Enneagrams and Clients, with Gordo Flores

Gordo Flores, a producer and owner of Axiom Media, shares his journey as a freelancer and the growth of his company. In this episode we discuss the importance of hiring the right people and focusing on what you're good at, the challenges of working with a spouse and the benefits of direct client relationships.  He shares how he uses the Enneagram to tailor job assignments to his employees' motivations and desires for recognition.  We also talk about the challenges and rewards of working in a creative field, the importance of building relationships with clients, and the role of AI in the industry. 

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 (00:00.142)
on our shoot, I don't think, I took this photo of you and it's a picture of your cowboy boots in the dirt. And yeah, yeah, yeah. I sent a picture to my friend and I was like, this Gordo dude is so legit. He drives a Tacoma and is wearing cowboy boots on set. And he was like, dude, that guy is the man. He didn't even know you, but he was all for you. So then when I got home and I was like, I was like, well, if Gordo can wear cowboy boots on set,

I can wear a cowboy hat. So I bought a cowboy hat. So I'm not going to let it go to show, but it inspired me. That's awesome. I saw you post a picture with that hat. I was like, that's pretty sweet. Yeah, I was like, Gordo can wear boots. I can wear a hat. So funny story about those boots. I bought them specifically for that shoot. Did you really? That's awesome. That's how cool I am. Super imposter. OK, on that note, I'll be honest. I actually.

I actually ordered this hat for this shoot, but it didn't come in at times. 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.

Seth Lowe (01:20.046)
Hey, welcome to the solo creative. This week we're talking with Gordo Flores. Gordo is a producer that owns Axiom Media down in Phoenix, Arizona. What's going on Gordo? Can I just say that your intro sounded like AI wrote that? That was like so like... Dude, that's my best one yet. The last episode I think I had Megan comments on and I had to do it like eight times in a row and she was just laughing at me. So that was, I'm glad I did that first take. Yeah. Tell me about, tell me about Axiom. What do you guys do? How long have you...

own started Axiom, what's the background? So between 2005 and 11, I was working first, I was working with a TV station. I was like creative. It was called like creative, creative arts. I can't remember. No creative services. So we like make promos and stuff for like the 70s show and like stuff like that. We would just like put it together. Yeah, it was as a real small like Fox affiliate. It was so small that we had like.

20 different stations like all within that. There was like no news or anything. It was just like syndicated TV basically. So yeah, it was pretty basic. And then from there I went to go work at a church, big mega church in Phoenix, Arizona. And that's where I was just like on the side, like doing a bunch of jobs because you know, you have a little extra time on side that doesn't compete with your job, you know. So that's kind of how I was able to do that.

Dude, that is funny. I think, I mean, I would say probably like 80 % of the freelancers I talked to have like some sort of, myself included, some sort of like, I worked at a church for a minute background. It's hilarious. Yeah. Working at a church was great and terrible at the same time because it does suck a lot of your time up like on the weekends and everything. Um, but it also gave me an opportunity just to meet a lot of different people that were in different jobs, different things. And then all of them were like, Oh yeah, can you do this? Can you do that? You know, so it was.

I definitely got a chance to work in a lot of different corporate type industry places because of connections at the church. So yeah, it worked out great. Yeah, I think it's also just like a great sort of safe place to experiment. You know, like you can just do whatever you want. And as long as it looks better than, you know, the iPhone, it's kind of a win. So you can have a lot of like, you know, wins and losses and try things really quickly and see what works. And it has such a short lifespan. It doesn't doesn't really matter. That's so true.

Seth Lowe (03:41.71)
What's funny about that is that I thought I was making this incredible like music videos and Films and all this stuff. I look back at animals like man, that's embarrassing Never put any of that stuff out right now Yeah, not saying same for me. So from 2006 years 2005 to 2011 What at what point did you decide to go freelance where did you have like a

I need to get to like a certain amount of clients or a certain amount of income or did you know, like what, what inspired the jump to go, go full time? Uh, it was definitely income based. So what I was able to do while I was freelancing was basically double my salary. So I, um, at first I was like, this is just a side thing, whatever. And then, um, we really got into like Dave Ramsey. Um, and we were like, we got to, we got to do as many jobs as possible to like clear all our debt and everything. And.

We went hardcore and so that was like, it was just kind of like finance based. Like we're just like, got to do all these jobs and all these things to get, you know, bills paid off. And then once I, once we did that, we've got, we actually were debt free while I was working there. And I was like, maybe I could do this thing instead of work at a church. So, so yeah, that was basically it. Like I doubled my salary and then.

And then I had a mentor and I started talking to him and I was like kind of thinking about doing this and then he like kind of goes down this checklist with me and We'd kind of decide like together like yeah, I guess it is the smart move now to go do this instead of work at the church Yeah, that our stories overlap a lot there Worked at the church doing freelance stuff on the side and it was basically we didn't have like a lot of debt or anything You know, just like I had a little bit of student loans

A little bit of credit card debt and we just got really aggressive paid everything off saved up a few month buffer and then went for it Yeah, yeah, it's that that first step is kind of scary, right? But yeah for you, like what was the decision that said like yeah now I can do this My goal was to have I think it was six months of Freelance income that matched my salary and as soon as I had like six months of that income match like I was like, okay, I

Seth Lowe (06:04.91)
Six months is a pretty solid jump in time. I felt like I didn't have anything to compare it to. It just seemed like if I can do it for six months, then I can probably do it for another six months. So yeah, I might as well. It's going to. Was your mentality like, oh yeah, now that I can always go and work at McDonald's or I can always go do this other thing if I need the money. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, you know, yeah, exactly. Like worst case scenario, I'll someone I'll do something somewhere. I don't really care. You know, I'd worked like.

I'd assisted a couple other, I was really, I went out when I started, I was just doing photography. I wasn't doing video at all. So I just kind of figured, you know, I'd worked for other photographers before I'd worked at like an Apple store. I'd had there, I wasn't like above having another job or anything like that. You know, I, I could figure it out, but I was like, you know, six months is pretty solid, no real debt. Let's go for it. So just, you know, my wife had a lot of conversations about it and on the same page and it felt right. So we just did it.

kept her overhead really low. That's how you do it. I feel like when I hear people, especially like other either business owners or and maybe not just in production, but a lot in production, it's like, oh yeah, I bought this equipment. I bought this thing. I bought this. And they're like, I'm like, oh man, you guys are making like real good money. It's like, oh, it's on credit cards. I'm like, what? Like, how can you guys be putting yourself in all this? Like that's overhead. Like you are.

You yeah, and that's to me that just get I I freak out because I'm still conditioned now to just hate debt that it's like Anytime I hear of anyone like stepping into that I'm just like oh, I'm like my heart breaks for them like oh This is gonna be so tough for you to get out of that, you know, but yeah People view things differently and I get that but for me man, it's just uh, yeah that that's like one of the scariest things for me Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of it. Just stress from a stress standpoint

Like I have a payment on my truck, but when I bought it, I had the cash, I mean, I could have bought it outright if I wanted to, but I just decided I felt, I mean, we got like a 2 % loan during COVID, you know, so it was like the loan is nothing. And I just felt better about having the cash on hand in a savings account. Like should I have a bad like couple months or something? Like, so yeah, but you know what I mean? At any point I could just pay it off if I wanted to. It just felt safer to.

Seth Lowe (08:26.958)
It's kind of backed on my own savings really, so I didn't really feel like I was a bad debtor or anything like that. No, no, we have that same thing. We have a credit card, like a Southwest credit card that we put a lot of stuff on. We basically just use that to pay everything and then we just pay that off monthly. Same thing, same thing. There's even some contractors that will pay on with a credit card just because funnel it through there and pay the debt. But I mean, that's against Dave Ramsey's...

financial piece like there. But we yeah, we we kind of pick and choose what we want, you know, that's all. Yeah, you guys. The owners should be. Yeah, he's got some good ideas, but it's not really slated at like self -employed people, I don't think. So what what did what did growth look like for you over the first five years? Was it, you know, pretty, pretty rapid, pretty, you know, accelerate pretty quick as you were getting out there and getting gone? Yeah. So when I left the church, my first client was the church.

And the deacon of the church, one of the deacons of the church, he had like a events marketing job at a big college, the Universal Technical Institute. I think I can say names, right? Yeah, yeah. It's no problem. So anyways, yeah. So yeah, he was like events marketing guy there. And then like, so he was giving me jobs from that. And then the church was like also employing me to do like jobs for like, not their like main production, but like other.

parts of like a neighborhood groups and stuff like that. So because of that, I was able to like take, start taking steps that were like a lot easier and it wasn't like, but then like after that, like because of that, like being available to all of those things, then it made it like, like I could hire people on to do those jobs and help do that. And yeah, I, I went from this mentality of like, I need to do everything to I need to get people on my team that can do all the different things. So I think that was like the first.

the first big step to growing is knowing that you can't do all the things. And at the time, I didn't even know what a producer was. I didn't realize that I was a producer. I was just like, yeah, I'm a videographer. I'm a guy that does, I do videos. We make videos, that's all. You know what I mean? I was the DP, I was the AC, I was all the things. I did all the things. And then once I started bringing more people on to do some of these jobs, then that's kind of like where it...

