We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Avidon Respes. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Avidon below.

Avidon, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later

My current business was started in late December of 2018. I was actually in the middle of trying to open a clothing store with a previous business associate when I was met with a very serious problem… My “partner” had changed the terms and conditions of our agreement after we had come to a disagreement about certain operations within our agreement.

All of the drama ramped up and pushed me to go all in on my OWN business. That “partner” knew that I was building my own business separate from our proposed collaboration before we even had a discussion of what “we” would do, yet it became a much bigger issue for them.

For MY business at that time I was trying to be a “life coach” and a sort of business advisor, it wasn’t going the best, but it opened the door for the next biggest opportunity… I shifted my focus to creating media and “visual storytelling”, I found a partner that wanted to join me and my vision, which together we decided to pursue.

The fateful day came when I had to decide which opportunity I would take the risk with… I chose to decline on entering the store partnership and instead bet on myself and my new business.

The business I started from out of this situation and many others is called BRIODS Corporation Of America. We made it through the pandemic, and we’ve reached that 5 year mark where most businesses fail… We are looking toward the future.

Long story short, I don’t necessarily feel that my timing was off since everything happens as it should, but what I would have done more if I could go back, I would have gotten serious with creating online content and focusing more on building my personal brand first.

No matter what you do or what happens, I’ve learned that if you have a personal brand, you’ll always have a way to make money.

A few things that would have changed for me if I started earlier and took it more serious, I would have more money, I would know some other things that I probably don’t know right now, and I would have different people in my network that I haven’t met.

My only wish was that someone conditioned me into business and branding at a much younger age like 15 when I was old enough to start understanding basic economics, other than that, I’m right where I need to be.

Avidon, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Most people can’t pronounce my name properly lol, so I usually allow people to call me Avi (AH-vee). My name is Hebrew origin and I grew up Jewish; but not like the stereotype financially well off Jew, I grew up on the lower end of middle class.

My parents did the best they could to provide for my sister and I with what they had. During the day my mother would work in the banking industry and at night my father worked at the casino, this allowed us to have enough money that I could join extracurricular sports outside of school like travel soccer which I loved.

I was always extremely passionate about cars and soccer. I believe the technicalities associated with these 2 profoundly intrigues me, much on the level that I would later learn that entrepreneurship sparks heavy interest within me too.

As passionate and as much as I would have wanted to become a professional soccer player, the truth is that my purpose is much greater. I can do way more things with my life without being strapped to a job, essentially.

Fame and fortune have also always been on my mind… Who wants to be poor by choice?

I never knew what would get me there aside from soccer since I didn’t really know anything when I was younger. Fortunately my father was involved with this network marketing company, I will have to ask him exactly how he got started, but he stuck to it even though it was costing more than it was earning.

This network marketing company was much different from the rest due to the principles that they were teaching, and they offered leadership development training in a very systematic way.

For years my father would attend meetings, conferences, and be completely loyal spending much of his income on their training tools and products. My sister went on to join him when she felt it made sense, and they both worked on building the business together, whereas my mother and I refrained from being involved.

It’s really interesting how things align in your life. While they were working on their business, I was attending college at Rutgers University, Camden, playing on the soccer team, and failing in most of my classes. The school officials along with the soccer management gave me and a few others an ultimatum… Either get your rear in gear and improve these school grades or suffer the consequences of removal from the soccer team preceding a complete rejection from the university.

Back then I had a friend that was on the soccer team with me, also facing dilemmas. We shared similar interests in soccer and cars, hence when they met with us concerning our status, we both made the decision to leave Rutgers and pursue an automotive career.

We went to Lincoln Tech where we received our automotive technician certifications, and then we went on the job hunt.

I was able to find a job in Northern New Jersey at a BMW location where I wanted to start my career, and work my way up the ranks to one day be a fully certified automotive technician.

At BMW, they made me start by washing cars and moving them around the lot whenever necessary. I really wanted to actually WORK on the cars, but if this was how I had to get my foot in the door, I was with it.

The day I got fired was a major mistake on my end, but it taught me one of my most important lessons in life; never lie to the people that are actually trying to help you and benefit you. I strongly disappointed my manager who had a very high impression of me, that feeling was something I didn’t want to ever purposely recreate again.

My life tumbled as I felt like a failure.

Soccer didn’t work since I wasn’t able to play in the university anymore.
Cars didn’t work since I needed real experience before I would ever be a technician.

What else could I do?

In my mind my options ran completely dry, my only choice was to go back home and start all over from scratch. After about a month of job searching and wasting time, my father and my sister offered to pay for my startup costs to join them in the network marketing business… They gave me no choice, as it was a mandatory sentence.

