Podcast Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to my podcast. You know, this is really exciting to be doing this and I’m not sure how I’m qualified to have a podcast. It is a great compliment and a great honor when people call me and ask for my advice and over the past couple years the calls have been increasing. There’s a great number of folks out there, perhaps because my network, my friends; we’re all in our 40s now and so maybe there’s a number of folks that are interested in starting their own businesses and it’s always a great compliment to get a phone call when somebody says “I’m thinking about starting my own business. Can I pick your brain for just a minute?” This is really the greatest compliment I could have and a funny thing that’s happening since a lot of my friends and the folks in my network are in their late 30s or 40s or 50s. Their kids are coming out of college and some of them are interested in getting into media production or starting a business and so their kids are calling an entire generation of young entrepreneurs. And again, it’s a thrill to get a phone call and when somebody says can I have your opinion about something. And I thought in this podcast perhaps this could be a way for me to share some of the thoughts that I have provided when somebody calls and says “may I have your opinion about something?” It gave me a sense that perhaps what I have learned over 27 years or so of being in business might have some value to someone else. So what I’m gonna do is put together about 25 to 30 minutes of thoughts on a topic as often as I possibly can and put it out to the world and maybe this could be a good resource. And I’ll put in the right keywords maybe there’s a question out there that folks might have. Frankly, even after 27 years of being in business I have more questions than answers and perhaps that’s why in a way it baffles me at times when people call for my advice about things. I will tell you too, there is a consulting portion of our business. There are people who call and ask for some advice about how to set up a studio or how to build a creative services department and for some of those services, obviously we charge money and that’s a very small part of our business, but I enjoy that kind of work so again how can I use this podcast to provide some value to the listener? Why would anyone tune in, and the answer might be perhaps there’s something that I might have to share in screwing things up and in failures. And in 27 years of business I could almost write a book called how not to run a video production company. But the true value is in the mistakes and the failures; and so what I want to do today, and reflecting on all of this, is talk about recreating the customer experience especially in a service based business. I am very familiar with the service based business. A video production company is obviously a service oriented kind of operation and I always think about the plumbing business that my grandfather started in 1958, Wilson Plumbing & Heating. And of course this is a service business and there’s a lot of plumbers in town and how do you win in that field? You provide a great customer experience, and in 1958, obviously they did not have Google reviews. They simply didn’t call you again if they were unsatisfied. If they were unhappy about something and the right thing to do of course, if you’re interested in providing good customer service and a great customer experience, is to make everything right. You always hope that if some customer is unhappy, they call you. I have a situation that I’m not happy about and I am in this situation the customer and I’ve started to really evaluate why I’m not happy and what I’m gonna do about it and here’s how it goes. My CPA retired and he deserved it. He was in his 60s, he had worked very hard with his brothers to build this firm and I won’t mention any names because everyone in the story, they’re all great people. It’s just my experience with the new owner who took over this CPA firm, this accounting firm, my experience wasn’t good. And I don’t know if it has a lot to do with anything other than my experience with the CPA that I had been working with tour for 27 years was great. We had a relationship, we worked well together. I only have 48 credits at the University of Akron I am a sophomore and I worked on that from 1992 to 2002. While I was working as a freelance videographer trying to get the business off the ground and I did well in that era of my life. In accounting classes I got A’s in accounting and the reason I got A’s in accounting as a 26 27 year old college student was because my CPA starting at about age 16 or 17 every time we got together to do my taxes he would explain how the deductions worked and I so valued his advice his time. He was training me to be a business owner and every year that we got together I began to understand how to write off mileage, how the auto expense should be tracked in the books and how it should be handled on the tax returns. So, very different things he explained to me the. Section 179 depreciation he explained the idea that meals and entertainment is only 50 percent deductible and of course all of these rules are subject to change every time tax laws change, but in general terms he taught me that you need to demonstrate a pattern of responsibility. If the gap that generally accepted accounting practices needs to be in place and if your books are clean and that you approach