S06 E04 - LinkedIn, Pricing Strategies, and Why Video is the Medium of the Future with David Kilkelly

David Kilkelly 0:00
It’s not necessarily about what you can do at the time, but it’s about cataloging that success. So the next time you go into that situation you can say, hold on. We’ve done this already for this client and this is what happened and therefore we value this service at this price now, and you’ve got some evidence to back that up.

Jason Resnick 0:28
Hey Feasters, Welcome to Episode Four of season six of live in the feast. I’m Jason, aka rezzz, helping you grow your business by having a conversation with someone who’s been there had success and built a business designed around the life they want to live. That’s live in the feast. If this is your first time listening, hit that subscribe button so that you get notified each and every single time a new episode drops. Live in the feast is in your favorite podcast app of choice. Probably the one you’re listening to right now. If you’ve already heard the show before, leave us a rating and review in iTunes or drop us a comment on breaker or cast box. Today’s co host is David Kilkelly, David is the founder of his own video production company called blink back helping businesses create awesome content. He’s worked with all sorts of businesses, including the National Trust green King breweries, and Chris Ducker, he’s since moved back into the educational role. See, he was a teacher at a university in a previous life if you will, but now he’s helping entrepreneurs create content for platforms like LinkedIn. The reason for this is that he’s seen a shift in the way we do business online, the quote unquote interactive web. As he calls it added the ability to have your personality and level of trust be amplified. In this episode, we dive into why video is still on an upward trend, especially on platforms like link, then how video allows you to supercharge the connection you have with potential clients. And pricing is as simple as what you can be bothered doing it for. I asked David how he communicates the value of video to his clients and how he thinks about his pricing. I don’t think his answer is going to surprise you. Although you’ll hear him explain how he caters to the lower budget and less ideal clients. So let’s dive in.

Hey, Feasters. Welcome to another episode of live in the feast. I’m here with David. David, thank you very much for your time today.

David KilKelly 2:49
Hi, Jason, how you doing? Thanks for having me on your show.

Jason Resnick 2:52
Yeah, no, thank you for being here. I know, we’re part of the Youpreneur community, which those of you out there that don’t know what that is. That’s Chris Ducker’s, entrepreneur, personal branding community for business owners that are looking to inject their personal brand into it. And you guys know me, I inject my personal brand into everything that I do. So, you know, I know when David reached out, and I’ve seen him in the forums, and he reached out and he was talking about video and helping other folks in that community on video. I wanted to bring him onto the podcast and bring him to you guys. Because David’s you got a very unique perspective on video, how to use it for business. And also he’s got a young family. So

David KilKelly 3:37
which is what I’m all about. You’ve been reading my notes.

Jason Resnick 3:41
I mean is you know, it’s all that mean? That’s what I’ve got. We just had, you know, we have a newborn son. He’s only weeks old at this point. So Oh, wow. Okay,

David KilKelly 3:51
you’ve got your work out to them.

Jason Resnick 3:52
Yeah, you know, we have a two and a half year old and a newborn. So, you know, a lot of adjusting going on in this household right now.

David KilKelly 4:00
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Do you? Is your office in the house as well? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. So you’re gonna have to set some boundaries there?

Jason Resnick 4:08
Yeah. Well, I got this nice door here. And usually, I mean, the TJ a two year old will help sometimes his face will plant up against the window on the door sometimes and you know, introduce himself onto video calls and things like that. It’s all good. I mean, that’s what that’s what it’s about. So. So, David, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, why you do what you do. And I’d love to know what your defining moment in life so far is

David KilKelly 4:35
okay. Um, well, let’s rewind a little bit then. So I am and I’ve actually been working with video for I think I figured out earlier on this year that it’s, it’s my 30th anniversary effectively, of working with video because I first picked up a camera when I was kind of at school. And they let me use that as part of the kind of art courses and things I was doing. I then went on to study at college, I fell out of college and landed job teaching video at UK University, University of Sussex. And I was there for about 12 years, I think it was teaching media teaching about effective shops and documentary production, but general kind of media production. So that was that kind of graduate level and also postgraduate level, so so I kind of cut my teeth quite a lot. I’m really I mean, I, you know, they say when you teach you learn, so that’s really where I probably learned a core and a bulk of the skills. But I, you know, being a university and the way universities work is they tend to, I think, well, at least where I was at, they tend to slip backwards rather than forwards. So you know, what essentially video is used for these days is marketing. That’s the Internet has given video a kind of a purpose, and vice versa. Actually, I think the video has given the internet purpose as well. So these two things have kind of combined. So we’ve got now global reach, we’ve got this amazing communication tool. And video is really the thing that helps people make sense of that. So we can reach out with video, and create trust and creates of connections between people far easier than using text, for example. And so that’s what kind of interests me about it, and what interested me about it back then when I left the university. So actually, I think you asked me about the defining moment. And that was those two things probably intertwined because having been in a nice cozy job for 12 years, you know, doing things a certain way, it was probably that moment where I realized I wanted to leave and go and do my own thing. So that was quite a big moment. Because then that meant, you know, cutting the strings on a perfectly good salary. And we left the area of the UK where we’re in, which is in Brighton south of London, and moved to a completely different part of the country, because we figured if we were going to make a change, we might as well make a big change. We moved to the west of the UK, which is much more sort of is a countryside, it’s small, and it’s much Wilder. And and we set up the business there. So yeah, I think we were creating a challenge for ourselves. See, I had no no net, no network here. No business experience. And yeah, but it was exciting.

