Ep. 2 with Evan Bourcier - Action Begets Luck, Pt. 2

Pt 2 of our conversation with Evan Bourcier. In this podcast episode, the discussion revolves around the strategies and mindset freelancers can adopt to succeed in their careers. Key topics include negotiating rates confidently, quoting projects effectively, and making smart gear purchasing decisions. The importance of setting clear financial goals and managing business finances, such as hiring an accounting firm, is also highlighted.

The conversation also delves into the debate between investing in oneself versus saving for retirement, with the guest suggesting that self-investment yields the greatest return, especially early in one's career. Success is attributed to a combination of awareness, seizing opportunities, and hard work, emphasizing the significance of maintaining an open mind and readiness to take advantage of chances that arise.

Interested in coming on the show, or know someone who would be a good fit? Email us here - seth@sethlowephoto.com

Follow the show on Instagram - @thesolocreativepod

Transcript

Seth Lowe (00:01.366)
Hey, welcome to The Solo Creative, a podcast for freelance filmmakers and photographers who want to become more successful at the business of freelancing. I'm your host, Seth Weld.

Seth Lowe (00:15.338)
Hey, welcome to this week's episode of the show. This is part two of my interview with Evan Borchir. I wanna keep these episodes around an hour apiece, but Evan and I ended up talking for over two hours and I didn't wanna cut anything as I thought there was a lot of great info in there. If you haven't listened to our first episode, I would encourage you to do that, but otherwise, let's jump in. How much do you worry about setting your day rate versus what your peers are charging or how much do you kind of stick to your guns or know like, hey, I know the average is a lot of my...

a lot of my peers are getting 1,500 bucks a day or two grand a day, but I'm committed to getting 2,500 a day on these types of projects or whatever. Like how much do you worry about that or walk away from a project or be told budget or whatever? First few years of my career, I was very much like, tell me what you've got and I'm gonna make it happen kind of person. At some point, a few years ago, I turned a corner more towards like being firm on what I think my time is worth.

Um, and part of that, honestly, I think it's just better. It's just better conversation management. Um, I still run into it with friends who I'll call and be like, Hey, I want you to come shoot this thing. Like, what do you want? And they're like, well, my rate is 1500, but I'm willing to be flexible. I'm like, please stop saying that. That's just a stupid thing to say. Like.

you're asking for a negotiation when no one is asking for one, and you're only negotiating against yourself in that scenario. So I've become much more like a, here's the number. Another thing that I feel like I just learned about myself was that there's often more money than we realize and that I skew higher in general on everything. Like early on in my career,

It used to be like, okay, Google what ShareGrid is doing for a rental rate and undercut that by 10% or whatever. And at this point, I'm more like, look at what an actual rental house is charging and mark it up a little bit because I have the convenience factor of just bringing it. Like I'm not, you have all the little parts that someone else is going to forget or whatever, you know, it's, it's ready to go. I'm not trying to be cheaper than ShareGrid with anything. If I'm showing up with a whole package, you know, like that's, that's going to be a thing. Um, it's a little different, like whether I'm playing.

Seth Lowe (02:34.258)
sort of that like line item for a production company and agency game or like the direct to client sort of here's a flat number game in how I'll go about it. So like I actually have to send a quote today about something and generally like it's a weirder world I find negotiating rates in the freelance world just because the structure of the day rate conversation there isn't much to actually negotiate. And so it just sort of comes into an arm wrestling conversation where like in the client side,

You know, we'll usually present options and you know, whatever it is. If it's like, Hey, here's $5,000 option. Here's $20,000 option. If they're like, okay, well we need to be for 15. Then it's like, okay, well here's what I can take away to get you to 15. But when it's like, we need you for three days for 10 hours. And you're like, I want two grand. And like, we'll give you a thousand grand or a thousand dollars. And you're like, okay, I don't know. It's just an arm wrestling contest now. You know, it's like.

Well, is the weather nice that week? Do I want to be, am I going to want to be outside? You know, you're just like, what's, what's it worth to me? Right. But I've found that in general, my personal experience is that, uh, the person being hired has more leverage than they give themselves credit for a lot of the time. Yeah. And I even find that like when I hire crew members for our stuff, I'm generally just like, tell me what you want. And I'm not going to argue with you. If there's a really firm number where you have to hit, I mean, that's a rare situation, but that'll come into play. But like.

My experience has been that if someone's calling me to do photos or whatever else, like even a 20 or 30% gap isn't enough to go to the next guy on the list. Like you have to be pretty out of the ballpark to screw it up. And so I skew relative to the data I'm aware of, I always tend to skew high. And I find that works. I'd rather like tell a client, yeah, you know, it's three grand for the day. And they're, and they're like, could you make 2,500 work out? And then it's like, yeah, great. But if I'm like,

1500, well, I just left a thousand dollars on the table. You know? Right. It is wild too though, like full disclosure, like I was texting some friends yesterday cause I do find there's value in sort of just like probing for information cause it's really easy to live in our own heads. And so I texted a few friends who are in different worlds cause I got this email about like, Hey, can you do these like 40 or 50 portraits and headshots for us? And I was like, how do you think about this?

