Episode 3
Season 2
All Business is Show Business Creating an A-list Celebrity Brand
Welcome, Jeremy Nicolaides to Saturday Soundbites! This veteran film industry executive shares his insights into developing an “A-List” celebrity brand and making sure you the only sensible choice in your niche.
He shares with Veronica how he has helped businesses grow through proven strategies AND execution. Strategy alone will not get you to your desired outcome. Jeremy has seen companies and startups make the same mistakes again and again with their marketing efforts, and he shares how you can avoid making those mistakes.
Join Jeremy and Veronica as they talk shop and give you tips on how to improve your overall business success with an “A-List” celebrity brand.
[00:00:00] Veronica: Hello. Hello and welcome to Saturday soundbites. I'm your host, Veronica Sofer. And I am thrilled to be here with you talking about all the things that really can grow your business, including marketing, branding, advertising, networking, and putting it all together because it's your visibility strategy.
[00:00:20] Your visibility strategy needs to be able to connect very clearly to your brand, which is your promise. And there's a lot of different ways to put it all together. And I bring you guests that really help with all areas of your messaging. So if you are listening on the podcast, make sure you hit subscribe.
[00:00:37] We don't want you to miss any episodes and Saturday soundbites. And if you're watching on Facebook, drop us some comments. So we know that you are tuning in, let us know where you're coming from. And if you catch the replay hashtag replay. So that my guests and I can go back and connect and answer any questions you might have.
[00:00:55] My guest today is fantastic. He's coming with a phenomenal background in the entertainment industry. He knows exactly what it looks like. And today we're going to talk about all business is show business and how you can show up. So with that, I'm going to bring on my guest, Jerry. Nicola
[00:01:16] Jeremy: Nicola
[00:01:17] Veronica: Nicola. I practiced.
[00:01:19] We even practiced ahead of time. We did. We
[00:01:22] Jeremy: did I miss that? Well, you're not the first person, so you're in good.
[00:01:27] Veronica: Well, I even wrote it out phonetically, which I'm not even, and we practice folks just so you know, but the great part about Jeremy being here is that he can tell us how to pronounce his name, and then he can share with us a little bit about his expertise so that you can learn and grow your business.
[00:01:44] Yeah. I mean, Jeremy, tell us a little bit about
[00:01:47] Jeremy: yourself. Sure. Yeah. And thank you so much for having me on, I really appreciate being here today. So yeah, so I've got a big background in the film business. You know, I started in the film business over 20 years ago and it really, things started to change for me when.
[00:02:02] I was working early two thousands. I was working on IMAX films and ride films for the theme parks. My specialty was 3d where you put on the glasses, right. And then all of a sudden, around 2009, some movie called avatar comes out. Right. And I wasn't associated with it, but because I had so much experience with 3d leading up to that point, and now everybody else wanted to do to be working on 3d model.
[00:02:24] My value overnight skyrocketed. Right? So the point I had to had to get an agent to help manage my contracts and making sure that I was protected. I was able to start a big consulting company at that point, like in, because I was just consulting constantly. One particular consulting job led to me becoming a global creative director for this one particular.
[00:02:43] And we built it from 50 people in LA to 3,500 people worldwide in 18 months. It was bananas. I don't recommend it. I was younger at the time, so I got through it, but it was, it was crazy. And what ended up happening was, you know, I got to this point, I had this, this dream job, right. They were, I was paid really, really well.
[00:03:06] They were flying me all around the world. First class. What I didn't realize at the time. Is that I was the pre-pitch guy. I was the guy right. That came in. I would do the whole song and dance, the presentation, you know, meeting with the directors and the filmmakers and the studio executives, and really setting up the sales guy for success, who would just like take them to a conference room or out to lunch and close like a seven or eight figure deal.
[00:03:31] Right. Right. And, and like, to me, it was just cool. Right. Like one time they, you know, they flew me out to the Harry Potter set, which was outside of London. For like a 45 minute meeting, right? So it's like first class over to London, nice hotel. We go out to this old airplane factory and I do this, this pitch and the song and dance and whatnot.
