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

Dane, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

So to preface this, I work in the wedding industry, and I think that the wedding industry is most definitely a unique industry. I am convinced that while there are definitely universal lessons to be learned, there is a lot of truly unique and niche aspects to the wedding industry that do not apply in the same way in corporate America. It’s one of the few spaces that large corporate entities have not taken most of the market share, leaving very little space to start something small. I think the reason that corporate America hasn’t taken over most of the wedding industry is because people want that soul, they want that passion, they want a team with them on their wedding day who is real. They want real people, not soulless corporations, to be with them on their journey, and small businesses, run by passionate people, are exactly who you want by your side, making things happen, when you’re getting married.

When it comes to the wedding industry, I think the biggest thing you need is a deep passion for weddings and the romantic stories we get to be a small part of. As wedding professionals we get to be a part of someone’s life on a very important day that holds great meaning for them. The passion and love for weddings and every story you get to be a part of is important both to help you as a business owner continue to elevate and improve the service you’re offering, and to help ensure you’re providing an experience for your clients that is very personal, genuine and real.

The particular niche of the wedding industry that I work in is wedding films, and I think that for both wedding videos and photography, you need passion on a whole other level. This is because at the end of the day, I think that passion for what you’re doing inevitably translates directly into the product you’re producing. If you’re not in love with what you’re doing, it’s going to be something you can almost feel as a viewer watching the final video that is made of the day.

That being said, I think you also need a deep passion for running a business as well. This is because at the end of the day, no matter how nice your photos are, or how great your wedding videos are, you are running a business, and that is gonna end up taking up a good chunk (if not most) of your time. What I have learned doing this, is that the people who have passion for what they are doing, want to wake up in the morning and go to work. They want to edit the videos, and they want to make Excel spreadsheets, and figure out ad campaign strategies. It’s a fun puzzle for them, so doing it every day is exciting. As a small business owner you don’t have a boss who is gonna help motivate you to do stuff, it’s all on you to wake up in the morning and go to work, and that takes a good deal of internal self motivation and drive.

I love what I do, and I think if your passionate and constantly striving to improve both your product, and your business, your gonna be a success :-)

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

So, if you have ever seen the film “Super 8” by J.J Abrams, I was, in spirit at least (not in reality), the kid from that film. Starting at around the age of 10, I was obsessed with making short films and telling stories, and that passion simply never went away. As I aged, the direction and what exactly I did with narrative film changed, but I was always passionate and never stopped perfecting the craft.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I ended up signing up to help out a small local wedding videography company as an assistant, basically just carrying bags, and pointing a camera at people when my boss asked me to. Prior to that gig, I had no clue that wedding videos were even a thing, that you could make such incredibly beautiful films for people.

I remember one wedding in particular, when I decided I wanted to make wedding films. We were doing what is known as a “Same day edit” – a Same Day Edit is where you shoot all morning, shooting the bridal preps, the ceremony, and everything from the morning, and then you hand all that footage off to an editor, and have a film ready to project by 6pm that evening at the reception. I was running around with these people all day, watching them work, and then when that film hit at 6pm that evening, when we tossed it on the screen, it was beautiful, it was heartfelt, I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes, I could feel those fluttery romantic feelings welling up inside me, and knew right then and there, that I wanted to make wedding films for people.

I ended up working for a number of years after that for a bunch of different wedding film production companies, starting small and working my way up, from assistant, to second shooter, from second shooter to lead shooter, and eventually my obsession with quality and making the best videos possible lead me to starting my own company so that I could control more of the process, and get the freedom to really elevate the product.

Honestly, I love what I do now, and I am so grateful that I signed up to carry some equipment cases one fateful summer day.

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

I have learned to focus on what makes me love business and what makes me love what I create, and to focus less on the money.

In the culture we live in, we are surrounded by messages from big corporations and people who are trying to optimize large scale businesses for maximum profit. I have, in the past, made the mistake of taking advice from people who love money first and the product they create second. Every time I have sat down and taken advice from people with that mindset, they have advised me to up sell clients things they don’t need or want, and to cut quality because “people can’t tell anyway” and ultimately it hurt my image, and more importantly it made me less passionate about what I do. The second I returned to my roots, my passion for what I do came back, and my profits only went up from there.

Be frugal, don’t waste money on things you don’t need that add no real value to what you make, but always, always, always be genuine, and put the quality of what you do first.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

The two things you need for a good reputation in business:

1. A deep passion, downright obsession for quality. If you are driven to produce the best product you can, and to deliver it every time, without fail, people will notice that you deliver time after time, and that what gets made is phenomenal.

2. Be nice to people, be nice to everyone. Help elevate those around you, both with words and through action. Contribute to the community and the world will give back to you time and time again. We’re all in this together, your community is the life blood of your small business.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.caspersonproductions.com
• Instagram: @casperson_productions
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYg2tZf9cWDyMwNiT7Ql34w

Image Credits
Kate Holt Photography Daniel Stark Photography