Episode 209 – Howie Zales

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[00:00:00] Heroes or an inspiring group of people. Every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell from the doctor is saving lives at your local hospital. The war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers and the firefighters who risk their safety to ensure ours, every hero is special and every story worth telling.

[00:00:20] But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignore the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer. The ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what? I can fix that I can help people. I can make a difference and they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service, some go on to change the world.

[00:00:36] Others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the hero show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers, their success and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money and experience more freedom in your business.

[00:00:51] I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…

[00:00:55] Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews, and today I have live on the line, Howie Zales. Howie are you there?

[00:01:02] Hey Richard. Nice to see you.

[00:01:03] Awesome glad to have you here. I know we were talking before we got on and you’re coming in from New York, is that right?

[00:01:08] Yes, sir.

[00:01:08] Have you started to get to the warm weather there yet?

[00:01:11] It’s just that we had a really 95 degree weather weekend last weekend that I kind of dip down. We’re hoping for a stable, smooth 80 degree weather we can this Memorial day.

[00:01:22] I mentioned before we got on, we’ve been traveling up the national parks here along the 15 freeway.

[00:01:26] So like, you know Zion and Bryce and whatever else the other ones are, but we have, for whatever reason, we were like a week ahead of all the good weather. So it was like, we were in Zion, and it was cold until the last day, then it was warm and sunny. And then like that day, we left up to Bryce where it was snowing and it snowed all week until the last day when it was sunny and warm.

[00:01:44] And then we went up to Yellowstone where it was snowy all week. And then in the last day, it’s sunny and warm cam up to glacier. So anyways, the last four weeks have all been cold. Cause we misplanned our spring trip like one week, we were one week ahead of the good weather. So anyways, what I want to dive into before we get too far into this is just a brief introduction of who you are.

[00:02:05] And then we’ll start talking a little bit about your business. So Howie Zales an Emmy is an award-winning camera operator. Who’s turned his passion for television broadcasting and to several entrepreneurial endeavors, which we’ll talk about a little bit today, but what I want to start out with ,Howie is what are you known for? What’s your business like now? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

[00:02:22] Yeah, I used to be a camera operator. I worked with NBC Sports and the World Wrestling Entertainment for over 20 years, close to 25 years. I’ve shot Superbowl’s, Olympic, Kentucky Derby’s, WrestleManias.

[00:02:37] So we’ve seen your work, probably.

[00:02:39] Absolutely. You name it. I’ve shot it. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve had the good fortune to see the world and cover some of the biggest and best sporting events and entertainment events. So it’s been a great career, but simultaneous to that, I always had a business on the side HJZ Productions, which, where we staff sports and entertainment shows with the proper crew that our clients need. Anything from camera people to audio people, to replay people, anyone that it takes to do a TV show.

[00:03:11] Awesome. And so that’s what you do now is you run that production house is that full-time?

[00:03:17] Yep. I stopped traveling, doing the camera work, two back surgeries and a pandemic. I’m good.

[00:03:25] Has it helped at all that cameras have gotten smaller and lighter over the years? Cause now they’re little things.

[00:03:32] No, actually the broadcast handheld cameras are just as heavy as they were 10, 15 years ago because the cameras are high def. So that means that the lenses have to be high def and the lenses are heavier there’s more glass in the lenses than there was previous. So the back of the camera has to be just as heavy to balance it out. Otherwise you’d be like that.

[00:03:57] You hit forward, yeah. So the shrinking technology has not impacted, it’s just made it higher quality, but not any smaller size.

[00:04:05] Exactly.

[00:04:06] That’s funny. Yeah. I’ve been blown away by how small, some of these things have gotten over the last couple of years for the quality, but like, that really impacts us as the consumers that we’re just getting a lot more quality in a much smaller package, but I could see for the professionals, they’re just expanding the definition and the quality without really changing the size of the gear you’re using.

[00:04:27] Right.

[00:04:28] That’s cool. So what I want to talk about then is how you got into the camera business in the first place, right? We talk on this show about your origin story, every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s something that made you into the hero you are. We want to know what that was.

[00:04:44] Were you born here or were you a bit by a radioactive spider that made you pick up a camera and become a camera man? Or you start in a job and eventually become an entrepreneur later on, essentially, where did you come from?

[00:04:54] Yeah, it’s a few good stories. Growing up, I played baseball and a few other sports, but I wanted to play professional baseball and I knew I needed a backup.

[00:05:03] Just in case and spoiler alert, I did not play professional baseball but I needed an elective to fill my last course or class schedule in 11th grade. And I saw this elective, it said TV production and the description was a trip to NBC studios, Arturo Rockefeller center in NBC studios.

[00:05:23] And to watch a show being taped I’m like, how bad can that be? Right?

[00:05:30] Yeah, I would’ve said yes to that.

[00:05:32] Right. And I fell in love with it immediately. And I knew it was destiny from there. I knew I had to combine my love of baseball and sports and my new love and passion of television together. And kind of looking back, I grew up always going to Nick’s Games, Ranger Games, Yankee Games, and now it always be, we’d always sit near the camera operators. I always find myself watching what they were doing and then talking to my parents, we had a family member that used to be a photographer for the New York times. So it was kind of a bit in the blood, so to speak.

