they did. Now, if it was a rough film session, I wouldn't lie. What I would say is, "I am so impressed with how you showed up and still pushed through despite this, this, and this." You never want to your talent because eventually they pick up on it and they realize like, okay, a compliment from so and so never is actually that helpful because they don't mean anything they say. So, you want to always be truthful about it. But the reality is is like if you've had a really hard day, like if I got an email from a partner of ours and it was really bad this morning, that would throw me off. So maybe it wouldn't be the best video ever, but it'd be impressive that I still showed up and decided to do the action regardless. So, you always want either your team or if you're the team watching this, you want to send your talent a message telling them how well they did. And I would encourage you to call out one or two things they said. This way, they really actually know you were paying attention to what they said. It wasn't just like, "Oh, the lighting was great and all that." No, no. The content of what was being said was valuable, insightful, and useful for myself, and I know it will be for our greater audience. This then allows them to go on to the rest of their day or into their evening feeling better about what they made. And what that does is if we believe brand is how we defined it at the beginning of this that creates a intentional pairing between relevant things them and good content and eventually they start to associate that. And so then they start to associate good feelings, excitement and positivity with film days. A lot of people really hate film days and they really see it on their calendar as like a massive dread. They know it's necessary, but they don't want to do it. What you want is an environment that you look forward to it. When you see film day on your calendar, you want to be excited about it because it's so enjoyable because the environment is so reinforcing of what you are doing. The next one is to systematize repurposing. Now, real quick, I want to give a big qualifier here. Repurposing content, like for example, what we talked about earlier with the waterfall method. You make a long form piece of content and then you clip micro from it. That is a great way to start. But it is 2025 and we are now at a point where all the platforms are fragmented and behave differently. The best version of content and we'll talk about this more in a little bit but is making content contextual to the platform itself. Making it native for Tik Tok, for Instagram, for LinkedIn, for YouTube long form. And sometimes pulling clips from long form is native, right? Like a lot of podcast clips do really well. More podcast clips don't do well than podcast clips that do. And so if you want predictive power and you and you want to be certain that the piece is going to do well, the best version is going to be making it contextual to the platform. However, if you are earlier in your efforts here, and I'm talking like first 3 years even, you're probably going to be doing more repurposing. The 2.0 0 version of this is not just clipping or extracting short form content from long form. It's actually using insights of how content has performed on one platform in one medium and using that to inform new mediums for new platforms. Let me give you an example. There was a client that I was working with a couple years ago and she had a really powerful statement. I I can't remember off the top of my head right now. So, uh it was powerful but I can't quite remember it and I apologize. She put it out as a tweet. That was it. We put it out as a tweet and so many people were responding to it. It was one of her top performing, like most liked tweets of all time. So many responses, so many people sharing that tweet to their stories and tagging her. And so we thought we had something here. This is called social listening. We paid attention to what the audience was saying. They were calling this quality. They're like, "This is quality, y'all." So what did we do? We tripled, quadrupled, fiveupled, whatever that word is down on this. And what we did is we then created a short and we had her expand on this statement. We used literally the tweet as the hook and then she explained why she came up with that quote, why she said that, what the story was, what the scenario she was going through that inspired that quote. Next, we actually created a poster of the quote and we put it up in a very cool, aesthetically pleasing environment and we took a photo of it. Like I said earlier, if you were paying attention, something that does really well, this is a tactic, not a principle, but something that does really well right now is taking a photo of a real life thing, whether it's like you're writing on a post-it note or it's a printed, you know, quote or whatever, that is doing really well on social. So what we did is we printed the quote, took a photo of it, posted it, and it was one of, if not her top performing Instagram post of all time. So then what we did is we turned it into a longer form hashed out LinkedIn post. So we took the quote and we use that as the hook cuz it had been proven effective on Twitter. It had well now X, but it was Twitter at the time. And it had been proven effective on Instagram, on YouTube shorts, on Tik Tok. It did well everywhere. So we're like, cool. We're not going to around with the hook. We're just going to keep it the same. So, we did that and then we had her expand on it, right? We took a little bit of what she said in the short form clip and then we had her add or round it out, add more commentary, more color commentary to it. That performed really well. It was definitely a top three, if not her top post on LinkedIn. So then, guess what we did? We used that to inform making a YouTube long form video on this entire quote. And so what we did is we utilized I think we did a version of the quote as the title. You know, YouTube, you kind of have to play the youtuby game. But what we did is we used that and it informed a long I think it was like a 25 30 minute video. It was probably in her top 10. I don't want to say that it was her top video. It wasn't, but it was in the top 10. It performed really well. How incredible that we started with a tweet and what started as a tweet developed into some of the top performing content for all of her platforms. But did you notice what we didn't do is just repost the tweet everywhere. We made that tweet and remade it contextual to what the needs of the platforms were at the time. If you're listening or watching this right now, please like rewind or I'll just say it again. Make the content contextual to the platform. Reverse engineer what the platform is telling you it wants and what its users want and make it in that way. It can be the same exact message but repackaged differently. An analogy that I love to use and I'll probably share it multiple times throughout this course is you watching this. You are you. Okay? Wow, what a what a breakthrough statement. But you are you. But you show up to different scenarios and circumstances differently. Let's say, for example, you're going and getting brunch with your family on Saturday. And then Saturday night, you're going to go out and meet up with the ladies and go out for cocktails. And then Monday morning, you have a business meeting. you. Let's say your name is Sarah. Sarah is showing up to all of these different circumstances, events as Sarah. But the reality is is Sarah is going to talk about different topics and speak with a different tone and probably use different vocabulary given the different scenarios. That's not her being inauthentic. That is her revealing different parts of herself contextual to the environment she is in. Knowing her audience is what she's doing. Well, social media is the exact same thing. All the platforms are just these different events that you're going to. So you show up as you. Sarah shows up as Sarah on LinkedIn, Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, all of them. But you reveal different parts of yourself. You emphasize different parts and you use different vocabulary because you're in a different environment. That's what it looks like to create contextual content to the platform you're on. And then lastly, I would encourage you define your energy rhythm. And this sounds like so woo woo and blah blah blah, but really what it is is it's knowing thyself, okay? It's knowing I perform best. I have the most amount of energy and clarity of thought in the morning or I'm way better late at night. Whatever is your best time, I would encourage you to schedule your content creation around that. For me, I know that probably around midday, I start to get a little tired. So, in the morning is my best midday and then towards the end of the day I start picking back up. And so I try to plan accordingly to that. If I were really good at night and I sucked in the morning, I was just all groggy and like clear, I wouldn't film in the mornings, right? Because not only would I not enjoy it, it wouldn't perform as well. And so just look at where you find your most optimal times, where you feel most dialed, and schedule your content sessions around that. And a subpoint to that is protect your creative and your content time just like it's an important business meeting. Something that I've seen a lot of people do is kind of depprioritize this and they move their content day around all the time. And I understand very important if you're running a business or you know if you're an artist and you're meeting with a potential buyer for your painting or whatever. Sure, that's very important and that I would prioritize over your content creation. But I would tell you that unless you have a very mature team, more than likely what will happen over time is if you continue to reschedule and push off content days, unless they're very mature and they've been around this for a while, they're going to interpret it like it is not a priority for you. And if it's not a priority for you, it's going to become less of a priority for them. And so the way that you show up often times will dictate unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it, how your team shows up for you. Hello there. This is me interrupting this programming for a very interesting little advertisement. I just want to let you know about a email newsletter that we are putting together. Now, this isn't going to be your traditional newsletter. It's not like a weekly or monthly cadence. We're just going to occasionally send you dope free that we think is going to actually drive massive impact for your brand and scale your content rapidly. And so, if that sounds interesting, you can go to caleb rston.com, enter your email, and we'll send you some dope goodies. All right, the next section is utilizing storytelling in your content. Now, I don't think this is going to be any secret to anyone. Storytelling is incredibly powerful and effective. So much so that you're seeing one of the creators who is most known for maybe not utilizing as much of traditional storytelling techniques, Mr. Beast, who has been more like adrenaline go. He is even implementing far more storytelling tactics into his content. Especially if you've watched Beast Games, you You know exactly what I'm talking about. Stories aren't just entertaining and engaging. They also change people's perspectives. They allow the individual to see maybe a similar concept or a similar circumstance that they've been dealing with from a whole new perspective. But they also keep people hooked. I mean, attention is the greatest asset right now in today's age, right? It's what everyone is looking for. And storytelling does keep people hooked. It does retain attention. Stories also create an emotional connection between you and your audience. They allow you to provide more depth and round out the concept or principle that you are sharing. People have a harder time remembering facts, but what they do remember is the stories that you tell them and the new perspective they were able to gain because of the story. Here is a storytelling framework that you can use in your content. But please do not operate off of this framework like it's something rigid. It is not written in concrete. It's not in stone. This is a guide for you. You now have the rules. Feel free to break the rules. Like move things around. Like whatever you find is working most effectively for you. Please use this in a fluid way rather than a rigid way. What we're going to go over is the hook, the problem, the journey, the lesson, and then the call to action. First, the hook. We have to get attention fast. We are living in a world where you're competing with everything. You're competing with all the other creators, all of their friends, everyone on social media that is making content. You're also competing with the dog that's barking at them. I mean, there is so much going on in people's lives that you're competing for their attention for. And so, you have to get their attention immediately. Depending on the platform that you're making content on, some of them you only have like a second or two to get that attention. If we're talking Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook reels, YouTube shorts, LinkedIn video tab, any sort of short form video, you have about two or three seconds to get their attention. If you do not do that, guess what they're doing? Not consuming the rest cuz they've already scrolled five posts further down. Now, for YouTube long form, what a lot of the industry experts like to say is that 30 seconds, you have 30 seconds to capture attention. I don't really agree with that. I think you have about 15 to 20 seconds max to capture attention. And really what they're looking for is like one, is this video actually what I clicked on, right? The the packaging, or am I getting, for those of you that remember back in the day, the Rick Rald thing, am I getting Rick rolled, right? Or is this actually what I'm looking for? Two, is this the person that I want to listen to telling me this information? For a strong hook, I recommend starting with a very bold statement, potentially a contrarian view, something that is uh different that you see differently than your counterparts or industry experts in your field. This can also be an unexpected fact, although I I do think that those are kind of getting a little tiresome at this point. But I think that no matter what, if you say something that most people believe to be true and you claim it to be false and give an alternative take, you're almost always going to catch people's attention. Here's two examples for you. Subscribers, views, likes don't matter. What actually matters is that is an example of a contrarian statement. A lot of counterparts, a lot of the industry experts within online content creation would say the opposite of what I just said there. A lot of them are pushing for those metrics and that hook would catch attention because it is different than what the majority of other content creators are saying. Thus, it stands out. Another great example of a good hook is a pattern interrupt. So, one of the top performing clips I ever made for Gary Vaynerchuk was uh the blueberry clip. And he literally starts it off by he's like chomping on some blueberries and he goes, "I eat blueberries like it's my job." And then the next thing he says is, "You missed the first 30 I ate." And this was like such a such a pattern interrupt for a lot of people. This was one of at the time it was his most viral clip at that time. And so basically what you want to do is you want to either provide a contrarian point of view, a pattern interrupt. You want to ask a thoughtprovoking question, something that is going to be a thumbs stopper that is going to cause them to have to watch the rest of the video because they're so interested. Next, we have the problem. This is where you're going to set up the stakes. Here, you're going to introduce a conflict or some sort of emotional investment. And this doesn't have to be a massive conflict or anything like ultra dramatic or anything. Essentially, what you want is some sort of problem or thing that the main character has to overcome in some way, shape, or form. Now, ideally, you want to make the problem specific and relatable. So, ideally, this is something that your audience is going to be like, well, yeah, I've gone through something similar. They're going to be able to see themselves in that problem. They maybe have recently encountered something very similar. An example might be, I was working 14 hours a day for my hero, Gary Vaynerchuk, but I still felt stuck. This creates stakes. It shows you how much I care and that I love working for Gary and that he is my hero, but that I was in this inner turmoil of feeling stuck as an example. Next, we have the journey. This is how we overcome it, right? In the traditional like storytelling mantra, this is how the prince slays the dragon to rescue the princess. Now, one thing to note is people resonate with progress, not perfection. And so, if you're sharing this journey, I would encourage you to not just share the highlights. Share the low lightss, right? The low points where you've made mistakes. In the example of I was working 14 hours a day for my hero Gary Vaynerchuk, but I still felt stuck. I would then go on to tell the story of how I got unstuck through a sequence of victories and losses. Okay? It wouldn't necessarily just all be roses because that's not what life is. And people resonate and connect and relate to your struggles, I would argue, more than your successes. And I encourage you, show the messy middle. Show where you're doubting yourself, where you're doubting the opportunity you're in. Maybe you're building a business right now and you can share how you're like unsure how this is going to actually go. Is this going to build into some big business? Is it going to be successful? Am I going to be able to provide for my family? Or am I going to have to go back and get a real normal job, a 9 to-5? If you're a musician, maybe what you end up doing is you're putting out tracks and you're trying a new style of music. Maybe you've traditionally done more rock and roll and you're entering the country music world and you're uncertain if that audience is going to resonate with it. I think that your audience is going to resonate more with you explaining why you're trying this new thing and the fact that you're not certain of how it's going to go. I mean, that's what I've been doing probably throughout this course. Maybe you've noticed it, but like there's been times where I'm indicating I think this is going to be a powerful project. I think this is going to affect a lot of people and I think it'll lead to a lot of good outcomes for Rston, my consulting firm. But I don't know. I have no idea. I'm investing a lot of money, at least for me, and a lot of time and effort into this, right? Like, we've been filming all day yesterday, all day today, and we'll film again tomorrow. And like, I'm exhausted. I'm investing a lot into this and I have no idea if it's going to turn out. I think it will, but I don't know. And I think that me sharing that, more than likely, you resonate with that. At some point in your life, you have also too had a moment where you invested a lot into a project. Maybe it was back in fifth grade when you were working on that volcano for science and it was like you put a lot into it but you didn't know if it was going to actually erupt for Mrs. Fields, right? Like I don't know. So I really truly believe in your storytelling framework this is the key. We want to share the transparency. We want to share these moments. We want the audience to see themsself through you in some way. An example of this could be I realized I was burning out because I was trying to do everything and that's when I realized that I could do blank. That is an example obviously very concise version of it but that is an example of giving an insight to the journey a mistake that I had made. I was trying to do everything and I realized that I was burning out. Now for the lesson this is where you make it useful for your audience. Every story that you tell is going to give them a new perspective and a shift. It's going to open them up to new possibilities and new realities. So, this is the moment when you give them the lesson, the takeaway, the thing that they can act on. Otherwise, it's just they're being entertained. You're just telling a story, and they're like, "Oh, cool. Great story." If you give them the lesson, the takeaway, and you make it easy for them to take action on that by giving them step-by-step instructions, chunking it down, making it as easy as possible for them to change what they do. Then, what you're doing is you are providing value to your audience. Cuz ultimately when people say provide value, that's all providing value is something that is useful, something that the audience can take and immediately put into action. That is what valuable content within the education space is. Now, an example of how I might transition to this is here's what I learned from that season of my career and here are three ways that you can apply these learnings in your career so that you avoid the mistakes that I made. Ideally, what you want to do is tie this lesson back into what your expertise is and really ideally back into what your offer is. Because ultimately, we are trying to either build our business, build our craft, build our art, whatever it is that we are offering the world, we want to make people aware of that. And so, every time that we can tie our lessons, our stories back to that, the better. And lastly, we have the CTA or the call to action. Now, immediately when I say that, 99% of you immediately thought it was something like, "Now, if you want to learn more about things like this, go to my website and buy my offer or pay for my course or whatever shit." That's not necessarily the case. A call to action just literally means telling people to take action. It doesn't mean that you have to sell them something. I would argue that your best content is not going to be pushing and selling If anything, the 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 0 version of this once you have bigger budgets is you just retarget those individuals who paid. That's a totally another video. We'll do that one other day. The call to action can be a very simple thing of comment below on what your biggest takeaway was and how you're going to apply it to your life moving forward. That can be a very simple call to action. It drives engagement. It causes the viewer to think and actually probably identify what they are going to actually do and then increases the likelihood that they will change their actions. So, an example of this is if you're struggling with trying to do everything yourself and burning out, try delegating and training your team. Please, what I would love to hear from you, comment below, tell me which of these tactics you're going to use in training your team and delegating some of the tasks that you currently have on your plate so that you no longer are the one trying to do everything so you don't burn out. Now, ultimately, what this does is it bridges the gap between engagement and viewership and actually taking action. And that's the ultimate goal of educational content. Now, we have two more sections here on story. And then right after that, I am going to go very in-depth on what I believe educational content is, what its purpose is, and how you should go about making it. But first, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into more around storytelling, which brings us to the best types of stories to tell. Not all stories work equally as well in content. The best ones fall into these categories. The first one is origin stories. Uh people love this one. Now, if you start your journey of making content and you do this for several years, I promise you, you're going to get bored of your origin story and you're going to get to the point where you start telling your content team, "Stop cutting that. Stop including that." Do not do that. You need to treat your content like you're always trying to reach a cold audience because that's what you're trying to do. And guess what's so unique about a cold audience? They don't know your origin story. Origin stories are what people resonate with, in my opinion, the most. It's how you got to where you are. It's the thing that you're going to tell that is going to be the most relatable for the audience watching. The thing that's not relatable is where you're at right now. Let's say you're a very successful businesswoman and you've built a massive business and you have, you know, your $500 million net worth. You're huge. You're on the cover of Forbes, all this crazy That is not relatable. But how you went from being a barista at Starbucks, barely making ends meet, all the way to that point, that is what we, the audience, are going to resonate with. So really, please lean into your origin story. This tells the audience why you are doing what you're doing. Okay? This gives us the understanding, right? This is the Peter Parker getting bit by the spider. This is Batman encountering the terrible situation with his parents. This also gives insight to pivotal moments that shaped your career and shaped who you are as a person. We are a collective of everything that has happened in our life up to this point. And if you don't share that with your audience, they're not going to truly understand why you do what you do, why you say things the way you say them, why you act the way you act. So this is me right now committing to you guys. I am going to continue to dive deeper and deeper over the next year into my origin story, into why I operate and think the way that I think. For example, we talked about how we shape the environment for filming. There are a lot of things that occurred in my life leading up to working on set that allowed me to have a completely different perspective and insight into how to make talent feel comfortable. Another example is the first video that we put out on YouTube talking about my career journey, right? I literally tell you in that video how at 15 years old, Sean Kel gave me the book Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk. I read it and forever changed how I viewed my career. I all of a sudden realized I could do video content. And so it gives you insight to so many different things. why I chose this career path, how I've navigated it, why I've overemphasized social media even at the time when the majority of marketers and my counterparts were talking about how it was a fad. You also gain insight on probably why I referenced Gary so much throughout this course in a lot of different speeches and podcasts that I do because Gary has had such a huge impact on my life. But if you didn't know the fact that I read his book when I was 15 years old in high school and decided to completely change the trajectory and course of my life, you'd be like, "Wow, this guy references Gary a lot. It's kind of interesting. It's kind of weird. Why does he like Gary so much?" And this gives insight as to why. The next one that people really relate to is failure stories. I think most humans have one thing in common, which is we fail. By telling failure stories, what you do is you become relatable to your audience and you build more trust with them. People trust vulnerability more than they trust success. They trust failure more than they trust wins. If you do tell these stories, don't only talk about what went wrong. Don't make it just a sob story. You hopefully gained lessons and insights from that failure, from that loss, from those mistakes. And what you can do is not only did you learn from it, but you can help others learn from it and avoid having to make the investment of time, money, whatever that you did and lost in your mistake. And so ultimately you are servicing your audience or providing value, usefulness, so that they can then make different decisions and avoid that pitfall altogether. For example, referencing the career video again because at the time of recording this, it's the only video that I've put out on YouTube. I share the story of how I thought I was a hot shot, big shot. I signed two I502 legal cannabis companies in Washington state and I had tripled my income and I was like, I was the big man. I was hot And then that same client cut my monthly compensation in half and I had to go fire three friends that I had hired. Again, Mr. big shot immediately brought down to low very very disappointed little Caleb. It was brutal. And I shared that story. But not only did I share the story, I shared what I learned and how I will never make that mistake again. And what I tried to do is articulate in a very clear way how you, the viewer, can avoid the same mistake in your craft, in your career, in your business. Now, as much as I think sharing the losses and the failure stories are very important, it's also extremely important to emphasize your success stories. Otherwise, people will just think that you are a failure constantly learning. And that's not what we want. We want to actually create the association between you and the success that you have had. More on that in a little bit. But what you want to do is show before and after transformations. Okay? So ideally, these success stories end up being the proof that validates that you are the right person to be listening to on this subject matter. And when you validate that you are the right person to listen to on the subject matter, what you're doing is increasing trust in the viewer. And if you increase trust in the viewer, a lot of magical things happen. And if you start to highlight small wins that became big results, this starts to build on your credibility. For example, I like to reference as often as possible how I worked with Gary to grow his Tik Tok from 300,000 followers to 3.5 million in just 3 months. And by doing this, I am providing you with credibility or proof that what I'm about to say is valid because I have had success in this realm. Another one is customer and client success. This is more proof that not only can you execute something for yourself, but you can do it for others. you can replicate this success. And if you can replicate this success, then why would you, the viewer, not believe that you could do the same thing? This is another moment where you get to let the audience see themselves in your content. Ideally, they see themselves in your success story and then they go and take action and get that same success. An example would be I met with an agency owner about 2 years ago. They were asking me, "How do I get more out of my editors? How do I get them to be better and up to speed?" And I shared with him a very very simple tactic and it comes from the principle of let them know what you like so they do more of it. And what I told him is I said instead of only leaving comments on frame of all the things that you want your editor to do differently, spend at least the same amount of time leaving comments on reinforcing what you want them to continue doing. Because editors, if you only get notes on what you should change, well, you don't know if the client liked what you did on, you know, minute 1313. And so then they have to spend energy on the next edit wondering, should I continue doing subtitles that way? Should I still do transitions in the same way? They don't know. And they have to expend effort in guessing what you liked. So call it what you like equally, if not more than what you want changed. And he texted me about a year after that and told me it was the greatest insight that he had ever heard in training a team. And his output and quality, and by quality, I mean the performance of the content increased and went better for his clients. And his client retention increased because one of the common problems that a lot of agencies experience is high client churn due to poor editors. Well, this changed how he trained his editors and it changed his agency forever. There's an example of me sharing a client success story. The final one that I'm going to share with you is industry stories. Now, I like to take a contrarian view to this because what you don't want to do is just be another person that's agreeing with everybody else and regurgitating all the same So, if you have the same opinion as other people, ah, I mean, yeah, sure, make the content, put your opinion out there, but I don't think that you're going to find that is as effective at catching attention and sparking conversation. And so what I would encourage you to do is look at what the people in your industry are talking about. And when you have a differing opinion, put it out respectfully, of course. Don't be talking and naming names and stuff, but share the industry trope that everybody touts as gospel. And then share your contrary belief or your view on it. An example here is maybe you call out the fact that a lot of people are encouraging content creators to make heavy calls to action for their offer in their organic content. And maybe you believe differently like I do. Maybe you start the video off by saying never tell your audience about your offer in your organic content. And then you expand on it. This is going to take a very typical trope that a lot of people are touting in my industry and flip it on its head. It's going to catch attention and provide a slightly unique perspective that most people have not heard. Now, this next section is purely about educational content. So, for anybody who is making entertainment, this might not be as useful. But for those of you who are making educational content, this is going to be possibly the most critical next few minutes of this entire course. This is the purpose of educational content. If you and I agree on the same definition of branding and brand. Branding is the pairing of things. And good branding is an intentional pairing of relevant things consistently which then creates the byproduct which is brand which is when the audience inherently associates the two things. Then cool, we're on the same page. And what I'm about to describe will make a lot of sense. In educational content, what you want to do is you want to share success stories. What ends up happening when you intentionally pair yourself with the relevant thing, success stories, you and success stories, is over time the audience begins to associate you with success. Now, what happens there is not the magic sauce, okay? That's not the epic because what that causes is trust. trust in what you say. So that's amazing, but that's not the final byproduct that we're looking for. When they trust what you have to say, now they start to hear the lessons and takeaways that you share. When they trust those lessons and takeaways that you share, they then start to take action. This is when the gold starts. When they start taking action, they start to get the results that they want. They get their desired outcome. They see that success that they were hearing about in your client stories for themsel. When this happens consistently, what begins to happen is the audience doesn't associate you with success stories. The audience begins to associate you with their success. This is powerful because what ends up happening is they realize whether it's conscious or subconscious that they always get more than what they invest with you because all they had to do was invest their time to consume and then their time to take action. Now, sometimes you're going to be telling them something that's going to also cost money. Maybe it's running paid ads. So yeah, they have to invest money in it. But I guarantee if they get the success outcome, it is greater than the investment they made. And so what you're doing is you are teaching your audience that what they invest with you always leads to greater outcomes. And this is the brand that you start to build with your audience. And guess what happens all of a sudden? When you make your audience aware of the offer you have, they believe, they trust that what they will invest in this offer is very little in comparison to what they're going to get as the outcome. I can't tell you how many different people I've worked with where we have done this at scale. There was one company that I worked with and we were putting out a lot of educational content, specifically long- form content on LinkedIn and YouTube. This company started conducting in-person seminars. I remember I would every once in a while try to attend them and and bounce around and mingle with the guests. And the question that I would always ask them is, "Hey, what what was the the conversation with the salesperson like? What was the point of sale like?" And they would almost all say the exact same thing. I literally told the salesperson, "Shut the up and take my credit card." Because through the free content you put out, I knew that whatever you're going to charge for was worth far more than what I had invested. So if I'm paying $1,000 to go to the seminar, I know I'm going to get at a minimum $10,000 worth of value. But actually, the way that we created content, they were getting like 50 to 100x the value of their investment. Ultimately, educational content is just scaling trust. And when you scale trust, doors that you could never imagine fleeing wide open for you. Opportunities start knocking at your door like you could never imagine. People come into your life that you never would have thought would have any interest in you. And the profit that you are able to make on your offer or for your company goes through the roof. Again, educational content, I believe, is ultimately just scaling trust. and trust makes everything in business and life easier. Now, we're on to having your community drive your content. I would encourage you, please involve your audience in what you are creating. I'm going to give you an immediate example of this actually that happened literally last night. We're here filming this content and uh an individual who is here that works at this studio, he also makes music. And we were talking about just different ways to involve and get more engagement from his audience. And one of the things that we were talking about is a lot of musicians, they have, you know, multiple different versions of a verse for a track, as an example, that they're working on. Or they might have a guitar lick that they're working on, and they have a couple of different ideas or versions that they're working on. This applies, by the way, to like filmmakers, to authors, like literally any medium that you're making. And I told him, well, a very simple way to engage your audience and to get them to feel very bought in to this single or an album, but let's call it a single for now that you're releasing is to upload maybe to your Instagram or whatever platform you prefer, the two different options. So, let's say you have two different versions of a verse that you're going to run in a track that you're releasing. You upload both of them and you allow your audience to tell you which one they like the most. Guess what? They're going to be invested. How cool, right? And if you're an author, you can do the same thing. You might have two different versions of a chapter. Sure. You might have two different versions of the title of the book. There's so many different things that you can do here. But if you involve your audience, one, you're making content or you're making something that you know they're going to want because they have told you they want it. But also, they are so much more bought in. They're going to be your advocates. They're going to go out and be your missionaries telling other people about what you produced because they were part of the process. The mindset shift here is shifting from creator first to community first. If you make everything about them and serving them and bringing them into your world, bringing them into your content creation, it's a totally different ballgame. It's no longer just a one-way talking at them. It's talking with them. Next is you want to create a feedback loop or feedback loops. This is where you listen and adapt. Listen and iterate. This is where the magic is. This is when literally people think that you're reading their mind. I believe the best content ideas actually come directly from your audience because you're making content to serve your audience. Let them indicate to you what they want more of. Now, I do not necessarily believe that what this looks like is posting a poll being like, "What do you want to hear from me?" I like that for like Q&A format, but I actually don't think that that is the best way because they don't know what they want. Let's just be honest. They they don't know what they need. But what they do is they will send you DMs or they'll comment questions. That's where you want to see the insights. So I I find when people make polls asking their audience, what should I make next? I'm not nearly as much of a fan of that. I think that that is way too blue ocean and doesn't provide any sort of constraints for them to make the decision within. However, the questions in your DMs, the questions in your comment section, that is insight on what your community is wanting more of from you. An incredible example of this, like I kind of said at the top of this section, is Gary spends an incredible amount of his time doing what we refer to as social listening. He is looking at tweet replies. He is looking at Instagram DMs. He is looking at comments on his content and he is taking all of that in and synthesizing it. What he does is he starts to notice that maybe five people today asked him the same question or a very similar version of a question. And what Gary does so well is he immediately acts on that and creates content answering that question. Now what he doesn't do is say, "Man, so many people have been asking me about blank." He immediately jumps into it and addresses the problem or question that he is receiving from his audience. And then this crazy thing happens. People comment on his post being like, "How did you know I needed this right now, Gary? You're somehow reading my mind." And it's almost like he is reading their mind because what he's doing is recognizing if five people in the last 3 hours ask me a very similar question, there are thousands of people that for whatever reason, whatever woo woo magic in the universe, they're experiencing that right now. And they need that insight right now. And so if you do this, if you pay attention to what your community is saying and the feedback they're giving you, you can be making content that is literally speaking to them in their exact moment right now, aka reading their mind. Another thing that you can do is you can make your audience the hero of the story. By doing this, you encourage them to want to take action on what you're sharing, get the success, and then become one of those success stories. So what this looks like is sharing community wins, transformations, and case studies. If you have a weekly call that you do on Zoom for free for people in your audience and you're telling them or sharing information with them or sharing some new direction or something that they can do and they take action on it and it changes their life, you should be sharing that on social. Don't just keep it for the community. share that publicly because what that will do is one, it will incentivize current members of your community to take action and win so that maybe they can be a success story, but two, it will cause people who are on the outside that are a little bit more skeptical to be less skeptical and trust you more. An incredible example of this is if you receive a DM from somebody in your community, somebody that's in your audience, and they've gained success. they tried something, they put into action something that you told them, a lesson, a takeaway, and they got the result that they were looking for. What you could do is you could turn that into content. Maybe what you do is you do a an Instagram video call with them, record it, and then you put that piece of content out there. Now, no, this is not going to be your top performing content by any means. Anything like this, you're not going to see massive engagement on. You're not going to see a ton of views, likes, or anything like that. But what you will see is it will encourage future people to engage with your content and send you their success stories, how they have won based on what you have shared. And lastly, leverage user generated content. UC is kind of the acronym that almost everybody in the industry uses and so that's probably what you're more familiar with. I would encourage your audience to create with you. And so what this can look like is potentially you put out a prompt encouraging your audience to share an insight or story based on the lessons and advice that you share in your content. Then what you do is you take those videos that they have posted. Maybe it's to Tik Tok, Instagram reels, and you can stitch them. You can actually create content off the back of your audience's content that they are already creating. What this will do is create a perpetual cycle of engagement. This empowers your audience to want to one create content with you, but also to promote you to their audience. And no audience is too small. Like even people that have 300 followers, I want them informing their 300 followers about my brand. Now, I believe that there are three pillars to community content. And my hope is in sharing this, this just allows you to come up with more ideas within these three different pillars. First one is educational content. This is when we're teaching our community. We help the community by solving their biggest problems. The next one is conversational content. The goal or purpose of this is to engage the audience. You want to make your audience feel heard and involved in your content. Again, we don't want this to just be a one-way relationship. We want it to go both ways. And number three, social proof content. This is where, like we talked about earlier, you can showcase community wins as an example. You want to be highlighting real stories from your community and how what you're putting out there is driving impact in your community. So, we've gone over the value of building a community and having the community drive your content, but how do you turn viewers into community members? Well, first off, you're going to want to make engagement the goal, not just views. So, the way you do that is you create content that invites them to participate. This might be as simple as literally just asking your community to drop a fire emoji in the comments if they found this clip useful. This could also go so far as to literally ask them to debate in the comments. So, what you could do is you could share a controversial take on something. Again, not controversy for controversial sake, but something that is counter what the industry norm is. You could share that and then your call to action could be literally telling your audience, debate whether or not you agree with this in the comments below. Or you could go even crazier and say, "I would love to know your two cents on this. I'm going to be engaging with some of you and going back and forth. We can debate it in the comments." Drive engagement in your content. And second, please respond and reward participation. People ask me, "How do I increase engagement in my content?" The number one thing that I notice for most of the people that ask this question is the three people that are currently commenting on their content, they're not responding to. So like why on earth would you think more people are going to start engaging with your content if you're not even responding to the ones who are? What you want to do is set an example for future people, future audience members, somebody who's new that comes in. If they see that you are more likely to respond to comments, they are more likely to comment. Go figure. People don't like one-way conversations. They love when creators, even big creators especially, are responding to their comments. What you're doing is you're not only acknowledging the people that are engaging and thanking them for that, but again, you're giving signals to other audience members that they can go from becoming a viewer to an actual community member. And the last one, I'm I'm a huge fan of this. I love to create inside jokes and shared language. I believe that really strong communities have very unique terminology and shared language that they all understand and outsiders do not. Think of any niche, any interest that you have. Deep within that community exists a lot of different sayings that maybe your friends and family do not understand. For example, gym bros have bulking season and the Harley community has all their jokes about sportster riders. So, when you're thinking about your community and your niche, what's the inside joke? Whether it's leveraging one that already exists and implementing it in your content so that you show people that you are an insider, you get the inside jokes, you understand the lingo, you speak their language, or it might be creating your own. There's so many different creators who have their own little sayings that people outside of the community don't understand. The takeaway is either leverage inside jokes and statements and language that you know already exists within your community and niche or create your own. And now we've reached the point in the course where we are going to talk about scaling your content. We've established how to pick your medium, how to pick your preferred platforms, everything, right? We've given you a lot of different frameworks and you've been consistently posting. You're involving your audience. You're doing all the right things. And now we're at the point where we want to scale the out of this thing, right? We want to amplify your brand at a whole another level. More content equals more opportunities to engage, more opportunities to attract, and more opportunities to convert. But here's the thing, scaling does not need to equate to burning out or quitting early, right? We want to build a process and system that is sustainable and works for you. Now, the key to making platform specific content is actually recalling something that I shared with you earlier, which is the analogy of you are you and you show up to multiple different circumstances, events, situations as you, but you're going to present yourself slightly different given the context or the environment that you are in. You're going to speak to different topics or use different vocabulary. Let's say I'm going out to go riding with the boys, right? I am going to talk in a slightly different way than when I go and get breakfast with my mom. I am still me, but I'm going to emphasize different parts of me and use different vocabulary that is appropriate for the setting that I am in. I view social media and the different platforms the same way. You are your brand, but you're going to show up and emphasize different parts or elements of your brand given the platform you're on. You're also going to use different lingo and language. you're going to talk way differently on LinkedIn than you are on Tik Tok. Now, what you've probably been doing up to this point is making content and then deploying it to all the platforms. So, let's say, for example, you made a YouTube long- form video. You're probably mining and pulling shorts from that and then posting those shorts on all the different platforms. And that was a great start. That caused you to be able to scale your brand to a certain point. But right now, you're probably hitting a ceiling. And the way to smash through that ceiling is to now start making those same clips but have a different creator tackle it given their knowledge and context on the platform they're distributing it to. So what does this look like? Well, one, it looks massively inefficient because what you're going to do is you're going to provide the same source media to maybe five different editors and they're all going to cut it slightly differently to make it contextual to Tik Tok versus Instagram versus LinkedIn video because all three of those platforms might require a completely different hook. Now, what you might find is that the meat of the video stays roughly the same, but the entry point into the meat of the video, the hook might be different because people are looking for different things or solving different problems on LinkedIn versus Tik Tok. Just because you've been doing it one way doesn't mean that that is how you continue. Often times, the way you got to one point is not the way you're going to get to the next point. And so the solution here is to take your team and the creators that you have on your team and reverse engineer their specific skill sets and interests and assign them the platform that lines up with their strengths and interests. Cuz what you want is you want them to be living, eating, and breathing this platform. I remember when Gary assigned TikTok to me and we were at 300,000 followers and literally what he had me do is the first week I didn't make any content for it. I sat eight hours a day for a whole week straight just scrolling through Tik Tok. That is like doom scrolling on another level except I was actually taking note and learning what people were doing on the platform that worked. And what I was trying to do is extract the insights that could be applied to Gary's content. So at the beginning of this section, what we did is we outlined prioritizing two or three platforms. But now we're probably at the point where, yeah, you still are prioritizing, let's say, those three platforms, but you're probably redistributing the content on another three. So, what you're going to do is you're going to take your top three platforms and your bottom three platforms, and you're going to assign those out to your team cuz more than likely, you don't have like 10 people on your team. You might have three editors that you can assign to these platforms. So, what you do is you give your best editor, your number one platform, and your number four platform, and so on and so forth. Your second best editor gets platform number two and platform number five. Okay? And then again, the third gets number three and number six. And so what we're going to do is we're going to tell them to spend 85% of their time, effort, and energy making platform native content for their top priority platform. And then they're going to spend the remaining 15% trying to experiment with platform native content for their second priority platform. Notice that is a huge discrepancy. 85% and 15%. Because we have identified that these three platforms, your top three, are what are actually driving the economics of your business. They're driving awareness to your art. They're driving awareness to your offer. And so that is where we're going to put all of our effort. So here's an example of how this is actually ran. Let's say Angela is our best editor. Okay? So we assign Instagram to Angela. Angela is going to spend 85% of her time during the week creating Instagram native content. She's literally making content specifically and only with Instagram in mind. Now, could this be redistributed to other platforms? Of course, absolutely. But you want her thinking through the mindset of the Instagram audience that you have. And then she's going to spend the remaining 15%. Let's say Tik Tok we identify as number four. Okay, cool. 15% of her time is going towards making platform native content for Tik Tok. What this probably will end up looking like is maybe creating seven original pieces of content for Instagram a week and maybe one or two for Tik Tok. And that's fine. Again, what we're doing is we're taking the Eye of Sauron approach that I mentioned earlier and we're delegating that out to the team now. So, it's not just you or the head of your content team doing that. You're actually giving the power to your individual contributors on the team to do the same. They're prioritizing the platform that drives the most results and then they are testing and around with the secondary platform because as we know social evolves, things change and we never know if Tik Tok is all of a sudden going to jump in priority. On one of the teams that I built, we had gotten to a point where we had already optimized quite a bit on the platforms. But when we made this change, an already massive massive output team that was getting billions of impressions every year, we were able to see a 1.5x return. Now, that might not sound like that special. Everyone talks about 2x, 10xing, 100xing, but what you got to realize is when you are at the top. 0.1% of content creators, a 1.5x increase is massive. A great analogy for this, if you know uh powerlifting in any way, shape, or form, when you are early in the days and you first start lifting, you can be doubling your lifts every couple of months, but then once you get to a point where you're like maybe squatting 6 or 700 lb, uh you're not going to be doubling that, right? If you get a 5% increase in your lift, that might be the difference between a standard lift and a world record. Now, why is this actually effective? I think I've given a fairly good argument for it. But in case you're still on the edge and still don't totally feel like you've been convinced, here's a couple reasons. This allows for each of your creators to have more focus. Instead of spreading them thin and having them make what I would call vanilla content, something that you're making and hoping will work on all the platforms, they don't give a about the other platforms. They are focusing the majority of their efforts on one primary platform. And what is so beautiful about this is not only do they learn what the audience wants, they become very closely tied to the actual performance of the content. When you're a shorts editor and you make a clip, it is very difficult to continue making clips and track the performance of that short across five to 10 different platforms. But if you own one channel, you actually are able to keep way better track of the performance and the creators end up being held more accountable. They understand how the clip is actually performing. This is the beautiful marriage of creative and data. And what you want is you actually traditional creative has data and strategy in a completely different house than creative. That is like the traditional agency model. What you want is you want them to be as close as possible. the further they are away, the less that the data is actually informing the creative and then we're just making subjective calls rather than informing our decisions off of what the audience has told us they want more of. Another reason why this works is this will actually lead to greater retention with your team. Why? Because they're starting to see greater success with their content. It's a very powerful reinforcement loop. They make the content, they see how it performs, it does better. Amazing. They take the insights from that and that informs the next creative they make and it creates this incredible flywheel that is unstoppable. The other thing that this will end up doing is it actually incentivizes your audience to follow you on multiple platforms because you're not posting the same at the same time. You're actually posting different content at different times. And so if I look at your brand on Instagram and then 5 minutes later go to LinkedIn and your post is at the top, it's not the same Anytime that you're posting the same content at the same time to all the different platforms, you deincentivize your audience to follow you on all these platforms. Why would they do it? They they have no reason to. I just need to follow you on Instagram and I'll get everything that you put out. Versus, if you're making individual content per platform, well, then I am very incentivized to follow you everywhere because I'm going to gain different insights and different perspectives depending on what platform I'm on. The other added benefit is you create a team of strategists, not just creatives. They start to learn how to think strategically. And what you're actually doing is you're training future leaders of your team. A lot of editors are maybe a little bit more on the meek side and not as willing to share strong opinions because maybe they don't feel they have the data to back it up. Well, this puts the data in their front lap. This makes it so available for them and they start thinking differently. And what you'll find is two, three, couple of individuals on your team are going to rise above and shine. And you're going to see that they have more skills than just being a creator. And what you might find is that this individual is able to be in a leadership role on your team in the future. This provides them the opportunity to see that that is a potential for their career. Whereas before, they may have always thought they were an editor. I can't even tell you how many different editors that I've led that once we did this, they were like, "Oh my goodness, I always thought I was just going to be an editor." And now I see like maybe I want to be a a strategy lead or I want to be a creative director. And it opens up this whole other opportunity, which is amazing for them and provides value to them and their career, but it also is extremely valuable to you because what you want as you scale is to have leaders that understand your brand and ideally have been there for a long time, right? Consistency is a powerful thing with your team. Now, the next question you might be wondering is, okay, how do I determine who gets what platform? How do I evaluate the creators on my team and what platform they should own? A very basic version of this is just look at how they operate and how they communicate. Does the creator match the tone of the platform? For example, on Tik Tok, do they understand current humor and current trends that are existing? Right? Tik Tok for more than I think any other platform has like their own language that they speak. Maybe this is me being a millennial and just getting old now and maybe it's not just Tik Tok, but you want somebody who understands that and is up todate with culture and what people are saying so that they can participate in a way that is relevant to the users on that platform. Another example is LinkedIn. Do they have a deep understanding of the subject matter that you are speaking to? oftentimes you're going to want somebody specifically on this platform that actually understands the message and the content that you are putting out. If they are just repurposing what you put out from other platforms, that's decent. But if they actually have a deep understanding, they're going to pull more out of you that is what the audience on that platform is actually seeking. And for YouTube, honestly, my measurement on YouTube is does somebody consume a shitload of YouTube content? I truly believe that if they're living on YouTube, they love and are deeply following a couple of different YouTubers. They're going to understand the best practices and what is working, but also they're going to see the evolutions that are occurring in real time and be able to take those learnings and apply it to the content you're making. What you don't want is somebody who only consumes Netflix and Instagram editing your YouTube content. You want somebody who is deep in the weeds of the YouTube community and understands what people are doing there and what the audience is preferring. For example, you want an editor who is noticing that vlogs are having a sudden resurgence over the last year. There's more people making vlog content. Now, those vlogs look very different than they did about 5 or 6 years ago. And so you want somebody who's noticing that emerging trend and can act on it without using their preconceived notions or what used to work in 2014 or 2015 when vlogging was really big. You want them to understand the nuance and the difference between what a 2015 vlog looked like and a 2025 vlog on YouTube looks like. So we've evaluated the creators for the platform. Amazing. Now, what we need to do is make sure that we have a great data tracking system in place so that the creators can know if what they're making is working or if it's not. And even more than that, so that you can know if what they're making is working or not. Something that I've observed with a lot of different teams is that we say things like, "This video got 400k views," or "This video got 10,000 likes." and people celebrate, but we don't really know what that means. Because what we don't know is what the average is and how this is either underperforming from the average or overperforming from the average. In the very beginning, when it's a small, nimble team, everyone knows what the averages are, okay? And so, everyone knows like, wo, if we got 100,000 views on this, that's crazy. That's way more than we normally get. But eventually you get to a point where you're putting out so much and you have so many different platforms and you have multiple different creators that you no longer really know what your team means or what people on your team mean when they're saying we got 100k views. And so what we want to establish is benchmarks and then we want to report against those benchmarks. And so the way I like to do this is I like to create what we call a multiplier sheet. I am not a software developer, so I haven't put together some like software tool for this, but we do this in Google Sheets. And it's very simple. In the beginning, what you're going to get is what I like to call directionally correct, not scientifically accurate, but again, it's directionally correct. It's going to move us in the right direction. What you're going to do is you're going to review the last 75 to 90 days of your content. And this is per platform. So, let's pick Instagram, for example. You're going to go back and review the last 75 days of content on your Instagram channel and I want you to pull the median. Okay? So, we're going for averages. Use the median, not the mean. Some teams can do and get away with the mean, but a lot of you probably have some posts that are massive outliers and this will tip the scales and make all of your content look like it's underperforming and not allow you to have a proper benchmark to establish or grade yourself against. And so what you're going to do is you're going to grab the median of the last 75 days. And I would encourage you to do this for different formats, right? So do this for reals, do this for carousels, you can do this for uh static posts if you do that. You could do it as as an average across all of it, but it gets way more scientific if you break it down according to the medium that you're tracking. And so what you're going to do is you're going to establish what that median is for the last 75 days. That is now your benchmark. Moving forward, you're going to report performance of individual pieces against that benchmark using a multiplier. So, let's say, for example, your average is 100,000 views on Instagram reels. After you have established that, your first post up gets 150,000 views. That would be a 1.5x multiplier. What this does is it gets the entire team on the same page. We're all speaking the same language. we're seeing it from the same handbook. Instead of saying, "Oh, this got 150,000 views." No, it's this was a 1.5x. This was a great clip. It did really well. The benefit of this is you track this over time and you start to see what topics, what formats don't perform as well. It becomes very clear, like unbelievably clear for you to see. And what you can have your team do is start focusing on making more of the that works and less of the that doesn't. Now, a technical note for you is I would recommend for most platforms waiting 11 days after you post it before you report on the performance. Sometimes what you'll find is uh a piece of content might, you know, do decent for the first 2 or 3 days, but then eventually it actually pops. Something that's happening a lot more on social is content does well for a few days and then maybe like 7 days in it'll pop. And so you want to give it enough time to experience the life cycle of the platform. The other beauty of this is if you share these sheets across the team, the person who is running your Tik Tok can start to see things that are performing really well on Instagram. Let's say you have a 3x clip that went up on Instagram. I think that would be very interesting for the person who's running Tik Tok to test it on Tik Tok. And what you can start to do is calibrate the crossover performance between platforms because again this makes it far easier for you to know what success looks like rather than saying well this clip got 150k views on Instagram and it did really well and then we posted it on Tik Tok and it only got 50K. Well maybe your average on Tik Tok is 10,000 views in which case it was a 5x multiplier. And so when we use the same nomenclature, the same language, we are all on the same page and we can start to make more educated decisions. Now, what