How a small wooden box changed my life

When I was a little kid in elementary school, I used to travel every summer break to my grandparents’ house where I would spend a few weeks with them.

My grandfather owned a machine shop. Waking up at 6:30AM every morning, I spent my days with him at the workshop. In the beginning, I just hung around in the backyard playing with the junk and building imaginary things.

Then, when I was in 3rd grade, I remember going into his office and telling him that I wanted to build a wooden box.

“Great,” he replied. “Here’s a piece of paper and a pencil. Draw your box here. What size do you want it to be?”

I replied, “I know exactly what I want to build. It’s in my head, no need for a drawing.”

He looked at me for a second or two and said, “Okay, come along…”

We stepped into the workshop, where he gave me a small board of plywood and said, “Here it is, go ahead…” And on the way out, he asked one of the workers to keep an eye on me.

Knowing how to work basic carpentry tools, I took a ruler, a saw, and a file and I started eagerly to create the box as I had imagined it. I drew six equally-sized squares on the plyboard, cut and trimmed them, and after three days of hard work, when trying to put them together, I found that they didn’t fit!

You see, in theory, when thinking of a cube, you know it has six identical, perfectly-sized sides. But when you build a cube-shaped box, one needs to consider the wall thickness of the plywood, so in fact there are three different pairs of walls in the same size that need to be cut.

When I came back to my grandpa’s office with the wasted materials, he looked at me, smiled, and said, “The paper and pencil are still here, waiting for you…” He helped me to create a drawing with the right dimensions. And a few days later, what a beautiful box it turned out to be.

Without realizing it, I had learned two important lessons for life:

1. You must have a plan to successfully complete a project.

2. If you are going to do something, do it right!

In the following years, I always looked forward to my summer breaks to complete yet another crafted project. And many years later, working for NASDAQ-traded firms, I would find myself implementing the same principles I had observed on the old workshop floor.

Before I started my own business, a video production company, I talked with my marketeers friends and colleagues, trying to better understand their pain points in making testimonial videos for their tech companies.

While they all recognized the importance of authentic Social Proof and having customer testimonials in their video marketing strategies, many of them expressed the notion that producing such videos is a huge hassle.

They would budget for it in their annual marketing plans, but invariably would push it down in their task lists and often move it over to next year’s plans — or just forget all about it.

Knowing the importance of such a powerful marketing tool, but never getting to the point of producing it, is a paradox. Why does it happen? Because it is not just another task you mark off on your ‘to-do’ list, this is a project!

It is a project, because you need to convince your best customers to take part in a testimonial video.

It is a project, because you need to define the objective of the video: Who is it for? And what is it for? Determine the key messages, write a brief, and come up with interview questions.

It is a project, because you need to find a trusted and customer-friendly videographer to shoot the interview. In many cases, your customers are located in a different country, maybe speaking a different language.

It is a project, because you need to coach your busy customer on the whole process and coordinate a filming day.

When you do finally get the interview footage, you’ll need to hire a video editor to edit it. Have several revisions and go through it with internal focus groups until you get the final cut of the video that is just right.

Finally, you’ll need to create a campaign to effectively release the new testimonial video aimed at your specific target audience.

Yep, if you made it to this point, surely you can relate to the frustration felt by marketers when producing such videos.

It helps if the production process is handled like a real project with a solid plan, timelines, resources, assignments, and critical path. After defining the objective of a video, determining a deadline in the sort of outreach campaign, a launch of a new website, or any other event, is super important.

Going through a Gantt (e.g., using Monday.com) on the critical path and focusing on the friction points, like?convincing your customer?to take part or getting consent for the video theme, will elevate your production success and experience, big time!

Want to create inspiring testimonial videos? We at?ViDiMONi?can help!