Seth Lowe (04:46.442)
And it was funny because I got everything from one guy texted me that he'd charge like 150 bucks an hour and the other guy was like 15 grand. And I was like, these are two very different goods for the same thing. But I like having that information because it just challenges whatever my preconceived model of how I was going to go about it. And like, if you normally think in a day rate conversation, like a lot of those types of conversations now, I'll skew the whole conversation to let's talk about

person served. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's kinda how I look at it. Yeah, cause if someone were to be like, oh, it's a day at whatever, you can argue a day to be whatever you want, but maybe the reference points two grand or something. We hired someone else for a day. But if you go like, oh, I can get all 50 of your people portraits for $150 each. Now you're at 7,500 bucks. And if that's in their budgeting works out, you know, it's really a lot of controlling that frame of reference and what people think you're selling. Cause I've run into that too in the past with

photo stuff where people have been like, oh, we were really looking to be at X number and I'm like, okay, well for the number, number of deliverables you want, that would be whatever it is, $2 a photo. And that's not really realistic. So that w that's what puts me over here. And then usually that even something as simple as that reframed look like, Oh yeah, that makes sense. It's like 30 bucks a photo. That's not that expensive. The whole bill may sound expensive to me, but like what I'm paying for the thing is expensive.

Dude, I literally just did like 75 headshots for this company. Like I shot them back in like November. I'm really touching now. And yeah, I did the same thing. I did like a per person basis. And I think I was right around that. Like, I think I made like eight grand or something like that on the thing. And I just set up like a structure where they had somewhere between like 50 and 70 people. And I set up, set it up in a way where like, okay, if only 40 people show up, I'm going to at least going to hit this per day. And I'm not going to like.

I don't want to get hosed and sit around for three days or two days and three people show up, you know, or something like that. And I just kind of found a structure that worked and it made sense for them because they sort of had like a per person calculation and then like a safety minimum for me and they're happy and you know, it worked out great. In a situation like that, are you delivering like a selects gallery and letting people pick deliverables or do you just pick like, cause that was one thing actually that I was debating with this quote in particular was like, are you looking for a single headshot of each person?

Seth Lowe (07:07.498)
Or do you want options that's more funny one, more serious one? And because I find generally I've never really given clients select privileges. I know some people do that. That's like, here's all the photos from your session. Which ones do you want to use? But how do you handle that? On that situation, I had a friend who did a swing, Digitech lighting roll for me. And then we shot.

tethered into Capture One and then as soon as I shot someone's portrait and I felt like I had a good one, you know, they would just go over and look right away and I had like a little bit of a look applied to it, you know, it's had a little contrast and everything and you know, I just let them pick right there and we just flag it and that was boom, that was it. Some people had like two or three favorites and they couldn't pick and I'd be like, alright, I'll just send both, you know, and let you choose or if you're, you know, you have whatever, take your time, pick it later, doesn't really matter to me. Some clients like, you know,

I'll send, like, let's say I go on like a commercial shoot and it's, you know, we shoot like a thousand images. I'll probably cut it down to like 200 or something like that, that I think are worth seeing, you know, or maybe, like, if I know like they're going to the contract, I have to deliver 50 images, you know, I'll try to give them like four times that to pick through so they have like a reasonable starting point. It just depends, you know, I don't think at the end of the day, like, I don't think anyone wants to look at all of the images. So, right. No, I agree. Well, and that's where I've generally skewed towards like, usually we'll write out like,

minimum number of deliverables, but I always sort of have the like five guys, French fry mindset about it. That's like, okay, we're going to quote it at 50 is what the contract says. And you're probably going to get 120. Like I'm not going to sit here and hold you to 50. But I've also never been someone who's gotten into a lot of jobs where there's like heavy retouching where it's like, Oh, we need three campaign images that we're really going to go in and like dial in the grass color and do whatever else. Um, so workflow wise, it's.

a process, it's kind of annoying, it's not as glamorous as you think it would be. I mean, I, I don't particularly enjoy the thought of having to do posts on that level of images. Uh, and so that's where I've always just been like, here's a hundred great things. Like I'll do quick passes on everything, but I'm not, I'm not generally involved in things where it's like, okay, we're going to go really dial in every little thing and clone out every little imperfection. And I feel like if I was doing that, that's when I would be like,

Seth Lowe (09:28.758)
pick the five you want me to spend five hours on each, but otherwise I'm just sort of quickly batching through things. Yeah, I'm kind of the same way. It depends on the client though. Have you ever like gone in debt? Have you always been like straight cash, like buying gear or whatever? How does that work? Do you have any rules or do you just kind of play it by ear as you grow or how has that process been for you? Yeah, so growing up, I feel like I was sort of on the Dave Ramsey, like debt is bad train for whatever reason.

Um, so I never had a credit card or anything. I was straight cash homie the first few years of doing everything in this business. Um,

The first loan that I took out was to buy a Scarlett W. I forget if it was the body or the accessories, what we technically financed, but it was like a 10 grand loan. I think I almost spent more on the accessories. Yeah, no, I think it was. I wanna say that it was like the brain was like 10 grand and everything to get it running was like another 10 grand at the time. It was like a $20,000. Yeah, I had the Scarlett W and I think it was like the exact same experience. I spent like 10 grand on the brain and then another 10 grand on things to go on the brain. Yeah.

So I financed that. It's probably the worst gear financial decision I've made in my career. People didn't want to rent it. It just like, it didn't do well for me. And so I had it for a little while, ended up selling it. And right around that same time, it was literally like a conversation while we were playing FIFA together. Me and another buddy decided to go in on an Amurra together.

And the Amira is easily the best gear decision I've ever made. So we split it. I had cash cause I had just sold the red. And we, I think we each put in 17 grand. It was like 34 total for a used Amira package. We mostly just rented it out on our own stuff. Which to your earlier question about revenue streams, I've never done a lot of like external rentals, but I've always done a lot of just renting things to production through me.