Seth Lowe (10:52.43)
that's where the growth really came from. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you I'm guessing now, like because you're you know, you've been in it for like 15 years or whatever. You probably don't grow at the same rate. Growth looks really different once you've been at it for like 10 or 12 years. You know, like you. Do you really worry about growth or you just like, man, I'm at a solid the building, whatever you're building now, does that feel really good? And you're just trying to maintain or you still trying to grow like what do you what are you trying to do?

So when I started Axiom, I had this 10 year plan of like being a full on agency and everything and like branding and all of that. And I was like super excited to kind of go that route. As we started growing and as we started, I realized that like we hired on people at one point we had like, I think it was like four or five people on staff, like full time and everything. And right before COVID, we decided that,

hiring people on and like having them on payroll, having a pay, like having all that overhead was just like so stressful and we just kind of like made a decision to scale down. So yeah, it definitely changed our perspective, like what growth looked like. And for us, growth was like freedom. And that's what we want. Like that's what we wanted to be in a place where we were just free to do what we what we wanted to do and not stuck on doing like every single like even during that

During that time, we even took on a high school prom reveal video. I was like, yeah, we got a couple guys, they can go shoot that. But it's like, do you really want to be in the high school prom game? Yeah. That's hilarious. So yeah. So our mentality was like, OK, what do we really want? And do you really want to be branding? Do you really want to make websites? Do you really want to do all this other stuff? And we're just like, no, we want to just stick to what we like to do.

Part of it too was that we were hiring website creators that were just moonlighting. So a client would be like, yeah, we need this done right away. And then we'd be like, okay, let me go talk to the website guy. And the website guy is like, well, I'm not gonna work on that till this weekend. And then I'd be like, letting my clients down, letting everybody down. I'm telling people I can do these things that I really can't personally do them. So now we're in a place where I'm super comfortable.

Seth Lowe (13:18.382)
where we're at, but our growth now is very directed. So our long -term goal now is that we want to basically be our own clients. The worst part is when we put all of our time and effort into this great video, film, whatever it is, and we present it to the client, and they're like, ah, it's too long, or oh, we need to chop this out, we need to chop all this stuff out. You know, like,

And it's like all of like the good stuff that we like spent good like time shooting to make it look so like dramatic and cool and all of that. And then we're just like, OK, how do we get to a place where we're making the calls on what stays in and no one else is telling us that what we can and cannot do. So that's kind of like our long term goal. And we're on our way there. We're, you know, taking a couple like we've worked on a documentary recently. We're working on another project with another partner and with another company that does like.

safety videos and that type of stuff and we're going to be the people like fully running it and then yeah so that's kind of like where we're hoping to get to. That's cool. When you say we do you have a like you mean you and your wife or your you have a business partner you're just kind of saying like we're as in like general statement we are as an axiom. We we as an axiom no yes but yeah no I say we because it's never like I guess I say we because I'm never the

guy that does all the things, you know what I mean? So it's like, yeah, totally, totally. Yeah. So I just was asking for clarity sake. Yeah. But you met Adam at our last shoot. Yeah. He's like kind of like right hand person that I mean, he has his own company too, but we are for lack of a better term, like partners, like I bring him on on all of my projects that I can. I mean, he still has the option to say no, but yeah, it's pretty rare. So.

Yeah, I've got a local guy like that Jordan like he's we're not like partners any formal sense of the word but like any project we can we tag team Yeah, that makes sense. Were there like when you let I mean you let everybody go and cut people back to contractors Were there people that were employees then that are still contractors for you now? Were there any hard feelings there or was that? People get it. No, I still yeah, I still talk to everybody that was a part of that team

Seth Lowe (15:38.926)
Yeah, I know there wasn't any hard feelings, but it also happened kind of naturally. So like, because we knew where we wanted to get to, it wasn't like, all right, next day, everybody's cut. Like it was like, all right, this is kind of the direction that we're going to go in. One of the employees was great person, but really struggled to work on a team. So we ended up having a couple of conversations and he ended up finding another job somewhere else. So it was like, all right, we're not going to fill that position.

Another guy stayed on with us like we closed our offices down and everything and he stayed on with us. But yeah, he Eventually was like I'm gonna go full -time freelancer. So I was like, all right cool So we didn't have to fire anybody which was cool. Um, that's good And so yeah, everyone just kind of like went off on their own way. But yeah, we were still cool with everybody That's great. I think that's the heart. I think that's the I'm sorry. That's just gonna say the hardest part with like

with having to make those decisions is like, did I give people enough opportunity to bounce back from this without it having to be like, I feel bad about it, you know what I mean? Like how would I like to be treated in that situation? One of the books that I read that really helped with that was this book called Entree Leadership. Keep going back to Dave Ramsey. I'm really not that much of a fan boy, but I mean, I do like him, but.

But he wrote this book Entrez Leadership and he talks a lot about small businesses and stuff. And it really goes through the hiring and firing process and when you should do it, how you should do it. And that book is super practical if you're starting getting into business. It's definitely a good read. And just like everything else with every one that you read or hear about or whatever, just take the parts that really resonate with you. But that was a big one for us was hiring and firing. Obviously, whenever we fire.

Whenever we fired anybody, we gave them a big severance package, you know, let make sure that they had time to like bounce back and stuff. And being financially free was actually the reason why we were able to give people fun. I know those types of like severance packages and stuff like that. Oh man, that's that's awesome to hear. I've listened to a couple of episodes of that podcast. I haven't read the book. Maybe I should. Oh yeah, I don't know if I don't know if I ever listened to that podcast. He does like you don't even know. I don't think he hosts it. I think.

Seth Lowe (17:58.926)
I can't. Yeah, someone else does. Yeah, I think you're right. He does this Entree Leadership Summit like it's like a conference or whatever. And then like he's like the keynote speaker for it and everything. And I think I went to that first and then I read the book. But OK, they're pretty close together and it is legit. Like it's super good. Yeah, that's cool. I've been to a few like business leadership conferences. I've been to Global Leadership Summit. That's kind of a cool one. I don't know if it's still a thing.

but there's always some kind of big names there. When you hired people, was it the idea of just, I'm trying to build a company? Was it trying to solve a problem like having talent on demand versus always trying to find talent? I think that's one thing I struggle with is, locally I produce a lot of jobs where I'm bringing on two, three, four crew members.

And just getting people locked down and available can be a challenge. But I also don't want to have employees. Did that solve a big problem for you? We use QuickBooks for everything. And on QuickBooks, they're like every position has its own line item. And then we can see how many times we hire a specific person or specific role. And then and then we can see like we've spent this much money on this role this year.

And then it's like, okay, does it make sense to hire that role for that price for a year salary versus hiring them every time? That's quite a nice feature. And then we broke down our edits for our clients. We broke it down from editor from edit. Sorry, we broke it down from edit motion graphics and then like the other stuff like music licenses, like all that other stuff. So we knew how much like we were.

estimating for and how much we're getting paid for like a motion graphics person so like our first our first And I'm terrible at motion graphics like I love doing them But it'll take me like 20 hours to do something that a guy can do in like one hour 30 minutes even so it was like it at least made sense to hire someone that did something that I couldn't do and We were paying a lot of money for it. So that was like the that was one of the first hires was like a motion graphics person

Seth Lowe (20:18.862)
Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it just lined up it was just yeah and when you are able to track stuff like that it just makes those decisions like a little easier to make because in my mind I'm like, oh, yeah, we need to hire like a person that can do all the things like we need a You know what I mean? Like I mean another me but yeah, exactly. So yeah, yeah, that's I think that's kind of like my Like having the data is like a big thing to kind of like push like what decisions you should be making?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you do, uh, do you do your payroll through QuickBooks? Like, do you have to do payroll and QuickBooks to see that? Um, like how many times you've heard of that person? Is it like a shared thing or do you know, Seth? Um, so you were talking about something that my wife does and again, I don't know. I don't know anything about anything. I just hired the people that know what they're doing. No. So what's funny is that. So when my wife, so my wife quit her job, like, um,

a year after and it was like she was a teacher and it was Christmas break and she was like had availability and I was like, Oh, can you help me do some of this stuff? And she just like helped me. And then I just saw like how much she brought to the table. And then I was like, and she does like, she's like, she's the exact opposite of me. She's like super organized, like knows.

like systems knows how to build like that type of stuff, like knows how to work within systems and everything. And I'm like the love, you know, I'm a seven enneagram. I don't know if you know anything about any gram. It was I'm just like, I want to be. I want. OK, so I want to be all over the place. I want to do all kinds of things. Yeah. So yeah. So yeah. And she's the one. So it was just like make total sense that she would just take over. And I was just like, either I'm going to hire someone to do this job or you're going to do it. And then she's like.

quit like super reluctant, quit her job and never turn back. So yeah. That's great. So yeah, she does all the payroll. She does all the contracts. She does all that side of it. And yeah, so sorry, I don't remember the specific question because as soon as you said, how do you do this thing, I just went over my head. I don't know. I don't know how I do it. So and that's the other thing with like working with your spouse. I know.

