Transcription

@0:09 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Hello everyone and welcome to The Shades of Entrepreneurship. This is your host, Mr. Gabriel Flores. Today I'm here with Augie Johnston.

Augie, how are we doing?

@0:20 - Augie Johnston

I'm doing good. Thanks for having me on.

@0:21 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I'm excited to talk a little bit about entrepreneurship, I'm excited because this is something I actually need to start learning a little bit more about video editing.

Before we get into all that, fact, the business is called VID Chops. Before we get on that, Augie, tell us a little about you.

@0:37 - Augie Johnston

Where are you calling in from? Give us a little background. Yeah, well, I'm calling in from California, San Luis Obispo, California.

It's a hometown where I was born and raised. little bit about me, of a quick background is I moved to Europe in 2009 to play semi-professionally basketball.

So I was over there, I was getting paid peanuts. I'm talking about this is semi-professional. Okay, but I wanted to keep playing, right?

@1:02 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I wanted to keep.

@1:04 - Augie Johnston

Exactly. So it was after college, I played at a small college and stuff and so I wanted to find a way to make more money online.

So I did that Google search that so many people do, how to make money online. figured if I was living over there, I could supplement my income and continue to play basketball.

So that Google search kind of took me down the rabbit hole of entrepreneurship. Eventually, it led me to create my own YouTube channel and launched a business through YouTube.

So I grew a basketball training YouTube channel to about 400 or 200,000 subscribers, over 20 million views. And throughout that whole time, I was creating products, building an email list.

I built an email list of over 50,000 people. And I launched over 11 products to that audience. And throughout that whole thing, I felt the pain point of how hard it is to create content online.

And we can talk more about that later. But one of the biggest. Pain points for me was the video editing.

I was releasing one video a week on YouTube, which wasn't that much sometimes too, but I was also releasing a lot of info products, online courses, how to shoot a basketball, how 12-week workout program.

A lot of times, those had 50 videos in them just for one course. The video editing pain point was something that eventually when I finished playing and moved back home, I decided to tackle.

had read a book called The Seven Days Startup by Dan Norris. I highly recommend it. I put together a website and I put together a business plan, of a semi-business plan, and I launched VidChops, which is a video editing service for YouTubers.

At this point, we're just looking for ways to help solve all the biggest issues that video creators and entrepreneurs face when trying to create online content for YouTube or other social media platforms.

That's the journey I'm on now. We've been running it for about five, almost six years. And yeah, that's a big chops and that's where I'm at now.

@3:03 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So it sounds like, because one, it kind of sounds like you're primarily inspired or inspired by some of your own personal pain points.

And what you found was a business opportunity.

@3:16 - Augie Johnston

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that's a good tip for anybody. mean, whatever kind of business you have, you know, you're facing pain points.

Right. So if maybe the next step in your entrepreneurial journey would be to solve a pain point from your past business, you have a business right there.

@3:32 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So that's exactly what happened. Now, let's go back to the beginning of the entrepreneurial journey. Take us through the process of, you know, essentially developing and creating, you know, this video editing entrepreneurship business.

How did you go from creating your own to creating a business?

@3:54 - Augie Johnston

Yeah. for big chops, it's considered a productized service. So if you've never heard that term, it's pretty popular buzz.

We're now back then it wasn't. So basically it's a great business model I think for anybody because you can take pretty much any service and you can just productize it.

Meaning it's a monthly subscription, right? So you sign up for a monthly subscription with us. So for example let's say you're an accountant and you work remote.

You could take that skill set that you have. You could productize it and launch a business and be the accountant.

I was the video editor, right? So all I needed was a landing page, a way for us to collect payments.

I was off to the races. I shared it around in a few Reddit forums and a few places online got my first one or two clients I edited.

Once we grew, I think we got to 10 clients I was editing for. I was in the position to hire and that's kind of how you can start and run a productized service.

The good thing about it is it's so much value because it's not just digital dust. You're not buying a course.

You're not buying something that's Just here today, gone tomorrow, you're buying a real service where there's real people behind the scenes taking a look at your business and helping you putting in the hours to do it.