Seth Lowe (11:36.966)
Yeah, I'm on job. It's also the same. I have a few buddies I'll rent stuff out to and things like that. Yeah, same. I have like two or three DP buddies who will take my FX9 or EZRig or whatever it is, you know. But we did, I wanna say, I don't remember the exact number. We did something like $130,000 in rentals on it in like two years. That's awesome. And then we sold it for $29,000. So it only costs us like four grand net to own the thing for like two years.

Yeah, that's a good for you, dude. It was that was, but talk about another eye opening thing where I was just like, oh, I'm not screw the stock market. Like I'm not tying 30 grand up into this. Like I want to play these games now. So the right gear is the right gear can make you a ton of money. I actually made a lot of money on my Scarlett W. I did really well. I think I owned it for like 18 months and I probably made like, I'd have to go back and look, but I think on probably like I bought it used.

I pieced together a few accessories. I think I spent like 18 grand. I probably did like 15 or 16K in rentals over the first year and then sold it for like probably 12 grand. Yeah, that's not bad. Yeah, did all right. Yeah, that's awesome. My Komodo was, I had the Komodo for a while. That was a huge money maker because I got it like right when it came out and everyone wanted it and I had that thing printed money. It was a fantastic, fantastic investment. Yeah, I've heard a lot of good things about the Komodo. I haven't actually really gotten to use one, but they were all over the place.

Um, but yeah, so past that it was like, so I financed the, the Scarlet W paid that off. Um, at some point it clicked to me. Uh, I think it was originally, I got a platinum AMEX for the travel benefits. Um, cause I was traveling all the time and then I just started basically cash flowing everything against my AMEX. Cause I was like, Oh, net thirties don't matter if I don't have to pay everyone for 30 days after the thing.

And so I never carried, I've never carried a balance on a credit card to be honest, but pretty much everything that I do at this point goes through my gold business Amex or the Platinum Travel Amex. Yeah. A little hack for that. Hopefully the IRS isn't listening. I don't think it actually matters at all, but you can route your Amex through Venmo now. So they have this like send and split thing.

Seth Lowe (14:01.438)
And so we had a lot of subcontractors where like, they'll be like, oh, can you pay my thousand dollar invoice? Can you do Venmo? And I can actually just send it from my Amex to Venmo, send it to them, but then it still gets cashflowed against the Amex payment and you still get points on it. So we've been doing that for a while. But yeah, the only other thing, the only other thing that I've financed was when I bought my FX9 in 2020.

It was when we had just started that big training project that I was working on. And it was like the first day of shooting, we had a Venice and a A7S3, I think, and we were doing walk-in talks. And long story short, I just realized like, there's gonna be enough days on this thing that like, if I do 12 days of Venice on 12 Grand Deep, like I might as well just buy an FX9. And we're gonna get autofocus and I can kill the AC on all the walk-in talks and it's gonna do a better job.

And at the time, Texas Media Systems was doing a four year, zero percent financing thing on the FX9. And so yeah, my payment was like 350 a month or something. And I was renting it for 450 a month. And so I was like, okay, I'm net positive, even if the thing goes to zero, if I use it one day a month, we're net positive on it. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I think I still technically owe like two grand on it because it's still got like eight months left or something.

But yeah, the FX9 is the only other thing I've really financed. I'm at this point much more open to financing and I feel like having a much better sense of like the cash flow game and values of things, I could do it without screwing myself. I saw a lot of people early on in my career go deep on Alexa minis and reds and whatever else and not know what they were doing and screw themselves. And so I think it's like, if you understand what you're doing, it can be a really...

it can be a really, really valuable tool to not over, to not over-leverage yourself and actually just manage the cashflow. But if you don't know what you're doing, I've also seen people put themselves in really big holes where back to even just the overhead thing, it's like now you've got six grand a month in payments you gotta make. And so now you're taking every job you can, bringing your Venice out for whatever anyone will give you just to try and clear the payment. And that's not a great place to be in. So trying to just like- Yeah, the gear owns you, you don't have the gear. Right, exactly. Yeah. I'm pretty, pretty similar for me.

Seth Lowe (16:21.574)
Mostly, always cash. I mean, I've always used like a travel credit card just for the benefits of that and things like that. Plus, it's just nice like if you're renting a couple grand worth of gear and buying a couple airline tickets, you don't have to immediately like hit your bank account before a client sends a check, you know? And then, you know, the only thing I've ever like financed really is, and I kind of regret it not because I regret financing it, but I bought the C200 right when it came out.

and Canon had like a 0% two year lease to own program or something like that where you know you bought it at the end of two years you could buy it. It was like basically it was no cost difference whether you bought it or either the 0% thing and I was like kind of just really starting to get into video and so I for whatever reason like I was a Canon still shooter and I was like oh this camera makes sense I guess I'll just try it and so I bought it and kind of hated it so I just sold it and I think just paid off. I don't know I don't really remember what

If it was a win or a loss, it was just a learning. I was just, the only time I've ever done something like that. But. Yeah, I feel that. I feel like, sorry. Well, I was just gonna say, my general rule now is, like, I won't buy any gear that I can't pay off in a year of rentals. That's typically my rules. Like, I'll buy it cash. Like, you know, let's say I spend five grand on a light and I think I can rent that at like, I don't know, say 350 bucks a day.

