My name is Chris McClain. I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. I am currently 31 years old, married almost 8 years. I have a son on the way coming in the next few weeks. It’s very exciting. And that’s pretty much been occupying most of my time for the last 9 months almost. We’re getting the house ready, child-proof type stuff, buying a crib, baby sheets, clothes, things like that. What else do you want to know about me?

I wear a 14 on some days and a 13 on other days. It depends on the weather.

I’m an event film maker which basically is a fancy way of saying I film weddings. A lot of times people will think, “Oh, he’s a video guy.” And that’s basically what I do, but there’s more to it than that obviously.

I started out part time doing an internship with another company, and I found that I really liked it. I got good enough to the point that the owner of that company said, “You know what Chris, you’re doing awesome. I think you should go out on your own.” And so I did. That was about 2 years ago. That was 2008 when I started. I’ve been doing it ever since. I did it part time for about a year, so I’ve been doing it full time for a year now.

While I was doing part time, I worked at The Cheesecake Factory as a bar tender, trying to build up the business doing marketing and getting whatever clients I could, just to prove that I was legit. It’s a difficult business to get into. A lot of times people think, “Oh, I can just go to Best Buy and pick up a camera and go shoot a wedding.” And they can, and it’s better than nothing, but if people are really interesting in preserving that wedding day, that special day, it’s important to have a professional do it because it’s all they do. They’re dedicated to it and know what to look for.

I really enjoy it. There are so many resources out there to help people in the business become better and more efficient. And that’s been my goal. I wanted to start the business right, not grow too fast or take on more than I could handle. I’ve been really dedicated to doing it right from the very beginning: keeping things organized like the books, keeping client material organized so that I wouldn’t lose anything.

Kind of both… When I was a child, my dad picked up a Sony video camera, one of those big ones that you strap the VCR around your shoulder. My brother, sister, and I started filming shorts. I was about 12 years old, and my brother would have been 15. We would re-enact movies. We redid Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Terminator… the funny thing is that all these movies are rated R. My brother was the terminator, I was John Conner or Kyle Reese, and my sister was Sarah Conner. We’d go through scene by scene and do the whole movie. We’d cut it and edit it ourselves and add music. It all started back then.

When I went to school, I studied those so-called safe subjects: finance, marketing, economics. I ended up graduating in economics. People were like, “What are you going to do with that degree?” and I responded, “I really don’t know.” And I went into the restaurant business, and I was a manager. Before I was at The Cheesecake Factory, I worked at Joe’s Crab Shack. I started out there as a server; I worked myself up into a management position and opened up a few stores. I just wasn’t happy doing that at all. The hours are really long, the pay is horrible, you get talked down to a lot, you have ridiculous expectations, and you always work when everyone else is playing. I’m still working on the weekends, but it’s a real pick me up because weddings are one of those fun events. It’s something so special in somebody’s life that I feel it’s more like an honor for me to be there. It’s like a party every weekend, and I get paid for it. It’s great.

I decided I wanted to go back and study film, so I did. I was at the University of Utah, and I took a bunch of classes up there. And that’s where I found this guy to do the internship with. I did my internship with David Perry Films and he is now one of my best friends. We work together frequently. We have a great time and career relationship. He refers people to me when he’s booked, and I do the same for him. He’s been a great mentor, teacher, and support to getting my business up and running.

Yeah. There’s an organization here in Utah, I’m the president this year, and it’s called the UPVA. It’s an association for videographers and filmmakers. We come together once a month and we typically have a topic that we talk about. Next month our topic is efficiency. We’ll have a speaker, maybe a guest speaker or a member, talk about what they do to become efficient. It’s like a support group where we all get together. Although people see us as competitors, I don’t really see it that way. I see us more as collaborators and colleagues. There are so many “non-professional” people out there who want to jump in and do it, but it’s important to have that education and support.

For example, without the support I would have been in serious trouble. Last June I was on my way to a wedding in Bountiful and a semi truck grounded me. Without the support group I wouldn’t have had anybody to call. But because I was in the UPVA, I was able to call a few guys, explain what happened, and within 20 minutes, they were at the temple waiting for my wedding party to come out of the temple. I would have missed the wedding otherwise. Other people who are by themselves and not in a support organization like this would have been S.O.L.

My favorite part is the flexibility, creating my own hours, being my own boss, and being creative in my own way. There’s nobody telling you how it’s supposed to be. I have complete freedom of editing the way I want.