So I think you can create a lot of value through product services.

@5:12 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, one of things you just mentioned right there was you're creating this network and one of the focuses you met or one of the platforms you mentioned was Reddit.

Take us through that process because I think that is kind of an underserved and underutilized thing is first creating your brand through networking on the social side.

@5:34 - Augie Johnston

So how did you do it? Yeah, it wasn't any kind of master plan to it or anything. But you know, one of the things that I learned through my YouTube business is that you need traffic, right?

You need eyeballs on your product. And I think a lot of people face that they have this big idea.

Yeah. And I did in my early years too. mean, the first course I launched was before I started a YouTube channel.

I, you know, outsource pretty much the whole thing except for the course part, creating it. And I got At the web page up and I'm like, right, here we go.

We're going to rank on Google. We're going to get all these kind of eyeballs, but no, no sales happen.

You know, and that's what led me to say, well, how do I get traffic to my website? And that's when I started the YouTube channel, built my audience, redirected them to my offers to create sales.

And so when I came time to launch VidChops, I, like I said, created the business got everything in line and I knew I needed traffic.

And so Reddit was the first place that I went to and I found some, you know, video creator for.

More of places where people were already talking about YouTube and I just started adding value and just starting helping people out and then eventually I posted, hey guys guess what I just launched this new thing.

And and a couple. I mean, I I got maybe one client off that, but it was just enough because I brought that client in.

I over delivered as much as I could. He referred me to another person who signed up who over delivered again and luckily that person was somebody who had any.

@7:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

FEMA's this goes with almost every profession. talk about constantly in the healthcare world too. You know, you have to look at ways that we provide value to these community providers and those community hospitals, clinics and so on and so forth, including our patients, right?

How do we provide value? And then, and then on top of that, you're kind of mentioning one, how do you create the value?

But then also just once you're done, come back, like always kind of return back to your network, because I think you mentioned you only got one cell, but that one cell is all you really kind of need, because that's

I'm also going to create that confidence in kind of going forward. I think everybody remembers that first sell, right?

Now, let's go back though. I won't even go even further back. What got you into visit? You're playing professional ball over in Europe and then you went video editing.

How did that transition occur?

@8:19 - Augie Johnston

Yeah, it was really all about trying to extend my playing career and make some money and kind of set myself up for when I was done playing.

I fell into the whole laptop lifestyle movement. wanted to own my time. wanted to be location independent. All those kind of things were new to me at the time back in 2009, 2010 and really intrigued me.

I'm not working in nine to five. I have an apartment that the team provides me. me learn and let me try to implement and see what I can do.

When it started on YouTube, But I didn't know anything about video editing, right? That was kind of my practice ground where I got good at it and learned.

And so when it came time to kind of figure out what's next, I had other ideas too, you know, maybe a productized service for graphic design, maybe a productized service for, I don't know, writing, know, copywriting.

But what I looked around, I said, okay, well, what's the future? You know, I saw online video really blowing up, right?

this, especially back then, right? This is, you know, YouTube, I think started like 2005, got purchased by Google 2006.

And then here I am in 2009, starting in seeing like, wow, this YouTube thing is really growing. I want to be in a market, right?

That's, that's hungry, starving market. So that's what kind of led me to make the decision to go with the jobs.

Also at the time, there wasn't any other productized services for video editing. had first mover advantage in that. So all those things kind of made a lot of sense to me to try and get started with a video editing service.

But, you know, what led me to video editing was creating content online. And I think that's a good way for everybody start.

know, you pick up a new skill, you learn how to record the video, you learn how to edit the video, you learn how to publish it, and now you have a new skill set.

@10:22 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So that's what happened to me. You know, and I love that piece, you know, trying something new because you are just going to learn a new skill set.

Everybody, you know, internet was only not what's like 1994, 1992 or something like that, which is kind of crazy.

know that's a long time ago, but folks, it really wasn't that long ago. really, really was just, you know, I was talking to Augie before we jumped on this call.