Little did I know that I would learn so much about business from working in a network marketing company that would benefit me substantially once I opened my own business.

The network marketing company taught us a lot about leadership development and I knew that this was something that was lacking in the overall market. I believed that I could also deliver this service after working hard, developing myself, and learning everything I could from them.

They made it a habit of always telling us that they weren’t any smarter than us, they were just able to create a system that generated them results. Ah ha! – I thought to myself… If I can create a system, then one day I can be successful too.

The light bulb was twinkling.

Part of the information being shared in their leadership development training was about risk taking for your goals and dreams. I was ready to take a huge risk to challenge what I had learned from them, thus I could gauge exactly how applicable it all was without the “training wheels” they provided.

There’s a unique opportunity offered to any and every Jewish person, that if they want to return back to the homeland and immigrate to Israel, it can be a very streamlined process with 1 significant condition… I would have to enlist into the Israel Defense Force given the national requirement of enlistment, at 18 years of age.

Making this decision at 21 years old would put me at an enlistment age of 22, where luckily the service requirement was cut from 3 years to only 2 years. I would spend my first year learning about the country, the culture, and integrate into society. Afterwards I would enlist into the army exactly 1 year after my arrival, having the required timeframe of 2 years military service.

I would only find out my military profession just 2 weeks before my enlistment day, until then I tried my best not to think about it. In waiting I prepared my future reality by ordering my life for that date. I tried to earn as much money as I could and minimize my expenses without getting myself into binding contracts like cars or apartments and such.

My service in the IDF (Israel Defense Force) was specialized in the Military Police, Prison Unit, Solitary Confinement Commander. Interestingly enough, all of the leadership development training paid off in a lot of the situations I found myself in.

A few of my close military comrades noticed how I handled things, they also watched how I lived and saw that I did things a bit differently. One of them would listen to speaker Les Brown, and he suggested that I consider the path of public speaking along with possibly life coaching.

I definitely gave the idea tons of consideration to the point that I would start my first company based on life coaching and success development. What I didn’t know at the time was that nobody really cared about my insights or what I had to say because I wasn’t yet an actual success, even though I had accomplished a variety of things most people would never.

I thought that this was enough to attract clients to help, and build a business off of… I was wrong.

This was BRIO Developmental Specialists, where I would encourage people that I would guide them on their journey to success. The overall concept made sense and the vision I had for it was OKAY, it just wasn’t IT.

Even though I had come back to America, gained some experience working for a few small businesses, and attended various BNI meetings, my true expertise was only beginning; although I had thought I already knew enough. You could easily say that I didn’t make any money with that business, nor did I obtain any reasonable clientele to substantiate the business model.

I didn’t give up, this motivated me, I started researching more ways to find clients and reach my developing target audience. That’s when I started paying more attention to those digital marketing ads and wondering maybe that could be a way that could help me. I took a few of those “guru” courses, and still received none of the results I was looking for. Doing this gave me a new idea though, I could create my own course that was packaged with everything I wanted to share instead of searching for direct 1 on 1 clients.

My course was called “8 Days To Resurrection” where the objective was to recharge and reboot your life within the next 8 days using an extremely strategic set of principles. This journey in making my first course opened the door to later on launching my next business that would turn out to be a success.

Frankly I didn’t have the funds, I had to create my course from scratch all by myself. I spent hours watching “how-to” videos on course making, then I had to also watch videos on videography along with video editing since I would be the one filming and editing my content.

After finishing my course I recognized a few things that were very different from all of those “guru” style videos.
1. My videos were NOT clear.
2. My audio was NOT the best.
3. My descriptive visuals did NOT connect with the vocals.
4. My physical presence NEEDED WORK.

A long list of things needed to improve if this course was going to be a success and achieve my desired results. Rather then focus on improving the course, I sought to improve myself.

I had an inner belief that as long as I was on this pathway to development, eventually I would get to where I wanted to be in life. I wasn’t going to give up on business yet, I still had a fire for entrepreneurship inside of me… I was only getting a taste of what this undertaking is irrefutably about. Business is not easy, there are innumerable amounts of skills and information you must know if you plan on dominating and making it to the top.

As they say, you have to commit to being a life-long learner in order to succeed.

Although I didn’t pursue more course making, I did however give a go at content creation. Creating content was much more direct and simple. I could connect with my target audience using a variety of channels, leveraging some of the most popular social media platforms that host billions of monthly users.

I could do live videos, launch pre-planned content, I could post photos and share my story with the world at the click of a button… Suddenly my perspective about social media was changing.

Maybe I was using it wrong this entire time…

What if I started using social media for my business, instead of just updating my friends about stuff they didn’t care about anyway?

