We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Video 4.0 a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Video 4.0, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
I started off in the Dance industry. Music and entertainment played a big role in where I am today. Taking hip hop classes .. taking my brothers to their dance classes ballet jazz contemporary. Everywhere I went music followed. It wasn’t long befor I started filming and recording everything making highlight videos became a norm . I said to myself, it be cool if I could Perform my own music and make incredible videos behind it! But that was just a drop in the bucket compared to what happened next. I begin filming model to highlight their shows / and I got to talk one on one with a international model. One who was really talented and we’ll recognized. One day her story touched me. I will never forget she said she didn’t know if she wanted to contain the modeling space because so many models get taken advantage of and it’s making the industry look bad . People don’t wanna pay models anymore. They want them to work for free – so there are no more replicable places any more.. I felt her pain and immediately felt like it was time to do something about it. So I made up a small scope and sequence of what I wanted this business to represent I studied how to become my own Publisher, my own Entertainment company I had already started a music label by this time . One that would help music Artist gain music knowledge in learning the music business and thus making a living on their own, I thought why not add more to the entertainment business and separate it from my artist name and call it 4Zero Entertainment LLC. And then my business was formed .
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 started out as a music artist, and I navigated the music space for about five years. I realize that a lot of music artist knew how to perform, knew how to make a music to necessarily know the business of how to make a living in this music space.. I was also making great music at the time but did t quite know all the small things things like publishing monetizing, how to collect digital royalties, mechanical royalties. I didn’t know that there was a multitude of different type of monies there was to be collected once an artist made a song. So I put it upon myself to learn the business aspect, so that no other artist would have to endure a long journey of disappointment. I said I had to take a five-year program and turn it into 24 months of education so that when a person comes in to our establishment, they get the complete education on how to do it themselves,. So now we not only offer full service of a full blown. Label we offer education we offer entrepreneur independence.. we offer modeling services we offer dancers we offer filming film editing, we offer music performances, but the most important thing that we do for people is save time.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
One of the things I can say that I had to unlearn was performing at showcases that did nothing for me, even though it made me feel good, was not quite the smartest thing to do for business. I learned that giving free performances, and a venue that does not compensate you for those performances did not help because it took money out of my pocket. Instead of put money in my pocket I had to unlearn that pay to play was not the smartest thing as far as making deposits into my bank account that in fact, it was the quiet opposite. As a beginner, I learned that everybody was out to get the uneducated artist money, and they did not care to put money back in your pocket, or to give you. The notoriety deserved with the cost that came along with pay to play. Now I’m not saying that all Peter plays bad, but when it does nothing for your career, then it just may not be the best choice.. there are so many other ways to market yourself in the music space, and in the modeling space, young and uneducated, you can end up spending and wasting a whole Lotta money .
Have you ever had to pivot?
I started out in sports football to be exact boxing on the backend, and when I shift gears, I wanted to dance and music. I had to learn real quick that there was not a lot of teamwork outside of sports, and that running a business or becoming a CEO was going to be a task unlike no other, and so when it happened, I had to pivot and make the decision on having less friends when I had came from an organization that had many friends but if it was hard because you start to see the real world, and how people can be very deceiving and loyal and backstabbing , you start to see greed, and in a way You almost feel as if you are alone and there’s some cases you are, and you have to find a way to keep going, because in the end life is not about how much money you have about how much time you have.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.4zero.net
- Instagram: @video4.0
- Facebook: Video 4.0 MUSIC
- Twitter: @video4_0
- Youtube: Video 4.0
- Other: www.Video4-0.com
Image Credits
4Zero Entertainment. LLc