Transcript:
Neil Carroll [00:00:06] Hi, welcome to The Smarter Business Podcast. This episode features Tim Bouchard, a partner and the CEO of Luminus. Tim was the president of AAF Buffalo for two years and has recently been named to The Buffalo 40 Under 40. He talks about the early development of his business, his experience with vlogging, and how video, in general, has impacted the growth of his own business. If you like what you hear, please subscribe wherever you’re taking in this podcast, and please leave a comment. We’re always looking for feedback and this can help people find this show.
Neil Carroll [00:00:45] Welcome to this episode of The Smarter Business Podcast. This month we have Tim Bouchard from Luminus, and Tim, what is your title these days?
Tim Bouchard [00:00:56] I am one of the two partners and chief executive officer.
Neil Carroll [00:01:00] Alright, you may be the first CEO we’ve had on the podcast. So do you want to tell everybody, Why don’t you kind of intro yourself and Luminus?
Tim Bouchard [00:01:12] Yeah, my background in marketing is in the development space and a little bit of design. I went to UB. Been local here in Buffalo for twenty years now, and ended up forming Luminus, meeting my partner Mike in 2007 through a mutual employer when he was doing contract work, and he is heavy on the design side, and we started doing projects together. Picked up from there and formed Luminus in 2010, which was primarily a logo design and web type company. The two of us sharing projects, and that morphed into more of a strategic marketing creative agency in 2015. And we started hiring for marketing, and illustration, and development, and account services, and everything that goes into running an integrated campaign. So now we’re a creative agency. We do integrated campaigns. We don’t touch a lot of PR and media buying, but we do handle brand strategy all the way through campaign execution, kind of soup to nuts that, that way.
Neil Carroll [00:02:24] Excellent. Yeah, it’s been exciting to see you guys, you’ve had a lot of growth since, see, I’m going to spin this right into the next part here. Since our days back when we shared, we used to share office space not far from where we’re shooting this now on Elmwood Ave in Buffalo, where we kinda had, we sort of had a coworking space before it was cool.
Tim Bouchard [00:02:47] Yeah, the EVC, The Elmwood Village Creative. That was before we went into the EVC, Mike and I worked out of our houses, and we’d have meetings or I would go to Lewiston and he would come to Buffalo and we’d just meet in our little home offices. EVC was the first time we decided, that was one Luminus itself really started. We were good freelancing together. Let’s get an office space, move in, share costs, share sales, share project management and then get to meet other people, as a coworking space that was the benefit, right? We got, we met you, video media production. There were some marketers in that floor, photographer, app developers. A lot of different talent sets and we’ve kept some of those connections, obviously.
Neil Carroll [00:03:35] Right. Yeah, that was a cool little experiment.
Tim Bouchard [00:03:38] Taught us a lot about leasing office space.
Neil Carroll [00:03:41] Yes it did.
Tim Bouchard [00:03:42] And how hard it is to paint.
Neil Carroll [00:03:45] And never trust a development company when they say they’re, well, that might not be true. Specific develop companies.
Tim Bouchard [00:03:52] Definitely learn what lease contracts are.
Neil Carroll [00:03:54] Yes. Yeah.
Tim Bouchard [00:03:55] And how your pricing square footage, and what type of space you need and what the amenities are.
Neil Carroll [00:04:00] Yeah, that was a, that, I remember kinda, yeah. I had no idea what the price per square foot really meant until we got in there.
Tim Bouchard [00:04:09] Yeah we all went in green, and we came out orange, blue, black and yellow.
Neil Carroll [00:04:15] It was a very bold color palette, yeah.
Tim Bouchard [00:04:17] I’m pretty sure the colors are still on the walls there.
Neil Carroll [00:04:18] I would, could you imagine painting over that, that stuff we put on the walls. That’s incredible. Yeah. It’s gotta still be there. Well we’ll put up a little graphic of that stuff too, the logo. Yeah it’ll probably be right, usually I put them right in that space. And yeah, get an idea of just how wild it was in there. But since that time, you guys have grown quite a bit. So it’s just the two of you then.
Tim Bouchard [00:04:45] Yeah.