I said at the top is that this isn't scientifically accurate. It's more directionally correct. And the reason why is because you just pulled the last 75 days and some of those posts have been up for 75 days. And so it's not the same amount of time that you're reporting on. So what you're going to find is it's going to take a little bit of time to establish a scientific benchmark. Use it though. This will help you go in the right direction. What you should be doing is every month, make sure that you update what your benchmark is. This way, you're always measuring against the new median rather than a median that may have happened 6 months ago. This allows you to continue raising the bar and instead of you artificially coming in and saying, "All right, the new benchmark is we have to hit 500k views all the time." No, your benchmark is moving up according to how your content is performing. And one thing to call out is uh I wouldn't recommend doing this for YouTube necessarily because there are actually tools out there that already do this. There's one of 10.com, there's view stats, and I'm sure there's millions of others that will pop up over the next couple of months. But as of right now, I am not aware of any tool that does this automatically for your Instagram, Tik Tok, etc. So, typically what you'll find is you have to do it manually for short form platforms and then your YouTube you can utilize these tools that do it automatically for you. It's an extremely extremely powerful tool. And on the topic of data, I would recommend that you make this part of the culture of your team. You want to ensure that everybody is viewing data as their god. This is how they make decisions. This is the framework that they operate under. It's not us coming up with subjective creative ideas. I would allow, as a side note, a little bit of room for that, right? like maybe 10% of your content is just new ideas that the team is coming up with, but 90% of it should be backed by data. And so I would emphasize in your hiring process to ensure that you are bringing people onto the team that actually place an emphasis on data. And you can take this even a step further by actually hiring somebody who maybe not their full-time job, but a main part of their job and a main part of their experience coming into the job is tracking, analyzing, and then disseminating the information and the takeaways they acquire from reviewing the data. I remember uh on my last team, there was an individual that we brought onto the team and he completely changed how he viewed data. I I'm talking it was a complete game changer. all of a sudden everybody on the team started actually carrying and tracking the data of the platform they were owning. And so the moment he came in, we had a huge shift in the culture. So I would highly recommend if you currently have a team and nobody on your team is a data nerd, that's what you want. Go for the data nerd. They are going to accelerate the rate at which you grow and scale your content. A little pro tip for you is it's not a boulder that builds a building. It's brick by brick. And so I would encourage you to make a list of the bricks that you have noticed lead to better content outcomes. And what you can end up doing is having a massive internal playbook that is specific to your content and your team. Your brickby brick list won't necessarily look the same as any other teams. So, as much as I would love to say download our brick-by- brick list, it's actually far more contextual to the type of content, the niche you're in, and the platforms you're choosing to deploy your content on. But I would really encourage you instead of just being like, "Oh, that's cool." and hoping that you remember it, actually build a list of your bricks with your team. And then this becomes a training tool when you onboard new editors to maintain that level of excellence and level of performance. And you know what? it. Let's throw in one more pro tip because I think this is really powerful. Something I learned in the last two years that was a real gamecher for me is if it doesn't change your actions, don't track it. The amount of teams that I've met with that have these massive analytic tools that are tracking every single kind of metric you could imagine. I mean, there's so many of those, right? I mean, that's pretty much every team. You probably have somebody on your team that has some sort of crazy analytics tool that they're tracking every single little metric that you can imagine. But here's the thing. How much of that is actually going to change what the team does? And if it doesn't change what the team does, why are we tracking it? What benefit does it have? If anything, what it does is it gives information overload and makes it much more difficult to know what decisions to make off of the data because you don't know what you're looking at. you have a million different things that you're tracking rather than tracking two to four metrics that actually indicate what you should do next. And the next one, and this is going to sound a little aggressive, but I I like to say some things uh that are a little bit more polarizing every once in a while. the social media manager. We don't need that. The people that you just assigned those platforms to should be the ones that are managing the platform. They're doing the posting. They're going to gain far more insights. They're going to be tied to the data like we've talked about and they're going to understand in real time how the content they're creating is performing. Now, a couple of different little pro tips for you on how you can go about making your content in an efficient manner that allows you to do this for a long time. Cuz like we've talked about throughout this course, this is only effective if we stick with it. Build a content machine. Okay? Instead of hustling your way to success, build a system and process that allows you to put out content consistently and continue to provide value to your audience rather than being kind of an inconsistent spotty creator. First thing that I recommend doing is batching and scheduling. If you are a very busy individual, I recommend actually batching your content. Now, I do believe that there is a lot of power into real time content. You have the idea and within 24 hours you film it. But for some of you, actually probably a lot of you watching this, that's not realistic with where you're at in your career, in your business, in your endeavors. And so what you need to do is you need to give yourself the system that is realistic for you in this current season. And more than likely, that looks like blocking off a Thursday or Friday, the whole day to film. This is where you need to go back to the section where I talk about creating a conducive environment to extract the best content. Because if you're going to take a whole day to batch content, I will tell you cuz I am doing it right now, it's exhausting. And so you need the right environment to be able to continue and roll with the momentum so that you can make high value and useful content. Next, what I want you to do is create a content assembly line. Step one is ideation. This is when you are researching and brainstorming the topics that you are going to create your content around. Step two is the creation. This is when you're drafting the script. you're hitting record and you're filming it. Step three is editing. Now, this is where, as we've discussed, you are optimizing the edit per platform that you're distributing. So again, those top three platforms that you're prioritizing, those individuals are each editing that content for their platform. Step four is distribution. This is when you post and ideally engage. Again, the individuals who are managing those platforms and creating for it, they're the ones who are posting it on that platform. Now you have to figure out whether you want your team to engage on your behalf or you engage yourself. I would encourage you highly it should be you. I think there's a massive amount of value for me as an audience member knowing that if I comment on your post and you respond, it's actually you. And I would actually prefer you do that at the detriment of high volume engagement. So maybe that means that you only respond to five comments a week. That's a little bit extreme, but maybe it's only five. Well, I think that is a higher value if it is always you responding to the comments rather than your team responding to every single comment on your post. A tiny little hack around this that I will recommend that you can do is you can have your team make a team account. For Gary Vaynerchuk, we did this with a team Gary Vee account and this was very effective. Many times if he was extremely busy or we were posting and then he was going to hop on an international flight where he wouldn't have Wi-Fi. Okay. Well, he would tell the team, "Go in under the Team Gary account and I want you to respond to every single comment." Sometimes he would literally have us do every single comment. And as you may be aware, he gets thousands of comments. So, it was very extensive. But this was a very effective way to do it. The audience knew that this was his team and there was no funny business. There was no bait and switch where we were pretending to be Gary. No, we were just very clearly his team engaging with the audience. And then finally, step five is analyze. This is where you're reviewing the performance and you're taking note of what you can do to improve it in the future. The next section is create room for experimentation. The biggest mistake that I see in content teams, they stop experimenting. It actually happens pretty slowly. At first, you're innovating. You're creating new content and breaking through ceilings and making stuff the industry has never seen. But what ends up happening is you start learning what works and you double down on that, which is right. But then complacency and comfort sets in. The problem is the algorithm doesn't get comfortable and it doesn't get complacent. It's always shifting. Now, am I encouraging you to constantly try and chase the algorithm? No. But the reality is is that your content is going to be served in a different way whenever they make a change. And so, you have to adapt to that change. What got you to where you are now will not get you to the next level. The unfortunate reality is is usually by the time that a team realizes this, it's almost too late. They have built a culture of doubling down only on what they're doing and never trying new And often times, as much as I've been pushing databacked ideiation and databacked content, a lot of times true innovation has no data to back it. So what is the solution to overcome this hurdle and this huge problem that I see in many different teams? You need to bake experimentation into your process. This needs to be an intentional thing that you actually systematize and allow your team to do on a fairly consistent basis. What I like to do is I like to encourage my teams to drive innovation through what I call content hackathons. Honestly, most teams aren't failing because of bad ideas. They're failing because they don't have any new ideas. And this is why I recommend either a monthly or quarterly content hackathon. Here's how I run them. Either a monthly cadence or a quarterly cadence. You're going to dedicate an entire day to experimenting and for the team to make something completely new and completely different than what they do in their day-to-day. So, it starts at 9:00 a.m. And what you're going to do is you're going to do a kickoff call. It's usually 15 to 30 minutes. It doesn't need to be anything fancy or long. What you're doing is you're giving context to the team because maybe you're scaling and you have new members on the team this quarter than last quarter. And so you need to make sure that everybody is on the same page. And what you're going to do is you are going to give them a safe space to try anything. What I would literally do is I would say I don't care how anything you make today performs. I want you to create something that you've not done before on the team. Something that is not part of your dayto-day. And typically, I would advise people to only make one or two pieces of content. I'm not going for high volume here. We're going for something completely disruptive and so different, so off-the-wall, that it's either going to absolutely crush or completely flop. And either way is fine because that is what you are incentivizing. Innovation, not performance. And a little fun thing that I like to do, too, is I like to send everybody on the team gift cards to pay for their lunch. If we're all in the same place, cool. I'll order lunch for everybody. And the reason why is I just don't want them to have to think about that. I want them focusing on this innovative content they're making all day. And so what we do is we do the kickoff call and then they all go and start ripping away at their content. And typically what I like to do is give them basically from 9:00 a.m. to 400 p.m. to create. And what I do is I put together a slide deck where they all have access edit access and they are supposed to on their slide upload their content. They're going to present it to the entire team at the end of the day. So 4 PM hits and usually I'll give them a 15 or 30 minute window to upload their content and embed it into the slide. At 4:30, we're going to have a 1 hour or 1 and 1/2 hour call with the entire team where each individual is going to present what they made. Now I don't want them to just click play on their video. I want them to explain why they did what they did. And then what happens is after we've reviewed everybody's content, instead of having the incentive be the performance of the content, have the incentive be the amount of innovation that occurred. And the best way to measure that is the team. They all know what you are making on a daily basis. And so what I like to do is have the team vote on who won, who made the most creative or innovative or completely off-the-wall piece of content that we should then run publicly. And I like to give a prize for it. So like often times I'll do like an Amazon gift card or or something of that nature that rewards them for pushing the envelope. Some of the best content formats that ended up being top performers for months or even years for us came from content hackathons. I can't recommend this enough. It is amazing. Not only is it really effective, the team loves it. It's an entire day where they get to try new and there's no consequence to them making something that doesn't perform well. What you're actually doing is creating an environment for freedom, innovation, and creativity to flourish. Now, content hackathons are great, but I want to give you a framework that you can actually utilize for ongoing experimentation that will empower your team to not only make what they know works, but also spend a little bit of time innovating and trying new Cuz ultimately, not every single piece of content should be an experiment. But if you never test new things, you will certainly plateau. So, this is the 702010 framework. 70% of your content you want to be proven that you know works. This is the bread and butter. This is what you know consistently you can put out and will perform well and your audience will resonate with it. This is the content that reliably drives engagement and conversions. Now 20% is small improvements and iterations to the content you know works. This looks like minor tweaks to content that is already hitting with your audience. This looks like maybe adjusting the hooks, trying a new call to action, or testing a new format with the same subject matter. And lastly, 10% should be saved for pure experimentation. This is where the breakthroughs actually happen. It looks like trying completely new formats, new topics or messaging, or completely different creative approaches to how you make the content. The unfortunate reality is most teams get stuck on the 70%. And I understand why. It's comfortable, but comfort doesn't build iconic brands. The best teams out there always ensure that they have at least one foot in the 10% zone. To wrap this up, innovation isn't optional. It's a requirement to scale. Trends will shift, platforms will evolve, and audiences are going to move on. If you're not creating space for experimentation, you're setting your team up to be in reaction mode rather than leading the pack. Because the teams that adapt first are the teams that win. And the last thing that I want to leave you with on this section is the scaling mindset. So many people quit too early. Mainly because they didn't have a good process and framework in place that allowed them to do this ongoing and enjoy it. So they quit early. The people who win in the content game are the ones who stay consistent and stick with it for a very very long time. Also scaling is about iteration not perfection. This is observing, learning, and adapting over time. Progress over perfection. And lastly, let the audience determine what is great. And the more you post, the more data you get on what your audience says is great. All right, so we've covered brand, we've covered content, and now we are on to team. And I would argue this is actually one of the most important parts of the whole puzzle. And personally, it is probably my favorite section of this entire course. This is where I get a lot of enjoyment and fulfillment uh for myself in my career is building teams and helping to develop them. And so, a couple quick things that I want to share with you before we really dive in on why your team is everything. Ultimately, your team is not just there to execute, right? They are a multiplier of the vision that you have. A strong team doesn't just help you scale. They are there to help you build something far bigger than you could ever do alone. Now, a lot of people watching this probably have never built a team. Definitely not a media or content team. A couple things to keep in mind that will help us as we go through this section are one, you don't hire just for skills. I actually emphasize hiring more for culture than skills. I find it a lot easier to train skills than culture fit. You want to make sure that they align with your brand, where you're wanting to go. So, where you are right now and what you're wanting to accomplish and the subject matter that you're going to be speaking about. They should be interested and curious about those things. You want to make sure that you're hiring based off of platform goals that you have. And so you want to identify what are the different platforms that we are emphasizing this next year or years and build the team around that not just your traditional videographer, editor, designer, audio engineer roles. And you want to make sure that they fit into your overall creative process. If you don't like a lot of preparation for film days and you like to go off the cuff, then you need to make sure you're hiring people that are comfortable with that and able to ask you good questions to prompt more information that comes out of you. And number one is that we don't hire just to fill roles. We hire to solve problems. So, if there isn't a problem that you can diagnose, then there shouldn't be a role that we're hiring for this non-existent problem. Ultimately, what you end up doing, and I'll get into this further in a little bit, but you end up bringing somebody on that ultimately has no purpose on the team. And that is shitty for both parties. Another one is that a bad hire doesn't just slow you down, it massively slows you down. it takes months to recover and you lose a ton of money in the process. And so what we're going to do in a little bit is we're going to walk through my entire hiring funnel. And I really encourage you pay close attention during this section because what we've talked about brand content, that's super important. But mistakes made on hiring your team are going to cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and are going to become a massive headache and ultimately it causes a lot of people to write off this whole team thing. I'm just going to do it myself with one other person. That's not the way that we want to do this. But we want to do it correctly from the start so that we build the correct foundation. And lastly, the best teams aren't built overnight. They require patience, intention, and investment in people who align with the desired outcome and the brand that you are building. So with that, let's dive in. All right. So first, before we hire anybody, let's define what we need. Okay? So define your needs before hiring. There's what you need and there's what you want. We are only going to hire on the prior. What you need. A lot of people hire way too quickly and they hire for roles that they think they're going to need. They've maybe heard people mention like that you need this D and what they don't do is they don't hire based on constraints. What you want to do is look at your process and what is causing the biggest constraint. For example, before we dive into this, if you are filming a bunch of content but nothing's getting edited, there is a very clear and obvious constraint. It's editing. So, what would you hire? An editor. If, on the other hand, you're always getting videos done in post-production, but you don't have enough in the pipeline. So, the editor is sitting there twiddling their thumbs being like, "What the do I do?" Maybe you hire a videographer or a content strategist that can help you ideulate and come up with new ideas to film. We are hiring based on problems and constraints we have in the process, not off of some random perceived idea of what we should have on the team. Now, to avoid making the mistake of hiring just what you want or what you think you need versus hiring off of problems you have, ask yourself these three questions. What tasks are taking the most amount of time away from high value work? Okay, so an example of this is if you're a content strategist but spend 50% of your time editing videos, you might need an editor. That's probably not the best use of your time and skills, okay? Because ultimately, you were hired to be the strategist. And if you're splitting your time, sure, in the beginning, you're going to have to do that as you're building the team, but eventually we get to a point where we're going to want to specialize. And so, if you are finding that you were hired or you hired someone for a very specific role and they're fulfilling multiple roles, the way to scale up or improve efficiency is to hire somebody to do that role. In this case, hiring an editor to relieve time for your content strategist. Question number two, what's slowing down execution? And I hit it already at the top, but I'm going to hammer it again because it's really important. If you're finding that you're filming all of this content and then it's just not going out, it's not getting done, you need to hire an editor. If you are always ready to film, always ready to edit, but you're sitting there twiddling your thumbs, not knowing what the to actually film, than a content strategist or ideation strategist, whatever you want to call them, that is going to be the critical role to bring into your team. Whatever the bottleneck and constraint is, that is what you want to hire around. This is how we actually scale rapidly. And the last question you're going to ask yourself is, what content opportunities are currently being missed due to lack of resources? So, for example, if we identify that YouTube is your number one most important platform and you're posting one video a month and your goal is to get to two, but the current bandwidth of the team only allows for one. Well, then we're going to go up to the question above and we're going to find out which part of the process is our constraint and then we are going to hire for that. Ultimately, it's all boiling down to hiring around the problem, the bottleneck, the constraint that you have on the team. This is how we're going to scale fast. If you hire five editors, but editing isn't your constraint, you just brought on a lot of cost for no gain because you don't have enough input to match the output the editors can accomplish. Please prioritize hiring for bottlenecks over convenience. Just because you're really good at hiring videographers doesn't mean that you need to hire five of them. You want to make sure that when you're hiring, you're hiring to create more leverage, not just offloading busy work. In fact, oftentimes what you can find is as you bring more people on, you can actually eliminate the busy work because you start to recognize the big tasks that actually move the lever for the team. Ultimately, we're not just trying to lighten everyone's load. We're trying to accelerate execution and the impact that each individual has for the collective team, which drives bigger impact for the brand at large. Now, a huge mistake I see a lot of people make is they hire for general skills, not platform specific needs. What do I mean by that? Well, there is this very interesting split in our world that is occurring right now. You have great DPS, people that are great at filming beautiful videos. You have editors that are incredible at editing these beautiful commercials or these long form films that you see going out on Netflix, etc. And they are incredible editors at their craft. But what a lot of people don't recognize is a great editor for a Netflix film is not a great editor for a YouTube video. They are very different skills and very different needs. Same for the videographer. A DP that works on some like Amazon or Hulu documentary is going to have a very different set of skills than somebody who is filming, let's say, a vlog for one of the YouTubers, one of the big YouTubers online. Okay? Completely different needs. And right now we're still in the early stages of really understanding the nuance and difference between those kind of creatives. And so what you get a lot of times is people hiring somebody who is a great graphic designer and they make amazing brochures. They're so good at designing your logo, your website, but they suck at YouTube thumbnails because it is a totally different skill set. And so what we want to do is identify what are the platforms that you are focusing on, which we've already done. And once we've done that, then we want to build the team around those specific needs. If you're not doing a lot of graphic design work, brochures, business cards, flyers, website updates, then you don't need a traditional graphic designer. If all they're doing is YouTube thumbnails, then actually typically those individuals do not have a traditional graphic design background because a lot of YouTube thumbnail best practices slap in the face of traditional graphic design best practices. Now, another version of this is, and this is the funniest one, people being like, "All right, we're going to post some content on social media, so we're going to hire a social media manager." This is the worst thing in the world. If they're a generalist, if they are great at all of the platforms, they suck at all of the platforms. The reality is is in 2025, there are very few people on planet Earth, I would say less than .001% that actually understand at a master level all of the different platforms. It'd be impossible. They're evolving all the time. And so, what you're going to actually find that you want is you want channel specific managers, not a social media manager. So instead of hiring a social media manager that oversees all your different platforms, maybe what you're going to do is in the beginning because you can't afford to hire a manager for all five of the platforms that you're on. Maybe what you do is you make sure that your creatives that you bring in emphasize one of those platforms so that they have a greater understanding than you do of how YouTube works or Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever the new one in 2026 is. Now, on the contrary, if LinkedIn is where the majority of your business results occur, where a lot of conversions happen, where a lot of your customers are, and a lot of interesting conversations happen, well, I would actually recommend hiring a LinkedIn writer. Again, notice I didn't say copywriter, just general. I said LinkedIn writer. Hire them before a video editor. Like, if you look at how we approached content for Rston in 2025, we started posting on LinkedIn before any other platform. And so we emphasized that. We started working with a LinkedIn writer uh freelancer and instead of making video content right away, we actually emphasized that because I had a feeling that that would generate a good amount of leads for our business. And it did. We made sure to align our hiring with our actual needs. So as an example, instead of hiring a generalist, you might hire a YouTube editor and immediately get 2x the content output. You might then bring on a short form video editor to maximize repurposing that long- form content. Ultimately, a lot of the times we're trying to build a scenario where the individual, the talent on camera isn't spending all their time creating content. So maybe for a while you have the long form that you're doing and the editor does that. They 2x the output and then the short form editors are just utilizing that same media, that same footage and repurposing it, but you're getting two, three, four, five times the amount of impressions you would if you were just doing the long form. Then maybe you hire a platform strategist. And notice I'm saying a platform strategist, not social media strategist, because what you want to do is you want to make sure they are specifically tailored to the platforms you're prioritizing. Now what you might find in the beginning is you need to hire somebody who is a gangster at YouTube. They understand LinkedIn and you know they dabble with Instagram. That's fine. But you just want to make sure that they are prioritizing and more proficient in one. The generalist not what you want. If it's not obvious by now, the key takeaway is always hire for the highest impact content first. Whatever platform you're getting the most traction on, make sure you hire around that. and whatever platform you're hiring around, hire for whatever the biggest constraint in the process for creating for that platform is. So now we've defined what the roles are that we need and and why we need them and we're being very intentional with how we're hiring them and what problems we're trying to solve with these hires. Now we got to actually do the hiring. So let's streamline the process. Just like we were defining our needs, we are now going to define the role clearly. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when they're hiring a creative uh for their team is just they don't know what they're actually looking for. Maybe they know the role and they know the problem, but then they haven't articulated the specific needs that they need to solve. Let's say you're hiring a videographer and you're going to be making uh vlog content around motorcycles, right? You hire this videographer, you know that you're going to be filming vlog content, so they got to be proficient at that. You know it's going to be motorcycle content. So, okay, you want them to be at least somewhat interested in the subject matter, but then what if you are somebody who is only willing to film early early in the morning, like 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. or 8:00 p.m. to midnight, and you have those very specific needs. If you have not articulated that in your job description, you are going to get a lot of people that apply and go through the interview process and waste your time that are not willing to work within those hours. And so you need to really sit down and clearly articulate what are all the needs, not just the function, not just the subject matter, but also what are the ancillary needs that you have that are unique to you. So, a couple of questions you can ask yourself before you start looking for candidates are the following. Is this role about creating, managing, or analyzing content? An example is that a YouTube editor is creating content, but a content strategist is managing and optimizing distribution. Very key distinction there. So, we want to make sure we understand what their function, what their role is. Number two, are we at the point in our team, in our company, in our brand where we can actually hire somebody who is focused on a single platform or are we still in the early stage where we need somebody who can work across multiple platforms? Again, from what I said earlier, you want to always make sure that you are hiring somebody who is a specialist, but in the beginning, you can't hire people that are only going to do one thing. It's just impossible. So you hire a specialist who is willing to play the role of a generalist and they do end up taking on multiple platforms in the beginning. This needs to be clearly defined and articulated not only for yourself but for the candidates. Number three is how does this role contribute to the bigger picture. This is really important because one you want to know it so that you can justify paying this person but also you want to always be tying what the individual once you hire them what they are doing to the big picture to the vision to how the company how the brand is scaling and growing. If you do that it gives them way bigger purpose and allows them to see themselves in that role in that organization for a lot longer. And again, please remember, I'm just going to keep emphasizing this throughout it because it's so important. Every hire should be brought on to remove a bottleneck, to solve a problem, and allow the team to execute faster and more effectively. All right, cool. So, we've defined what we need. We've defined the role. Now, it's time for everybody's favorite activity, which is writing a job description. Now, I say that sarcastically, but I actually, for whatever reason, I don't know what the is wrong with my brain, I love writing job descriptions. I love the whole hiring process, interviewing, everything. It's my favorite. But if it's not your favorite, I think walking through this is going to be extremely helpful for you. What do you get with vague job descriptions? Vague candidates. Be very specific with responsibilities and expectations. So, I like to use the four Rs framework for drafting job descriptions. And rather than just running through the different four Rs, I actually want to describe what each R is and then walk you through an actual job description that I have here right in front of me on my phone. So the first R is role. What contribution is this individual making to the organization? What function do they have within the team? So for this job description, this is for a brand director and the role overview is company is looking for a brand director to build and scale the CEO's personal brand across YouTube, LinkedIn and other key platforms. This role requires a deep understanding of content strategy, social media growth, and personal brand development. You will be responsible for transforming CEO's thought leadership into an influential digital presence that resonates with entrepreneurs, business leaders, and innovators. So that's the role part of the job description. All right. So now we move down to responsibilities. What are they going to own? What tasks are they going to own on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. This is a very extensive one. So stick with me. Under responsibilities, we have it broken down into different subsections. First one is content strategy and execution. establish and scale the CEO's YouTube presence, leveraging his speeches and interviews to create both long- form and short form content, eventually building on top of this and developing platform native platform first YouTube content. Develop and execute a LinkedIn content strategy incorporating a mix of written posts and short form videos derived from existing content. creative production and management, oversee the filming and editing process for social content, ensuring highquality production and platform specific optimization. And I think you get the picture here like the responsibilities are going very tactical into what they are owning. What are they doing on a daily basis that you expect them to do? Now the next one is requirements. I think this is pretty obvious and and speaks for itself, but essentially this is what are the skills and experience they need or are required in order for them to do this job to get this role. So again, for this one, I'll read a couple of the requirements, not all of them. Uh, one of them is three plus years of experience growing a personal brand with proven success in scaling reach and engagement, a strong background in filming, editing, and social content production, both short form and long form. Experience managing creatives. exceptional storytelling skills with the ability to extract and refine high value insights. So that's requirements. Again, this is just telling them this is what you need to be able to do and have done in your career thus far in order to qualify for this role. And the final R is results. What are the success metrics that we are tracking? What does success look like? What are we expecting them to do and accomplish or what are we expecting to have happen based on their responsibilities? Think of it like responsibilities is the input and results is the output of those responsibilities. So on this one, I'll read you a couple. Again, I'm not going to read them all cuz this is a very heady extensive one. And this is definitely going to be one of those things that you can download. I'm sure there's already been an icon that popped up. Study it, duplicate it, and use it for yourself. If you're hiring a brand director, by all means, use it how you need. Establish the CEO's YouTube channel with consistent long- form uploads and high performing clips. A minimum of two videos per month. Scale LinkedIn engagement and follower growth through a mix of written and video content. Posting at least two written and two video posts per week. We want to make sure that it is not only describing the efforts, but it's very specific on what the output will be. So, if you want to be doing two videos a month, okay, cool. Make sure to specify that, not just say establish CEO's YouTube channel with consistent long form uploads and high performing clips. That would be very vague and not helpful. Two things that I like to add to a four Rs and they have nothing to do. They don't start with an R or anything, but it's communication and cadence and expectations. I always like to make sure that a candidate understands like if you expect them to respond at 7:30 a.m. in the morning on Slack, well, that's not necessarily the norm in most workplaces. And so, if that is an expectation you have, okay, by all means, have that. But make sure you vocalize it and make it clear to them before you hire them so that they can tell you whether or not they are down for that or not. And if they're not, they're not the right fit for your role. And that's fine. No worries. The other one that I like to add is core values. I like to ensure that if a candidate is going to come in and join the company that they agree with what our core values are. And ideally, it's something that they already prioritize in their personal life. And so when they hear your core values, they actually resonate with it and are able to speak to, oh, I live my life by this. This is actually how I apply blank core value. All right. We've defined the need. We've defined the role. We've even created a job description using the four Rs framework. And now we need to start the hiring process. So, I'm going to share with you my hiring funnel. Now, this is probably going to seem pretty extensive and maybe a little too much. It's worth it. We talked at the top about how expensive it is to hire somebody that is not the right fit and then have to exit them and rekick off the search. It is a brutal, painful process. Trust me, I've been through it multiple times. Do everything in your power to not shortcut things. I will tell you, I have hired a lot of different creatives and anytime that I've made a mistake on it, it's for only one reason. I was in a rush. We had pain on the team. We had pain in our process. We had a very clear definition of what we needed. And we were clearly solving a problem because it was a problem we were feeling every day. But I tried to shortcut the process and I ignored red flags that were pretty obvious and in my face. What this hiring funnel is designed to do is to make those red flags very clear, very obvious, and then allow you and your team to discuss them. Ultimately, we're never going to find when we're searching for a candidate a 100%. There it just doesn't exist. So what you're looking for is an 80% and you want to discuss with your team if that remaining 20% is something you feel confident either you don't need or you can train. So the first part of the hiring funnel is you need to have a place where candidates can submit their CV and potentially even a video. This is obvious like you know you can use Indeed, you can use all these different platforms or you can have something hosted on your website. I would encourage you to do that if possible. And this is an area where they're able to upload their CV and show you their work history. This seems obvious, but there's a lot of you out there right now that are thinking about building your creative team and you've never really thought about this part. No, I don't overemphasize CVs and I want to make sure that's super clear. It's not the most important thing by any means, but it does reveal some potential strengths or weaknesses. For example, if you notice that a candidate has had 10 jobs in the last five years, that is an interesting thing. Not necessarily something that's going to rule them out by any means. Different industries, different roles have higher turnover, right? And it might be just normal and part of the function of that role. That's fine. But it's definitely something you're going to want to have a little bit of a further investigation on and discuss in the screening call. And for the video portion, I highly encourage anybody that I'm working with to give the option for a candidate to submit a video. I wouldn't require it, but I would definitely give them the option. And the reason why is I think one, you see a lot of creativity that comes through, but more than that, there's no personality. There's no human element that comes through in a CV. You're not going to see like how they talk if they talk too much, their negative or positive tone, right? you're not going to see their little quirks, their silly personality that come out. That can be such a massive benefit for you to see how you feel they will fit with the rest of your team. For example, there was a role that I was hiring maybe about a year, a year and a half ago, a creative director role. We had been looking for about 3 or 4 months. I remember this one candidate came through and I was very impressed with their CV and everything, but what really impressed me and stood out was they had made a video, not like an edit that was showing what their skills were. It was a video of them talking about their experience, their background, their passions, and how that applied to the role we were hiring. It was it was amazing. It was a multicam video, too. I mean, it was very impressive and it was very clear that this individual was hungry for the role and truly believed they were the right fit. They put in way more effort than any of the other candidates. And spoiler alert, we hired him. After they submit their resume or CV, you're going to have somebody on your team that is going to be doing screening calls. So, what they're going to do is they're going to have gobs and and piles of résumés and CVs to look through. In doing the screening, what you're trying to do is you're verifying that they are aligned with the salary expectations. If you're wanting them to be in person or remote or hybrid, they understand the communication expectations. If you're an organization that needs somebody working 6 days a week, you're making sure that they're okay with that. If this role is someone who is traveling, let's say it's, you know, a videographer that's always going to be on the road traveling five days a week. Well, you need to make sure that they saw that in the job description and they're good with that. And so, you're just making sure that this candidate understands all the basics and they're good with it. You're also verifying a little bit of experience. So, I give a few questions to the screeners, whoever is doing it, whether it's a recruiter or just somebody else on your team. I tend to provide them two or three slightly technical questions. The reason why is because oftentimes if I'm running the technical assessment or the technical interview or the final interview, I want to watch the screening call. I want to understand how they showed up so that I know how to interview them. And by asking a few light technical questions, you get a lot of insight on whether or not they know what the they're actually talking about or if they're just kind of bullshitting you. Or the craziest thing that I've literally encountered five times in the last month is individuals using AI that is listening to the question in the background and spitting out an answer in bullet points for them to regurgitate to you. This is becoming a very big thing and uh I have literally experienced it five times in the last month and it's it's alarming. If you get a good technical question or two into the screening interview, you typically can avoid this and sus out if it's actually Sarah answering the question or if it's chat GBT. Once they get through your second line of defense, which is the screening call, you're going to go to a technical interview. Now, ideally, this is conducted by somebody who actually understands the role deeply. So for me, luckily I understand all the different roles on a creative team. So I'm able to do a technical interview for any role. Designer, motion graphics, uh videographer, editor, copywriter, content strategist, channel manager, anything you name it. Often times you don't have somebody like that in your organization. And so if you don't, what you're going to look for is somebody who can understand the role as best as possible, right? And so what this might look like is doing some research on what a YouTube video editor is and what they need to be proficient in so that you can actually ask them the right questions. Because if you don't ask them the right questions, you're not going to know if they're the right fit. There's a second thing that I'm going to touch on here in a second, technical assessment. Just cuz they do an amazing job on a technical assessment doesn't necessarily mean they can do it over and over and over again. And so you want to ask strategic questions that not only show that they know what they're doing, but show you how they think about solving problems, how they think about coming up with new ideas and innovating on stuff they've already been doing. Your goal with the technical interview is to assess strategic knowledge and the ability to execute. You want to make sure they have both. So, for example, if I'm interviewing a short form editor, let's say I have a brand and we have a very known style of short form content, okay? And a lot of people copy it, for example. Well, if that's the case, I'm going to not ask the short form editor, do you know how to make what we are currently doing? What I'm going to ask them, and this is what I've done with many of the different brands I've worked with, I'm going to ask, how would you go about innovating on this? I'm tired of the style that we've been doing for the last 6 months. I need something fresh and new. What would you do in order to get that new style? What I'm not looking for is the right answer of this is the new style I would do. I'm looking for how they think. How would they go about getting that new style, creating that new style? Because the problem for a lot of editors is they're very good at following rules and instructions. They come from a checklist army, but they don't have ownership and they don't have the ability to create innovation and drive a new style, new format on their own. And so that's where you're trying to assess their strategic knowledge and abilities to execute on said strategic knowledge. So if they pass the technical interview, you're going to want to immediately provide them a technical assessment. This should mirror what their actual job looks like. You don't want to do something that has nothing to do with what their day-to-day is. This is your opportunity to see how do they show up on the tasks that I'm going to be giving them daily, weekly, or monthly. So, for example, if we're hiring that short form editor, what I'm going to do is they just walked me through how they would go about creating a new style for our short form content. So, what am I going to do for the technical assessment? I'm going to give them 72 hours and maybe one hour of raw footage and let them create a new style for our short form content. Now, what are we testing in this? Well, one, we gave them a 72-hour deadline. So, we're seeing how are they with time management and commitments. Number two, they're going to have to deliver this item to us. How do they go about delivering it? Like, do they just like upload it to Google Drive and hit share straight from Google Drive? Do they package it into an email? How is their communication? Number four, we're seeing can they actually execute on what they were saying in the interview? They talked a good talk of how they're going to come up with a new format and new style. Can they actually deliver on that? And number five, do they show their work? So maybe they created this new style, but do they explain how they went about it? Now, that's bonus points and everything, but if somebody does that, what that shows me is they have the strategic ability, they're very creative, they can execute, and even crazier, they could train somebody else to do the same. If they can understand the why and the how, then they can duplicate that to anybody. But again, please just make sure that the technical assessment lines up with what their actual role is. You don't want to waste anybody's time. The other thing too, little side note here is ensure that you give every single candidate for the same role the same technical assessment. If you give them different you don't know how to measure them against each other versus if they all have the same thing, you're able to assess who's the right fit and who's not the right fit for your team. If they absolutely blew you away with their technical interview and their technical assessment, congrats. You're on to the next round. It's not over yet. Culture interview. If you are a team, an individual or a company that actually operates off of your core values and builds your culture accordingly, then this should really matter. This is where you find out, okay, they're very technically proficient. They're very good at their job. Now, the way they operate as a human in the workplace, does that work with the current humans we have in the workplace? For example, if speed of communication is a high priority, like you send a Slack message and expect a response at the latest five minutes later, and this person prioritizes deep work and will go 8 hours a day without checking their Slack, they might be an incredible editor and do amazing work, but it might not work well for your team. If you expect 5 minutes and they wait 8 hours, you're going to be pissed. and you're going to be pissed, but it's not really their fault because you didn't do a good job of determining whether or not they lined up with your communication culture. And honestly, a lot of the hires that I've made, I actually overemphasize their cultural fit over their technical fit. And it's just my belief that I can train the technical gap pretty well. It's actually really not that hard to take an editor who you might rate as like a five or six out of 10 to like a eight or nine fairly quickly. However, somebody culturally that you rate as a five or six, taking them to a eight or nine, that's going to be a lot harder. You're talking about ways that somebody operates in and outside of work. And so, if they're getting reinforcement and they're building the pattern of doing it outside of work, you have a big hill to climb. So, I prefer if somebody is technically mid, but they are culturally great. They show enthusiasm, lack of ego, and they're willing to do whatever the it takes. Man, I'd hire that person at a five or a six over an eight or nine editor who has a massive ego, who can't take any feedback, and is kind of lazy. And actually, an example of this is Trevor Odum. I hired Trevor about 3 years ago, and I would call him probably a 6 out of 10 in his editing. Culturally, he was a 10 out of 10. He showed massive humility. He showed extreme eagerness to learn, willing to do whatever it took, hard worker, would take the shitty responsibilities as well as the cool responsibilities, and showed a lot of consistency, especially for a young age. I hired Trevor and we trained and worked on his technical skills. And the reason why we were able to work on the technical skills and he was able to see growth is because he had the soft skills. The culture of it was very much there. I'll take that all day over somebody who is highly proficient but a Now, ways that you can identify whether or not they're a culture fit is asking about their past work environments. What was that like? How do they approach problem solving? A question that I really like to ask is if you're in a meeting with five or more people and somebody gives you direct feedback in front of everyone, how do you respond? If somebody is demanding that you drop what you are currently working on and assist them, but they're not your manager, how do you respond? I like to give them real life scenarios that actually occur in the workplace. And what I just mentioned is two of many very common occurrences that happen in the workplace. Right? If I know somebody who's higher up on the team, maybe the CEO or CMO has a preferred way of communicating, I'm going to ask them how they feel about that preferred way of communicating. A lot of CEOs actually prefer very direct, very quick communication. They don't add fluff. They don't add smiley faces and things like that. I like to ask, are you okay with that? Sometimes if you're hiring a videographer to film with a CEO, for example, the CEO is not going to want to talk to the videographer about their life. They're not going to want to talk about anything other than what they are there to film. That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But I need to make sure that the videographer is going to be able to handle something like that and not need to talk about their personal life with their boss. All right. If we have passed the screening, if we've passed the technical interview, the technical assessment and the culture interview, we are now on to the final interview. And typically what this looks like is a high-up leader. So if there is a department like let's say for example you have a CMO in your company and your content team falls under the marketing department maybe the final interview is going to be with the CMO or if it's a very very uh important and crucial role maybe the final interview is with the CEO I prefer the final interview to be with the most senior person that this individual will be corresponding with. So if they are going to be messaging or interacting with the CEO in any manner I do think that the final interview should be the CEO. However, if they're never going to interact with the CEO at all, CMO, director of brand, whatever is perfectly perfectly fine. And usually the way this works is it's somebody with a lot of experience. Okay? So, they've hired a lot of people. They've hired a lot of the right people. They've hired a lot of the wrong people. And they're reviewing all the different interview notes from all the different interviews leading to this moment. They are the ones with the most context, both from their past history, but also the most context on this specific candidate. And so it's their job to poke holes in any areas that were question marks from the previous interviews. If somebody thought they were hardworking but potentially weren't open to working on weekends and this role required every once in a while to work a Saturday or Sunday, the final interview is going to have to press into that and ensure that they're okay working on an occasional Saturday or Sunday. You shouldn't leave the final interview with any additional questions. Everything should be finalized within that interview. Now, the same goes for the candidate. You give them on all of these, but especially the final interview, you want to give them the opportunity to ask you questions as well. In doing so, you're going to learn a lot about them. If they have no questions to ask, probably not a good thing. On the other hand, somebody who asks very strategic questions that make sure that they understand what is required, what's expected of them or they gain clarity on that. That is somebody who is very interesting because they are thoughtful and they make their decisions based on information and context, not just emotion and excitement. Now, here's a pro tip. Uh, what I just said is insane, right? That's like so many different steps. And you might be like, "Yo, homie, I am a oneperson team that's about to hire my first person." Then what I would encourage you to do is not skip any of these steps, but maybe what you do is you combine them. So instead of having six different steps in the process, maybe you have three different calls or two different calls that you do with this person or these candidates and you just chunk them together. So maybe the technical, maybe the screening and the technical occur in the same call. Maybe culture and final are same and you have the technical assessment in between. That would be a three-part process and you would be able to accomplish that with one person. ultimately use what you got. Okay? Like if you don't have a team of 20 people, yeah, you're not going to execute this. That's fine. The other thing that I will say is sometimes there are individuals who you work with on a vendor like basis that they might be able to be part of the process. Say for example, you have a YouTube agency you're working with and you're hiring a YouTube editor. If you have a good relationship with this agency and you trust them and you've established what the timeline of your engagement will be, so they know you're eventually bringing it inhouse, maybe they can conduct the technical interview for the YouTube editor since they probably understand YouTube editing far more than you do. So, there's a lot of ways to be creative with this. Don't write it off just because you don't have the headcount to be able to do such an extensive process. You want to be extensive. You want to be detailed because you're bringing somebody in that is either going to raise the bar or lower the bar. And all we want to do here is raise the bar. Okay. So, why does this process actually work? Well, one, it removes bad hires early. Especially the optional video. This can filter out candidates who aren't taking the role serious, right? They're applying to a hundred different role. I mean, now using AI, they can automate applying to like a million different roles every day. And so you can weed out who are the ones that are just mass applying versus the ones that are looking at this specific role within your specific organization or team and saying I'm a good fit for this. Number two is we are actually ensuring that there's platform alignment here. Like we said at the top, we're trying to prioritize platforms and hire people accordingly, right? And so we're using technical assessments to test the execution ability before hiring them for that specific platform. So, we get to see this YouTube editor. Are they a great editor or are they a great YouTube editor? Number three is that it creates cultural fit. Culture interviews allow you to avoid hiring somebody who is highkilled but also a piece of Somebody who's not going to fit into your culture. And just because they don't fit in your culture doesn't mean they're a piece of But there are lots of pieces of out there that are great technically at what they do. and 6 months in you find out they're an absolute nightmare to have on the team. And even though their performance is high, they drag everybody else's performance low and they're actually an anchor rather than a rocket. And finally, this actually just speeds up the hiring process. If you have a designed and intentional process that you follow, everybody whether it's you yourself and I or you and your team are on the same page and eliminates a lot of unnecessary back and forth and it can move people through the funnel a lot faster. Now, I'm also going to share with you a completely different funnel system, but it doesn't work for every single role. I've typically found that it works best for editors, designers, and strategists. It's a try out system or a try out funnel. And I'm just going to walk you through exactly how I do it. What I did is on Monday, I announced that we were conducting tryyouts. On Monday, I opened up registration for the tryyouts and closed registration by 12:00 p.m. Pacific time on Thursday. So, they had a couple of days to be able to sign up. Thursday at 3 or maybe 5:00 p.m., we sent out an email to everyone who had registered. And the email had the following. It had instructions on what we expected. We want you to edit a 12 to 20 minute YouTube video using this raw footage. We want you to create a thumbnail and title. And we want you to create a short form video that goes with it. We were asking for a lot, but ultimately that's what we're asking for in the day-to-day job. And so we want to make sure that what the assessment is mirrors the job. And so what you're going to notice here is it's essentially the same funnel, but it's in a different order. So we sent that email out. We linked them to the raw footage, and we gave them a due date. Again, this was sent out Thursday at 5:00 p.m., and the due date was Monday at 9:00 a.m. Just like I mentioned earlier for the technical assessment, we're measuring so many different things. How do they manage their time? They have all these different tasks. How do they prioritize? If somebody submits on time, but they didn't submit everything, that might be okay because maybe we've identified that the short form video is the lowest priority and the thumbnail and title were just to see what their skills and knowledge were there. And if they prioritized and executed on the long form video, maybe they win. Maybe we just have more insights that they're not capable of adding the ancillary benefits of packaging or short form content as well. And so you're able to evaluate candidates on a very granular level. You also get the benefit of they're all editing the same exact footage and you might be reviewing, you know, 10 different editors or in my case 200 different editors editing the same exact footage. So what we had is about, I think, 1500 different editors register for it. Throughout the Thursday to Monday deadline, we had about 220 250 editors that actually submitted their work. And so then came the screening time. That was gnarly. I'll tell you, you get really bored of that footage very fast. But the cool thing is is you're able to evaluate how every single person did the intro, how they did the outro, and the meat of the video. And so it's very easy to stack different editors against each other and evaluate who was the best. Now, what we did is we reviewed everything. And the ones who passed the technical assessment, we then set up a screening interview. Then that went to a technical interview, then a culture, then final. So essentially, we did the exact same funnel as we normally would, but we moved the technical assessment up front. That was a very interesting way to do it. Now, this doesn't work for every single role. As you can probably imagine, it would be almost impossible to do this with, say, a videographer. So the try out system only works from what I have gathered. And please, I would love to hear if any of you have used it for other roles. Like I'm very curious what I found success in just to remind you is designers, editors, and strategists. Anything that you can provide one source piece that everyone can use versus you being the source piece and you can't scale to 100 different people, 200 people all across the world. And like I said earlier, I talked about hiring for culture rather than skills. I actually want to make this an entire section here because it's that important. Think cultural fit over perfection. I believe that you can teach anything, but in a realistic amount of time, you can teach technical skills fairly easily. I I cringe when I say that cuz I I know a lot of people are going to hate that I say that, but I truly believe you can train technical skills pretty quick. However, teaching hunger, empathy, adaptability, these are traits that are a lot harder to train, have years of pattern established in their life that you're going to have to overcome. Is it doable? Yes. Is it worth your time and money? No. And I truly believe that somebody who is highly proactive, they have high agency, they own everything, they're hungry, they're going to get a lot more done over a long period of time than somebody who is technically proficient but has less drive. And here's an amazing example. There's an individual named Jason Leva. I love this man. Uh he was one of the best hires I have ever made in my entire career. And the crazy part is he wasn't that experienced. You know, Jason, if you're watching this, please hear this through uh all love and everything, but I actually didn't think his edit was that great. I thought it was good enough and he passed and went to the screening call. He actually went through that tryyout system. But what I noticed was he was so hungry to learn and so willing to figure out how to solve a problem. He was a sponge. Now, most directors would have written him off and saw the edit and been like, "Well, that wasn't in the top 10, so nah, we're not going to move forward." Sure, he passed the screening call, but now that I'm doing the technical, ah, not a fit. But what I noticed was that he was a sponge, and he took feedback unbelievably well. I gave him very direct feedback on the interview, on his edit. I told him what I really liked, and I told him what I didn't like. I called out areas where he made mistakes, right? there was a dropped frame or there was, you know, a plugin missing or something like that. And Jason took that feedback so graciously. He was grateful for it. He thanked me for it on the call. It was crazy. And so it was in that moment that I realized, okay, this is the kind of character that I want to bring onto the team because whether it's short form editing right now or eventually being a videographer later, this man is willing to do whatever it takes. And that's what I need more than somebody who is technically proficient but not adaptable and not willing to hear feedback. Hire for mindset and train for execution. A motivated member can grow into a role. However, a disengaged one will definitely stay stagnant. Now, the next section is prioritizing strengths that match the platform. Every platform has a unique content style and requires a very specific type of creative thinking. If you hire the wrong person for the wrong platform, they might be really good at YouTube shorts and Instagram reels, but if you hire them to be a long form editor, you might kill your engagement and your success on YouTube. Now, we talked earlier about how all the platforms behave differently, right? like you are yourself and you show up as you to all these different platforms. But just like if I am here filming right now, then I go meet up with my mom and then have dinner and beers with the boys. I'm myself, but I'm going to present slightly different given the context and scenario I'm in, right? We already discussed that. And that's how the platforms behave. You show up as yourself on LinkedIn just like you do on Tik Tok and Instagram, but you're going to talk about and emphasize different things based on the context of the platform you're in. You need to reverse engineer those needs into individuals and that's how you hire. Take Tik Tok and Instagram for example. Uh these are short form and fast-paced traditionally platforms. And so the best fit is going to be a creator who is immersed and understands trends and understands fast-paced editing or at least understands how to continue to open and close loops to retain attention. This is ideally somebody who lives, eats and breathes Tik Tok and Instagram. They need to understand really truly what is