[Fully Managed] Benjamin Poss from Edit Crew Ep. 184

Shannon: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast. For those who don’t know, thank you, Ben, for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Ben: It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me, Shannon.

Shannon: Sweet. I am super excited for today.

Guilty Pleasures Game

Shannon: So today we’re going to start with a game. This one is very easy, not any kind of marketing business, any kind of thing related. It’s just a fun thing for me to get to know you a little better. So it’s called guilty pleasures. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to share a guilty pleasure of yours in a minute or less, if possible. You can go a little over a minute. That’s fine. Two minutes. Harsh stop. And you’re going to convince me to want me to have it as my guilty pleasure. That’s what you have to do. This is a persuasion game. I’ll give you time to think.

Ben: I have exactly one thing in mind. And the reason for this guilty pleasure… Or rather, this guilty pleasure is the reason I ended up deleting Snapchat off my phone. Because while it was fun to have fun picture conversations with your close friends and family, I kept swiping over to that page where there’s all the short form content. And like that company’s put out. And it’s the worst way to consume that content because you can just watch it on YouTube with uninterrupted with no ads but if you decide to watch it on Snapchat because you have a short attention span every eight seconds there’s an ad that’s five seconds long and it’s the worst possible way to waste your life so this is my guilty pleasure though because you do find some gems in terms of good content. There’s some crazy content on there too.

Shannon: We were just talking about this on one of our lives like a couple of weeks ago about how Snapchat has become something I don’t even know. I can’t even comprehend at this point of the articles that they feature. Sometimes they’re very, risqué is not even putting it lightly, of very… I don’t know if there’s kids on Snapchat anymore. I have no idea what they do now. But I feel like probably. And there are some crazy stories on there that I’m like, oh, my God, they shouldn’t be accessible for people under a certain age. There should be a warning for who’s allowed to use this app and everything. I don’t know. But you don’t have to convince that to be my guilty pleasure. I should honestly delete Snapchat for that reason as well. Maybe you’re inspiring me to do that same thing. But yeah it is, it is a weird place to be for sure.

Ben: Yeah they definitely push the edge of like what is acceptable to be hit without some sort of like age filter so I think there’s ethical conversations to be had there but also that’s why it’s a guilty pleasure because those Snapchat stories are like the Wild West in a way, but in the digital space.

Shannon: They really are. There’s nothing stopping them. Snapchat is pushing the line continuously. We also discussed the idea that they almost have failed in something that they had. I think that they created a new social media platform that was so innovative for its time and they kind of clearly lost so much traction in such a short period of time that I feel like is lost space. But, you know, we don’t have to get into that, but I just thought that was something about Snapchat.

Podcast Introduction and Guest Background

Shannon: Anyway, thank you so much for joining me again. For those who don’t know, this is the Fully Managed Podcast. This is a podcast where we discuss marketing and business tips to help assist you on your business journey. I’m your host, Shannon, Benji’s Partnership Coordinator, and I’m joined here today with a very special guest, Ben Posse from Edit Crew. Thank you so much for joining me again.

Ben: Yeah.

Shannon: So please tell me a little bit about yourself. Tell us and me and the audience, not us. There’s only one of me. And about anything that you think is relevant up until now into founding edit crew and what you’re doing today. Anything that you think you’d like to share?

Ben’s Background and Edit Crew Origin Story

Ben: Yeah. So I started edit crew about five years ago now, almost five years ago. I’d come from a video background. I was working in Hollywood at the time, just on sets as an assistant production assistant. And then I was working in an agency in house as an editor and later producer of like, you know, online ad content basically, and having the firsthand experience of like having worked in that agency as well as other video companies that I had interned for, running my own little sort of one man plus freelancers agency, even before edit crew, I had seen a lot of different ways of working with teams and creatives and sort of through that process, feeling out where the difficulties were when it came to specifically working with a video editor and with my background, having been an editor, it just made sense to, I think start a company where we can try and eliminate those difficulties and those problems as much as possible while maintaining the upside of having of course, great quality content and then doing it at an affordable price.

Because as anyone who’s worked in the video industry knows, there’s that famous picture of the triangle where each part of it, or each, what I’m trying to say? Each corner of the triangle has words on it, which is fast, good, and cheap. You can only choose two. And so our thing is like, well, what if you could have all three? And we’ve packaged a business together with different team members of people who are doing different parts of the process so that it’s indeed possible to get all three. And it’s been a wild ride. I just stepped back in as CEO actually after taking about a year and a half almost away from the company in a day-to-day role. So it’s definitely a very poignant time in this very moment this week as I’m coming back in. But it’s been fun to jump back in and it’s reinvigorated me in a lot of ways. Yeah, I’m excited to even take it even further than what we have in the past five years since it started.

