SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
I Didn't Know a Video Production Company Could Make This Much Money, EP 279 - Michael Mogill
12 Jun 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
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Every Monday, I give one of you, Top Tribe, a hundred bucks to invest in your idea to get it to the top. To enter for your chance to win, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444. Good morning, Top Tribe. You are listening to episode 279 of The Top. And coming up bright and early tomorrow morning, you're going to hear episode 280 from Tim Ray.
He does a meet on demand service and he's going to do 1.2 million in 2015. Top Tribe, good morning. Our guest this morning is Michael Mogul, and he's the president of Crisp Video Group. His company bridges the gap between video production and video marketing and has produced video content for major international brands such as Coca-Cola, Verizon, and Red Bull.
He's been featured in Forbes, Under 30 CEO, The Huffington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Michael, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. All right, let's do this. So first things first, tell us what crisp video does. What's it deliver service wise and how do you get paid?
Yep. So we're a video production company or a video marketing company. We work nationally. Clients and businesses come to us where they have some sort of marketing or sales challenge, whether they're trying to attract new customers or a specific type of customer, brand themselves, educate, whatever that might be.
And we help them put together the video campaign and then actually produce those videos. So we do everything from the production to the implementation.
And so tell us about the client that you're most proud of.
That's a good question. I would say that the client that we're most proud of is probably our smaller business clients. I mean, we've worked with a lot of brands, but with the small business clients, we're able to make really significant impacts for those guys. I mean, we've, we've changed people's lives. I mean, it's, it's incredible.
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Chapter 2: What services does Crisp Video provide for clients?
What year did you found the business in?
We founded the business. So I guess we're, we crossed the three year mark last year. So we're in our fourth year. So I believe we found it towards the end of 2012. Okay. 2012.
And what was first year revenue?
Oh man. You remember? Nothing. It was, I mean, we bootstrapped the whole thing. No investors, nothing, anything like that. So I think first year revenues were, and we only had a few months that fiscal year. So it was probably about a hundred thousand.
And what was 2013? 2013 was roughly, I believe, double that. Okay, so it's called 200 grand. Yeah. And was this just you and some buddies and friends or what? Start off just me. Oh, I love that. Okay. And how many employees are you now in 2016?
Right now we're at about 15.
Oh, wow. Okay. And all in Atlanta, right?
Yes, yes, that's right. And what God, I was gonna say that that doesn't count our cinematographers. So we also have a network of about 2530 cinematographers nationally.
Got it. And those are just contractors? Correct. Yeah. Okay.
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Chapter 3: How did a small business client double their revenue with video marketing?
And you're getting all kinds of recognition all over the place. What was in 2015? Obviously, 2016 is still going. But in 2015, what was total revenue?
So we, we exceeded seven figures, we have actually doubled year over year in the last two years has been actually a 300% increase. So it's, it's really kind of it hit that hockey stick where we were growing slowly year over year, but every year has been at least doubling with the last two years being 300% increase.
So it's fair to say in 2015, you did about a million bucks? Over that, yeah. Over a million bucks. Okay. And then what, you know, let's say it's New Year's Eve 2016 going to 2017. You have the office party. What revenue number is your goal for this year that would just make you celebrate and jump for joy if you hit it?
So our goal right now, and we always kind of, we meet quarterly to do these goals and also year end. For the end of this year, we want to go about four times that.
Okay, so you want to hit like four or five million? Correct. Yep. Okay, interesting. And so here's a question for you. You're, I think, well, actually, how old are you now? 30. Okay. You're 30. Yeah. So fairly young guy. What are you and what's your situation? Are you married? Single? Do you have kids? Nope. Nope. No kids. Not married. Awesome. So here's my question to you. How are you?
I mean, a lot of people, they build a business and I always like to kind of get in the mind of what that person actually does with the business. Once the business is generating cashflow, are you pulling money out of the business or like, how do you manage profits?
Yeah, so that's actually really interesting because so much of the early years was just focused on just survival and making sure that we could handle payroll and that we could grow and scale the business. But now, as we've reached a certain level of comfort, I'm actually, I mean, there must be something wrong with me because what I have done is I've doubled down even on that.
And we just hired four additional people. We're moving into a larger office. We've invested in our people, in our marketing. So I really doubled down on everything. It's again, I mean, for me, it's, it's always been about how much we can grow and how do we offer the most value to our clients?
And it's, I mean, I guess it's never been about really pulling too much money out of the business or anything like that.
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