the situation where you can prove, even without receipts, that you can prove that there was a pattern of responsible accounting that you’re gonna be okay. And of course in my paranoia I fear like many Americans like many business owners. You fear the IRS audit that’s the idea you fear enforcement so you follow the law, but I wanted to follow the law because I was genuinely interested in having a tight set of books and every year that we got together to do the Moser media taxes and taxes for other businesses that I owned, or had been involved in. So my tax returns as I got older got a little more complicated as they began to own other businesses and he would guide me through all of it and I just really appreciated the relationship that we had. I had a great experience, I enjoyed going to see the taxman because the customer experience was so great and then he told me that he was going to retire and I got a little nervous. He’s 60 something, I’m 40-something. It was bound to happen but I asked him you know what would you consider doing my taxes in your retirement but that defeats the purpose of retirement. You’re not gonna retire, sell your firm to another accountant, but then take all the accounts. That wouldn’t be fair. That wouldn’t be right to the person buying the accounting firm. So, I went ahead and and worked with last year when we did our 2018 tax returns in April of 2019 or I went to see him in February of 2019 and I worked with the new owner and it was not the same experience. And he’s very competent and I’m sure a very nice guy, but I didn’t know him and John the original CPA, my friend. I saw him twice a year because we’d have a planning session at September and then we would, you know we would do like an end of the year in November let’s hear something like that. Where he would kind of see where you’re at to see if we’re gonna buy any cameras and our equipment or any deductions we want. Just to do some tax planning while it was still within the tax year and still appropriate and then I would see him of course at tax time and the new CPA didn’t want to do that. And I thought okay that’s fine and then the new CPA didn’t want to sit down with me and go through everything together. He wanted me too just send everything over and then he would do the work and send it back to me. And I thought “well that’s not how we used to do it”, but I just wanted to be respectful and I thought well I can deal with change right? They want to be scared of change but I didn’t like it and it wasn’t a good experience and as I reflected on why it wasn’t a good experience as I do in a lot of cases, I began to look more at myself rather than the other person to say “okay what did I do wrong here? Maybe this is just how it is and I just had incredible service with the previous owner, my friend.” And now I’m just getting the service as it is in the industry and I started to wonder what is this idea of recreating the customer experience and how can you sell your business and make sure that those who are going to carry on will deliver and have the same level of customer service? The same customer experience that all of those customers grew accustomed to and I started to think about how that could be applied to the video production business. How can we create a customer experience that’s better than what other people are doing and also how can we recreate it every time? How can it be that our videographers that work for, they go out to a job, they deliver exceptional service, they have good bedside manner, they of course deliver an outstanding product, but part of that product is the service along the way the experience of booking the videographer? The experience of meeting with a producer to talk about a video project how we look and sound and act when we show up. All of this is part of the customer experience and what were to happen if the business someday 30, 40, 50 years from now when Hump not involved – let’s be honest I’ll still be involved 50 years from now. This is, you know this is what I am. What am I doing that I couldn’t be doing it 90? Could I run this business at 90? I don’t know, but the serviced based business are all about this customer experience and obviously retail entities and other operations certainly customer experience is important but if you’re a service-based business, the service has to be incredible. So what if the positive experience at a business? The incredible customer experience is linked to one person and it can’t be recreated then you don’t have a business. Early in my career while I told everybody I own a video production company I was really just a freelancer and there’s no such thing as just a freelancer because freelancers worked very hard and I did and I had an assistant here or an intern there and I would do big jobs and put together a crew and we had a lot of fun. But from 1992 to let’s say 2000 or so the first 8 or 10 years of my career I might have been viewed by many as a freelancer. So, the challenge in converting the freelance style, the freelance operation, to a business. The challenges in hiring and recruiting staff that deliver that customer experience that your clients have come to expect and this is a hard thing to do. Frankly the reality is in my career I was good. I did a nice job on videos, but as I began recruiting employees I found, and this is hard to do to admit that there’s going to be people out there that are better than you, but the reality is in 2008 let’s say