IAM865 – Founder Helps Businesses Increase Conversion Rates

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00:02 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:29 -Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresham from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Andre Oentoro of Bread and Beyond. Andre, it's awesome to have you on the show.

00:39 – Andre Oentoro

Hey Gresham, thank you for having me here.

00:43 – Gresham Harkless

No problem. Super excited to have you on. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Andre. So you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Andre is the founder of Bread and Beyond an award-winning explainer video company in Milk Whale and an infographic production company that has been trusted by many Internet publishers. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos and other Digital marketing strategies. Andre, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:12 – Andre Oentoro

Right.

01:13 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, Let's do it. So to kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more about how you got started. Could you take us through what I call your CEO story and when you get started with the business?

01:24 – Andre Oentoro

Okay. So when I started Bread and Beyond, I was, I don't know if you can believe this or not, but I was about to get married. So, before Bread and Beyond, I was working in a construction company. I had a quite good position there as a general manager. And basically, I run almost all aspects of the company, but I just feel that it's not my calling. I always thought that As a man, when I am about to start a new family, I need to provide a good living for my family and I have to have my own business because I want to make sure that everything goes well as planned. Maybe that's just why. But after I was sure about what to do, I tendered my resignation, and then I founded this business.

02:37 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Yeah, that definitely makes sense and you know want to be able to kind of, you know, provide you know for the people, you know that we love and we care about I think so many times that we forget about I used to say that human aspect of business and why we do what we do. And I think that when you understand that, you understand wanting to obviously, you know, provide a better life for yourself, but also for the ones you love and care about that, a lot of times brings it home to why we do exactly what we do.

03:00 – Andre Oentoro

Totally. When I started Bread and Beyond, I believed that every aspect of the business has to be beautiful, it has to look good. And when I start this, I know that there are many, many small businesses in the world. Not just in the US, but in the world. All of them need to make sure that they have good-looking appearances on every aspect of their business from website, name cards, proposals, everything. And then we founded Bread and Beyond, sorry, I founded Bread and Beyond as a graphic design company. After a few months, we kind of transformed ourselves into an explainer video company because it seemed that the demand was better and I could help my customers better when doing that.

04:16 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense and it's great to hear how you've been able to make that pivot because I feel like explainer videos have been actually really huge and being able to kind of communicate to potential clients and customers exactly what these businesses do. So I know obviously you do that for people who may not know as much about exactly what explainer videos are, could you take us through a little bit more about that and how exactly you go through that process with your clients?

04:41 – Andre Oentoro

Sure. So an explainer video is a short 1-2 minute video that explains a business product or service to the viewers. Basically, it's just a short show-and-tell video where the video will show a problem and then the solution. It can be more commercialized just like an advertisement or sometimes it's just a quick show of the product and the pricing. But the main goal of an explanatory video is to explain things. So when we started to do this, it was actually with the help of one of our clients.

He owns a marketing company in Boulder, Colorado. And then at that time, it was 2009, there were not a lot of companies that could do this type of animation because it was still early when I think it was Dropbox that started this kind of hype with an animated video that was in 2008. And then I think we are quite fortunate to have ourselves started in 2009 with this kind of video because we are riding the right wave.

06:07 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I think that as you said, and I love how you talked about one of the ways by which people are one of the basis, I guess, our foundation of why people create explainer videos is basically to show, you know, a problem that people have and to be able to show typically how their product and services provide that solution that, you know, people are looking for and some of the great, like I think the very first explainer video I saw was from Dropbox, I believe. And it talked about how that was, how they really talked about what it is that they were doing so that they can communicate to clients on how important it was, the service that they were providing, and the product that they were providing.

06:42 – Andre Oentoro

Yeah, exactly. And It's not just business kind of organizations also need this kind of video. We've even done several videos for safety purposes before you enter a construction site, for example. So it's just typical where your safety hat, where your safety shoes and so on. But it's still short videos that explain things and it's easy to watch.

07:11 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Because typically they have, you know, graphics and it makes it a lot more engaging. I think too, I mean, probably a lot less. I guess you don't have to get like the actors and all the people and the scripts and things like that to be able to make that happen and so you also do you have an infographic production company as well to talk a little bit more about that.

07:29 – Andre Oentoro

Sure. So at Milkwell, we produce infographics, the kind of tall infographics that you can see in blogs or publications like measurable and so forth, and so on. So these infographics are good for marketing and especially SEO. Before we started this company and my partner, we didn't know that infographics may lead us to get a lot of SEO-related clients. But after a while, we found out that that was the best market to have some sort of product market fit with us. It's really helpful with SEO because it helps you to attract backlinks to your website. That's mainly it.

