We were lucky to catch up with Tommy Dunn recently and have shared our conversation below.

Tommy , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

When I first started my company, as a party promotional/marketing company called Party Profiler. I started by investing in local parties as a promoter. I started hosting events such as comedy shows, Greek parties, celebrity club parties, and other social events. In the very beginning, I connected with a friend and we had a promotional company named Distinguished Gentleman Ent. Once he decided not to throw parties anymore, I then started working with another group of brothers, who had a promotional company by the name of Bout Bread Entertainment. Putting together parties and being the lead Promotion Team, requires grind and grit, especially during the Dallas club scene days at that time.

As the party scene under that company started to phase out, I came up with the name Party Profiler to review parties and offer my graphic design and videography services. Literally, I started doing graphic design work to cut down on my party expenses and overhead cost. Under my brand of Party Profiler, I started doing more than just party promotion Graphic Designs. My clients wanted the full package of Videography, Photography, and Web Design. The full branding and marketing experience. As my clientele grew I had to change the name to fit a well-rounded business market and that’s how I came up with the name PpSquared Production. PpSquared Production is Party Profiler to the second power and from there I started making short films and featured movies, shooting big event Photography and videography such as weddings and business launch day events, and programming Website Designs for large corporations. Most recently, we now offer a full Brand Building package for all marketing needs.

What started out as promoting parties and bringing crowds of people out to have fun has evolved into a high-demand, all-inclusive branding/marketing service for all of our clients’ photography, videography, Website designs, Brand Building and graphic needs.

Tommy , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

What’s good World! My name is Tommy G, my real name is Tommy Dunn and I own a Graphic Design, Website Design, Photography, Videography, Brand Building and Filmmaking Company named PpSquared Production, PpSquared.com. My first step into this industry, I invested in a party when I moved back to Dallas from college in 2004. This started my journey as a Party Promoter. I started by doing local events such as Comedy Nights, Greek Parties, Club Nights and Celebrity Events.

During this time, to market these events, I would pay people to do my graphic designs and flyers. Me being an artist, one of my friends introduced me to Adobe Photoshop and showed me how to work the basics. From there, I started doing my own graphics for our events. At this time, I was learning the software, doing promotions and working a regular 9 to 5 as an Assistant Manager at Walgreens. I did a lot of free work to build relationships with different club owners and promoters, in trade, they would let us use their venus for different events, me and my Promoter Partners. If that wasn’t enough, along the way I picked up bartending, started working at the front door as a Bouncer, still doing promotion and I was one of the Managers for another bar.

While I was working as a Bartender, I began working at a bar called the Ice Barr. My Bar Manager started paying me to make small event fliers to bring in more customers. From that work, more paid graphic work came from people he knew and people coming to the bar. I quickly became the guy they all came to for flier work. As the bar became more popular in the city Night-Life, I designed more fliers. These steady bookings helped grow my business and develop my craft.
On a booking for a Frat Brother’s wedding, somebody stole my bag with my camera and my laptop. I was devastated. I had to start over from square one. This was a curse and blessing at the same time because this birthed my filmmaking career. Before my camera and my laptop got stolen I was working on so many different projects. I knew my next set would both be upgrades. I invested in a new Nikon D3200 camera. I was new in this design space, it was difficult to get clients, so I did movies with my nephews and niece. My two favorite genres to write about are Comedy and Horror. I started investing in different lenses for my camera. This led to me starting back writing scripts, shooting and editing my own projects. I continued to network and connect with people. Most of my jobs now come from word of mouth and referrals.

With the new camera I also started to enjoy Photography, shooting family events, my friends’ weddings and kids birthday parties. I started watching tutorials on how to shoot betting and doing free events and kept working on sharpening my skills to this day.

Overall, we provide a quality “One Stop Shop” for our clients. We build strong visuals that’s attractive to the human eye, that tell their authentic story, across many industries with strong customer base sales and ROI. Our super power is creativity, PpSquared.com has the power to create your ideas into reality.

Most exciting is that PpSquared Production continues to grow in skills and portfolio. Recently, we have partnered with DTR TV Channel and App that’s free on Roku, Amazon Fire Stick TV, Google Play and Apple Store. Content Creators have an affordable platform to upload their film projects for customer consumption. DTR TV has even created a Film Festival! So many other fun projects such as new Indie Author novels, clothing line designs, and much more!

Our Brand will continue to give positive awareness imagery and stories. A few of our future film projects will be focusing on awareness about love, education and entertainment. You can find our work on PpSquared.com and DTR TV Channel and App.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I have several pivots in business and in life. My first pivot point resulted in me having to change my business name from Party Profiler to PpSquared Production. During the first few years of business I had a business partner. The business strategy was for me to provide all of the graphic, design, marketing needs for each event and he would negotiate our deals with the business, artist and club owners. Many bad and crooked deals later, we decided to split ways. I’m grateful for the bad times, as it forced me outside of my comfort zone even more. I was comfortable being the Director of Creativity and this forced me to learn even more of the business. This pivot taught me contract building, booking obligations, networking and implementing business strategy.

What I came to realize was that Party Profiler wasn’t professional enough to do business outside of the event party spaces. I knew that I had outgrown the name. I pivot Party Profiler into PpSquared Production, (Party Profiler to the second power). The business now encompasses all Marketing, Graphics, Web Design, Brand Packages, Brand Building and even Film Making.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

As life will have it, you may be forced to pivot in the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected ways. The tail end of my club promotion career, my drive home was always late at night, early morning. I found it harder and harder to see at night. Every year, I had to increase my prescription. It got so bad that driving home was getting really scary, especially when it rained. I have strong muscle memory and I drove the same way home every time but it got to a point where my glasses were useless. At my next eye appointment, rather than ordering a stronger set of glasses, he informed me that he could no longer help and I needed to see a specialist.

This season of life was one of the lowest points of my life. I was literally losing my vision in both of my eyes. My corneas had become deformed, which led to me having surgery on both of my eyes…one year apart. This was a 4 year period. I had to stop driving, navigating public transportation with limited vision, working a regular job with a set schedule, etc. Losing my vision, I had to let go of a lot of side-hustles that I had taken all, which impacted my finances.

Through it all, I learned to appreciate this pivot.I call this time of my life transition. You have to embrace all life transitions because they will happen if you like them or not. I gained inspiration through a guy I saw on Youtube, he was born with no arms and legs and yet he climbed a mountain. Then I started looking around, my cousin Bo Dunn became fully blind as an adult, I had a friend that was paralize in a wheelchair due to being shot as a teenager. I put it in my mind that a “little vision problem” will not stop me from getting what I need done. I worked with my vision! I asked my doctors if being too close to the TV, Computer Screens, or Phone would hurt my eyes even more, they said no! The rest was history. While waiting for surgery and afterwards,I still did graphics, editing, photography, and videography. I use my camera for my eyes when I coach little league football. I use my phone to see things when I go to my son’s football games and even watch movies at the theater. I fell back in love of writing film scripts and plotting movies. I embraced this new pace of life.

I developed an understanding from empowerment research that everything starts with the mind, so I preach “Do and Speak what you want into existence”. Today my vision is better, as I was fitted with a special contact. PpSquared Production is in good shape because I continue to build clientele and relationships. I didn’t let my vision stop my vision.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ppsquared.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ppsquaredproduction/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PpSquaredProduction
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommy-dunn-72676b199/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/PpSquaredProd
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSRwZXMoZ5OkuCxUjG0EzfA
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/ppsquared-production-garland?osq=PpSquared+Production
• Other: https://pro.imdb.com/name/nm8325005/overview

Image Credits
Photos by PpSquared.com