even as early as 2000 I started hiring crew and noticing they were doing a better job than I ever did. And when the animation software came out and you had Adobe After Effects and even you had new cameras and then of course we got into the DSLR and those who had a real passion for photography got into video production and you know you have these cinematographers that are greater at coming up with the images than I would have as just the local videographer. Let’s say and it was hard for me to say wow these people are more talented than I am but I realized this was the path to growing the business. To turning the freelance career into a business and what I needed to perfect was the customer experience. I needed to build it as a business in the path to that was making sure that if I wasn’t there on the shoot that this team I had assembled was going to do a great job. Probably a better job than had I just shot up myself as a freelancer and could I recreate that if we had a day where there were two video production projects being shot at the same time can both clients on the same day, have a phenomenal experience, have a good customer experience, have come away with a great product write me a note and say “hey your team is really, really professional. They really did a nice job.” So this is the challenge. This is the topic for today and what training and practices need to be in place to create this perfect customer experience. Back in the day, for us it just happened I didn’t plan this I wasn’t smart enough to figure this out. I might not be smart enough to figure it out even today, but I’m thinking it through what training and practices need to be in place to create the perfect customer experience. If you have a crew a team that is just doing everything right, this needs to be documented, it needs to be written down. This best practices, best policies all these procedures, this needs to be shared with future employees. So, you go out into the world and you recruit based on this handbook. Perhaps an employee handbook a selling guide might be helpful customer service training. All of these things need to be in place. I looked at buying a business in my career – I’ve, I’ve bought a few businesses. I’ve sold a few businesses – and one business I looked at a few years ago, the deal fell through and we were close. We were close to a deal. We had had a lot of discussion. We really had, had there was a deal on the table and at the end of it, I could not go through with it and I’m gonna share the reasons why. I did not get a chance to meet the employees or understand the customer experience. I met the owner and it was a video recording firm. It was a company that was in the business of video recording things. Video, we’ll get into the specifics of the niche that they were in, but this is a niche that I’m not in and it appealed to me because if I were to have purchased this business I would have learned a different part of the video production business that I’m not currently involved in and I really looked at it carefully and I thought “Okay, could one of my employees take over this business and manage it and what do we need to learn about what their procedures are, what their customers expect?” And what happened was as we got closer and closer to finalizing the deal, it became clear to me that this business owner was not going to tell his employees that he was negotiating a sale. That I wasn’t sure that the proper non-compete agreements or even the proper payroll taxes were in place. I wasn’t sure how the employee, employer relationship was structured, but more importantly than that, I didn’t get a chance to meet them and see just one job even. Just going to one job to understand what the dynamic was so that I could maintain it. So that I could hire and train somebody to run it. I did not want to manage this business, I wanted to just own it and I wanted to hire somebody else to manage it or maybe one of their current employees to be the manager, but I could not do that unless I understood what the current customer experience was and could it be recreated, or could I maintain it? And this is the challenge we face when we’re trying to decide we’re launching a business. Is it going to be a business or is it going to be our freelance career? Is this a lifestyle business, is there in a service-based business a customer experience that we can recreate through training, through best practices, through the employee handbook, through all the policies and procedures. And all that sounds corporate stodgy almost how in the world would we get into a creative field and then follow the handbook, but the reality is it’s a business. And the final thought we’re gonna have for the day here is thinking about is your business successful because of you. It is possible, it is very possible that the business owner can be much in the case, much like the case of my CPA, that the business owner is the business and if you do turn around and sell it, how many of the clients are gonna stay with the new owner? Can that new owner carry the customer experience and deliver the same level of service? What if it goes the other way, this is the final thought, what if it goes the other way? Are there ever cases where the business owner actually interferes with the ability of a really great team to deliver the exceptional customer experience? Does this happen, are there business owners who know that they have put a team together that delivers a better