Neil Carroll [00:04:46] Now, did you, you were already Luminus before you moved in though at some point?
Tim Bouchard [00:04:51] We were in 2009 to test out working together is the first time we’d ever been partners with someone in a business. We actually started with the DBA for one year. The nice thing about the DBA is that if you decide not to continue business together, there’s almost nothing to dissolve. You just go back to county records and say, “I’d like to remove the DBA.” But it worked out for a year and then we got our LLC in 2010 as Luminus Media and it shifted to Luminus LLC in 2017. What we really wanted to let people know that we were shedding just the media type of stigma that we had with us about web design and development and really prove a point that we had integrated marketing services and a full team of strategic and creative positions.
Neil Carroll [00:05:40] Yeah, it was good looking rebrand too.
Tim Bouchard [00:05:42] Yeah. Yeah. We got an ADDY for that one locally because that’s as far as it can go. But then our second phase of growth was we actually did two really progressed like step by step ways to grow. We didn’t hire anyone as a production team person until 2015, 2014, 2015, but we hired for sales in 2013. We operated on our own for two, two to three years and we got so busy that we couldn’t actually answer the emails and phone calls coming in about new work. So we hired an outside contractor to help us guide those inbound requests into contracts and agreements. That work ballooned and opened up time for us to do more production time. We got back to our 115% rule that we like to call it where we decide we need to hire someone. And that’s when we hired our first developer in 2014 I think it was. And now we’ve gone from that one developer, to we have nine total people now plus me and Mike, so eleven.
Neil Carroll [00:06:42] Eleven. Where’s that put you in the agency food chain around these parts.
Tim Bouchard [00:06:47] Mid-tier, mid-sized. There’s probably, the one great thing about Buffalo is that it’s a very good city to start a business in because cost of living is low. To be honest, the salaries are depreciated or depressed compared to the rest of the country, but it does offer a lot of opportunities to do business outside of Buffalo where the money is better. So we can live well here and do work for higher-paying clients out of town, and it works out for everyone really.
Neil Carroll [00:07:17] Yeah and that was when I started up. I had the decision to start up in Baltimore, or start up in Buffalo, and being from Buffalo, I came back and started up here partly because I knew my runway was a little longer than it would have been in a higher rent city o that’s cool. So what do you think next steps are, you guys have plans?
Neil Carroll [00:07:38] For us we started our next steps a year or two ago. It was for seven or eight years, ten if you count Mike and I freelancing together. We were a project shop, someone would want a website, someone would want a new brand, someone would want a digital campaign. Creative, someone would want a poster, brochure, whatever it is. When you start to take on a couple hundred thousand dollars in payroll every year, you kind of want more revenue consistency than project sales.
Neil Carroll [00:08:09] Yes.
Tim Bouchard [00:08:10] So we shifted from doing something like, you know, a few hundred projects for 50 to 70 clients a year, to having 13 or 15 clients, that we still do a few hundred projects a year in, and we work with them annually on their marketing budgets, strategic objectives for the year, project planning, and schedule planning. And then from there we execute and then the next year we go back into analysis.
Neil Carroll [00:08:36] Yeah, that’s, that’s the, that, that model makes it a lot easier to grow, doesn’t it?
Tim Bouchard [00:08:44] It does make it easier to grow. It makes it easier to be stable if you do good work, treat your clients well, get success and results in campaigns. It very much elongates the sales cycle though.
Neil Carroll [00:08:56] Yeah, well, that’s true.
Tim Bouchard [00:08:57] You can sell a project in one day to four weeks.
Neil Carroll [00:09:02] Yeah.
Tim Bouchard [00:09:02] If you, the price is right, the deliverables and your comps arend your portfolio are there to sell a long term strategic engagement with someone, they have to understand your work, understand your process, trust you, like your pricing model, things like that. And that takes time to win people over. They’re always not always ready to buy in the moment when you meet them. They may be exposed to you in a networking event or through referral, but they might not be ready to buy or not have the money to hire your company yet. So you stay in touch with them. Post content, they warm up to it, ask you more, and then you can start to sell. That’s a perfect segway, right?
Tim Bouchard [00:09:40] I’m here for all the segways.
Neil Carroll [00:09:42] You’re nailing it, it’s like you’ve read this form before. Yeah.
Neil Carroll [00:09:48] So that was, I was going to segway into your, you know, you’re talking about about providing content and like the name of the game there is typically to prove your expert status, right? Like let people know, you know what the hell you’re talking about. So you tried out a video series and had one going for a little while there recently.
Tim Bouchard [00:10:11] Yeah.
Neil Carroll [00:10:11] So I guess I’ll make this a two-parter. We had your series, but [00:10:16]content wise is Luminus as like a whole, utilizing a lot of video as content?[5.3s]
Tim Bouchard [00:10:23] [00:10:23]We mix it up where we’re primarily from the Luminus side where we’re primarily using video is trying to take case examples from work that we’ve done and make, we do LinkedIn a lot now. That’s sort of when you’re in that long term sales cycle and you’re dealing with sea level or director level people that you’re trying to sell with, that’s the best platform for us to plan. So we’ll take logo progression videos, clips from campaign videos. We’ll just do pan videos of still print pieces just so there is something moving on the screen and we’ll try and do something that’s 15 seconds or less so it does the auto loop, or if it’s an actual video, then we’ll just play the one the size that it is. [42.6s] But one of the things I even talked about in my Executive Marketers Minute vlog that I tried writing Spring was that video is getting a lot more attention in social than static images, and the algorithms are preferring it over text-based and static images. So we’ve been trying to mix that in too. Sometimes you just can’t get away with having a good text post or an image to share, but when you can incorporate something that has movement, it draws the eye. And again, the file type itself is better for the algorithm.
Neil Carroll [00:11:41] Right, yeah, they bonus those, or the networks themselves will bonus that stuff, especially native content, but that’s a great way for somebody who’s doing print work or design work to easily incorporate video. I mean just do a pan shot. It ‘s a piece of cake.
Tim Bouchard [00:12:00] You know, some of them that we’ve done have even just been long width brochure two pagers. And if you throw it even into something like iMovie, it’ll do an automatic like Ken Burns scan or something over it. And there you have your movement and you’re going to go from there.
Neil Carroll [00:12:18] No that’s perfect.
Tim Bouchard [00:12:19] When it came to the vlog that I tried this year, my initial idea was, again, to try and put something out that had some expertise in it. So the Executive Marketers Minute, which actually has a website still, executivemarketersminute.com.
Neil Carroll [00:12:34] All right.
Tim Bouchard [00:12:35] There you go. There’s a plug for a vlog that doesn’t exist anymore. I did, my initial plan was to do one 30 or 60 second video every weekday of the year. I made it eight weeks.
Neil Carroll [00:12:48] Right. Well, it’s a tough thing to do, right. Casey Neistat was real famous for just doing a video every day. And that’s like, that would be a lot of work.
Tim Bouchard [00:13:01] I learned a lot of things doing it. One is, if you don’t have time for it, don’t do it, or get someone to help you do it. I tried to make mine very produced, so I had, every time I shot, I would try and shoot a week or two’s in one afternoon, and for every 1-minute video I was shooting, I was probably spending an hour and a half to two hours producing it.
Neil Carroll [00:13:22] Sure.
Tim Bouchard [00:13:23] Between writing it, shooting it, which takes multiple takes if you are really OCD about how you sound and look. Editing it., creating the graphics for the website, the YouTube banner, posting it, scheduling it for Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, publishing and then doing that four more times for the week. I was probably putting almost two full workdays into a two-week span.
Neil Carroll [00:13:47] Yeah. Yeah. Well, all the people, a lot of folks don’t realize how much goes into it, right? That is, yeah. I don’t even like to use the terminology but like the, it’s not pressing a button like a lot of people think right. Record it and then push it out there.
Tim Bouchard [00:14:08] To some degree, there’s some people that are very charismatic and very off the cuff where they can do the Instagram story where they’re just in their car, they pop it up and they just go to town. And I admire the hell out of that, but it’s a little, I’m not that person, I’m a little bit more prepared. I even sent Neil notes for this interview on the things that I was gonna say.
Neil Carroll [00:14:29] Those were the first notes that we’ve received, right? Usually we just wing it.
Tim Bouchard [00:14:33] Yeah, so, and the other thing I learned about that, besides making sure you have the time, I think it is a worthwhile thing to have a series like that. I probably chewed too much trying to do it every single day, trying to make it so produced. And then also when you’re posting I had this conundrum where I was posting these on YouTube because I wanted the YouTube channel to gain subscribers and have view analytics, and I wanted to post these on LinkedIn, but in order to do that, they wouldn’t auto play on LinkedIn unless you actually posted the file there. So I ended up in this channel debate internally.
Neil Carroll [00:15:08] Well, that’s a huge question. So like we will run campaigns that remarket like based on, you know, people viewing something on YouTube. And to do that and kind of interact with LinkedIn, you gotta use YouTube links. So what we have found is like we’ll sometimes double post content where it will be native on LinkedIn and it’ll be on YouTube in certain situations and other situations it’s just on YouTube. But the one constant that, I don’t know, I would agree with the way you did it, like the one constant is it has to be on YouTube, like from an SEO standpoint, you cannot do better, but.
Tim Bouchard [00:15:51] It’s the, it’s still the second best search engine in the world right now, and Google owns it anyway. Which if you watched the first episode of the Executive Marketers Minute, that’s one of the things I talk about, is that YouTube is the second most popular search engine right now.
Neil Carroll [00:16:04] We use that stat all the time. But it’s it’s, yeah it’s something you have to figure out, something you have to tackle, and.
Tim Bouchard [00:16:14] If I did it again, I would just make it.
Neil Carroll [00:16:17] Native LinkedIn.
Tim Bouchard [00:16:19] I would make it native LinkedIn. I would post it on YouTube and then just double posted it on LinkedIn afterwards and just call it a day. And then also I would probably do one episode a week, instead of five.
Neil Carroll [00:16:32] Well that, and that was another thing that like just when you were talking about that, we, we have had that internally where you bite off more than you can chew in terms of like getting it done. And that was like very purposely when we started this podcast. Like once a month, we feel we can be consistent at, right? And there have been like we’re recording this a couple of months beforehand so we’ll have stuff in the can and everything.
Tim Bouchard [00:17:01] Happy Thanksgiving!
Neil Carroll [00:17:05] But we will, you know, you have to be able to kind of continue to produce it. And if you if you get ahead of yourself there, yeah. It just becomes well, it becomes stressful. It becomes less effective.
Tim Bouchard [00:17:20] I am planning to try and start a new podcast next year, and it will be once a month.
Neil Carroll [00:17:27] Monthly, there you go.
Tim Bouchard [00:17:28] And then maybe if people like it, I’ll do you one every two weeks, but definitely just once a month.
Neil Carroll [00:17:32] That’s, that’s kind of exactly the plan that I have. I have head here. And yeah, it’s been interesting. We’ve had a handful of people ask to be on. People seem to like it thus far, though we had to, I had to convince you to be on Tim. You didn’t really want to do it.
Tim Bouchard [00:17:47] No we just want to play frisbee golf, and you were like, “You want to be on,” and I was like, “Sure, when?”.
Neil Carroll [00:17:52] Oh, yeah. So I guess it wasn’t that much convincing, but, yeah, no, I’m glad that we got you on. Yeah, and you know what, I didn’t take any shots that day, did I? Because Tony, you know Tony DiSimone at all?
Tim Bouchard [00:18:04] Yeah.
Neil Carroll [00:18:06] So he, we went this golfing and I put a couple clips of our round together.
Tim Bouchard [00:18:11] You took one of me shooting from over, when I almost hit the creek.
Neil Carroll [00:18:14] Yeah, I’ll put it up. So we’ll make sure it gets up there. People will see your throw. All right, so I’m going to move it along here. Well, we talked a lot about your challenges, but did, results wise, from that video series, do you feel like it was effective in its short…?
