We recently connected with Ryan Tolleson and have shared our conversation below.

Ryan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

We believe what sets us apart is our ability to offer high production quality at an affordable price.

We are unconventional in the way we do some things – Michael is a self-taught artist and entrepreneur and Ryan is a formally educated filmmaker. As both worlds collide, we are able to identify the most effective avenue to accomplish our client’s goals, while keeping the cost within reason.

We’ve learned, over the years, how to wear many hats and use our long-standing rapport to be as efficient as possible.

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?

We grew up in the small town of Bethalto, east of St. Louis, in Illinois. During our Junior year of High School, we started a garage band – which is where the creative partnership truly began.

As we both moved on to college, the projects became video/film-related. Michael was writing his own music at the time, and Ryan shot his music videos. It was a great way to train our creativity, create a process, and really build a team dynamic. Around 2014, we both decided to take the leap and go full-time into Whole Street. We’ve had the honor of shooting for some fairly large companies but have had the most fun when given full creative control on smaller gigs, with the room to experiment and play.

We both have a deep affection for St Louis (Ryan graduated from Webster University) and have
always had the long-term goal of building our company here and working with as many local
businesses as possible.

We strive to help businesses create video content that may have previously been thought to be out of their budgets. The importance of video in marketing has exploded in recent years – if
you’re not using video to promote your business, you’re already behind your competitors who are.

Whether it’s more informational content like testimonials and brand films, or more creative type
work like narrative commercials, we produce quality video that you can use on multiple platforms to showcase YOU.

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

We were working on our first semi-large budget music video. It was a milestone for us. The project was very involved so we got to hire our first crew. It was a fantastic feeling to bring in like-minded individuals who were experts in their own positions.

Everything was ready to go for the Friday night walk-through. We were all super excited and confident and just ready to make a great product. As we said our goodnight and the crew left, the artist began to get cold feet. We spent the better part of 2 hours trying to relax and give confirmation that we were all set.

Unfortunately, he walked off the set and never returned. We had to cancel the project and all the hard work and time we spent on pre-production, was gone.

We had a serious moment where we both said, “Do we want to continue doing this?” It was absolutely demoralizing.

We took a few days and regrouped and decided we couldn’t give up. Literally, that same day, we got an email from another artist, asking to shoot a video. That video became one of the best projects we have had the chance to be a part of, to this day.

It was validation that we are doing the right thing by continuing to fight and never giving up.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

Oh, plenty of times. Our business is very cyclical. Some stretches, we’ll have more work than we can handle and other times, the cupboard is bare.

We’ve had to forgo payroll a few times and even considered selling gear and personal items to just make it through the dip. It’s extremely humbling and, frankly, terrifying, but we always seem to pull through.

We certainly lived off credit cards for the first few years of the business. It was very difficult to grow such a technical business, with no injection of capital. However, we managed to do so and are very proud of that.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wholestreetproductions.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/wholestreetproductions
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/WholeStreetProductions
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/wholestreetproductions
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/WholeStreetProd
• Other: www.vimeo.com/wholestreetproductions