Full Sail Reflection

A year has come and gone and my time at Full Sail University has come to an end. What an incredible ride it has been. I have learned how to properly write out my business plan for Guerilla Gear. We already have some investors lined up; they just have been waiting for what I have come up with.

The thought that operating my own business is so close at hand is a feeling that just keeps boggling my mind. I always wanted to run my own company; I just felt that I didn’t have the right knowledge to make it a success. After going through the Entertainment Business Master’s program, I walked away with the confidence that my business plan can be successfully implemented.

What I really liked about this class is that it re-emphasized what I already believed took to make a successful entrepreneur mentally. But what it also taught me was that I could do everything right in presenting my idea but if there is no perceived market, finding investors would be next to impossible. Doing due diligence can mitigate a lot of the unknowns and having faith and determination in your business can make it a great success.

The time has come to make Guerilla Gear a reality. We have the personnel in place, the products lined up, the investors prepped and waiting and the determination and willingness to see this venture through to the end. I can’t wait to unveil my business to the world. I honestly believe that this is the beginning of a great chapter in my life and I look forward to sharing it with whoever listens. I plan on keeping this blog up to date and use it as a springboard for creating backlinks to Guerilla Gear. Keep coming back and one day you will see links to my company.

Guerilla Gear and Internet Video Marketing

As I was searching around for other potential streams of revenue for Guerilla Gear, I came across this article. I liked how the author related how videos can give you quicker information to help keeping your business’ costs down. This can also give Guerilla Gear an extra advantage in showing off what the company’s products can do.

Being a new business, keeping costs down while getting your brand out there is crucial to the viability the company. Having Guerilla Gear produce Internet marketing videos will accomplish both. By producing the videos, the company can keep its name in the minds of whoever sees that video. This is essentially free advertising for Guerilla Gear. The more videos the company does, the more the company stays in the spotlight. The more attention the company gets, the more of the market share they start to acquire.

Like the author of the article said, videos can play to the emotional side of the viewer, much more so than just a PowerPoint presentation. Emotions play a big role in the decision-making process and videos can help guide people in a certain direction. The better the video, the better the results of the marketing campaign. As Guerilla Gear’s success in this area grows, so will the company’s credibility. By consistently putting out successful marketing videos, Guerilla Gear can show to investors, customers and critics that the company’s products are completely reliable and can deliver as promised.

I feel that as years go on, video will play an even more pivotal part in Internet marketing. People want instant gratification anymore and that can only lead to them wanting a video that can paint them the most vivid picture possible as to what your product can do while showing you those possibilities in the shortest amount of time. It will be a challenge but that is where Guerilla Gear thrives.

Guerilla Gear's Thoughts

As I looked more into Mr. John A. Troland, the more I feel that this person would be a great help to Guerilla Gear. Since Mr. Troland has been in the T.V. business for over 18 years and has helped write numerous successful business plans, he would be an ideal candidate when seeking information for Guerilla Gear’s business plan.

Looking at the questions that John has answered and it is clear that he wants to help. Every question that was posed to him was answered with as much information as he could give. Questions that were about business plans, he wanted those individuals to contact him directly at either his 800 number or his personal email. Even questions that didn’t pertain to business plans were answered with any help he could provide.  

After looking at Mr. Troland’s answers, I feel that providing a T.V. treatment along with my business plan to potential investors could greatly help. By having a treatment already written, this would show investors that Guerilla Gear is serious about getting the business going.

When presenting Guerilla Gear’s business plan, I think the most important part of it is going to be the inclusion of new products. By showing that we will continuously offer new products, investors can feel safe that the company will do everything in its power to make sure that it keeps its doors open and can also bring in a profit on a consistent basis.

Help with Writing Your Business Plan

Writing a business plan can be a very tricky and delicate matter. To help me with this, I decided to look for some help. This is when I came across the website www.allexperts.com. At this site, I was able to find some help in writing business plans. What I really liked about this page was the quick and precise info they had on each expert provided. The various areas that they are rated on are also a very helpful feature of the site.

The first expert I was looking at was John A. Troland. He produces a live one-hour cable access show called “Business Beat Live” which is aired in Connecticut. What intrigues me about him is that he can help in answering questions about how to get a new television show off the ground. Guerilla Gear plans on getting involved in doing some sort of video production. This will not only show off what our products can do but can also provide another source of income. By having some help in knowing what to include in my business plan for a show can only help in my benefit.

The other expert I looked at was named Leo Lingham. With over 18 years in management of numerous areas of business planning and over 24 years in consulting in those numerous areas of business planning, Mr. Lingham has seen pretty much any situation when creating a business plan. He is a virtual fountain of knowledge and is will to help out and answer whatever question a person may have.