You know, I'm looking at creating a video channel, YouTube video channel as well, because I was mentioning Augie video is king or queen or however you want to pronounce it.

is kind of the creme de la creme right now. It's where most individuals, Those are starting to look to some education or some traction in the marketing.

There's a lot of YouTube University, called YouTube University for a reason. so hopefully, you know, soon here in the future, so folks listening, you're going to have to hold into this.

So here soon, you'll hopefully see us on YouTube. You'll be able to see us alive as well. So now you've kind of gone through this process.

You're building up this brand. starting a business can have its rewarding moments, right? What are some aspects? And that you found relatively enjoyable during the early stages of your entrepreneurial journey?

@11:36 - Augie Johnston

Yeah, things that I would found enjoyable were like landing big clients. know, like sometimes, you know, I was in this YouTube space, right?

For like four years with my own basketball train channel. And I was doing the Google search, you know, how to grow on YouTube, how to get more views, you know, trying to find the best practices for YouTube.

And there's people out there delivering that information, right? And I really looked up to those guys and I was like, man, these guys are some unique

YouTube Geniuses, they're providing me so much value. And eventually a lot of those guys became our affiliates, our partners, or even our clients.

And even some of the biggest names in the YouTube Help or YouTube Expert niche are currently our clients, or where our clients in the past.

of them have testimonials and everything from them. So that was like the best. being able to serve those guys and work with those guys, although pretty stressful, it's full, just kind of made me feel like I was kind of a part of their team.

know, like even though they're the ones getting, you know, speaking gigs and going and being the MCs at these major conferences and stuff, I was kind of the man behind the scenes helping them out to achieve those goals that they were achieving.

So that was super enjoyable for me. Also, too, like once I started building a team of editors and admin and all that kind of stuff, I really enjoyed just managing them and being a part of them and being able to say, hey,

It's okay when you make mistake and just work on my leadership skills and stuff in that regard because I come from the basketball world.

I currently am a basketball coach, I coach in varsity high school basketball. And so it's fun for me to kind of see myself on a team that's not in the basketball world.

@13:19 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I don't know if that makes sense, but that's pretty enjoyable for me. Yeah, that's a very interesting concept because I think, you know, I played sports, played basketball, football, baseball, kind of grow it up.

And, you know, I think one of the things that sports teaches you is just a very unique camaraderie in like that team aspect approach, right?

But it also creates this competitiveness. Right. And I think that's something that entrepreneurs, all entrepreneurs have. Now, what was that first client that you're like, this is it.

@13:50 - Augie Johnston

We're going to do it. Yeah. So his name is Andrew Edwards. He's actually still our client five years later.

It's kind of my claim to fame there. He's a great video creator. He has a tech channel and we've watched him grow over the years.

And yeah, so he signed up. He bared with us through a lot of tough times where we just didn't have our act together fully.

I remember even one of the first few videos that I edited for him. He, you know, there were some just some issues because he has a tech channel, right?

He knows what he knows. knows video editing. He knows tech. He knows how to automatically sync audio. And at that point I didn't.

And I remember sending him a project back and the audio wasn't automatically synced. It was manually synced. And he actually educated me on how to automatically sync the audio.

yeah, so he, you know, guys like that are kind of like our dream clients because not only do they create great content and stuff, but they have a business that's sustainable to hire a video editor for five years straight, you know.

And so yeah, it's been great working with him and just kind of watching him grow and speak. Is this just kind of be an industry leader?

@15:02 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I think that's another important piece too is, you know, folks out there, if you have a special skill that you can, you know, provide some mentorship to others, please do because that also allows you to strengthen their skill in that skill set.

Right? Everybody knows if you're doing something, if you're teaching by doing, you're going kind of get understand it a little bit better, right?

You're going be able to do it a little quicker, you become more efficient. But then you're also helping somebody else out.

This isn't always a You're to do a And I think that's pretty cool. What you have in the client, be double to say, Hey, this is how you do things.

And I appreciate, you know, it's a lot of the folks that have come on this show to have taken time to really say, Hey, this is how you do this.