Tim Bouchard [00:18:34] Yeah. So I had, I didn’t get a huge slew of views or anything, and it was never really supposed to be a business development tool. We just wanted something more out there to talk about the types of ways that we approach work, you know, through process and, and knowledge that we have. So I was putting those into little videos. I had people at networking events, you know, say they like the videos, keep them up. They’re pretty neat. I had a few direct messages through a couple of the social platforms. I don’t really know if I could tell you if you got to the point where I thought it worked or not. It was just something to get out there to test a theory on if people would watch it, which, you know, each video had about 40 to 60 views, which isn’t a ton, but it was something, especially so, you know, in a fledgling vlog, if you will.
Neil Carroll [00:19:22] Well, and we talked about this in another episode, but people get really hung up on the views sometimes, and the reality is if you get that 40 to 60 and they’re the right 40 to 60 people watching it, like that’s, you’re talking to a roomful of people essentially. You don’t have to hit a million, right?
Tim Bouchard [00:19:42] Right, and the other thing we were, we were going to use those videos for and we still can, even though I’m not doing the series anymore, is we did talk about the why that some of the things we do are important, and how they can be beneficial to people, whether it’s identifying your personas or having a voice and tone, something like that. So these little 60 minute videos that were part of a series aren’t anymore can still be linked to from our sales staff to say, hey, if you want some more information on why this service is important to your business, there’s this 60 second video that you can watch of our CEO talking about the importance of it and the benefits.
Neil Carroll [00:20:19] Yeah, yeah, we had a clip from our first episode of the podcast already make it into one of our sales videos. Right, like it’s, when you’re creating content if it’s worthwhile, you can use it in a number of different ways.
Tim Bouchard [00:20:33] Chop it up. Send it to whoever you want. And that’s a direct send so that video, if you’re sending it to someone that is talking about that topic with you is an immediate value add.
Neil Carroll [00:20:43] Right. And that’s only one view if you’re sending them a YouTube link.
Tim Bouchard [00:20:47] And think about that, eight to nine months sells 12 months sales process I’m talking about. If you need things to continually poke someone with, a blog post here, a video clip here, a news clip about something, or a comparable project that was just released, you need to have a lot of those things lined up.
Neil Carroll [00:21:04] Yeah. And if you, if you did eight weeks at every weekday and you’ve got…
Tim Bouchard [00:21:09] I’ve got 35 or 40 videos up there.
Neil Carroll [00:21:11] You’ve got 40 videos. So that’s cool. All right, well, I think that worked really well. I wanted to talk about creating a series, and I think we covered that really well. So we’ll move to the next piece here which is the big question of The Smarter Business Podcast, which is, what is one thin, you only get to pick one, that’s what makes it difficult. What is one thing that you have done to make your business smarter?
Tim Bouchard [00:21:49] So I would love to say two answers, but I think I’m going to pick one because you’re making me.
Neil Carroll [00:21:57] Yeah, just one. We’ll see if there’s time for a second.
Tim Bouchard [00:22:01] The thing that I’ve done to make the business smarter is we were, you know, Mike and I started this company and we just did things. We hired people and we just had them do things, and it was, we got money in, we did things, we sent stuff out. When you get to a certain size and you need to start to raise prices and understand estimates better, and you have multiple people working sometimes at multiple different rates for different timeframes during a project, it’s hard to understand where the time is going and how much you should bill for it, and if you’re making money. [00:22:35]So time tracking was the thing that we implemented, not even after we hired our first employee, it probably took three years into developing the team to realize that, like, we can’t just handle this through assumptions anymore. We have five employees at that time. We need to understand where the time’s going. How the projects are being worked, and once you have that data, you can turn it into the hourly rate versus the cost to do the business. Find out where your gross margin is and from there, figure out your profit is. And it just that spilled into accounting, business growth planning, business development estimations, and just made everything more accurate. [38.4s]
Neil Carroll [00:23:14] So that was the first domino in kind of making the whole thing smarter.
Tim Bouchard [00:23:19] Now we’re so corporate.
Neil Carroll [00:23:20] Yeah.
Tim Bouchard [00:23:20] Timetracking, cost of goods.