[00:03:51] And we ended up closing, you know, like eight figures that day. Right. It was really, really cool. And I say all this, because there was a massive, cool factor there and like the quote unquote dream job. But what happened was. As the dust started to settle on that expansion. I didn't feel the fulfillment.
[00:04:10] There was something lacking inside. And so I ended up leaving. I walked away from the dream job and bought a print marketing business in my neighborhood. I was like, I want to be close to home. I don't want to be traveling all the time. I just want, I wanted to be part of the community. And let me tell you, I had no idea.
[00:04:27] Well, I didn't know. We want to talk about going from like the top of the mountain to the valley of despair. We got to the point, we had no idea. We're going to pay our bills. Like we ran out of money. We filled up the credit cards, borrowed money from the bank, borrowed money from the family. I mean, it was brutal, but what ended up happening is I stumbled upon podcasts, like your show, right?
[00:04:50] Where people are like, you're starting to learn from other people. And then it would lead to like a coaching program and a mastermind. And I. You know, I didn't have to start from ground zero constantly. And the real trick to everything is truncating the trial and error. Right? Like how do we do that? And using like proven things to move forward.
[00:05:10] Right. And so I was able to like, once I, I, things started to spin. I started to say, okay, well, how did it work before? What did I do in the film business? How did that relate? And how can I turn this around? So I got that business to be about 80% past. I started opening up other lines of, of revenue and kind of spread things out a bit and then was able to like take a sigh of relief.
[00:05:31] Cause I made it back out. Right. And that was like this crazy transition from the film business out to entrepreneurship and business owner and then kind of bringing it all together to really say, Hey, I actually know a lot of this stuff already. Why wasn't I using it? You know?
[00:05:46] Veronica: Yeah. Yeah. What a journey.
[00:05:48] Right. I love that I have these visions of this fancy Hollywood experience. And then all of a sudden you're like okay, I've got to put the gas on the credit card and then we're going to get groceries on the credit card, but that's the entrepreneurial journey for some people.
[00:06:02] Jeremy: Absolutely. I mean, we went from, you know, and, and like, I didn't say this part, but, you know, I met my wife right before that transition.
[00:06:11] Right. So we're taking like nice week, long vacations in Cancun at the Ritz Carlton to like, you know, getting married and having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and water, you know, what did I, what did I do to her? Yeah.
[00:06:24] Veronica: Yeah, no, well, again, you, she stuck around, so that's, that's definitely, so tell us a little bit about what you're seeing in the space that it excites you and that really you know, can, can propel a business for someone.
[00:06:37] Cause clearly you figured out a formula to do that. You created some passive income, you build systems in place, and we talk about branding and how important that is. And you, you kind of hinted at, it took a little bit of effort, but you got there. So tell us about
[00:06:50] Jeremy: that. Yeah, I think, you know one thing in like today's world, right?
[00:06:55] When we're, when people are looking to do business with, with a business, right? Like whether it be a B2C or B2B, whatever it is, we, we look them up. Right. We look them up online. We say, okay, who is this person we're going to be talking to or meeting with or buying. And there's so much out there. We have to fight being a commodity, right?
[00:07:16] If, if people go online and they look at my business as someone else's business and they look the same, they're just going to pick the cheapest one right now. It's just a race to them. Which happens in the film business all the time, where everybody's just like, we'll undercut you to get the job, to get it for less, to get the client, to get the movie.
[00:07:33] And everybody's just getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and we don't want to be a commodity. Right. We want to be, we want to be an, a list celebrity brand, but at the same time, I don't want to be an influencer. I don't want to be somebody who's on social media all the time, constantly putting out content and I, don't not actually living my life.
[00:07:51] Right. And so the idea here is we want to model, you know, movie marketing. If we look at the way movies are marketed, right. Last year I worked on dune and Godzilla vs Kong. And when these movies come out, what do we see? What happens? We see people all of a sudden, they start showing up on the late night shows doing interviews, right?
