From Creative Role to Operational Ownership
In August 2019, I was hired by Rob Dial. The engagement lasted 3.5 years. The role was simple on paper: personal videographer. The vision was bigger: be the DRock to his Gary V.
The expectation was clear: produce, no matter what. These conditions forged me.
What started as a videographer role evolved into full ownership of content operations: planning, production, hiring, systems, and delivery.
Early Output: Viral Content at Scale
The first phase focused on short-form, viral talking-head videos, one per week.
From there, the work escalated quickly. By late 2019, we moved into the second phase: weekly produced narrative pieces with a lesson attached.
Every week. No missed deadlines. Including during the pandemic.
Scripts. Casting. Locations. Production. Editing. Most of it ran out of my apartment.
This continued for 7 months until we were forced to pivot.
The Pivot: Podcast as the Engine
Scripted short films became too difficult with social distancing, so we pivoted to producing just the podcast. That meant:
- Building a studio
- Designing sets
- Multi-camera recording
- Editing long-form and short-form assets
- Creating a repeatable content pipeline
The result: 84 pieces of video content produced from 4 podcast episodes.
This became the core media engine.
Building The Team While Shipping
As volume increased, I built the team. At peak, the media operation included five people.
I handled:
- Vetting
- Hiring
- Role definition
- Quality of Operations
No formal training systems existed, so everything ran on execution, speed, and trust. It was trial by fire. And it worked.
A Clean Exit
By early 2023, the operation was stable. The media machine was running. The team was in place. The systems didn't require me anymore.
So I replaced myself and exited cleanly in January 2023.
