We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lindsay & Ryan Longenecker. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lindsay & Ryan below.

Hi Lindsay & Ryan, thanks for joining us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

We are definitely risk takers. A long time ago, we decided to follow our highest excitement within our means. We’ve used that as a “motto” of sorts to make small decisions and very large life changing decisions. As entrepreneurs, we’ve taken many risks over the years.

One of the biggest risks we’ve taken was leaving our full time jobs to run the business while starting our family. Ryan left his full time job in May of 2018 when Lindsay was about 5 months pregnant with our daughter Lucy. After spending the majority of her maternity leave editing wedding videos for our business, Lindsay left her full time job in February 2019.

It was really important to us to have more flexibility while raising Lucy. In 2019, we brought her along to many of our shoots and did a lot of remote work so we could spend lots of time with her. It was definitely challenging to have the time, energy and money to have both of us running the business full time while having a little one at home. As tough as it was, we’d never change a thing. We love having Lucy grow up knowing her parents love what we do and how hard we work.

Lindsay & Ryan, 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?

We started Collective Mind Technologies so we can have more flexibility while raising our daughter Lucy. With our combined backgrounds, we are able to provide creative and technical expertise. We offer a variety of creative technology services for driven leaders.

We started out as on site Apple tech support. Our services organically grew over time to incorporate all of our collective skills. We love partnering with ambitious trailblazers, bold entrepreneurs and change makers. Our vision is to provide a platform of creative technology services to small businesses. We want to support our community of entrepreneurs by offering a variety of services in one centralized place. We currently offer video production, photography, technical support services and more.

With our versatile team of experts, we can help streamline your technology and create innovative content to engage your customers. We provide high quality, reliable and customized creative technology services for all of our clients.

We are proud of the relationships we build with our clients, the work we produce, and the company we are building. We love that CMT allows us to follow our highest excitement while helping others thrive.

Connect with us at collectivemindtechnologies.com. We can’t wait to help you thrive.

How’d you meet your business partner?

We are business partners and married, so our story of how we met goes way back to 2009. We met at Red Rocks at a music festival called Monolith. We were both volunteering for the event and met at the sign up booth. Lindsay happened to be there solo, so Ryan offered to meet up later. We exchanged numbers, but didn’t meet up at the festival. We went out for coffee a week or so later and discovered we had very close mutual friends.

We actually made a terrible horror movie together a few months after dating, with a camera we bought at a police auction. It was a blast, but not very good. We spent the bulk of our 20s following our passions independently, playing music and creating a documentary.

Fast forward to 2017, when Ryan came up with his billionth business idea, on site Apple tech support for busy entrepreneurs and individuals. As it grew, Lindsay joined in to help with the video production gigs Ryan was bringing in. Now, here we are in 2022, with a 3.5 year old daughter and a growing business.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Although we started CMT in 2017, we had a slow build up while working full time and starting our family. In 2019, when we were both working for CMT full time, we spent the bulk of the year significantly growing our business. By the last quarter of the year, we had grown so much, that we did not have time to run our business. We were scrambling to get help last minute so we didn’t have to turn down new clients.

2020 started off with a bang, continuing on with our success from 2019. We had just upgraded our video gear and had some of our biggest contracts to date. Then of course, the pandemic hit in early March. Unfortunately, every aspect of our business tanked instantly. We lost contracts and a lot of jobs that were in the works. This was an extremely stressful and tough time for us. We relied 100% on our income from CMT at this point. We wrapped up some jobs we had in progress and realized no new work was coming in.

So, we did what we had to do. Ryan started a job in August of 2020. We weren’t able to instantly pivot and continue providing for our family. Thankfully, Ryan got an amazing job and has still been able to support CMT in his free time.

In early 2021, we sold our home due to unexpected reasons, and decided to buy a van and travel for a couple months. Ryan’s job was completely remote and business was very slow. So we decided to create a travel blog documenting our 3 month road trip up the west coast. Of course, business picked up right beforehand, so we were not only creating our travel blog, but also editing a few projects along the way. We had a blast and loved every bit of our trip. We are so happy we documented it so we can have those episodes to look back on indefinitely.

Now, we are grateful to be growing CMT once again. We are growing our team, building a studio space at our home and finally looking forward to building the company we’ve been dreaming of.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.collectivemindtechnologies.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/collectivemindtechnologies/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/collectivemindtechnologies
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/collectivemindtechnologies
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/collectivemindt
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiGdsb35LcNCPRUUl_uj1vQ
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/collective-mind-technologies-denver
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@collectivemindtec

Image Credits
Collective Mind Technologies