We recently connected with Glory Visuals and have shared our conversation below.

Glory, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

Darren and I (Austin) met at church in the spring of 2017. We quickly became friends and bonded over a shared love for cameras and photography. At the time, I was selling Yellow Pages advertising and absolutely hated it, but was also second-shooting wedding films on the weekend, which I fell in love with. Darren was doing freelance photo, video and design for a couple of startups.

I knew that I wanted to make a full-time career out of video, and I spent my free time consuming hours upon hours of Youtube tutorials and learning the ins and outs of the camera I had recently purchased. I was keeping my eye out for someone to team up with and start something as I knew I didn’t want to do it on my own.

It really clicked for us when Darren hit me up to help him on a church sermon series promo video. He had a script and a track, and we just need to film a bunch of b-roll of the city of Omaha to make something out of it. We met up that night right before sunset, shot until dusk, and edited the whole project together that night. It was an experience I will never forget.

After that, I think I mentioned something to Darren about wanting to go full-time and asking if he would be interested in partnering together. He said he was open to it and we started talking about what it could look like. We tossed around names and ultimately landed on Glory Visuals.

In early 2018, we had a logo designed on Fiverr and filed for an LLC. We had an office setup in our pastor’s basement and spent as many evenings as we could meeting to get the business set up and begin building a portfolio.

Early on, we of course weren’t making full-time income from shooting videos; we had zero work to show for ourselves outside of the couple church projects we had worked on together. So we began networking. This mainly looked like attending business events and shaking hands; reaching out to businesses that we saw had a need for video and offering to create something for them for free; putting out content and messaging people on Instagram. We knew we needed to get our name out there in any way we could.

The next step was to go full-time. We had a goal of May 2018, but I knew I was getting fired from my job (I sucked at sales) on April 6th. Then, on April 4th, Darren got let go from the startup he was working primarily for and we decided it was time to jump in.

We went full-time April 6th, and have never looked back.

That’s not to say everything has been perfect since. There were several times where we couldn’t pay ourselves the modest salary we had decided upon. We owed $35,000 to the IRS at one point because we didn’t have an accountant and didn’t handle the financial side of the business properly. We almost sold a major portion of our business for $15,000 because we didn’t see how we would climb out of the hole we dug for ourselves.

I think the key, however, was that there was never a backup plan or an escape route in either of our minds. We knew that this was what we were supposed to do and that if we kept being faithful, that it would pan out.

Looking back, I don’t know that there is much I would change. We’re coming up on our 5th birthday, and going through the challenges we’ve faced over the past 5 years has taught us to be more responsible, better leaders.

We have grown financially ever year since we started and we currently have three awesome full-time employees, making us a team of five. We have a big vision to build something great and it’s only the beginning!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Darren and I are both self-taught (shoutout Youtube University).

We are in a unique market in that Omaha is full of opportunity but there isn’t all that much competition. We are striving to carve a niche for ourselves as a lean, cohesive team that can provide a service that outweighs the cost. Our biggest passion is to serve others, and many times that means taking a level of ownership over a brand’s image that isn’t commonly seen. We strive to do the absolute best with what we have, which is often a set budget, time period, etc. Our goal is always to exceed expectations for our clients.

We are proud of the team that we’re building, the feedback we get from our amazing clients, and the opportunity that has came our way.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

The book Who Not How by Dan Sullivan has greatly impacted the way Darren and I lead our team. When anyone starts a creative business, more often than not they have to wear every hat — but there will come a point where that becomes unsustainable and burnout begins to set in. If I could go back, I would have relinquished my pride in being able to do everything earlier on and brought people onboard to help staff the things that I didn’t need to be spending my time doing. It was 3 years until we hired our first full-time editor because we were to afraid that our standard of quality would dip; but in the past 12 months, we’ve hired 3 more employees because we realized we couldn’t continue to do everything as our business grew. This has lead to more freedom to do things like plan passion projects or write treatments for upcoming projects.

Who Not How, in essence, is about finding people who are better at their area than you are, and empowering them to run in and crush their area. Because of this book, we now have people on our team who are better editors than we are, better at pre-production than we are, and it enables us to do what we are best at. It’s definitely easier said than done and many hundreds of hours of training have gone into the team we have to get to this point, but we are now able to have a healthy balance in life because we’re able to focus mostly on things we really love doing, and let others handle what they love and we don’t.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

We also have a podcast called The Glory Boys Podcast. One of the most rewarding things about being a creative is helping others through talking about the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.gloryvisuals.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/gloryvisuals
• Facebook: facebook.com/gloryvisuals
• Youtube: youtube.com/gloryvisuals
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/glory-visuals-omaha?osq=glory+visuals

Image Credits
All photos were taken internally