The same type of content that I presented in my course I started sharing more on my social media. A lot of people thought I was crazy, they unfollowed me and I didn’t care. I finally felt like I was moving in the right direction for once.

At first nobody watched when I went live, I just kept doing it cause it was fun. Over a little bit of time I started to gain some popularity across these very small, tight-knit communities of micro influencers. My social media friend’s list on Facebook went from like 1,ooo something to about 4,000 over about a year from 2017 to 2018.

The live videos I was doing were getting hundreds of views over time, and I thought that the support I was obtaining was genuine. Until a few scammers went through my whole friend’s list spamming everyone with this ridiculous digital art scheme. It ruined my network.

Hundreds of people DM’d me asking who the scammers were and it was a major headache to deal with. I had connected with a lot of my Facebook “friends” on personal relationship terms, when this took place it ruffled a lot of feathers which pushed my business further off the brink.

Again I was left clueless with what I should do.

I still stayed consistent researching how to improve myself and improve my content. I saw that it worked, I just needed to figure out how to do it better and find a system that worked for me.

Upon my research, I came across some car videos that I really enjoyed. The way they shot them really captured the cars in a way that was unique and expressive. How did they shoot these videos?

Since I was now a beginner videographer, I started to think about ways that I could shoot some new type of content other than just “self-help” material. I remembered when I was younger, I used to go to car meet ups and do things like that, I thought to myself perhaps there could be an opportunity available in this avenue.

I didn’t have any connections, I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t have anything that people would be looking for as a fair trade value. My mind was racing and my heart was pounding; I knew I was on to something, but I didn’t know what. I kept searching and sourcing information from every reference on ways to improve my craft, I was becoming more and more invested into the visual production process.

Often you just have to be present in the moment, that’s when things come to you… I was actively searching and looking at videos when I came across one that turned my light bulb on even brighter! — In the video the presenter was talking about the most popular forms of videography, their industries, and pretty much what to expect.

Another “ah-ha” moment.

They suggested getting into videography by working with startup musicians and artists. This was an easy way for you to truly gauge your content for what it was in conjunction with the artist’s content/presence. If you’re doing it right, you’ll see growth; plain and simple. This also opens doors, creating access and networking opportunities where your work can finally be seen, even by just a small audience.

I tenaciously went on prospecting and trying to get in front of people, however I still didn’t have a camera.

One day I was offered the proposition of working with an artist and using the camera they had; I would just need to be their dedicated visual creator… Without pay.

At the time it was fine because I was learning so much more while executing on the work as opposed to simply being home watching videos all day. This was basically my first time working with a team to build a visual campaign around something… An artist.

Any and every question that was put on the table was immediately brought to me, and I had to find the answers. I had to know how to bring our visuals to life, similarly to the mainstream content we were used to. I had to know how to shoot properly, how to create seamless edits, how to blend audio, and so much more.

I thought I knew a lot after creating my first course… This though, was a completely different world.

More complex editing tactics, much more digital and abstract elements to add into the scene, I had to learn the true definition of “b-roll” and why it’s so important to storytelling. I had to learn new shot angles that were intended to procure a feeling that the audience would resonate with, and coming up with proper staging for the artist to be seen in.

After working together for some time, I felt I was ready to get my own camera. I became interested in wanting to shoot other forms of content, maybe even produce a documentary or short film… The possibilities now seemed endless.

The artist I was working with planned to go out of town, which would have left me camera-less. I begged and pleaded with my mother to buy me a camera so that I could maintain my work regardless of my artist being present or not; I was still using their camera for work.

She bought it, and as soon as my camera arrived I got right to it.

I increased my prospecting to obtain more gigs and work with more startup artists. I was seeing this type of business getting traction. Something was working.

At the time I had absolutely no idea who I really wanted to work with, I was open to working with almost anybody. Most of what I was trying didn’t ever go anywhere, until I met a new artist that would later evolve into my business partner for my next business venture.

My business partner and I connected very strongly on fundamental principles, we also shared similar visions for what we desired out of life. The more we discussed our own inner objectives, the more we saw the chemistry brewing. It made it much more simple to share my speculation with them because they did their own due-diligence on the market, including the overall risk/reward potential.

Would it be worth it to bring this artist in on what I was doing?

Although I knew I could have used the help to attract more clients, I was seeing a much larger picture in the mix. There were a few bigger jobs I could take on now that I had assistance… With that being said, I saw that a business was forming from the ashes of the one currently crumbling. BRIO Developmental Specialists was becoming BRIODS Corporation Of America, a grander and more powerful pursuit.