Seth Lowe (22:36.142)
I've actually met with a couple people that were like, how do you work with your spouse? Like, like sit down coffee conversations, like, because like they were thinking about doing it and they just weren't sure if they could. And I'm like, basically the way that we're able to do it is that I stay out of her way and she stays out of my way. Like that's the only way, but like, you know, she's really, really good at what she does. And I can't step on her toes because like that she won't do that job that she's good at. So it's like, I got a letter.

I gotta let her fly, you know? Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Like I said, Megan, who I had on last week, she's a first AC and her husband's a DP. And, you know, we had a really great conversation about like, I mean, they're like married and they're in the industry together and they're working on the same sets together. And she's not always, but often, you know, his first, I'm like, you guys are like really in it. So we had a lot of fun conversations about that. That's pretty awesome. We're both in one or just her? Just her. I think I might bring them.

It wasn't intentional like I just like reached out to her and I hadn't like connected the dots that they were married when I'd reached out to her to come on the show and then like over the weekend right before as I was doing it, you know, I was like, oh it all kind of clicked in my brain. So I think they'll come back on as a couple I think of down the road, but it was still a really, really fun episode. Man, I cannot imagine like even like even going to shoots like whenever I have to bring her on like to.

actually be a person on set. Like it's, it's almost awkward. Like, we're like, it's like, we don't know each other. Like that's how it becomes. But yeah, it's pretty funny. It's very, it's very rare that she's on set too. So yeah, my, my wife helps me with some, um, kind of behind the scenes stuff and she's a lot more capable than she like takes on. And I, I think maybe I'm just a little.

my like a little hesitant to maybe get her more involved just because my my dad was self -employed and my mom worked for my dad and they just like fought like constantly and so I think there's just like you know some sort of trauma there maybe where I'm just like I don't I don't need that in my life I don't think that would be us but I'm still just you know I don't just let's just not so maybe eventually I need to maybe get over that if me and Bethany my wife were

Seth Lowe (24:56.43)
to be working close hand in hand with, like, whenever I have to, like, early on I had her do some edits. Like, we had this one project which was like super simple edits and I was trying to explain to her how to edit, basically. And oh my gosh, were we the whole time, you know what I mean? Like, it's, so yeah, it's like, early on we figured out the best way for us to work together is to let her do her job and if she asks questions, she asks me and.

she lets me do my job and then when she has questions, she asks me, you know what I mean? Like it's, we try to like just, and that's how we keep the peace. But because of that, because we know that about each other, then we just like, we're both able to work really good. That's like, my, my wife doesn't edit anything for me, but when I've done Instagram reels, I like, I just can't figure it out. I'm like, what do I do? Like I just, here's the footage. Here's, I want this song.

put it together because I like I try and I just get so angry trying to utilize that little app like to create something and it just makes me so mad and I'm like you do it I think things I've not done it every time I just edit it and then I will upload a final video I don't try to edit in the thing I'm that's why should you we actually got in a fight the other night cuz I was like trying I was trying to edit a real I was getting so mad that she's like mad that I'm mad and I'm like why should be so easy why can't I do it that's awesome do you uh

Do you mostly work with agencies or client direct? We work directly with the client most of the time. I mean, this last job we were the agency, but I feel like they're kind of an exception. So with most agencies that we work with, I mean, we do work with agencies, but with the agency that we just worked with, they are so embedded with that client that I feel like they're part of the client. They're not really just the middle man for them. So.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't. But yeah, most of most of us, most of our stuff is direct to client. We work with like communications departments mostly. We do some market like we've worked with some marketing parts of the companies that we work with. But yeah, most of them is like communications and stuff. OK, yeah, that's I would say I'm probably like. I don't know, 6040 client direct agency. But yeah, I kind of like doing that.

Seth Lowe (27:19.278)
Typically I like doing the client direct stuff a little more. It's a little less stress it seems like and yeah, maybe the reason why is high but I don't know. Oh really? Oh no, I think they're well, I don't know. I didn't hire with yeah, I think they're higher when you're direct to the client because you're kind of cutting out that in my experience, we're not working through somebody else that is like kind of taking a big chunk of that profit, you know, so yeah. Oh,

the all of the client relationships that we got and solved in word of mouth. So we'll work with somebody and then they'll just be like, we'll just be solving problems for them for the most part. Like, oh, we need to tell this story or we need to do this. We need to do a live stream like one of our one of our jobs for one of our clients was like how we're going to do a big conference. And we want all of our C level sweet people to rehearse their scripts for like a week. So we like set up prompters and.

there was no filming, no anything. We just set up prompters and we have a prompter operator running the scripts for, it's just these random jobs that are like, we're just solving problems for the client. The client knows that they need to do something and then we're just like, okay, how can we do this for you guys? So one of our, we didn't do live streams too often and now we're doing, feels like this year we're probably gonna do.

I don't know, like eight or nine live streams. And they're like full on live production live streams. So again, it's not something that we do normally, but because the client's like, oh, can you guys do this thing? There's cameras involved. Can you guys do it? I'm like, yeah. We'll just jump right in and figure it out. Solving problems. It's a lot easier for them to hire us that we've been with them for so long than it is for them to figure out someone new to come in and.

You know run this project for them. Yeah, I I totally get that plus like I mean if you can do it, why would you? Turn it down and then they just find someone else and then they find out that other person can Do the other thing that you're already doing and then you just lost a client because you thought you were too good to film a live stream or something Yeah, exactly. Oh man, that's yeah, that's my whole mentality as a seven. I Like a seven thing but they're missing out right? It's like yeah. Oh dude. Yeah Yeah

Seth Lowe (29:43.438)
So do you do a lot of, or have you studied the Enneagram a lot or done a lot of stuff with the Enneagram? Not really. I took the test and I have a friend that's obsessed with the Enneagram and she gave me the book and so I think I read the first two chapters and I was like, this is cool but I'm not that committed. It makes sense. When I first heard about the Enneagram I was like,

No one's going to tell me what whatever. And then like I read through it and I'm like, oh, yeah, that's me. That's to a T. That's exactly who I am. And it's like when I first saw it, too, I was just like, this is like a cheat code for people writing like novels or writing stories or even like short films or whatever. Like you couldn't like you can know like what motivates a person by like assigning them like a number and then like, OK, and then like just kind of going down the list like, oh, yeah, this motivates. This is all, you know, like.

You can have them dialogue based off of like that and super good. Yeah, that makes sense. Another huge thing for me was when I did have employees, like I had them all do the Enneagram and then I knew like how to motivate them. And that was like, that was also a cheat code. So one of my guys was like a three, you know, do you know much about doing? I think my wife is like three, I'm pretty sure she's a three. Okay. It would make sense if she knows how to Instagram reels.

So yeah, threes are achievers and they want to achieve but it's based off of recognition. Like they want to be recognized for doing good things. So one of my guys was, I'm like, all right, if I knew a job was going to get them like recognized or noticed or whatever, then I try to like.

play to that and like just show how much like they could be, you know, and they would overextend, not overextend, I'm totally butchering this. Let me start over. No, I know where you're going. Yeah, so like a three would just be like a cheever. They just want to, and they just want that recognition. And then I can, if I had jobs, yeah, they have validation, exactly. And if there was jobs where I knew that they would see that, then I,

Seth Lowe (32:06.318)
You know, like here, here's the job that here's a gig that you can do. Like, here's the thing that you can do. And like they would, they are cheaper. So they're just going to do their best at it because they want to look good. And it's to me, it sounds so vain, but at the same time, it's like, that's your motivation. Like for us, our motivation is we just want to be happy, whatever, or we just want joy. You know what I mean? Like, so if that job is going to bring me joy, our mutual client, the agency, they asked me if I want to go to Chile to go do it.

job out there and I was like immediately was like yes I want to go I can't wait and then I tell my wife and she's like no you can't wait you're not going to that I was like alright I gotta figure out how we can do this but yeah it's like yeah it's just like to me it's like I'm motivated by like happiness like it brings me joy it brings me happiness I want to do it so I I don't know what person what number this person would be on it the the Enneagram maybe you can tell me I have a buddy that I used to hire to edit

a lot of projects for me. And like I could in the space of like a month, let's say I'd have like a corporate video that had a great budget, but like, you know, just the most boring deliverable ever. I could be like, hey man, I've got this, you know, the budget's great. You've got time, just crank it out. You're going to get paid well. And then maybe like in the same month I would do like some little local nonprofit. I'd go shoot something for them. And then I'd be like, Hey,

You know, I've got this other little project. Can you help me out on? Don't put a ton of time into it. It's a quick, you know, just a little little bio story thing for this nonprofit. I mean, the paid like you could I could have paid him 10 times the amount of money for the corporate video. And it's still it was like, you know, just the painful to get it across the line, like painful to get across and get him paid. And it was like minimum effort. But then like the nonprofit thing that would be like, you know, a totally ridiculously low rate.

