We were lucky to catch up with Tais Lourenco recently and have shared our conversation below.

Tais, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the story of how you went from this being just an idea to making it into something real.

.One idea changed our business, our relationship, and our future, and it wasn’t revolutionary or frankly that unique.

The idea of entrepreneurship is so rarely talked about.

You can be innovative, you can be clever, you can be a leader, but what about the desire to create from scratch? I think everyone has a deep desire to play, create and break things. To get to this advice though, a method that changed my outlook on everything, see if my story relates with you as it has when I tell it in person,

When I thought about myself, and my direction for the next 3 years I felt a deep in gut pressure that bothered me. I think women with a working spouse can relate to this; You have a feeling of “am I doing enough.” We get into a mind space of wanting to help and build and dream but sometimes feel helpless in actually executing. We want so badly to support our partner and show we love them, but the stress paralyzes us into inaction. It sucks.

In my case, I’m incredibly lucky to work with my husband in our own company, a creative agency called CineSalon. The problem is that he founded this company before we met, has built a reputation with many leaders in DC, and has industry knowledge years ahead of me.

I come from Brazil, with a much different background and more limited business acumen. I was learning English and performing and visual arts. A totally different world from business.
Not because I didn’t like it, I just had no contact with it, even the whole idea of coming to the United States seemed far away from my reality.

After being here, meeting people, working and learning with them, I felt smarter, l had (still have) the chance to not just learn, but experience the whole thing.

We talked often about how I could do more for the business and it would always end in the same way. “Tais, I want to make you CEO, and I’ll be president.” There are many reasons that’s an advantageous position for a company given today’s climate and as government contracting goes, a major bonus for us.

The problem was. It’s just not my dream or my interest. I love to create, be the comedian, and frankly get nervous thinking about doing meetings talking about EBITA, ROI, PPC, ROAS, blah blah, and 100 other acronyms I don’t know.

I said “Shane, it’s not what I want. I’m sorry” He understood, but it hurt.

A few weeks after dropping that bomb, I was browsing through X when I came across a word I didn’t see before, entrepreneurship or the art of being an “entrepreneur within a company”

I ran down the stairs yelling to my husband, I want to be an entrepreneur. I know what I can do that will give us both what we want! YAY!

I’ll be the head of creative. Hear me out. We own a creative agency right, There’s no reason a “creative” can be a major owner in the business. You always talk about these old-school guys who were creative and started these ad agencies, why don’t I do that? You do the business stuff and I create.

This person, x, said I can be an entrepreneur. I can come up with my own initiatives, departments, and ideas, and still have a boss. So keep being the boss and I’ll handle the ideas.

He sat in silence over a bowl of 11 PM cornflakes. “Let’s try it.”

For the past 3 months, I have been leading the charge on scaling our creative efforts, scripting for clients, building our brand and my personal social channels, and doing what I love being creative. It’s been a game changer for us too, as he’s able to handle the sales & client relations stuff better than before as creative was wearing us thin.

What’s better is that I’m able to test and prove methods on ourselves before bringing them to clients. They see it working, they see our relationship as rock solid, and it makes them want to try and buy. It’s really incredible.

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’m the creative director at CineSalon.

We’re a video production agency that helps grow brands by using video better. That means more relevant storytelling, better-paid ad strategies, and strategic influencer activations.

We come into brands and audit their current marketing efforts, going through their paid media metrics and finding all the tweaks we can do to help squeeze as much value as we can from their funnel.

We’re very unique in the team we’ve assembled for our auditing hit squad.

It’s not the usual agency type, and we’ve done that by design. It’s helped us explode with growth and provide services big agencies struggle to personalize. A few larger firms have brought us in as their agency of record to handle their video efforts, they use us once, or twice, and by the third go we’re an outstretch of their team.