I'll just be like, okay, can I get this light out for 20 days this year? And if I'm very confident I can, then I'll buy it. There's always some gear that you buy that you're like, I'm just buying this because I like owning it. And I just picked up a set of the Nissi Athena Primes. I don't know if I'm going to rent those. I don't really care. I'm just going to use them. Whatever. If I get a rental rate, great. If I don't, I want them anyway. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff like that that's like, I feel like it becomes like the tool value.

versus the cost is like irrelevant to the theoretical rental value. My, I have a full set of like Sigma art primes at this point. And it's one of those things it's like, they're so cheap, it's silly. And they're so good, it's silly that it's like, it really doesn't matter. It's like, I'll go. I was thinking this week actually, I was like, I sort of want to buy a wider one, whether it's like a 20 or a 14, but it's like 800 bucks. It's like, so it doesn't really matter at this scale, you know?

Seth Lowe (18:45.398)
But yeah, I think that's a good rule. I will say my one push back to that was when I was starting out, I would see people say all the time, like, oh, you have to have the thing totally paid off in 12 months or whatever. And I would look at like a $70,000 thing and be like, dude, that's like, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to clear that. And so with stuff that moves quicker, I think that's a really good rule of thumb. I find that

I've become much more cognizant of depreciation rates on things and finding the sweet spots in bell curves on things. And so that was where the Amira for us was at a point where I think retail was 60 or 70. It was two years in and all of a sudden you could get them for 30s. The one we got was a good deal. I think most of them were going more low 40s, but we got in at mid 30s. But the reality of that camera was if we had booked it for three days and sold it, we wouldn't have lost any money.

It was just like, it wasn't going to go down that much. Uh, the risk, the risk was kind of taken out of it for you. So it was totally worth the exposure was super low. And that's where, even when we did get out two and a half years later, like I said, I think we got in for 34 and got out for 29. It's like, I, my C 100 cost me more money for two years than the Amira did. Yeah. Um, but just having more of that mindset, there's a, there's like an extreme example of that where like, when people will, I'm always shocked when people buy like.

$150,000 lens sets that rent out for like 200 bucks a day. I'm like, dude, that's a long play. Yeah. And you're really banking on that asset value staying, which as I've seen in the last 10 years is like wildly all over the place. Just watching what like happened with, what were the Zeiss lenses that everyone was obsessed about for a while? Oh, like the CP2s? No, the like old stills lenses that everyone was rehousing.

Not the Genes, because they're actually kind of cool again. Maybe the... Not the Contacts. I don't remember. Anyway. It was the Contacts. Was it the Contacts? Because I had a set. OK. And I got in way too high and somehow got out. I don't know. Yeah. But like they went up super high for a while and then tanked. And then in the last few years, it's been like the K35 went bonkers. And so it's like... The Genes are next. That's the one right now, I think. Yeah. Things are just going crazy. But there are a lot of those games that you can get in and play well.

Seth Lowe (21:09.586)
And like for me, I've always been someone who flips a lot of stuff too. And so I'll buy a lot of stuff used and just know that like my overall risk exposure at any given point is pretty low. You know, it's like you go buy a Mavic for 2,500 bucks used, use it on a job for three grand and then sell it for 2250. And it's like, I don't, that's why it's funny because I started out doing a lot of lens pro to go stuff and I still find there'd be a lot of value in.

renting, but the last few years I found myself more and more just like flipping stuff, even if it's only for one job. It's like it's cheaper to buy it on Facebook Marketplace and sell it than it is to rent it. Yeah, sometimes. You're not wrong. Yeah, I didn't mean the year is like a, I don't really know where I got that from. It's just my personal comfort level. I don't think it's like a, maybe it's someone's rule or like a good rule. I don't know. I just was like, a year seems like a risk I'm willing to take on paying something off and it seems practical. I don't think it's a bad rule. I just think it'll stop.

There are certain decisions that it will stop you making and you have to decide if those are decisions you wanna make. But like some of those bigger things, you don't have to clear the whole thing in a year to be up pretty positive. Yeah, that's true. Do you find yourself setting more like financial goals as a freelancer or more creative goals? And has that changed maybe over the years? We talked about early on, it's like,

You just wanna, you don't care about the money. You just wanna make the thing, you know, 12 years later, you know, like I, and maybe this has been balanced. I probably set more financial goals than necessarily creative goals. Yeah, I think they're always connected for me. Like the, my experience has always been that the creative and the financial side were intermixed.

And then I ran into a period where I felt like that wasn't true. Like I kept feeling like, oh, if the money gets better, the work's going to get better. And then I hit the point where the money started getting better and the worst work started getting worse. And I was like, wait a second, what's going on here? Um, but yeah, I mean, I, it's a funny, it's a funny season for me to be honest, Seth, cause it's like, I'm in this weird world where like, I see really big opportunities and I'm having more and more big conversations.

Seth Lowe (23:21.378)
that are like exponentially larger than what I've had before. We're like, we are having conversations with people about shows that are potentially like, Hey, here's a, you know, $500,000 production budget, whatever it is, which isn't necessarily actually a ton of money for me at the end of the day, by the time you pay everyone that would have to make the film, but like, it's a, it's a bigger thing. Um, and I think for me more than anything, it's just like, I, I

find myself focusing on like, how do I build days that I enjoy? And how do I find like, work with people that I like working with? Part of that is creative expansion. Part of that is creative advocacy. You know, part of working with good teams is being able to bring good people together, which requires advocating for budgets. You know, producing things well, I find that we are able to do better work for cheaper than people who produce things poorly. And so you're

Seth Lowe (24:21.23)
$60,000 to do and I can do it for 20 grand and make a better thing and that the marginal and that's actually great. I don't really set out with like the North Star of like here's the amount of money I wanna make this year or anything. I find that like, I definitely have found more opportunities lately where I'm like, if I can cover my bases really quickly and know that my bases are covered, that's compelling to me and then I wanna just go do fun stuff.