And you know, he would just pour his heart and soul into it. It'd be like, you know, three weeks later, he's still working on this, like, you know, turning his like half day shoot into like a feature. You know, it's incredible. That's funny. It just drove me crazy. So I don't know what number that was on Instagram, but man, the Enneagram, not the Instagram. I mean, you can probably find it on the Instagram too. No, I think it depends. So if they were motivated because it was a nonprofit, then they might be a two.

Seth Lowe (34:30.926)
So twos are like super into helping other people. So like if their motivation to do really good on that project was because they were like, oh, I get to help people, you know, I get to help these people. And even though it's a low budget. And it's like, and for him, it's like low budget. Oh, like they can't even afford to like, I'm going to do really good because they can't afford to do like to pay someone else to do this even better. You know what I mean? So, so I think that could be it. And then the, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's total hero comp.

For sure it unhealthy. It's hero complex healthy. It's like I just want to help people like that's what drives me helping people so yeah, totally so Yeah, I But they could also be a three because it's gonna be like a three is like I'm gonna get I'm gonna put this video out and The nonprofit now these people are gonna see it I'm gonna get to post it and how to show how great I am like on my stuff, you know, I'm a who are gonna see it from that know me and I

all this stuff and then like this corporate video, like no one's gonna watch that. So why would I even, why would I even care? You know what I mean? Yeah, that makes sense. So, but those are those projects that still need to get done and you just need to, they need to get done regardless for stuff like that. I, even though there might be like a real long deadline for that, I would just put a tight deadline or a closer deadline, reasonable close deadline and be like, here's our deadline for this. Here's the budget.

I want to make sure I see this version of it because before we put it out so it's like you know what I mean like yeah, yeah, I would just add like a delete a week off the calendar on every like check -in point, you know, and yeah for sure No, I think yeah, those are the projects because we have a project like that right now We had we shot like six videos in one day with actors and everything and then like we're they're releasing these videos like once a month and the next one is due like next week, but

We could have done it like three months ago. I mean, we've been super busy these last few months, so I don't blame our editors as, sorry if you're watching this or listening to this, but yeah, those are the types of things where it's like, you just, you have to put the, we have to put a deadline on it regardless of whether we have six months to do it or not and just get it done because it's better to get it done and show the client that we can do it.

Seth Lowe (36:55.726)
You know what I mean? Like get it done quickly and deliver them all at once versus like one at a time. Here we go. So the way I kind of look at everything and as a producer, I think it's really good to look at it this way is like what's the client? Not what the client expects, but like what would make the client happy? You know what I mean? Like not so much like if they might be like, oh, our expectation is this. And sometimes their expectation is unreasonable or whatever. But like. If I know we can't hit a deadline that's coming up.

and it's like three days away, four days away, I like to get in there quickly with the client and be like, hey, this is what's going on, this is what's happening. So it's not like the day before and then we're like kidding them or like the day of and be like, sorry, we're not gonna be able to get this to you today. It's like giving like that client management. To me, why we're successful is because we kind of can feel like stuff with clients pretty good. Like I feel like most producers do, but like, or business owners do is like.

Especially especially successful ones is like they know kind of like what the client wants and what they and then sometimes it's like just being able to kind of feel like what's coming up and There's times where I'll be like I'll hit I'll reach out to editors and be like hey Where are you guys at with this or where are you at? You know? Whatever because I know like a client's gonna be hitting us up real soon about this one project and sure enough like that day or next day or whatever like they're hitting us up and if they're not hitting us up it's because we hit them up already and more like we're

this is where we're at with this project. We're going to be here with it. You know, so yeah, or like deadlines coming up. I know, but we're going to deliver this one earlier. Get him like, I don't know, just yeah, dealing with the clients and like having that relationship with them. I think it's like the most important thing, whether the video is good or not. I mean, it should be always good, but if it's not going to be good, like it's like that communication and that relationship with the client is just key. Yeah, I completely agree. I'm, I'm like a huge proponent of if there's,

if I think there's going to be a slight issue or delay or a new sort of something we couldn't have foreseen maybe when we estimated the project or set the schedule or whatever comes up, I'm like the second I can, if I can't immediately solve it, the client knows about it. And it's just like, Hey, here's what's going on. Here's what we're trying to do to mitigate it or what are you comfortable with or how do you want to, you know, go forward with this new challenge or deadline, whatever, you know what I mean? But I think it's just so important. Yeah, totally.

Seth Lowe (39:17.742)
to be on the front end of it and just have a conversation. I mean, it almost never is a problem or backfires. You know, the people just want to be looped in, you know, clients aren't usually mean or angry. They just want to know what's going on. That's the biggest thing. They want to know what's going on. Yeah, definitely. What's, are you, like, what's your, like, role? I guess I should have asked you this a long time ago. That's a great question. Because I mean, I know you as the photographer that was on set and then you're like, doing this podcast, but I'm like, you're talking about, like, you know, working with editors, you're talking about all this other stuff. Like,

That's a great question. I wrestle with that a lot. So I'm in a pretty small market compared to you, like 250, 300 ,000 people. I'm halfway between Chicago and St. Louis. I mean, I went to school for photography and that's kind of what I jumped out freelancing in. But I love video, so I started basically like I was shooting stills for clients and they'd be like, hey, do you do video? And this was like 2000, I don't know.

13, 12, 13, when digital video was starting to become kind of real. And I was like, yeah, I can do that. And so I just figured it couldn't be that hard. So I just got a camera and just started trying it. I shot a few things, shot a fun little short film with my grandpa and filmed a couple music videos and just doing stuff. And here where I'm at,

there's not really a lot of production companies or anything. So I just, I'm kind of like, I produce like local stuff, you know, there's a handful of clients that need, you know, need like corporate talking head stuff, maybe product, hey, new product announcement, or, you know, that there's that kind of stuff where it's like one, two day shoots, one, two cameras. Maybe sometimes I kind of produce, like I'll bring on a DP and maybe like, you know, a gaffer, you know, the,

the all hated swing roll that everyone loves to dunk on. You know what I mean? Like a couple of people like that. And, you know, maybe I'll like produce and kind of shoot stills or direct and shoot stills and maybe bring in someone else and kind of like line produce for the day if there's a lot going on. So that's maybe like half or a third of my income or busyness. And then the rest of it's, you know, photography or, you know, I've, I've DP'd stuff for production companies, that kind of stuff. So it's just, I'll, I'm kind of like, I just like.

Seth Lowe (41:45.518)
I like having a camera. I like being on set. Yeah, that kind of stuff. So so are you like a when you're not because you are you typically shooting like when you're on set? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like 90. Yeah, 95 % of the time. Gotcha. OK, so so you are a photographer that turned into a producer whenever it's needed. Yeah, like, yeah, I I kind of started realizing a couple of years ago.

I went through like a what am I doing with my life face and I really had to start peeling back like why do I like photography what makes me tick what am I actually interested in because it seems like there's more I Don't want my identity to be photography and there's more to me than just a camera. But what is that and I realized I like helping people I like solving problems I like connecting people like I'm always the one that's like oh if

If someone needs help, I'm like, you gotta call this guy. He knows how to do that. He'll have the answer to that. I love connecting people. I love technical problem solving, hence liking a camera, but I also like logistics problem solving. If I was in a bigger market, I'd probably would maybe steer a little more towards the producer role thing. It's just not a big enough city to sustain that full time where I'm at. But I really do love that side of it and the client relationship side. So I'm kinda wearing a lot of hats, I think, just largely out of, you know.

where my market is like and where I'm at. I wanted to pivot over to outside life. I know you're married, you have almost two year old now. How do you think routines play into success? Because I think a lot of freelancers really struggle with having a healthy routine when they're not on set or when they're not shooting. It's one thing to get a 5 a .m. call time and you have a schedule handed to you. But if you're going a few weeks without getting a call sheet,

What do you do with your life, you know, so how does routine play into success or what's like your routine look like? Good question routine So I'm really bad at like doing the same thing over and over again I think there's a typical things that I do every day and that's check my email and that's about as routine as it gets you know what I mean, like I

Seth Lowe (44:11.79)
That's I'll check my email every day. Like that's the only thing I know for sure that I'm going to do every day. But because there's always like so many different projects going on and being a seven, I'm like I'm like.

kind of feels like a audio board where you're just moving little dials slowly up every time for all my projects. So it's like, oh, I need a crew. I need a crew this job that's coming up. And I'll be like, all right, contact a couple of people. And like, oh, I need to do this. I need to buy these pieces for this, I don't know, cables or whatever. And I'd move that one up a little bit. And oh, I got to do this. Oh, I got this client over here that's asking. It's just like little bit, little here, little there. And that's kind of how I basically just run.

run my life, but There's a couple things that so I know I'm not very good at structure. I'm like terrible at structure So I like purposefully will build out systems that I can live on they live it within does that make sense? So it's like Like so I have so I'm like really really good at Excel, which I shouldn't be because of who I am, you know, like like um Don't put me in a box. But like yeah because of that like I'll be like, okay, I

And it's kind of ridiculous. They'll be like, oh, let's plan family vacation or something. Let's plan family vacation. What are we going to eat or whatever? Let me build a spreadsheet. That's hilarious. So any project or anything that happens, the first thing I do is build a spreadsheet. And I start putting things in place because I'm so unstructured that I would never, or I'm not.

