We were lucky to catch up with Jack Spitser recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jack, appreciate you joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

What Epic Drone Tours does differently than most drone and video production companies is our ability to customize our work based on the creativity needed for each project. While it’s the same level of service each time, we’re able to adapt to the task at hand to take our clients’ vision and blow past it, exceeding expectations. We’re specialists in FPV drone flying, which is on the newer side of the drone industry. Since 2020, the FPV market has exploded with more and more companies, agencies, and sports teams utilizing this unique style of POV footage, bringing the space and experience to life. Rather than only filming static drone footage, we’re helping to elevate the industry with creative and cutting-edge techniques that create really inviting media.

Jack, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve been a creator for as long as I can remember, dating back to my elementary school days when my dad bought me a camera to document my life while he was deployed in Iraq.

Throughout high school I cultivated my passion for videography and photography, capturing local sporting events and creating my swim teams’ end-of-the-year banquet videos. Towards the end of high school I began charging money at local swim meets to photograph the swimmers, with their parents paying me for photos of their kids competing. This turned into a photography career that led me during college to become the head photographer for the world’s largest global swimming news site, SwimSwam.com. I had the opportunity to photograph at the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games for SwimSwam which was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

I graduated from UC San Diego during the height of the pandemic and dabbled in a variety of business ideas until landing on Epic Drone Tours, which originated as a way for residential realtors to create virtual tours of their homes with drones so that their prospective buyers would not need to tour them in person (during the pandemic, walk-throughs and open houses were halted).

I consider myself a persistent marketer/salesman. After filming my friend’s home with a friend of mine who flew FPV drones, I sent the video to 100s of realtors, leading to our first paid shoot being in Hawaii for several $10 million+ homes. We worked in residential real estate capturing the most expensive real estate on the West Coast, and have since expanded into many industries including commercial real estate, hotels & resorts, live sports broadcasting, and more.

The brand that we’ve cultivated is professional and fun with a focus on amazing customer service. We put out a lot of media online that shows behind-the-scenes of our work and inside the lives of our teams, something that a lot of media companies don’t do. By showing who we are as people and the fun we like to have on shoots, our clients are able to trust us and want to work with us because of the ease, enjoyment, and benefits of paying for our services.

As we continue to grow, we’re looking to double down on what we’re good at while pushing to break into the Film/TV world as well as work on more live broadcasts.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

One of my favorite stories of our persistence and unique sales strategies was how we gained the San Diego Padres as a client. Being a lifelong fan and living across the street, it was a dream come true to get to work and partner with them for their live drone footage. I live across the street from the stadium and bought season tickets for the 2023 season. While meeting with the sales rep for the tickets, I told him about our company and what we do, and about 6 months later, I got a call from a videographer for the Padres, asking to speak about drone footage for the team.

This led to a few conversations, and then I came across news that the videographer was no longer with the Padres. Knowing that he had mentioned that the CEO of the team was excited to have this footage, we guessed his email, leading to his referral of us to the marketing department, and the rest is history.

We filmed several games for the Padres this year, providing live drone footage for their TV broadcast and on the in-game Jumbotron. We’ll be back next year for more games and are looking to work with more and more networks and teams.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

The number one easiest way to get more clients as a creative is by picking up your phone, hopping on a social media platform and messaging as many people in your target market as possible, every single day. It’s a volume game, if you message 100 people and 3 are interested, that’s the way you build a business. Don’t speak like a robot, but put in the reps to get your services in front of as many people as possible as quick as you can.

We have a system that sends 100s of emails a day to our target clientele, which is more advanced, but that, along with brand building, is the best way to continue to grow and gain customers. The phone in your pocket is the key to building a great business!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.epicdronetours.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jackspitser/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/epicdronetours/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-spitser-5751b7137/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@jackspitser