And so for me, it's also more like, I feel like I'm at a place where outside of the last few months being really slow and going a little like, okay, what's going on? I'm more interested in like investing and spooling up other things at this point. And so like for me this year, like I wanna do more clothing projects that are like personal brand stuff. I wanna do more collaborations where we're actually like investing in things with people. Like.

less just like creative work for higher margin and more like let's get other things going on. And so like I got a call from a buddy a little while ago, just full transparency, he was like, hey, I've got these like three things that I'm gonna need help with posts on this year. It's not super sexy, but it's super predetermined. It's gonna be like this week, this week and this week. And if you say yes, I can just guarantee you 30 grand this year for it. I don't really wanna be a post guy.

but the way that I think about it is like, that's a significant chunk of my like, annual personal fixed overhead that I can just guarantee right now. And the sooner I can hit that number, which for me in my head, that number is like 70 grand. That's like, okay, I can make 70 grand, pay all my bills, do whatever else, eat, go to the gym, be fine. That if I can hit that number really quickly, then everything past that's fun. And fun doesn't necessarily just mean like, go do personal projects for nothing. It means

put yourself out there in new relationships, try and develop new things, do creative stuff for yourself, invest in some of these other projects. But so my mindset is usually like, cover the survival baseline as quickly as possible, and then just go aim to have fun past there, creatively and financially. Because I think the reality is that the best financial rewards too are when you have that margin to actually like invest in.

Seth Lowe (26:40.258)
bigger, riskier things and it's not a pure time for money equation all the time. Yeah, I completely agree. I think one of the healthiest shifts I made in the way I run my business is when I shifted over into paying myself a salary. And I'm an S-corp now. I did it long before I was an S-corp. I just decided that, hey, you know what, my wife and I basically did a zero-based budgeting thing where we just added up all of our monthly expenses.

10% padding room and we're like, okay, we need to make five grand a month or whatever it was. And then it's like, okay, so that's just the salary I'm going to pay myself. And whether I made 20 grand that month or two grand, I just, like, I paid myself that salary and it really detached myself from sort of like, you know, looking at like, oh, this is a great month. I made 20 K and this is a bad month. I made 1500 bucks or whatever. When it was just the salary average, everything out and separated the two worlds a lot, um, it just, man, it, it just, the mental shift there was huge for me.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I find that it helps a lot with actually making the decision making process too, where it's like, when you don't have any sort of target, my experience has been that when someone calls and you hear a decent sized dollar number, it's easy to feel obligated to take it just because who says no to money. Yeah. But when you actually have some sense of like, okay, I need to make six grand this month and I've made 10 grand this month, I can say no, you know, like I or I can.

play myself a little further ahead this month because the month before was slow. But like to me, it's more of almost like a deal flow mindset which I've always come to the production table with as well. I see some people get very myopic, honestly, about like, oh, well, we don't have the 50 bucks for a rental on this thing. Or we can't afford a PA on this day. And I've always had much more of like a deal flow mindset that it's like there's sometimes that your margin is gonna be big and there's sometimes like, we just need a PA and it's gonna eat our margin a little and we're gonna make it back on the next one sort of thing.

And so for me, it's like unhinging yourself from everything being a totally individual decision and seeing a bigger picture that's like, okay, whatever, if your goal is I want to make $50,000, I want to make $30,000, I want to make $100,000. Having a target is so helpful to then go like, okay, I need to do, you know, whatever it is, five AC days this month. I need to go do whatever it is that you just actually have something you're fishing for. And then you have a goal that once you hit it, you're like, okay, now we get to play

Seth Lowe (29:07.65)
bonus money, whether it's bonus money creatively, bonus money, I'm gonna go do whatever else I wanna do, I'm gonna go screw off and just enjoy my time, but you're not in this constant existential threat, hungry, hungry hippos mode because you're grounded against something. Yep, yeah, I completely agree with that. Do you have an accountant? Do you make a lot of your own financial decisions or do you work with them to kind of like, hey, what should I be doing to?

you know, be more profitable or pay less taxes or, you know, what does that look like? I've always been someone who has made all my own decisions, uh, as far as like gear and investing in the business and all that sort of stuff. Uh, I want to say it was 2020 that I finally got, uh, I started working with a company called core group and it changed my whole relationship to my business. To be honest.

I'd always had like CPAs do my taxes, but I had done the like quick books online thing or whatever and I would bring all my paperwork in. And basically my pattern was like November every year I would start panicking and be like, I don't know anything about anything cause I wouldn't keep track of it. I just wouldn't. I would wait until November, December, and really wait until April to run any of my numbers. Like I was just flying off the seat of my pants and say, okay, I have money in the bank account, I'm fine. And then...

I would start like stuffing nuts in the tree in November that I'm like, I'm just gonna save as much of this as I can then December to April, I'm just gonna have anxiety going back and trying to label all my transactions, not knowing what's legal cause I buy so many weird things. Oh, you have to buy $500 of peanuts. What do you class that as in QuickBooks? I don't know, it's a business expense. And so then I would patiently wait to find out what I owed.

the IRS and it was always just a big lump sum in April that I would always just pay in cash but it'd be like, hey, you owe 20 grand or whatever it is. You know, you owe 4 grand depending on the year. And so when I finally hired CORE, they took over all the bookkeeping so they have direct access to all of my business bank accounts and they label everything. If they have questions, they email me and they're like, hey, what is this? But otherwise it all gets labeled as it goes. I get monthly P&L statements. I get actual like conversations around here's where we're at on estimated taxes.