I don't do like the routine like I guess that's another routine I guess like I build these systems out that I can live with it Otherwise, I'm like all over the place. So So yeah, and then I try to include as many people as I can within that Spreadsheet or whatever it is so that everyone can have like input on it and like it's not just coming because I'll I'll build stuff I'll over complicate things like so quickly that I'm trying to include everything within it, you know, so it's like yeah, I

Seth Lowe (46:21.102)
You're gonna have some like family meeting someday and you're gonna plot a spreadsheet and your junior high kid is just gonna be like dad I hate you so much Trust me, I don't like them either I just do it because I have to okay, but yeah, that's the that's yeah my Yeah, there's no like typical routine and it's like I'm sure there's a detriment to that There's a there's a couple things that I do. I just keep a list. Um, I

a to -do list that I always go back to and then my list will include like talk to this person about these things or and then one thing that's always on my to -do list that is like spend 30 minutes like thinking of a Axiom project that is like just Axiom like no client basically you know so that's kind of like one thing that I try to do but yeah I like that that's really cool but I seriously like follow that like maybe twice a week.

But it's like, you know, you get busy, but yeah, I just try to, I try to do that. Yeah. I like that. My, my friend, Seth Haley has a, uh, on his calendar every day at like 10 AM or something. And it's like work on personal work. And he's like, if, you know, I'm on set, like I just obviously don't do it, but if I'm home and it pops up, I'm like, okay, at 10 AM every day that I'm home, I just work on personal work. And it could be like editing something. It could be just thinking of a new idea. It could be writing, but it's something.

like internal, you know, for me, and I think that's really good. Yeah, I think the other thing, too, is goals, like setting goals for everything. And it's funny because like I was so hardcore about goals like, but this last couple of years, like I haven't been as much. I mean, we have goals like serious goals that we're trying to hit. But so like a real goal, like the way you write a real goal is you put a deadline to it. You put exactly what.

meaning that goal looks like, like what, you know, and then like you spend time like envisioning like what happens after you win this, like after you do this goal, like what does that look like? You know, all these things you spend all this time. That's how, that's how like a real goal is actually created. Not just like, Oh, I want to lose weight. You know what I mean? So it's like, um, and we used to, I used to be so hardcore about it and that right now there's only like two real goals that we're trying. I'm trying to hit like in businesses. And that's just that we become like completely.

Seth Lowe (48:47.726)
like we don't have clients anymore, like we're our only clients and then we're just selling content. That's kind of like what we're hoping to be able to get to. And then the other goal that I have is that I want to write a Hallmark movie. Seriously, that's awesome. I love that. Are you for real? I have this dumb idea. Well, okay, so we, my wife and I will watch our hallmark movies and I think they're hilarious and.

so cheesy and it's like you know exactly what's gonna happen it's like and the structure is like there you know what I mean like it's already and then in my mind I'm like I can make this better I know that I could make this better and that's been my goal for like the last like five years I still haven't done it yet so that's hilarious one of my one of my friends his first full -time AC job was he first did like first AC'd on a Hollywood

or not Hollywood, a Hallmark Christmas movie. Oh, that's awesome. I've always wanted to just go check it out. I'm guessing they shoot it like in the middle of the summer and like some town in Canada. I can't remember. It was like outside of New York somewhere. I'll ask him. Oh, was it? OK. Yeah. I'm not like not like in the city like New York, you know, proper. Right, right, right. Like upstairs somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like you can always see like the fake snow that's like stapled down.

Yeah, all of that. So I feel like you and I are the opposite there. I'm I'm pretty routine driven and I'm not very goal oriented. Oh, really interesting. I mean, I have like things I want to do and I have I would say Travis Travis and I talked about this. I'm more like outcome driven. Like what do I want to experience or feel or have happen? But in terms of

how I get there or maybe the timeline is fairly open and it usually for me. Like I'll try multiple ways of achieving it or having the outcome I want. And unless I'm just, need to be honest with myself and maybe I'm really slacking on something which definitely happens. Usually I'm not like super married to a timeline because I just know like, I don't know, I'm just kind of open to like one time, I'm busy and I have a wife and kids so it's hard for me to always commit to like, I'm gonna shoot a.

Seth Lowe (51:15.662)
short film by June, well it's like I could get a dream project, my kid could have something come up, you know what I mean? It's just like, and I don't even beat myself up over things I can't control. So, but maybe I could be a little bit more cool. I mean, it helps, but I think, yeah, it's always hard when it's like, I know this is not gonna pay off or it's not the, it's just like passion, you know, it's like, oh, I just wanna do this for fun, but then like,

That's the hardest part is when I want to do a project that is a project that just passionate about and excited about when the client calls like you got to do that job. You know what I mean? Like that's the that's the project that's going to feed my family, not the fun project. So it's like, you know, it's hard to to take away from that. But yeah, no, that makes sense. When you are like when you're thinking about like these open ended projects or whatever, like is it?

Is it because like you said that gets based on experience like you just want to have an experience off of that So are you talking about like doing like a short film and then you're just like I want to go through the process of that Like what? Yeah, like yeah, I guess that's a good way to summarize it not so much like an experience I'm like I want a feeling but yeah, I want to make a short film I'm not going to and I know that I have

limited time to invest in making a short film. So I'm not going to commit to like by June, I'm going to make a short film. And then if it's something I hate and I spend a lot of time, I'm mad at myself. Like I'm just going to like, okay, I'm going to spend a little bit of time. If I'm on a flight, maybe I'll sit down and try to write a few ideas for a script down or think through some ideas, you know, or, um, like one of my, I guess a goal I have is I want to do a hundred mile bike race this year, but I haven't like, I haven't necessarily committed to one yet. I'm going to kind of see what opens up, what my schedule looks like and try to hop on something.

And, but in the meantime, I'm just going to be training and I'll just train. And if I don't do a hundred mile bike ride, that's okay, because I'll still be really fit. And I love being on my bike and I'm not married to the outcome. I guess maybe that's a good scenario. I'm not always married to the outcome. I enjoy the process of getting there. And if I didn't do a hundred mile bike race this year, because you know, or even if I signed up for one, and then I got my dream job and had to like back out of committing to this ride, I don't think I'd even be mad because I still had fun and I rode my bike a lot and you know what I mean? So I don't, I don't know if that makes sense. No, it does totally. Um,

Seth Lowe (53:38.382)
You would hate Elon Musk. So I read Elon Musk's book and he was like, did you? Is it the one that is it the one that he like, like some some girl wrote it like it's a journalist wrote it for him, but like he got a chance to like. It must be. I don't know. Yeah, like the one that just came out like, you know, like, oh, it just came out. No, no, this one's I think it was older. Oh, OK. This one came out like maybe around Christmas or something. OK, this was a little older anyways.

He talks about deadlines and he says that he makes deadlines kind of arbitrary, but arbitrarily like real short, like real quick. So it's like, and it's most people like scoff at the idea of like, so like, I think one of them was like, he wants to put the, like he wants the Tesla to be, or the, one of the, one of the models, whatever model is or whatever it was. He wants it to go out on a specific date.

And everyone's like, that's impossible. We can't build a car that fast or whatever. He's like, we'll do what you have to do to get it done at that time. Like he just like gets in everyone's face. Like it's super like harsh about it and everything. And he says like, I rather have an arbitrary deadline that is soon and we don't hit it, but get really close to it. Then have one that's realistic and spread out and like never hit it. You know what I mean? Like, because it's like, no one's it just like.

drives people and like pushes people to like do the fastest best job that they can to like hit these deadlines that are arbitrary. Most deadlines are arbitrary and even if the clients thinks they're not most of the time they are. Yeah the book I read he talks about that a lot and I actually do really appreciate that and I tend to be a book I really like is a screw it let's do it by Richard Branson. Okay yeah it's a good a good one you might like and he's very much like if.

He wants to do something. He just does it. And I'm kind of the same way. Like I'm not someone like with the podcast, I'm like, I'm not gonna like sit around and write, you know, come up with a whole show and develop the show and plan out all this stuff out and everything else. I'm just gonna go and I'm just gonna jump in and episode 10 will probably be a different structure than episode one. And that's okay. I'll learn along the way. I don't need to have it all figured out before I do it. Let's just jump in, you know, and just figure it out. So.

Seth Lowe (56:04.718)
Yeah, I read his biography and he was, yeah, that's one of the things he says is like, if you have an idea or one of his people offer staff or whatever, they have an idea and they like want to do it, like we just go for it. We just do that idea. And if it's successful, great. And if it's not successful, then we just stop doing it. It doesn't work out. It doesn't work out. But at least we tried. Why not? Try as many times as we can. Yeah, for sure. I love that about.