happening on the platform. What is the psychology and what are the viewers and consumers on that platform expecting and looking for? Ideally, the 2.0 version of that is they understand all of that and they're able to identify tiny little gaps in the market, maybe within your niche that currently exist, and they're able to provide you the direction of how to fill it. Now, a very clear red flag for somebody on Tik Tok or Instagram that you're hiring is going to be if they are overly focused on high production value without understanding what it takes to attract attention, a strong hook. And ultimately understanding that high quality, as we discussed earlier, is not determined by us on the team. We don't subjectively determine what quality is. The audience determines what quality is. And so if somebody is overemphasizing high production value and high quality content, well, that's based on their subjective definition of what quality is, not what the audience is. And that's not what we care about. Now, LinkedIn, if we're looking for somebody there, the best fit is probably somebody who thrives in long form writing, right? They probably need to know some penmanship and have a little bit of abilities there. But it's not going to be somebody that excels at writing long form articles necessarily. This is somebody who is able to take a couple of sentences and structure them together in a way that not only hooks attention but holds attention throughout the post. What's going to usually work here is a writer who is skilled in crafting high value concise content that sparks conversation. That last part is key. You want to especially with how LinkedIn and we talked about it earlier but I'm just going to hit it again because LinkedIn is one of the ones that I'm most excited about this year. LinkedIn right now, if you get engagement on the platform, everyone sees. It's crazy. It It literally is true virality. And so what you want is somebody who understands not only how to provide value, but how to provide value that sparks conversation in the comments. That is what is going to drive awareness beyond just your current following. And the red flag is somebody who is too focused on formal and corporate writing. You would bet that that's what you want on LinkedIn, right? It's a bunch of business people in suits and No, that. That's the reason why you don't want that. Everybody does that. Everybody sounds like they're in their elevator pitch, you know, in a interview with like a board full of like 10 different people trying to sound all stiff and proper. Nobody gives a about that. The more human and the more personable you are, actually, the more you will stand out on that platform. And so you want to make sure it's somebody who if they're writing on your behalf is able to understand your personality and inject that into the content rather than taking it out. Now, if you're hiring for YouTube long form specifically, you're going to be looking for an editor who understands that your opening 15 to 30 seconds is the most crucial part of your entire video. And if you don't nail that, the rest doesn't matter. They also need to be somebody who then understands that throughout the video they need to be creating tension, stakes, open loops, some sort of reason for the viewer to continue watching. They need to understand that if you do deliver all the value of the video in the opening 3 minutes, why would they remain for the next 10? So, they need to understand good storytelling and engaging editing, but they also need to understand the subject matter enough that they are competent and aware of the subject matter so they can sprinkle the value throughout the video rather than giving it all in the upfront. Because, as we talked about before, YouTube loves watch time. And so, that's what you're going to want to look for in a YouTube editor. Huge red flag here is if you're hiring a videographer for your YouTube, if it's somebody who overemphasizes very traditional styles of production. Maybe you're a running gun operation doing more vlog style content and they want to stop every scene, every moment and ensure that the lighting is perfect, the composition is perfect. They want to they aren't willing to use zoom lenses. They only use primes. Not going to work, right? You want to make sure that their technical skills align with the technical needs of the role. All right, the next section is start lean and grow intentionally. I laugh because uh this is a a huge problem that I see with media teams and then they have to do massive layoffs. Avoid overhiring too early. A small, high impact, nimble seal team six style team will accomplish so much more than a bloated inefficient team. I believe in hiring specialists, but early on these specialists need to be willing to be multifunctional, okay? They have to wear multiple hats. You might have somebody who is specializing in YouTube long form editing, but you're probably going to need them to cut some short clips and maybe even create some thumbnails. That is okay. In the beginning, that is what you're going to need. And so, you need to make sure that you emphasize that in the hiring process. Here's an example. If you're at the very beginning stages and you're limited on budget, you probably need a videographer and an editor, but you might not be able to afford hiring both. And so, you're going to hire somebody who can do both. Somebody who can film and edit. You gain a lot of efficiencies in that. Ultimately, down the road, you're going to want to send them down one path or the other so that they can be the specialist and you can get the most out of their skill set. But in the beginning, you have to have people wearing multiple hats. So again, if you need a videographer and editor and you have a very limited budget, I recommend hiring somebody who is skilled at both. Now, you need to make sure you identify which one is the priority. If you prioritize really good filming and steady hand and all that great question asking. And maybe they're not as good at editing, maybe that is an okay concession to make at the stage you were currently at. Now, why does this actually matter? Like, why do we want to not overhire? I mean, it seems obvious, but I'm going to run through just so that you really understand why you should avoid this. Number one, you avoid unnecessary payroll expenses before proving the ROI on content. I truly believe that anybody who does content correctly will get an ROI literally no matter what they do, even as an employee. However, you might not be doing it good, and you might not be at the point where you can actually hire enough people or the right people to do it well. And if that's the case, then you might be putting out content that sucks and doesn't provide anything. In which case, I don't know that I'd be scaling your team up from there. You're just going to be hiring more people that are not capable at actually driving awareness to your content, which means you're driving your ROI down because you're adding headcount and payroll, but you're not adding any profitability or revenue to the company from the content. If you keep the team smaller and don't hire too quickly, well, you also keep operations nimble, making it flexible, easy to pivot and move around as needed. I can't tell you how many times I've had to change process, priorities, everything, because one, platforms are constantly evolving and changing and requiring new things for you to win, but also your client. If you're building a team for the CEO or founder, or if you are the CEO and founder yourself, your desired outcomes, your preferences are going to change. You might really enjoy doing vlogging for a while and then go into a season where things are stressful and you don't want to have a camera around all the time and you need to make more sit down direct to camera style content like this. Well, you need a nimble team that is able to pivot and reverse engineer those needs. If you have a massive bloated team, oftentimes, I mean, think of it like, you know, if you're turning on a dime in a little speedboat, it's not going to be that difficult. But if you have to turn on a dime in a oil tanker, you're The last benefit that I really see here is there's a lot of context that is developed. You allow the individuals on your team to understand the various functions that you have on the team. Well, how is that helpful? Well, one, when you bring in more specialists, they're able to communicate in an educated way cuz they did the role at least at some capacity. So, they can speak the lingo. They can talk the talk. Two, they understand what any request they make actually takes for the other person. They know that if you're asking them to edit a video that was just shot this morning and edit it by the next morning, you're going to be up all night. A lot of people don't realize that. And so I think that it's not only effective in helping the team communicate and work together well, but you also get this benefit of if somebody is sick or quits or gets fired, you have people on the team that do maybe not at the same level, but they understand the role and how to function within it. Now, as the team scales up, you're going to go through this process where you take these specialists who you are asking to be generalists for a short period of time, and you're going to move them back into their specialist role again as the team scales. And so, I just want to share a very quick little framework for you on how you go about expanding these roles gradually. Step one, you're going to start with the multi-roll hires. Okay? So, it's going to be somebody who is highly proficient at filming and they're really good at editing and so they're doing both of those tasks. Okay? They're handling multiple tasks. Then what you need to do is ensure that you are documenting and defining the process. You want to make sure that all the workflow, every little tiny little thing that this individual is doing is documented and it's super clear for the next person that comes in. Once you do that, this videographer and editor, they're highly proficient at filming and good at editing. They should document their whole process for editing. And once you hire an editor, they no longer need to edit. So, they can now focus entirely on filming. They can specialize. So, that leads us to number three, which is specialize as you scale. Once the volume starts to increase, volume of output and volume of members on the team, you can start to split roles to improve efficiency. For example, if I am an editor, but I also have to jump up every two hours and film with the talent I'm working for, I'm losing massive efficiency in my editing. Every editor that is watching heard that the moment that you break out of the edit, it's not like you lose that 1 hour that you went to go film. you have another 30 to 45 minutes of trying to get back into that flow state that you were in. And honestly, a lot of times it's very difficult to get back into it. In general, it doesn't take 30, 40 minutes. It might take waiting until the next day. And so, anytime that you can allow somebody to stay in that flow state, especially an editor, a designer, somebody that's doing more batch work like that, you gain so much efficiency and what I subjectively call quality. Now, in the interest of starting lean and growing intentionally, a very common question that comes up for people is, well, do I hire full-time in-house employees or do I hire contractors and agencies? And so, my team and I, we broke down, we actually created like a whole table that we're going to walk through that contrast the benefits or potential downsides given different scenarios, different factors that we're wanting to keep in mind. And we're going to compare full-time employees versus a contractor or agency. And so I'm actually going to read this off my phone. This is something that you can download if you would like. We actually have a worksheet that you can go through and it'll help you evaluate whether you in your scenario should actually use a full-time employee or hire a contractor or agency. Let's dive in. So the first factor that we're looking at is budget. And uh this is obviously a major uh concern especially for those of you who are in the early days, right? You're maybe a startup or you're a soloreneur and you don't have a lot that you're working with. This is where I'm at right now. I don't have any massive budget or anything and so I'm having to think strategically about what I bring in full-time versus contract out. For full-time employees, it's a higher long-term cost. Okay? You have salary, benefits, training, right? If you bring somebody in, you need to invest in them. And the difference between a full-time employee and a contractor here is you don't need to be training contractors. In fact, they should not require any sort of training. They should come in batteries included. They should be able to do the role immediately. You're not going to be paying for your contractors to attend a workshop or uh consume courses online. That's something that they should be doing on their own time and their own dime. Now, on the contractor side for budget or contractor agency, they're more cost-effective for short-term projects or specialized needs. Here's a great example. This very course that we're working on, there's a full-time employee working on it and there's a contractor working on it. So, behind the camera right now is Trevor Odum and he is actually on our team, but then we are working with an amazing motion graphics artist named Michael and he is a contractor because right now I don't have the need for full-time motion graphics. I I wish I did. that'd be awesome, but that's not the place that we're at right now. And so, if we were to bring him on full-time, we wouldn't have enough work for him anyways. And so, it's far more cost effective and operationally less intensive to be able to just bring him on on a project-by-p project basis. The next factor is workload. Okay, so for the full-time employee, this looks like ongoing daily tasks that require their full-time attention. If you don't, like I just mentioned with the our contractor that we're working with for the motion graphics, if you don't have enough work where they're doing daily tasks, then it is most likely not a full-time role and not necessary at this point. For example, a lot of you are filming content, right? But maybe you only film once or twice a month. Why would you have a full-time videographer if all they're doing is showing up twice a month to film with you in batches? That to me is a great scenario where you would want to hire a contractor or an agency. So the workload on the contractor agency looks more like project based, it's flexible or it's temporary work. So maybe you have a scenario where you have an event coming up, okay? And instead of just having one videographer, you need like four different people going around and capturing B-roll, testimonials, filming the keynotes, whatever. This is a scenario where you might hire a bunch of contractors or an agency to fulfill this temporary work. The third factor that we want to keep in mind and and use to I guess determine whether or not we're going to hire somebody full-time or if we're going to bring on a contractor or agency is expertise. Now, on the full-time side, typically they have deep knowledge and a long-term investment in your company. Even if they don't come in with like uh master level knowledge, that's fine. You're going to invest in them. And if they're the right culture fit, as we discussed throughout this whole section, they're worth it. And you're going to invest in training. You're going to provide them courses. You're going to provide them workshops. You might sit down one-on-one with them once or twice a week to really pour into them. And that's something that you're going to get the return on because they are a full-time employee working for you. However, on the flip side, contractors, not the case. Contractors should come in as the expert. Ideally, they have specialized knowledge that may not be needed long term. So, a great example of this is in the past what I've done is hired agencies for 3 to 6 months and we bring them in and we have them school us, teach us on what they're doing, provide us the playbooks of how we can move forward without them. I think of it like expedited learning. You're almost paying for like a fast pass to be able to move past some of the clunky learning stages uh that a lot of people take like 2 or 3 years to get down. You're able to accomplish that in potentially 6 months with a really quality agency. Now, the next factor is speed and agility. I have a lot of thoughts on this, but first I'm just going to go with what we have on the table here. It takes time to onboard and train an employee, right? Typically, you're looking at 60 to 90 days before they're really up to speed and executing at the level that you're looking for. The beauty though is they do provide continuity and consistency. Okay? Okay. So once they are onboarded in theory, as long as you do a good job of retaining them and you provide a good work environment where they're always able to grow and learn, they are more likely to stick there. And so you're going to have the same person working on the same projects. I'm going to kind of jump into it already, but the problem on the agency side that I've experienced is agencies do tend to have a higher turnover rate. And so, for example, when I've worked with YouTube agencies, what you'll find is you might have like seven different editors over the course of six to 12 months that work on your projects because they're turning through them. No matter how good they are at having playbooks, checklists, all that there is a difference and and you start to notice that it's not as consistent in the quality or in the style. You might not care about that. And so, if that's not a factor that you give a about, it. Who gives a let's just hire somebody full-time in-house if you have the amount of work necessary for that. If we're looking for extreme consistency here, I probably would not recommend going the agency route. Now, the benefit on speed and agility that you get with the contractor or agency is you do get immediate access to expertise. So, unlike a 30 60 90day onboarding plan with an employee, agencies would be fired immediately if it took 90 days for them to get up to speed. they're they're just like that is not the way that they function. And so typically what you'll find is maybe you have an onboarding call with them, but then after that they're ripping. And so if you do have something that you need done immediately, the agency or contractor route might be a better solution for the short term for you. Now, brand consistency, what you may think of is like making sure that they have the right logos, fonts, colors, all that And that is important and I care about that. But that's not what I emphasize the most when I'm talking brand consistency. I'm thinking about like messaging or topics that maybe the the talent we're working with have no desire to ever talk about. Okay? Or maybe we know as a team that there are certain statements in context of what's being said that are fine, but if they're cut out of the context, it's going to be really bad. That's something that you're going to be able to reinforce and establish extreme clarity on with somebody that's in-house far more than a contractor or agency. The reason why is because not only are they constantly working on projects for you, they are also involved in your internal meetings, okay? And so they're getting feedback far more consistently than an agency or contractor. So they know where they stand with the content that they are creating. and when they do it right or when they do something that goes against brand guidelines. Typically on the contractor and agency side from my experience on brand consistency, this is one of the areas where it requires the most amount of oversight. I can't tell you the amount of times that an agency that I've worked with over the years just didn't quite get it right when it came to what we were trying to do from a brand positioning and association standpoint. even down to simple things like if the talent on camera is referencing, you know, a successful entrepreneur and a not successful entrepreneur, they might flash up two individuals that we want no association with. And that happened very consistently when working with contractors. And the last factor in this section that we're trying to use to determine whether or not we're going to hire somebody full-time versus a contractor or agency is scalability. Full-time employees typically, I believe, are more scalable because they are more ideal for your culture and building culture and training people into leadership roles. You're able to scale the team up in my opinion because maybe you hire somebody as a video editor and over a year or two train them up to be a manager and they can oversee other video editors. And because of that, they understand the culture and the DNA of the team. They understand the brand and what the preferences of that brand are. And so not only are they able to continue to use that and implement that within their work, they're able to train future members of the team. This is really good for consistency and scalability. Now, on the other hand, the benefit of contractors on this is actually not long-term scalability, but they are very useful in testing out a theory. For example, if right now you are emphasizing YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok, and you recognize that LinkedIn is one of the platforms that you should really, really around with in 2025 because it is the only platform right now that has true organic reach. Okay, that's an interesting hypothesis. I would argue that you are correct, but you don't totally know. And so rather than going out and hiring a full-time LinkedIn specialist that might cost you a lot of money, what you could do is take three to six months and test it out with an agency or a contractor. Then you're not making the high investment and long-term commitment to an employee and you're just doing an experiment and validating whether or not this is something worth investing in. And so in that case, maybe we would bring on a contractor to work on our LinkedIn for 3 4 months. and they're making the content. We're tracking the performance. We're tracking whether or not it's generating qualified leads for us. But then we're also working with this contractor because they are an expert, a subject matter expert in that field on developing a playbook that then we can use internally as our guiding light for the new hire that we bring in full-time once we have validated this idea. or on the flip side, we find out that LinkedIn was not for us and we didn't go through the problem of hiring a full-time employee, incurring that cost, and then unfortunately having to part ways with them. Now, we just went through and kind of compared full-time employees versus contractors and agencies, but what I want to do is actually break down three different phases or stages that you may find yourself in and what I would recommend you do. Now, I want to be very clear here. This is general advice, okay? I don't know what your exact scenario is. So, there's a lot of nuance to this. This is a good starting point and a good guiding light for you. I would not necessarily completely follow this as doctrine. The best version of this is like, I'm going to dive into your team, look at everything that you're doing, look at what your goals are, and we're going to develop a whole custom plan for you. But if we're not able to do that, 99% of you we're never going to be able to do that with, I would use this as your starting point. So what we're going to do is we're going to go through three different growth stages and then the recommended hiring approach that is associated with each stage. So stage number one is zero to one year. We're a baby at this point. And what I recommend we do is primarily hire contractors and agencies. That way we can stay lean, not invest a ton of upfront cost, but also we get to test our theories and test the platforms and see what works best for us. I really believe that there are the best platforms to be on and then there's the best platforms for you to be on. And so what I would recommend is utilizing the agency contractor method to validate, are you cut out for LinkedIn? Are you cut out for Tik Tok? Just because everyone says Tik Tok is the best place to be. Well, if you're not good in that format, that Whatever format you're best in and most comfortable in and feel you can provide the most value in, that's what you should do. Okay. So here we're testing and validating those theories. We're staying lean and minimizing our investment. As the founder, I recommend in this stage you are heavily involved in the content and strategy that you are making. You should be shaping what this looks like. Of course, you want to bring in contractors and agencies that you trust and that you lean on, but ultimately this is your brand and this is what you are building. So you should be the one that is shaping what that will look like. The next growth stage is kind of like years one through three. Again, roughly there's a lot of plus minus to this, but let's just say roughly one to three years in, you are in the stage where you are transitioning critical roles in house. So what this may look like is maybe you were working with a YouTube agency for a year and maybe you have realized after that year, hey, YouTube is our top priority. This is where 70 80% of our qualified leads are coming through. Well, in that case, maybe you want to hire a video editor inhouse. And maybe that doesn't necessarily look like firing the agency. It just looks like reducing their scope. So, instead of them doing the editing, maybe they're just doing consulting for you. So, you're pairing your video editor inhouse with the consulting power and the knowledge and expertise and experience that the agency has. The other benefit in this is typically agencies offer multiple services. So, a lot of different YouTube agencies, for example, don't just do the editing, they also help with ideiation, scripting, and packaging. And maybe this editor that you bring in house isn't skilled at those things. And so, you take the editing off of the agency's plate and bring that in-house, but then you still have the agency doing the ideation, scripting, and packaging. And so, you're keeping them around for very specialized skills. Now, stage number three is 3 plus years. And this is around the time sometimes people get this earlier around 2 years but typically around 3 plus years this is when you want to bring everything inhouse. Okay. So all critical roles that are high volume and necessary to the business I recommend bring it inhouse. Uh we just went through kind of like the pluses and minuses and the benefits of full-time in-house employees versus contractors. So I think you understand the value of having an in-house team. One thing that I didn't fully touch on that I think is actually really worth highlighting here is that when I have brought roles inhouse, so previously working with an agency and then I end up bringing in house, the speed at which we are able to accomplish and finish projects increases dramatically. The level of communication goes up drastically. It's literally impossible for an agency to be able to communicate with you at the cadence that a full-time employee does because they have multiple clients that they're servicing, right? And a lot of these agencies, their editors are overseas and so they're in a totally different time zone. Okay? So it changes the dynamic completely. The moment that you start to bring things inhouse, speed goes up like crazy. Now, what I do recommend is still at this stage, there are going to be some agencies you're going to keep on or contractors you'll keep on either for very, very specialized work or access to worlds that you don't have access to. What do I mean by that? Well, typically a media buying agency might have a better relationship with Meta than you do or your media buyer does because maybe they're spending millions of dollars a year on Meta and so they're a more important client for that platform. If any of you out there have ran ads or done organic content consistently on a platform, you know, having a relationship with the rep there is valuable as And so if you can't get that with your full-time in-house team, you may want to maintain an agency purely for that relationship in case something goes wrong. I also believe that agencies or contractors can be very useful to have in your rolodex available to you so that you can scale up as needed for sprints. Sometimes you might have a launch where you're going to triple the amount of creative output that you normally have and you don't want to hire full-time people for a temporary need. So, you just scale up temporarily with an agency and then you can scale back down to what you were normally doing and you don't have to fire a bunch of people. Nobody likes firing people. That's the worst thing in the world. I would avoid it at all costs. And the easiest way to avoid it is scale up using contractors or agencies. Hello there. Before we continue on this course, I actually want to inform you about something really cool that my team and I are putting together. We're putting together a little newsletter for you. And this is different than your average newsletter. We're not going to be sending something weekly or monthly. We're only going to send you emails when we believe that we have something that is truly valuable. Whether it's a bite-sized nugget that's going to change your perspective or a crazy in-depth playbook, we only will be sending you when we feel it will drive massive awareness for your content and scale your brand in the way that we believe is best. So, if that sounds interesting to you, you can go sign up for it at calebston.com. If not, no harm, no foul. And with that, I hope you enjoy the rest of the course. Amazing. We've hired all these individuals. We've identified their roles. We've made it clear to them. Now, we need to onboard them. Okay? And I will tell you from experience, a poor onboarding process leads to weeks or months of wasted productivity and a demotivated employee. I will tell you an example. I started at a role one point in my career and I remember the first week I didn't have any of the uh tech set up right like the asauna the zooms all that none of that was set up for me I didn't have my work laptop and I had no expectations that had been given to me no deliverables that were required I didn't even know what meeting cadence I should be on I had no clarity and what happened with no clarity extreme anxiety I was constantly wondering like am I living up to the expectations that my boss has. Am I am I doing what is required? But how can you know if you're doing that if you're never informed of what is required and what the expectations are? On the flip side, I also had a recent role where I started and I had gotten a 30 60 90 day plan given to me like 5 days before my first day. So I went into day one knowing exactly what was expected of me, knowing what my schedule looked like. I had all the equipment necessary and I was motivated to do some work. So what you get is if you prepare an employee and you allow them to know what is expected, you're going to get a highly motivated workhorse. If you do not provide that, you're going to get a highly anxious, apathetic individual and that may only last for that onboarding period, but it might just carry into their entire employment. So if you do a structured 30 6090, it eliminates confusion and sets very clear expectations from day one. Okay. So we're going to create that 30 609day plan. This is a structured three-phase onboarding approach that ensures new hires integrate to the team smoothly and understand what the they're there for. Think of the first 30 days as orientation and core learning. Okay? They need to gather context. Yes, of course they ask questions. You gave them the spiel in the interview process. I'm sure you sent them some about us packet, but let's be real, that's all That's not actually how the company runs. That's not how communication occurs. That's not where they gain the insights on how to communicate with the CEO versus the CMO versus their direct manager. This is when they're understanding the company vision, the values, the workflows. This is how the the sausage is made. This is where they learn the core processes, the systems. They see a content calendar, asset management, maybe you use a sauna or ClickUp to manage everything. They're getting to understand and get a feel for how you operate. I often like to give smaller tasks. I don't want just, you know, knowledge acquisition to occur during this phase. I do want to give them tasks. One, because I want to make sure that they are able to execute. You know, technical assessments are great, but you really learn a lot in the first 30, 60, 90 days about an employee. I want to make sure they're doing that, but I also want to give them wins and momentum that they can build upon. I truly believe if you nailed the opening 30 days, you have such a better employee employer relationship. Also, don't just leave them on an island to themsel and let them just figure it out. There's very rare cases where that is the right move. Maybe if that's what the role is actually like all the time, okay, sure, you could justify that to me. But if the role is not going to be like that, make sure that you do regular check-ins with this individual. Ensure that they understand what they're working on. Understand what is happening on a meeting. They understand who's in the meeting, what the process looks like, what the context of this project is. Anything that is necessary for them to be able to operate efficiently, you should be providing in the check-in. Also, you can be asking them how are they feeling? Are they confused? Do they feel overwhelmed, underwhelmed? Do they need more information? Do they need to chunk things down a little bit? This is where you get to get a feel and a gauge of where they're at and how they're responding to these opening 30 days. For example, if you hire an editor, this might look like them shadowing your senior editor or some experienced team member and ultimately they're reviewing high-erforming content from the past. Maybe this editor they're shadowing is walking them through their top five uh YouTube videos of all