This is how you sync this. is how you, you know, make sure the music kind of dials down. So again, I think it's pretty awesome because it's fun learning, right?

But I don't know what I don't know. There's a lot of my wife tells me there's a lot that I don't know still.

So now entrepreneurship challenges. Let's talk about some of the challenges. Challenges, can you share some of those significant hurdles that you encountered when you started your own worker business?

@16:07 - Augie Johnston

Yeah, so, you know, the losing clients and gaining clients, like it happens, you know, and so I think the biggest challenges for us were actually losing losing big name clients.

So, you know, like I said, we had one of the industry's top authorities in the YouTube help space who was with us for years and then he left, you know, he went to a competitor and then eventually came back, you know.

So, I think that was definitely a challenge, a big hit where I looked at my team and I was frustrated.

say, hey, how do we drop the ball in this one? You know, this is, this is could destroy our business, all that kind of stuff.

So, those are definitely some stressful moments. I think anytime you have clients and you're not running a business that's just kind of, you know, I guess ecommerce where they're just buying a product from your

There's more stress. There's a lot more stress because you got people, you have the expectations, and you have to meet those expectations.

so that can create stress. for me, that was definitely some of the challenging times is losing big clients and trying to figure out what we did wrong, fixing that.

Also challenges are, know, good challenges are when you get like a rush of new clients, right? we have one partner who every now and then will be promote us out to their huge audience.

And when that happens, we get a rush of clients and we have to kind of sometimes figure it out.

And whether we need, you know, admin on our team to step up and go and start editing videos, we have kind of now at this point, you know, a lot of things in place to protect us from those issues.

a rush of clients is a good problem to have, but definitely a challenge.

@17:55 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, one of things you kind of mentioned like challenges and overcome in some of these things. Have you ever had

That moment of self doubt.

@18:01 - Augie Johnston

And if so, how did you overcome it? Yeah, definitely had moments of self doubt, but to be honest, this thing has been rolling pretty well.

guess the biggest moments of self doubt is when I see a competitor come into the space and offer something better than what we offer.

Right. They, you know, we have our price points. We have what we offer in our scope. And of course, you can always do more.

Right. So a competitor can come into our space offer more than we offer. Maybe they offer. You know, social media posting, like they'll post to your social media or maybe they offer, I don't know, just things that are outside of our scope, right?

writing service on top of it or graphic design on top of video editing. Those are definitely challenging times and things that kind of make me second guess what we're doing.

Like maybe we need to do more. And so those are definitely, you know, the competitor. The space is highly competitive now.

When I first started, it wasn't it. Like I said, we had to I think mover advantage. So that's one of the things that we're constantly trying to deal with is new people coming in and how do we kind of differentiate ourselves and make sure that we're offering a better video editing service than they are.

@19:10 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, that's a great point. Let's could you walk us through the strategies and efforts that you employed to build and establish brand identity?

How do you differentiate yourself?

@19:22 - Augie Johnston

Yeah, I think with us, it's in the video editing space and a lot of services too. all quality. know, it's do we hit our deadlines?

Yes. Do we offer quality in every single edit? Yes. Do we offer repurposing? Right? So that's when you take a long form video and you make it vertical for TikTok or Instagram reels or Facebook reels.

So these are like little pieces that we've added. Most recently, it's something that we've added is community. So we've launched a community where people can log in, ask questions as well as group coaching calls where.

People can hop on a call with myself once a week. We can help you come up with video topics, titles, scripts, stuff like that, all that coaching call.

I think all those things have kind of helped us build our brand. And then as far as actual branding goes, know, it's about releasing content, you know, nowadays.

So we started releasing content, podcasts, stuff like that. To just help build up the brand and make sure that we're offering more value than just the video editing service.

So those things are all kind of brand new. And really excited about the community. I think it's going to help a lot because, you know, one of the reasons people do cancel is they're just not recording videos, right?

They're just not finding the time to go and hit record and deliver their message and create that video. And so that's a challenge for us because that's really out of our control.

can do things to help. But a lot of times that's on the client.

@20:56 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

If they're not using our service, then they're going to cancel. And one of the things you mentioned, you've been doing this since 2009, you continue to grow and continue to learn.