I think you have to kind of detach your ego a little bit because like if something fails, it doesn't mean you're a failure. You just you have to try a lot of things and some things will work and some things won't. But it's worth it. Yeah, for sure. So hard, though. Right. I mean, it's I love the idea of it, but there's so many things that I just want to go for and do. But time, all these other things play into it. And then I self -regulate before I even start it. So it's like, like.

For instance, writing a Hallmark movie. I really wanna do it. I've always wanted to do it. I think I even have a pretty decent idea in my head of like all of the characters and all the things. I've started a spreadsheet, you know, it's very important to spreadsheet part of it. But then I'll be like, oh no, I can't do it right now. I got family time I need to, you know, I've got this other project I'm trying to do. I'm gonna have this other thing. So I'm like, I'm not gonna start it. I'm not gonna start it. But it's like, if you have that mentality of like, no, just do it, just start it, you know.

That's another Gary Vee. Yeah, you listen to his stuff. Yeah, same type of thing It's just like just start doing it and as soon as you get bored with it, then stop doing it That's when you know that you don't want to do it if it's boring to you. So it's like yeah And that's I think that might be part of it too It's like I'm gonna get really into this really dumb idea of making a Hallmark movie and then and then realize like on us actually not that fun to do like what are we?

Who knows where exactly or what other doors will open? That's never well, exactly. Yeah, that's the thing. It's like I'm self regulating. I'm telling myself like no. When why like why you tell yourself no, just do it. Just go for it. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I feel like there are almost no dead ends if you stop and think about it. They almost all, you know, like a dead end almost provides you something that applies somewhere later. Oh, 100 percent. Yeah. How has how has becoming a dad like changed?

Seth Lowe (58:28.302)
maybe the way you spend your time or has it changed how you invest in your business or gear or anything? Or is it like, do you feel like you're pretty, you were so deep into your career role that it didn't really impact that as much? It didn't impact that side of it as much, like how much I spend or what I do on that side of it. Also that has to do with that. I don't do anything with finances. So it's like, makes it real easy for me to be like, ah, I don't know. I didn't change anything. I do ask my, before we spend any like major stuff, like I,

talked through it with my business partner, your CFI financial advisor. We talked through it and we decided if this is a purchase that we can make or not. But for the most part, it hasn't that side of it. What it has though is that it really makes me focus on what type of jobs I can take and what type of jobs I can't take. So the one that we just did, it was like basically five days, it was four days of sh.

of shooting, but it was like five days like with prep and all that stuff. And sure. And it's like it all falls on my wife to like be able to like it all falls on her to raise her kid basically for those days. Like she's 100 percent on everything. So it's like, OK, can I take a job like that? What are the parameters that I can do to take this type of job? You know what I mean? So it's like, yeah. So for us and she's got help and everything. So I'm able to. But it's like.

It just makes me second guess these bigger projects. Like, okay, what can we do? And then also last year, or last Christmas, we took two really big jobs right during Christmas. That Christmas New Year's time, two different customers, one customer was like, we need to release this video, it's really important and it's a big deal. And we hired a few different motion graphics persons to do that. And then we had a shoot that we did.

And it was like all my time was at the shoot. All my time is like talking to these people, like trying to get these jobs done. Like it's just like, and it really sucked me out of like that timeframe. And like we had a come to Jesus moment at that after that. And it was like, we're not going to take on these jobs anymore. We can't, we can't do that. You know what I mean? It's like, okay. So it's just, yeah, they just become like, do you have this, you have discussions that you normally wouldn't have when it's like, okay. Like, and for me too, it's like, do I really want like,

Seth Lowe (01:00:54.35)
I'm led by happiness. I know that when I'm on set, it's fun. You know what I mean? I know when I'm doing this stuff, it's just fun to do. It's a great time. But on the other side of it, it's like, do I really, stepping back, do I really want for me to be away from, especially the first couple years, learning something new almost every day. It's so hard. Yeah, I had a real busy day and my wife comes back from being at her mom's and stuff and it's like.

Oh, look, look what you do. And he's just like spinning around. It's like the most dumb thing, but it's like he's spinning around. You learn to spin around. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, I missed like, I missed like the first time we got to do that. You know what I mean? Like, okay. So it's just like, like stuff like that. It's like, no, I want to be around for that. I have my own business. I, our goal was to have freedom so that we can do this. Like, why am I doing these jobs that are taking me away from what our goal was? So, so yeah. Yeah. We, I'm like,

probably 90 % travel jobs, which is, I mean, I love it because like, you know, my high school dream was to be in a band and tour the world. And this seems like a better outcome because, um, it's still traveling with my friends, but I actually make money and, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's hard, you know, like you, you know, fly out at like 5am on a Monday, get home on like, you know, Thursday or Friday. And yeah, you miss four days of your kids learning to color something or.

You know what I mean or swing or whatever it is. It's like silly stuff. It's like, man, like, you know, it's tough. Yeah, 100 percent. Yeah, to me, it's like the reason why and we are in those like such a better place than 99 percent of people out there, you know, like some people have to put their kid in daycare. They have they don't have a choice. Like they have to do those things for us. It's like I mean, we got into this kind of late in the game anyways, like.

I'm already in my 40s, you know, like most people have kids like in their 20s or 30s, you know what I mean? Like, so we got into this game pretty late, but it's like the reason now is like we have a business that's established. We have clients that are predictable. We have all of these things. Like we set ourselves up so that we could spend a lot of time with our kid, potential kids. So it's like, what's, you know what I mean? That's like.

Seth Lowe (01:03:16.654)
This is why we do this. You know what I mean? Like we have an opportunity. Like why would we squander this opportunity by just taking on these extra jobs that are fun, but aren't really, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, they'll bring us money. They'll bring us financial, whatever. But it's like, nah, I want to see my kid, you know, want to see my kid learn to walk. I want to see my kid speak. You know what I mean? Like I, that's, that's what I, that's, that's the real joy. Yeah. Yeah. I completely agree. I had a really healthy step forward.

over the past couple years where I've really found joy outside of work. And I mean, I love what I do and I have a blast, but that's not where my true joy and self -worth comes from. And that was a huge, huge breakthrough for me to get to that point. Yeah, what's your thing? Oh, I mean, family time is huge. Just walking in the door, even if it's like I took the garbage out and I walked back in and our son Wyatt is like, dad. It's like the best part of his day. I was gone for 30 seconds. So just, you know, like that.

building way more than, you know, taking an amazing photo. You know, being outside, just I love, you know, going for a bike ride or a hike. You know, just things like that. Reading a book, spending time with my wife, just not being so tied to where my self worth and joy came from a job or being on set or, you know, landing a client. You know, those things are great and they're still, you know, I celebrate them. I get pumped up, but it's not not as emotionally roller coaster.

those moments you know. Yeah 100 % that's cool. So I get this question a lot I'm curious what you do what do you guys do for health insurance?

We hired a health insurance broker that oh, okay so I mean it's just like a They're out there like it's just like a Housing like someone that's like a housing agent. What is the cult realtor? Yeah, it's the same thing like you just you just hire like you do yeah You tell them like this is like we need health insurance. This is our family. This is you know, whatever and

Seth Lowe (01:05:26.062)
And you just kind of think through what your goals are, you know what I mean? Like and how healthy your family is. So like the main things is like if an emergency happens, we need them to take the brunt of that. You know what I mean? But other than that, like, yeah, we're doing checkups semi -annually. You know what I mean? Like some things, some things we go to the doctor for like yearly, but very few, you know, so dental vision. Like we know like I have terrible eyes. My wife has terrible eyes. Like we know when you vision.

You know what I mean? So it's like, we just tell them like, these are all of our needs. And then they go and they find the best health insurance for you. And then they tell you like what it cost. And then they'll like, this is what you'll pay if you do this, this is what you pay if you do this. You know, like all these different things. And then, and then they'll just present to you all the different health plans that you can get. Yeah. So for us, so wait, hold on. You don't have health insurance right now? You got kids? No, I didn't know like a.

A health insurance broker was a thing. I just got you. OK, yeah. OK, so you do have health insurance. Well, sort of. We use it's called a health care sharing network. It's like one of those Christian ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're on. It's called Samaritan. So we OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we send like a check every month to it or PayPal to like a different person. So it's been great. Yeah, no, I have a couple of friends that have done that and and they're super happy with it. We probably would do that to.

but a while ago we had an HSA. So like it was, our HSA was basically like a built in like way to stash money that the government couldn't touch. So that was the, so that was kind of like our like, oh yeah, let's do it this way. But we've definitely looked into doing something like that because we don't even have an HSA anymore. I mean, we have still an HSA account which we use, but yeah. So yeah. I think I'm going to do one this year actually. That's kind of one of my things I need to get done.

HSA. Yeah. So I want to get LASIK next year. So I'm going to like dump a bunch of money in the HSA and then get LASIK. Yeah. It's it's nice to be able to like it's I mean, that's the question that you just asked. It's like so many questions like that, that people are like trying to do a business and they don't even they don't even think about like, oh, what am I? Because like they're like, oh, I want to do my own business, but I need health insurance. I'm like, well, you can get health insurance. You just got to pay for it.

