We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ben Reed a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Ben thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

About 8 months ago, I started working with a business coach. His name is Trevor Olesiak and he works through a company called Novus Global. I can’t recommend business coaching enough to anyone in the business world. It’s completely changed my mindset, my language and my outlook – we can get into more of that later, but one of the exercises Trevor challenged me to do was write a letter to myself from when things weren’t going so well business wise. For me that was 2018. I always try to be transparent so hopefully this isn’t an ‘overshare!’ But, if you want to know what it’s like during the struggle, during the “in-between” time, this is it.

“2018 was the worst year of my professional career. We had our first child, business was not great and we were down to $3000 in our bank account. Savings and checking. It cost us $5000 to have our child and I had to put it on a payment plan. And in December I couldn’t pay the credit card for the first time in my life. Suddenly, we got $5000 from a family member for our daughter’s college fund. Sorry kid, we’ll pay it back. And then a 12k bonus from an investment unexpectedly. I was so down and questioning everything. But those unexpected blessings from God snapped me out of it and told me it was going to be okay. At that point I was trying so desperately to sell my own projects. I had basically been fired from a job I thought was going to put me on the map. And in actuality it was the worst project of my professional career. It was awful. So many hours, for nothing. I was so exhausted. Truth be told, I couldn’t even sell a free video to a tree trimming service. So many times I would just sit on the stairs and cry. Wondering how we got to this place, wondering what I did wrong and wondering if I would ever have a legitimate business. 2 months later, I sold the first Blazing Bull Production. It had taken 5 years to do something completely my own. It was a national commercial spot that no one wanted. The budget was 10k, which is nothing but I didn’t care. I felt like I had one shot so I spent all of it. I made no money. But I was going to make something I was proud of. And we did. And that project led to another project, to another project and they are now Blazing Bull’s biggest client.”

Really, the moral of the story here is don’t give up. Believe in what you are doing. In my greatest successes I’ve questioned my ability, my worthiness and my opportunity the most. But what I learned through the scale up is that I am enough. Hard times are going to happen, but if I can celebrate the “no” and stay true to myself and never give up things will work themselves out. Since that time I’ve seen revenue skyrocket, survived a pandemic, hired two full time employees, have moved from my home office to a larger office and continue our growth in the industry. A lot of that is due to business coaching. I’m a creative at heart, I don’t have a business degree but I’ve always asked questions, developed relationships and sought out the right people to help get me where I want to go. In 2018 I never dreamed I would be where I am, but I’m so grateful I pushed through and am excited to see how things continue to scale up in the future.

Ben, 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 am the Founder and Executive Producer for Blazing Bull Productions based in Jacksonville, FL.

Blazing Bull Productions is a full service, bespoke content creation company with a co-op of national vendors that can provide creative services for any production need. Our goal is to define success for our clients and use our expertise to execute a product that stands out from the crowd. We specialize in managing projects from conception to completion. On-site or in the studio we can do it all: feature length documentaries, short and long-form features, charity profiles and social media content.

An 18 year veteran in the sports and entertainment production industry, I’ve been blessed with 3 National Sports Emmy Awards and 9 nominations. I helped redefine how NASCAR was presented to the masses and worked on staff with PGA Tour Originals before founding Blazing Bull Productions.

I have been a story producer or editor on several high profile projects like “All or Nothing: A Season with the Michigan Wolverines,” on Prime Video; “Shaq Life” on TNT, “Coach Snoop” on Netflix and “1989: The Year that Made Us” on National Geographic.

My work has been featured on every major sports and entertainment channel as well as multiple streaming platforms. And I has been an on-site producer for some of the biggest events in sports like The Ryder Cup, The Masters and the Daytona 500.

Through hard work and some amazing clients, the Blazing Bull team was selected as the broadcast content team for the 2020 and 2023 Ryder Cup, 2021 KitchenAid Sr. PGA Championship and 2022 and 2023 PGA Championship as well as several other amateur golf events. In addition, Blazing Bull has produced four feature length documentaries to date and a vast array of original and branded content throughout the sports community and corporate partners.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

The first one that comes to mind is a feature I was directing in Montana. It was a profile piece on a youth golf team near Glacier National Park. We had been there for a few days but the forecast said snow on one of the days, so we made sure to shoot all the “inside” elements that day. Well, no snow that day and the final day was for all the “outside” activities. The next morning, with no forecast of snow, I wake up and hear a strange noise. I grew up in the mountains, so I know what cars driving on snow/ice sounds like. My first instinct was “Oh NO!” So I called the coach of the team and before I could say anything he said, “I’ve got a plan.” Since you can’t play on a frozen golf course, we built a 3 hole course on the driving range and made it work. However, we still had a card of footage corrupt on us and we couldn’t do a lot of the things we had planned, but we powered through and it actually turned out great. The other side note to that was this was in to be a series of features that several production companies were producing and I had been asked to do one of them. And these were much more established companies with national/international renown. However, I’m competitive and when I kept hearing about these other companies and how awesome their features were going to be I said to myself, “No. Mine is going to be the best.” Haha. So that weather situation added some frustration to the day. BUT, and this is a big but. That snow made it memorable. And because the people were so great and their stories so compelling, I ended up having the best feature. That really set me on a good path of work and connected me to one of my biggest clients now. Also, because of that feature, the coach got a lot of notoriety and ended up winning a youth coaching award for it. So the lesson here is that you can’t focus on what you don’t have, you must embrace the circumstances you are given and make the most of it. Things rarely go right in the TV world, learning to be resilient is paramount.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

For most of my life I always felt that if I did the right thing, treated people the way I want to be treated and worked hard things would fall into place for me. And I came to realize, that while those are admirable thoughts, I have to be more proactive in my story.

My business Coach has helped me a lot with this. Being SPECIFIC! Painfully specific on what I want to achieve and how I’m going to get there. As I realized, I was vague with almost all my goals and dreams. It wasn’t intentional, but it was almost like a subconscious eject button that gave me an out when things weren’t going right or were too hard. Now, I’ve built an actionable schedule with deadlines (because I need skin in the game) that I challenge myself to meet. It is a much more empowered way to approach life, in my opinion.

The other lesson I’m trying to unlearn has to deal with the goals themselves. I’m an achiever, I like to make lists and cross off tasks when they are complete. I like to reach and achieve my goals. Missing the mark is not easy for me. But, one day, my coach said it’s great to hit your goals, but if you hit every single one your goals, they aren’t big enough. And that really impacted me. I’ve achieved some things in my life and career – but the idea that my goals were too achievable really through me for a loop. Now, I’ve reframed my attitude towards goals. And it’s okay if I don’t achieve them as long as I am making progress – not using that as an out to slack off, but a freeing way to stretch myself to places I never thought I’d be.

The other thing that I have tried to unlearn is the idea of saving money. My entire life I was told save, save, save. (Saving is a good thing, not saying spend every dime you have). But I heard Warren Buffett say something a few years ago. He said you’ll never save your way to wealth. Yes, it’s good to save and have money stored away – but you’re not going to generate wealth by cutting the cord or not buying Starbucks. You generate wealth by taking risks, going for it and taking an offensive approach (to use a sports term). That really changed my mindset and ties back into my desire to be more proactive in life.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.blazingbull.net
• Instagram: @blazingbullprod
• Linkedin: Ben Reed
• Twitter: @BlazingBullProd
• Youtube: Blazing Bull Productions