Neil Carroll [00:23:23] Right.
Tim Bouchard [00:23:24] I say things like gross profit which is gross.
Neil Carroll [00:23:27] Yeah. There’s a reason people say that stuff though right. There’s a lot of those numbers that, well and processes and stuff that are, yeah, they’re unavoidable. You can try to stay not corporate for as long as you want but.
Tim Bouchard [00:23:44] And the other thing that it benefited was we started doing a lot of work that we hadn’t previously done a lot of or had a new position that we previously didn’t hire for. And we had to understand how their time was being used in projects. So that was a way for us to learn even how to incorporate a new type of position into a project estimate is what they’re typically spending on the projects that we’re giving them off the bat. You’ll start to see that stabilize and average out and then include that in the estimates.
Neil Carroll [00:24:11] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right so I don’t think we touched on a big accolade that you got awarded today, right Tim?
Tim Bouchard [00:24:21] Yeah.
Neil Carroll [00:24:21] So today won’t be today when when this is released.
Tim Bouchard [00:24:25] Actually this might be coming out right around when the luncheon is for it. So it might be very good timing.
Neil Carroll [00:24:32] But Tim was named as a 40 Under 40 for Buffalo Business First.
Tim Bouchard [00:24:38] Yes.
Neil Carroll [00:24:38] And congratulations on that, Tim. What’s involved in such a thing? You have to be under 40.
Tim Bouchard [00:24:46] You have to be under 40. You have to be over 30 and under 40. And, you know, I’ve been nominated multiple years for this. It’s not very easy to get awarded and honored for it. And what I learned through my experience trying to be involved in this process is it’s not just about personal or business success. It’s also about community involvement, heavily weighed on that so that you’re not just making the world better for yourself, but you’re also making a good for everyone else around you. And where I really started to have that sink in was when I started to get deeper involved in the industry organization, AAF Buffalo here. And I was president for two years at that organization, and then also two years ago, Luminus at our retreat, started choosing a nonprofit to work with every year where we would donate our time. And we’ve donated forty thousand dollars of unbilled time to two organizations, Dean of Western New York and the PUNT Foundation over the last two years. Currently, we’re working with the PUNT Foundation, so that helps, too, because that is me using what has been successful for us to give back to the community and be more involved from that aspect. So I think what really helped this year was I have the business growth success. I have the, I’m contributing to the industry with the AAF help. I’m actually on the AAF national board now. So that’s cool progression in that, and then also the community involvement. So if you want to be 40 Under 40, hit those three pillars, find a really good nominator, and find someone that’s good at PR to help you with your writeup and there you go. It’s cool, though, and it’s not, like I said, I’ve tried multiple years, and I, you know, I was lucky enough to have them select me as one of the 40 this year and it’s, it’s nice to be in a group with such awesome people. I know a few other people on the list, and it’s just like, I’ve looked up to them so to be on the list with them is really cool.
Neil Carroll [00:26:54] Yeah, that’s. Yeah. It’s a big deal, right?
Tim Bouchard [00:27:00] Sure, Yes.
Neil Carroll [00:27:02] People strive for it, so it’s great that you hit it. That’s awesome. How about Mike though. Did he try for it?
Tim Bouchard [00:27:09] No. But Mike did have a baby this year and that’s pretty cool, too.
Neil Carroll [00:27:13] That’s good. That’s good.
Tim Bouchard [00:27:15] Mike’s a dad.
Neil Carroll [00:27:16] Yeah. Otherwise Mike would be here.
Tim Bouchard [00:27:18] Mike is my business partner. I don’t even remember if I said his name earlier.
Neil Carroll [00:27:22] The other half of Luminus.
Tim Bouchard [00:27:24] Mike is the chief creative officer and he is my better half. Most people are my better half.
Neil Carroll [00:27:31] In partnerships.
Tim Bouchard [00:27:32] Yes. Yeah.
Neil Carroll [00:27:34] So that’s great, and congrats on that again. The one other piece, and this kind of is born out of, we’ve always done this when we do interviews and stuff with folks, but we find that the best soundbite is, is often after the interview is over and you give people the option to kind of just an open ended, do you have anything else to add, right? A lot of folks have been doing book recommendations here, or other business tips. So this is either an option for your second smart thing or, you know, you could do, you could do whatever you want.