Jason Resnick 7:12
Yeah, I mean it to that. I mean, you essentially moved away from a spot that you were familiar with the network was there, like you said, You decided to strike out on your own and move away from all of that. Yeah. Was it a creative poll to go there? Or was it like some? I mean, why would you leave that network where you were sort of like, Okay, if I’m striking out on my own, I need obviously, clients. So the clients are here.

David KilKelly 7:38
Yeah. Well, oddly, I, when I was working in university, I didn’t really have a network, I worked with the same six or eight people for 12 years, you know, a few people change around the edges. But that’s the funny thing about working in a big machine like that, which is just like, you know, there’s 2000 members of staff at the university. And, you know, you tend to work in little, you tend to work in little bubbles, you know, so I’m only now having run the business of five years in this part of the country, I know, way, way more people than I did back then. Because, because I have to go out and meet them. Because I, you know, if I didn’t go out and meet people, and I’ve effectively got my business, and they work so and actually that social components been really, you know, exciting and interesting, just to go out and meet loads of different people. So yeah, I mean, I just, it was just an upward hills slope for that first year or two, we really had to go out and build a network from scratch, but we were prepared for that. So that’s okay. You know, and also really just, we moved to this part of the country because it’s quality of life. So within half an hour of our house here, we can be on wild Moreland, we can be down by the coast, we can be on a river Lake, we can be in two cities. So it just it just had a lot more options for us. And we had young kids at the time. So it was about where they wanted to grow up, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Jason Resnick 8:54
Yeah. And it’s you and your wife that are the company, correct? Yeah,

David KilKelly 8:58
correct. We both working the business, and then we use, I’ve never really been a big fan of having huge overheads. I’m not sure if that’s the way that companies in the future are going to work. I think we’re in a time now where a nimble businesses is, is more common. And actually, you know, more fun, really, you can, because you can change things when when you need to show when you see a shift in the market, when you see something happening that you need to respond to, it’s almost exactly the opposite from what the university offered. Because everything is saying it’s like trying to steer the Titanic, you know, everything’s going in one great thing, just direction and, you know, changing, it’s really difficult. But when you run your own thing, you can switch and flip and turn and respond to the market. You know, and if one thing’s not working, you can do something else. And I think that really appeals to my kind of entrepreneurial mind, you know?

Jason Resnick 9:51
Yeah, now hundred percent. I mean, that’s, that’s kind of how I am as well, like, you know, I have a home office, I don’t want to carry overhead, you know, people like with two young children, when do you want to go to a co working space? How do you concentrate and those kind of things? And I’m like, Well, I just make do like, it is what it is, like, I like being around like, Yeah, sometimes it’s difficult, but, you know, it is what it is. I you know, same thing, like, I came from a corporate background, I worked for Fortune 100 companies all the way down to small niche design firms. Right, were like, you know, so small, it was like, one of them was just a niche in educational material, building educational sites for flight schools. So I mean, it was like, you know, so I come from the big the whole spectrum there. And so yeah, either way that was was I found the same thing, it was like to change direction, and the market was tough, even even with the smaller design firms, because it was like, okay, there’s still like 30, or 45, or 60, some odd people there that you know, is going in that same direction to then shift the market, you know, see that shift in the market to go that direction is going to be hard to pull all those people there. And it’s even harder with the larger corporations. So I get that to the point of the shifting in the market. When did you start to see that video? Like, because obviously the internet? Technically, I mean, the internet is still a young kid, so to speak, right? Like it’s still very young, in the grand scheme of all of commerce, right? When did you start to see that video is a thing? Like, I mean, was it real early on? Was there something that you saw other companies doing and seeing success with because video, I mean, I still remember I still have the camera where I had to fire the you know, record it on tape, FireWire, that into the computer, press play so that my computer could record. So it was not very easy. But now obviously, we all have video cameras in our pockets. Now. What did you see that shift happening? And

