Who Exactly Are These People?
You might already know Rick Smith from some presentations he made at national video conferences, including at WEVA '08 and the 4Ever Group. Or maybe you have tripped across our How To Sell Videos Facebook fan page or Rick's SIV groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Or you have come here from our Tweets or YouTube videos. Perhaps you just stumbled in here are are curious what this is all about. Welcome!
We live in coastal California in a small, idyllic spot less than a mile from the ocean. Before we started our own business, Rick ran a successful video publishing department at California Polytechnic State University called Visual Education Productions. (More about that to follow) We’ve run our own video production business since 1998 and have operated ecommerce sites and been in internet marketing since 2005. In the beginning we supplemented our income with corporate video work. We still do some of that but now we only accept the clients and jobs that we want to work on (Rick still loves the production side of video and Kim enjoys editing) so that we can spend more time on our internet business.
How We Got Started In This Business
(Rick) I began in media production and publishing before the invention of the VCR. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth and indoor plumbing was becoming common. I met Thomas Edison at a networking luncheon. Well, I'm not really that old.
I was working as a professional photographer at the age of 20. After graduating with a degree in art (photography) I found myself working for a university department, Visual Education Productions (VEP) at California Polytechnic State University, that specialized in producing and worldwide marketing of commercial educational materials.
Not only did we have many award winning productions and a few programs aired on PBS and the History Channel, we also won awards in our direct marketing efforts. We literally sold millions of dollars worth of educational videos and other media all over the world through our own direct marketing efforts. This was a fantastic on-the-job immersion into real world marketing.
In 1997, the university went in a new direction and sold my division to a commercial firm. I decided at that point to go on my own doing a similar business to what I had done at the university. I went for small business counseling and when I explained my business model to the "business experts" I was assigned, they just couldn't get their heads around video publishing and tried to steer me into the more predictable path of providing video services such as commercials, wedding, etc. I did do a little of that, but not for long.
(Kim) I met Rick when he was the director of VEP. On the tail end of completing my photography degree and feeling stifled in my job in human resources for the university, I approached him with my portfolio in the hopes that he would hire me. Well, he didn't hire me but I did end up working with him anyway - as his spouse! (Much better benefits I might add! ;-)
In 2000, Joe Clokey with San Luis Video Publishing hired us to produce a new educational video on soil. Rick was so busy with a large client load that I decided to take a shot at starting it. I had never done anything besides a very lame little video for a photography class before, but I had very recent experience doing photography projects (Kudos to Cal Poly's learn-by-doing focus!) and I decided to approach it as a class assignment. I researched, storyboarded, wrote a rough script, contracted with an advisor who helped me refine the script, and directed, shot, and edited it. Needless to say, I was hooked. That video is still out there and selling strongly. At the time I was tickled with a big check upon completion but after seeing how well it is doing, I have changed my thinking. If I could do it over, I would produce it on my dime and sell it to the many distributors that now sell it. Lesson learned!
Enter The Internet
(Rick) It all started with a video I made of my father.
In 2005 we completed a video about my father called Patrick Smith’s: A Sense of Place. For many years my dad, a Florida writer and public speaker known for his hugely popular book A Land Remembered, told me that if I made a videotape of the talk he gave throughout Florida I would sell thousands of them.
Of course that sounded great to me but it seemed to keep getting put off due to my client work and the very real fact that I live in California and my dad lives in Florida. But then my dad was diagnosed with cancer and on a visit back there, he graciously sat down with me on his back porch and I taped him with a very simple video camera and microphone setup.
Over the next few years through numerous trips back home, I taped B-roll and researched photo archives to illustrate his story. I turned that little story into a video that won several awards including a Telly Award. Winning all those awards felt great but I had also put a lot of time and money into this film and felt my dad was right, I could actually sell this thing. However my market was in Florida and I lived in California and my dad, through health constraints was no longer able to do the lecture circuit and sell them to his fans. So that left the internet.
Now as I have said, I had been in direct mail marketing of video titles for 22 years for VEP but never sold anything on the internet except some video equipment on eBay. I could see the potential to reach a worldwide market for pennies, which was about the limit of my budget, and this video was a perfect reason to get started.
Dad was right and I have sold over 5,000 copies of this DVDs to individuals, schools, clubs and institutions at prices ranging from $20 to $95 per copy …and I am still getting orders for it from all over U.S. That is over $100,000 in five years from one product. I've spoken at many events throughout Florida, been flown to speak on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. and had it shown on Florida PBS stations. All of this from taking that first step.
That simple video is sure to sell for many years to come. As a result of this experience, Kim and I share a new way of life. She no longer works in human resources at the university and is a full time partner in this business with me. I have to give her credit for pushing me to finish that video of my dad. Without her urging I might have always said I'd get to it someday. Well, there is no "Someday" on the calendar. I hope you have someone like that in your life.
Great Background Story But So What?
We are definitely not ready to retire on our income from this business, and we're not saying bogus things like you can make $25,000 a month overnight if you buy our programs. However, we do have big plans for the next few years and we are seeing solid growth from working on this part time.
Our business plan is to develop multiple streams of income from many different video programs and get them to the point where they are performing well without requiring much interviention from us.
Remember, I said that we work on this part time, and we are in the midst of a very bad economy. Even so, in July, which is typically our slowest month, we still made over $2,500, mostly from PatrickSmithOnline. We can make up to twice that or more during the months of October through December. PatrickSmithOnline is basically on autopilot, churning that income into our bank account every month. We often go for months without doing anything extra to promote it. Our goal is to get 10 to 20 such sites performing at that level or much higher, and we are on the path to achieving that.
If you aren't interested in making an extra couple thousand dollars or more a month in your spare time this may not be for you. Maybe you want to do it full time and make a much larger income. You can do that. It is all up to you.
Rick has former students he has mentored who now run very successful high six figure businesses doing this. One, in fact, runs his company part time and that business brings in $500,000 a year without doing much marketing beyond mailing a catalog once or twice a year to a relatively small list. At Rick's insistence he built a new online store in 2008 and is seeing increasing internet sales.
If that intrigues you, your next question will be “How do I do it?”
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