Recruiting An A-Team To Scale Your Wedding Business To The Next Level With Dave Mcqueen

 

No matter where you are in business, once you start on your journey, the only way to go is up. However, for some, growing a business tends to be a far-reaching concept, proving to be way more challenging than starting one. In this episode, Dave McQueen of Amari Productions provides great insights into how you can make this already possible thing closer to reality. Starting with his own story, he shares his journey of growing and scaling his wedding videography company. At the heart of it is having a solid team that can collectively carry on your business goals. Dave shares his tips for building and developing your A-team so you can take your company to the next level.

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Important Links:

• https://AmariProductions.com/
• Amari Productions
• Seven Pines Productions
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• YouTube – Amari Productions

About Dave Mcqueen

Owner of Amari Productions, a high-end photo and video studio specializing in weddings. Our brand is built on a deep passion for creative storytelling and candid, genuine connection. Our clients have taken us all over the world, from Tuscany to Tulum, Portland (Oregon) to Portland (Maine).

Recruiting An A-Team To Scale Your Wedding Business To The Next Level With Dave Mcqueen

Jamie: In this episode, I am both excited and a little bit afraid, I’m going to be honest. We are bringing in one of my besties, one of my dearest friends who has been my long-time wedding vendor and mentor, Dave McQueen with Amari Productions, to talk to us about how to grow our teams. For some of us, that may seem a far-reaching concept, but I promise you there are some real and tangible things that we can all take away from this episode to grow our businesses bigger so it’s less of us doing all the work and more of us growing a team to get the work handled collectively.

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Jamie: I’m super pumped for this episode. We have Dave with Amari Productions joining us for a little chit chat. Hi, Dave.

Dave: Thanks so much for having me.

Heather: Hi, Dave.

Dave: Hi, Heather.

Heather: I’m so glad to meet you. One of Jamie’s oldest friends from 30 years ago.

Jamie: As a little means of explanation, Dave and I have known each other since high school. I think I was fourteen and he was fifteen. He has been in the wedding industry way longer than I have. When I first got started with my business, he’s the first person I turned to, to be a mentor in the space. What does this space look like? What should I be doing? Does this make sense? Is this normal? I remember my first Catholic wedding. There was a giant gap between the end of the service and the beginning of the reception. I was like, “This event is going to fall apart.” He was the first person I contacted and he’s like, “This is super normal.” I’m excited to bring him in and have him share some of his wisdom with you guys. You’re the person that I’ve been turning to for business advice for so long. I’m super excited that now, other people can tap into that.

Heather: What do we want to pick his brain about first, Jamie? I’m thinking the team building that Dave has going on is top-notch. Dave, why did you start building a team? Jamie says you have a pretty awesome story behind that.

Dave: We founded Amari Productions right in the middle of 2011. 2012 was our first full season. When we started the company, we knew that we didn’t want to just be a husband and wife studio forever. We didn’t want to become more and more expensive, more and more exclusive over time. We wanted to build out a team. I saw in our industry that there were companies that were husband and wife. They are very exclusive, experienced and high quality. They’re expensive for a reason. I saw studios like that, then I saw studios that felt they were the exact opposite, where they just went for volume. There wasn’t a lot of consistency. There wasn’t a lot of quality or even branding. They were very volume-centric.

We thought we saw from the beginning this opportunity to find a niche between those two saying, “We don’t need to be this crazy big national company in five years but we can also build out a team.” One of the biggest early takeaways was seeing other successful studios 5, 10 years in, even 3 or 4 years in trying to start associate teams. They built up their brand. They got popular or they’re finding traction, and then trying to build up an associate team. They are struggling because they had developed so far in those five whatever years that it was hard to grow that far and then try to slate somebody in back at the beginning and catch them up to speed.

What we did in our first full year in 2012 was we hired our first associate team. We didn’t even know if we were going to have a full season’s worth of work yet. As far as our pricing was starting to settle in, I was already seeing couples that couldn’t quite afford our pricing or maybe we were booked for. We decided to go ahead and start that process one year behind us so that our associates would be able to learn with us while we learn. They would be able to grow with us while we grew. The other thing that we did that was helpful at the beginning was we also started our associates under a separate brand to start. We created another website, another logo, all of that. We had a little bit of brand shielding so that if for whatever reason this experiment tanked, it didn’t work or if it turns out that I was bad at picking people to invest in or picking people to hire, it wouldn’t directly reflect on our brand at Amari.

