IAM1047- CEO Connects Brands to Photographers and Videographers

Philipp is the founder and CEO of cherrydeck.com, a marketplace for brands that need to find experienced photographers and videographers. Clients include companies like Google, Adobe, and Four Seasons Hotels but also small brands around the world. His team is based in Hamburg, Berlin (Germany), and Ljubljana (Slovenia). Philipp has over 10 years of experience in investor-backed startups and as a founder.

• CEO Hack: Hiring new people using a unique questionnaire
• CEO Nugget: Make decisions based on the ‘me now' vs ‘me tomorrow'
• CEO Defined: Personal freedom

Website: http://www.cherrydeck.com/

Instagram: instagram.com/cherrydeck

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Transcription

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00:15 – 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.

00:42 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Philip Baumgarten from cherrydeck.com. Philip, it's great to have you on the show.

00:51 – Philipp Baumgaertel

Thank you, Gresh. Thanks for inviting me. Happy to be here.

00:54 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely super excited to have you on as well. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Philip so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Philip is the founder and CEO of cherrydeck.com, a marketplace for brands that need to find experienced photographers and videographers. Clients include companies like Google, Adobe, and 4 Seasons Hotels, but also small brands around the world. His team is based in Hamburg, Berlin, and Slovenia. Philip has over 10 years of experience as an investor-backed startup and as a founder. Philip, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:26 – Philipp Baumgaertel

Absolutely, I'm excited. And yeah, I have to say it again, I'm excited to be here.

01:32 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I'm super excited to have you on. So let's get into it. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:43 – Philipp Baumgaertel

Okay. Well, when I was younger, I wanted to be a doctor because my dad's a doctor, a surgeon, a trauma surgeon. And I always thought like, okay, being a surgeon, you know, that's my destiny and everything. And then I, in Germany, you have a thing called Abitur, which is kind of like when you graduate the high school. And I realized my grades weren't that good. So, if you want to study medicine in Germany, you have to have really, really good grades. So I thought, okay, if I want to study now, I will have to wait for like 5 or 6 years until I can start studying because you know, move down, move up the ranks with time.

So, you know, I thought what else can I do? So I did an internship in a sports marketing agency and another internship in a textile company and I figured out, okay, you know, the business thing, you know, something I like to do. So I started studying business in Austria, which is in Innsbruck, Austria, it's a small city. And I was skiing and snowboarding a lot. And 1 day I wanted to go to a resort to go snowboarding because it was a great day for snowboarding and the car was full. So I didn't have a car myself, my friend had a car, it was full. And I thought like, okay, well, you know, isn't there like a platform where I could hitch a ride to a skiing resort?

So this was 2010 and there was no platform. So what I did, I just grabbed a bunch of friends and said, like, let's build this platform. So this is what we did and after 4 or 6 weeks, we had like a little prototype, and we, you know, Back then you would still get really huge organic reach on Facebook and stuff. And so we posted this idea and a lot of people started using it. And we got really good feedback. TV station came and said like, hey, you know. And this really made me confident in this, you know, doing my own thing, you know, developing my own ideas. And then I did another thing called Career Club.

I did it with 2 other guys. It was basically a site where we would offer big companies recruiting options at our high school, because in all states like this, there's like this 1 big city, it's Vienna. And this is where all the companies go to recruit people for a city like Innsbruck, which is significantly smaller. They don't go recruiting there because so small so I told them like okay I will give you 10 or 20 really really good students at the dinner table you know with their CVs and you can have dinner with them and connect with them if you give me like 5 000 euros and they said like yeah cool and there was it was that was an also like a really, you know, awesome idea I could, you know, put to put to work.

And, and then I did an internship at Lufthansa Airlines. And this was the complete opposite experience. I mean, I love the airline experience and I love the product and everything, but it was like really stiff and, and lots of hierarchies. I couldn't really do stuff as an intern there. So I said, okay, I cannot go into the big company. So, and this is how I got moving in this industry. And yeah, eventually ended up here at Cheradek, which a company I founded 3 and a half years ago with a couple of other successful entrepreneurs and yeah, that's where I am.