Very important. If I wasn’t creative and unique I would be just another guy with a camera. To be competitive, especially in Utah because there are so many competitors out there, you have to be different. If you’re not different, you’re like everybody else and there’s nothing special about that.

It starts when the couple wants to book me. I don’t take their money right away. I like to get to know them first and before I will take their money to reserve a day, I want to make sure they’re a good fit for me and I’m a good fit for them. I want to make sure our personalities jive together because if we don’t, that wedding day is going to be awkward. They’re not going to be themselves. It’s going to be hard for me to do my job. It’s not going to be as fun.

I make it special by getting to know each couple individually and their stories. When they know me, and I know them, I show up on their wedding day and I’m a friend with the camera. And they trust me completely. They’re not worried about anything, they can be themselves. And when they are themselves, I’m able to capture their day uninhibited because I’m not saying, “Okay, pose like this.” I’ll pose and do shots here and there for dramatic effect, but I focus more on capturing the candid moments as they happen.

I feel that their films turn out infinitely better because of that. It’s not all staged, it’s not like a movie: it’s real life.

In the restaurant business people are typically pretty young. They’re still in school, and maybe they’re married, and maybe they’re not, so when a server or somebody in the restaurant was getting married I’d say, “I’m a videographer, I’m just getting started. How would you like me to film your wedding for you?” and I’d give them a deal significantly less that I charge now. So that was a way to get my foot in the door and get experience and get material to have a demo to show people so they would book me. Over the span of that year I had enough material to put together a good demo disc.

They also have bridal shows that occur throughout the valley at various locations: Provo high school, Thanksgiving Point, Southtowne Expo, Grand America, all these different places. I did a few bridal shows just to get my name out there. I’d have a booth where I’d hand out my demo disc and a TV playing that showed some weddings. That’s how I got my start.

I still do bridal shows now, but not as involved. I don’t like to have a booth there anymore, because I feel like a used car salesman. People are usually there for the free stuff or the discounts, and I don’t do any discounts anymore. My prices are fixed at the lowest I can do to remain profitable. So what I do instead is put flyers in the gift bags that they give away at the door so I don’t have to physically be there anymore, which is very nice. I can be focused or be filming a wedding that day instead of being there, or I can be working on other projects and finishing things up for other clients.

Most of my business now comes from referrals. I’d say 90% of my work comes from referrals and 10% from new people finding me on the internet. Referrals are the best way to keep in business. These past clients that I’ve worked with feel comfortable with me, and they love their wedding video, so they’re comfortable recommending me to their friends, saying “You know what? This guy will take care of you. He does a great job.” And most of the time these people call me and say, “You did my friend’s wedding, I loved it. I want the same thing…” It’s not going to be the same. I always tell people it’s going to be different and unique specifically to you. That’s how I get most of my business now, through referrals.

Paperwork. I hate accounting. I took accounting classes in school and I thought I liked it, but I absolutely can’t stand it now. It’s one of those things that I wish I didn’t have to worry about: handling the different accounts and keeping it all organized. By spending time on things like that I’m losing valuable creative time. It eats into my creative thinking worrying about stuff like that. That would probably be my least favorite thing. I love everything else.

Absolutely. I try to do a lot of networking with other vendors be it florists, photographers, reception centers, or videographers. I work with tons of photographers. It’s like that organization (UPVA); it helps out a lot.

I guess it’s more like an attitude recommendation. A lot of it comes back to just being supportive of other people who are just getting into the business. I really do want to help people because I was helped. Without that help, I wouldn’t be where I am today. Without David Perry Films, there’s no way I’d be where I am now.

I remember I went to one of these meetings and he said, “A raising tide raises all boats.” I’m a boat; the tide is the information, knowledge, and skill. We all help each other and raise that tide. All of us will be raised. We can all raise the bar. That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s what all of us are trying to do I think, raise the bar.

We’ve all seen those cheesy 1980s wedding videos that are just awful. Go to YouTube and type it in, you’ll just die; it’s like, “I don’t want this at my wedding! Why would I want this?”

And the bride’s hair catches on fire.