[00:06:08] Yeah, absolutely. And so you started out in high school being like, Hey, I’m going to take this class. How does that translate into you run a production house of your own?

[00:06:17] Yeah. So, I only went to schools that had television production programs, and I fell in love.

[00:06:24] I picked the perfect school for me and I fell in love with doing sports and I made my way into it. First I took a job shooting news and I’ve got the phone number of ESPN and called and said, hey, I’m here, I’m ready to shoot sports. And the woman on the other end, Donna said, well, what’s your experience?

[00:06:41] I said, well, I shoot news. And she said, call me in five years when you have some more experience. So I literally put it in my calendar for five years down the road. And I had a ton of experience at that time, I called her back and I said, I spoke to you five years ago on this day, I told her whole story and she laughed and couldn’t believe that I was calling her back with all the experience I had gained. Yeah.

[00:07:05] That’s awesome. And did she hire you then?

[00:07:07] Yeah. She gave me a few days of work.

[00:07:10] Nice. So then you got into the sports stuff and then you did the sports stuff for a number of years. And then you said you started your side business, which is the HJZ Productions. So how did that come about?

[00:07:20] Yeah. A friend of mine who I went from, I think elementary school all the way through college was working at MSNBC.

[00:07:27] And if you remember, I miss in the morning, he used to do his radio show from MSNBC. And once in a while, they would take the show on the road. At this time they were doing it at a casino, just outside New York City and Connecticut. And he called and said, Hey, Howie, are you available to do camera on this day?

[00:07:45] We’re doing the IMS show. I said, yeah, sure. He said, do you have any friends? You know, I need some counter people, audio people. I said, yeah, absolutely. He goes, can do me a favor. Can you get who’s available hire them send me one invoice and pay them for me, it would make my life so much easier. I’m like done deal and I’m like, there’s gotta be a business in that.

[00:08:08] And so I started my company then and we slowly made our way into the industry and we provide we provide a cruise for Superbowls and Wrestling events.

[00:08:21] So you’re like a one-stop shop kind of place, for like, hey, we’d have something filmed for TV. They can just hire you and then you guys just do everything.

[00:08:28] Yeah. For example, we have a Showtime boxing event this weekend. Showtime calls us says, we need five camera people, five audio people, some replay people, some utilities. We hire them. We tell them when to show up based on what the client tells us, we send one invoice and then we payroll everybody.

[00:08:46] That’s awesome. So I’m just curious, cause I’ve never been in that space before you provide all the cameras, all the people, all the stuff that happens who provides the connection to the actual television, so that the viewers can see it.

[00:08:58] Yeah. So in most cases we provide just the crew. The client is providing the TV truck and the equipment, some cases we’ll go out and get the TV truck and the equipment.

[00:09:08] So that what’s called it’s a TV Truck?

[00:09:09] Yeah, it’s basically a TV studio on wheels. Everything you need to produce a TV show in a control room is on a 53 foot truck.

[00:09:20] It shows up, usually it takes two mobile units to make up one facility and each truck is probably worth around $20 million.

[00:09:30] Damn. You want to run into those on the road?

[00:09:33] No.

[00:09:34] So, here’s my curiosity. You’ve got those two trucks and whatnot. Is it the same requirement for prerecorded content versus content that’s being broadcast live?

[00:09:45] It depends, you know, if you do like a concert, right. A lot of concerts are done prerecorded, so yeah, we would use the same TV truck. And instead of rolling the tape room, instead of using it for replays we’ll just record everything and then it would be edited after the fact, if it was a live scenario, like a sporting event the replay room would be used for replays and recording.

[00:10:12] So then it just goes directly right out of the stuff.

[00:10:15] It hooks up via fiber or satellite to the network that it’s airing.

[00:10:20] Yeah, to the broadcaster. So here’s my question. And this is just something I’ve always been curious about. I don’t know if you know the answer to this or not, and I don’t even know if it’s relevant to this conversation, but I’ve always wondered when you’re watching a live sport event, like the Superbowl, for instance, and they’re doing the replays or even doing it live and you’ll see like the lines that are on the grass.

[00:10:38] Yeah.

[00:10:39] Or like the stuff on there, they show up under the characters, like the actual people they look like they show up under on the grass and I’ve always wondered how they do that. How do they do that live, particularly like to show up animations that you know they’re not in the camera shot. Like those lines don’t exist. Someone else’s doing that. How does that happen?

[00:10:57] There’s a special device, well in football there’s three cameras on top. The left 20 to 50 and the right 20 there’s a special device attached to those three cameras. And it’s all software driven. And it’s like a third party software that is integrated and the cameras can be taken with the first and 10 line, that’s what we call it or without the first and 10 lines in it.

[00:11:27] So you can decide whether or not that information is going to show up on the feed, because it’s always like blown my mind. I’m like, I know that’s digital information being overlaid on top of what we’re seeing, but I’m like, I just don’t know how it’s happening. Always been a curiosity of mine.