Heather: Dave, I will agree with Jamie here that you are very clever. I see you building a company here, not just a job for yourself, which is a problem that a lot of wedding industry people get themselves into.

Dave: It’s that struggle of wanting to be your own boss, wanting to do your craft, doing that for several years, being excited about it, being jazzed about it, then after a certain number of years you’re like, “Now what’s the next step? Where do I take this? Where do I go? You’re already behind the eight-ball.

Jamie: That’s something that you mentioned to me very early on, which is why I picked the name JW Coordination, is get away from your name. Do your best to not use your personal name in your company name because then people want that name. They don’t want an associate. They don’t want anybody else. That’s why I went with JW Coordination. We will be rebranding soon, but it’s still not going to have my name.

 

Dave: It also helps if your name isn’t a beautiful stage name with great flow, which is my case. It’s like Dave McQueen Productions. I could just see it. It was like some ‘90s software tech company branding with beveled edges and gradient. It will never be going to look good. We got away from that. My advice for somebody just starting their company. What I’ve seen for companies that did start as their name, they will evolve their company name to an abbreviation of their name. Yours has coordination at the end. There’s way or studio. There are ways that if you start as your company name or if you are currently your image or your personal name, you can quietly and subtly evolve that without throwing off all of your contacts and all of that.

Jamie: It’s not like you’re changing from Jamie Wolfer Coordination to something.

Dave: It’s like, “Who the heck is this?” If you go from Jamie Wolfer Coordination to JW Coordination, they’re like, “She just updated her website.” After a while, as you start to bring in, your face and name start to pull back a little bit, then it’s like, “JW Coordination. I don’t even know what it stands for. It just sounds cool.” Which I gave you those other companies and studios and that’s what I thought they were. I thought they were these cool abbreviations when I first started to work with them. I was like, “That’s the owner’s initials. I got it. I figured it out.” It definitely works.

Jamie: For those who are reading, what is the benefit of having teams? Automatically I think there’s a monetary benefit. It also pulls you away from what Heather and I called the dancing bear business where you’re doing fewer boots on the groundwork but you’re still getting an income from it. In your mind, what are some of those benefits?

Dave: The benefits start immediately. I remember in our first year in 2012, we brought our associates on. We did the hiring process in the summer. We had to train them. We did a few weddings for free, which is a great way to get them started. They got a handful of weddings that year. I remember our tax year and sitting there being like, “Whoa.” It was $5,000 or something but me being like, “We made $5,000 off of selling a wedding that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to sell and having somebody else service it, and then me just doing the edit or whatever. That’s cool.”

The benefits will come right away and then they grow. The long-term benefit being that you can create a steady stream of income. Another big thing for us when we started the company in 2011, we knew that we weren’t going to be engaged, quite married yet. We knew we weren’t starting any time soon, but we knew eventually that was something we wanted to do. On Saturdays, soccer practices and needs or games on Saturday and Sundays as well. I knew that there was going to be some point in the future where working out will not be nearly as feasible as it was when I was 22 and 23, whatever it was.

It has that benefit of starting to create a steady stream of income, letting you work a more traditional 9:00 to 5:00, and then longest-term that I haven’t seen yet but it’s coming. The point is it equates to retirement income. I heard this from another studio that works very similarly to us. You’re creating your retirement income because you can eventually start to pull back more and more from the day-to-day and create a steady stream of income. I don’t think you would ever be able to call it fully passive income. It’s not quite the same as taking dividends on stocks, but you could get it close if you build corporate structure behind you as you pull back.

Heather: I am so interested in seeing how this could work for my business with me having a virtual planning company. This is super interesting to me, Dave. I love what you’re doing here. How did you set up your pricing? I can imagine that it would be a little bit tricky with this group of people working underneath you, and what do they want to make? What are your normal pricing tiers? How did you develop that?

Dave: When we first started Amari, I took what we were making as somebody else’s associate shooters and what we were making doing freelance edit and mashed those numbers together and it was like, “I’ll sell it as my own package.” Right away, it was very expensive. That’s not sustainable, but it was something to get the ball rolling. Pretty quickly we started raising our prices and that’s where this whole thing starts. Our first price was $1,250 or $1,500 for a wedding package, which is standard for somebody who’s just starting out. I know we definitely did six hours of coverage and a highlight film. We did one for $700 that first year. It was like, “Our wedding is in two weeks. Do you want it or not?” I was like, “$700 is better than zero. Let’s do it.”