05:00 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate, you know, hearing kind of the journey. I think so many times we see like, you know, whatever a CEO or a founder is working on at that time, we don't really see kind of like the process you go to kind of get there. But it kind of sounds like you're really big on, you know, connecting it sounds like and being able to kind of bridge the gap between 2 different things. I kind of hear that in a lot of the startups you had before.

05:22 – Philipp Baumgaertel

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is also what Charitec is about, you know, it's a marketplace. And so we connect businesses with freelancers basically. So photographers and videographers, and we have users in over 110 countries. So it's a pretty connecting type of business and obviously we're not, you know, where we want to be at. We always want to be bigger, better, you know, get faster and everything. But this is at the core. What we do is actually, yeah, helping those people on our platform win clients.

05:52 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And so could you take me through how it works and when people go to the site exactly like how they navigate and what they will find there?

06:00 – Philipp Baumgaertel

So if you're a brand, you can sign up. So you get a charity account, and you sign up for an account. And what you can do is you can, we have a search tool where we can search a database of talent basically. And this talent is, they're on the other side, they can sign up to our account, on the other side of the marketplace and they've been vetted by us and by, partly by us and partly by the algorithm to see if they, you know, what type of category they fall into because there's different needs for different companies. You know, some companies need, you know, the best of the best global talent and they, you know, they can pay for it.

They can pay them like 5 to $6, 000 a day. Why, where there are other companies, you know, like small startups, they cannot pay that much. So they can maybe pay like 500 bucks. So they need different types of people. So we group them into these different groups. And yeah, so companies can search for those people, or they can post to a job board. We can say like, hey, I'm looking for some campaign. And if they use a job board, the applications come into them and we pre-screen them for them. So we kind of make sure that it's easy for them and it's fast and it's convenient. And yeah, they pay us a fee for that.

07:14 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I appreciate you breaking that down because it almost feels like you're creating like a, you know, I think so many times in business we get caught in like, okay, I want to win and forget about everybody else winning. But it sounds like you have that synergistic kind of opportunity where there's like win, win, win, win, win, you know, all across the board because the, you know, the people that are looking for those opportunities, the photographers, videographers, for example, get those opportunities to kind of showcase their work and to get more work. And then the brands that are looking for that talent and those people get that opportunity to kind of find them a lot easier too.

07:43 – Philipp Baumgaertel

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at the end of the day, if our users win, we win. If we create a product that is good for them to use, and it's successful, you know, helps them have more success, be more successful, get more jobs or whatever, and helps the brands, you know, find the best talent, you know, this is something you can charge for, you know, this is how we got to win. So that's, that's, yeah, it's also a win for us. Absolutely.

08:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And do you feel like, your background and experience that you had, you know, prior to this has kind of, you know, set the stage for you to be able to kind of build this and kind of even see the idea of it?

08:17 – Philipp Baumgaertel

I mean before I was doing this I was a CEO in a company called Light Boys. The company actually went bankrupt but in that company we were looking for talent ourselves all the time so it was a we were doing like art and commercial installations for big clients across the, across the globe for, you know, companies like Sophie Terrible, whatever. And 1 of my jobs was obviously always finding, you know, the right people to work with especially designers and photographers. So, when I had this job, I was going to Instagram because Instagram is such a great portfolio tool but it's not easy to search on Instagram.

So I thought, why can't I have like a, know Instagram portfolio with the Google search power? So this is basically what we try to build at Charitex. So in the beginning, it was actually something we promoted as Yellow Pages or Google for Instagram. This is what it was in the beginning. Obviously now it's much more, but This is the beachhead we had to start.

09:19 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, no, I love how a lot of times we don't realize that innovations happen when you're able to kind of merge 2 different worlds, quote-unquote, together. So I love that kind of Instagram with the Google search and be able to marry those 2 together so that you have, you know, everything you're building in Cherry Deck.

09:34 – Philipp Baumgaertel

Absolutely, absolutely. I fully agree.

09:37 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. So I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce, which you might've already touched on. This could be for yourself personally or the business or a combination of both, but what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

09:48 – Philipp Baumgaertel

You know, making my people succeed or helping my people succeed. So my employees also believe in them. So a lot of my employees, they're like junior talent and they started as an intern themselves. And for example, my CMO today, she started as an intern, you know, and what I do, what I try to do is to give them as much responsibility as I can and to push them pretty hard into this responsibility because if I see obviously that they're or if I think they're capable of getting it done and if I see they're intelligent and they like to learn and they're motivated and everything that I know they can do it.