A critical and key component that any business plan needs is a well-written executive summary. The executive summary section is the first thing any investor sees. It needs to be designed and written to capture the reader’s attention and yet provide only enough information to make the reader to want to continue on. Also, getting to the point is a must. Don’t beat around the bush and hint at the amount of funding you are seeking. In the minds of investors, time is money. The less time of theirs you take up and yet get your business idea across clearly and prove that there is potential with the venture, the more likely you are to achieve your funding goal.   

Guerilla Gear Thinking of Digital Video Expo

I was looking for upcoming video industry conferences and came across the Digital Video Expo in Pasadena, CA from September 19 – 21 at the Pasadena Convention Center. This expo has been going on for over ten years and offers opportunities to network with over 6,000 video industry professionals. The expo also offers a wide variety of conference sessions that cover pretty much any angle of creating HD digital content.

Now when I stumbled upon this convention, it had me very interested and immediately wanted to try and get Guerilla Gear entered into but I wanted to find some feedback from attendees as to what the expo is like. I found a couple of interesting articles that didn’t really paint it the glamorous event that it was made out to be.

The first one I found came from an individual named Radraven and was written in 2009. When she first starts talking about going to the DV Expo, she sounds excited to finally be getting back to her roots of video conventions. She goes on to say how the convention as a whole has dwindled in scale from what she remembered. It had been three years since she had last been there but the difference was noticeable.

The second article I found came from Fred Ginsburg and was a review of the DV Expo from 2011. He even talks about how much smaller the convention has become but despite that, there is still quality information and products that are there.

Both of these articles talk about how the convention circuit has been getting smaller and smaller each year but yet there are still companies out there that are willing to show at them. Even so, will there come a time when these conventions are no longer put on? Radraven says, and I have to agree with her, that there is no comparison with physically holding a product in your hand and looking it over with your very own eyes versus looking at numerous photos of something. Even if every angle was pictured.

Personally, I’d like to think that these conventions are invaluable. Who’s to say that the person you strike a conversation with doesn’t become your next biggest client/buyer/business investor/accountant? To me, the chance to network with so many professionals carries more value then the $1000 it costs to attend and around $4100 it costs have a vendors tent. Either way…you can write it all off come tax time.  

Good Video SEO Tips

As my business, Guerilla Gear, starts to break into the industry, I figure that the videos we will use to demonstrate our equipment will need to be found easily when people search for them or videos like them. I wanted to get some information on how would be an ideal way to get my videos to the forefront of search engines and found a couple of really helpful articles.

The first article had some really good information but what I found the most helpful were the three tips on optimizing hosted video on SEO; Delivery, Content and Links. Not only do we plan on having videos on You Tube but we will have videos hosted on our own website as well.  I want people to be drawn to our website as much as possible and these tips were very helpful but the one tip that stuck out to me the most of the three was Delivery.

By having our website be flexible and accessible to many different formats and readers, we will cast a bigger net and catch the eyes of more viewers. As of right now, our website is built to use Flash and I’ve found out that Flash based websites aren’t really search engine friendly and that they rarely work when trying to be viewed on a mobile device.

The second article talked about a number of different things as well and what I found most interesting was that with video SEO, a website’s age isn’t important. Google doesn’t take age into a video SEO so even small companies can compete at the same level as the big guys when it comes to using video to generate business.

The main theme I found between these two articles, as that content is paramount. The better you describe your site with Long Tail descriptions or submit more meta data, the better your business will fit search engines’ algorithms. When our website can start doing that, I’m sure we will notice a big difference in our orders.

              

Film Festival Help

Getting a movie submitted to the South-By-Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival is a goal a videographer friend of mine has. I have been working with him in getting a business formed for the camera mount we want to produce and sell. His business is called Guerilla Gear and can be found at http://guerillagear.net/. We have a good team of writers and are close to completion on a script, but we need to make sure we have everything we need before we submit to SXSW.

While looking around, I came across a really good site to help me with, not only SXSW, but any other film festival. Film Festival Secrets’ site is really helpful in that it’s pretty much a one-stop shop for getting any question you may have about film festivals answered. The website’s creator, Chris Holland, has written a book called “Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers” and he offers the first to chapters of it downloaded for free as long as you sign-up for his newsletter. Not a bad deal in my opinion. The first two chapters deal with what you need to do before you submit and then when you do submit, however, the book covers a number of different topics like selecting the right festival for your film, preparing the screener for the festival, saving money on festival fees, creating marketing collateral and more. At $24.95 for a print version and $9.99 for Kindle or from the iBookstore, it’s priced quite reasonably for the amount of information it gives you.

The one thing that I thought really stood out on this page was that Mr. Holland offers his professional consulting on the film your company is planning on submitting. Having a your film screened by a festival programmer is very appealing because it gives you a direct sense for what the judges will be looking for when viewing submissions.

This site is definitely going to be of great help when our production company gets going. We have a lot of plans in the works and we all realize that film festivals will be an intricate part of our operations. Not only will we be able to showcase our films but gives us a chance to perform one of the most important aspects of this business…networking.