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We started out at $1,200, $15,000 somewhere in there, then we went up to $1,800 immediately or very quickly. That was when people were coming in and saying like, “I’ve got $1,000. I’ve got $1,200.” I was like, “Okay, let’s do this.” Our associate pricing originally were under their own brand. It was Seven Pines Productions. Their pricing was a little bit lower than mine, generally about $500 lower than mine or 10% to 20% depending on the package or what year our pricing was in as it scaled up. Eventually, though we did get to a point where we started promoting some of our substitute shooters to our main Amari brand.

There was a while where we were running three price points. I have my pricing like Dave, the owner, and then I had staff videographers, that’s what we call them, then our associate brand Seven Pines. That was harder to do. That was very hard when you had three different teams. How I would feel that is when an inquiry came in, I would try to feel out their budget range based off of their venue, maybe their other vendors, where the referral came from. I tried to figure it out and I would try to give them two. I’d either say, “Here’s me and my staff.” If I felt they were going to be on the lower-end, I would say, “Here’s our staff and our associate brand.”

Heather: You were transparent with your clients about the fact you’re developing these teams under you. You are referring work to these other teams.

Dave: I would always try to sell myself first because that was our most expensive team and I wanted to fill out my schedule. I’d always try to sell myself first, but if I was booked or if my pricing was too much and they’re saying, “Can you do anything with the pricing?” I’d be like, “Here’s my associate team,” or “Here’s my staff team.” If I was fully booked, I would say, “I’m fully booked but our staff is available.” Something like that.

Jamie: Talk to me about running into issues with people not wanting to book the lower groups. How do you pitch the newbies, even though they’re not new, run into issues like that. Selfishly for me, what I run into is people want me specifically, but I do have a team of people. I feel like I’m shoving them in that direction. How do you sell an associate without making them sound like, “I know they’re new. They’re going to be cheap, but you’re going to love them?”

Dave: The biggest thing there, and this might come from my marketing background, is everything’s positive. It’s different levels of positive. You never want to highlight anything that’s less than, anything that’s poor or lower quality or anything like that. If somebody asked that specific question, I would start with the associate team. I talk about how great they are and what they can do. I would talk about what the principal teams, which is what we have now. I don’t take weddings anymore. We also shut down our associate brand, which is an interesting story or data point there. I can tell you why. We have principal and associate teams now. We still have two pricing tiers.

I’ll start by talking about how good the associate team is and what the principal team can do on top of that. It’s good and better. There are two caveats or addendum to that. If we can tell that all they can afford like there’s no way they’re going to afford the principal team. The associate is where their budget is. We then don’t even need to talk about the principal team. Why talk about something they can’t have? Why talk about something that’s not attainable for them. We’ll just talk up all the great things about the associate team. You’re never embellishing or lying or anything like that. You wouldn’t put somebody under your brand if they weren’t professional that were doing great work. You talk about that. The other addendum is if we know that they can afford the better team and maybe they’re price shopping us against our own team, then we will focus on what the benefits are of working with the principal team. Why we have principal teams in the first place? Why don’t we just have a ton of volume at the associate price point?

Heather: Why don’t you do that? Why wouldn’t you just have a whole bunch of people working under you like an army of videographers?

Dave: I’ll answer this in the way that I would talk to a couple about the team because this also gives you another piece to work with. Our associate videographers, we don’t hire any temporary freelancers for one-off shoots. Anybody that works for us, we train up from the start. They will go through a training program. They will assist that wedding before they can even become a second shooter. They’ll second shoot until I see that they not only are being an awesome shooter, but they have that leadership and critical thinking to lead a team. Our associate teams, these are the teams that I know are doing high-quality professional work 100% of the time. I know that they are going to come out and they are going to document well your entire day. They’re going to be in the right spot at the right time. They’re going to have good light and good light balance. They’re going to get all those important moments.