10:34 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Well, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple Book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:45 – Philipp Baumgaertel

It's basically something I do when I hire new people. I send them a questionnaire. It's like 20, or 25 questions. And they're pretty personal. So in Germany, the market or the laws for what you are allowed to ask in an interview. They're sometimes strict. So for example, you're not allowed to ask, are you pregnant or you wanna become pregnant? And the questions I'm asking, they're very personal. They're like, okay, when was the last time you had to cry And why was that? And when are you going to quit?

And all these kinds of questions are, when was the last time you were so overwhelmed with something or super happy or this kind of questions? And I ask people before they have their first day in our company, you know, to return this to me. And at the same time, I give them like a 1 page, you know, a letter about me, where they learn about me, how I am. For example, you know, it's gonna say something like, I'm very loud, you know, I'm not screaming, I'm just a loud person. When I entered, I slammed the door loudly and I put down my jacket loudly and stuff like that.

And I'm also going to say something, there's also going to say something like, hey, I'm going to might call you on a Saturday or Sunday just because my head is in the clouds and I forgot that you're an employee and you don't have to pick it up actually, but I might forget that I shouldn't call you on the weekend. And so this is how we get to know each other. And it gives the employee a little bit of an intimate moment with me, which builds trust. And I get to know by the questions they answer, what is important to them.

12:26 – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that. And I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be 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.

12:38 – Philipp Baumgaertel

I have a, I mean, I can't always follow it, but I have this idea that I might set, there's a, there's a, there's, there's me now, and there's a version of myself tomorrow. And every day we have decisions to make if we want to, you know, make the the me of now happy or the me of tomorrow, For example, do I want to go work out? Right now I might say like, ah, you know, I'm not going to work out. I'm going to have a pizza or something, or I'm going to watch a movie. And it goes at the expense of me tomorrow. And me tomorrow would say like, yeah, man, go work out, then it's done, you know, then I don't have to do it tomorrow.

And I think a lot of good decisions, you can ask yourself this kind of question, you know, do you want to make the me of now happy or the me of tomorrow And tomorrow doesn't have to be tomorrow. It could also be me like in a year or so, the future me. And I think a lot of those, yeah, a lot of questions you can ask yourself come down to this question, or a lot of decisions come down to this question.

13:45 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Well, now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Philip, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:54 – Philipp Baumgaertel

I think the possibility of personal freedom. I think everybody in law or not everybody, but a lot of people in life, strive for financial independence and they also strive for personal pleasure. They strive for security and belonging and all those things. And I found for myself for this stuff, I need this, not necessarily being a CEO, but being self, sometimes also being self-employed would be the same thing as I can make decisions on my own terms and I don't have to, I can do what I think is best.

14:30 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Well, Philip, truly appreciate that definition and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let 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 and your team are working on.

14:46 – Philipp Baumgaertel

Well, first of all, if you want to get in touch, just drop me an email, Philip at charity.com. You can check the website, share.com, find me on LinkedIn, you know, all that's all the places people go to Instagram. Yeah, I think everybody who would like to be a CEO or founder or entrepreneur just go out and do it and it doesn't have to be the biggest thing. I mean, I started with this super small idea of ride-sharing for skiers, which was maybe, I don't know, a market of 5, 000 people in total, you know, which is not a lot, but it was a lot of fun. And you know, you get to learn the basic concept of building something that people want. And I think this is the most important thing. So yeah, that's all I have to say.

15:33 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, we'll definitely have the links and information in the show notes. I love that last point that you spoke about. And that's why I appreciate you for telling your story and talking about the steps of the process. Cause I think again, so many times people will just see Cherry Deck and they don't see what you learned from with the ride-sharing company and being able to kind of take those steps and learn all of those things that I'm sure helped you out with Cherry Deck and all the awesome things you'll build now and

15:55 – Gresham Harkless

in the future as well too. So truly appreciate you for giving us all that information, and taking some time out today I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:02 – 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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