IAM865 – Founder Helps Business Increase Conversion Rates

Intro  00:02

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.

Gresham Harkless  00:29

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh. For me, I am CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. As Andre on tour of bread and beyond. Andre, it's awesome having on the show.

Andre Oentoro  00:39

Hey, Chris, thank you for having me here.

Gresham Harkless  00:43

No problem. Super excited to have you on. And before we jumped in, I want to read a little bit more about Andre. So you hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Andre is the founder of brand and beyond and award winning explainer video company in milk oil 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 strategy. Andre, are you ready to speak to the imcl? community?

Andre Oentoro  01:12

Right?

Gresham Harkless  01:13

Awesome. Well, let's do it. So they kick everything off, I want to hear a little bit more on how you got started, can you take us through what I call your CEO story once you get started with a business?

Andre Oentoro  01:22

Okay. So, um, when I started putting beyond, I was I don't know if you can believe this or not, but I was about to get married. Before before that, and beyond, I was working in the construction company, I was having a quite good position there as a general manager. And basically, I run almost all aspect of the company, but I just feel that it's not my calling. And I always thought that as a man, when I am about to start a new family, I need to provide a good living from 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 fine. But after I am sure about what to do, I tend to have my resignation. And then I found that this business awesome,

Gresham Harkless  02:37

yeah, that definitely makes sense. And you know, wanting to be able to kind of, you know, provide, you know, for the people, you know, that we love, and we care about things 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 loved ones you love and care about that a lot of times brings it home. So why we do exactly what we do.

Andre Oentoro  03:00

Totally. And when I stepped foot and beyond, I believe that in every aspect of the business, it has to be beautiful, it has to look good. And when I started this, I know that there are many, many small businesses in the world, not not just in the US, but in the world. And all of them need to make sure that they have a good looking appearances on every aspect of their business from websites, website, name cards, proposals, everything. And then we found a way to add and beyond I sorry, I forgot to put and beyond as a graphic design company. And of the few months ago, we kind of transform ourselves into an explainer video company, because it seems that the demand was better. And I can help my customers better when doing that.

Gresham Harkless  04:16

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And and it's great to hear how you've been able to make that pivot because I feel like explainer videos have been actually literally 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 that 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?

Andre Oentoro  04:41

Sure. So an explainer video is just short, a one to two minutes video that explained about a business or product or service to the viewers. Basically, it's just a short show and 12 videos, where the video will show a problem and then the solution it can be commercialize, just like an advertisement. Or sometimes it's just a quick show of the product and the pricing. But the main goal of an explainer video is to explain about things. So when we started to do this, it was actually, by the help of one of our clients, he owns a marketing company in Boulder, Colorado. And then at that time, it was 2009. There's not a lot of companies that can do this type of animation, because it was still only when I think it was Dropbox that started with this kind of hype with animated video. That was in 2008. And then, I think we are quite fortunate to have ourselves started in 2009, with this kind of videos, because we are fighting to Lightwave. Yeah,

Gresham Harkless  06:07

yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I think as you said, and I love how you talked about one of the ways by which people are wanting 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 provides 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 that 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 the product that they were providing.

Andre Oentoro  06:42

Yeah, exactly. And it's not just business kind of organisations also need that this kind of videos, we've even done several videos for safety proposed before you enter a construction site for an example. So it's just typical, where your safety head where your safety shoes and so on. But it's still short videos that explain about things. And it's easy to watch.

Gresham Harkless  07:10

Yeah, absolutely. Cuz typically, they have, you know, graphics, and it makes it a lot more engaging, I think to have and probably a lot less, I guess, you don't have to get like the actors and all the people in 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, too? Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Andre Oentoro  07:28

Sure. So it milk will be produced infographics, the kind of tall infographics that you can see in blogs or publications like Mashable and opentable.com, and so on. So these infographics are good for marketing, and especially SEO, before we started this company, me and my partner, we don't know that infographic may leads 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 really helpful with SEO because it helps you to attract backlinks to the website. That's mainly it.

Gresham Harkless  08:21

Yeah, absolutely. It's so funny because we get so many kind of infographics that people are sending to us on for the blog, just because it's a way as you said for for backlinks, but it also provides a lot of really valuable information typically about a specific topic and a very nice, you know, looking way because you get again, like we were talking about with explainer video, you get to communicate that information, but do it in a very 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, has those SEO benefits.

Andre Oentoro  08:53

Yes, absolutely. Because on the internet attentions. Our attention span is study says that it's shorter than eight seconds. So we have to make sure that everything that we do everything that we have, is getting the right attraction.

Gresham Harkless  09:11

Yeah, absolutely. 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 combination of both. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

Andre Oentoro  09:31

And beyond? I think what makes us unique is 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. Sometimes a series of explainer videos, when they are hiring someone in the States, it can be devastating for them, because sometimes it can go up to 10 k of 15 k 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 be can put us good enough surface that they're proud of with just a fraction of that budget. And we believe when we are helping startup companies in their early age, when they're just starting up, they will eventually grow and help us into it. By giving us more,

Gresham Harkless  10:54

I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and tap into some of that expertise that you have. So I wanted to ask you for what I call a SEO hack. So this might be like an app or a book or a habit that you have. But what's something you think makes you more effective and efficient? I like to go with books and habit. I have several favorite books, but some of them are well known, like, for hours, work week and so on. From Wait, wait,

Andre Oentoro  11:20

let let me just take a look at my Goodreads because I kept all of my books here. The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Tim Ferriss 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 get this book, actually, it's because I'm a parent, I have three 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 person, because when we are doing our business, we are talking to many types of people, including our employees, including our employers, clients, customers, suppliers, everyone,

Gresham Harkless  12:33

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 happen to a time machine might tell you younger business. So

Andre Oentoro  12:45

if I have a piece of advice that I'm I want to tell my myself 10 years back, I would say network network network, because building a good network of friends, and building good business relationship 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 was thinking that building business means that we have to build system, we have to make sure that everything is in place, we have to have a 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 network, make 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, is it's really cold. And so if there's one thing that I would say to my to myself, 10 years back, it's networking.

Gresham Harkless  14:06

I love that nugget. And I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO, Robin are different, quote unquote, CEOs on this show. So 100 was made of CEO means

Andre Oentoro  14:17

as a CEO, I always see myself as someone who listen, when I talk to my employee, ask them what they think. And I listen, when I felt with my customers, I asked them, How can I improve of service? How can I improve? How can I give them more value for most of this and I listened.

Gresham Harkless  14:43

Andre truly appreciate that definition. And I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is 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 ahold of you and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

Andre Oentoro  14:58

Right now. I'm going to But my business is poor and beyond and Bill quill. And I believe that with a with an explainer video, you can really tell about your service or your product to your customers. And it can be in any aspect of the business, it can even be just a tutorial of training for your employees and safety training for employees and visitors to construction site. And any aspect of explainer videos that has has not been untapped. And I would love to help you if you think you will get one. So the best way to reach out to us is to our website for nba.com or milkweed. calm. And if you want to get in touch with me personally, I think the best way is to go to LinkedIn and find me the answer at LinkedIn.

Gresham Harkless  15:59

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 day.

Outro  16:22

Thank you for listening to the IMC o podcast powered by Blue 16 Media Tune in next time and visit us at I am ceo.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@www.sceeto.co This has been the mF CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening