We were lucky to catch up with Trenton Carson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Trenton, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

Scaling up has been one of the hardest and most rewarding part of the business journey. It requires constant pivoting, refining, retooling and sometimes rebooting. Each level presents new sets of challenges that you haven’t dealt with before. My business has drastically changed since first starting out. When I first started my video production company, we were mainly a music video production company. We were heavily involved in the indie artist/music scene and regularly shooting artists performances in whatever avenue they performed in. We would shoot them performing onstage, in hopes of connecting with them via social, to eventually creating a music video for them. While this worked in the capacity we were in, this wasn’t sustainable. We’d have to shoot dozens of music videos per week at those rates to break even, and still would need a part/full time job to remain afloat. While the indie music scene were often insanely creative, the funding just wasn’t sustainable to run a business, let alone for growth.

We had to pivot from working within the music industry to working with entrepreneurs, solo and small business owners. While the creativity wasn’t always there, the funding at the time was far better than before. In this space we were able to grow a little more. It went from a one man crew to having one other being able to help on a production. One major difference early on was the timing. With the musicians, your day would start around 3pm and usually end around 1am. If on the weekends you could see yourself arriving home after 4am. Now, when you’re working within the small business community, your day starts at 7am. Another major challenge that we weren’t used to were networking. There are early morning networking meetings, lunch networking, after hours networking, etc. Trying to navigate in a more professional setting proved to be challenging as we had to learned our elevator pitches. As we gained more comfort and experience, we started to add on to the production team on shoots. This required…you guessed it, more money. Now since we were growing and raising prices, we started to run into the same problem as we did with the music industry. We’d have to have x amount of production shoots per week to be sustainable. We had to pivot once again.

This time we had to focus our efforts on the bigger small businesses and eventually medium size businesses. It was refreshing to enter a space where there were already a prepared budget for your services. The challenge now was that there wasn’t one person you had to sell too, there were several decision makers. So now we were pitching to a group of 2-5 that had all different opinions and assumed theirs were right. Also entering in this space where you had to learn that you had to spend money to earn money. The networking events eventually turned into business associations, chambers, closed networking groups, BNI, PowerCore, etc. Each having annual and monthly membership dues. This is where we grew substantially. We were able to bring on a very good size of freelancers that became our main crew. With those talented people added to our team, we were able to bid on bigger projects more aggressively. This also where we were able to bring on our business manager. This helped streamline our behind the scene and admin procedures effectively. Contracts, processes, filing, etc was now handle by someone else. This allowed us to focus on other aspects of the business and to obtain more growth. But as all businesses will experience, it was time for another pivot.

This is now where we’re currently at. We still work with small businesses, but now effectively market to medium size businesses and corporations. With this next move, more funding was required. Our overhead jumped considerably. We had to deal with new softwares and platforms to handle our production company. Not to mention paying for additional insurance coverage. With this territory, we had to rethink our messaging. Yes we are very good a video production, but we could no longer be everything to everyone. We had to do something that I was fighting off for the longest. That is, we had to niche down. To do so, we had to go back over every project that we have ever completed. We had to discuss what we liked and didn’t like. Which services were actually profitable. Which services that our clients benefited the most. Which industries would we serve better in. This took a lot of planning to do. Meanwhile, our team was growing even more. We now added on a production manager, production coordinator, video producer and our latest addition; an account executive. Now there are many assets running the day to day, which mean overhead grew even more. This means our current production schedule was no longer sustainable and the profit margins became razor thin. We had to complete our niching down and stick to a solid message of who we will and will not serve.

That leads us to where we’re at today. We’re a Video Production Company that partners with business owners and executive marketing teams to develop and execute highly customized video marketing campaigns focused on driving leads, awareness and brand loyalty in the Tech, Finance, Manufacturing and Healthcare industries. We do that by creating highly effective Branding, Marketing and Testimonial videos.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

After obtaining my bachelors degree in Cinematography in 2007, working in Hollywood and working at a National TV Station, I decided to bring my production expertise to business corporations by starting my own Video production company. I has been owner of TC Productions Video Production company for over 11 years. Over the years I have shown businesses how to leverage video to give them a real marketing advantage to grow their businesses, within their respective industries.

TC Productions Video Production Company partners with business owners and executive marketing teams to develop and execute highly customized video marketing campaigns focused on driving leads, awareness and brand loyalty in the Tech, Finance, Manufacturing and Healthcare industries.

The two areas I specialize in:

You get videos produced specifically for your intended audience – Video Production.
You get those videos in front of your intended audience – Video Marketing.

I have successfully helped my clients:

*Build brand awareness and establish an influencing presence online

*Ensure they are properly conveying their company’s messaging and services
*Effectively use video as a tool in their marketing strategy
*Create evergreen content that enhances their marketing message
*Become comfortable with the growing demand the market has for videos

What I learned:
Stories are in everything you do. Your brand and the story it tells impacts people, what they believe, how they feel, and the decisions they make. The combination of visuals and sound evoke emotions more effectively than text alone. If you want to draw your viewers in, connect with them emotionally, and move them to take the next step, working with TC Productions to produce your next video will make you the company hero.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Being online has been the best source of clients for us. We practice what we preach. When we tell our clients and audience on how videos connect their brand/business to their audience, we’re saying that because thats what we do for ourselves. Being able to be found on Google and being seen on Youtube has done well for our credibility and reputation. The main objective is to be consistent. Our content manager has a content calendar that highlights our company as the expert in the industry. We post several videos and blogs….weekly. On multiple platforms.

Even though online visibility has been the best source of clients for us, business associations and networking events are great as well. We’ve benefited from being sponsors and attending various events. The main thing, in which ever marketing route you take, is to be consistent.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

You have to be really proactive in keeping touch with clients. We put all of their information into our CRM just to ensure we’re following up and keeping up to date with them. Our business manager has a robust system for checking in and keeping our clients updated. Our account manager has a system for reaching out and getting update on how are videos are being used by our clients. Our content manager makes sure we follow all of our clients on their social media platforms. That way, we’re able to follow and share their success with them. It’s a revolving system to keep up with our clients, but those are some of the reason why they are loyal to our brand.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tcpvid.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tcproduction/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TCProductions/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tcproductions/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TCProductionvid
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPUsbIKDbPIw7HycsUVN3BA
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/tc-productions-llc-roswell-3