Capturing Your Brand Message With Video ft. Joe Tjosvold & Emma McIntyre

VO: Let's get geared up for startup success. Join Josh's. He interviews knowledgeable guests from all corners of the entrepreneurial world and gets the answers to the questions you've been asking. Get ready to learn something new on this episode of From Idea To Done.

Josh: Hey everyone, I've got Joe and Emma here from Chesy. Guys, thanks for joining us today.

Joe: Yeah, thank you. Appreciate you having us.

Josh: Yeah, why don't you give us a little background about yourselves and about Chezy as well?

Emma: Joe, you wanna kick us off?

Joe: Ah fine. My name is Joe Tjosvold and I am the founder of Chezy. We have a parent company called Advertise Edge, which was founded about five years ago now and Chezy was founded in at the beginning of 2021.

Emma: My name is Emma McIntyre. I am the Director of Community Development over at Chezy. Prior to my work at Chezy, I actually worked at a nonprofit as their Entrepreneur Programs Manager. So it's been super fun to go from working with startups to working inside of a startup.

Josh: Awesome. So about five years ago for Advertise Edge a little bit over a year for Chezy. Tell us a little bit about who's the target market for or target customer for Chezy, and what problems you help 'em solve.

Emma: Why don't you take this one?

Joe: Okay. So Advertise Edge, our parent company is more of a traditional video marketing company. Not a lot of differentiators when it comes to our competitors. When Covid came around, it kind of took away some business, so it allowed us to pause and reflect on the industry as a whole, ask critical questions of what are some of the problems that this industry has or small businesses have with video marketing. And what we came across was simply the price point of video marketing can be extremely difficult for a small business or a startup to swallow. So our team picked apart different ideas on how we can provide a solution to make small business video marketing more accessible from a price standpoint.

Josh: Awesome. Yeah, I, I think we're in a similar boat. We provide custom software solutions and it's an intangible thing that you don't know what it's gonna be until you get to the point where it's done. And so I'm assuming that your target market would if they hadn't done video marketing before, it might be a little bit of a leap for them to see, I'm gonna go spend 10, 20, $30,000 on something. What's the value in it for me? Is that an adequate statement?

Joe: Yeah, I would say in video marketing and maybe branding and logos, it's hard to guarantee an ROI. So for a small business owner, if you can't guarantee that ROI, it makes it a very tough pill to swallow when that price of one video is $20,000 or $30,000.

Emma: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I would say our customer maybe when Chezy first started is very obviously small businesses. One of the things that we realized, a part of what makes Chezy affordable is just efficiency or incredibly efficient. So not only are we inclusive of small businesses of fitting more so in their budget in regards to video marketing, but for larger businesses we take some of the burden off of their current video teams because we can help execute projects that maybe their team doesn't necessarily have capacity for. So our customer is almost twofold of small businesses that need to share their message and larger businesses that need content in large amounts.

Josh: Sure. So you talked a little bit about efficiency. How do you get those efficiencies out of recording? Cause I mean there's gotta be a lot of prep when it comes to writing scripts and getting onsite. Talk a little bit about how Chezy helps make that more efficient.

Joe: I would say our efficiency has two parts to it. The first part is pre-production and setting up the shoot day. So with Chezy, most of our clients only have one shoot day and we are filming about 20 videos for that client in one day. Setting up that day needs to be incredibly efficient and that's a very unique approach to video marketing is we're gonna be your project manager, you know tell us what types of videos you want. We'll will help guide you through that and consult with you what's the perfect plant for your business. And then let's say you wanted eight client testimonials, all you need to do is give us the contact information for those individuals that you want to do a quick testimonial for you. And our team has the approach and process that we're gonna reach out and do that for you.
Everything that we've done in we have streamlined to the best of our ability. We have automated certain tasks to just make that extremely efficient and setting up our shoot day to be the most fluent shoot day that we possibly can. And then in pulse production that's when we get a little bit more technical. We have our research and development guy named Tanner on our team that his main role is to dive into the Adobe Premiere Pro software and find different efficiencies like rendering time, how can we cut rendering time of 10 hours per video down to 30 minutes?

Josh:

Joe: and I don't have those exact numbers, that's not my responsibility. That's more so tanners, but things like that. And then also creating some of those automations within editing. That's the most time intensive part of video marketing

Josh: .

Joe: And that's really where we found our ability to maximize our capacity for different projects.

Josh: So I come in as a client and say, Alright, I want a year's worth of videos and do I come to you? You guys come to us? Like you talked about client testimonials. How does that kind of work logistically?

