We recently connected with Kayla Oudthone and have shared our conversation below.

Kayla, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

My father was a great man. He came from Thailand as a young boy with our family, speaking zero English. He grew up in Martial Arts and this inspired him to have his own Martial Arts studio in his later years. Throughout this, my father taught us about living a passionate life. He showed me that it would not always be easy, that there will be many obstacles to overcome and there will be many people who will doubt you. It was always important to believe in yourself and to treat others with respect along the way because you never know the impact you may have on their lives. He was a humble man who just wanted to live his life doing what he loved. I watched this growing up and so did my siblings. We are now all three pursuing a creative career that we have started from the ground up. I believe we all went an Entrepreneurial route because of him and how we viewed the workforce. We learned perseverance and how it can sometimes take all of you to make it work, but it is the most rewarding thing to start seeing growth. It is the most rewarding thing to see a dream take form in reality.

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?

I own and operate a production company with my sister called, Oudthone Productions. We provide a variety of photo and video content for companies and individuals. Ranging anywhere to headshots or a small commercial for a company, to family portraits or a wedding film for a happy couple!

I am most proud of our company being a family/female owned and operated business. We pride ourselves in making it in a male dominated field and providing job opportunities for other female Entrepreneurs as well.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice

My view on NFTs would be that they are the future. I highly encourage all artists and creatives to look into your own if you want to get ahead of the game. Build your presence in the world of NFTs because this is the opportunity to be an outlier of something that will be booming in the next few years. It is already in motion. There truly is nothing to lose from putting yourself and your work out there in digital form.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When it comes to resilience, I think a lot of us creatives or Entrepreneurs share a lot of the same pivotal timelines as of recently. The pandemic really affected so many of us. Our company was set to have our best year in 2019, but we had not fully committed to full-time with Oudthone Productions. We spent a few years hustling with multiple jobs on the side so that we could build our inventory and portfolio. At the beginning of 2019, like most people, we made a New Years resolution to go full-time and be completely dependent on our company, to go full force with passion and resilience. We decided 2019 was our year and parted from our salary jobs. Things were great. Until they weren’t. Two months in we were were hit with the world shutting down, just like everyone else. Every client through the 2019 calendar year canceled and we were left with an uncertain future. Flooded with questions in our minds. Feeling defeated with no direction. The only thing we knew to do was take advantage of the silence with building our brand in a different way. We took the time to indulge in more education revolved around our skill. We taught others how to use equipment they just started picking up. We started reaching out to companies about COVID-19 related videos. We had to figure out how to use this to our advantage and not to be discouraged by the feeling of hopelessness. It helped to know we were not alone in our journey to build ourselves back up from nothing. Our pivot and resilience through a pandemic that wiped away all of our income in moments, will always be something that we will be able to lean on when things feel at a dead end. Currently we are projected to have our best year so far, but it is because we never truly gave up. It took until mid 2021 to feel the weight slowly coming off of us, but we were confident in our product and ourselves to make it to where we are now.

The thing about life, is that it is unpredictable. Things are always changing and morphing into something we may or may not be prepared for. We have to allow ourselves to keep an open-mind and to be flexible through adversity. It is only a dead end if you see hardships as a wall you’re unable to climb. Everything can be seen as an opportunity if you create space in your mind for it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.oudthoneproductions.com
• Instagram: Kayla_Oudthone
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayla-oudthone/

Image Credits
Oudthone Productions