Discussing Burnout and Stepping Away

Shannon: Can I ask why you stepped away? Or if it’s personal, you do not have to tell me.

Ben: No, sure. I’ve spoken about it before, actually, on a different podcast around that same time. But just the short answer is burnout. And I was just focusing on that. That was my number one thing. Not really having a good… or rather not having developed the maturity for myself to know how to balance out the intense work demands that doing something like this requires with having a life that I’m happy with and that fulfills me and fills my cup. That combined with a number of also like personal things going on at one point sort of collided and I was just like, I can’t do this anymore. Like I need to step away. It was a lot of change both in my personal life and in the company like all too fast, too soon, all at the same time.

So in a way, though, I’m very, very grateful for that time period because it allowed me to get to a place where I said, I need something to change. I need to figure out some things for myself, which now coming back into the company this second time, I feel in a much better place and I have much more clarity about how I want to run the company in a way that not only works for myself, of course, like it has to work for me if I’m going to do it. But then even fostering our team’s growth even more, having our clients have more success. So really thinking of it as like a win, win, win, as opposed to like, I don’t know, some other version, which isn’t as favorable towards those involved, including yourself.

Agency World Challenges and Burnout

Shannon: Yeah. No, that makes complete sense. And I’m happy that you touched on that. I do think that there is a… I love the agency world in so many ways because I think that it is kind of an escape from this corporate environment that I think a lot of people leave in order to start their own agency or be incorporated into an agency because I think that there is this more, I don’t know if I should say more lax environment, but something that is less structured in a way that accounts more for people being human. But I do think that there is, because sometimes there’s this lack of structure, I think that people sometimes are more susceptible to burnout because they don’t know when to stop. I think that because of maybe not having a streamlined position or the wearer of many hats, as you probably heard so many times, I’ve heard it so many times, of the idea that people are overwhelmed a lot, especially in smaller agencies, because there’s so much to do and so much to accomplish. And a lot of people are doing a lot of things at all at the same time. And I think that a lot of times there’s more susceptibility to burnout because of that lack of structure.

Ben: Yeah, it’s a few things, definitely. One of the biggest things with agencies that I think cause burnout is the never-ending revolving door of deadlines that occur on a near daily basis or a daily basis for us, especially. We promise turnarounds in like one to two days. So yeah, deadlines are what we do. And that can cause burnout if the volume is too heavy for too long, which if we want to talk about mistakes I made, it was definitely not having an eye on the workload and the bandwidth of the team that we actually had to support that workload, i.e. like it didn’t work out with the ratio of work to people. And then having good people burn out and leave the company or just feel like, oh, there’s no growth opportunity here because things are being mismanaged a little bit. Or not mismanaged, but not ideally managed. And so that’s one reason. And then another reason, what was it? I just had it in mind and it left me. Man, maybe you can cut this part out, but I had two things and the other thing just completely left me. But that is, I would say, yeah, like to touch on just the never ending sort of cycle of deadlines.

Shannon: Yeah, it’s especially difficult. I think I can completely understand your model, because that is exactly what ours is in the same way that we promise very short deadlines that are manageable for the amount of people that we have, but also something that is very scary. And it does perpetuate burnout in a lot of ways. I think that there needs to be a very set structure in order to make something like that work. And it’s very difficult to navigate, especially when it’s new. And the revolving, even if you don’t have that model, I can understand exactly what you’re mentioning of like the revolving deadlines, because even if someone does not have the one to two day model, if they have whatever days it may be, if they keep having people come on, then they’re going to keep having things being moved around, keep having, you know, to reorient themselves for new deadlines. And there’s just more and more things. Or I think more people need to understand their capacity. And I think that’s like a learning moment most of the time when you realize that you’re at capacity or you’re over capacity and that’s when you figure out your capacity. But I think that a lot of agencies at a detriment to them think that they can handle more than they can. And that is hopefully a learning moment, but sometimes it takes way longer after finding that out to stop.

Scaling Challenges and Solutions

Ben: Yeah, well, it can be tough if you haven’t been at that level of scale before. That’s where it really starts to get challenging, especially if you don’t have much prior growth data and sort of headcount growth or how many people you have in the company at each stage. So that’s something we started tracking really diligently and we now check every single day is like, how many clients do we have of each plan? Okay, that means we need this many editors, this many project managers, this many quality control people. And are we above or below that number right now? And not only that, but taking into account, okay, what cancellations do we have coming up? What new sales that are likely to sign up with us in the near future do we have in the pipeline?

