Many of you reading this probably thought I already had my own business. I’ve done freelance video production work for almost 10 years now - from a few freelance gigs in college to some higher profile videos (with Pat Brown) to more recent marketing, social media, and video work alongside my wife, Jordan Goebig. I’ve had the makings of a business, but it’s never been official - until now.
Starting a business can be easy, if you want to shell out some extra cash for places like LegalZoom to help navigate the forms, fees, and filing. I wanted the full, in-depth, frustrating experience though, so I opted to print off the forms from CyberDriveIllinois.com (yes, that’s seriously where the forms are), and started filling them out. After one failed attempt at filling things out correctly, I asked Jordan to help me out. We were able to get everything situated, filled out appropriately, and now everything is in motion (i.e. in the mail), and Droi Media is an official business.
What this means is now I can sit back and let the jobs come pouring in while I play Fallout Shelter and drink Fat Tire all day. I wish. Now it means I officially have to bust my butt to make things happen, and if things don’t happen, I only have myself to blame. While working at Illinois State I certainly worked hard to build a client base, get connected in the community, and learn everything I could about video production (both creatively and professionally), but if something went wrong I could chalk it up to being too busy, too engaged elsewhere, etc. Now it’s just me.
To me this is both the best and worst part of having started a business. Now the victories, the reputation, the great jobs, the annoyed clients, the broken deadlines, the working late - basically the good and the bad - are all on me. I like having that kind of influence over my life, but it’s also somewhat terrifying. Luckily I’ve got a great business partner who has helped me through several years of freelancing, and has liked it (and me) enough to stick around during this next phase in our adventure.
So besides sucking up to my wife via blog posts, what does this new endeavour entail? For starters it means I spend way more of my time trying to seduce, er, find, I spend way more time trying to FIND new clients. Having a day job was great and that regular paycheck meant I was OK only having a few clients in the area, but now I have the opportunity to work with even more clients and grow Droi Media. I’d like to continue working with people, organizations, and businesses around the local Bloomington-Normal community - but at some point I think expanding beyond that geographic boundary will need to happen. In fact, I recently filmed a few videos for Alaska Airlines, based out of Seattle. Ideally though, we’ll continue to recruit clients around the community and work our way up from there.
In addition to the actual filming and editing and client-based freelance, one of our goals is to share these experiences and information with others in the industry and within the community. This blog is one of these endeavours. I’d like to share what we learn while navigating the world of starting and running our own freelance video production business, as well as some of the more nuanced stuff, like social media, optimizing videos for YouTube, dealing with difficult clients, interviewing people on camera, and so forth. We’ll likely release a new post every other week. Check back regularly for new content and let us know if there are any topics you’d like to see covered!
In the meantime, keep up to date with us by liking Droi Media on Facebook, following us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us with any thoughts, ideas, or jokes you have.
Thanks!