[00:08:10] The talent is there, or the morning shows or, you know, daytime, we start seeing them in magazine articles with interviews and newspapers, and we start seeing billboards and trailers and all this stuff. Well now, because of the decent decentralization of media, right? You have a media outlet, like we are on your media outlet, right?
[00:08:28] And coaches all over the planet are telling people, you got to have a podcast, you gotta have a YouTube channel. You gotta have, you have to have these platforms to get out there. Right. And I agree that these are really strong things to have for your business, but sometimes people don't have time for that, or they don't have the interest or it just, it doesn't work.
[00:08:47] But we can still use that. So instead of me being, you know, Dwayne, the rock Johnson on, on, you know, jungle cruise and going on Jimmy Fallon at night, I could be Jeremy Nicolatus with golden ox pillar going on Veronica Sofers podcast. Right. They're going live on Facebook and doing that and sharing and putting things out there.
[00:09:06] Right. And what ends up happening is we become. You know, an influencer in our space without having to be that stereotypical influencer. Right. And we're using that same model to get our message out there to other people. Right. Does that make sense?
[00:09:20] Veronica: Complete sense? It, I I had visions of movies I've seen when they talk about movie junkets or press junkets or, you know, but there's a strategy behind it.
[00:09:31] And I think that's really important. And clearly Hollywood has figured out for many, many years, and in fact, probably generations, how to get us to connect, to, to market a new show that's coming out or you know, a reboot. And when you talked about modeling that and having that overlay on our business, Blew my mind, because there is a formula.
[00:09:53] It doesn't need to be recreated.
[00:09:55] Jeremy: Right? Exactly. We want her groove and strategies and techniques and tactics, right. Things need to be proven because like I said before, we want to truncate the trial and error. There's always going to be trial and error because what works for my business might not work perfectly for yours or somebody else's.
[00:10:10] But if we can start with. Things that we're going to try that we know work and have been proven over time. Like over a century, the film business has been refining this. Right. And then what happens with it? You go on and you talk to these people, but now you have these clips, right? Like you and I are talking right now, there's video that's happening.
[00:10:27] We can now afterwards take these and make quote cards. Right? Like I have a VA that takes my interviews and things like that. And she. Cut out little things. And then now that becomes my social media posts. Right. And it's like, oh, and it's a quote by me right here with a microphone talking to you or on stage, it's like these virtual stages.
[00:10:45] And so now when people look us up like, Hey, this person is a leader in their industry. They stand out as a, you know, an, a list celebrity instead of like an everyday brand. Right. And so it's one or the other. And so when you become that celebrity. You don't have to race to the bottom on pricing. You don't have to have a lot of clients that pay you a little bit of money.
[00:11:06] You can have a little bit of clients that pay a lot of money. Right. And you've got, obviously you've got to find what works for your business, but that's just a piece of it. Right? And then you can also take video clips because now you've got the idea of like trailers and commercials and billboards. And now I don't have to spend all my time on social media because that content can get repurposed constantly.
[00:11:24] Right. Cause how many? There's so many podcasts, there's so many YouTube channels. You know, I give that, I give, when I really try to hone it in to explain to people how it works. I talk about like the Superbowl, right? The super bowl is coming up. It's going to be here in LA. I'm really excited about the halftime show, being somebody that grew up in the eighties, the halftime show, right?
[00:11:43] Yeah. They just put out an amazing trailer for that halftime show the other day, too. Right. It got me excited, but imagine. If I was able to call up the Sophie stadium, right. And say, Hey, I know you've got 70,000 people. Those 70,000 people are my ideal customers. And I would love to be able to stand up and talk in front of them for 30 minutes at halftime.
[00:12:03] Can I do that? And they're like, well, how much money do you have? Right. Oh my God. I don't know like how to can't do that, but if I can find seven people online that have 10,000 followers, that's the same amount of people is talking to the Superbowl. Right. And it doesn't have to cost me anything. Right. And now we can also partner up that's.