Seth Lowe (31:23.466)
And they are people who I can constantly ask. Like the first six months of our relationship was basically me asking all the questions that I'd wondered but couldn't get solid answers to that's like, can I write this off? Can I not write this off? What about buying a car versus leasing a car? What about this, that or the other thing? Like all of these things that were worrying me. And yeah, the peace of mind for me has been huge. Like the actual benefit of like, they were the ones who were like, yeah, you should really do.

And S-Corp, you should do payroll. They run all the payroll stuff for me. But they have taken over, like they go to bat whenever stuff comes up with the state or the IRS. Like there's been a few times that the state's like, oh, there's this new filing thing, you know, or whatever. And I'll just email the letter to core and they're like, we're on it. And they'll take care of it, you know. So they've been great for that. They do run all the payroll stuff. They look at all of it. And that's where they were like, the first year they were like, if we ran your taxes,

last year as a sole prop paying himself as opposed to the escort payroll thing, you'd be paying $15,000 more in taxes right now. And that for me was just like, okay, like the, the peace of mind is really what I feel like I'm paying for it. Cause I just don't worry about it at all ever anymore. But it is also actually, I think just financially more valuable. So I, I'm, I, I'm a shameless core shill because doing this for 12 years, that is the biggest

fundamental business shift that I've had in my life. It's just like having people to take care of all that stuff for me. Yeah, I think it's one of the most valuable investments. I should check out Core. I use the same, well, Taylor Shanton referred me to his account and they've been awesome. But yeah, I mean, same thing. They take care of a lot of things. I just approve transactions and QuickBooks. I mean, I could have them do it. I think it's for me, it's nice to just.

It's a good way to, I never look at my credit card statement. I look at the books for some reason. And it's just like, oh yeah, I did spend money on that. Or should I spend, you know, it's just like a good, like sort of keep your thumb on the pulse of, you know, like where your money's going. But yeah, I mean, they, you know, every quarter they're like, Hey, here's some different ways we can structure the way we write things off or whatever, and here's how much, you know, you're going to owe. And, you know, I pay myself a monthly salary. So I pay, you know, my taxes just come out of my, you know, paycheck, which is.

Seth Lowe (33:35.794)
really nice and then I usually owe a little bit at the end of the year just you know because of the way things work. But yeah man it's I did the same thing for a long time where I was just like hoping I had enough to cover the tax spread at the end of the year and it was like so stressful for like four months. Yeah it's just big anxiety. Yeah and that's really just not having the anxiety and I think anecdotally I feel like when you're so used to just like doing it all napkin math it's like paying someone a couple hundred bucks

sounds like a lot of money, and then like paying your taxes quarterly sounds like you're losing money. But it's one of those things that it's like, money you just don't miss. It's just gone now and it's fine. And the amount of bandwidth, at least for me, that it opens up is like way more than the cost of any of that. Oh my God, yeah. I don't think about it at all. Like I put, like let's say I spend the equivalent of two day rates on my account in a year.

Totally worth it. I don't think my taxes, like nothing. They just do it all. It's totally worth the freedom of mind. Right, yeah, 100% agree. Yep. Do you, you know, this sounds really old for us, but do you like have like a retirement account or how do you, you know, we don't exactly have like a 401k in this business. What do you do? Yeah, I've never really gotten into any of that. I've considered it more the last few years.

Seth Lowe (34:54.038)
I don't know, I have mixed feelings about it, to be honest. On the one hand, I think that like, almost the accounting thing, like setting money aside that you're not gonna miss, I think is smart. I don't find a lot of...

comfort or confidence in the markets, especially lately. And I'm sure there are a lot of like financial advisor people who would say that that's naive or whatever else. But like, I've always just been someone who's like, I can put that 12 grand into an account and it's gonna make me a couple hundred bucks this year, or I can invest that 12 grand in me somewhere. And I've always chosen to believe in the exponential value of investing in myself.

whether that's investing in a project, investing in equipment, investing in anything. So yeah, I mean, it definitely becomes more of a thing on my mind, like being in my 30s now, where at 20s it definitely wasn't, but.

I think more so than like a retirement account, the thing that I become aware of is just like, okay, how do we keep rolling the snowball? And that's where like having the mindset of being at least aware of like financial opportunities, I think can be helpful because we are people who are by nature in a position that you can have exponential wins, right? Like you could make a hundred grand one year, play your cards right in the next year, do a million dollars. And that's not even, it's not crazy. It's not even close to crazy. It's really not.

But in the next year you could do like 10 grand. Right, and that's the true volatility of it all. But I think that's where like, especially for me starting out, it's like if you're making 20 grand on photography and filmmaking, my personal opinion, spend every single dollar on yourself. Like, because if you do that well, you can quickly get to the point where in a week you're doing 20 grand, which was your whole year before.

Seth Lowe (36:54.122)
And like that leverage is way more valuable than the 7% you might earn on it. Once you get to the point where you're like, your cost of living is covered, you're able, your business has margin, you know, setting aside 10 grand a year, whatever I think becomes a much more viable thing. But I think that for me is also just been part of it. It's like timing. It's like, okay, I'm not against that, but like the leverage of my money. For the last 12 years of my life, just, it hasn't made sense to me to stick it in an account, you know? Yeah.