 

What our principal team does and what defines our brand, and this is why all of our samples are from our principal team. Our principal team, all of that professional technical knowledge is now second nature to them. It comes naturally. Instead of spending the day thinking about, “What light do I need? What light balance do I need?” It’s coming to them naturally. Instead, they’re spending the day thinking about, “How can I do this differently? How can I bring artistry to this? How can I use the unique light in this room to shoot the dress in a different way? What’s the underlying dynamics here with the bride and her bridesmaids, her sister and her mom? Where are those almost intangible moments going to happen, so that I’m ready to capture them? It’s that added level of artistry on top of professionalism. I would say our associate teams are professional documentarians and they are going to crush it. Our principal teams are all of that plus being very experienced and developed artisans. That would be my spiel.

Heather: I can see how you couldn’t have an army of these people because that would be a lot of people to train.

Dave: It does take time to get that extra mile. It’s a logarithmic curve. It’s where you’re getting less return. You’re putting in more work and the more work you’re putting in, the less you’re getting out over time. That’s how you become that level of pro artist. You’d go and take a training course. One day, you watch and you do a day of training on videography. Now you’ll know how to work your camera. You’ve got a lot of return for that day. After a year, from 1 year to 5 years of experience, that’s the difference between an associate and a principal. The practical difference is small. It takes a lot of time, but it’s both small and big, to be honest. It’s the difference between very high quality and consistent professional volume studio and a smaller more specialized, more artistic studio.

Jamie: It sounds to me like your business fits any unique niche between those two. When you got started, there was either the expensive couple that was worth every penny, but it was just them and you’re buying them as the brand. They’re going to be the ones to come and shoot your event or the tournament Burnham style where they’re super affordable, quality control is not quite the same. You don’t know who your videographer is going to be, but you’re going to get it for a great price. You found yourself right smack dab in between those two. How can we create a new subset of videography where we can still touch the ceiling but keep our feet on the ground?

Dave: You described it perfectly. We’re right in the middle. In some respect, we can’t compete with either of them. In much bigger respect, it puts us in a great position because when I say we can’t compete with them, there are still couples to this day that will come and say, “I have $1,000 budget. I have a $1,500 budget. I have a $2,000 budget.” Our associate team starts at $2,900. In our industry, in our geographic location, $2,900 is the average price. It’s dead center on the bell curve of where videographers and photographers would price.

Generally, anything $2,500 or less is where you’ll find less experienced photographers and videographers. Anything $3,500 or above is where you’re starting to get into people that are getting enough inquiries, getting enough referrals that they can charge more than the market average. Our associate team starts at $2,900. If somebody comes to us and says, “So-and-so is offering me this package for $2,000,” I 100% believe in them. I know there are a million companies that are offering that. For us, I will never talk down another studio or anything like that, but that’s where we’ll talk up what we offer. What we can often end up doing is pull those couples up out of their initial budget and get them to book our associate team.

Jamie: You’re getting them to buy into what your product is. It’s not like, “We’re growing so we’re going to make you pay more than you originally intended.” You’re explaining the value of the product that you’re offering without bashing other companies. It’s like, “I see that there’s a $2,000 videographer out there. Here’s why we’re $2,900.”

Dave: This is huge for any sector in this industry. For anything, it’s always their sales call. I know your sales call is very private. It’s just you and the couple. Nobody else is going to hear it, but that is the definition of integrity right there. Don’t talk down other companies. Don’t ask them who else they’re considering and then talk them down. Talk about why you’re awesome. It will pay you dividends because the couples will see that and they’ll appreciate how genuine and caring you are for your community of fellow vendors. That’s the low-end, and then on the high-end, I know that there are very high-end planners who won’t refer us because our prices are too low.

The fact that on our price sheet, there is a number in the $2,000 is offensive to their couples, even that there’s a number in the $3,000 is offensive to their couples. I know that there’s lost revenue there. There are lost sales there because we don’t start at $6,000. You can’t get everything, but by putting yourself right, by offering a very high-quality product at a very thought-out price point, you can do fine for yourself and for your teams if that’s what you want to build out.

Jamie: For so many of us, I feel like I’m on a hamster wheel at times or the dancing bear business where it’s like, “How many more times can I raise my prices before I price myself out?” Now I’m doing five weddings a year and maybe I’m making the same amount, but I’m out of touch with the reality of where I started or a majority of couples. I feel this associate idea circumvents that.