time and explaining why they got to that level and how they're implementing those frameworks and those structures to future videos. And maybe potentially it's working on internal projects or rough cuts of an edit that you review internally and that don't have high stakes of going out publicly. All right. Then you have the 60-day, the next 30 days. Well, what are we doing there? This is where we want to have them taking more ownership. What does that look like? Well, they begin executing independently on their core responsibilities. They're no longer just doing small tasks or just shadowing. They're actually owning tasks of their own. They're also developing their own workflows and systems within the team. We have teamwide process and workflow, but then within that, individuals have their own way of operating. Every editor has a different way that they set up a file, right? Some editors like to go through all the A-roll and then start adding music and then B-roll and blah blah blah. Some of them like to go section by section and they go A-roll, B-roll, music, graphics, and then on to the next section. Allow them to build their own workflow and utilize that for the greatest efficiency that they can have. In these next 30 days, at the 60 mark, you're wanting to also analyze their work. Look at how they're going about their workflow, the process, their communication, and the final output, and give them feedback. This is where you can start to reinforce the good things and help correct the things that aren't as effective or helpful for the team or process they're working on. An example here is a an editor would probably be editing full YouTube videos, uploading them, and then we would be reviewing the performance and giving them feedback accordingly. And then the last 30 days, this is the 90-day mark, right? So we have the 30, the 60, and the 90. And this is chunked down into 30 days at a time. And this is the last section of their official onboarding. We are fully integrating them into the team and giving them a high level of contribution. No longer are they working on small tasks or owning their own task. They're owning the big tasks. whatever the number one most important thing that we listed on the responsibilities on their job description, they are now owning that entirely. This also looks like owning it entirely with minimal supervision. Okay? So, instead of me coming in and checking in on them during the edit five or six times, I might check in with them at the beginning like I would any editor, maybe a midway point and then upon completion. We're also now at the point where they're demonstrating actual results, like true impact they're having against their KPIs that we're holding them accountable for. You know, if they're a YouTube editor, watch time. Is the watch time at least average, if not better than average, what our normal performance is, or if it's slightly below, are they improving the watch time each video they're doing? I always am looking for rate of progress. Are they at least improving? If they're not where we want them to be, are they moving in that direction? And finally, at the end of the 90 days, you want to actually conduct a 90-day review. Sit down with them, walk through everything that they've done, tell them all the wins they've had, all the things that you love, the way they communicated, the way Sarah said to John, you know, the feedback on the edit, she gave it so well. Great job, Sarah. Reinforce that and make sure they continue to do those things. But also, there may be things that you noticed in the opening 90 days that weren't as desirable or as effective, and you want to correct those. The last thing you want to do is just ignore a problem and just hope that it goes away. They don't go away, they get bigger. And so, at this 90-day check-in, this is where you want to give them some very real feedback. If there's something that they cannot continue doing, tell them now. If you do not tell them now and they continue doing it, that is not their fault. That is your fault. It is your job at this point to inform them of any behavior changes that need to occur. So, as an example, at this point, if we have a content strategist at 90 days in, they should be identifying high performing content and what we should double down on or how we should reformat it for another platform. They should be proposing new content ideas, not just reviewing what is working. They should be innovating and coming up with fresh new ideas. And they should be optimizing distribution for maximum reach. and they should be able to sit down with you and take feedback on what they were doing right on all of those and what they need to change on all of those. So now that we have the 306090, well that's amazing, but that's not the only part of onboarding. That is a piece of the pie. That is a tool in the belt, but it is not the entire belt. So if we want to make onboarding seamless and effective, one, we want to provide a clear plan before day one. So this is sending onboarding materials. This is like a company handbook, a vision deck, a a strategy deck, whatever that looks like for you. And the 306090 that we just went through. Number two is you're going to assign a mentor or onboarding buddy. Often times, if you don't assign this, they will make their own friend there, right? And that's great, but you want to make sure to also intentionally pair them with somebody who is going to really help them in the role that they have. Ideally, somebody who has a lot more context on the organization and team and how they function. typically a more senior individual. This allows them to speed ramp their learning but also have somebody that is a guaranteed or verified point of contact for when they have questions because in the beginning we have a multitude of questions and typically we're afraid or embarrassed to ask them. If you help assign this individual and you clarify upfront that this is what they are here for is to help you ask questions or help you answer questions and that there's nothing wrong with asking questions. it's actually encouraged to well then you set them up for success and instead of them sitting there trying to solve a problem for 2 hours they might solve it in 5 minutes asking Sarah what the answer is. Now number three is to schedule regular check-ins. You're not going to have a pulse on how this person is doing and how it's going if you're not checking in with them regularly and getting an update. I prefer typically in the first month to do multiple check-ins per week. So maybe it looks like instead of one 30 minute meeting, it's three 10-minute meetings, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, end of day. And you're just checking in to see what was the most interesting thing that you learned today. What was uh the most confusing thing that happened this week that I can maybe answer? What roadblocks are in front of you that I can bulldoze through to make your job easier. This is also an incredible opportunity to celebrate wins and reinforce great actions. If they're a new hireer and you're on a call, a brainstorm meeting, let's say, and you're beating up a YouTube video idea, and they contribute a thought, even if it's not a good one, but they actually speak up, man, immediately give them daps for that. Like, give them all the love in the world for that because that is the kind of action and behavior you want to encourage, especially a new hire. I remember there was a hire that I made a couple years ago and I want to say like day one he was sitting in a meeting where nobody asked his opinion on it. He volunteered it and in some organizations they might not like that. I immediately stood up and gave the dude a high five. I was like this is incredible. You're day one. You're nervous as hell. You don't know anybody. Nobody knows you. Nobody knows your background or skill set and you're already contributing to the overall discussion. That's what we're hiring people for. We're hiring people to contribute, not sit and be a fly on the wall. And number four is kind of a bonus. I don't believe it's fully necessary, but it's definitely very helpful, but if you're resource constrained, I would save this for when you're at a bigger scale. Number four is building an onboarding portal or resource hub. And this can be fancy like, you know, using some software to automate the onboarding or it can be as simple as a Google Drive folder that has your vision deck, your strategy deck, context on the team, SOPs, playbooks, video tutorials on workflows, Q&A document with the founder or CEO to give more context on the organization. Anything that you feel would help make this person's life within the org easier can live in this hub. And again, it can be a very simple Google Drive folder. It doesn't have to be anything fancy and complex. Just like in the hiring process, we want to define a role clearly. We also want to ensure that once somebody is onboarded, we also make sure to continually define their role clearly because as we know, roles evolve, process evolves, needs evolve on the team. And so as those evolutions occur, you should be continually updating the role description. And one of the biggest mistakes I see on teams is overlapping responsibilities without clarity around who is owning what. And so what ends up happening there is if two people both think that they own the same task, often times they assume the other person's going to do it and then nobody does it. And so what you want to do is if you're going to have two people working on a task, make sure it's very clear what they're each owning and what the expectations of output are from each of them. hold them accountable. I like to set KPIs for accountability, which removes ambiguity in the performance of their job expectations. Here's an example. If you have a community manager and their task is to analyze metrics, right? They're supposed to look at how's engagement, are we getting enough impressions, are we driving enough traffic to our website, etc., etc. But then you also ask editors to do the same thing. One, I mean, it it seems incredibly inefficient and pointless, but two, eventually you get to the point where they're doing redundant work, and what I have observed is they both get frustrated by it, and then they both don't do the task, and then nobody does it, and it's not getting done. And so, there are going to be tasks that you're going to have overlap. That's impossible, right? Like, there's going to be tasks where multiple people have to own different micro tasks that ladder up to the big one. I understand there's nuance to it, but I would really encourage you if you are going to have two people tackling the same task, make sure there is clarity on what is expected from each of them. So, we went through all of this onboarding but what does this actually mean for us? What does this give us as a result? Well, I'll tell you. You get faster ramp up time. People are actually going to get up to speed and able to execute on their role at a high level much, much faster. I can't tell you early on in my career how many different roles that I took that it took me like four or five months to actually get to a point where I was effectively creating for the team that I was on. Not necessarily my fault, but just due to a lack of a structured onboarding process that the organization did not have in place. Number two, the most important thing, stronger retention. It costs a lot of money to lose an employee, like two and a half times what they actually costed you originally. Employees who feel supported and cared for and actually have clear understanding of what is expected of them stay longer and perform better. Number three is you typically get more ownership and initiative. Clarity from day one fosters confidence and independent problem solving. This is somebody who if a problem comes up they're not just immediately running and tapping on your shoulder and being like Sarah how do I solve this? Right? They are somebody who is going to if they come to you they're going to come to you with proposed solutions. So the key takeaway here is I want you to change the way you think of onboarding. It's not about introducing process and introducing team members. It's about setting up new hires to win early and often which benefits both them and yourself. All right, we have defined what we need. We've defined the roles. We've hired the individuals and we have onboarded them effectively. Congratulations. You are killing it. But now we have to develop and retain this high performing team, right? We brought all these amazing individuals in, but we need to make sure that we keep them and we give them an environment that makes them want to stay and feel like they are growing and empowered rather than stifled and capped at their growth. A strong team is not just about hiring the right people, though that is very, very important. It's also about developing them into leaders, lining up opportunities with their individual long-term goals, not just the companies, and ensuring that they never stop growing. Always giving them opportunity to further their growth and see that where they are right now, the ceiling is always moving up. So, they're never limited with the amount of growth they can have within your team. If your team is not evolving, you're not scaling, you're just maintaining. One of the first things I can recommend in trying to retain employees and keep them on your team and keep them feeling satisfied and like they're growing is creating a culture of ownership. A lot of individuals that have creative teams out there really believe heavily, I would argue too heavily in SOPs and checklists. Now they are very important, right? Checklists ensure quality control. SOPs ensure that we are operating in a very similar function and similar way when operating on a process. Okay, so this is super important. The problem is if you build an army, I like to call it a checklist army. You're building individuals that only follow instruction and don't take ownership for themselves. I believe that high performing teams thrive when they take real ownership of their role. Instead of waiting for direction from you, they are taking action. They're solving problems. They're innovating on content and ideas themselves. If you are the only one making decisions, you don't have a team. You just have a bunch of assistants that are running around doing your bidding. You have what I call a topdown approach rather than a bottom up approach. So, here is how you encourage ownership on your team instead of doing what we all want to do because we care about everyone on our team. I mean, every person I've ever hired, and whether or not you you with this, I don't give a I love them to death. I care about every person I've ever hired an insane amount. And so what sometimes occurs then is you want to solve problems for them. You want to make their life easier, but that them up. So what you want to do to create a culture of ownership is you actually want to not solve their problems. When they come to you with a question or a problem, instead of being like, "Here's the answer. Here's the solution right away." You put it back on them. Ask them, "Well, how would you handle this? If I got hit by a bus right now, how would you handle this?" If I was out sick for 3 weeks, how would you handle it? If I went on vacation for two months, what would you do to solve this problem? Oftentimes, they know the answer or they're creative enough to be able to solve it. Typically, what you're finding is they might be being just slightly lazy or more than likely they've been in a previous environment where their leader did solve all their problems because their leader didn't trust them. And if you start noticing that they just bring a bunch of problems to you, encourage them to stop bringing problems and start bringing solutions. So if they're constantly asking you how to solve something, encourage them to move from asking you how to solve to being like, "Which of these two or three solves would you recommend I try?" That is going to be far better. But then again, I would recommend that you put it back on them and say, "Well, which of the three do you think is going to be most effective?" And third, give them autonomy with accountability. Meaning, empower them to make a mistake. If you're going to ask them, how would you go about solving it? They present the idea. You might know that's not going to work. But if it's not absolutely missionritical, I would encourage you let them fail. They will learn so much more from that than from always getting it right based on what you say. And the crazier part, and a lot of people don't realize this, but they are paying attention to what you are doing. They're seeing here that you trust them and you trust them despite a potentially not correct or not ideal outcome. When you do this, you empower them to gain confidence and continue to solve problems. And when they realize that there's not a consequence to them getting it wrong and that you're just going to encourage them to go about it differently next time, they have no fear. And when you don't have fear, that is when creativity thrives. Creativity is not only important for creating content, it's important for solving problems. As an example, I once had a creative director who was technically incredible, right? A a brilliant mind, an incredible strategist. But I'm gonna be honest with you, they lacked a lot of personal skills and ability to read another person in the moment. And so a lot of times when we would be filming with the talent we worked for, this individual would ask me, "How do I handle this situation?" And a lot of times it was in the moment, right? And so instead of them just like verbally asking me, they were texting me. And I started to notice that I was answering it always. I was solving it for them. And what I realized was three months into doing that, they had not improved. They always listened to me. They acted on what I said, but they kept asking questions at the same rate. And so what did I do? I started saying, "Well, how would you handle this?" And sometimes this person would say something that I knew was going to piss the talent we were working with off, like that, potentially interrupting the entire shoot, and maybe we wouldn't actually get a video that day. short-term bummer, long-term gain. What ended up happening is he learned from his mistakes and started to be able to figure out how to solve the problem on his own to the point now where he is leading the initiative for that individual and knows how to engage with them and handle any problems that come up very effectively without texting me. Now, we've identified that we want to build and empower these leaders, right? Well, how do we develop people as a leader? I believe that teaching is actually an ultimate hack here. Now, not in maybe the way that you're thinking. I love team training, but I don't like to lead it myself. Not all the time. Of course, I'm going to do team trainings here and there. Uh it's important to hear from your leader and to hear straight from the horse's mouth. But I actually believe that the best version of this is when you empower the team to do team trainings. Okay? There's so many benefits to this and we're going to go through many of them. So, why does this work? Well, I think a lot of us have probably heard the traditional saying, but it's traditional for a reason. It's true. You learn a lot by teaching. And so, giving people on your team the ability to train others and teach others allows them the opportunity to learn more about that, to really ingrain that learning into their repertoire, into their utility belt. It teaches mastery. If you can't actually explain something, you don't fully understand it. You might be able to do the action. An example is editors. A very early entry-level editor who isn't super experienced or technically proficient if you ask them, why did you cut this video in this cadence, right? Why did you go 12 frames, 36 frames, 12 frames, 36 frames as a cadence, in a sequence? I got really technical there, so please just ignore it if you don't speak editor lingo. But if that's the case and you ask them why they did that, a lot of beginners and novice editors will say it felt right. And that's a totally acceptable answer, but it's not a technically sound one. An editor who truly understands would say, I was training the audience to understand and expect the cadence that I was going to edit in because the next scene was going to be very dramatic and I was going to break that pattern. And by training the audience to get used to cuts on that pattern, when we deviate from the pattern, it emphasized that moment. That would be an editor who is very technically proficient, experienced, and understands the why behind why they did the cut. And the magical third thing that you get here, which is absolutely incredible, is you reveal hidden strengths and passions. I can't tell you how many different times that I'd have somebody on one of my teams, they would do a training on something that I had no idea that they were really proficient in and were passionate about. You learn all these interesting things, like people that love sound design, and all of a sudden you realize, oh yeah, that's right. All your edits are really good with sound design. Or you discover that somebody's really passionate about storytelling, and you realize, huh, now that they think about it, all of your videos actually do follow a very, very specific and strategic storytelling framework. Holy And then you get to spread that information to the rest of the team. And what happens is they start to develop their brand within the team. And so if somebody does a presentation on storytelling, for example, and George, another editor, has a question about it, they're going to go to that person. And so what that does is increase efficiency. Rather than sitting and trying to solve a problem on your own, you know who on the team is the subject matter expert to go to to solve the problem with. Now, how do you actually implement this? Well, I would recommend that you conduct a weekly training. Rotate between the different members of your team on who leads the training weekly. I also recommend setting up what is called like a mentorship loop. This is where you take somebody that is more senior on the team and you pair them with a more junior level individual. This doesn't mean uh seniority as far as tenure, but as far as skill set. So maybe you have a videographer that's been on the team for a year and then you hire a brand new videographer who is far more technically proficient. I would recommend pairing them together. The cool byproduct of that is the new videographer, she can help train him on technical proficiencies and he can help train her on proficiencies on how to operate within the organization and how processes work. You get a win-win on both sides. Now, oftentimes when you're hiring an employee, we're humans, so we're selfish. We're thinking about what's in it for us. What are we trying to get out of this person? How can we maximize the returns from this human? But what I would recommend is gain understanding on what their long-term career goals are and start to line up opportunities that you give them with those long-term goals. If they want to be in a place of leadership or they want to hold an executive role and they're an editor right now, well, something that would be very good for you to do is give them those training opportunities so they can gain the skill of communication and presenting. Often times, especially with creative teams, there's this like myth out there that, oh, creatives don't want to talk to anybody. they just want to be locked in a room and d and I believe that that is true but my belief is the why behind that is because they've been trained they've been told that's how they are they work for an organization and the organization never gives them the opportunity to communicate with clients or with the whole team they never give them presenting opportunities because they say well creatives don't like to do that so we're not going to give them the opportunity whatever their desired outcome is for their career it is your job if you want to hold on to them for a long time to make sure that you give them opportunities to grow towards that. If you have somebody on your team that has expressed what they want to accomplish and what you are doing and the opportunities you're providing them are actually going in the opposite direction, what you're going to have is somebody who becomes very dissatisfied with their role and will want to leave at any opportunity they have. Stop being like most leaders and start knowing what your people what your team wants. This is why creative teams lose great people. It's usually not because of like the work output and stuff. It's because they no longer see themselves growing towards where they want to be. In fact, often times they see themselves growing away from where they're wanting to be. And that is the exact opposite of what a human is going to prefer and choose to do because ultimately, like I said at the top, we are all selfish and we want to accomplish what we want to accomplish. Make sure you align the work and opportunities you give your team with what they want to accomplish. So, I recommend doing this by conducting one-on ones. And here are a couple of great questions that I love to ask during a one-on-one. Question number one, very, very basic and obvious, but most of you don't ask it. What's your long-term career goal? Shocker. If you find that out, the amazing thing is you can give them opportunities that move them towards that that also serve the company. Where do you see yourself after this? Do you see yourself at another company? Do you see yourself starting another company? Do you want to jump to a different industry? Are you wanting to experiment with different roles? What is it that you're wanting to accomplish directly after this? You've already asked what their long-term career goal is, but between then and now, what do you see? And third, what skills do you want to develop? Is there anything that you've been interested in? Right? If they're a video editor, but they're really passionate about motion graphics, how cool would it be to be able to give them more opportunities? Maybe you're not able to make them a full-time motion designer because that's not what's required on your team for the content you're producing. But maybe what you can do is say, "Well, I mean, it would be cool if we made our lower thirds a little bit more fancy and we did some cool transitions and maybe we got a little bit crazier with how we animate text." Okay, cool. You're giving them an opportunity to hone in on the skill that they care about most and where they're wanting to go. And then what you're going to get as a byproduct of that is them sticking around a lot longer. So the goal here is ultra simple. Make sure you align their growth with what they're doing daily. If they feel like they're just checking boxes and doing tasks, they will eventually check the out. A really good example of this is I had somebody who was at a manager level on one of my teams that really expressed in the opening like literally in the interview process expressed that they eventually wanted to be a CEO and they wanted to uh have a pretty large organization that they ran and at this point they were at a manager level and so what did I do? I started to give them more opportunities to oversee the team or a section of the team entirely. So, not just a manager level, but I gave them a lot of the responsibilities that I had without necessarily giving them a director title right away. One, just to prove that they can do it and make sure that we were putting them in the right spot, but I wanted to give them the opportunity to start to hone in on skills that were necessary and more importantly to be able to identify deficiencies they had that they needed to work on to eventually get to the point where they would be a CEO. Now, your jackof alltrades, your generalists or your specialists who are willing to generalize, that's going to work in the early days. And it's actually not only going to work, it's necessary. You can't hire specialists entirely from day one, unless you know, you just got unlimited money and really deep pockets. But even then, I wouldn't advise doing that. But eventually, you get to a point where specialists are the way that you're going to actually drive real results, right? We talked in the content section about specializing content to specific platforms. We talked about how in the beginning you make content like you might make a short and then you distribute that on all the different platforms. YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, Tik Tok, Facebook reels, LinkedIn video tab. But the best case version of this is you take that same asset, that same raw footage and re-edit it, remake it contextual to each platform specialization. Well, the same thing is going to happen with your team. In order to make that content special to the platform, you're going to need the individual to specialize in that platform. Here's why this matters. When you move from the generalist workflow to a specialist workflow, you get individuals who execute at much higher levels. They gain massive efficiency by doing the same thing or relatively same thing over and over and over rather than hat jumping. They really iron out all the kinks, all the weird inefficiencies. They develop beautiful workflows on this because they're doing it all day every day. Also, this leads to mastery, which reduces the amount of revisions and back and forth that you have to have with your team. You would not believe how effective it is and efficient it is if you can eliminate two rounds of revisions across all your editors on your team. Sure, in a week that was nice, but add up all that time over a year and you're saving weeks of your time. The benefit for the individual is that specialists have way more long-term career value. They are able to earn far more throughout their career because they are a specialist. Companies will pay far more for that than somebody who is decent or proficient at everything. So, by you investing in them as a specialist, you know, the reality is is unfortunately there's all these people that we love that we have on our team and we want them forever, but they're not going to stay with you forever. The the nature of a career and of a job is that there is an expiration date most of the time. It is my goal if you join my team, I want to set you the up so that when you go to the next spot, you are 10 times better than you could have ever imagined. And the way you do that is you promote specialization. they will typically be far happier and earn way more throughout their career. Here's an example of this, and this is pretty typical that I find in creatives, but specifically short form editors for whatever reason. Trevor on my team, I hired him about three three and a half years ago now. And I remember we brought him on as a short form editor. about I'm probably going to get this wrong, but let's call it 9 to 12 months in, he started getting to the point where he had mastered how we do short form and was absolutely crushing it and started noticing the editors that were working on long form content and how sexy that looked and how interesting and shiny that was. And around 14 to 16 months in, he started vocalizing to me how he was considering wanting to move from being a short form editor to a long form editor. Now, a little bit of context for you is at this point, we had reached a serious level of mastery to where he was the go-to guy on the team for shorts. In fact, so much so that every other short form editor whenever they ran into an issue would go to Trevor to help solve the problem. And so what I proposed to Trevor is two different paths. I said, "Dude, like you're an A player. You're a gangster. I want to keep you around and happy. So I'll move you over to long form if that's what you want." Now, it won't happen overnight because we are a business and we have needs, but we can transition you if that's what you want. The way this will work is if you move over to long form, you're going to go to the bottom of the totem pole. You're going to the very bottom of the ladder. Okay? Like there's already some serious gangsters over there and you're not as experienced in it. So, you're going to be starting from zero. Now, on the flip side, you could continue down this editing short form path. Right now, you're the top dog. And I see very soon in your future you managing all of the short form editors. not only being the person that they come to with their problems and helping them solve and the one who always ends up having the most viewed clips, but you actually manage them. Now, a little bit more additional context. This was young as He was 22 when we were having this conversation. A 22-year-old managing editors that were like six, seven years older than him potentially. This was a crazy crossroads for him. And I told him, I said, I believe that if you specialize, you will go into a place of leadership that there's not a world where you'll get there if you go over to YouTube. That will take years for you to establish here. We're already 2 months out from this. And if you go up to that level, then eventually if you want to do a lateral move over to long form, you move over there in a totally different position. And so you're not starting from zero. You're starting from a place of leadership. it's a completely different position for you to take. And so he chose to stick with short form. Now, we gave him some long form edits here and there because he's a creative guy and he wanted to do it to the best of my ability. Whenever somebody on my team vocalizes an interest or something they're passionate about and want to do, I want to do my best to give them that opportunity. That's just how I like to roll. But we focused on short form. And guess what? He not only was promoted to senior editor, he was then promoted to lead editor. So he was promoted the most out of anybody on the team and he was managing three different editors at the age of 22 and 23. It was absurd. Okay, he only got that because he chose to specialize. And now we're at a point in his career where he is starting to expand and be more of a generalist again. And so the way that this will most likely work is he'll have a couple of years or a season of time where he does more activities and then he'll focus again