Not an option. I have not been cursed with that, knock on wood. Obviously things don’t always go the way you’d want them to. My whole attitude with filming is that things aren’t going to go the way you want them to all the time. Maybe you’re dealing with a difficult photographer who monopolizes the time and doesn’t let me do anything. Or maybe I’m dealing with a really small venue and I can’t get as many shots. I could get frustrated pretty easily with that which could cause me to fail. But I always view things as opportunities.

I was filming a wedding a couple weeks ago. The photographer was taking a really long time to do things. I wasn’t going to have time to do stuff with just the couple. There’s nothing I could really do about it. This other photographer was there and they were getting pretty frustrated with how long he was taking. I was like, “There’s not anything we could do about it. Let’s just enjoy it. If our frustration shows, the bride and groom will know it and that would affect their day.” That would be a failure to me, if my performance or my attitude affected their wedding. I don’t want that. I want them to enjoy their day like I wasn’t even there and then be able to relive it from my non-biased eyes. I think that’s my goal.

Everyone has fears when they first start a business. Am I going to make enough money to survive? The answer to that is not yet. I haven’t made a ton of money yet. I’m barely making enough to get by as it is. So that’s a big fear and I think anybody starting a business has that fear.

Am I adequate? Am I able to do this job? And then I guess the fear of failure. Nobody wants to start something and fail at it. I mean it’s going to happen. Inevitably people are going to start and then fail. How many first year businesses go out of business? A lot. What do they say? If a business gets through the first 3 or 4 years then they’re probably in business to stay. I’m not there yet. I’ve only been doing it for 2 years. So there’s that fear, am I still going to be here in 1 year, 2 years, 3 years? And if I’m not, what am I going to be doing? Am I going to be bar tending again? I hope not.

That’s my fear. Would I regress? I don’t see myself doing that. I have faith that I will continue to improve and that people will continue to use my services and that I’ll keep getting better and actually start making money hopefully.

Get to know people within that business. If you want to be in photography, get to know photographers. Videography, videographers. If you want to be in marketing, you’re probably going to want to do an internship somewhere. You always have to have experience. You see these movies where people are trying to get hired. They just graduated from MIT, they’re smart, they have a 4.0 GPA but nobody will hire them because they don’t have experience. Get experience first. Find out if it’s something that you really love and are passionate about. If you’re not passionate and don’t love it, then you’re not going to be happy.

I’m from here. I grew up in West Jordan, Utah, so I’m a local boy. I graduated from BYU a couple years ago. What else do you want to know?

I graduated in Economics, and I’m glad; I really like Economics. Even though a lot of the work I’m doing isn’t related to what I studied, I still think it was a really good major. I think studying economics really helps you to think analytically and weigh pros and cons and costs and benefits, which I think can be useful.

I got minors in math statistics and business. I was originally planning on getting a Ph.D. in economics because I really like it, but then when it was time to head off to grad school, I was thinking about it—grad school is expensive, and my friends and family are here. Also to study Economics at the graduate level you have to have a lot of math and statistics, and so I took a lot of classes, and in those classes I met people who were going to be actuaries, and I decided to do that. I worked as an actuary for a couple years and took a lot of the exams, and I still do some stuff related. Then I got laid off. […] So I have some business background and about two years of work experience, and my business minor.

That’s a good question. I think that it’s something that I always thought I’d like to do. I always envisioned myself graduating from college, getting a job and then I’d start some business on the side and work on them until they were big enough until I would quit my day job. I’m very risk adverse, and usually people think of entrepreneurs as people who enjoy risk. And ironically, I don’t know if you’re familiar with what an actuary is… their whole profession is about managing risk—definitely, a contrast there. While working as an actuary, I thought I’d be an entrepreneur but wasn’t really sure.

I’ve always had an interest in humanitarian work, and this is what led into my different entrepreneurial endeavors. I’d learned about microfinance and I thought, “That’s a great way to help people in need because it helps them become self-reliant rather than just helping them temporarily.” And so I always had thought I’d wanted to do something; I thought maybe I’d start some kind of business where the profits would go to help fund microfinance or something. I was always thinking of that but didn’t want to take any risks like that.

Over the years of thinking about it and learning about the internet, I came up with an idea which is Ads4Africa. And then I got it started with some of my roommates; shortly after we started getting it going, I got laid off from my job as an actuary. The company went under and so they laid off almost everybody. I thought, “Now that I’m getting severance, I’m going to take this time and focus on getting this humanitarian thing going. And I think when it’s done I’ll go and get a job again.” And as I did it, I realized how much I enjoyed doing it and working for myself. In addition, I didn’t want to pay someone to build our website and so I started teaching myself how to build the websites and do other things with the internet.