Tim Bouchard [00:28:12] I was going to the second smart thing, I’m gonna do the second smart thing, and I’m going something else too.
Neil Carroll [00:28:16] Okay.
Tim Bouchard [00:28:18] The second smart thing I was going to say was, and this is what everyone says but I just, we, it took us eight years to do this and we finally did it, was to pick a niche to go into. Whether it’s positioning yourself vertically or horizontally, you either have to be really good at the thing that you do or, you have to be really good at a lot of things in a particular industry or segment of the market. So we went vertical and we chose to take all of our integrated marketing knowledge into the building material space. And as like a little bit of a side gig, we still like to do child care because Mike’s illustration background works really good in that space. But what it does is it opens up your sales channels, your topics for content creation. You finally have clarity on what you should be following and a hashtag on LinkedIn, what magazines you should be reading to gain industry knowledge. And it seems scary, but it just opens up a world of possibilities once you’re like I, we are good at this one industry in particular and know a lot about it so you don’t have to teach us about it when you start working with us. We can focus on you, and doing really awesome work.
Neil Carroll [00:29:27] Right.
Tim Bouchard [00:29:28] And then secondly, for my last note, I would be remissed if I didn’t say you should participate in your local networking and industry groups.
Neil Carroll [00:29:39] Oh, it’s an AAF plug, huh?
Tim Bouchard [00:29:41] And you and I are on BNSME, which is the Buffalo Niagara Sales and Marketing Executives. Two reasons, one is if you’re a horizontally specialist, position specialist like you are with media and production, that’s a great way for you to find more business connects. Right? It’s also a great place to learn things. So I know both of those organizations, from what I’ve been at with the events and running AAF, and trying to promote its professional development side of the organization is to teach, learn, and then connect people.
Neil Carroll [00:30:14] Right.
Tim Bouchard [00:30:15] And if you’re in a small business, there’s nothing better than connecting with people, especially ones that want to hear about what your expertise is, and we’ll actually take the time to listen to you.
Neil Carroll [00:30:23] Absolutely.
Tim Bouchard [00:30:24] I think that’s worked very well for us. I mean EVC was technically the first time where we networked together.
Neil Carroll [00:30:31] Yeah, that’s true.
Tim Bouchard [00:30:32] And shared some photography projects, and illustration and logo projects.
Neil Carroll [00:30:36] And we have Dave on the AAF board who’s one of our production specialists or our production manager. He is, he sits on that board now.
Tim Bouchard [00:30:47] And I have, when I left last year, our account executive Jeff was nominated and appointment. So,
Neil Carroll [00:30:54] Excellent.
Tim Bouchard [00:30:55] I wanted to stay involved with that.
Neil Carroll [00:30:57] Well, then we both have people on the AAF board.
Tim Bouchard [00:31:00] Yup, that’s of owners in power do. Send out their minions.
Neil Carroll [00:31:05] They can do it.
Tim Bouchard [00:31:06] No, it’s great for them too though, because then they get to learn new leadership skills and work with people from other companies.
Neil Carroll [00:31:12] Absolutely.
Tim Bouchard [00:31:14] On club projects and things.
Neil Carroll [00:31:15] Yeah. Yeah. Very true.
Tim Bouchard [00:31:16] Yup.
Neil Carroll [00:31:17] All right. Well those, I’ll let you pass with the extras there because that was all great advice. All right, Tim. Well, thank you very much for coming on, and you know.
Tim Bouchard [00:31:27] Now we have to Frisbee golf again.
Neil Carroll [00:31:29] That’s right. We’ll have to do that again.
Tim Bouchard [00:31:30] Rematch.
Neil Carroll [00:31:31] Soon.
Neil Carroll [00:31:32] OK. That wraps up this episode. Be sure to visit Luminus’ website and check out some of the awesome creative work that they do. Thanks for checking out The Smarter Business Podcast. Subscribe and comment on this episode to help us grow our audience.