and he'll pick probably one lane or two that he goes more narrow and gains more mastery on. It's very similar if you notice to the accordion framework or method that I use for content, but you can do the same thing with your career. Another thing that I would highly encourage you to do is not only utilize your team members to educate and train each other, but invest in strategic education opportunities for your team. For example, if there is a workshop on YouTube retention editing that you can pay for with somebody who you know worked really closely with Mr. Beast, for example, I would highly recommend that you invest in that. And then what you do is instead of you taking that course, you assign one or two of your team members to do it. Here's the pro tip. Don't just have them go and attend and consume the workshop or the course. Have them then turn it into a team training that they present to the rest of the team. Again, we've already gone over this helps them retain the information far more, helps them develop mastery, and then they're able to share all of those insights and information with the rest of the team rather than hogging it all for themselves. So, we've talked about doing regular check-ins, but what does that look like? Well, it looks like running effective one-on- ones. I believe that if you only check in when something's going wrong, you've already lost. Consistent, structured feedback is what keeps people from checking out. It's what keeps people engaged and feeling like this is an area where I'm growing and my leadership cares about me and cares that I'm actually developing and growing rather than just staying stagnant and letting me rot. In order to do this, you need to run effective 101 ones. So, here is how I recommend you go about running effective one-on- ones. Number one, talk about the workload and blockers. How's your workload look right now? What's slowing you down? Do you need any extra resources or support? Is there anything currently getting in the way of you accomplishing your job? Can I bulldoze through any roadblocks to make your job easier? Revisit their long-term goals. You're crushing this thing. How do we set you up for the next step? What is it that you've been wanting to learn but haven't had the time to invest in? Are there any interests that line up with your long-term goals that we're not currently leveraging right now that we're not giving you opportunities to gain skill in that maybe we can implement that would be effective for our content? I had a content strategist who was unbelievably good at running Tik Tok, ideulating, and creating a lot of engagement on that platform. They had expressed interest in being a creative director. And so I started giving them opportunities to begin developing bigger campaigns and presenting those campaigns. Not just developing them, but presenting them to myself and to the talent that we were filming with. The reason why this happened though was in our regular one-on- ones, I was asking them, "Well, okay, you've come in, you're killing it as a strategist here. You own this platform. You've told me you want to be a creative director. Right now, none of what you're doing is really lading up to that. you're very much an individual contributor here. And so what we did is in our 101, we developed a plan of how they were going to start taking on bigger tasks that involved more people. So when you're developing a campaign and pitching a campaign, you're not thinking about just your sole contribution, you're thinking about how the entire team feeds into that campaign because it was a multiplatform approach. And in doing so, what we allow for is not only for them to gain the skills of thinking strategically of how to involve other people, but how to persuade other people to get involved and how to think about workflow and process, ultimately lading up to their long-term goal and vision of being a creative director. None of this would have happened if we didn't actually do regular check-ins to see, are they actually feeling like they're moving closer to their desired outcome? and am I following what I preach and actually giving them opportunities to be able to hone in those skills. So, here are the final takeaways on this section. Developing a team that grows with you. Number one, push ownership down. If you're making every decision, you don't have a team. You have a bunch of assistants. Let them start to own the process and solve their problems. Number two, make leadership a habit. Teaching and leading trainings should be part of the job, not your job, their jobs. Okay? Typically, this is an afterthought. You want to make this a priority. Number three, tie their growth to the company's growth. Let them see how what they're doing contributes to the overall growth of the company and the team. Especially with content teams, a lot of times they're like the weirdos in the cage in the corner. It's like, don't feed the crazy creatives, right? No, you want to show them how what they're doing is leading to the revenue and profitability that your organization has. Number four, go deep, not wide. As soon as you can, promote specialization. This is beneficial for you and your team as well as them, the individual. This makes them far more valuable to any future employer. And number five, none of this is going to happen. You're not going to be able to measure progress if you don't do structured check-ins. So have the one-on ones. Give them feedback. Ask them for feedback on how you're doing as a leader. If you choose not to make time for feedback, you'll eventually have to make time for hiring. If you create a culture of ownership, of growth, and something where they know where they're headed, and they actually feel like the opportunities they're getting are lining up with their career goals, you're not just going to have a team of employees. You're going to have a team that wants to build and can build with you. All right, the final section on building your team is building a strong team culture. This is so important. I will not be able to emphasize it enough, but I'm going to do my best. I'll tell you this, a good team culture is not built by accident. A lot of team cultures are built by accident, but a good one is not. It's shaped by intentional decisions that you make every day through leadership, actions, and how you communicate with the team. And if you do it right, it's not just a buzzword that everyone likes to talk about on Instagram to sound like a thought leader. It actually becomes the operating system of how your team works and how you make decisions. This is how you grow. In building this strong culture, you need to define and then once you've defined, you need to reinforce the core values. A strong culture starts with clear core values that guide your hiring, your decision-m, and your day-to-day behavior. These are not just words up on a wall or that exist on your website. These are literally what you live by and how you decide what you will and will not do. So, here's how to reinforce your core values once you have established them. Make sure you hire based on alignment with those core values, not just alignment on skill set. Again, like we said earlier, skills can be trained. Values very, very hard to change. Number two, recognize and reward actions that reflect company values. One of the best ways to do this is to publicly celebrate team members who are actively upholding the values that you've defined as a company. And this can look like a message in in Slack, shouting somebody out in front of the whole team. This can look like during a full team meetup recognizing them and giving them a gift card or an award. There's so many different ways to do this, but we all know the feeling when you are publicly recognized for something that you did well. It feels good and it makes you want to do more of it. And number three, don't be the leader that says all this and does completely different. Those are the worst. They breed no trust and everyone eventually wants to leave that team because they know that they are part of horseshit. That's just the reality. And there's a lot of these leaders out there. The majority of people that lead a company preach these core values but don't actually uphold them themselves. Lead by example. I remember a really good story actually is um back in my uh church days, I was on a worship team. The worship team is like the band that plays the music before the sermon happens. And I remember the youth pastor said something so powerful to me and it stuck and it it's how I've thought of myself in any leadership role to date. Caleb, when you are up on stage playing bass in the worship team, everyone in the youth group is looking at you as an example. And whatever you do, they're going to do 10 times. And how I apply that to leadership is if I am slow to respond, they're going to be slower to respond. If I show up late to meetings, they're going to show up really late to meetings. If we're a remote work environment and I show up on calls all the time in my PJs, guess what they're going to do? Show up in their PJs. And maybe that's fine in your company culture, but maybe it's not. Whatever you do, they're going to do times 10. Lead by example. If you have a team that is operating in a way that you do not like, take a look at yourself and how you're operating as the first point. More than likely, you are leading them by example in the wrong way. And just because you're the leader doesn't mean that you can hold yourself to a different standard. If anything, you need to be the one that holds the standard and sets it and maintains that bar as high as possible. So, for example, maybe contrary to some of the like, you know, hardcore examples I've been using here, Patagonia has a really beautiful team culture. They prioritize environmental responsibility, integrity, and work life balance. And guess what? They actually do it. So, here's how they reinforce those core values. They hire for alignment, right? They prioritize candidates who are passionate about sustainability and outdoor activism. That's the DNA of the company and the brand. And so they want to make sure that the people that work on it also are in alignment with those values. Number two is they recognize and reward employees. Employees who contribute to the environmental causes or develop innovative solutions for sustainability are actually publicly celebrated and even receive grants to further their initiatives whether it's within or outside of the organization. And for leading by example, their founder sets the standard by literally running the company with the same principles that he lives by. Giving 1% of sales to the planet. He even closes the office on powder days to give employees the opportunity to go serve or go skiing. And he treats his work like it's a mission, not just an activity that he's doing to get a paycheck. Now, the next point here is to be transparent about decisions. You're never going to have a scenario where everyone agrees with every decision that you make. That is okay. But what I would recommend is trying your very best to provide them the understanding of why you made the decision. The quickest way that leaders lose trust is keeping their team in the dark when there's a lot of changes occurring. So, here's what transparency actually looks like in leadership. If a project gets canled, especially last minute, explain why and how it impacts the bigger picture. I remember one time having an editor who had been working 13 hours a day on a project for probably 5 or 6 days straight. Huge edit. She had put so much effort into it. It was an incredible piece. But the person we were editing it for didn't like it. But it sucked for this editor. And instead of me just cancing the upload and not giving them the why, I explain to them how we want to create a an environment for the talent we're working with where they trust us. And the way that we earn that trust is if there is a piece of content that they don't like and they don't want to be put out, we abide by that. We honor that. If we do that, they are going to feel more comfortable opening up and revealing more and being more transparent and vulnerable with their emotions in future content because they know if they don't like it, it's not going to go out. But in that scenario, rather than just leaving her in the dark and being like, "Hey, I know you spent 6 days, 13 hours a day working on this and now last minute I'm coming in and cutting this." I explained the why of why we were cutting it and why this impacts future content and how it'll make our team more effective moving forward. Number two is own your mistakes. Man, if I could say this one like 20 times in a row, I would. I can't tell you how many times that I've had leaders in my life that make a mistake and just brush it off or acknowledge it as it's like, "Oh, well, that was part of the plan. That was intentional. We meant to do that all along." Everyone sees through your They already know that you weren't intentionally trying to make that mistake. That was not part of the plan. Don't around and try and make yourself posture yourself to be smarter than you are. Just to own it when you're wrong. The amount of times that you're going to gain respect from people when you do that is zero. When you actually own your mistake and you admit it to the team, the amount of respect you gain is infinite. It's unmeasurable. I am not in any way perfect. Very much flawed. But I really always try to do my best. When I something up, even when it's small, I immediately try to own it with the team. I try to be the first person to call it out because we've all been in the scenario where somebody messes something up and you're on a group call and you're all kind of like vaguely hinting at what happened, but not I want to be the person that immediately says, "No, I this up. I can't believe I did it. It caused all these problems. Here's how we're going to move forward." And lastly, I highly recommend communicate pivots as soon as you can. Don't wait until the last minute. A lot of leaders, I think, procrastinate on this conversation because they're afraid of how the team is going to respond. If you have to make some big pivot in how the team is going to operate, in output, in process, in cadence, whatever, it's a freaky thing. Like, humans get used to it. We're creatures of habit, right? And so, when you come in to the team and say, "We're going to do things completely differently." It sucks. Do it immediately. The sooner that you do it, the more time you give your team to be able to digest this and accept the fact that they're going to have five times the amount of videos needing to go out per week rather than telling them the week before that you're going to do it. Ultimately, the theme you're noticing here is transparency. Be more transparent with your team. Share more with them. The more that you trust them, the more that they will return the favor and trust you. Another great thing that you can do as a leader is pay attention to what your team cares about. If somebody on your team mentions the fact that they love Legos, maybe you take note of that and on their birthday you send them the Millennium Falcon uh Lego set, right? Like something absurd like that that shows that like you care about them outside of work and you pay attention to what they care about and are passionate about beyond just editing. For example, another thing that I love to do that I think is very contrary to the majority of leaders is if one of my team members mentions to me that they're sick, rather than being skeptical and not believing them and assuming that they're just trying to, you know, cash in the day, take the day off, I actually like to go a really far. I like to send them soup and bread or a pack of juices from like Prest or something of that nature. I want to show them that I care about them because I do. It's not just an act. It's actually just taking what is in here in my heart and putting it external. And this is amazing because if they're truly sick, cool. You're helping them get better. You show that they care and you give them the freedom to be able to take the day to relax and rest rather than being anxious the whole time. And on the flip side, if they are that very unique individual that's lying, they're going to feel really guilty about it and probably not want to do it the next time. And so either way, you win. And lastly, I believe that you inspire loyalty in your team by providing them opportunities to grow. We're humans. We're selfish. We want to look out for our self-interest and what we get out of it. And that's okay. So, make sure that on your team, you provide individuals the ability to scratch their selfish itch and grow. Ultimately, the best teams aren't just efficient, they're invested in the mission. And this only happens when people see a future for themselves within the organization. And they only see a future for themselves within the organization if they see continual growth. So here are three different ways that you can help build a culture of growth. Like I've previously said, but I'm going to emphasize it right now. Make sure to tie what individuals are doing to how the company is growing. Make sure every single team member sees how their individual contributions lead to the company's growth. Number two, check in regularly on their career goals and aspirations. Ensure that they are actually growing. We talked about that earlier, but what's amazing about doing that is the byproduct is they are loyal as to you if you actually genuinely care. Why would they want to leave? Why would they leave somebody who is experienced further in their career, understands a lot of the landmines they're going to have to navigate through their career, and that actually cares about their growth, and wants to see them reach their full potential and their goals. Nobody's going to leave that. And thirdly, we haven't really touched on this. Give people stretch opportunities. Push them. Make them uncomfortable. Give them opportunities that they would not imagine on their own that they could accomplish. What this does is one, it gives them opportunity to grow. Cool. Amazing. But it also shows them that you trust them. Trust begets trust. When you show your team that you trust them, they will show you in return trust to you. Like I've said, I try to ask every new hire on any team that I'm running, what do you want to accomplish in your career? What is your career goal? And this isn't just blowing smoke. It's literally how we tailor projects and opportunities for the individual working on the team. This accelerates their growth, accelerates their loyalty, and it makes them want to contribute more and help other people on the team realize their goals as well. One element of building a strong team culture is building an effective culture. Typically on creative teams, you have a lot of individuals that are individual contributors. They're makers. And often times in organizations, those makers get because people set up random meetings throughout the day. For a lot of individuals, a meeting is no big deal. You hop on and then you got the next meeting. Maybe you have a 30-minute gap. Okay, cool. I'll do some like random little assa tasks, send some emails, whatever. If you're a creator, you're a maker, that ruins everything because your whole goal is to get into the flow state. And if you get into the flow state and you're editing and time is nothing, it's non-existent and you're just killing it. And then all of a sudden, ding, that Google calendar notification says meeting in 10 minutes. Well, boom, done. It's over. Then you hop onto the call. Amazing. Awesome. Call happens. And then you try and get back in the edit. It's going to take you 30 to 45, maybe even upwards of an hour to get back into that same state that you were in before. And so what I recommend you do for your team culture is implement what Paul Graham created which is the maker manager schedule. And basically what it is is it identifies that there are two different types of individuals within an org. You have makers and managers. Managers are typically people that are managing teams and they get done by having meetings. Meetings actually are literally integral to their role. If they don't have meetings, they're not getting anything done. On the flip side, a maker, meetings are their enemy. All the editors and creatives watching this are like nodding their heads. Their heads are going to roll off their neck right now. They're like, "Yeah, meetings suck. Half the time I don't even contribute. I don't even get information that is necessary other than for 5 minutes of the call." And then the other 25 minutes was completely unnecessary. The issue is there's no problem with either. Neither one is right or wrong. The problem is when either one tries to function within the other one's setup. Okay? So when a maker gets pulled into a manager schedule or when a manager gets pulled into a maker schedule. Now typically within organizations like I said you have both. It's not like you have a team only of makers or only of managers. Neither would be possible. So what I recommend doing is creating maker manager schedule. Now, the way that I typically like to operate, and you can mold this to whatever works best for you and your team, but the way that I operate is the first half of the day is your maker time. So, for me, this looks like usually 7:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. I'm in maker mode. This is when I am working on drafting things like this, or maybe I'm writing a script for a future video, or I'm reviewing a script for a client and giving them notes on how they could improve it. That is my maker time. And I do my best to not interrupt anybody on my team and pull them into a meeting during maker time. That is reserved. That is holy and sacred time for them to do their thing. Now, you do need some manager time. Meetings, unfortunately, have to occur. I say unfortunately cuz I think now I'm in a season where I'm a little bit more in a a maker uh mode than manager as much, but they're important and they have to occur. So, typically the way I run my schedule is 12 to 5 is my manager time. This is where I try to schedule all my meetings. Now, do I hold to this perfectly? No. One of our partners is in the UK and so because of that time difference, there's one day a week where I have a meeting at 8:00 a.m. But if you are intentional and you create this system, you empower the team to be able to follow that. You empower your editors, your designers, your strategists to be able to actually have five, six, seven hours of uninterrupted flow work. It's incredible the level of efficiency that you get. Also, the team loves it. They they prefer it so much. And typically, what you'll find is they actually end up pushing you towards making one day a week an entire maker day. And what I like to do is I usually have Wednesdays be that day. So Monday would be a meeting day or a manager day and I would stack as many calls as I could on that day to try and have as few the rest of the week cuz once you're in that mode, you might as well just like suffer entirely. But then on Tuesday, I would operate in the morning as my maker time. And then usually the back half, like 2 to 5 would be manager time. Wednesdays, I'd block entirely for maker time. And then Thursday would follow and Friday would follow the same exact schedule as Tuesday. There's probably an icon that's popped up that breaks this down. We have a little playbook for you on this that'll walk you through how to build your maker and manager schedule. I can't emphasize the importance of this enough. You will gain so much efficiency and your team will be much happier with their work if you operate this way. So, we've talked a lot about hiring, onboarding, and culture. Right now, one thing that we haven't discussed or touched on yet is the great debate that has basically started to take place in society since 2020. And that is remote work versus inerson or hybrid. And I think there are a lot of benefits and detractors to all three. And so what I want to do is walk through a couple of different factors that you're going to be thinking about when deciding or determining whether or not you're going to be a remote work uh team, a hybrid team, or an in-person team. And so we're going to walk through these different factors, and I'm going to give you just a couple of points on it. Again, this is a sheet that you can download. I think this will be very useful for you to use. This is an important thing to get right. And when I say get right, I'm actually going to explain that a little bit more. It's not that there is a right or wrong way. There's not. All of them work. All of them have downsides to it. The key is to make sure that you are very intentional about how you go about doing this. The way you build culture remotely is far different than in person. You have to be a lot more intentional and thoughtful remotely because as we all know, there's amazing moments in person when you're just walking through the office and you happen to pass by that employee and you just randomly embark on a 20-minute conversation where you learn a lot about them, right? You're able to pour into them, help answer or solve a problem they are encountering. That doesn't really happen as much by accident remotely. It's not like you're just like walking through the Zoom rooms and happen to stumble upon someone. Like that's not how it works. And so you have to be more intentional with how you set up meetings, check-ins, etc. So factor number one is flexibility. Okay? And for remote work, the flexibility is unbelievably high, right? Employees can work from anywhere. They're adaptable with their schedules. It allows the employee to be very flexible. This is viewed, in my opinion, as a benefit. By doing this, you actually in some instances can pay lower than typical market rates because this is a huge benefit for some individuals. There's a lot of people out there that are parents that maybe have young ones and they want to be able to be home around their kids. It doesn't mean that they're not working. It just means that if their kid, you know, starts puking or something like that, they can actually take care of it, right? It also cuts down on commute costs for them. There's a whole lot of benefits that play out for the employee and the company. Now, for inperson, the flexibility is pretty low. Let's be real. These are typically fixed hours and a required location that you are working at. Now, there's a lot of benefits to this, as we'll see. And now that we live in a world where a lot of people have become accustomed to remote work, this is something that a lot of different teams are finding difficult. Now, hybrid is a little bit of a medium here. Uh, and that's kind of what you're going to find is hybrid for all of these is kind of like a happy medium between both. This is a mix of remote work and office work. This is far more flexible, but provides enough structure that maybe the company might feel a little bit more comfortable with that cadence. A lot of individuals that run companies have this fear that if people are fully remote, how do I know that they're actually working, right? And so the hybrid model allows you to be able to see them in action maybe two or three times a week, but then maybe they're the type of employee that gets a lot more work done at home. Okay? And so the flexibility here is medium or moderate and I think is probably more realistic for most organizations and individuals than an all or nothing approach. The next factor that we're looking at is collaboration. Remote work requires strong digital communication tools, potential for time zone challenges as well. So you need to make sure that your tech stack and your standard operating procedure for communication is very clearly articulated to the team. If you expect people to be messaging back and forth constantly all day long in Slack, you need to make sure that they know that. If you require that people hop on Zoom calls, like that needs to be very clear. The amount of collaboration that happens by accident in a remote environment is very minimal. Every once in a while, you get blessed with that that moment where you're on a Zoom call talking about one thing and then it changes and evolves into a big project or whatever, but for the most part, you don't get those happy accidents. Now, for collaboration in person, this is far easier. Uh, in my opinion, there's a lot of real-time collaboration that occurs. If we're talking about a creative director giving notes to an editor, it's so much different providing notes on frame.io and and giving a couple of notes here and there versus sitting down with the editor and being like, "What if we did this?" And then the editor chimes in on that. And they feed each other and they ladder up to a way better idea than probably what they would have landed on using just a Frame or some sort of digital service like that. Now, don't get me wrong, we use Frame. I love Frame. I use it with all of our partners. I've used it for years and I think it's a very effective tool and better than 99% of alternatives if you're not in person. But there is a beauty of having the team working together on the ground in person. Being able to real time go back and forth on potential solves and solutions. Again, what you'll notice with hybrid is this is a balanced approach. depending on how many days you have this individual coming into the office is going to be the amount of time that they get those happy accidents, those random occurrences where collaboration takes place that was not planned. But it does also give them the ability to be a little bit more focused at home and have less distraction. Collaboration can be a big benefit, but it can also be a detractor of productivity, which brings us to the next factor, which is productivity. Now productivity for uh at home or remote work varies. This is very dependent on the individual. I would say when I look at the teams that I've ran, half of the people fall into the camp of they are highly effective at home. They have a lot of agency. They know how to own their own and they're mature enough to be able to manage their time effectively and not fall into the trap of putting on Netflix and getting into their PJs or, you know, taking 2 hours out of the middle of their day to cook a crazy lunch or some I know those are a lot of the fears that a lot of CEOs and founders have uh for remote workers. Now, productivity for in-person work, I actually believe it's the exact same answer. So, it varies depending on the individual. Some people thrive in an environment where they are away from their home and they know, "I'm in the office. This is my working time." However, there are a lot of individuals that have the gift of gab and they love to talk and they get really chatty when they're around their co-workers. And actually, I fall into this category. I personally get a lot more work done when I work from home and do a deep work session versus trying to do the same deep work in an office. even if I have my own cubicle or my own office, you know, the roles that I've had over the years tend to be roles where a lot of people want my input on things. And so I remember like Vayner Media for example, loved the work environment there. It was super cool. It was an open floor plan and everything, but the downside to it, like the benefit was like I could turn over to Dkirk or to Drock or anybody on the team and be like, "Hey, do you want to come check this out? Let's jam on it." The downside was when I was deep in an edit, anybody could do that to me and they could just tap my shoulder whenever and there's no like do not disturb, you know, mode on when you're in person. And so I actually find that half of the individuals that I've worked with are not very effective in office. They don't have enough discipline to not engage in random conversations here and there. And one thing I'll say is even if they are ideulating on a piece of content or they're working on it, sometimes that's beneficial, but sometimes that's not what the priority is right now. If they have an edit that's due tomorrow and they're sitting there talking with the team about a video we're going to film in two weeks, that's not the best use of their time. Okay? And so again, I think this varies and depends on the individual. So that's why again, I like a hybrid approach here because you can actually build a team where you reverse engineer the individual. Maybe some people need three days, four days working from home and only come into the office one or two days a week, while others maybe it's like, no, they need to be in five days a week. And you mutually agree upon that because they're self-aware and know, yeah, I don't I don't do a good job at home. Like I end up just like around, turning the TV on or cleaning my house or whatever. I do a lot of home activities when I'm at home. So ultimately, I think especially on the productivity side, you need to reverse engineer the individual. Now I understand there are some of you that are in bigger organizations and you're about to build a creative team and they have their way of operating and you don't have the ability to be flexible there then okay cool like borrow my life philosophy which is whatever you are given you will turn to your advantage okay so if you do need to be in person 24/7 okay cool make it your advantage you know organize a morning breakfast once a week where you and the team have pancakes and coffee and you jam on different things you've observed online that maybe could apply to the content you're making or whatever. Or if you have to be remote and you can't be in person, okay, cool. Maybe what you do is you create a happy hour on Fridays or Thursdays. Not Fridays, cuz nobody wants to do a happy hour on Friday with their co-workers. They want to go out with their homies. But on Thursday, maybe you end the day with like an hour session where you all have cocktails or, you know, you drink sodas, whatever the deal is, kombucha if you're in Bellingham, Washington, uh or Portland, Oregon. And like maybe you do that and you all jam and maybe sometimes you're talking about work stuff, maybe sometimes you're just talking about life. I think that you can always try to take the benefits from the opposite operation. So if you're in person, you can take the benefits from remote or if you're remote, you can try and take the benefits from in person and replicate them in your own way. Now again, this is another situation