[00:11:41] Usually it’s called camera one, two and three with with the first and 10 lines in and then 51, 50, 52, 53.

[00:11:52] That’s interesting. So same kind of thing, depending on the sport, like they have the same kind of technology that just sort of like puts whatever the overlays are.

[00:11:59] If you’re watching baseball, the pitcher catcher, there’s like an advertisement behind the catcher on the wall usually, that’s a green screen. And that only appears on that center field camera.

[00:12:12] That’s interesting, do you control that or does someone else in the TV controls it?

[00:12:19] TV controls it.

[00:12:20] So that’s not your team then?

[00:12:22] No.

[00:12:23] That’s interesting. Yeah, that’s really cool. I always wondered how it was done. So thank you for that. I know this not particularly relevant to your business, but I’ve always just been curious how that works. So I want to talk a little bit about your super powers as someone who runs a television production business.

[00:12:37] Every iconic hero has their super power whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect or the ability to call down thunder from the sky in the real world heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill you were born with or a skill you developed over the course of time that really helps you to help your clients come out on top, to slay their villains, so to speak.

[00:12:55] And the way I like to frame it is you’ve probably got a set of skills that you’ve developed over the course of your life. And if you look at them all, they’ll have like a common thread. Something that ties them all together. And that common thread between your skillsets is probably where your superpower is. And so I’m curious in HJZ Productions. What your superpower is there?

[00:13:12] Yeah. Well HJZ I guess overall, cause I have my other business as well is I have one person that manages each business, that is in charge of the business and I kind of oversee everything.

[00:13:30] And then, my superpower, I guess, for both businesses would be just always surrounding myself with people that are smarter than I am, because if I’m the smartest person in the room, then we have a big a big problem.

[00:13:43] Yeah. I was just having that discussion with my son the other day, about how entrepreneurs, like one of the superpowers that entrepreneurs share is the ability to create time. And the way we create time is by empowering other people to get work done. Because if we tried to do it all ourselves, we couldn’t do it, but we can empower a whole team of people to accomplish things that we couldn’t accomplish on our own. And it’s a type of creation that’s very unique to entrepreneurs.

[00:14:10] And he responded with a story that is pretty common, he’s been reading the Rich Dad, Poor Dad books about Henry Ford and asking him a question about math or something like that. And he’s like, I can pick up the phone and get the answer. And so he calls like one of his mathematicians and gets the answer for it.

[00:14:27] And he’s like, cause I don’t need to be the smartest person. I just need to have access to the smart people.

[00:14:32] Exactly.

[00:14:34] Yeah.

[00:14:35] And knowing who those people are, knowing who to call or who to contact for whatever the situation is, is 90% of the battle.

[00:14:47] Yeah. It’s just knowing how to, one of my entrepreneurial friends refers it to as being the master facilitator. That like your job as the head of the business is really to just facilitate the creation of the teams and the people that are gonna be able to handle the resources.

[00:15:05] Right. Exactly.

[00:15:08] Cool. So the flip side then, right? So if your superpower is being the mass facilitator and being able to surround yourself with those people, the flip side of your superpower is generally your fatal flaw. Just like every Superman has his kryptonite or wonder woman who can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad, you probably had a flaw that’s held you back in growing your business.

[00:15:26] For me, it’s a couple of things I struggled with perfectionism for a long time. Kept me from shipping product, also struggled with not having good boundaries with my clients. So I’d let them walk all over me and not have a good relationship with time, essentially. But I think more important than what the flaw is, is how have you worked to overcome it so that people who are listening might learn a little bit from your experience there.

[00:15:45] Two flaws. One is that I’m not a good writer. And I should have pushed myself when I was younger to get better. Right. If you’re not good at something, the only way to improve is to put yourself out there in an uncomfortable situation to help yourself improve. Therefore, I do not send it an important email out without Jen, my wife and business partner checking it first because I don’t trust myself that I don’t want to make us look bad. So I don’t send an important email out. So I feel crippled sometimes because of my writing skills and maybe we thought a little dyslexia, you know, so we’re very careful about that, but that is something that is like a kryptonite to me. It’s debilitating sometimes because I don’t want to embarrass us.

[00:16:40] And the other thing is knowing when, you know, family time, right. Turning the phone upside down and not having a client interrupt or paying attention to my family, the business can wait.

[00:16:55] Yeah. And just knowing how to prioritize that stuff and when to prioritize it. And that’s a tough thing. It’s one of the things that I try to do a really good job of keeping business stuff on the calendar. And if it’s not in the calendar that it doesn’t get attention until it’s on the calendar. That’s how I try to deal with that one.

[00:17:12] Yeah. And since my wife and I work together and we own our business together, If something pops into my brain at 9:30 at night, when we’re lying in bed, it’s very difficult not to, it was very difficult at first, not to just say, hey Jenny, you know, how about this? So now I just write it down in my notes for tomorrow morning.

[00:17:33] You can come back to it when it’s business time.

[00:17:35] Yeah, yeah.

[00:17:36] Not when it’s business time, if you know what I mean.

[00:17:38] Right.