David KilKelly 12:06
I think it’s probably still happening, I it’s one of those things that, you know, we’re right in the middle of something at the moment. And it’s sometimes quite hard to see the bigger picture because we’re only halfway along and we’re you know, we’re right on the on the wire sort of thing. But I suppose people talk about web one, point O and web two point O. So when social media really kind of started, which was probably 2006, seven onwards. And that’s when they people talk about web two point, which is essentially the the interactive web. So rather than just people broadcasting out, like a brochure or like an advertising platform, like like we would like we did all the way through the 80s. And the 90s. You know, rather than this one way conversation, it suddenly became two way because we had WordPress, and we had stripe, and we had all these different kind of tools that that allowed people to basically set up their own stuff without high level technical knowledge. And so now, you know, pretty much anyone can set up a business with just a laptop and using those different platforms and tools. And and, and it was around about that time that people started being able to upload video to Facebook, for example. And all the social networks started adding video in, I thought it was really interesting watching that happen, because literally social networks weren’t video platforms at all to start with. So Instagram was a photograph at Platt, and then they added video in you know, you’ve got video on Pinterest. Now I think on Twitter, additive him and Facebook’s got it. And now in the last 18 months or so LinkedIn has added video. So you know, all of these platforms obviously recognized the power of the the opportunity there. And, you know, obviously, as the technologies walked alongside that, and we’ve all got good quality cameras and our phones now that it means that pretty much anyone has access to to that. So you know, the web speeds got faster the platforms adapt to, and it will just kind of evolved, and that’s in the last. So in the last five or 10 years, it’s really taking another big step forward. Yeah.

Jason Resnick 14:15
Recognizing the power and opportunity that’s in front of us, while we are knee deep in it is often hard to do. Our industry as developers and designers is always evolving and changing. As David points out here, surrounding yourself with a community of like minded folks, selling services allows you to hear what others are also seen in that industry and space so that you can validate your thoughts and ideas, David shares with us his story of the shift that he had in his own market. And as you and your business grow, you’re going to notice shifts, changes in clientele and your pricing, you’ll hear what David does to serve a wider range of clients with both large and small small budgets and how he approaches each very differently. This is a great way to build out different revenue streams for your business and make it sustainable long term. Bottom line is that our industry is largely commodity. That’s why I want to invite you to check out feast. By using the code video at checkout, you can get your first month for only $20. Within that first month, you can learn exactly how to unpack the value of a client and put a price on your services. feast is the community and resource hub for developers and designers ready to get off that project searching hamster wheel and actually run the business that you set out to build feast helps position you in the market with what you do, who you help, and helps you build the processes and systems for client management, sales and marketing, delivery. And pricing. Your business isn’t the same as everyone else’s. When you become a member of feast, you get paid personalized guidance from myself. It’s absolutely essential for me to meet you where you are. And make sure you’re getting the exact tools so that you don’t get lost in the shuffle. The moment you sign up, we’re going to have a chat so that I can create you a custom syllabus of resources within fees to meet you where you are. If you’re serious about not competing on price and having clients that respect you and your expertise, then I would love to see you inside a feast, head over to feast course.com today.

I keep saying Okay, I’m going to do YouTube. I gotta get involved with that a little bit more. And although I have the camera, I have a tripod and all this other things like I’m just like, okay, I still don’t do it. Like it. Yeah, I don’t know why I just like podcasts, I turn out podcasts not a problem. I mean, that’s my medium of choice. video, I see how impactful is for businesses. And I’m sure you do as well, obviously, that’s what your services are. But how do you explain that to someone like myself that says, Okay, yeah, I’ve haven’t leveraged video like I could, I could see the value there. But I don’t know what I’m like, for me, it’s like, what am I going to video here in this room for eight to 10 hours a day? Maybe sometimes, right? And so, like, I’m like this, it’s nothing exciting, right? It’s just me and my computer? How do you have those conversations with folks and businesses that come into your ecosystem? if you will? To say like, yeah, this is what video can do for you.