Seth Lowe (01:07:49.07)
It's like everything, you know what I mean? Like it's like, it's expensive. Yeah. Yeah. It really can be. But like if you're pretty healthy person, um, you can just have a really high deductible and yeah, that's, yeah. And it's, and it sucks, but it's like, okay. But like at that point it's like, you're going to pay that much if you don't have insurance anyway. So might as well just get that type of insurance. You know what I mean? Like, so yeah, we were on a plan like a, I don't know, like.

Blue Cross Blue Shield or something. I don't even remember. Maybe like probably about seven or eight years ago when we first got married and we were paying like, I don't know, like $600 a month. And then we looked at this healthcare sharing thing and it's like just under $300 a month. And I was like, you know, my, we were like, kind of nervous about it. My wife was really nervous about it. But I was like, let's just, let's just try it and see what happens. We always go back to insurance company. We're healthy. So I mean, you know, you talk like 300 bucks a month savings.

That was almost eight, no, seven years ago we switched. We switched right after our daughter was born. Seven times, 12 months times seven years, whatever that is, like 80 months, 86 months times 300 bucks a month. That's like $30 ,000 we've saved. It's crazy. Which is way more than our deductible on this plan. 100%. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And different people are going to be different. Yeah.

Everyone everyone needs to take it the way they need to, you know, what is best for them and their family. But yeah, for us, it just was like it was just funny. Well, I think, you know, where we found out about the insurance broker people is the can't. Gosh, it's only such a fanboy Dave Ramsey. They have the they have the E .L .P .s or they have like, yeah, they have like these all these different people on their website that you can find, like that are like will do your taxes or do.

you know, all of the different stuff. So yeah, they, they, we found them on there and then now we just know to look for them. So yeah. Yeah. You know, speaking of Dave Ramsey, have you seen the meme going around and it's like a picture of Dave Ramsey and it's just the caption just says, if you had been saving all of your, you know, extra hours, daylight saving times hours in an envelope, like Dave Ramsey said, we wouldn't have to change time anymore. I thought that was so funny. That's hilarious.

Seth Lowe (01:10:16.142)
I love that. Yeah. I've seen a few of them with him and some of them are like just real like just real silly. He's so memeable. Like I mean he's just he's a walking meme in so many ways. Yeah totally. Well that Entree leadership. So do you start real quick as we're talking about Dave Ramsey on the Entree leadership there's a portion like on that when he does that conference there's towards the end of the thing he's like.

speech is like, you know, coming to an end and he's like, is I know a lot of you guys are struggling with your with businesses and that's why you're here. You're trying to figure out how to keep this going. And then he starts yelling, don't give up or something like something along those lines. Don't do it. Don't give up. Don't don't like sex is screaming. Don't do it. Don't do it. And if you are in that mentality, like in you're just like, yeah, like, yeah, like.

It really gets to you. But then if you're not, then it's just kind of funny to see this guy on stage. Yeah, like, don't don't give up. That's hilarious. That's funny. Yeah. Is he's good. I'm trying to remember. Is Donald Miller? Is he a part of that or he's his own thing? Right. Or maybe maybe his own thing, I think. Yeah. Maybe he's just like a guest on the podcast or something. When I listened. Oh, yeah. I don't know. I've never. Yeah, I didn't see him on that. But Donald.

I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book. I think that's a really cool book

Seth Lowe (01:12:06.382)
business program you can go through online. He has a couple of books. You should check it out. They're great. They're really good. Yeah. I haven't. And yeah, I mean, I still like him a lot, but it's like, I knew that he was doing like marketing stuff or whatever, but yeah, Storybrand. You should check out Storybrand. It's really cool. Storybrand. Okay. Yeah. I'll check it out. And for people that are listening and thinking about quitting their job, another book that really was influential for me was a book called Quitter by John Acuff.

Yeah, Johnny, it's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's really silly, but it's actually really good. And then at the end of the or somewhere in the middle of the book, there is a checklist of all the things you should do that you should check. And it's like one of those. I remember, I don't know if you remember, like those 17 magazines where, like, it's like, does your crush like you and like.

You know, yes, no, like all these different like it's like goes full on checklist and then you get to a number and then if the number is greater than whatever then definitely likes you or if he does, you know, it's exactly the same thing but it's like should I quit my job and then go down this list and that's cool. There's like, there's probably like 40 different questions on there. I don't know, but it was like super helpful to me because it was like a resounding like, yeah, you should quit your job. Like this, that was like one of the things was like, okay, nail in the coffin. Like definitely I'm gonna do this now. But yeah, it was a really good.

It's a good book if you're thinking about quitting your job to like do this full time. Yeah, that okay. I'll throw a link to that in the show notes. That'd be cool for people to see. Dude, Seventeen magazine. That's like, that's hilarious. You get like one of those and like a, a Sobe. Was that the drink with the lizard on it? You know, like peak, peak. Oh man. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah. So you seem pretty financially savvy. I mean, do you, do you use like a, um,

like saving for retirement. Do you guys do that? Do you use like a financial planner? Do you just like have like an online, you know, IRA or what do you, what do you do? Yeah. So we structured our business to be, I think originally it was like a sole proprietor. S we switched it to an S corp so that we could actually like, um, at the time we had employees, so we were like matching Bible. Yeah. Yeah. I know what's what's five, four days right now.

Seth Lowe (01:14:18.286)
401k. Again, I'm terrible with financial stuff, but we switched it so that we could do this thing so that we can save money. And basically just like it's like a matching system that that you can put money straight from your company into your 401k. And then it's like, yeah, it's gross. So, yeah, what we did was again, going back to the Dave Ramsey thing, we found a guy that was a financial advisor.

And basically they will help you. They look at your income, how much money you're making and they tell you like you should be putting this much money into your accounts and then they manage all your accounts. So you don't pay them or you don't pay them like a fee or anything. I guess there's some that you can, but we don't, we never paid a fee or anything to this guy, but he manages all of our accounts. And it's great because like,

Like every year he has a meeting with us sometimes we skip the meetings because we're like we're not gonna put any more money in right now but we skip meetings and then like but like who meet with us will tell us like we figure out where our goals are and then we'll and then he aggressively tries to get us to our goals which is great because That's cool. If someone else is worrying about that side of it, then it's makes it awesome for us. Yep Yeah, my I have kind of a similar situation. I I'm structured as an S corp and then

out of my like salary, you know, self -salaried income, we have a Roth IRA. But then on the business side, I have a SEP IRA, Self -Employed Persons IRA, which is kind of like a 401k. And so, I put a little money in both, basically like, usually like at the end of the year, if I've had a pretty good year, I'll just kind of like do a lump sum dump into the SEP IRA. And then,

I kind of trust the guy that we have a local guy in town, finance guy, and he'll just kind of, you know, they kind of look at like my tax return and everything in there. Like sometimes they're like, Oh, you should just leave the money in the SEP IRA because you know, the, the Roth IRA grows post -tax. The SEP IRA is pre -tax. So, you know, if I take money out of that, I'll pay taxes on it eventually. And so sometimes they like suggest, Hey, you should transfer from the SEP to the Roth. They do it. I don't know.

Seth Lowe (01:16:38.702)
Imagine having to have all that information in your head. I can't do it. I'm not built that way. I don't can't think like that. Yeah, totally. Yeah, but you have to know that people like ask questions though. Oh, for sure. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. You go in because it's your money. So it's like, what do I want my money to do? How do I want it to act? You know what I mean? Like you got to control that stuff. So it's like, yeah. So but yeah. But once they're there, they can like, OK, taxes, you know, whatever, like.

Oh, this is getting shut down by the government. This is the new thing you got to do. He always has new programs, new systems that is beneficial and then we can make the decisions based on that information. He's been great. We get reports every year where our money's at, or actually monthly, not monthly quarterly. I don't know. I get a monthly email that I don't even open. I'm just like, cool, delete.

Like I trust you. Yeah, yeah. It's like, well, I look at, yeah, we just, cause we can, we see what all of our individual stuff is. So then at the end of the year, he like brings it all together and says, all right, you're worth this much. And I'm just like, okay, good. But yeah. You know, I think even if for people listening, if even if you hate Dave Ramsey, I think a really valuable tool that he has is on his site. As Gordo's mentioned, you can go on and you can look for like realtors or.

CPAs or financial advice people and he's done a really fantastic job of just vetting a lot of these people and weeding out people that Might be dishonest or have you know, like a financial thing that benefits them alongside what they're selling you and I think it's absolutely you could hate the guy whatever it's totally worth going on his site and just it's a great it's a great tool for sure. Yeah, really valuable tool Yeah, I mean even if like

Even if you find somebody there and you decide you don't want to work with them, you don't have to work with them. You know what I mean? You interview all these people still. But the list is there that you can go through and not be like, okay, let me Google this thing that might solve my problem. Yeah. Way better than a Google review starting point. For sure. Oh, you know what I just did the other day that was awesome. So cool.