08:21 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. It's so funny because we get so many kinds of infographics that people are sending to us for the blog, just because it's a way, as you said, for backlinks, but it also provides a lot of really valuable information, typically about a specific topic in a very nice looking way because you get, again, like we were talking about with the explainer video, you get to communicate that information, but do it in a very, I guess, engaging and exciting way to some degree so that it allows people to not only see it but also to take in the valuable information that they provide. And of course, like you mentioned, it has those SEO benefits.

08:53 – Andre Oentoro

Yes, absolutely. Because on the internet, our attention span is, study says that it's shorter than 8 seconds. So we have to make sure that everything that we do, everything that we have. Is getting the right traction.

09:12 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Especially because of those attention spans, which I only see as decreasing more and more. So you have to make sure that you're being as engaging as possible. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce. And this could be for you personally or your businesses or a combination of both. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

09:30 – Andre Oentoro

At Bread and Beyond, I think what makes us unique is our current geographical location here in Indonesia, because we believe that we can serve people better if we can provide them the right pricing and value mix. So most of our clients are startups and small businesses. They don't have a lot of budget, but they really need an explainer video. So sometimes a series of explainer videos. When they're hiring someone in the States, it can be devastating for them because sometimes it can go up to 10k or 15k per minute. And it's quite heavy if you are bootstrapping your startups. But due to our geographical location, we are able to provide much less than that. And we can produce good enough service that they're proud of with just a fraction of that budget. We believe when we help startup companies at an early age when they're just starting up, they will eventually grow and help us in return by giving us more.

10:54 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and it's happened to some of that expertise that you have. So I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this might be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something you think makes you more effective and efficient?

11:08 – Andre Oentoro

I like to go with books and habits. I have several favorite books, but some of them are well-known, like for hours work week and so on. From, wait, let me just take a look at my Goodreads because I kept all of my books here before our work week Tim Ferris is obviously one of my favorites here but let me just share one book that I think not all of you know. And this one, they really helped me in a way, although it's not a business book. So it's called,' How to Talk So Kids Will Listen' and “‘How to Listen So Kids Will Talk' by Adele Faber. When I got this book, actually it was because I'm a parent.

I have 3 kids at home and I need to know about kids' psychology. In this book, there are so many good chunks of tips and tricks about how to listen and how to talk to people. It's not just for kids. I think this book is really good for business people because when we are doing business, we are talking to many types of people, including our employees, our employers, clients, customer suppliers, everyone.

12:32 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

12:45 – Andre Oentoro

If I have a piece of advice that I want to tell myself 10 years back, I would say network, network, network. Building a good network of friends and building good business relationships with more people is the best thing that you can invest your time. Right now, I have to say that I might start a little bit late with networking. Earlier, I thought that building a business meant that we had to build a system. We have to make sure that everything is in place. We have to have product mastery. We need to understand how we can develop our product, make sure that our surface is top-notch, and so on. But building a network, making sure that we know a lot of people, we help a lot of people, we create a good business relationship with suppliers, customers, and everyone else is it's really golden. So if there's one thing that I would say to myself 10 years ago, it's networking.

14:06 – Gresham Harkless

I love that nugget. I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're all going to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show, so Andre, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:17 – Andre Oentoro

As a CEO, I always see myself as someone who listens. When I talk to my employees, I ask them what they think, and I listen. When I talk with my customers, I ask them, how can improve our service. How can I improve or how can I give them more value from our service? And I listen.

14:43 – Gresham Harkless

Andre, truly appreciate that definition. And I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic so to speak just to see if there's anything additional you collect our readers and listeners know and of course how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

14:58 – Andre Oentoro

Right now I'm growing both my business's bread and beyond and milk well and I believe that with an explainer video, you can really tell about your service or your product to your customers. It can be in any aspect of the business. It can even be just a tutorial or training for your employees and safety training for employees and visitors to the construction site. And many aspects of Xplender videos have not been untabbed. And I would love to help you if you think you will need one. So the best way to reach out to us is to our website, ednbjorn.com, or milkwheel.com. And if you want to get in touch with me personally, I think the best way is to go to LinkedIn and find me there under LinkedIn.

15:59 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Well, I appreciate that. Andre, We will have the links and information in the show notes just so that everybody can follow up with you and find out about all those things you're doing. But I appreciate the work that you're doing, helping people to communicate exactly what they do to solve problems or explain how to do certain things in such a succinct, careful, and really valuable way. So I appreciate you for doing that work and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of

16:22 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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