[00:17:39] So the other one that you mentioned was the I wasn’t going to say, I lost my train of thought there it’ll come back to me eventually. Your first flaw, remind me what you said. The first one was, was the writing and communication, right?

[00:17:53] Yes.

[00:17:54] Yeah. And I’ve been convinced for a long time that writing and communication ability is a power multiplier for people that if you can communicate well, it almost like enhances everything else you do.

[00:18:09] So I could see how that would be a really. You mentioned debilitating, right? A debilitating flaw. And so I’m curious, like what are some of the strategies that you put in place other than like, I mean, you mentioned like running things by your wife, but what are some of your other strategies that you use to sort of overcome that?

[00:18:24] Yeah. Great question. I’ll compose and this is like for important stuff. So I’ll compose an email, I’ll put it off to the side. And then come back to it three or four or five minutes later, just to make sure it says what I think it says. ’cause sometimes I do that cause I’m doing, you know, my head is ahead of what I’m doing.

[00:18:46] My brain is ahead of what I’m doing. I think it says something but really on the computer that’s not what it says or it’s missing a word or a piece of punctuation. So I put it off to the side and I come back to it. That’s one way I’ve learned to overcome that. And I just stay in my zone, I don’t use big words or if I don’t know, I look it up if accepting or accepting. Right. Which way. So I look it up.

[00:19:18] Yeah, absolutely. I do some of the same things. I don’t know that it’s dyslexia exactly, but my right-hand or left-hand is faster at typing than my right hand.

[00:19:28] Or one of the ways, one of my hands is faster than the other ones. So I’ll like type things out. And then a lot of words where like where one of the letters comes from this hand and the other one comes from this hand, there’ll be mixed up. So we’ll have words that are like, they’re all mixed up. So I’ll have to like write something and then go back and look at it afterwards just to make sure that I actually typed it properly.

[00:19:47] I totally get it.

[00:19:49] Type things wrong and you’re like if you send them off immediately, you’re like looking at me like, oh man, I just looked dumb.

[00:19:55] Yeah. Yeah. I never send anything of without walking away or putting off to the side for a time.

[00:20:02] Yeah. One of the tools I’ve been making use of more recently as a Grammarly, because Grammarly looks at your stuff and they’ll highlight like grammar issues or spelling issues for you. So you can make sure that things are going right and it’s been really useful for me.

[00:20:15] Yeah, I’ve also used like, for important emails, I’ll create it in Google Docs or word, and make sure it’s good. And then copy paste it into an email.

[00:20:28] Yeah. Something where you can’t accidentally hit send before it’s ready to go.

[00:20:31] Yeah.

[00:20:32] There’s nowhere to go in Google docs. It’s just going to stay there until you do something with it. It’s a goof idea. Cool. So I want to talk then a little bit about your common enemy and this will be an interesting sort of discussion cause I don’t think we’ve ever talked to someone who does TV production about this.

[00:20:47] But every superhero has an arch nemesis, it’s the thing that they have to fight against in their world and in the world of business it takes on a lot of forms, but we’d like to put it in the context of your clients, the people who hire you and it’s a mindset or a flaw that you have to sort of fight to overcome in order to get them the result that they hire you for.

[00:21:05] And so I’m curious, what is sort of that common enemy that you constantly have to deal with in your business?

[00:21:12] Yeah, in HJZ Productions the hiring business, there’s one large company that does what I do on a very large scale nationwide. So they’re our biggest competitor.

[00:21:26] And so. I sell it’s up to me since I’m the face of the business to sell our services on why to use us and why we’re different. So that’s one thing in our livestream business viridity entertainment, you know, again, I’m the face of the business and I oversee all of our productions and I sell to our clients, why they would want to use a smaller business and why the workflow we developed is superior to other companies out there.

[00:22:00] Yeah. So it’s an interesting sort of place to be in, especially when you have huge competitors. And this is just my guess. There’s probably not a lot of people in your business. It’s like, there’s the 800 pound gorilla and there’s probably you guys and a few others is that what I’m understanding?

[00:22:16] Yes.

[00:22:18] So you sort of regularly have to have that conversation about, why choose the smaller one when there’s this huge looming 800 pound gorilla that everyone knows about it and could hire.

[00:22:30] Right.

[00:22:31] So what are some of your guys’s reasons for clients to hire you versus hiring the big guys?

[00:22:38] One I’m a former freelancer, former camera operator. So I know the industry. I know the people that I call and hire they’re vetted. I’m not just looking through a list on a computer and sending out blanket emails. We’re a small company, if you have a question about invoicing or payroll, you call Lori.

[00:23:02] If you have a question about the crew, you call me. If it’s an HR question, you call Jen and that it okay. So we pride ourselves that we’re a small business.

[00:23:13] So it’s personal experience, personal touch, that kind of thing. So do you find that matters to your clients as much like, if they’re also smaller or larger, like if you’re dealing with a big company, do they care as much?

[00:23:27] I think so. Yeah.

[00:23:31] It’s interesting cause sometimes I know when you’re dealing with really big company, You know, it’s just a checkbox they’re like this team has hired yes or no kind of thing.

[00:23:41] Right. Yeah. So it also depends on who you’re dealing with, what company you’re dealing with. But yeah, I find that a lot of people like our small business, they liked that. When it’s a question of that they need answered that I answer relatively quickly. Not that I drop everything and I’m checking my email, you know, 24/7, but I make the client’s priority, especially during business hours.

[00:24:09] Yeah, absolutely. So have you over the course of doing this discovered or like picked out like a smaller niche that sort of, you guys are a standouts for. That gives you like an advantage over the big companies?

[00:24:22] Yeah. In the live stream business, we deal with a lot of corporate events, concerts, talk shows, and we know that our workflow is like is second to none.

[00:24:37] And what we do, we pride ourselves on providing our clients super high end outcomes to their events and we go the extra step to make sure that they get what they pay for.

[00:24:50] Yeah. Which I assume for like a lot of those livestreams, I know. Cause in our business, we work with people who put on live events sometimes.

[00:24:57] Cause I’m sort of like on the marketing side we do like, Hey, we’ve got a course or a something or whatever, and they’re going to like deliver it live. And so they would hire someone like you. And like when they do a live stage event is like what they’re looking for is they want it to both, like at the event, they want to have the screens that look really good for the people that are there, but they also want to have like top-notch recordings so that they can then sell later.

[00:25:17] Right.

[00:25:18] And so you guys probably have all of the processes worked out for like, hey, here’s what it’s going to look like in the live event. Here’s what the assets you’re going to get when you’re done.

[00:25:24] Yep, exactly.

[00:25:26] Yeah. Do you guys do the editing of the events as well? So they ended up with like polished product or do you guys just do the actual recording?

[00:25:33] Yeah. We do have the capability to do the editing. I don’t specifically do the editing myself, but yeah, my team.

[00:25:40] Your team

[00:25:40] does all the editing. That’s cool. Cause I know it’s a regular thing that happens like in the coaching space is, you know, the coaches will come in and they’ll do like a live band and teach and train us like that.

[00:25:50] And like, it’s important to have it look good at the event, but that’s only gonna be for the a hundred or 200 people that are there, but they’re going to sell the recordings to thousands and thousands of people over the next couple of years.

[00:26:01] And the content that they walk away with is invaluable.

[00:26:06] Yeah. Like, that’s their big win. So they have to have a top-notch crew to make sure that that content is worth putting together and we’re selling and worth offering to their audience.

[00:26:15] Yup.

[00:26:16] That’s cool. So I’m going to talk then a little bit about your driving force, which is the flip side of your common enemy. So if you’re common enemy is what you have to fight against the driving force is what you fight for just like Spider-Man fights to save New York or Batman fight to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information.

[00:26:33] What is it that you fight for with your business, your mission, so to speak.

[00:26:37] Yeah. You know, I love what I do. I love the television business. I love creating. You know, I first started out as a camera operator, so I love being able to have a little bit of an ego to do this. So I love being able to get a replay and fight to have the best shot and have my shot be used the most. So whatever I needed to do to get the best shot, whether take the camera off my shoulder, shoot for my knee, or put the camera above my head. I would do whatever it would take because I love what I do. I loved seeing my stuff on the air and I loved having my family, my kids see me at the Superbowl when my shots on the air.

[00:27:17] And with our business is now, I love being able to walk away from helping produce a live event or a live stream and having the client say, you know, we’re so glad we used you guys, because that was the best event we ever did or, you know, that’s what drives us.

[00:27:36] Yeah, absolutely. So I’m curious when it comes to like the way that the market has shifted for television over the last 10 years, a lot of it has shifted from cable packages to Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Max, and Apple TV and stuff like that. Do you find that has changed your clientele at all, or that it change the business much in terms of like what you guys are actually delivering?

[00:28:05] No, because we do mainly in broadcast sports entertainment. So sporting events are still being broadcast at the regional level, meaning the home network area. So not yet, what we are finding through the use of live streaming. Events like high school sports or low-level division college sports D two and three or lower level sports, like some new football leagues and some track and field events that maybe never would have seen the light of day are now being live stream.

[00:28:45] They are being live streamed on like YouTube and stuff like that?

[00:28:50] YouTube or there, or a content delivery network that’s associated with the website of the company whoever’s producing it. Or just even if it’s the high school’s website or our local Facebook page for our high school. So now we’ve created jobs for people in the television space or the television slash live streaming space.

[00:29:13] We’ve given an avenue for these athletes that maybe would never have been seen to be seen. Maybe they have a chance now to go even further.

[00:29:24] Yeah, absolutely. I know we just watched a live streaming of the day of my niece’s graduation from their high school. And I was like, I know, five years ago, if you’d graduated five years ago, we wouldn’t have gotten to see it.

[00:29:34] But today we did, or like I say today, but it was like five days ago. Right. We got to watch her graduation. It wasn’t well-produced, which makes me think that there’s probably like. What would you call it? There’s a range in the marketplace for doing that kind of stuff. And there’s probably like the super cheap version of doing it, which is what it looked like they had versus like bringing in a professional team, like your guys to actually make it look like a production. I would imagine.

[00:30:04] We’re on the high end of that. We definitely produce events for high-end fortune 500 companies whether it’s completely virtual hybrid. We do talk shows with athletes. We’ve worked with Charles Barkley, Magic Johnson, Tiger Woods, just to name a few.

[00:30:24] Yeah, absolutely. I was just, cause it just popped in my head when you said high school graduation. I was like, hey, we watched one of those. But it looked to me like the production was like a guy with a tripod at the back that they just hooked up to a YouTube live stream, which is fine. It works. It worked, but yeah, I would imagine having someone who’s got like a camera crew and knows how to set up and you can actually make it look like a good production.

[00:30:47] Right.

[00:30:48] Requires some, some skill and knowledge about how to do that and where to put the cameras and how to make sure that your audience, isn’t all walking in front of the camera and blocking the view from your live stream viewers.

[00:30:58] Exactly.

[00:31:00] So that’s cool. Okay. Well, I want to switch gears then and talk a little bit about your hero’s tool belt. And this is just a practical portion for people who run businesses.

[00:31:11] Just like every superhero has a tool belt filled with gadgets like their batarangs or their magical hammers, or, web slingers, lasered eyes or whatever it is. Talk about the top one or two tools that you couldn’t live without in your business to make it run.

[00:31:23] It could be anything from your notepads to your calendar, to something that you use for marketing or the systems you use for product delivery or in your case service delivery. Something you think is essential to getting the job done today.

[00:31:34] Yeah. I rely on systems and processes. I never want to make the same mistake twice.

[00:31:42] We make a mistake, we have a meeting, we’ve come up with a way to fix it and we fix it and then move on document it, send that document to everyone else. That way, we have something to fall back on when situation arises again. I live by my calendar. Cause if I don’t have it in my calendar, I totally forget.

[00:32:02] And if I need to postpone it, I don’t just let it pass. I actually move the item in the calendar. I have a very strict morning routine, which starts usually the night before with a few things that I want to get done early in the morning before other people in the house wake up around like five o’clock and then I work out for an hour and by 9:30 I’m ready to start my day.

[00:32:30] And we have our first meeting, our first team meeting at 9:30 in the morning, and then at like 9:45, whatever needs to happen for the days starts to happen.

[00:32:41] Yeah, absolutely. I love the idea of having a good morning routine mine, like for whatever reason, my trigger is getting my morning shower.

[00:32:48] If I don’t get my morning shower, it feels like my whole day doesn’t go right. But the documentation, the system stuff is something that I’ve been spending a lot of time on in my business recently. And it’s realizing that, I started mapping out all of our processes that we had documented versus what we didn’t have documented.

[00:33:06] And it became really clear to me. I was like, we don’t have any good documented processes for like our lead generation or like our sales stuff or our HR. We have all of our documents on our service delivery, which is fine because that’s how the money is made. But it just dawned on me that I was like, if we got hit by a bus tomorrow, the only thing that would have survived is the service delivery.

[00:33:27] Cause that’s the only part that’s really well-documented. And I was like, it became really obvious that we need to get all this stuff documented and all these other places. So we have like, I don’t know. It feels like, if you don’t have a documented, do you really have a business or do you just have really good habits?

[00:33:42] No, you’re right. Yeah, I watch out for busses.

[00:33:45] Yeah, absolutely. So it’s been a big focus of mine over the last couple of months is figuring out, okay, where are the places that we need to improve our documentation? Because that’s really the only way you can grow and scale, right? Because back to the thing we talked about earlier, creating time and hiring people, you can’t do that. If all the information is locked up in your head.

[00:34:07] Exactly.

[00:34:08] Or someone on your team said.

[00:34:10] Right.

[00:34:13] Cool. And just the other note on that we’re on like episode 210 or something here for this show.

[00:34:20] Oh wow.

[00:34:22] Probably roughly 85, 90% of people who come on and tell their story about entrepreneur mentioned their calendar as being one of their most important tools, which I find interesting. I say regularly the entrepreneurs live and die by their calendar.

[00:34:35] And I believe that before I started this show, but after I have interviewed so many people, it’s interesting how consistent that particular thing is, is that like entrepreneurs, we just can’t live without our calendar. And I’m just curious, do you see the same kind of thing?

[00:34:49] Yeah, and for me, I always set r:eminders up for each event. You know, I have like a 15 minute depending on what the event is, is do I set the reminder up for the day before 15 minutes before, but I don’t just put it in the calendar. I set reminders up because sometimes I could be on a call that was unexposed. And so I have to set that reminder up and I try to limit my time on the phone if it’s not necessary or if it’s not a client, because it’s wasting my time taking me away from something else.

[00:35:25] One of the things I’ve started doing recently too, is instead of just having like predefined events with clients or team members or whatever we’re doing is also adding like tasks onto the calendar where it’s like, this is the thing that I need to do. And looking at time with myself to do that task has been really helpful and making sure things get done.

[00:35:44] So instead of having like a task list. It’s like their appointments, I’m taking tasks and putting them onto my calendar as appointments.

[00:35:51] Exactly.

[00:35:51] It helps to get things done because you’re like, Hey, this is my hour that is dedicated to accomplishing this thing.

[00:35:57] Yeah. And you know, to accomplish my morning routine, I don’t book anything before 9:45. Because my first meeting is at 9:30 every day with my team. And before that I’m working on my morning routine, working out, having my first meal, whatever, walking the dogs, it’s all part of the routine that gets the day going and nothing is booked before that time.

[00:36:24] Yeah. You got to protect your time because that’s the only thing you don’t get back. Right?

[00:36:28] Right.

[00:36:28] You can always find new clients, make more money, hire more team members. You cannot get your time back.

[00:36:35] Exactly.

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[00:38:04] Now back to the hero show.

[00:38:07] So I want to shift gears then and talk a little bit about your own personal heroes, right? Every hero has their mentor, just like Frodo had Gandolf or Luke had Obi Wan or even Robert Kiyosaki had his Rich Dad or Spider-Man had his uncle Ben.

[00:38:20] Who were some of your heroes? Were they a real life mentors peers who were a couple of years ahead of you maybe authors or speakers. And how important were they to what you’ve accomplished so far in growing your couple of businesses?

[00:38:32] Yeah, great question. I’ve had several mentors, business mentors.

[00:38:37] The first one was in college. Chris, Chris Kelly was my college mentor who were kind of like really brought me into the television department at Plattsburgh state where I went to college. So he was my first mentor and he stayed up until two, three in the morning with me sometimes teaching me everything I needed to know.

[00:38:56] So he was like my first mentor, then the person who I did my internship, who has become one of my closest friends, Paul Frederick. Was a mentor. And then Ted Flander, who’s a camera person who kinda showed me the freelance ropes and then some other older camera operators within the NBC world that kind of showed me the ropes. Yeah.

[00:39:24] Yeah. So it’s people that helped you get good at what you’re doing. Right?

[00:39:29] Yeah, I picked their brain, asked a lot of questions made mistakes in front of them and they kindly corrected me. And then also right before the pandemic, most recently hired a business coach who became a mentor who kind of opened my field of view.

[00:39:51] I wasn’t just a camera person. I was an entrepreneur who was a camera operator on the side. And my wife was the one that really helped me make that mindset change. She said, you know, you’re really an entrepreneur. You have these two businesses You know, maybe it’s time to focus on that. And I would be lying if I didn’t say that Jenny, my wife is not a mentor cause she helped me make that mindset change.

[00:40:18] Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned that when you make a mistake as a camera operator, the other camera operators have helped you sort of like see those, which is it’s a perspective shift, right? It’s someone who’s been there done that they can help you shift your perspective on, on those things.

[00:40:33] Just out of curiosity, though. What is a mistake look like as a camera operator? And from the perspective of like, you guys are a production house. You’re helping someone produce their live event or something like that. Like what’s a mistake look like from the camera operator standpoint and how do you guys sort of cover for that in the production?

[00:40:54] Good question. So let’s take the sports world, for example. If I’m sitting in the TV truck watching all eight cameras part of the responsibility or 10 cameras, however many cameras are in there. Part of the responsibility of the camera operator is to listen to what the announcers were saying. In one ear, listen to the director and the other ear and decide what he or she is going to shoot, because ultimately we’re telling a story, right?

[00:41:20] We’re telling the story of what’s happening in the event. We’re telling the story of what the announcers are talking about. So we want to cover that with pictures and you also have to know what the other camera people are shooting. So you’re not shooting the same thing and not all 10 cameras are shooting the same image.

[00:41:38] So you have to one, come prepared, know who the players are, what their numbers are and what the storylines are. And you have to have an idea of what the announcers are going to talk about and be listening to what the announcers are talking about. So to answer your question, what does a mistake look like? You may never see the mistake that the camera operators are making because it’s covered, but we know who’s not doing what they’re supposed to be doing. If that makes.

[00:42:07] Yeah. So like, you can see it on, like, whoever’s doing the I don’t want you to call it, but the one who’s watching, all the cameras is sort of making sure that’s happening. So you’re covering for that. So what does a mistake actually look like? Is it that they’re filming the wrong thing or they’re not paying attention to what’s going on? Or is it shooting like camera exposure settings or like what kind of things are the mistakes?

[00:42:26] It’s not exposure settings. Cause that’s taken care of by somebody else. It’s they’re not shooting the right things. They’re not paying attention to what the announces are saying. Their framing is not good.

[00:42:36] If it should be, you know, chest up and their head to toe, it’s not creating movement in the shot. It’s just standing there flat shooting something, not moving off to the side and creating depth of field. It could be a number of different things. The viewer at home might never know.

[00:42:56] But the director and a lot of the TV crew would know. And that’s what makes the difference between just an okay camera person and like a really standout camera person.

[00:43:08] Yeah. So do you guys hire for that talent? Or you guys training that talent?

[00:43:16] Both HJZ Productions. We hire for the talent, but then I also have a course, a broadcast sports course where we train new people that are coming that want to get into the business on how to get into the business and how to be successful in the business.

[00:43:35] How to be a standout camera operator?

[00:43:38] And work as other positions in the business. Yeah.

[00:43:43] Absolutely. That’s really cool. I didn’t realize you guys do that as well. So I think that’s a good place to sort of get to the end of our interview.

[00:43:50] But one of the one of the last things we always cover is your guiding principles, right? And so one of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever sends them to Arkham asylum. So as we wrap up here, I want to talk about the top of one or two principles that you use regularly in your life.

[00:44:06] Maybe something you wish you’d known when you first started out on your own hero’s journey.

[00:44:11] Yeah. I trust my gut, if I don’t know what to do gut to my head, I go at my gut to see what my inner gut is telling me is the right decision, I go with it. Cause I feel like it’s never steered me wrong. I don’t think long and hard.

[00:44:26] I almost know what the right decision is. And family first there’s no event, no nothing that’s more important than being with my family.

[00:44:38] Yeah, absolutely. I like the idea of trusting your gut. I tried to do the same thing, not always great at it, but I do try that and I know on the family first thing I actually number of years ago, I was under the impression that your clients wouldn’t respect you if you told them your family came first. But like I have since discovered that that’s really what everyone wants in their own lives is to put their family first. So when I start out client relationships, I always let them know.

[00:45:01] I’m like, so you’re aware my family will always come before you.

[00:45:07] Right.

[00:45:08] And it’s never gotten me anything other than just like the utmost respect people are like, yeah, I run my life the same way and I wouldn’t expect anything less from the people I work with kind of thing. Biut I remember being afraid of that when I was a younger entrepreneur.

[00:45:20] But really understandinh, hey, these are my priorities this how it’s going to go. And you will always be a second class citizen in my life. You will be after my family.

[00:45:28] Yeah, you know, in my industry, in the sports world, most sports, especially football’s on the weekends. So I’ve missed my fair share of family events.

[00:45:39] Weddings you name it birthdays, but ultimately it comes down to being there when it really, really counts and being there for my wife and kids, when it really, really counts, I don’t want my kids to ever say, you know, daddy, miss this or my wife to say, you miss that. To me, that’s the most important thing, because you can have all the money and all the clients in the world, but if you don’t have your family, what good is that?

[00:46:07] It’s no good at all. Well, that is a wrap on our interview, but I do finish every interview with a simple challenge. I call this the heroes challenge and I do this to get access to stories that I might not otherwise find on my own because not everyone’s out doing the podcast rounds like you and I might do. So the question is simple.

[00:46:22] Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a good entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine and why do you think they should come share their story with us here on the hero show? First person that comes to mind for you?

[00:46:33] Yeah, my business associate Jamie has a great story. Absolutely.

[00:46:37] Yeah. An why do you think they should come share their story here?

[00:46:40] He got such an interesting business, his passion growing up with skiing and lived in New Jersey, New York City, most of his life, and it’s hard to, you know, you don’t own a car in a lot of these places.

[00:46:55] And he started a tour business to take people from New York city to the ski mountains and has developed like a worldwide business running these a winter tour events.

[00:47:08] Well, that’s cool. I didn’t even know that was a thing.

[00:47:11] I know I didn’t either.

[00:47:13] Yeah, that’s cool. Well, we’ll definitely reach out and see if we can get introduction. Maybe he’ll come on and say hi. We always get cool stories out of that. So thank you. And in comic books, there was always the crowd of people at the end who were cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism. So our analogous to that is where can people find you if they want to hire someone for their live events, where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak and say, hey, Howie, we could really use your help.

[00:47:35] And second to that is who are the types of people that are the best to reach out and actually ask you to hire them. I mean, them to ask you to hire, you know what I meant?

[00:47:46] Yeah. Companies or small businesses, big or small that are looking to do virtual or hybrid events that need help with the technical production, the writing, the run of show.

[00:47:57] We handle from the beginning concept to the end of the show. We can handle anything. You can reach me on LinkedIn at Howie Zales and at ViridityEntertainment.com. HowieZales.com. And we’re also on Instagram at Howie Zales.

[00:48:16] Awesome. Thank you very much for that. We’ll make sure we get the information into the show notes at the bottom of this show. I know a lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs and they run small businesses and I know that just for my audience, if you run any sort of event, the value for hiring someone like this is the end product, right? If you can get those recordings, those recordings can be such huge things for either your content marketing or for products that you can sell later. Having a well done recorded event is just such a huge benefit to your business.

[00:48:56] Yeah. And anyone listening to today’s show, if they call us saying that they heard me on the show, we offer a 10% discount on their first production. It doesn’t matter what style hybrid virtual in person.

[00:49:10] Awesome. And do you guys have like a event size that sort of like a floor or a ceiling for like what you guys do?

[00:49:16] No. We’ve had anywhere from no audience to streaming at globally to hundreds of people and streaming it globally. Everyone is different, but no.

[00:49:29] Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you very much for coming on and sharing your story with us today, Howie, I really appreciate it. Is there any final words of wisdom for my audience before I hit this stop record button?

[00:49:38] I had a blast. Thank you so much.

[00:49:41] Thanks for being here.