What's the next five, 10 years look like for VidJaps?

@21:10 - Augie Johnston

Yeah, for VidJaps specifically, I want to continue to help video creators and entrepreneurs that are creating video content. It goes much deeper than video editing, right?

I just mentioned scripting, I just mentioned repurposing videos, all that kind of stuff. I think it can even go deeper than video, right?

Like how do we help these video creators make more money off their channels? How do we help them monetize and build an email list and launch products?

So really just heavily focused on helping people create online businesses through video. I think another opportunity could be ads.

How do we become an ad editing service or maybe even an ad production service where you say, hey, that's our product.

And we can create an ad for you, can launch your ads. So that's kind of the future. I think the future of VidChops, we have built a proprietary app that we use as a kind of a client portal where our clients can log in, has project management aspect to it, it has video review tools inside of it graphic review tools, and we've built all that from scratch so I think there is also maybe a software play in the future, maybe some sort of SaaS product.

We talk about it sometimes internally but. It's just a huge endeavor that maybe in five years that's something we take a look at.

@22:36 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That's a great example. First and foremost, I think your entire business model, VidChops, the way it started, You're basically addressing an issue that you see pretty consistently, that you've thought other people's had, and then so you basically create a solution.

And now you're working through your solution and you realize there's another issue and that is this communication back. To your clients talking about the project, project management, video review and making sure all these things are set and you're realizing, hey, other people might also have this same issue.

Right. And so folks, I hope you're really understanding like when you're going through these processes. In fact, one of my former, I believe was Opel, a former guest.

Same thing, right, where they were agency and switch to a SaaS company. Right. And so these pivots are so unique because I think it's the experience of getting out And there doing the work and grinding through it, it allows you the opportunity to uncover that these needs are, they don't have a solution to them.

Right. That's how most of these problems kind of become uncovered. Now, what, what, what you would you say you wish you knew before, like, to this day, what is something you wish you knew when you started all this, something you knew know today that you wish when you started your entrepreneur endeavor that you knew?

@23:56 - Augie Johnston

I would say probably the, The whole client acquisition stuff. When I first started VidChops, my only experience was with organic traffic, right?

I had a YouTube channel that would get views, how I would ask people, hey, click the link in the description to get your free workout that you can download.

They would click the link, they would go to a squeeze page, they would enter their email, we'd send them the workout that they could do, we would build a lead.

And that's basically how we operated. There was an email follow up sequence that would pitch products, deliver more content, build the relationship.

Pretty typical digital marketing strategy there. Nowadays, the way we operate is much more complicated and in-depth. We now have a sales team, have setters, we have closers, we're booking calls, we're running ads.

So I wish I was just known a little bit more about that upfront because I probably would have launched the company a little bit differently, grew a little bit faster.

But in the past couple years, all these kind of more, I guess, in-depth high tech. Like sales processes are pretty good.

You know, they work pretty well. mean, imagine. So now we run ads, right? Somebody clicks on our ad. They go to a website.

They enter their name, their phone number. We build a lead. Well, our appointment setter will then call that lead, you know, and say, Hey, thank you for filling out the form.

Is there anything I can any questions I can answer for you real quick. If you'd like more information. If you want to know more about us, you know, and they'll qualify and be like, you know, do you.

Create content. Yes. Do you have a business? Yes. Then they'll say, well, you should book a call and they'll book a call on a closers calendar.

Who then will get on the call with them and. Try to close them or really just try to figure out if we can help them and if we can, then, you know, offer them the best plan that we have for them and.

That sales process there is one that any company that's selling anything that's semi high ticket. know, we're not talking about a $47 product, but something that's.

You know, you got a lifetime value of maybe $2,000 on a signup. That's a great sales process that you should implement.

So that's one thing that I've just recently kind of been diving into.

@26:12 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Folks, I want you to take note of this example right here because this is a great example. And in fact, I'm pretty sure, Augie, this is exactly what you're talking about, is a sales funnel.

do but there's also the marketing funnel. there's two different funnels and the sales funnel and the marketing funnel, they have to coexist and they have to work together.