[00:12:23] The second thing is, is these partnerships that we create. And so I can create an office. For my business and I can offer a percentage to the person that allows me to speak to their audience. Right. And now we start, we're able to grow our business quickly without spending a bunch of money up. But we're partnering with people.
[00:12:42] Does that make sense?
[00:12:43] Veronica: Absolutely. Yeah, no, I love it. And I love the idea of being strategic and finding ways because finding ways to do it economically because not every entrepreneur, as you shared in your initial story, has the capital the way a corporation does. And, you know, we know. In the traditional nine to five corporate space, there's budget lines for marketing.
[00:13:04] There's a budget line for public relations. There's a budget line for donations and nonprofit community engagement, but in the entrepreneur space, it's, it's a little more limiting. So the things that you're saying absolutely. Makes sense. And I'd love to hear how you think this could work for maybe a realtor or maybe someone that does have a brick and mortar business.
[00:13:25] Maybe it's a service-based expert or, you know, a CPA, someone with a more traditional business.
[00:13:30] Jeremy: There are so many platforms out there, right? There is somebody with a podcast or a YouTube channel or a Facebook group. There was somebody. That has everybody's ideal client. You can be a roofer, right? And there's probably people like about roofing and, and, and, you know home remodeling.
[00:13:51] But if you're, you know, a realtor, you can still, you can find a podcast, you can find some kind of platform that has your ideal audience, and then you talk about it. You can give tips and in buying a home, selling a home, you know, fixing up a home, you can have that. Right. So again, you're saying things that you're.
[00:14:08] You're saying things to your ideal customer one to attract them, but you're also testing your message, right? It's like, it's like train, you're doing your reps, right? Like you're getting out there and honing your message. So the more you talk, right? The more you bounce things off of people out in the world, the better and better you get at it.
[00:14:27] And you find what works. Right. And so anybody can do this. Anybody can get on there and then. They have their clips for social media, they can repopulate everything. You know, one of the tricks we do and, and you may do the same thing, but we say, okay, I want, you know, 10 posts a week and five are going to go to Instagram and five, we're going to go to Facebook, but then two months down the line, I want you to switch those posts.
[00:14:51] And so not only we are building our posts now, but we're building our posts for two months from now. Cause it's just lightening the load and getting the message out there to make sure that when people look us up, we are the clear leader. In our industry in our niche. And we're the ones that people want to talk to.
[00:15:06] Veronica: Yeah. Oh, I love it. That that's, you're speaking my love language. You're definitely speaking my love language. So what are some mistakes that you are seeing people do that you're just like, oh, cringe. If you just would talk to me or find somebody you would, you'd be able to grow your business in a better way.
[00:15:23] What are some mistakes that you see?
[00:15:27] Jeremy: You know, the number one thing that I see, and I see this from in small businesses, but I'll see it in the big ones. Like my big consulting clients that I've come in, you know, doing they're doing eight, 10, $15 million a year. They lose track of their, their customer and understanding their customer, but also having this customer.
[00:15:49] Right where you might have somebody, you know, in a big corporation that's, that's selling and then just handing it off to somebody selling. And there's no notes, no connection to the rest of the company. But when we start to form a path for our customers from, you know, from awareness to engagement, to.
[00:16:07] Converting into that first sale, having this aha moment like this, you know, at what point do they really get what we do so that they become this client and making our customer are our company. Client-centric right. And it's always about the customer. It's always about the outcome. It's always about their transformation, whatever they need.
[00:16:27] That's the goal. And I think a lot of people don't spend enough time thinking about that. Who's who's my ideal client. And what is the path that they're going to take? And let's think about them from eight.
[00:16:38] Veronica: Yeah. Oh, that makes complete sense. And I feel like that is a mistake that I've observed as well.
