Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Mogill.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I’m a European-Jewish immigrant. When I was four, I immigrated to America with my family—my parents, my grandparents, and my younger brother. When we arrived, we had $500 to our name, little command of the language, and no other family to help us get started with our new lives.
By the time I’d finished college years later, my life was at a crossroads. I’d scored well on the MCATs and had been accepted into a few medical schools. But after spending over a hundred hours shadowing doctors and seeing what their day-to-day jobs were like, I decided that profession wasn’t for me. Now, I have the utmost respect for doctors, but the amount of politics and bureaucracy they have to deal with just didn’t gel with my entrepreneurial spirit.
Essentially, I was always an entrepreneur at heart. When I was thirteen, I worked out of my living room running my first business, a web design company. I’ll never forget how funny it was watching my mom letting my much older clients in the front door. As an adult, this drive led me first to do some marketing work for an events company and then to an important role in a fledgling streaming-music business.
Eventually, I found the perfect balance between both my entrepreneurial side and the creative elements of my life that were near and dear to me, and I started a video marketing company.
Crisp had found some success in our early years producing video content for some major brands, but because we hadn’t defined our ideal clients, we were having trouble differentiating.
However, after working with an attorney passionate about her craft but struggling to get the phone to ring, I saw a wide-open market with a lot of passion and a pressing need, so I decided to pivot our business to focus on helping attorneys like her. We now almost exclusively focus on providing video and marketing services to law firm owners.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The experience I had during my first year in business is an experience I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. It certainly wasn’t glamorous – I had no money, no clients, and no team. Which makes sense, because it’s hard to hire people when you have no money, and it’s hard to find clients when you have no team. I also built my business from the ground up, so I had no loans to fall back on. But, I put in the work and I kept going.
I never want to live in a world where I regret not becoming the person I could have become if I had kept pushing forward.
So, I did just that — but it wasn’t without its challenges. Some of the biggest challenges have included:
– Pouring all of my time, energy, and resources into trying to close just one client to keep the doors open (in the very early years) and never hearing from them again.
– Generating awareness for the brand (I used to go to every possible networking event I could find to meet people).
– Learning the hard way that if something isn’t measured, it doesn’t get improved.
– Investing in marketing or development efforts that don’t pan out.
Basically, most of Crisp’s big successes came from an idea that we had no formal plan to execute upon, but we figured it out as we went along. It’s required scrappiness, resourcefulness, and hustle.
Please tell us about Crisp Video Group.
Crisp Video provides video production and marketing using a method we’ve developed for telling a law firm’s story in a way that creates an emotional appeal while sharing what separates them from a sea of competitors. We provide premium legal video marketing for attorneys and law firms that simply want the best.
Our company has grown 1,158% in the last three years, landing us on the Inc. 500 after previously being honored on the Inc. 5000.
It’s hard to say what I’m most proud of, but if I had to choose, I would say I’m proud that Crisp is able to deliver a superior product that delivers tangible ROI for our clients. Not only that, but the product we create elevates their law firm, which elevates the industry as a whole by pushing their colleagues and competitors to strive for similar results. In a rather roundabout way, our goal is to ensure that consumers are able to choose the best attorney for their legal needs by creating a product that helps them make that decision.
Oh, and one big thing: we practice what we preach. So, we don’t offer a single product or service to our clients that we haven’t implemented in Crisp’s own marketing efforts.
Contact Info:
- Address: 2282 Defoor Hills Rd NW
Suite 150
Atlanta, GA 30318 - Website: www.crispvideo.com
- Phone: (404) 267-9240
- Email: hello@crispvideo.com
- Instagram: @crispvideo
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/crispvideogroup
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CrispVideoGroup
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/crisp-video-atlanta-3?osq=crisp+video+group
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