Following the affirmed commitment of this new artist to become my new business partner, I decided to put a business plan in place to make everything official. We would register the company, open a bank account, and do the necessary things needed to be taken seriously by the market.

December 2018, BRIODS Corporation Of America was born, and our sights were set on this fresh pathway before us:

Through BRIODS I would serve the market by producing high quality visual content using a specialized form of dynamic visual production, I would also help with idea generation, planning, and execution of content strategies to help reach more people on social media. Additionally, I would offer more advanced level business strategy sessions for those that wanted to take things up a notch with their brands.

Videography was my way in, and I knew it immediately.

Even with getting results and seeing things happening I wasn’t yet completely sold… It wasn’t until I came across another video that my perspective changed forever.

My mind was already open from doing so much research and trying so many new things. The video I was watching showed a cinema style camera worth upwards of $100,000 dollars total being retrofitted to a $250,000 dollar plus, Lamborghini Huracan.

Why?

Car commercials.

High end brands can pay big money for commercials, which is still considered a form of content creation. We had the potential to make some decent money if we closed on some big gigs. I knew it was possible because even though I had no idea who those people were from the video I watched, I saw that they had an expensive camera strapped to an expensive car and I wanted in!

I got active and went to the streets in search of more opportunity. I took my camera practically everywhere in hopes that one day would be “THE DAY”. My running around paid off as I was able to find a supporter who pledged $10,000 dollars into our growing business. They saw the vision, what we had going for ourselves, and they wanted to play a part in seeing us get there… They even had a very rare car to help us jump start our automotive aspirations.

With the money we were able to get some better equipment to make higher quality content. My previous experience selling clothes as a store manager was going to play a role too. I had confidence in us adding merch as an “evergreen” type of product to act as a base for our supporters to be a part of our brand. Furthermore, we began collaborating with other supportive businesses to increase our market share.

I was able to refine BRIODS into a business that mainly focused on working with: influencers, artists, and entrepreneurs.

Most of these influencers, artists, and entrepreneurs are not able to produce high quality visual content for themselves, that’s where we at BRIODS serve as the conduit for creating what they need. In addition, we are able to provide design services for them in various domains like merch, digital graphics, cover arts, websites, and much more.

One of my proudest accomplishments is the fact that I’ve been able to materialize my innermost convictions about entrepreneurship into the outside world.

An example of this is my work with Ryan Cala at F.C. Kerbeck, Palmyra, New Jersey. The history behind F.C. Kerbeck is longer than 100 years, and they are the ONLY high end luxury auto dealer in Southern New Jersey. As a child I would visit their showroom with my parents, dreaming about the day I would own a Lamborghini. If you know this dealer, you know that they barely allow photos to be taken of the vehicles; due to the exclusivity of their clientele. For about 20 years I’ve been going there visiting and just looking at their cars, until such time that my business partner and I would walk in there only to meet one of the owners and Ryan. Following a very brief discussion, Ryan inquired about our video services and sought to do a trial run, upon which we agreed. Ryan loved our work, to this day we work very closely together revealing some of the world’s rarest and most exotic vehicles from Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Bentley, Rolls Royce, Maserati, and so many more brands.

For me I know without a shadow of doubt that all my goals will come true, it’s only a matter of time.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Building my audience on social media has been a journey within itself. In the very, VERY beginning, I would post simple updates on Facebook. At that time I had absolutely no angle other than just sharing what I thought was valuable.

My initial posts would receive heavily mixed reviews, more often than not they were negative. I didn’t quite understand how to share what I was trying to share. I was under the impression that if I just posted, people would engage and it would go somewhere… That was extremely far from the case.

You need a strategy to build a decent audience on social media. Random posts and chatter-boxing don’t go far, unless that’s what you plan on developing your business around. The goal is to create a space where people can connect with what you have to offer; whatever that may be.

As I got better, I learned how to post better. I learned the right resolutions to post in, I learned how much text you’re allowed to use in a post, and then I learned how to use Ads to reach over 5 million people.

Some advice I can say is to focus 95% on communicating what your brand offers, and just 5% on whatever personality you want to share. Social media is a gateway to reach people that want to support your stuff!

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

A book that significantly impacted my entrepreneurial thinking was a book called “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David J. Schwartz. The book aims to help its readers achieve personal and professional success by teaching them how to think more positively and overcome self-imposed limitations… A key theme of the book is the power of positive thinking.

What resonated with me was learning that action cures fear, and a disease we develop called “excusitis”. According to Schwartz, “excusitis” is the disease of creating excuses for not acting or accepting responsibility… I had that, and I wanted to be cured.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.briods.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/avi.rps
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/avrespes
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avidonmrespes
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@avi_rps

Image Credits

BRIODS Corporation Of America