I would say I mostly agree with that. I'm 35, I'll be 36 this year. I would say, you know, up until about 30, I was kind of in the same boat where I was like, I'm the best bet, you know, I'm gonna keep growing my business, increasing my rates, my client pool, investing in equipment, recap rentals, you know, personal projects, you know, test shoots, whatever, you know, marketing, whatever it took to like scale the business. And I didn't put any money and I don't regret that at all. And then when I...

I don't think it was like anything to do with just turning 30, but around that age, I was kind of like, okay, I should probably like shift like down the road, like mindset a little bit more and start thinking like, you know, long-term, you know, because obviously, you know, in 30 years, there's going to be another version of me that's 30 and cool and hungry and they're going to be hiring that guy over 60 year old me no matter how good I am. So you know, I just need to have some sort of future plan. So

Yeah, we do like, we have like a retirement savings account, you know, but it is like a weird, you feel kind of old doing it. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I guess the other thing I'd say though is like, we've, we've played some other games, like we have one of those just like high interest rate savings account, cash saving account things at this point. And to me, that's a world where it's like, I'll take the four and a half percent in total liquidity over like locking something up until I'm 60. That's where my six month cash runway goes in that account.

Same situation. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's just smart in my opinion, but, uh, it's, I mean, a little cost you nothing. It's like a free bank account. Yeah. And then the, the other side of it is just like having being smart with other decisions, like everything from cars to housing, to, to gear investments to sort of keep the asset card rolling, I guess, for lack of a better term, like I've always tried to be really smart with gear. Um,

Seth Lowe (39:16.746)
I try not to hold on to gear for too long. Like I try to just get out of that where it's like, we're maximizing net worth out of owning any of these things. Yep. My rule is like no more than two years. Like it's, A, like I don't want to be outside of company warranty on stuff and you know, I use it enough and it needs to be fresh and new and what people want to rent and buy and rent and use or whatever. Right. So yeah, same. Like as soon as I like hit like kind of maximum potential, okay, I've gotten good rentals and I can still, it's still a viable thing to sell.

It's gone. Yeah. It's funny because people ask me, I'm like, what are you, why are you selling all of a sudden? Like it's just, I haven't touched it in six weeks and I don't need it. Like I'm just, I'm going to get rid of it before it depreciates to half its current value. Like we're just going to dump stuff. Yep. So those have been intentional snowballs that have definitely like made a dent in, you know, whatever the like net worth concept is between equity in our house, equity in our vehicles, equity in gear and all that sort of stuff. But.

you know, it's all it's all variable too, right? That it's like the market, the market can dip with any of these things. At this point, you never know which way it's going to go. So, yeah, I think it's like really easy to get sucked into like the Dave Ramsey thing with vehicles or whatever. But like we have a loan on my wife's car. Like, honestly, I could care less. I travel a ton. It's for me, I'd rather her just be in a nice new car that's safe. And I don't have to worry at all if I'm gone for like a week or two on a job. Like.

she's safe and she's fine and her car can get her wherever she needs to go. And you know what I mean? Like that's the peace of mind is like, I don't care about the debt. The peace of mind is worth it for me there. Well, I feel like, I don't know if you think about this. I always find myself thinking about this, that it's like, once you get into the world of like, four to five figure gigs, it just becomes so easy to rationalize it. It's like, that's one job.

Like I do one job and that's my car for the year and I'm fine. And that's like in my head, that's always the math that I'm doing. It used to be when I was working at a grocery store when I was 16, I would do the math of like, how many hours of work am I making for this sandwich? You know? But now it goes the other way that it's like, oh, that's like a day. Like I'm trading a day for this whole thing. And so it's not a big deal. But yeah, I agree. But I've been learning. So I've come down this fascinating rabbit hole recently, fascinating to me.

Seth Lowe (41:36.938)
on the car side of things, that's basically this whole community of people who do with cars what I did with the Amira, where they're really maximizing the depreciation curve point on exotics and stuff. I've seen those YouTube videos, it's pretty crazy. It is pretty crazy, and that's where I've been like, I might buy something fun this year. I'm planning on buying something fun this year, partially just because I think it would be fun. Yeah, yeah. But partially because like...

when you look at the math again, it's like, oh, I could drive like a BMW X5M for 18 months and have it be cheaper than my Kia has been for the last two years. Because you're just playing that depreciation curve right and the mileage of it. So those are the kinds of things that I've always invested in learning about too, because it's like that. There's a lot of hacks out there. There's a lot of hacks. There's so many hacks for everything, whether it's from your business taxes, saving $15,000 in taxes.

is a lot easier actually than like making $15,000 in a retirement account. So I've sort of focused on all of those little points of leverage, but there's definitely a point where it just makes sense to put money into those things. I would say we're like fairly like financially conservative, but I think a huge misconception is that it's a lot easier just to make more money than it is to save more money. Like it's a lot easier for me to increase my income by 10% than it is for me to cut my living expenses by 10%, you know. Right.

Totally. No, I agree. And that's part of where like, I've also always been of the mindset. My wife is more, much more conservative than I am. In many ways, you know, just like, I think culturally growing up and stuff, like it was sort of a family of like, we don't buy expensive things, whatever else. She was, she was the kind of person who like, even when I bought my Kia, she was like, who spends $30,000 on a car? That's a lot of money for a car. And I was like, it's not, in the scheme of cars, it's definitely not, but I get what you're saying. And so like,

she's always been someone who's like, where can we cut? Where can we save? Like even, you know, when I don't leave the house for a month, she starts going like, so what's going on a little bit, you know? And I get it. But I've always been like, I mean, make smart decisions, but like me hacking my Netflix bill $4 a month is not gonna make a meaningful dent at the end of the year compared to like, I could literally go.