And you have to weigh all these things to grow your team a little bit proactively, but not too proactively because then we’ve had times as well where we grew the team a lot in expectation of a big client coming on or some sort of growth lever working or whatever. And then we were just overstaffed and we, you know, early in the company, we had to do layoffs for that reason once. And those are really tough times, but that just goes to show that like being precise with knowing that like formulaically has been so crucial to our operation and I don’t think that’s why it’s really hard to scale a productized service creative company like Penji or edit crew to like the moon is because at the end of the day it’s a more linear relationship between revenue and how many people you have versus like a software company where it’s like, ninety nine percent net margin or whatever. And it’s, you know, not like people need to be you make it once and it works forever. That’s an oversimplification, but you get what I mean.

Shannon: Yeah.

Ben: The second thing I want to… Oh, you remember.

Shannon: Go, go.

Ben: Yes, I did remember what the second thing was when you were talking about, you know, agency work earlier there. So it’s also the lack of process that causes burnout with agency workers and also frustrates people, I think, working with the clients themselves, people working with the agencies. And that’s something I experienced when I was an editor and a producer at that agency I mentioned prior, is there wasn’t much of a process for anything. The agency had super talented people, honestly awesome people. Shout out to Narrative Ads, you guys were all cool. It was a fun company to work at at the time. But there wasn’t much process internally for how the workflow went. We were dealing with a lot of bigger accounts as well. So I think the more enterprise you go, the more white glove and high touch it has to be. So that was more of that model versus our model is, okay, we aren’t necessarily looking to do all these big, very traditional agency things like custom projects, custom quoting, you know, wining and dining, sending all these pitch decks for the Nike commercial or whatever, that’s not really our game.

And that allows us to have that process where down market or mid market, you have very similar needs with very similar types of companies because the smaller the company, the less people, the more likely those companies are going to run somewhat similarly because as human beings, headcount and revenue and offering of services grows, your complexity also grows. Your process also gets more complex. And then, you know, some people thrive in that environment for sure. But a lot of people just want that stability of like going in and, hey, I’m a video editor. I want to do my best editing work. I don’t want to worry about like all the agency woes of like managing all these tickets and like, you know, trying to figure out what the client wants and XYZ. If we can simplify that as much as possible, which we do through our process, then the people can actually focus on what it is that they love to do, whether it’s account management, quality control, editing, et cetera.

The Importance of Process and Structure

Shannon: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think that processes are really helpful for people feeling like they have a more set position and job going into work every day because I think that’s like a real thing that people struggle in the agency world is like not knowing what they’re walking into every day and when you have a process I feel like even though there can be many unexpected things that happen when you work at an agency I think that having a process for as many things as possible can really help you navigate those situations better rather than you know kind of like running around with like chickens with their heads cut off so to speak because I think that is like agency world sometimes like the SpongeBob meme of like every all the SpongeBobs running around and everything’s burning I feel like that’s kind of how agencies are like a lot of the time and I think it’s just because there’s not a lot of systems in place for certain things. Like, I think that the escape from corporate is great, but there also needs to be systems in place for people to function properly.

Again, I agree that there’s some people that function so well in a disorganized environment, which is so baffling to me. I’m not one of those people. But it is definitely an adjustment to learn what processes you even need because you run into a problem and then you realize, oh, we need a process for this. And I think that through agency work, it’s like a work in progress all the time. And that’s cool, but also sometimes not for everyone.

Remote Work Philosophy

Ben: Yeah, I don’t think I could go back to working you know nine to five at an office at a desk doing the agency life because that just felt very stifling for me which is part of why the company I found it is remote is because like I need to be able to move around during the day and go for a walk and not feel bad like oh is my boss gonna be mad that I left the office yeah I mean I did that anyway when I worked an office job I would leave every hour and walk around the block because I just had to to survive yeah but being remote obviously you have a bit more flexibility of your schedule and your routine and setting my life up in that way in a way that works for me and whatever goal it is I have at the time whether it be work personal stuff with sports I’m a climber I love to climb so you know moving towards those goals as well. It allows me to hold all those things a lot better in a way that works for me.