David KilKelly 17:37
I think it’s, well, firstly, I think that people that you and I are probably a disadvantage, or our generation is at least because we haven’t really grown up with it. So it’s not like it doesn’t come naturally to us. If you look at YouTube, and you look at the the camera, some of these up and coming platforms like Tick Tock and Snapchat and those kind of things, you know, the the younger generation who have literally grown up with it mobile phone in their pocket, they find video a much more natural thing to turn to. So you know that they find it easier. We watched all of that happen. And it’s not necessarily in our nature or our DNA to use video, so it’s a little bit more of an uphill struggle. And then I think you’ve got to think about well, we always talk about funnels in marketing, but you can talk about funnels with video as well. And all that really means is thinking about what level in your process? Are you talking to people? And at what stage in any kind of relationship building process? Are you talking to people. So you know, you can have stuff at the top of the funnel, which is really reaching out to heaps and heaps of people, you can have stuff in the middle of the funnel, which is where people know you and you’re kind of getting to know them a bit more. And you can amass again different and then you can have stuff at the bottom of the funnel, which might be more salesy or kind of direct. And then the other thing just because there’s always the things that cannot what you just said that, but you know, you say that talking in a podcast is quite natural. Well, the difference between what we’re doing here, I mean, we’re at we’ve actually got a camera running here. So effectively, you’re doing video. So but this is much more like a live video than a produced video. So as soon as you start kind of producing video, that’s very, very different thing from live video, live video, you’ve got to think off the top of your head, it’s bit more conversational produce studio, suddenly you kind of think like, you’ve got to plan it a bit more and say, Well, actually, what am I going to say here, who’s it for, where in the funnel is it going to work best and, and then you’re going to, you know, maybe be crafted a bit more. So if you write a blog post, you probably go through it and you edit it and you think about bits, and you take bits out and take a bit more time over it and you craft it. So it’s pretty much the same with video, if you’re going to do that kind of like a video blog or something like that. Firstly, it’s about thinking about the message, but then also refining it and tuning it down a little bit. And, and I think you know, a really good way for people to get started with it is just to think about demonstrating their expertise. So, which is essentially what you do in a blog, it’s just if you do it with video, you get to see the person, you get to feel who they are a little bit, you get to a bit of a character a bit of the warmth of that person. And that’s that just is just super charging that message essentially, it’s just making it, you know, it’s me, enabling your audience to connect better with you. And it’s hugely powerful. I mean, you know what, you know, how we react to celebrities, and it’s kind of ridiculous, you know, you see someone famous in the street and go weak at the knees and stuff. It’s like, they’re just a person, it’s just happened to be on a screen a bit more often, you know, reason it has that effect. And it’s kind of magic in it.

Jason Resnick 20:39
Yeah, yeah. So when you have conversations, and I guess, actually, I have a couple of questions. And I’ll get to that one in a second. Taking a step back, when you started out on your own, you know, leaving the Titanic, if you believe in the Titanic and started on your own? How did you start defining your services in a way that, you know, for one? I mean, obviously, it’s creative. And there’s a lot of designers that listen to the show, a lot of the things that and this is what I mentioned to you earlier on was that I get questions about pricing all the time, and how do I come up with pricing and all that, and as soon as I say it, they’re like, okay, but you’re working on the bottom line. For design aspects, or for video, or for writing a lot of these things, you can’t necessarily tie directly to pricing. But I heard you mentioned the funnel, which, you know, obviously, that word in and of itself, I disagree with, I think it’s just business relationships, it’s selling, its marketing, all of that stuff. And, you know, obviously protect the innocent and all the things, you know, even of yourself, no trade secrets, or whatever. But how did you come up with and define your pricing to your clients? And how did you have that conversation with them to say, hey, look, this is the results that you can get from video? And this is how, how I can do that for you?

David KilKelly 22:01
Um, does? It’s a tricky question, isn’t it? And I wouldn’t pretend to know, absolutely the answer to that. Because even just this last week, we’ve been reviewing pricing and thinking about how to, you know, adapt, and that, you know, going back to what I said about running your own businesses, that’s one of the sort of more exciting challenges about figuring that out. So, you know, video is inherently quite an expensive process, because it takes a while. And you’ve got to, you know, you’ve obviously got to film it, you better edit it, but and then the bit that people quite often forget about is the planning and the preparation. So you know, the creative development and the and getting the message, right, and all that kind of stuff at the beginning can take almost as long as the filming and the editing, you know, sound, but it depends on the project. So trying to communicate that as best as possible is always valuable, I think for the clients, I just kind of, you know, laying that out. I mean, it’s taken like five years to figure all this out, and I still don’t have it figured out, you know, the first time, you know, the first few projects we did, I did for like 300 quid or 500 quid, and it was just just just something to put in the portfolio, and then change for some money, whatever someone would give me. And but obviously budgets have gone up and up and up. And, you know, I think after a while you identify your ideal client. So, you know, most of the clients we work with now on the certainly on the sort of bigger side of the projects are six or seven figure businesses. But you know, in this part of the world, there’s also a lot of really small businesses like wanting to man bands, and you know, like us, and I understand what it’s like to be in that position to not have five grand for a video. So, you know, we’ve looked more recently at kind of simpler, lower cost ways of doing that. So maybe using a freelancer to do some of the video stuff, and then just keeping the edits really simple, and just turning something around in a day or two. And then for those kind of budgets, we can do something a quarter of that price, or whatever it is so so it’s tricky, though, you know, I think it’s, it’s a bit I know, when I, when I was starting the business, I asked a friend of mine who’d been a freelance editor for a few years, how he costed things, and he came back with something that was so simple, and so brilliant. And I still to this day, remember it, and he said, you just do it for what you can be bothered to do it for. And I know that sounds like, kind of like oversimplifying it, but actually, it’s really, it’s really kind of profound, because I couldn’t be bothered to do it for 300 pounds when I started. And then I realized that actually, you know, I my time is more valuable in these other areas now, and I can’t do that for that anymore. So you know, I put put my prices up. And generally every, every year, my prices have gone up by 20, or 30%, or whatever, to the point where now I have, you know, a price for a video which I can which I can, which I’ll happily do and not feel like I’m ripping myself off, right? And if as long as I’m feeling comfortable doing it for that price, then that’s a good price for gotcha.

