We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sacred Thomas a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Sacred, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
In 2012 I started a party bus transportation service with my business partner Vinny Jurado. We both started it while we were in college at Texas State University. The company ran for about 7 years. While we were operating the business we used to hire a videographer by the name of Thomas Abowd to film our promotional videos. Thomas & I became close as friends and one day I asked him if he learned how to film while he was going to school at Texas State. He told me that he pretty much learned how to film from Youtube and not school. That statement planted a seed in my mind & from that point on I would continue to think about it. During the final year of operations I knew I wanted to do something different but I didn’t know what. I kept asking myself the question, “If time or money were no object, what would I spend my time doing?” (I’m a big Alan Watts fan.) During that final year I found a content creator by the name of Thomas Alex Norman on YouTube and fell in love with his travel videos. I took a course and picked up filming as a hobby with a cheap camera that I owned. Soon I was diving into the travel video content creator space and found people like Sam Kolder, Peter McKinnon, Chris Hau, Jay Alvarrez and more. I saw their work and was absolutely amazed. So after thinking about that question, “If time or money were no object, what would would I spend my time doing” for about a year I realized that answer was right in front of me. The answer was, I would travel & film. I thought, if my friend Thomas Abowd learned how to film on Youtube why can’t I? If these Youtube Creators can make a full time living doing just that why can’t I? So I bought a professional camera, learned how to use it from YouTube and the rest is history. (As a side note I learned most of my technical skills from Thomas Alex Norman. his courses and YouTube content were pivotal.)
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
I explained how I got into my industry on the previous question but I’ll expand on it. Once I learned how to use a camera I did a lot of free work for friends and family to sharpen my skills. Once I thought I was good enough I created a website (SacredShot.com) and put examples of my free work on there to use as a portfolio to show potential clients. I saw a listing on Honeybook.com that said someone was searching for a wedding videographer but they only had a $500 budget. I sent her my portfolio, we had a conversation and I booked my first gig! I was dating someone at the time who I hired as my second shooter and we crushed the wedding video. She absolutely loved the final product! From there I gained the confidence to actually get paid for what I do. My company has filmed weddings, corporate events, fitness commercials, festivals, travel content, you name it we’ve most likely done something similar. As I’ve grown the company over the years and have gotten better with video production myself I’ve always had a soft spot for travel video content so whenever I would take a trip I would film it and post that to my social media. I always say, if you want to break into a certain industry make sure you create videos surrounding that industry even if you have to do it for free at first. The more I posted my travel content the more it gave anyone watching the idea that, this could be them. Eventually I started to get booked to film projects in different states which turned into different countries. Before you knew it I started to live my dream of traveling and filming. These days what I’m most proud of is, we only take on projects that we can be just as passionate about as the client. I live in a creative space so there’s a dance that I must do with clients to really bring their project to life. If the client is a great fit its possible for us to create magic. These days I’ve also amassed a large personal following on both TikTok and Instagram so I’ve really become laser focused on growing an online community that I can provide value and entertainment to while still living my dream.
Is there a mission driving your creative journey?
One of the quotes I live by is, “Live a life you don’t need a vacation from”. My goal is to truly create a life that I love from sunrise to sunset. The goal is to be so in love with what I do that I don’t need a vacation from it. That doesn’t mean times won’t be tough but the overall arch of my life through the good and the bad is enjoyment.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I was an early instagram adopter. I was so early that I was able to secure the name @sacred on Instagram. That was eventually hacked and I created an account that I now use @sacredthomas. I grew that to 17k which took about 9 years. About a couple of years ago I discovered TikTok. I tried it for a second and couldn’t grow on it so I put it on the shelf. A couple months later my sister grew to 10k on the platform with what seemed like one post. Once I saw her do that I looked into how to grow on TikTok and discovered a guy on Youtube by the name of Robert Benjamin. I took his free course a year and a half ago and used the info to grow my first couple of thousand followers. From there I bought his mentorship program and used that info to grow to where I am now 262,000 followers and counting. With the introduction of reels it was easier to transfer content from TikTok to instagram so I started doing that religiously. My instagram was stagnant at about 17-18k up until the last 45 days. I had a post go viral and boom within that time frame I grew to 103,000 followers. After the post went viral I started to see dozens of articles written about me and my dad and an increase of brands reaching out to work with me. Now people may see that and think it happened overnight but the way I look at it was, for 9 years I worked on perfecting my craft as a content creator. When that post finally took off the people seeing my page already had interesting content to look at and it ended up resulting in people actually following my page. Once that one post went viral dozens of post on my page also started to go viral at the same time.
If I could give any advice to someone trying to grow their audience on social media it would be this:
Find something your passionate about and create content surrounding that. If you aren’t passionate about your work your audience will feel it. Passion will get you through the hard times where it feels like nobody is watching. If you’re passionate about the content you’re creating you’ll be more willing to continue to learn and get better at your craft.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sacredshot.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sacredthomas/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Sacredthomas
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sacredthomas
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/sacredthomas?lang=en
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SacredThomas
- Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sacredthomas Articles mentioned: https://www.yahoo.com/video/fans-floored-miami-vice-star-194906719.html Viral Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cd6JMwHl_kX/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=e8a93d21-0480-4c2c-8c9b-a87f2bacddb7
Image Credits
The studio images were taken by Katie Cadwallader. The travel images were taken by me.