What I have learned in my first few weeks as a business owner.

It has been just about a month since I left my job to run my business full time and I wanted to share some of the things I have learned so far.

First is branding. I reached out to my friend Dimitri Williams of Chasing Dreams Management and asked him to make me some shirts with my logo. I ordered a bunch of shirts from him and also a decal for the back window of my car as well.

I got the shirts a few days later and I was at Target doing some shopping and a man approached me asking about my services. We would up talking for about half an hour and he has hired me to do at least 6 videos for him. My investment of $160 for the shirts has already paid off and it was only the 2nd day of me wearing them.

Next is networking. I have tried a few different forms of advertising including facebook ads but I have not gotten a lot of traction. What has worked is by going to local networking events and talking with others and hand them my card saying if you ever need any video work done please feel free to reach out to me. People have already reached out to me and will be doing some work for them in the next few months.

These were my two big takeaways from the first few weeks as a full time business owner. I have also made a video about it and you can watch it below.

Running a YouTube channel for work

In today's blog post I wanted to write about a big new project that I am working on. A while back when I started working for Peace Camera I pitched the idea of doing a YouTube channel for the store to build up our social media presence and use it to showcase certain items in the store. Once we had finished the move to the new store location I was given the go ahead by the owner to start doing these videos.

For the first video I decided to do an unboxing video as those videos are some of the most popular videos on YouTube. We had just received one of the brand new Sigma 85mm F1.4 Art lenses and I decided to choose this for the first video. I tried to film it while the store was open and even if we were slow enough for me to film there was just too many distractions so I decided to film when the store was closed. 

i spent a few hours editing and making some lower thirds animations and I published the first video to the new channel. 

in the first day we gained 5 subscribers to the channel and a few comments that contained good feedback. The owner loved it as asked me to start doing more videos for the store. We decided that I would film and produce a video once a week to the channel. Now the next big thing to figure out is the content that I want to produce for the store. 

For my next video I decided to talk all about our used gear section as we are always buying and selling used gear. 

I am having a lot of fun filming and editing these videos. It not only forces me to push out a new video every week it also is helping me learn a lot more about video editing and also motion graphics. This week I filmed our latest video which was all about our huge supply of seamless background paper.

Next weeks video I think will be all about our wide selection of film developing supplies as every one of us at the store loves to shoot with film and it is certainly not dead in our eyes.

Now that I am producing these videos on a regular basis I need to start doing more videos for my personal YouTube channel. If you would like to subscribe to either the Peace Camera channel or my channel I will put links to both of them down below. 

Thanks for reading and I will see you in next weeks blog.

Peace Camera's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwLiuDE0QbHVdhksLgayQuw 

My Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdeTbKXbLpcEeRacp2l5J5g