Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Stulac.
Alex, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
When I graduated from UMASS-Amherst I had a great exit GPA, a brand-new college diploma, but no job. I applied to a few corporate jobs, and received some interviews, but nothing panned out. After about 2 weeks of being unemployed, and broke, my mother sat me down one night on our back deck and said “You need to do something”. I spent my whole college career studying cinema, marketing, and video production and now I was broke, with no job and back at home.
Back in high school I had won the Video Production award for my graduating class, and was approached by some people from the town about small video work. As a young kid, I figured I better put a name to my service. I was getting calls, so I thought “Hey, A business name would be fun”. I came up with ICW Productions (Imagine, Create, and Watch), but until I graduated from UMASS ICW was just a hobby.
My Mother looked at me, that night back on my deck 2-weeks after my college graduation, and said “You have ICW. You can either run with it, or make it a real company, or you can go get a temporary job somewhere, until a corporate position pans out. Those are your options”. I took the ladder. The next day I cleaned off my mother’s kitchen table and started laying out what kind of services I could offer. The day after that I took all the money I had and applied for an LLC and a company bank account. I started ICW Productions with $700 and a camera.
ICW at first was all over the place. I had no business plan, no idea what I wanted to accomplish with it, but I knew I was good at a few things. 1. Making Movies 2. Telling Stories and 3. Marketing and Sales. At first I got inquiries about a lot of odd jobs. Real Estate photography, and sports video game footage were big, but after a while of shooting houses, and filming sports I knew this is not what this company was started for, so I took a step back and rebranded.
When I finally laid out what ICW Productions does, it became something so original, but so beautiful. We are a content development company for creative marketing that specializes in storytelling. We are professional storytellers and we use video and photography to tell these stories for businesses to market themselves. I found, through my research, that your story, as I am telling here, is what defines you, what people either love or hate about you. It is what makes you and your company different and original, so I took my love of cinema, reading and storytelling, combined with my marketing knowledge and set out to offer businesses creative videos and photos to help promote themselves on social media… and it worked.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road was windy, rocky, and all over the place. When I first, first, first started ICW Productions the biggest struggles were convincing people to trust a newly college graduate with thousands of dollars of their money. I was new in the business, I had no previous projects to show for it, and only my word. I was also broke. I had to take every different type of job I could for very low pay, just to get a couple bucks in the bank, so that I could afford to make business cards.
The struggle of starting a business with no startup capital is beyond impossible. That fact that I am where I am today is a miracle. But the fact that I started this company with nothing allowed me to be more cautious with company funds, and allocate them in the ways that I knew would grow this business. The place I decided to spend my money was on content. I had a new website made, I made marketing and branding assets, I made a new look surrounding my story.
The road will never be smooth in business. That’s just business for you, but today I am beyond confident in the services we offer, the quality of our services, and the way we handle business. We designed our model around fun, creativity, and kindness. All these attributes have made ICW Productions as successful as it is today.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about ICW Productions – what should we know?
We build videos and shoot photography for creative marketing for businesses. Creative marketing is an identifiable image, and thought, that people recognize when they see your logo, or your business. It is what people think of when they see your brand. This content is creative and helps tell your companies story, so that people create a positive image toward your business.
We are known highly for our focus on story structure and our creative approach which works beautifully when designing unique content for businesses. We focus primarily on 2-3 minute videos, 30 second commercials for social media, and advertising photography for products/food, website, and social media promotion. We are a creative center for all your marketing content needs. Our team works closely with our clients to clearly tell visually what separates your business from any other business in its field.
So far, I am proud of the approach we take and execution because when I look back on the videos we’ve made, the photos we’ve taken, and the great experiences we’ve had with our clients, every piece works beautifully. We just designed a system that works. It works for us to deliver great content to clients, to work well with them so that they understand the whole process, and we get to be creative.
I get a lot of potential new clients that start off skeptical about video, and unsure. But in the end when my clients see the final video in front of them their smiles make everything worth it. I feel they love these videos so much because it is a representation of their business, their pride and joy, something they created from scratch, and now they finally see its success. I love that we create videos that stand out, photos that invoke emotion, but overall, I love that we have fun.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Listening and creating friends have to be my biggest keys to success. Listening to my clients and understanding truly what they need, and want. Not everyone understands marketing, or how video and photography work, and that’s okay, but I listen, and learn, so that I can work more efficiently with my clients to develop quality videos and photos. But I also listen because I’m truly fascinated by people’s stories they have to tell. I’ve always been interested to hear where people started, and how they got to where they are. It’s quite inspiring and motivating at the same time.
My ability to create friendships comes natural to me. When I meet a new client, I never look at them like a client, I look at them as a friend. I learn about them, who they are, what they like and dislike to the point that we become friendly enough to have beers together. For me it creates a better working environment, and overall a great trust factor. I am friends with all my clients. I have met most of their families, and I’ve even been invited over for dinner. I see it as why would you want to work with complete strangers, when you can work with your friends?
Contact Info:
- Address: Milford, MA
- Website: www.icwproductions.com
- Email: info@icwproductions.com
- Instagram: @icwproductions
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icwproductions/
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/icwproductions/
Image Credit:
Chef Brendon McGlothin, Kelly Formalarie
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