Emma: Yeah, I would say from a sales perspective, it's one of two things because what we're doing is so unique in the video sphere. A lot of it is educating people on the work that we do and the gap that we fill. So it's either myself going to an organization and saying, Hey, this is what we do, this is how I think that we can be useful in the work that you guys are doing and in sharing your story. Or somebody that comes to us and we kind of walk them through organizing their plans. So what needs do they have? What culture gaps are they experiencing that we can fill with videos? What are pieces of their onboarding that we can automate with videos? We then pair them with the director. The director helps them fill out the rest of their video plan and manages a lot of their shoot day. So it's great for, not only is cost an inhibitor in people wanting to do video, but time is also a big factor as well because it takes a lot of team time. But we found is playing on the efficiency side of it, not only is the way that we manage our projects efficient for our team, but most of our clients only spend five to six hours in prep work for their shoot day.

Josh: Great. I can imagine if you're coming in and you've got all these ideas in your head for what the video should be, I'm gonna shoot for the BO and I want explosions and I want car crashes and I want all this stuff happening. And then I get a quote for a hundred thousand dollars or whatever the number is. And in reality, I just need my customers to help tell my story a little bit better. And so I love the fact that you focus on what's the outcome that we're looking for and then let the experts take it over from there and really help craft the story of how are we gonna do

Emma: It. Yes, absolutely.

Josh: That's great. That kind of gets us into the area of a unique selling proposition. What we've been talking about is really that US p and one of the models we like to use is your brand offers a product or service for a target market to what insert your value proposition. Unlike an alternative, we have a key differentiator. And so some of those pieces we were talking about for our audience here is really focusing on the efficiencies, the internal efficiencies from Chez, leveraging technology, leveraging automations, helps my business get a better return. I focus on the things that I care about more, which is creating more software, creating more products for people and not having to focus on how am I going to get lighting in a room and all the stuff that you guys are experts on. So I definitely think there's a good angle there. And I think coming in at a attractive price point is something that you need a foot in the door. You need a way to be able to say, Look, it's only gonna cost you X dollars per month and you're just gonna pay that on a monthly basis. There's no huge upfront fees. That's gotta be refreshing for a lot of smaller rents that you work with. And like you said, even some of the bigger customers that have internal teams.

Emma: Yes, absolutely. I think, and the thing for us that is we found surprisingly challenging is we offer so much video to the clients that we work with. They oftentimes have a hard time using all of their credits. So good problems to have. One of the things we pride ourselves on is our value equation. So we define value and a part of our goal is in our verbiage we say we wanna provide the most value we possibly can for our clients. For context, we define value as the price point of our product, plus the quality of the product that we're offering. So not only is it inexpensive, but the videos that we offer are very high quality. And finally the quantity. So it's price plus quality plus quantity is the value that we provide to each client that we work with, which we would say plays a lot into that unique value proposition.

Josh: Absolutely.

Joe: And I would just add that with that equation we have not found any other video marketing company or agency to be able to match the amount of value that we're able to offer. And that's where our competitive advantage really comes in

Josh: That that's really something that's impressive. Cuz again, we've worked with other companies that do custom video. We all know the people players in town and it gets really expensive once you start factoring everything into it. I remember I was in a low campaign video a few years back and it was like I had a four second line in there. It was four hours from a production company outta the cities that came up to do it was like, I can't even imagine what they're charging for something like that. So just cutting to it, helping my business get the message and Brandy at needs. I think it's a great place to be. So those are great pieces to be talking about when you're looking at a unique selling proposition. What else about Chezy helped you stand out in the market?

Emma: Yeah, I would say the second one is our Chezy Cares initiative.

Josh: So talk a little bit about

Emma: That. Yeah, we're not only is accessibility huge for us for small businesses, but also for nonprofits organizations that have great stories to share. Are those doing that hard work? And our community So we have our Chezy Cares program where we donate 20% of every non-profit project back to the non-profit organization we're working with. We also fundraise for those non-profits year round. So say a non-profit works on us or works with us on a project in December they would then stay on our Chezy Cares fundraising list until the following December. All of the for-profits we work with, we commit $250 of their project back to our non-profit partners. They then select which non-profit from our Chezy Cares list they want that money to go to. We donate it on a quarterly basis. Not only do we fundraise for these organizations year round but sometimes time is harder to give than money. And so we also commit to volunteering year round in our community with organizations that may not be able to afford videography and our team volunteers on a monthly basis. So I volunteer weekly. Our team volunteers monthly in an effort to give not only our financial resources but our time back to the community that we live in.

Josh: That's great. Cause I mean every nonprofit has different needs. Some have a lot of capital, but not a lot of expertise. Some have a lot of expertise, not a lot of capital. So I think that's great to be a good partner in the community. Awesome.