Seth Lowe (43:55.462)
like volunteer to PA for anyone and cover that gap in five seconds. And so like, the offense is much more productive than defense, I feel like. Dude, yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. Unless you've got any gaping holes that you're like, I've known buddies. We had a conversation a while ago with a good friend of mine who he was like, dude, I feel like I'm struggling. Like I can't pay my taxes. And we like audited his stuff and he was spending like.

1500 bucks a month on Starbucks and stuff. And you were like, okay, like that's probably like, if you're really struggling, that's a hackable thing. But like, if you're not, like it's not worth overanalyzing which level of Spotify you're on, you know? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don't even know what level I'm on, it just works. Yeah. So, okay, last two questions, because I got to wrap it up here and you've given me a ton of your time, so thank you. Happy to chat. Would 20 year old Evan be impressed with 30 year old Evan?

Yeah, I don't know that 20 year old Evan could comprehend.

the last 10 years. Like I do think about that sometimes, like even beyond the momentary, like who I am right now, just like if who I am right now had to explain the next 10 years to 20 year old Evan, it would be entirely overwhelming. Like you're gonna travel the world, you're gonna do Apple and Bose and billboards and.

video stuff and produce things for ASICs and build a film community and burn down a film community and be 260 pounds and then do an ultra marathon. It's really been quite the ride and I'm super grateful for it. Dude, that's awesome. I love that answer. Do you think you're kind of where you are today and I think you're successful. So do you think your success is the result of?

Seth Lowe (45:45.714)
more hard work or more luck? I think that my success, I would attribute it more to awareness than anything. And I think that awareness begets luck and that awareness begets opportunities for fruitful hard work. And I think I've had a lot of both. My whole career, I have had experiences of

flow and luck and synchronicity and doors opening that I just like objectively can't take any credit for. Things that, you know, back to the 20 year old me thing, like I was 19 at my first Masters in Motion, where I had come from just like doing church videos. And I'm at this event with people who are shooting for National Geographic and whoever else and their DPs and producers and like, what do you do? And I'm like, I don't know anything. I have a T3I, I make videos. I don't know how any of this works. And the last day of that event,

in a penthouse with Vincent Lafferay, Eric Kessler, Tom Gilmette, I forget who else was there, and Philip Bloom was also there. And it was just like, I do, if you're playing odd man out in this room, I do not belong in this room. But for some reason I'm in this room. You know, Lens Pro pulling me under their wing, Eric Kessler pulling me under his wing, Angela at Mass Maritime pulling me under their wing. Like I've had so many people who have made this all possible. And...

So yeah, I mean, I think like having your eyes open, showing up when you get a shot and like giving everything to that shot, being willing to like continually double down on making things as good as they can be and also being willing to like have your eyes open for what's possible and not settling where you are. I, you know, I don't know that there's any singular magic bullet. I think that like, I've worked a lot. I've made a ton of stuff.

Like I forget how much stuff I've made when I really go back and look at even like YouTube client stuff, photo stuff, shooting stuff for other people. Like I've, I've DPD so many things that I've forgotten about at this point. Yeah. Um, I've put so much stuff on social media. Like I, I've just created an absurd amount of stuff in the last 12 years. So like work is a part of it, but for me, the work has rarely felt like hard work. I'm not a David Goggins, like put your head down and do stuff you hate kind of person, like.

Seth Lowe (48:06.866)
I've always really enjoyed everything that I've shown up for. And I think that's part of what's made me deadly. Like even when I got into CrossFit, it was like, I enjoyed fan bike workouts. I enjoyed getting better. Some people would say it was suffering. I was enjoying it and I was crushing people because of it. Um, but like luck, whether you want to call it luck, whether you want to call it other people, whether you want to call it synchronicity or the universe or God or whatever, like there have been so many moments in my career that I

Evan, the physical body and brain just can't take any credit for. Um, and so, yeah, I think it's really just like showing up with your eyes open, not being too stuck in whatever your little construct of how the world works is and like, bring in as much of yourself to bear as you possibly can open doors that I didn't even know existed. Yeah, that's awesome. I love your opening statement there. Awareness begets luck. And I think that's, that's so true. Yeah, that's great. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, man.

So well, Evan, thanks for coming on today. It's been a blast. I've really enjoyed chatting with you and seeing how some of our, there's so much polarity or similarity between our, not polarity, similarity between our stories. And it's always fun to see that and see how people are learning from the mistakes and what works and what's different. Yeah, dude, thank you so much for having me. It's been really cool to get to actually talk to you. I feel like you're one of those people that we've always been ships in the night for a long time now. Yeah, totally. I don't even know, this, okay, I feel bad admitting this, but this is true.

You're one of those people that I don't even know how long, we may have crossed paths on the internet 12 years ago or five years ago and I don't know. I just feel like you're a staple in my mind that I could not place chronologically. And so it's so fun to finally get to connect face to face more. Yeah, I agree. I feel like I've always known you, but we've never really talked or anything. So yeah, that's funny. Cool. Well, hey, I appreciate it and I look forward to chatting next time. Yeah, man, thanks for having me.

Seth Lowe (50:04.694)
Hey, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of The Solo Creative. If you enjoyed it, I hope you share it. And you can connect with us on Instagram at thesolocreativepod. Hit us up with any questions or suggestions for show guests. Thanks and have a great week.