Shannon: Yeah. And I think that’s another thing that I do really admire about remote work is that there is that room for, again, being a human, how I said about agency work. But I think that there’s different types of agency and there’s different types of how they function. So I do believe that sometimes they are this desk job that’s very typical nine to five. But I’m someone that truly believes that people function very differently and that nine to five is not a great structure for everyone. I would say maybe even most. That sometimes people work their best in the middle of the night. I think that if they’re reaching deadlines, I don’t think that a typical structure is necessary for everyone as long as they’re like achieving what they’re supposed to be doing in the amount of time that they’re given. And I think that is, I hope that that’s more acceptable in the future and kind of the norm rather than what the norm is now for like working structure.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. I think if I were to start another company, it would not be on a sort of daily deliverance cadence like we have now. Because unfortunately, the way our business is structured and the needs of our clients, we sort of have to be within that window of the kind of standard nine to five. But there’s some really good entrepreneurs online who talk about more asynchronous work a lot or not doing things in place of meetings or outside of having regular office hours or limited time crossover. If you do need to meet with somebody like there are definitely good ways to mix and match things that way, especially with a global team, like they’re just, everyone can’t necessarily be on the same exact hours. So it’s also just about expectations of like, hey, like generally speaking, we have to have this amount of crossover to collaborate, but also no one’s micromanaging you and like making you write down what you were doing every thirty minutes or whatever because no one loves that either. So it’s also about hiring adults and trusting people to be adults and letting the results speak for themselves. And if the results speak for themselves and they’re a good person and nice to work with, then all is well.

Trust and Management in Remote Work

Shannon: Yeah, no, I definitely agree. I think that a lot of people have this idea that if you go fully remote, then you’re going to have to micromanage people. Or if you don’t, you have this like lack of trust in them that they’re actually doing work. And I think that is the pushback of going fully remote for a lot of positions. And I think that’s very silly because I almost think that if you are trusting that you’re hiring good people, then you have to be able to trust that. Like if anything, it’s almost on you. If you hire people that aren’t like doing or aren’t being productive in a way, I think obviously you can hire something, someone that you expect to be good at something and they end up not being that way. And that’s obviously like trial and error of, you know, sometimes you’re wrong and then like the interview process isn’t perfect. But I think that if that’s the only thing holding people back from doing remote work, I think it’s kind of arbitrary. It doesn’t really, if you can trust your team and you were able to trust your team before they were working remote and they have set, you know, milestones, goals in mind, whatever it may be, and they do achieve those, and there’s, you know, evidence behind it, I don’t think that you need to micromanage them in a way that they’re completing it, you know, in bursts, rather than just having it all done by that time. Like, I think that that is, I don’t think most people work good under those conditions. Like to be micromanaged, I think that a lot of people like just work at their own pace. And that’s great.

Edit Crew Business Model Deep Dive

Shannon: But anyway, let’s get more into edit crew. We’ve been talking about more varied ideas of what we think about the professional environment, which is really good. But I also want to learn more about… So because it’s a similar model as Penji, I’m like super curious about a bunch of things. So for… Well, one, how does your payment process work? Are you a subscription model like we are?

Ben: Okay, cool.

Shannon: How did you… how did you develop like a structure for this? Did you, cause I understand you wanted to meet these three points that you say one has to be sacrificed normally in your field. But how did you develop like an efficient way of doing this process that, you know, make sure that you’re meeting deadlines and that you have enough people on staff and all that. Cause clearly I know it’s been like an adjustment.

Ben: Yeah. So when I started Edit Crew, there were a number of productized services that had already existed. The concept of a productized service wasn’t necessarily new, but I will say it wasn’t as saturated as it is today, which it is very saturated. And I have thoughts about that. And I also have thoughts about why it’s saturated, but there’s even still opportunity, but we can bookmark that. There were a number of services that I could go off of to start. So the first version of edit crew was essentially like a copycat of all these other services that I was seeing. So, you know, like design pickle is notorious. Of course they were around in the day looking at their packages, kind of basing it off that other video companies seeing what they are offering and just basing it off that.

And over time, as we started getting new clients, seeing what they need, figuring out we can go a bit upmarket from the sort of content creator, mommy blogger archetype up to like real B to B stuff. We just found the clients were easier to work with at that level. Their needs were also different. So our packages evolved over time to be exactly what our clients needed in a lot of ways, even if they don’t know they needed it that way. And like I said before, if you hire in-house or if you hire a freelancer or, or, you know, if you hire off of Upwork or Fiverr, I guess it’s still hiring a freelancer, but there are kind of the standard woes. Like if you do any of these things for long enough, you will find out there are common problems that you face. And basically we built into our service all of those common problems, or excuse me, not the problems, but the solutions to those problems. And this is actually just like sales and marketing machine one-on-one, which is like, okay, how are they doing it now? Why does it suck? Okay, let’s do it. And those things that suck, we can make be awesome. Yeah.