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Dave: I remember that too. It was 2013, the beginning of 2014. Our associate team was kicking and we were kicking. For us, a full season was 30 to 35 weddings every year. My wife and I had done five weddings. Our associate team had probably done another twenty. I had realized like, “If I’m good about my editing pace, I can edit both teams’ weddings.” We were taking home a good percentage of it but literally, Mariah was in the emails and I was doing the editing every single day. I remember having that struggle exactly as you’re talking about. I was thinking about all these ideas that I had, all these things I wanted to do to better present our company and to grow our company. I didn’t have the time editing every single day. It was the beginning of 2014 where I started doing the math on a napkin and saying, “I think we can have some come in and work in the office two days a week. I think we can afford that.” We slowly over the next year built it up from there until they got to full-time. You need to do something to make it so that you’re not on the hamster wheel every day. At least for me, I feel like I need to be always building towards something or building upon something.

Heather: It opens you up to people to work on your business versus in your business, which is such an important point to get to when you’re building your company. You can give yourself space to step back and develop the systems to build out the team to do all of that. Because you aren’t day-to-day grinding in there at events, editing, doing all these details of your craft. It sounds a good balance for you with where you’re at.

Dave: You mentioned events, that’s another big piece. On Saturdays, not having to be at weddings myself, that opens me up to being able to train people, to observe weddings. Even if somebody has a family emergency or something, I’m always the last backup. I can always jump in and take a wedding if I need to. That’s part of the story of how I got out of booking myself finally. I remember being at a wedding. It was the beginning of 2017. I was at a wedding. It was about to start. I remember it was at the Parker in Palm Springs. I shot the famous front of the Parker. I was about to walk in and meet the bride and I’m getting office calls. I was getting calls from a father of the bride that wanted to get a contract and know where to send the money, all the running the business type of stuff.

I remember feeling trapped at that moment. I need to be available to run this business, but I’m literally in it right now. I’m about to go and introduce myself to the bride and I’m going to be 100% hers for the next 8 to 10 hours or how long that day was. It was that moment where I was like, “Starting tomorrow, I need to start figuring out how to slowly transition myself out of being a dedicated lead.” The first part of that was taking my name off of one of the packages and switching it to principal and associate versus Dave and staff.

Heather: Jamie, I’m imagining this to be powerful for you to integrate with what you’re building because things are going so well. This is the next step for you.

Jamie: This is not the first time Dave and I have talked about this and I’m still taking notes. I’m like, “I like the word principal. That’s a good one. Quality control, added level of artistry.” I’m over here buzzing at the moment.

Dave: For your specific question of people saying, “But I want you.” That is where you raise your prices. That is where you have to find that supply and demand intersection so that anybody that wants you can have you, assuming you’re not already booked. It’s going to be worth your time as both the person in the business and run it working on the business. It’s going to be worth your time and they’re going to be making that investment for Jamie. If they say, “That’s more than I can afford,” then you say, “That’s totally fine. I have these great options. I’m so excited for you for my teams. I’ve worked hard on them. I love them. I’ve invested in them. I believe in them. They’re available to you at your price point or at a more accessible price point.”

Jamie: For everyone who’s reading right now, what are your thoughts on how do people get started? Quick little bites, what do they do? How do they find an associate? How do they structure this? If you have five steps you could give people, quick bullet points, what would those be? How do they start?

Dave: The first thing, it’s hard to think for every sector in our industry, but for photo and video, we have upfront costs of getting the equipment. It’s getting your hands on some equipment, finding some resources for borrowing or renting equipment, asking family members. You could ask family members to help invest or you could also ask them, “I need to rent gear or something. Can I use your credit card to back it?” If you’re young and just starting out as I was, I literally had to use my grandmother’s credit card. I had a scanned copy of her license because they required picture ID and a letter signed from her so that I could rent all the gear we needed because I only owned one camera, one lens and one tripod.

 

You have to get creative in figuring out how to get the tools necessary to start. You have to pound the pavement in terms of making those connections. Start with your networks. Start with your friends. If you’re starting out at a younger age, start with everybody else you know that’s graduating from college or in that general age group. They might be getting married and start blasting on social media. You can try getting listings on different listing sites. You need to try everything you can to get some of those first shoots. You need to have no pride and no ego. Go to a studio and say, “I’m trying to get some practice. I will come to assist you for free and carry your gear around if you’ll let me observe or you’ll let me shoot or something. Stylish shoots, I’ve personally not been involved in it. I’m sure Jamie or Heather, you guys could speak to that. That was me throwing it to you.