The team has 3 pillars of expertise, paid media, video creative, and influencer. We take a group of experts who have scaled privately funded ventures past hundreds of millions in valuation and have them focus directly on marketing issues. We’re like kids in a candy store, figuring out marketing problems is so incredibly fun. We’re weird. It works. Some people love to fish, we love to build businesses and hack sales/marketing funnels.

We also took 2024 to double down on our customer service and make that the star of our businesses. That meant cutting response times down to as short as possible. If we could respond instantly, we would.

We realized in a culture where ghosting and automated chatbots ruled, getting a real helpful person who responds fast is actually a dramatic competitive advantage.

Clients and your own team deserve the same customer service. Clear, quick, and transparent communication is crucial. I’ll make the argument that if you can’t do that, you are destined to fail.

We noticed a dramatic increase in new leads, reviews, opportunities, positive PR, and just good vibes within 2 months of implementing what we called “deliberate customer service” or conscious thought into what would make our customer’s life the best it could be in that moment.

We’ve made a basic handbook to follow that grows with each customer interaction that’s new. It sounds silly, it was silly, now it’s our religion.

We’re talking things as simple as having a cooler on set with candy bars for crew and talent, answering ultra late, and sending emails with information our clients or crew may find interesting. It seems so basic, but it’s a dying art in tech-driven everything today.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I feel like social media got really popular during COVID. Many people who started at that time became famous and built their audience. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them. I was watching content rather than creating. Back then, I was taking some acting classes, photography classes, anything to keep myself busy.

One day I took a social media class, and my teacher asked “Why are you still not creating? What are you waiting for?” That was my turning point.

I began doing what others were doing, dubbing TikTok audios and trying to create something funny. It was around the end of COVID, and things were opening up, but people began to notice me.

When I met my husband, we started making skits together. I created content comparing Brazilians and Americans, highlighting cultural differences, and sharing funny jokes that immigrants could relate to. This approach helped me grow my audience as people enjoyed that content.

These videos were pretty bad, but they kept getting views and support from “fans” kept coming. We had 2 videos break 1M views in a short amount of time, and I started to take it more seriously and invest more time in quality.

I soon realized I didn’t want to be known only as “the Brazilian living abroad.” I’m also an actress, and I wanted to showcase my talents. So, I began mixing my content with life situation comedies, couple comedies, and immigrant comedies, which is what I still do today.

Social media is deceptively difficult, just posting a ton of content isn’t enough. You need to craft stories, be real, be relevant, learn how to film and edit, and have a plan. It’s not impossible either. The key is consistency. It sounds cliché, but it’s true. I try to post at least five days a week now, but when I started, it was once or twice a week—that’s what I could manage. You can improve your content by consistently posting, observing what works, and using insights as your main ally. You might have to reinvent your content, finding what works best. I did that with mine. I probably lost some followers along the way, but I also gained new ones.

Remember, your first video might won’t be great or get tons of engagement, and that’s okay. You’ll learn and improve with each video. There’s no hack, no magic formula. Just be consistent, create interesting videos that people want to watch, don’t fear judgment, use underperforming videos to improve your next one, and most importantly, have fun. Do it for you.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

I manage a few teams between my work at CineSalon as the creative director, my own social media brand, and our coffee company in Brazil!

The same habits work across languages, industries, and products:

Be responsive
Be kind
Be direct
Own your own faults.

The easiest way to practice this is to envision your parents, you have a service or a product you want to give them. How would you treat that scenario? You’d tell them the truth, good and bad. You’d offer to help them use it. You’d deliver it and answer their questions. You’d be happy when they liked it, and fix it when they didn’t.

I look at our teams and do the same. I’m also honest with feedback, keeping in mind that ask for it as much as I give it out. You can’t overcommunicate, it’s not possible. You can be annoying, but that’s worth the risk vs a confused team that’s lost or confused, that’s what builds discontent and missed objectives.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cine.salon/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taislourenco__/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tais-lourenco/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ShaneAndT

Image Credits
I own the rights to the pictures.