customer experience than they would if they were handling it themselves? What if the business owner doesn’t always agree with how the customers are handling things? What if the business owner is interested in doing other things, other side projects, and the business is going just fine and there’s a team in place handling everything and all is well and good and the business owner decides maybe it’s best if I take a step back? I’ve hired these creative people, I’ve hired outstanding managers, I’ve hired people that are smarter and better than me as the business owner. Better than I would have ever been had I stayed as the service provider. So, you elevate yourself to the position of business owner and then you get out of the way, then you have a business. If you as the business owner come in later in the game and interject your opinions, you come in and you throw some thoughts maybe where they weren’t appreciated and you don’t understand how to let the people that you’ve surrounded yourself with have their space. How to just let them do their thing, let them serve the customer, then you could potentially be the liability? It’s a lot of food for thought, it really is, and it is an interesting place to be as the business owner and so many people call me, and I so appreciate the calls, and they say “You know I have this situation I’d like your advice” and sometimes it’s about a duck ssin and sometimes it’s about an HR issue and of course I have a lot of friends in the creative service business so you know many of them have similar issues and in production or in things that that I might deal with in. Frankly, from time to time I reach out more than from time to time a lot I reach out to that network and ask for advice on things. Finally, I’m gonna leave with this thought. I’m looking for a CPA and in my search for the CPA I am beginning to realize I will never have what I had I started last year when I knew this transition was happening. I just randomly called around the Akron, Fairlawn area put some feelers out and got a sense of, you know, what it would cost to do my tax returns which are complicated because I own a few businesses. I’m a sole shareholder of a few s Corpse. I am involved in some other things I have some consulting income over here, I just, I just have my hands and all kinds of things and the tax returns are complicated. And then I, you know we have company cars, we have company vans, we have cameras, we have a lot of crazy deductions and if the IRS is listening I do a pretty good job of making sure a personal expenses on my personal Chase Freedom Card and the business expense is on the chase Inc card – not an endorsement of any bank – and frankly also I am NOT an accountant or a CPA or an adviser of any kind so always check with your qualified advisor before following the advice I outlined here in these presentations. But, I am looking for a CPA and I am coming to understand that the deal I had, the relationship I had, he provided far more value than I provided in funding for that the bill that we got from him probably was the same rate I was paying in 1994 as a 20 year old wedding videographer and somehow maybe because I had it all my ducks in a row when we went in maybe he enjoyed that I asked a lot of questions maybe he knew that he was mentoring me. That he was teaching and that I wanted to learn. And how many other clients did he have that came in with a note pad and jotted down his incredible advice? Maybe he understood that I saw his wisdom, I saw the value in what he brought to the equation and maybe just the fact that I was really his student and he perhaps knew this. That’s the only theory I can have as to why he delivered so much value. Did he do this for his other clients, did he give them all this time, all this knowledge, sit there and answer all these ridiculous questions about why can’t I deduct my meal I had over here I was out of town, I was in New York, I was working? How come I can only deduct 50% of this, this should be on? He put up with me which is hard it’s hard for a lot of people and now that he is no longer in the business and, I hope wherever he is he’s enjoying his retirement, I hope he’s listening to this right now, and again in summary I’m looking for a CPA and I have priced it out in the area and after receiving some quotes and getting an education on what accounting and bookkeeping services really truly cost, I appreciate him now more than ever. And if you do have an incredible customer experience with a service based company or a retail operation, go back and enjoy it enjoy it again and again and again because they’re elusive. They are rare and if you find it fund it. Stick with it, honor it, enjoy it because it’s a lost art on both sides. I appreciate you listening today. Almost therapeutic to be able to step into the sound booth and rattle off a few thoughts. Share is on the top of mind and certainly I would appreciate it if you continue to listen, send questions, send answers. Frankly I could probably use more advice, then send it to Dan@mosermedia.com .  Like us on Facebook facebook.com/Mosermedia . We’re on YouTube with 678 subscribers. This is the greatest thing ever. You can subscribe on YouTube that is of course youtube.com/Mosiermedia and we are on Instagram and Twitter @Mosermedia . Thank you so much for listening and I hope that this has been time well spent for you. It has certainly been time well spent here in the sound booth in Fairlawn. Take care!