Heather: I have some dreams of style shoots I want to do that are specialized towards wedding hack or angle, but I know Jamie’s done some that are gorgeous.

Jamie: I am a sucker for style shoots. I love them very much. It’s a great way to showcase what you’re capable of. Many times when we get hired by people, we’re creating their vision, which is great and we love doing that, but being able to create something from scratch is dreamy.

Dave: I walked around your question mainly because back in 2011, the answer looks different than it probably looks now. I’ll give you what the 2011 answer was. That was Facebook. Facebook was still very big. Up until around 2014, 2015, a lot of our business growth came through being diligent about uploading our films. You didn’t even have to upload them directly to Facebook. You could put them on Vimeo and YouTube, and they would still autoplay. People see it. You would tag the couple and it would show up on their feed. All of their friends have comments on it. That was how we would get word of mouth that way.

For us, when we first started, Craigslist. It goes down every 3 or 5 days or whatever it was. I had a calendar reminder every three days or whatever to post another Craigslist ad for videography for cheap or whatever. When we were training associates, I would post on Craigslist for free videography to say, “I just need to get them practice weddings.” If you say free anything on Craigslist like a service, people will respond and say, “I’m getting married this weekend. I’d love a video.” That was the answer to 2011. Craigslist might still work. I don’t know how successful Facebook would be these days. It’s worth a shot. You could try LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter.

Jamie: At this point, that’s to create a volume of inquiries so you can get these people that you’ve connected with trained.  

Dave: It’s both. At that point, it was like, “We do this for a living.” We have second shot and associates shot for other companies. I built a website. Back then, I built it on WordPress. Now I built it on Squarespace. I created a cool little logo. Somebody booked me. Somebody paid me to do what I love to do. I promise I’m good at it. I just need somebody to trust me, give me the money or find me and book me for their wedding. Getting on Facebook, reaching out to networks, posting on Craigslist. That was the start of trying to drum up interest to get our name out there. In terms of finding associates, where we had great early success was reaching out to the colleges around us. I went to San Diego State and lived very close to it. We reached out to their film department there. That’s how we found all of our first shooters. One of them is still working for us years later. He’s my second in command. We started reaching out to other schools around us as well.

Heather: That’s all super helpful for people just getting their business off the ground. I think the Craigslist thing still works. I have hired people from Craigslist for photography and videography on the fly for events that were tied to my husband’s marketing company. He always forgets to hire these people on the day. I’m like, “I need a photographer in three hours,” and I’m doing it beforehand.

Dave: Craigslist still works. That’s the perfect barometer of how bad do you want to start. People talk about their dreams and what they want to do. It’s like, “Show me.” I kept posting on Craigslist for 3 or 4 years because I would get random people from it that would have the right budget and be interested. It’s free and it costs me nothing. I just need to stay committed to every third day copying the ad, posting it into a new one and hitting posts. If Craigslist still works, then that’s a great avenue to test yourself on how much do you want to get this going? How willing are you to put in the work? That’s the one avenue where you can’t say, “I would do it, but I can’t afford that. I can’t have the money for that.” You just need an internet connection and 30 seconds every third day for eternity until your business is thriving.

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Jamie: Especially when you’re in that catch-22 situation where, as a business owner, you have enough to sustain yourself, but you see what Dave saw however many years ago and what I’m starting to see in my business. I’m either going to price myself out or I’m going to wear myself out. I have to make a move. I have to pivot here. Using an option like Craigslist and jumping on there, you can drum up more business to pass off to these associates. One thing Dave told me months ago was like, “Maybe don’t include your business name.” That’s a great way because that was something I was worried about. What if we get whack jobs off of Craigslist?

Heather: It hurts your brand because you have an established brand and you don’t want that out there that, “She’s just finding people on Craigslist.”

Jamie: You had mentioned to me like maybe don’t do it branded, just offer day of coordination. Get your people trained up the way you want them trained up in a safer environment because your brand isn’t attached to it, and then they’re ready to work under your brand. It’s a great step-by-step process of like, “I only have enough weddings for me. What do I do?” Go to Craigslist, maybe don’t have your brand attached to it if you feel uncomfortable with that or if you’re still unsure about it. Get your teams on those. Those are the ones that you pop by. Those are the ones that you direct from behind the scenes. They then get the experience. They don’t damage your brand and then they’re ready to go onto your brand when you feel comfortable to move forward.

