We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Yeosh Bendayan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Yeosh below.
Alright, Yeosh thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.
This is really going to make us seem old, but we found our first client in the Yellow Pages. Like, the literal book… not the online version. To be fair, the yellow pages were super outdated already in 2006, but we literally had no other lead list to work off of. We were just starting out at the time and barely had $500 in our company checking account. So, without much to lose, we opened the yellow pages to the advertising agency section and started dialing. We got hung up on a lot, but we did manage to score two meetings from that.
The first was with a local agency we had never heard of. That meeting went super well and he hired us to work on some radio ads practically on the spot! That client went on to work with us for many years and still sends an occasional project our way. Not only that, he became a friend and mentor as we got into the business world.
The second meeting was with a gentleman (using that word loosely here) who indicated he may have a need for us. We were SO excited to meet with another agency, and we prepped and practiced our pitch. When we got there it turned out that this dude was trying to sell us on hiring him to help us develop our business. Total heartbreak for sure, BUT several years later we got a call from a person looking to create ads for their Italian restaurant. After several rounds of work with them we thought to ask how they had learned about us, and wouldn’t you know it, the shady ad agency guy sent him our way!
Moral of the story: don’t turn down any meetings when you’re starting out. And don’t be too discouraged when a potential lead doesn’t go your way. You really have no idea how those interactions might shape your future… it just might take a few years for it to pay off.
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?
My name is Yeosh Bendayan and I’m a first generation American with a mother who was born in pre-Castro Cuba, and a dad from Morocco. I’m a partner at Push Button Creative Audio, which writes and produces audio for local, regional, and national brands. Among our main services are radio/digital audio ads, brand music/jingles, and podcasts. Push Button has been around for 17 years and has worked with hundreds of brands coast-to-coast and around the world.
I got into this business while still in college. I reached out to a local rock radio station looking to get involved in production and be an on-air talent. At the time, I was studying television and film production at the University of Florida, but I was intrigued by radio, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I started with overnight shifts two nights a week, from 2-6 a.m. It was brutal for my sleep schedule, but honestly a ton of fun! Fast forward about a year and I was offered a midday shift Monday through Friday, which was a dream job for a kid still in school. I started learning the ropes of production and getting involved in other operational aspects of the station. One day, a new creative services director was introduced to the staff and we hit it off. We started partnering to work on radio commercials for various local clients and got recognized for our work by creative award shows and by the station management who saw sales revenues increase because the advertisers like the work we were doing.
As my college career came to a close, it was time to decide what to do next. I always was a business-minded person and thought we had a real opportunity to make something cool and unique. So, the creative services director, Jon Ruhff, and I launched Push Button Productions and away we went. Clients poured in and we were instantly wealthy.
Okay, not at all. We spent YEARS working on developing the business, honing our craft, learning the ropes of advertising agencies, attending networking events, and finding out how to create our own mark in the industry.
Over the years we have learned a lot about running a business. The main thing that we have figured out is that business is really all about solving problems for people. We think of ourselves as a customer service organization more than as an audio branding agency. We focus our efforts on finding solutions for our clients and making the process as simple as possible for them. When people ask us what the ‘secret sauce’ is, that’s really it. We are trying to be the last production resource our clients ever need, and we approach any project we take on that way.
I remember early on in our business thinking that we just had to get to five years because I’d read a statistic somewhere that said something like ‘businesses that make it five years have a 90 percent chance of making it to 20 years’. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I think what I’m most proud of after all this time is that we’re still doing something we think is cool and fun and worthy of our time. I still get a kick out of new projects coming in and getting to work with brands across the country. We’re now coming up on 20 years and it honestly feels like it went by in a blink.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Sometimes in business you have to stick to your guns. When we started out, tons of people told us that audio development was a thing of the past. That there wasn’t a need for a high level of expertise now that audio production was becoming more commoditized through software anyone could purchase and use. We felt differently about it though. We had a true passion for this – and we loved sharing that passion with our clients. In that case, sticking to our guns was a great thing and took us a long way.