Jason Resnick 25:00
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that’s smart, too, is that you have prices, but then you know, for your bespoke full service offering, but then to meet other customers that may potentially be your ideal customers, but not necessarily have the budget or not necessarily have the time, you know, for the full scale project to then say, okay, that’s okay, we know your budget, but this is what we can offer for that budget. Yeah. And this is what you get to get out of that. Was it something that you came to after time after you did some of the bespoke things and you kind of just chopped up like, Hey, we take like these three bits from the bespoke project and put that as lower offering, we can easily turn that out quicker.

David KilKelly 25:40
Yes, yeah. To a certain extent. It’s, yeah, so it’s just kind of keeping things simple. I’m just trying to think the other thing is, I think you mentioned before, when we were chatting before the podcast about, we talked briefly about pricing. And one of the things that’s really, really commonly said, is about looking at client return on investment. So you know, I think, you know, when you’re running a marketing company, so I’ve got windows shouting at me. And when you run a marketing company, you’ve got a lot more data, essentially, because you can say, like, right, we ran this ad campaign, and, you know, you put $300 in or whatever it is, and you got $700, out and Berlin, you know, so we can prove that through kind of data, it’s much harder with Creative Services to really draw a specific kind of return like that. But what we try and do is, is kind of match the quality of the production to the standard to the brand. So like, generally, a bigger company is more invested in their brand is more concerned about maintaining that kind of level of quality, and therefore then they’re happier to invest more money into that. But you know, we’ve done we’ve done it in a project for about, you know, I think was a five grand project for a little company that went on to make like hundreds of thousands of pounds of it. So that made me realize, and what will make me wish I’d done far better kind of value based pricing. But you know, something, I suppose you look back and learn on but it’s really difficult to get people to give up their marketing budgets and how much they’re going to make him I think you kind of have to when you do marketing, because it’s you got to look at the numbers much more specifically sure what you’re offering your creative service, people are a little bit more reticent to be open about their marketing budgets and their revenue in the turnover and all that kind of stuff. So it’s Yeah, it’s challenging. So that one law firm, what would you have done differently in the context of trying to position the value of it now that like, you’re looking at it retrospectively? Well, at the time, I think it would have been hard to do anything about it, I think, what what we need to do with that is actually we put together a really good case study from that. So we took we got hold of that data, we spoke to the client, they were really happy, but we got the data from them. I mean, they doubled revenue over the campaign, they ran out of things. So you know, for eight figure law company that was pretty good for them, you know, right. And so, you know, it’s not necessarily about what you can do at the time, but it’s about cataloging the success. So the next time you go into that situation, you can say, hold on, you know, we’ve done this already for this client, and this is what happened, and therefore, we value this service at this price now, and you’ve got some evidence to back that up.

Jason Resnick 28:14
That’s what I talked a lot about his portfolio is one thing, right? But track record of success is what actually matters, right? So you can do all the free work that you want, might look good, but they didn’t produce the results that your new leads coming in, or looking at, or looking forward. And I think that that’s super smart, that say they you know, okay, look, here’s the thing, this is what we did this the project. Now, let’s go back to those clients and see what resulted from that project. Yep. And that’s from a creative perspective, like, for me, I can see the data as it comes in, right. Like, I know, like, if I do some development, or a feature add to a ecommerce site, or, you know, change in email marketing, automation around, like those numbers, you know, within days, you know, I could see the effect on, whereas if you’re creatively making something that they’re going to then go ahead and use in their marketing campaign, or, you know, in some higher top of funnel method, you might have to go back, your engagement might end, and then you might have to go back to three, six months later and say, hey, look, you know, I’m just curious, I just want to follow up, how did that all work for you? You know, do you mind sharing any of the data or the information? And is that what you did with the law firm? You just went back and said, hey, look, can I have that data? or? Yeah,

David KilKelly 29:32
well, we Yeah, we time, I think, actually, the way that came about was that we asked them for a testimonial, because we knew they’d been happy anyway. So we went back to get a video testimonial from them. And it was through the process of that video testimonial that a lot of numbers and stats came out. And so and then we just use that as the basis for a case study. Awesome. That’s awesome. You killed like two birds with one stone, the testimony you get the data. Good. Awesome.

Jason Resnick 30:01
So the question that I had earlier on was, in that shift in the shift that we are now where we all have high resolution cameras in our pocket. Were you ever scared that like, okay, maybe my services aren’t going to be as needed anymore? I mean, I think I know the answer just from the conversation that we’re having in the kind of the clients that you go for. But was there that ever like a iPhone 10 is coming out, maybe, maybe somebody doesn’t need me anymore, they could go to buy a tripod and just talk to their phone?

David KilKelly 30:30
Yeah, possibly. I mean, I think you’ve got to really stay on your toes and your own your own business owner. And I think that, you know, we do kind of hot, quite highly produced kind of video content that suits a certain market in a certain need. But you’ve got to know that, firstly, there’s always going to be competition coming up for the lower ranks, you’re always going to have a young guy with a camera who doesn’t have any overheads, even less than we do. And, you know, any skills because he’s, he’s, you know, he’s grown up with that technology. So there’s that. And then there’s also people doing themselves as people using it themselves. So you know, for us, it’s about like diversifying and bringing in different revenue streams. So you know, we’ve this year, we’ve added in the new course, to help actually help people produce content for thing for platforms like LinkedIn, so video, video, LinkedIn course, we’re also looking at maybe setting up by the our editing service. So people can, you know, because editing is one of those things that kind of people look at as a bit of a dark art. So, you know, you might be able to film your own stuff, but then you don’t want to piece it all together. So, you know, that’s something that we can offer remotely online. It’s really easy these days, with platforms like Dropbox and stuff to just kind of shuttle about fairly large data, large amounts of data. So, so we’re looking at maybe setting up a platform where people can, you know, just use this for a date for an editing service, you know, so that that’s just, it’s just basically answering people’s needs at different levels in the market. So yes, the six and seven figure businesses might want our higher end services, but all of those freelancers and solo printers, and kind of like smaller businesses, you know, they’re they’re using video as well, but but they’re not going to invest realistically, you know, all of that kind of capital into having somebody come and produce their own video content is just doesn’t make any sense for them. To do it themselves, but we can help them do that. Sure.

Jason Resnick 32:25
Yeah. So to your point, and that was where I was going next, this social media, obviously. And you mentioned at the top, this, you know, kind of like the advent of video, like, you know, those platforms existed Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and all these, but then they introduced video, and now everybody has stories of some sort of shape or form, right? YouTube has them, Instagram has them, you know, they’re all over the place. Facebook, you’ve focused in on LinkedIn, why did you do that? Um, why not? Well, I mean, I’m thinking to myself, because like, I see a ton of like, Hey, this is how you produce stuff on YouTube. This is how you do Facebook Live this, you know, like this, all this material educational material out there for those sort of platforms? I haven’t seen too much, really, and I haven’t looked, but I mean, that other stuff is in my face, whereas LinkedIn, not so much. So I’m kind of curious, did you stay away from those because of the crowded market? Or was there a specific strategy behind saying, okay, we’re going to, we’re going to talk about Lincoln here.

David KilKelly 33:26
Yeah, it was, it was both of those things. Really, I kind of feel like, you know, I think Facebook is, I wouldn’t say it’s had its day, but it certainly had it sort of meteoric rise. And, and a lot of people rode that wave very successfully. It’s much harder now, certainly, with organic reach to get any kind of results out of Facebook. YouTube is an extraordinarily crowded platform, particularly if you’re working in the video environment, you know, like, for me to start, I mean, we do have a YouTube channel, but for me to get on it and start talking about how to create video, I’m up against go with, like, 300 400, you know, a million subscribers. So it’s, it’s a huge nut to crack in that respect. LinkedIn is, is just a much more achievable. Firstly, the audience is absolutely right. For us, you know, that it’s b2b professionals, you know, sure. What I really like about LinkedIn is it hasn’t got that noise that the other social channels have got. So you don’t really get many trolls on it. People aren’t there talking about politics, and religion and all that kind of stuff that everyone gets very, very heated about. They’re really just talking about kind of business, about strategy about mindset and development, about, you know, connections and other businesses. And that’s a much more interesting to me, and be much more relevant to our business. And the and the engagements really good at the minute because LinkedIn is on its upward trajectory. Now, that’s an exciting time. So you know, I can post something on LinkedIn, I’ll get a couple of thousand views on a video or get 40 likes and 30 comments, and people are just engaging with it. And you know, I just don’t get anything like that on Facebook. So I’ve kind of always given up on Facebook, I mean, he’s got a great advertising platform, and it does yield good ad results, you know, in terms of just conversational, kind of like raising your profile, building your connections, I just think LinkedIn is absolutely where it is at the minute.