Seth Lowe (01:19:01.806)
I just got my tax return back from my CPA for 2023. And you know, they're like slammed and I don't have time to get me in for a meeting right away to ask a few questions. And most of my questions are pretty ignorant stuff anyway, cause I just don't know how to read a tax return. And so I just, I just took the tax return and I uploaded it. I've been chatting with like a Claude AI. It's kind of like chat GPT. Oh yeah. I just was like, Hey, here's my tax return. Can you explain it to me and answer some of these questions? And it just spit out this amazing like,

bullet point list of like, here's what your CPA did. Yeah, yeah, dude, it was so cool. That's awesome. Yeah, and I was like, okay, that's great. What does this mean? And you know, like, it answered that. It compared it to my previous year and showed me like where I'd had business growth, how my like, like, it was like, it looks like you bought it the coma in 2021 and depreciated it this much this year, like it knew it was crazy. And then I was like, okay, are there any red flags or anything interesting in this? You know, is it really, really? I mean, in like the space of 10 or 15 minutes.

You know, I got a wealth of knowledge. It was really cool. So you should totally try. That's amazing. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah, I'm definitely going to do that now. Yeah. So the worst thing happened this year, our tax guy retired and then we got a new tax guy. This our old tax guy was like he was amazing. Even during Covid, he was like he reached out. He's like, hey, did you guys sign up for the SBA loan? Like you got to do that. Like I'm like.

Why are you calling me like, you know what I mean? Like just, just as such a, it's such a good guy. You know what I mean? Like he was just like, and then like throughout the year, um, my wife, she, um, we switched at one point from quick books, like whatever it was before to like online and like, oh, sure. He like walked, he like walked her through like how to make all these changes, like where the new stuff was, like all of the, like things that, you know,

I don't know if normal CPAs do this or not, but we never had like a really good relationship with CPAs before and then this dude came along and he was awesome and then he quit or retired, whatever. And then so we got a new guy and he's been fine so far, but it's just like the, like, we don't know what he's doing different than our old guy. You know what I mean? So it's like having this tool of like AI to like be able to like just double check even. I think it's great. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. You should, you should give it a shot. I think.

Seth Lowe (01:21:19.63)
I get that question quite a bit, the who does your taxes question. And then like, and then I'm usually it's me that's telling people like, you need to, you need to do financial, like you need to get a financial advisor. You need to get like all this. You don't have like pushing that on other people. Like you got to do this. Make sure you're saving for retirement. It's like, what? You're not saving for retirement? Come on. Yeah. I feel like I've just been talking out of my ass this whole time. So that's the whole point of a podcast. We were listening to Joe Rogan.

Yeah, but I guess super intelligent. That's the difference. Oh man. How do you like? Are you pretty like what's your future outlook? Are you pretty pretty positive on the future of like just the industry as a whole or your business outlook as a whole? Yeah, for sure. I think.

I think there's always been a place for people to tell stories. And like that's never going to go away. You know, I mean, I might take over and like tell stories for you, you know what I mean? But like it's like people are never going to be replaced. I don't think people can't be replaced, like authentic, true people. And I think that because of that.

I think AI is going to have a really hard time actually replacing the industry as a whole. Because yeah, they can create, yeah, they'll just make stock footage for you, or they'll do that. You know what I mean? But I don't know. I've always held to the, AI can do things really, really well. And it's a tool. But that tool is just a tool. People still need to eat.

Real people still need to be the ones like driving it for it to be good You know what? I mean? Like my relationship with a client is never gonna be replaced by AI like it just yeah It's just not ever gonna happen. You know what I mean? Like yeah, I probably doesn't want to just like sit there and dadada prom You know, I mean like they yeah Yeah, but when they when the client asks what they think is a simple question to me I'm like doing like 20 different calculations in my head of like yes How to deliver this to them, you know what I mean? Like yeah, I?

Seth Lowe (01:23:38.766)
And a client might think they're asking a question, but they're really like asking a very specific question, but they're asked typically like I'm translating that question and I don't think that AI. I I might do a great job translating and ask whatever, but that relationship that I have with my client like that they trust that what I'm going to do and how I'm going to pull it off is that's never going to be replaced. So I feel like because of that I feel like.

most of our jobs are still real safe. I think that if, I think if you're not bringing value to your relationships with your clients, then you will be replaced for sure. And I think the, as long as you're bringing value to them in a relationship that is authentic and for you, it's like, like, are you doing the best job for your client?

like, or you're doing that for yourself, you know what I mean? Like if it's for your client, then that, yeah, you're safe. I think, but because we do most of our jobs, like direct with our clients, then that's great. And then a lot of people like will go through, like work through agencies and stuff. And I think that to me is like, there's a better chance of you being replaced because unless.

You know what I mean? Like I just know the agencies that I've worked with in the past and like I feel like everyone at that agency is replaceable and everyone that they hire is replaceable. You know what I mean? So I don't know. Maybe I just don't have that good enough of a relationship with good agencies. Some agencies I think are really good with like if they get talent they like, they really stick with it. But a lot of agencies definitely have an attitude where, and I don't know if it's the agency attitude or client pushing this, but like having someone new every time is kind of cool and always having like the latest fresh and perfect.

freshest person is like sort of the business model. So, you know, I mean, you can't I guess you can't totally hate them for it. You know, it's like it's just it is what it is. I don't. Yeah, I don't hate them for it. I just think they're making things replaceable easier. You know what I mean? Yeah. If you have a great relationship with your clients like that's not replaceable like you're that's what's going to stick around, whether your client is an agency or whatever. But with certain agencies and certain.

Seth Lowe (01:25:58.254)
Like all that stuff is replaceable to them. So as long as you're building really good relationships, like direct with clients, I feel like you're safe. Like that, that yeah. And then if you get to where we're hoping to get to eventually where you're just selling your content and not working with clients, then that's even better because now you're producing things that are solving a problem that's out there. And yeah, I think that's.

I think that's a good place to be. Yeah, that's really cool. How old are you? I am 42. 42. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I feel like I'm I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if if this is like just an age thing or what. But like, I feel like at this age, like I just thought I stopped like really remembering like what my actual age is. Is that for you, too? Or? Yeah, I mean, I'm 30. What are you? You're 30. I'll be 36. But I'm kind of hitting that where I'm like.

People are like how are you I'm like, uh, I gotta think for a second. I'm like, I don't doesn't matter anymore, you know, like yeah It matters Okay, I've been I've been asked sorry one this Go ahead. Go ahead. No, I was gonna ask you to go back to it. Yeah Yeah, so I've been kind of wrapping the show up with this question for everybody would Would 20 year old Gordo be impressed with 42 year old Gordo? God no

So 20 year old Gordo was I was like doing like this traveling live production show and I was like on stage as an MC and like doing like silly skits and like all this stuff. It was just really embarrassing. But at that point I was just like everything was just fun and it was all about having fun and.

If I looked at my life now, it is definitely still very fun, but it's not like the fun that I thought I'd be having back then. If I saw, yeah. And I don't think I, it took me to like late into my twenties, maybe even like my thirties to realize like what, like what a like stable, like what it means to have like a stable job, like a, not a stable job, but like a stable company. You know what I mean? Like,

Seth Lowe (01:28:23.022)
I think to me the most impressive thing that I've done is that I've kept this business going for so long and it being secure. Like we're not, like I'm not worried even though I don't have any jobs like lined up for, I don't know, say September or October, whatever. You know what I mean? Like I don't have these, I have a couple of jobs I guess that are coming up, but it's like, like I don't, it's not like, I used to be so scared about like,

Am I going to get enough jobs next month? Am I going to get enough jobs? You know what I mean? Like I used to be so nervous about that when I started that I didn't realize like how like having the security of like, okay, like we're good, like how important that is. And back then I didn't I didn't even know that that was even a thing that I should worry about. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, so so yeah. So I feel like to me the most yeah, I.

I think back then too, it was like, I'm gonna have like 50 kids. I'm gonna be like, I just had like such weird like dreams and ambitions at 20 year old. I guess the biggest thing is I didn't know what I didn't know. You know what I mean? Like when you're that young, you're so dumb and you do so many dumb things. You know what I mean? Like, and it's just like, I mean, that's the time to do those dumb things. Like I'm not saying like, you know, like if you're 20 and you're doing whatever, like, yeah, that's learn. That's what that time is for.

Like you're not, you're not settled down. You're not whatever. And I think the most impressive thing is that I've been able to settle down and be happy where I'm at. And I don't, I don't think I would have liked that when I was younger, but I am proud of where I'm at now without like, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, without, without having to impress a 20 year old version of myself. That's a, that's a great perspective on it. I love that. It's honest. So, well, Hey, thank you so much for coming on. I mean,

It sounds like you're killing it and I had I just learned a ton talking with you and I had a blast It was a great conversation Thanks so much. And thanks for having me even though I don't think that Anyone would care what I have to say, but I appreciate you have me on I think a lot of people are this is this is really awesome. Thank you Oh, thanks. Thanks for having me

Seth Lowe (01:30:39.886)
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 the Solo Creative pod. Hit us up with any questions or suggestions for show guests. Thanks and have a great week.