Other times though, you really need to pay attention to what the market is telling you. Pivoting into opportunities has allowed us to capitalize on trends and make us experts in things we didn’t expect. For example, back in 2013 we stated talking about this ‘podcast’ phenomenon. After all the years of being told radio was dying, it was so interesting to witness the rebirth of radio on digital platforms. We spent the next couple of years watching the podcast industry from afar, trying to figure out if we wanted to get into it, and how we would put our own spin on it. To be honest, we tried to stay out of it for a while, as it really wasn’t a proven medium and didn’t have the kind of reach out clients would be looking for. So we waited…
Then around 2017, we saw some things change. People were asking us about podcasting more and more. We made the decision to tiptoe into podcasting with the addition of the service on our website and some outreach to existing clients to see how they felt about investing in it. We had some success, but it really was crawling along until… pandemic strikes.
In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic we all were sitting at home, just trying to figure out what we could do. Then the phones started ringing. And all these calls started to feel eerily similar… something along the lines of:
“Our CEO/CMO is stilling at home and wants to get something off the ground. How can we make a high-quality podcast with no access to a recording studio and everyone working from different locations across the country?”
So, we put our heads together and reached out to some of our vendors. What we figured out is that we could build remote studio kits and ship them anywhere for hosts and guests with enough quality that they would sound like they were in a pro studio. Now, it wasn’t exactly a cheap proposition, but it was a workable solution! So away we went and started building these remote kits for brands of all sizes – from Fortune500 companies to local doctors’ offices… the response was great, and now we had a clear angle into podcasts – helping brands to figure out how to get into the space in a high-quality way.
The client base continues to grow for us as another core component of our success in the space is the fact that we are very hands on. Many podcast companies are relying on artificial intelligence tools to help with editing and posting, but we are looking for the brands that want audio producers that are going to take the time to make a quality show. So, we don’t have ten thousand clients, but the ones we have we treat like family, and they tell us they love us for it.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
When we started in business, I think we figured that if you do a good job, people will talk about you and things will grow organically. And maybe that’s how it works for frozen yogurt shops, but that’s not how it worked for us! One common refrain we would get from agencies was “sorry, but you guys are our little secret… I’m not telling competitors to work with you, too!”. It was super discouraging because in this case doing a good job was potentially harming our prospects of growing quickly.
Now, looking back after 17 years, I think the thing that built our reputation more than anything was the desire to help the people around us without real consideration for how it might help or hurt our business. Don’t get me wrong, in the early days there’s almost nothing we wouldn’t do for a project. But once we were able to distance ourselves a bit from the ‘need’ to hustle for every bit of business, we could see the bigger picture more clearly. We were able to think about our clients more clearly, too. What we realized is that we shouldn’t be trying to sell our clients on productions, we had to sell them on us. Or to put it another way, we weren’t trying to close them on the deal on the table today – we wanted to be their audio production resource for life.
So, what does that mean? It means that we are completely honest with our clients about doing what’s best for them, even if it means telling them they shouldn’t spend money with us. As a matter of fact, not a day goes by when we don’t get a call from someone looking to have us work on something; and once we learn about their objectives, we tell them not to do it. Maybe it’s not worth the investment, or maybe it’s not a strategically sound idea right now. The point is to actually help people make the right decision for them without regard for how it impacts our bottom line.
The result? Sales are stronger than ever. People are connected to us because they feel like we’re working alongside them – and we are. We have an insane renewal rate with our contracts (100% so far in 2023). And it all stems from giving them the advice they need to hear, and not the advice that benefits us.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.pushbuttonproductions.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ohmyyeosh/?hl=bg
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/pushbuttonproductions
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yeosh/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ohmyyeosh?lang=en
- Other: https://twitter.com/pbproductions https://www.instagram.com/pushbuttonproductions/
Image Credits
Push Button Creative Audio Gator100 image: Matt Pendleton