We Started A Video Production Company With Less Than $5,000

Dave Emge

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Published: April 8th, 2022

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About
Business

Dave Emge

Founder, Soul Arch Media

Founders

Employees

Soul Arch Media

soularchmedia.com

from Gold Coast QLD, Australia

started October 2006

Founders

Employees

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I’m Dave Emge and I run a video production company called Soul Arch Media on the Gold Coast of Australia. We film and edit content for events, corporate, and TV, so there’s lots of diversity – every day is a different location set, filming different people.

What started 15 years ago as a small production company operated by a husband-wife team has grown into one of the region’s largest and longest-running media houses servicing hundreds of the country’s biggest brands and events, and filming content that reaches 10,000 million viewers worldwide.

What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?

I was born in Texas but grew up in San Diego. A love of surfing drew me toward a career in surf videography, and I created a surf TV show for public television. While it wasn’t lucrative financially it did lead me to land a job with Poor Specimen, who at the time was at the forefront of surf films. I traveled the globe for them for 7- 8 years, filming the sport’s elite in some of the remotest islands and surf breaks. I met my wife while filming in Australia, and after traveling together for a couple of years we decided to settle down in her hometown on the Gold Coast.

Even though my job was a dream role, I’d already started to tire of being on the road filming 24/7. However, when we discovered we were about to become parents, I started frantically job hunting to find a position that required less travel. I sent out hundreds of job applications for random roles I wasn’t a fit for – from car detailing to baggage handling – and although I scored a couple of callbacks and a few casual work hours I struggled to find a stable, reliable paycheck. With a baby on the way, finding myself unemployed was pretty stressful.

Being open to change, and making sure we’re in a position to adapt quickly, seems to have helped us survive and thrive over the years while many in our industry have folded.

My wife and I started Soul Arch Media out of necessity, with the hopes that I could find freelance work as a cameraman and continue doing a job I loved to support my family. Her background as a journalist and copywriter had brought her in contact with marketing teams of large brands, where she’d noted video content demands were on the rise – it was a gamble to invest in equipment when there was so much at stake, but we knew there was potential.

Take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you go from day 1 to today?

With no real marketing budget and no sales team, we had to get creative. I learned a bit of basic coding just so I could build our first website, and my wife started pitching local businesses and calling on friends and family for referrals.

We invested in equipment only as we gained projects to pay for them, in part to ensure we didn’t overspend on expensive gear that didn’t immediately have a way to pay itself off.

We joined a bunch of local business groups and my wife started networking. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to most businesses as the best use of time or energy, but it was worth experimenting with as we were aiming for local clients and trying to build our client base overnight without a big budget.

There was a lot of trial and error in developing our niche. One minute we’d be targeting real estate videos, the next minute social media content, the next sporting events and TV crews. We’ve evolved so many times over the years to adapt to demand, but the one constant is filming engaging content.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Pre COVID-19 pandemic we’d settled into a comfortable groove supplying TV crews, servicing corporate events, creating training videos and courses, and filming tourism content. We’d even set up a separate arm of the business called Happy Place Hunters just to host all the tourism content we were planning on creating in 2020, which in hindsight wasn’t great timing.

If you know of any industries harder hit than events and tourism, let us know – we’re pretty sure it’s been the toughest period a majority of our clients have ever experienced. The margins in their industries (and ours!) are quite slim, and so like many businesses, our bottom line took a beating.

However we were fortunate in that we hadn’t niched down tightly, and not all of our clients were in the same industry. Our location has also been spared the majority of lockdown restrictions too. That said, lockdowns in other states have still affected us – for example events are still being canceled here as attendees from Sydney and Melbourne can’t attend.

We’re optimistic that we’ll be back at Pre-Covid profitability by Christmas. A majority of clients come through our website, and it’s currently getting around 2,000 unique site visits per month – back to pre lockdown levels, with similar volumes of inquiries. As we’re targeting clients in a geographically small area, we don’t spend a great deal on ads and mainly rely on our social reach and word of mouth, which keeps customer acquisition costs low. We’re also lucky in that the lifetime value of our clients is quite high, as video content is something that eventually needs updating or refreshing – we have some clients that have been with us (off and on) for 15 years.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Most of our big business pivots have come about due to forces outside our control – market demand, changes in technology, and more recently COVID-19 restrictions to name but few.

Being open to change, and making sure we’re in a position to adapt quickly, seems to have helped us survive and thrive over the years while many in our industry have folded.

It’s funny that so many business experts champion finding a tight, specific niche and owning it, but we’ve consistently found the opposite – we’ve been able to adapt by having several broad target markets. Whenever we’ve had lean times, it’s after having to relearn that it’s unwise to put all our eggs in one basket. Whether that’s one client responsible for a big percentage of income, or one industry that’s driving the bulk of sales, if you lean too heavily on one niche or revenue stream then you run a bigger risk of tripping hard if the one horse you’ve backed to win falls over.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

We’d be lost without the Adobe Creative Cloud products, as we use everything in it from video editing to photoshop and design tools.

We’re also big fans of Xero for accounting and invoicing, as it’s simplified so many processes that were all done manually before.

For social scheduling, we use Postoplan as it works well for video files – and let’s face it as a video business that’s what we’re posting 99% of the time.

For customer relationship management we were using Hubspot CRM but just started changing over to Flowlu as it has project management capabilities built-in as well.

And our sites are all simple and built on Wordpress – customizable and easy to update and manage.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Find something you love that you know you can sustain being motivated about for years to come – you’re going to need it!

It’s a bonus if it’s something you’re happy to spring out of bed in the morning for – you don’t want to run out of energy after years of doing all the hard work of setting up a business.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We’re not currently hiring, but we’re hoping to bring onboard a digital ad specialist, someone with PPC marketing and social media management experience in the near future. They’d need to be Gold Coast-based and love working with creative types.

Where can we go to learn more?

Our main website or people can find us mainly on Youtube, Instagram, Linkedin or Facebook.

My personal Instagram account handle is dave.emge – always posting videos on there for fun too.