Jason Resnick 35:18
Yeah, I think that’s smart. I mean, everything that you’ve done so far, catering to those clients that, you know, may not have the budgets or the time to dedicate to a full full service offering. LinkedIn, you said, right there, that’s b2b, that’s our, that’s where our audience is, that’s where our potential clients are, you know, giving them the education around that sort of thing. You know, even thinking about expanding into editing, you know, just an editing services. Because be honest with you, that’s one of the reasons why I don’t do video is editing, like, I just I’m like, I can’t sit here and look at myself and move and all like, I couldn’t do that, which is why I have a post production for the podcast, I don’t like the editing part of it. But all those things it speaks to how you run your businesses is that yes, have this full service offering and I offer for a certain price, but I am catering to the needs of potentially other ideal clients that may not have that budget or that time or, you know, that the the wherewithal to invest in all of that just yet. But we have all these bits and bobs really underneath it that could help them in some way that they see at this point as their problem. Yeah, I love it, I think I think it’s, you know, it’s like connecting all the dots underneath. And, and it’s funny too, because I’m working through that myself, I’m taking apart my larger scale projects and starting to then go ahead and say, Okay, I can do this, I could price that. And I can do this and price it this way. And it’s like, you know, trying to come up with all of those things. Like you said, it’s fun as a business owner, because it’s like, hey, if this doesn’t work, okay, so I don’t do it anymore.

David KilKelly 36:58
Yeah, and if you produce, I mean, you know, we were talking about your printer, and Chris Ducker earlier, and he talks about an ecosystem. And, you know, if you have a range of services at different price points, and, and within under the same umbrella, so all of our services are video related or video marketing related, but they’re there for different types of people in different sorts of places. But you know, you’re creating essentially a, back to that funnel idea within your services. So someone might, you know, start off by just spending a couple hundred quid on a on a course with us, they then might go on to do a bit of editing by the hour, then their company grows, and they start to employ people, and they just, they want to outsource all of it, they haven’t got time for that anymore. And suddenly, we can offer them a higher level service. So you know, it’s just about kind of building in different tiers into your business so that you can, you can offer things at different places and to different people. But you know, sometimes that feels like you’ve got three different businesses on the boil. Yeah, you can manage it properly, and kind of get some system set up and outsource some of that and, you know,

Jason Resnick 38:01
kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, for what I, what I tend to do is I test it based off of the back of a larger scale product. So if we’re in the midst of a conversation with a lead, you know, obviously, if it’s a course or something that’s different, but with the services and things like that, if I had the conversation, and I started think that the path is moving away from the custom project, the larger scale project, I’m like, all right, I can offer them this. And if they buy, then I say, okay, that’s fine. If I happens a few times, then I’m like, Okay, let me formalize this a little bit more, and, you know, build out the documentation of processes and things like that, and to streamline a little bit more, and maybe throw it up on my website and see if people are going to bite directly to it. I’m always trying to stay as lean and as simple as possible. And if I don’t have to try to market multiple things all at the same time, that, to me, that’s when my head becomes overwhelmed. And I just kind of go top down like yourself, like you listen to your audience, you listen to your idea, clients and what they’re asking you for, then build that out, rather than the other way around. Yeah.

David KilKelly 39:06
And I think it’s like what you just said, is really important. And it’s just to kind of, you know, one of the reasons I said, we’re thinking about doing an editing by the our services, that at the moment, we’re doing the course, and, and obviously dealing with a kind of regular clients from the video production service. So, you know, adding in that, and, and the, and the Editing by the hour service all at once is just, it’s just too much, you know, it’s like, you forget how complicated these things are, it’s not, it’s not just a question of putting a thing up on your website, you’ve got to communicate that to people, otherwise, there’s no point in doing it. So, you know, you’ve got to have the right marketing assets, you’ve got to have the right message and tone, and you gotta and and also, if you throw too many things at once, I think people get confused about what it is that you offer. So yeah, at the moment, we’re really just trying to focus on getting the costs down and out. And then once that’s kind of up and running, we will move on to the next but you know, it’s trying to keep it simple.

Jason Resnick 40:03
And and where can folks go? And we’ll put all these links in and all of David’s resources in the show notes. But where can folks find out about the LinkedIn course and get more information about it,

David KilKelly 40:15
you can go to our website, it’s blink back.co.uk, which is BLINKBACK. And forward slash LinkedIn, that will take you there, there’s actually a LinkedIn sort of option in the menu at the top there, which will take you put a landing page there with some information about it. And yeah,

Jason Resnick 40:33
yeah, I mean, I think it’s like I was saying before about YouTube, you know, and my want to get into it, really just from an organic reach kind of thing, like, you know, I do have podcasts, I do have content, written content, rather. And when I have video two, people keep telling me LinkedIn, like, they’re like, you need to be on LinkedIn, that that’s where organically, a lot of things are happening where like, it was Facebook or Facebook 567 years ago, you know, Google ads, you know, 1015 years ago, right? Like they like LinkedIn is that at that point, at now, I think that’s super smart to go in there. And like you said, to it’s an which it didn’t hit me until you said it. But the reason why I shy away from Facebook is because of all the distractions that Facebook puts in front of you, right, like, so like, when I look at doing something for work, I don’t want to be distracted by my niece and nephew photographs, or, you know, that kind of thing. And that’s what happens on Facebook. I mean, that’s the idea that Facebook probably got some old science behind it all, why they do what they do. But like, That’s why, you know, inside my feast community, it’s a slack group, I had closed down really early on a Facebook group, because I want people to interact and talk about work, I don’t want them to be distracted by all the other things. You said LinkedIn, people go there to talk about personal development, business development, you know, marketing strategies, all these other things, they’re not talking that, like, you’re not putting pictures of your children up there. And like, you know, doing that sort of stuff there. So I think that that’s, that’s smart to do.

David KilKelly 42:08
It always surprised me that LinkedIn, or Facebook, or any social networks had some way of customizing your feed a bit more. And I know, they’ve tried various different things over the years. But for me, if I could have, like my business feed, where I just say, like, right, okay, this is my Facebook business feed, and it’s a tab at the top, and I can put what I want into it, and I can just, I can eliminate the pictures of my kids, you know, or my friends, kids, or whatever it is, and put them over there, and just have my business that, you know, connections in one place, that would be great. I mean, like LinkedIn, and Facebook are complaining that there’s not enough real estate and the screen and everyone’s arguing over, you know, who should go what, and they’ve got this algorithm that tries to determine it for you. Let me do it for myself. Peter, have three or four different feeds on Facebook for different needs, you know, yeah, yeah, I’m sure they have a reason. But it is. And it probably all comes down to add money the other day, I want to be mindful your time here, this has been an awesome conversation. Uh, before I let you go, what’s up next, I mean, I know you have the course and things, but what’s up next, in the next six to 12 months. Um, for me, it’s refining the what we do a little bit more always the there’s always things to tweak and things to kind of adjust you the businesses up and running now for five years. So we’re kind of comfortable. And we have a set of client base. And, and, and that’s, that’s one of the reasons why I started building the course out this year. Historically, we’re quite quiet between January and March every year, and we’ve been running the business long enough now to know that’s going to happen, which is nice, because we can bank a little bit in the autumn, and then we can, and then we’ve got some time in the early part of the year to do something constructive and to build something new. So we use that time this year to build out a course. I’m really looking forward to marketing the course because me that’s all that kind of geeky stuff that I quite like, which is sort of optimizing things and kind of setting up retargeting and all that kind of, you know, looking at the numbers and making sure that, you know, changing the copy and tweaking things and, and, you know, split testing your landing page, all that kind of stuff that I don’t really get to do that very often, with the video side of the business, I quite like that. It appeals to some part of my brain. So I’m looking forward to just not just launching the course, but then as an ongoing process, you know, seeing how I can get it to reach more people. And you know, doing more and more things like this more kind of podcasts and just expanding so we run I did we did the video for Chris Ducker for you pronounce so I was there last year at the summit, and we did the video content for that. And we’re going to do it again for his media and again in the autumn for the summit. So that’s much more about stepping outside of the Southwest where we are. And although it means me being on a you know, traveling a lot more up and down the country. I’m beginning to connect now with a bigger, wider sort of less local audience, which I think is really important for the more digital kind of education services. So it’s just kind of keeping those two things in balance. Awesome.

Jason Resnick 45:12
Yeah, well, congrats on the the summit and the repeat business too. So that’s a testament to have you been

David KilKelly 45:17
to the summit or anything I

Jason Resnick 45:19
have not. I’ll part of his mastermind is us mastermind. Yeah. But yeah, I haven’t been over there yet. Really, it’s been timing more than anything else is just, you know, and now, I don’t know, with a newborn, we’re still trying to figure out some travel over the summer and all that other stuff. So we’re just kind of playing it by ear at this point in time. But yes, no, I mean, first of all, David, thank you for your time. Second of all, where could folks reach out and say, thanks.

David KilKelly 45:48
I think I’m the only person called David Kilkelly on LinkedIn. So if you type that name in and you find me then come and connect with me there, that’s always good. That’s where most active so that’s a really good place just to kind of connect and have a conversation. And, of course, our website as well. So I mentioned earlier, if you want to go check out what we’re doing in a broader

Jason Resnick 46:10
context, also, and I’ll definitely link up all those in the show notes as well. David, thanks again for your time today and your insights and your expertise. really do appreciate it.

David KilKelly 46:20
Thank you, Jason. Thanks very much, and everyone listening. Until next time,

Jason Resnick 46:24
it’s your time to live in the feast.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, I can speak for both David and myself by saying that we’d love to hear what your one takeaway was. It’s super simple. In the podcast app of choice, probably this one that you are listening to drop a comment or review sharing what your takeaway was. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button either. So that you’ll be the first to listen to next week’s episode when will bring to the show. Vito Peleg, who’s a legitimate rock star. He’s also built an agency and to scratch his own it built a product that allows his team to get feedback from clients with ease elegance, and he made history with this thing in the WordPress space. Until then, it’s your time to live in the feast.