So each one of these sections of your funnel, as your funnel gets smaller and smaller, because you're trying to get from a lead to a sales, awareness of your product, down to a conversion, a sale of the product.

And so Augie is essentially doing that. Each one of these stages, he's also, I think one of the point you mentioned was the speakers, the callers, the first callers are screening, right?

They're asking specific questions because that algorithm is going to help them determine, okay, this individual, Joel can move forward to the closer position or it doesn't make sense.

don't want to waste time folks. We're not in the business of wasting time and we're not in the business of giving out a free lunch.

Right. And so we're really trying to focus who makes sense to kind of bring who who who who who's who's that makes sense to really spend our time and energy on to get down to the conversion.

Right. And then once you get down to the conversion now it's all about retaining. Now you want to change that for conversion to a loyal right customer.

Right. And that's all about. Good customer service quality right efficiency as Augie mentioned building a proprietary app that really allows them to stay on track for their product development because I guarantee you that is a probably huge customer satisfaction like having something like that that's catered specifically to me that is project management so I know I can see the workflow that's going on.

I'm as close as I want to be or as far away than want to be right that information is there.

If you want it. But if you don't want to open to that, you don't need it. And I think that is really important.

And so folks, when you're thinking about creating a product or service, and you're thinking about retaining all these customers, think about how you want to structure your sales funnel.

And how does your marketing funnel relate to it? Because they have to be related. You have to be using specific marketing tactics at specific times during that sales funnel to create from awareness to actual conversion down to a loyal client.

And so I just wanted to take a moment to point that out, because it's such a great example of the use of a sales funnel, right, in a practical, practical way.

@28:40 - Augie Johnston

Yeah. And if you don't have any kind of sales funnel, if you just have a web page and that's it, and you're losing out on a lot of money, because it's just, like you said, people are going to come, going to look and they're going to leave and never come back.

@28:53 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So you want to make sure to always build that lead. When did you start to learn about this? Because you mentioned, man, if I had to learn about this,

This sooner I'd have been so much more, I'd have been so much further along. When did you start to learn about this concept?

@29:08 - Augie Johnston

Yeah, I mean, I've known about it for a long time, but we started booking calls probably about two years ago, I would say.

And then since then we've just kind of tweaked it and gotten a little bit more advanced and a little bit better as far as adding a setter and doing qualifications and stuff like that.

@29:27 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Nice. Now, what you've been doing since 2009, you've been doing this, have various iterations and you're kind of starting to look into, you mentioned the app area.

What advice would you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?

@29:43 - Augie Johnston

The first piece of advice is get started, right? just get your first customer. you have an idea, you're listening to this, you never launched a business, you have an idea.

put up the webpage, add the PayPal, buy now, buy now button or whatever. And now you have something you can share around, you know.

Like the first step is just to hit up your warm audience, you know, the people that know you and that you know and see if you can get a customer because a lot of times, if you can get one customer and like the example I talked about earlier right and you can over deliver to that customer then that there's no marketing that needs to be done they will market it for you.

Right they will get the word out for you they will recommend you, especially if you help them have success because people are going to ask them you know how did you do that you know how did you grow your YouTube channel.

200,000 subscribers in just one year. Oh, well I started releasing double the content. Well, how are you able to do that?

Well, I hired a video editor. Right, so I would say the biggest advice is just get started. And then the second piece of advice that I have for for people that already have a business running right now is to focus on getting more traffic.

Traffic is such a challenge I think people don't talk about it enough everyone talks about you know landing page optimization and and creating.

You're offering all these things, but I think being able to get traffic is really the best skill because then you don't even need a product, right?

Then you can just send traffic to affiliate offers to other people's offers, make a commission on it. But it seems like that is the hardest piece for most people is to figure out how to get traffic and you do it through content, you know, organically or through paid ads.

And I think those are just really high value skill sets. You know, as you're trying to build up your skill set, can learn how to be a video editor.

That's one skill set. But if you can learn how to really run paid ads for a company and make them some big money, then that's a really valuable skill set.