[00:16:44] And it's one I try to avoid, but I think the journey and actually talking about that experience that the customer has, it makes you more relatable and your branding needs to be able to speak to that a little bit. And when you can get out there and like you said, repurpose some of that content. So you're just reinforcing that brand awareness, which is exactly what we're trying to do.
[00:17:05] Jeremy: Yeah. I mean, one of the hardest lessons I learned and it was, I was pitching this to work on this big movie. It's a big Warner brothers movie. I'd say the name of, because of what the story I'm about to tell. I'm not gonna say the name, but anyways, I guess it was when we would convert a movie from 2d to 3d to make it a 3d movie.
[00:17:24] And the studio would come in and say, okay, you're going to do this big blockbuster movie for us. And then we're going to hire this little team to supervise you. And it always drove me crazy because you know, for me, I'm like, I've got all this pride I've been doing this longer than anybody. Like there's only like 10 people on the planet.
[00:17:39] That's been doing it as long as I have or longer. Right. And now you're going to put somebody who's been doing it for six months to oversee me this doesn't make any. And so I put this whole presentation together on how we're going to make this movie 3d. And I took into consideration the viewer, the story, like I made it all about the experience and the emotion and all of that.
[00:17:58] And I was really excited about it and the cause we were going to get full control on this one. So I was going to pitch this to the studio and this is going to be great. And then the studio calls and says, oh, by the way, We are actually going to put somebody on this to supervise you. And I was like, oh, I'm like, okay.
[00:18:12] But that's okay. That's okay. I will pitch them what I was going to do. And they can use it and take credit. And I don't care because it was all about the movie. Right. It was all about the viewer. And so they come in, I do this big presentation and the guy looks at me and he says, I don't believe any of this.
[00:18:31] He's like, cause I had like ebbs and flows and you know, there was this gray, it looked like a rollercoaster, like on a graph. It's like, no, we're just gonna put it at seven across the board. And it was just like going from like beautiful color to like sepia black and white, like no energy, you know? And I was so disappointed, but I walked out of there realizing none of this is about.
[00:18:53] None of this. None of it's about me and no matter what we're doing, it's always in service to somebody else. And we have to make sure that we're serving our customers and our clients for the outcomes that they desire. And that's all we're doing is serving. If you don't want to serve somebody else, you got to go do something else.
[00:19:10] Cause it's.
[00:19:12] Veronica: Absolutely. No for sure. I mean, that's exactly what we need to be mindful of. And people can see through that in authenticity and they can see through all those facades and at the end of the day, your business is going to suffer. So I think the point is very well taken and I absolutely agree.
[00:19:29] What would you say are one or two things that people need to be thinking about right now? When it, when you talk about the elitist celebrity I love that because I think it appeals to people and people want to be, you know, they want to be the Nordstrom. They don't want to be targeted. We all love target.
[00:19:43] We all love shopping at target, but sometimes you want to be the Nordstrom. And when you think about having so much noise in this space, how do you what are a couple of things that people need to be thinking about right now today that can make the biggest.
[00:19:55] Jeremy: Well, w you got to get through the noise, like right away, right?
[00:19:58] Like I get out there and start talking and, and get in front of people for this purpose, right? Like you want to market to the masses. You want to get out there. You can't, you be quiet. Right? Like our first goal every day is we need to make offers. We need to talk to people. The only way you're going to grow your business is if you sell whatever you're selling.
[00:20:16] So we, that needs to be priority one. And you can only do that by getting. Right. And so we got to get out there. We have to, and we have to be very clear on our market. Right? When I, when I bought that print and marketing business, where I, when I came out of that, people would say, What's the one thing you can, you can tell me that was like that I should always know.
[00:20:34] And, and, and really it was, it was three things. It always kind of kept coming back to these three things. And the first one that I, that I walked in and the biggest mistake I made was I didn't understand my market. So the first thing people should be do is make sure they know their market. Make sure they know who they're talking to look at.