Emma: Yeah, absolutely. And it's fantastic team bonding. My goodness. , my goodness.

Josh: Absolutely is. So for our listeners out there think about these entrepreneurs, these startups, I mean Chezy a little bit over a year old. How do you think the startup should be start thinking about, All right, I've got this unique selling proposition, I've got my unique angle. How should they be thinking about that? If they were going to come work with Chezy, like what should they have in place? What should they lean on your team for when they start thinking about, I've got a great new startup, I'm a unique unicorn, How do they work with Chezy? Yeah.

Emma: Yes, absolutely. That's a good question. I would say a part of that is narrowing down what is their story and how can we help them share it? Really focusing on who are they, what sets them apart, , and who are individuals that can help share that story. A lot of the work that we do is interview based who are cheerleaders in your community that can be a part of capturing that via video like rambling.

Josh: No, that that's great cuz I sometimes I have a small team, but something we like to work them through as a step called the hundred allies, and that's where we want to get a hundred people into an email list that you can share your story with. And so a lot of startups are gonna have some very vocal fans around them. Being able to have them tell their story, I imagine would be a great way to interact with what the product is they're trying to build or the service or whatever it is.

Emma: Yes, I love that. That's fantastic. , absolutely fantastic. Well, and I would challenge them who are people that are good at promoting themselves as well. So if you can capture this individual on video and then they can share it in their network in addition to your network. , it just increases your cheerleader reach is what I usually call it . I love creating Chezy cheerleaders of those who you share the work that you're doing. They're obviously very supportive and how can you leverage video to tell that story?

Josh: Yeah, I think a lot of people, myself included, feel like if I'm gonna put myself out there in a video, it's scary. I don't want to do it. I don't look quite right. And so me doing that on my own, I may not take the correct steps and then it's like, I don't like it the way it looks. Coming to someone like Chezy helping to promote that or create that video for easier promotion. I always look better when I go to professional photographer versus trying to take my wrong angled selfie, which me and a guy in his forties does all the time. So yeah. That's great. What stage of businesses do you typically work with? So you said you've got some smaller teams, typically where are they at in their life cycle? Is there a particular point or is there a industry that Chezy works with a lot more?

Emma: It's less about the size of the organization and more about the stories that they have to tell.

Josh: What's the impact you can have for them? Yes, and if I don't have a good message or a good position in the market and I'm kind of a me too, I'm not gonna have the same impact I would as if there's something really cool that you're doing that sets yourself apart.

Emma: Yes, absolutely. Because it, it's not always about us interviewing teams, it's more about that specific organization or individual sphere. So if we go back to the cheerleader of who around you sometimes here in the Midwest, we don't always talk about ourselves the absolute best. We're not always the best cheerleaders of ourselves. So who in your circle is somebody that can showcase the great work that you're doing and talk about it in a way that represents your work accurately?

Joe: So what I would say about the size is for small teams, for small businesses, the videos that we make are generally gonna be used for marketing purposes. Now when we start working with, we just worked with Amazon last week all of these videos are gonna be used not for marketing because they're gonna have a marketing budget for half million dollars for each of these commercials that they have on national television. The videos that we're creating for Amazon are gonna be used maybe more internally to communicate with their teams and they still don't want to pay $10,000 for each video. And then at that point they might need to hire a videographer, which is also expensive. So that that's where we fit into larger organization is simple communication internally or for recruiting content specifically. That's what we did for Amazon, is recruiting content for them. So we work with a range of sizes. I would say the intended use of the videos that we're creating is what changes.

Josh: Well, awesome. Thank you guys so much for coming in today and spending a little time talking about messaging, positioning and ultimately what Chezy does. How can people find out more about you? Is there anything that you'd like to promote or plug?

Joe: You can learn more about chezy at chezy.com, C H E Z Y .com. You can go to our website. We have hundreds of videos on our website from client testimonials to brand storytelling videos of our own as well as our full portfolio on our work page.

Emma: Again, as far as anything that we're promoting videos, obviously whether you're a small organization, a large organization, we would love to help you share your story. So we work really well with small individual teams, we work great with agencies but if anything, we just love to open up the conversation on how we can be of help. So

Josh: Awesome. Well I love it and I love the Chezy Cares side to it too. So any nonprofits out there listening, definitely get connected with the Chezy team and see how we can make this region even better. So again, thank you guys so much for coming in. I appreciate it.

Emma: Absolutely. Thank you sir.

VO: Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of From Idea to Done. If you're enjoying the show, please feel free to rate, subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. We really appreciate it and we'll catch you in the next episode.