@31:41 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that goes back to what you were saying earlier is just creating value.

Yeah. How do you create value? mean, that's at the end of the day. So I guess I should say that again because the Sunjeev is probably screaming right now at me at this podcast.

We need to. For value entrepreneurs, we don't need to create value. People already know what's valuable to them. Essentially what we need to do is bring that value to them.

Things that they find already, because again, folks already know what they find valuable. So we're not really creating value.

We're just essentially leveraging what they find valuable and creating a product or service around it. Right. so that was one thing that Sun Jeep taught me.

So that's one thing I was kind of cat myself. It's like, we're not creating value or just finding the value and creating a product or service around it.

So that's my new thing. But to now Augie, for the listeners at home, they're interested more about bid chaps.

They want to connect with you. Maybe they do, in fact, need a client. They want to hire you as their vendor or their video editor.

@32:45 - Augie Johnston

How do they do it? Yeah, if you want to connect with me personally, then I'm probably most active on Instagram at Augie Johnston.

So that's a great place to connect with me. if you want to check out our video editing service, that's vidchops.com.

@33:01 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Perfect and you know what, folks, this is a great opportunity to remind you, all this information will be on the Shades of Entrepreneurship newsletter so you can actually subscribe to that at the Shades of E.com.

We're going to have all this information, and then we'll also have an individual web page of this episode on the Shades of E.com with a transcription.

We'll have Augie's link to the website as well as Augie's photo. So please if you're interested in connecting with Augie, please please go visit the shades of e.com or subscribe to the newsletter or do both because we do have a buy now button.

So please feel free to buy some of those products on there because they do help support the show.

@33:41 - Augie Johnston

Now, Auggie, is there anything else you would like to tell the listeners before leave? No, I would just say that, you know, one piece of advice that I tell all my basketball players, and I guess I can share this with entrepreneurs because it applies to is play to your strengths and hide your weaknesses.

So everyone has their strengths, whatever. Where skillset you have, go towards that direction. towards your strengths and then hide your weaknesses and that seems to work out for most people.

@34:07 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Give me an example. Give me example how you do that.

@34:11 - Augie Johnston

Sure. So let's say you are great at talking on camera. Start a YouTube channel. Let's say you're a great writer.

Tweet more. Let's write a blog post. Let's say you're good at just talking. Start a podcast. think that's one way you can play your strength in the content.

@34:29 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Game. And then there's plenty of other examples I think in the entrepreneurship world. Yeah, that's a great point. folks, I got to tell you, for my own personal experience, the first iteration is probably not going to be great.

I'll just be honest. My first podcast, you go back to listen to the first one compared to now. think hopefully I've gotten better.

speech is getting better. The quality is getting better. The guests have always been phenomenal, right? I think just be personally the quality and the what we're providing is getting slowly better.

To that point, I'm starting to get to that I got to outsource some things because I'm realizing after two years there's things I'm good at and there's things I'm not good at, but I'm really glad I've taken the time to learn all of these new skills, right, the video editing, the SEO, the blog posts, the newsletters, all of these different things has helped me tremendously, not only personally but professionally as well.

So again, folks take opportunity to learn new skills, get out there as Augie has been kind of talking about throughout this episode.

Get out there and actually network, there's people out there that truly want to actually help and they're willing to lend their expertise to you so long as you also are providing some value back, right?

We can't go over there empty handed. So make sure you're providing value back to your community because again we are a world of entrepreneurs.

So I'm excited, Augie for what's coming down the pipeline. I'm really, I'm maybe we'll come back in a couple of five years and have you back on the show and hopefully we'll

@36:00 - Augie Johnston

Talk about a new product that you'd be coming out with. So again, last thing, is there anything else you'd like to say before we head out?

No, I think that's about it. Thank you so much for having me on for the opportunity.

@36:10 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Appreciate it. Perfect. so folks listening, please follow me at the shades V.com. You can also follow us on the social sites, Instagram, tiktok, Facebook, and LinkedIn at the shades of E.

Thank you and have a great night.