where hybrid is the best move in my opinion. That's what I like to run. The next factor we're going to take into account here is cost, right? I mean, ultimately, we got limited budgets and and some of us have more limited budgets than others. And so, this is a a factor that I think is probably top of mind for a lot of individuals. And when it comes to remote work, this is probably the most cost effective. Okay? You save on office space. You save on like the employees save on commuting expenses. You don't have to have relocation costs if you're a fully remote operation. And you know, maybe you, the founder, are based in New York City. You can hire somebody in Florida and California, and Kansas, wherever, and they're not going to have to move to New York City, and so you don't have to pay an egregious relocation package. Okay? So, you save a lot of cost there. Now, for the office in person, this is the highest cost option here. you're going to have to pay for an office, whether you're buying it outright or you're renting. That's going to be a pretty high overhead every month. You also have utilities. And then typically nowadays, I mean, I think this is a great thing, but tougher for small businesses, you know, with the rise of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, all these cool in-person offices. Everyone's aware that like companies can provide cereal and and fruit and coffee and all these, you know, kombucha, beer on tap, cold brew, all of this And so more and more employees are starting to expect some perks for being in the office, okay? Like at the very least granola bars and, you know, sodas or something like that in the fridge. And so you incur not only the cost of your rent or your mortgage, you have utilities and you have the cost of some perks that you're going to probably need to provide. Now, in the beginning, is this absolutely necessary? No. Of course, there's going to be people that argue in the comments about like, you know, people have gotten soft. They need doesn't matter. It's more expensive to be in person for sure. Hybrid's funny on cost. It's actually, I think, the maybe only or one of the only scenarios where hybrid is a very bad option cuz you kind of get right? You're paying for an office. You incur the cost of having this space. And if it's hybrid, you need to have space available for the remote workers to come in, but they're not in all the time. So, you're paying for space that's not getting used all the time. So, you have free empty space that you're not monetizing. That kind of sucks. This is the detractor in my opinion to the hybrid model, which I have been very clearly in favor of up until this point. So, if cost is your major factor, it's your number one factor, then hybrid might not be for you right now. That might be something that you can aspire to. But maybe if cost is your number one priority, you're probably going to want to go remote. Now, the next factor that we're looking at is talent pool. What individuals do you have access to? And when you are fully remote, you have access to the whole world. You literally could hire anybody anywhere at any time. That opens up the door for not only very impressive, highly skilled talent, but also very impressive, highly skilled talent at a reduced cost. Think about it this way. a very very talented editor, a 10 out of 10 in LA versus a 10 out of 10 editor, same exact skill set living in Kansas City. Very different. I mean, honestly, the difference between a New York City or LA editor that it's a 10 out of 10 and a Las Vegas editor is very different. And so, if you are a remote team, you can hire highly talented. If you're based in LA, you don't have to hire LA editors for the LA Premium. you do have the flexibility to get away with not having to bring those individuals. You also get access to talent that is literally across the world. Okay? And so, like, if you're starting to make international content and stuff that you're going global with, you have access to a talent pool that's going to understand the nuances of those new cultures that maybe you don't get. This allows your talent pool to go from your local market to the entire world. If you are fully in office, however, you really limit your talent pool. If you're based in Los Angeles or New York City, your talent pool is going to be fine. You're you're not going to have an issue, especially when it comes to creatives. Like those are the hubs where the most amount of creatives are. But if you find yourself in like Chattanooga, Tennessee or El Paso, Texas, yeah, you might not have quite the same access to talent that those folks in LA and NYC have. This becomes a major constraint. You are all of a sudden limited to people in your local area or people that are willing to relocate. And that's going to drive your cost up because more than likely if you're going to bring somebody from LA to El Paso, Texas, you're probably going to have to pay them a premium because you're compensating them for a massive lifestyle change and literally them missing out on the lifestyle and opportunities that come from being in LA. The amount of opportunities that pop up for a video editor in Los Angeles are absurd. You can be at a coffee shop editing a video and have five different people walk up to you and talk to you about your work. And that's networking at scale. And so if you move to El Paso, you know, nothing against El Paso. I love El Paso. I've been there once. If you live in El Paso, I almost guarantee if you're in a in a coffee shop editing, you're not going to have five different opportunities potentially pop up like you would in a New York City or a Los Angeles. you really limit your talent pool when you are local, especially if you are local in a non- major market. Now, the hybrid model is a little bit better than the local. So, you can kind of use it as like a benefit that you you place in front of the candidate. Yes, you do have to relocate, but you're not going to have to be in office all the time. You can be remote. And so, maybe there's a scenario where they could be remote and go back to the town they're from and work remotely for 4 days a week. So, they could be in office 3 days a week and then they could go travel for four. This provides a lot more flexibility for the employee which does make the relocation offer a little bit more palatable from my experience. The next factor is culture and engagement. And I think you guys can probably already imagine where I'm going with this. Remote is very hard to build culture and to drive engagement within your team. There's a huge difference when I say, "Hey, Trevor, what do you think of this idea?" when he's right in front of me versus if I send it on Slack. He might be deep in work. He might be twiddling his thumbs, around, doing nothing. It might take him an hour to respond, right? And so speed, engagement, and culture are much slower. It's not impossible. You can absolutely build a very powerful culture remotely, but it just takes more time and requires far more intentionality. I I believe that if you are going to go the remote route, be very very intentional with your check-ins. send a morning check-in on Slack seeing how the team's doing. Is there anything that I can help with? Are there any roadblocks that I can bulldoze through for you? Is there any clarity that I can provide you? How are you feeling? Are you feeling healthy? Are you sick? Can I send you juice? Like anything like that that can help you expedite building the company and team culture. The other thing that you can do, now this is uh a cost, this is a higher investment, but if you have the budget to, one thing I found very effective is if you do have a remote team, you can create a in-person meetup. Okay? And this is a one-time event or maybe it's a quarterly event uh that takes place where you fly the team into one spot and you all hang out. What I would recommend if you're going to do that is make it a combination of fun and work. It shouldn't just all be fun and around, but it shouldn't all just be work, too. You want to give the employees the opportunity to do what they can't do, right? When you are in person, which I'll touch on in a second, one really cool thing that does happen is some employees are like, "Hey, you want to go grab dinner? Like, we're working late. Let's go grab beers. Let's go jam." And they develop a closer, tight-knit relationship, and that has a massive ripple effect throughout your team. The closer they are, the better they're going to communicate. the more they're going to understand each other, the less room there is for misunderstandings and weird drama and conflict. Now, like I was saying, for the inerson, I think this is the easiest method for building culture. But there are some downsides to it. One, there's a lot of young people that are in the workforce now that entered the workforce after or during co and so they've never been in person and so they have no idea how to hold themselves, how to behave maturely. And so you do sometimes, especially I've noticed on creative teams or younger teams, you run into scenarios where maybe there's a little bit more drama that's going to pop up. You might have to deal with a little bit more interpersonal training and education on how we conduct ourselves. Just like you get so much benefit from the high frequency, high touch, lots of contact, as we know, if we spend an entire weekend with our significant other, by the end of that weekend, we might be a little bit more likely to get in an argument. The same thing happens with teams. If you spend all day every day with each other, you might start getting a little irritated and maybe make a sly comment and that can snowball. And so that that's one thing that I would caution you to be aware of is if you are building a team that is utilizing a lot younger talent and more junior individuals that are earlier in their career, you are going to have to spend a little bit more time educating them on how to conduct themselves. Now, hybrid is a beautiful blend of the two, right? You get the in-person dynamic where you're able to scale culture quicker, right? You're able to reinforce good behaviors and correct bad ones a lot faster, but you also get the benefit of maybe not everybody is in the office every single day and so they're not all just chatting around a table every single day as well. And so you get the best of both worlds. You get expedited culture, strength of culture, but also you get to retain productivity that maybe some teams lose by always being in person together. The beauty of having a team that all love each other and get along really well and love to chat and work on is well, they work really well together and they get a lot done. The downside is is maybe they end up falling out of productivity a little bit because they're chatting too much. Personally, I would actually prefer, as a side note, for that to be my problem than the alternative. I'd rather that they they want to talk to each other versus them not wanting to talk to each other. So ultimately, I think what we have here is good, better, best. I personally like in person a lot. I I think that there are more benefits to in person than remote for the company, but that's one-sided. I think for a lot of individuals, remote work is better. I don't like to only do things in my benefit. I want to have a mutual exchange of benefit. And that's where I like hybrid. I think hybrid is the best version if you can afford it. If you have the ability to pay for an office that is not always being used and you won't get pissed when people aren't always in there, then hybrid is the way to go. You get the best of both worlds. You get to scale culture, correct bad behaviors, reinforce good ones. You get to do fun activities with the team. you get to know them better because you get the, you know, water cooler talk where you get to learn something about somebody that you had no clue that they were interested in. And maybe that's something that you can start to pour into. Maybe you find out that somebody on your team loves making music. Maybe you have a video coming up that you want an original track to and so they actually go home and work on that as a project. Okay, cool. Probably would have never discovered that over Zoom. But if you are at a stage where you can't afford an office, then I truly believe you can absolutely build a powerful strong team remotely. I've done it. I've literally had a team of 14 people all remote before. I know that it is possible. It is a challenge and you have to be far more intentional and methodical with how you approach it. So to recap, hybrid in my opinion is the best. Then the next two, I'm just going to say it. In person is best for the company. remote is best for the employee. And so you have to determine what factors here are most important to you. So the sheet that you have that you've downloaded, what I want you to do is order in priority what are the factors that are most important to you right now. And that becomes your decision-making framework. That's how you determine whether you're going to go in person, remote, or hybrid. So here are my final thoughts on building your team. Again, I think this is arguably the most important part of this entire course. One, a strong team is not just about skill. It's about culture, alignment, growth, and trust. Two, define and reinforce your core values daily. Right? If if good branding is an intentional pairing of relevant things done consistently, well, pair yourself and your organization with your core values consistently and then the team will inherently associate the two. Branding works externally and internally just as effectively. Number three, please be radically transparent. Just like trust begets trust, transparency begets transparency. You want your team to be transparent with you about the problems that are occurring, right? You don't want them secretly dealing with a bunch of different problems that you have no idea about and then one day it blows up in your face. Well, they're not going to be open and vulnerable with you if you're not open and vulnerable with them. Number four, make growth a priority. Your team is going to see themselves on your team a lot longer if they see a long road ahead of growth. If they think that they're probably going to be capped out on their growth within the next 3 months, guess what they're spending their time doing right now? Posting on LinkedIn and looking at potential other opportunities because they want to move the on. Number five, the most important one to me and how I strive to always lead. Lead with empathy. Your team will respond with empathy back. So when you up as the leader, they will be empathetic towards you rather than holding it against you. When a mistake occurs, often times it's not intentional. They're not trying to ruin your brand. They're not trying to up the process or lose the company money. Be empathetic to all that they have going on. A lot of times these people have lives outside of their job. Crazy, crazy concept. and their lives outside of the job affect their job. I truly believe that if you show up on a daily basis as an empathetic leader, your team is going to stick with you and fight for you and show up for you in a way that you could never imagine. Lead your team with empathy, not fear. If you lead your team with empathy rather than fear, creativity will flourish rather than be stifled. Culture isn't created in the words that you say. It's created in the actions that you choose to do every single day. If you're intentional about it, you won't just have employees. You'll have a team that's fully locked in and ready to build something much bigger than the individual. All right, y'all. We have gotten to the final section. We've gone over brand. We've gone over content. And we've gone over building out your team. And we are at the final piece of the puzzle, which is monetize. And we're going to start with trust before transactions. Now, most people make the mistake of trying to monetize too early. They push offers before trust is built and then they wonder why no one buys. The reality is trust is the currency that preeds the transaction. Now, before we dive in, I want to just say I understand this position to be in. Last night after filming for a full 12-hour day, Trevor and I were sitting at the Airbnb and we were actually debating and going back and forth just looking at what could we charge for this course and how many people do we think we could buy and we were running the numbers and I will tell you it is unbelievably tempting. So, I want to empathize with you if you are in a position where maybe you did try to monetize too early. Maybe you did try and get transactions before you built trust. I understand it completely. Maybe you're in the position right now where you're building your brand and you haven't made any asks, but you're still early in the process and you're like, "Fuck, I really want to make a little bit of money off of this." I get it. And off top, we got bills to pay and mouths to feed. So, if that is the case, then you got to do what you got to do. What I'm about to walk through is the best case scenario. But I understand there are realities that we live in, and so you have to do what you got to do and take care of your family. But with that, before you ever try to monetize, I believe that your brand should do these three things. Provide an unbelievable amount of value upfront. Your audience should feel like they're winning and getting so much value before they ever even spend a dollar. Number two is demonstrate credibility and expertise. You need to become the go-to authority in your industry. And thirdly, establish a relationship with your audience. Engagement actually matters. If people feel like they know you, sales become effortless. You're not having to push, convince, inject all this scarcity and urgency, they trust you. They believe that what you are offering is of actual value because what you've offered for free has been worth more than what they've invested. And so this leads us to defining your monetization model. Now, to be clear, I don't believe that all brands should monetize the same. Your monetization strategy should line up with your strengths, what you're providing, the value that you bring in your content, and more importantly, what your audience actually needs. So, here are five primary paths that you can take with your monetization model. Number one is services. Think agency life, think consulting, think coaching. This is ideal for hightouch direct impact with your clients. You'll find this works well if you have deep expertise and people are already asking for your advice. Number two is products. This is digital or physical. Some examples of digital are ebooks, templates, playbooks, courses. One thing to note here is these are also very high margin and so your profitability will be through the roof if you do this correctly. Now, a couple examples for physical are like a physical book or you could sell apparel. There's many different versions of this, but you're going to find that digital is higher margins. And so, I would encourage you to explore this and probably lean into more digital products earlier on so that you're able to scale. Number three is affiliates and sponsorships. If you've put the effort into building the trust, you're going to be able to monetize through very intentional and strategic partnerships with people that align with your brand. Now, what I would recommend you do is don't shill out tools and programs or software that you don't actually use. Make sure that you're always pushing stuff that you actually actually use and believe in. Your brand is your most valuable asset. And if you end up pushing out a bunch of products that you don't believe in or use and that are actually garbage for your community, that pairing done consistently will create a bad brand effect for you. people will start to associate you with the shitty product. So, make sure whatever you are pushing or promoting is something that you truly believe in and you know will be valuable for your audience. Number four is community and memberships. This can create recurring revenue for you via exclusive content, masterminds, online groups, or even paid newsletters. The list goes on and on. There's many different options for you in this realm. And the beauty of this is it's a great hub for your super fans and for you to go deeper with those fans and build a tighter connection and build greater loyalty with that audience. And number five is ads and content monetization. This looks like YouTube ad revenue, podcast sponsorships or even newsletter ads. This is a very popular route to go, but what I would encourage you to do is pair this with one of the other monetization models. Typically, in the beginning, you're not going to be earning that much in sponsorships or ad revenue, but it is a nice thing to be able to potentially cover costs of production for your content. This is especially effective for the hightra long-term brand. So, like I said in the beginning, you're not going to see much traction on this monetization model. This is kind of like a nice to have or an add-on to an already established, more effective and consistent monetization model. Now, a pro tip here is if you're not sure where to start, I would encourage you to look at your email and your DMs and your comments. More than likely, you can see what your audience is already asking for and then you can serve them what they already have identified they need. This will make it a lot easier to get conversions to occur. Next is share the knowledge, sell the execution. If you give away value freely, people will still pay for the help. A lot of people, and I I completely understand why, fear sharing way too much of their information for free. They think, "If I share everything I know, why would anybody ever pay me?" But the reality is is the more value you give, the more demand you create. The more value you give, the more trust you build. The more trust you have, the more likely someone is to convert. So, here's the formula. Share the knowledge, sell the execution. Your best content should be so valuable that people feel compelled to act. But then when they go to act, they realize that the execution is overwhelming and they might not have the tools, resources or knowledge to implement what you have told them to do. This is where the monetization comes into play. And as an example, I have modified my Harley-Davidsons like an insane amount. One of my bikes, it's a Harley-Davidson Road King special. And I have done so much to it, you wouldn't even recognize it as a Road King. Now, when I went to upgrade my exhaust pipe, for example, I watched probably a hundred different videos on YouTube on how to change the exhaust pipe. I just wanted to have the knowledge. I wanted to see what kind of pipes that I should choose between, what the best one was for my model. I consumed enough content to know exactly what to do. Now, if you know me, you know I'm not very mechanically inclined, like at all. And so in watching it, what it actually showed me was this is far too complicated and way too expensive of a vehicle for me to up. So what am I going to do? I'm going to go to the Harley-Davidson dealership that put content out for free showing me how I could go about doing that. And that's what I did. I ended up going and paying Harley to install the pipe. I didn't do it myself. And so they gave me all the knowledge and then they sold the execution. Another example is maybe you give away a framework that helps people land their first client. The knowledge is free but the execution requires additional guidance templates. That is what you sell. The execution of the knowledge. So the takeaway here is that the knowledge is free but you charge for the execution. And now we're going to build your offer stack. A oneizefits-all approach definitely will not work. We need something that is custom and tailored to each of us and what we are providing to the marketplace. Now, the best brands have multiple revenue streams. But guess what? They didn't start that way. Start with one offer, refine it, and then begin to expand. Don't start with five different offers. You're going to confuse your audience. Make it very simple. Make it something you can track and something that you can refine over time before you go about expanding. So, here's a simple offer progression. One, you put out free content. This builds trust and awareness. Two, create a lead magnet. Think miniourse, SOP, checklist, playbook. This allows you to capture emails and phone numbers so that you're not just beholden to the algorithms of these platforms serving your content, but you have a direct line of access to your customers. Number three is you have your low ticket offer. This is usually somewhere between $10 and $100. Think ebooks, mini courses, or templates. And what this does is it removes the barrier of entry. Number four is a mid-t offer. Now, this is anywhere from $500 to $5,000. I know that's a wide range, but it depends on what you're offering. Think group coaching, memberships to your community, or even really in-depth courses. These are for your highly committed buyers. And lastly, number five is your high ticket offer. Think $10,000 plus. This is your one-on-one consulting, your agency services, or any done for you service that you can provide. And these are your very high ROI clients. Most successful brands don't start with their high ticket offer first. They establish trust and build awareness before ever offering that to the marketplace. There are some unique scenarios where maybe you have demand before you ever start making public content. But that is very very rare and the majority of you consuming this if you're in the early stages, you are not at that point yet. You need to build more trust with your audience and get more people to be aware of who you are and what you offer before bringing a high ticket offer into the marketplace. Next, we're going to let our content do the selling for us. Sales should feel natural, not forced. People hate feeling sold to, but they love buying from someone they trust. That's why your brand should bridge the gap between value and monetization. So, how do we do this? Well, here is how you can let your content sell for you. One, teach a valuable lesson and maybe end it with a soft CTA. Number two is share client success stories. Showcase how your offer helped them improve. Number three, document your process. Show the behind the scenes of what you do and what you offer. Number four, address common objections. Answer the unspoken concerns that are holding people back. Number five, use lead magnets to capture data. Offer something valuable like a checklist, a playbook, a miniourse, or a full in-depth course in exchange for an email so that you have direct access to your customers. Here's an example. Instead of saying, "Buy my ebook on personal branding," try, "I helped John go from 0 to 10k followers in 4 and 1/2 months using this exact strategy." If you want the full system, I break it down in my ebook. There's a link in my bio. Do you see the difference there? It's far more compelling if you share the results that you are getting for your clients and for your customers than if you're just encouraging people to go buy the book based on what it is. And finally, I'm sure you've probably gotten this theme throughout. Play the long game. We want to monetize without losing trust. A lot of people approach monetization backwards. They think about how to make money first, then build content to try and drive sales. But the brands that actually win, they're not chasing short-term revenue. They're building long-term trust. If you end up doing this right, your audience isn't going to just buy from you once. They will keep coming back. And this is how you build a brand that doesn't just make money, it stands the test of time. So here is how we are going to execute this strategy. Number one is to deliver so much value that people feel guilty not buying. Instead of following what everyone else in the industry is doing, give away your best insights for free. Don't do the watered down version, not some teaser of what they can then go and purchase. You want to give the actual frameworks, strategies, and knowledge that people would traditionally be paying for. Ultimately, the reaction that we want to build within our audience is if this is what they're giving away for free, what the are they charging for? When your free content drives real results, your audience isn't just going to be open to buying from you. they're going to feel compelled to buy from you. Number two is build a system where people continue to come back. Create a recurring content format. I'm talking like challenges, weekly breakdowns, anything that gets your audience to keep returning. You also want to make sure that your content is easy to find and easy to binge. Put together playlists. Categorize it by topic. Make sure it's easy for your audience to consume this highly valuable free content you're putting out. The goal is to focus on long-term retention. How can we keep people engaged over months, not just days? Rather than thinking about a one-hit viral video, think more like Netflix, a series that you continue to come back to day after day, month after month. And number three, and this is the most important one, protect your reputation at all costs. It is way harder to rebuild trust than it is to maintain trust. Every short-term cash grab that you do comes with a significant long-term cost. You need to be obsessive with who and what you pair your brand with because these are the associations that your audience is going to make when they hear of your brand. A great question that I would encourage you to ask yourself before you make any moves for a monetization play are, will this increase trust with my audience or decrease trust? Will this make my audience trust me more or trust me less? And if the answer is that it's less, I promise you it is not worth it. Period. To summarize, obviously monetization is extremely important. We have to make money in order to pay our bills, in order to be able to fund projects like this, for example. But the reality is is if you try to make that play too early, you're going to burn your audience and degrade trust. You need to make sure that you establish immense amount of trust before you start monetizing your audience. This is going to make that monetization season, that play, so much easier for you and will allow you to continue to monetize down the road. The ones who are trying to make a short-term cash grab, what they're doing is feeding themselves today, but what they don't realize is they're making it difficult to feed themselves tomorrow. What you want to do is build a brand that allows you to continue to feed yourself day after day after day. But this only comes when you establish trust first. All right, that is exactly what I would do if I were building a brand from scratch. I hope you got a lot of value out of this and I hope you plan on taking action. So, in the spirit of taking action, please make sure that you download all the playbooks that we've given you throughout this entire course. It is my only goal that you not only consume this, but that you actually take action. That's what makes this whole time that you've invested worth it. It's pretty wild how much we were able to cover. So, here's a quick refresher to remind you of every little thing that we went through. First, we started with what brand is and isn't. Then, we went to defining your brand, then positioning your brand. Then, we went to picking your topics, choosing your content medium, choosing the right platforms, determining your posting cadence, utilizing storytelling in your content, having your community drive your content. Then we went to scaling your content, creating space for experimentation with content hackathons, why your team is everything, defining your needs before hiring, streamlining your hiring process, hiring for culture, training for skills, starting lean, growing intentionally, full-time employees versus contractors and agencies, onboarding your team properly, developing and retaining your high performing team. Building a strong team culture, building trust before you transact. defining your monetization model, sharing the knowledge, selling the execution, building your offer stack, letting your content do the selling, tracking and scaling, and last but not least, playing the long game. Now, like I said, it's your turn to execute. But for some of you, you may look at this entire course and be like, "Holy this is way too much for me and my team to be able to execute alone." And that's where my team, Rston, is here to help. We provide the direction and guidance along the way to help you take this plan and build a strategy that drives real results and leads to actual brand scale. And so if you are interested in potentially partnering with us, you can go to caleb rston.com, hit the application button, and see if you qualify to be one of our partners. We would be incredibly stoked to partner with you and help you scale your brand. Now, the reality is is the majority of you watching this, we will never have the opportunity to partner with. And that's okay. That's why we made this course completely free for you. My goal is to help you, whether we ever work together or not, scale your brand and see the results and create the life and the company and the business and whatever you're trying to build that you have dreamed of. If you got value out of it, consider maybe sending it to your team on Slack or texting it to a friend that you know is trying to build their brand. It's free and available for anyone. Share it with anyone you think would get value out of it. And last but not least, if you made it this far, thank you. My team and I put an incredible amount of effort into this project and it's just our second video that we've put out and I can't tell you how much your attention means to me. I know this was a very long piece of content here. And so you dedicating your time, there's a lot of different things that you could spend your time on. And the fact that you spent it here with me, I'll never be able to explain to you how much that means. So, I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for paying attention, for consuming, and thank you for taking action on this. Please let me know how it goes. Keep me updated. I want to hear about how your brand is scaling. And with that, that is how to build a brand. Thank you so much.