Since then, I still work with Ads4Africa and kept that going, but I’ve also been involved with starting some other business and have been able to so far make it into something full-time where I can just run my own businesses and support myself. And I think it’s getting to the point where I feel comfortable where I could support a family. And so, yeah, I’m kind of young and I just kind of fell into it. If I hadn’t lost my job, it probably wouldn’t have happened.

Yeah, we’re all scared.

I don’t think there’s one specific event, but there have been many events that have been small steps. Some of them have been certain people I’ve known. Growing up—I didn’t grow up extremely wealthy. We weren’t poor and struggling, but we weren’t really well off—I learned I didn’t need a lot to be happy. It was one of those basic things and I was happy as can be.

As I grew up I learned about money and finances and different things and I began thinking, “What is life really about?” I felt like I have been born in a country where I have everything that I need and so much opportunity. And there are other people who are born in situations where they can’t get out and they’re stuck in poverty cycles, and I feel like it’s no fault of theirs that they’re in those situations. I felt a responsibility like I’d like to do something to help them. I felt like I don’t want to live a life where I’m really focused on buying material things and getting a lot of money. And I would like to get a lot of money, not so that I can live an extravagant lifestyle, but so that I can help people in need. [… ]

I took an entrepreneurial class and there was one particular teacher who was into humanitarian stuff, he was also an entrepreneur, and he talked a lot about that. I took that class about 3 years ago and that was also a big stepping stone for me. […] Different things have kind of pushed me towards that and got me interested.

Ads4Africa is a search engine. Basically it’s powered by Google. All of us Google search every day, except there’s advertising on Ads4Africa. Whenever someone searches, those advertisers pay us and we use that money to help people in need. We use that money primarily for funding microfinance. I felt that this was a good way to be self reliant. Basically, it allows people to do something that they do every day, but when they do it, it will raise money for people in need.

That’s correct. Originally I had decided microfinance and I thought I’d like to start some kind of a business where I would use the profits to help entrepreneurs around the world. And it kind of started as a business, and then as I learned about the internet, I thought this would be a good way to start a business without having to provide a lot of capital to rent a place or do inventory for something. I can use the internet.

I learned about different things like advertising. The reason it’s called Ads4Africa is because as I first learned about Google Adsense, that you can place ads on your site, and Google will pay you, I thought, “Well what if we put ads on the site, but instead of Google paying us the money, we could use that money to help people in need?” And then I had the thought that the internet is very large, very fast, but there are really big sites that primarily advertisers target. And I think that there are a lot of smaller sites, like personal blogs, that individually they don’t really want to monetize because they wouldn’t give a lot, maybe a $1.00 or two in a month, or 6 months. But I thought an aggregate—a bunch of those—could raise a lot of money. And even a small number of websites could make up a larger portion of the web that is untouched.

And I think that in part, that’s what Google is trying to do with Adsense, allowing individuals to place ads on their site and reach that other part of the internet that is untouched. But I felt like there wasn’t a lot of incentive for people to do it because what’s one or two bucks, and why go through the trouble when they don’t know how to set it up? So the idea for Ads4Africa was to help people walk through putting ad code on their site so they would get money and that money would come to us and we’d use that to fund microloans for entrepreneurs around the world. So, yeah, it wasn’t search.

We wanted to extend into a lot of different things. For one, we talked about the advertising, and putting ads on sites. We also knew that Google allows you to add searches. People can put a custom search to search their own site or a particular topic, but you can also customize the search to do whatever you’d like. We had the idea that in the same way that people put ads on their blogs that they could also use the search engine and see the ads on there and those advertisers would pay us as well.

And so we had that idea, and my brother, I don’t even remember what he said, was the one who gave me the idea. He was talking about something, and then it came to me, “We could use the search in the same way.” So the day after that, we started the search. And basically in comparison with the ads and the search, people were much more likely to use the search. It was a lot easier.

When I first learned Google ads, it seemed complicated, but now that I’ve worked with it, it’s like an everyday language. But there are a lot of people who don’t understand what it is. But the search, a lot of people understood it because a lot of people perform searches. So people were a lot more willing to do that than they were willing to put ads on their blog or their website. And so that’s where it kind of switched.