[00:20:48] Look at other people who are successful in your market and look. The emotions that they're tugging on, like focus on the outcome, right? Focus on the beliefs, focus on, you know, transforming beliefs to make sure that you are providing what they want. You know, like the, the, the analogy of like, you know, airplane tickets, they don't sell the airplane ticket.
[00:21:10] They sell the destination, right? You want to go to Hawaii, you better fly with us. You want to go to Italy, fly with us. Right. So we need to make sure that we're focusing. On understanding the emotions in our market. Right. And so that we can speak to them and then we have to, we have to model success. Right.
[00:21:24] We need to truncate time. That was the other thing that I went over that already. Like that was a big one. And then we have to move, right? Like we have to take immediate action, everybody, you know, don't wait for things to be perfect. Don't like take immediate imperfect action and tweak it along the line.
[00:21:39] Too many people get caught up planning and thinking, and yes, we have to have a plan. But none of that works and none of it fully gets refined until you start. Right. And so by getting out and talking to people, it's the same thing. You're, you're, you're figuring out your message. People ask questions, you know, all of this, it starts to refine and you get better, better, and better and better.
[00:22:01] You know, the difference between, you know, a professional and an amateur is the professional practice. More than they actually do. Right. And the amateur like performs or plays more than they practice. Right. And so it's getting out there, like I said earlier, we gotta do those reps. We gotta, we gotta go. We gotta go and constantly keep moving.
[00:22:20] Veronica: Right. Yeah. Oh, I love it. That's fantastic. And I will definitely get I'm going to separate those in the show notes for our podcast, because I think people need to really be able to remember that those are the things that are gonna make the biggest difference in, in their. All right, Jeremy, how can people learn more about you connect with you, figure out if you're the right person for them to kind of work with.
[00:22:41] You've got some great resources out there. Clearly you have. Phenomenal experience and in this space and you, you bring a very creative and bright and colorful background with you. So how can they work with you?
[00:22:54] Jeremy: So right here for those that are able to watch us right now, golden Okta pillar.com is like, you can go there.
[00:23:01] That's, you know, you'll, you'll learn about me, my fractional CMO service on there. There's a link. I have a masterclass right now. That's called model movie. Right. And so it's something, we, we go through that and we talk about, you know, the message to market and marketing to the masses and motivating them to move and then maintaining that momentum, right.
[00:23:19] This whole thing. And so you can find a link to that on golden Dr. pillar.com and it's got the social media links. And so you'll see examples of the stuff that I've been talking about here. And you can tell. Yeah,
[00:23:30] Veronica: that's fantastic. Oh, I'm so excited. I'm going to go and I'm hoping you have a newsletter.
[00:23:34] So if I go to your website, I can join your newsletter or
[00:23:37] Jeremy: do a newsletter.
[00:23:40] Veronica: Well, I want to get in, I want to get in your sales funnel because I want to see the content that you're putting out, because I know that I'm going to learn and grow, and I want to make sure that I connect you with people who I think are going to be a good fit.
[00:23:51] Thank
[00:23:51] Jeremy: you. Thank you so much. Yeah, there's also on there. There's a link, you know, we talked about partnerships. There's a link on there. Like when it's talk about investing in meeting with people and working together. So it's all on. There you go to the website and you'll you'll, it's the rabbit hole, the fund rabbit hole.
[00:24:03] Veronica: Love it. Love it. Alright, thank you so so much, Jeremy, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time, sharing your expertise and just know that I'm going to be promoting this episode because I think everybody needs to learn how to be an alias, celebrity and their brand in their space. Thank you. All right.
[00:24:23] Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Saturday soundbites, we talk all things, branding, marketing, public relations, advertising, and how to put it all together to really grow your brand and stand out in your niche. I hope you enjoyed it. Jeremy's expertise. It was really phenomenal. I'm going to make sure all the show notes have all the links so that you can connect with Jeremy and learn more from him.
[00:24:44] So with that, I'm going to wrap up this episode by sending you lots of positive energy and light.