Dave: When you get to that point where you are bringing them on board because I see where this is headed. When they’re two separate brands, it’s a lot easier to differentiate when couples come to you and say, “Here’s my budget. I want Jamie. I want to spend this much,” or whatever, you have two separate brands. When they’d come under one brand and you have something like principal and associate, it gets a lot greater for couples because they’re like, “It’s the same logo on everything. It’s on the same website. How do I tell the difference?”

Heather: It sounds like you figured out a way to maneuver that transition from having people be a little bit more delineated as a separate entity to melding that into your company and your brand with your team.

Dave: What we have done when we brought them under one brand on top of the normal conversation that we have already touched on for documentarian versus artists. It’s being selective in the sample work that you show to help couples feel that difference between the two teams. For example, with our associate highlights, we edit those in a teeny bit more of a template to those films to be more efficient and be a little bit more centered on a price point. “How can we give you the best possible product at the best possible price?” That’s where the associate team is going towards, whereas the principal is like, “How can we give you the best piece of art at a reasonable price?” For the associate team, we follow a little more of a template. For 99% of couples, if I showed them three random principals and three random associates highlights, they might not be able to see the difference. What we’ll do to help create that contrast, to create that dynamic range is be selective with the samples that we show.

For planning an event like a design company, that’s super easy. The weddings that you do. If you get weddings at higher-end venues or with higher and floral budgets or with even more guests, anything that would make that wedding feel more luxurious. Luxurious and luxury, that word does not exist anywhere in the Amari brand website. We never use that word, but undertones of higher-end luxury black tie events. For the associate, it’s weddings where maybe there is simple florals or they DIY the florals, little details both in the design of the day and maybe the story of the dates. Maybe an associate wedding has a traditional “I dos” in it, and the principal sample has good personalized vows.

Little things to help those couples on the fly get that feel of what the difference is. That would be in a situation where you feel a couple could go either way because you have those two offshoots. Let’s say, Jamie, if a couple can only afford your associates, then show them your best associate work, the biggest or whatever. If you think they can definitely afford you and you want to work with them and you don’t want them to try to take the lower price point, then don’t even bother with it.

Jamie: There’s something powerful about that because clients can see themselves in those situations. If they look at the black-tie stuff and they’re like, “No,” then they feel they relate more to the associate style work. I see the power of that.

Heather: Thank you for letting us pick your brain and sharing a little bit of insight into how you’ve built this company that’s thriving. We hope you and your team are staying safe and well during all this craziness in 2020. It’s an amazing year for you and you keep that whole team busy.

 

Dave: 2020 will be something for all of us, that’s for sure. We’ll all see how this all settles in. Personally, I’m amazed at what I’m seeing from both our industry during this time from our couples as we all navigate the unknown. For once, you can use all of those adjectives and they will not be hyperbole.

Heather: Thank you so much and Jamie, thanks for bringing your big bro to give us a little wisdom.

Jamie: Now you see why when I have business questions, issues or concerns, I’m like, “Dave, I need your help.” He’s been asking me for help a lot because homeboy started a YouTube channel and it’s been rad to watch that process grow. You can find him @AmariProductions on everything.

Dave: Amari Productions on Instagram, TikTok and on YouTube.

Heather: I hear some big things are happening on TikTok too.

Jamie: Now you have to make that video about TikTok for wedding vendors.

Dave: I will make that video, but you can’t get off this thing before I’m allowed to sing your praises because you have sing me praises. Jamie is right, I have been picking her brain on a lot because Jamie kills it at YouTube. It has been awesome to be able to cash-in all of those brownie points and say, “Let me bomb your videos and let me pick your brain so that I could try to figure out this space that you’re the pro in.” I’m thankful for all of Jamie’s mentorship there. I’m excited about this episode and to see it take off.

Jamie: We’re so pumped. I’m very happy right now. This has been a good day.

Heather: It’s a good time and I’m just as excited being in the presence of two prolific YouTubers. It’s a special time for us.

Dave: Prolific in the sense that I watch a lot of it. I don’t know if I’ve been posting enough to be prolific yet.

Heather: By 2021, we’ll all know the truth here for you two. Thank you again and you guys stay safe out there. I hope you enjoyed this episode and getting to see behind the scenes of Jamie and her big bro.

 

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