And so, you know, of course, like, and we receive, oh my god, the haters online. If you’re just trying to start a creative agency or something, the haters online will get you because in our ads, we talk about this, of course, there’s always the really salty freelancer or angry person that says that, not all freelancers are this, not all people from Upwork are that, not all in-house people are that. Oh, I’m not, I’m not that way. And it’s just like, okay, yeah. But like, you’re going to, if you were in the shoes of the entrepreneur or the founder or the department head or whatever, you’re having these problems, which is why edit crew exists. If there wasn’t these problems, we would have failed, but we’re, we’re doing all right for ourselves because these are real challenges that companies are facing. And so really having that feedback loop of sales, marketing, fulfillment, and client feedback, and then funneling those things into the actual packages that we offer has always been our strategy.

Addressing Common Freelancer Market Issues

Shannon: Yeah, I completely understand. I mean, because our model is so similar, I completely understand everything you’re speaking on of the idea of like, yes, there are these inherent problems that people are experiencing with certain job markets. Like obviously freelancers, not all of them are bad or are not going to deliver or going to deliver at the wrong time. And that is inherently true. We can’t put everyone in a box, but also there is, this inherent struggle that business owners do deal with by hiring freelancers. And of course, something can’t be true about every single person, but it also is a problem that they’re dealing with. And especially, it makes sense that freelancers expect more money because they are just themselves in certain ways, but it’s also not affordable for a lot of small businesses, even medium-sized businesses sometimes to be able to afford that. And sometimes they shouldn’t be able to like, just because someone doesn’t have, I think that solutions like ours are much more accessible for a lot of people. And I do really appreciate that in a way of, that I don’t think you deserve less quality just because you don’t have the money to do so. It does suck that that is the case for a lot of situations. But I don’t think that that’s… Like, you shouldn’t have to make that sacrifice all the time if you can’t. And, like, these models are to make up for those, like, grievances, I suppose.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, I agree that there are so many good creatives out there at any level that if you’re willing to work really hard and search around, you can always find somebody who’s pretty good for a pretty good price. I mean, you always just can. It’s a matter of can you do that consistently and do you have the time to do that, which oftentimes people don’t.

Shannon: Yeah, the time aspect is also awful, especially like if it doesn’t work out like trial and error, you’ve like wasted time. And I think that that’s a difficult thing for people as well. Like outside of the money aspect, I think that it is very difficult for people to, cause most of the time they are also hiring outside of their work because they don’t, they’re understaffed a lot of the time or they’re overloaded. And so to be overloaded and then also look for someone like a creative to add on staff is so stressful that it almost doesn’t make sense. So it is wonderful to have a model like this in order to account for that.

Streamlined Onboarding Process

Ben: Totally. And not only just finding the person, but then getting onboarded with that person. That’s a problem we solve as I’m sure Penji does too, which is some sort of standardized way. Okay, you hop on one or two calls with us, you like what we do, boom, we pass you right along to this person who’s getting you set up here, who shows you this form that you submit all the information in. And it’s a very clear process, which you’re held by a team member all the way through, versus if you’re managing it yourself, you probably have to do like back and forth emails. Oh, how are we saving this? Is it Dropbox? Is it Google Drive? Oh, where is that thing? Okay, when’s the next step? There’s just no process. And when there’s no process, it’s inefficient. And when it’s inefficient, it takes longer. When it takes longer, you’re working more. And we don’t want to work more, guys. We all work enough. There’s a time to work more and work hard. But if we don’t have to, why are we?

Shannon: Yeah, no, I inherently believe that as a foundation of the professional world. And I hope that that becomes more normalized.

Closing

Shannon: But we are a little over time. But I think that just means that this was a really good conversation. I’m so sorry that we didn’t talk about edit crew as much as I would like. But I also think that you showcased a lot of really good philosophies about the professional world that I hope that people listen to a little more.

Ben: Sure. Yeah, no, we talked about we talked about Edit Crew plenty. So this has been a super fun conversation, Shannon. Thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it.Shannon: And also thank you so much for everyone for watching. I hope you watch other episodes to get to learn like I get to do from every episode as well. Thank you so much and have a lovely day, everyone.

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