welp here we go again…
After a long seven-month break, we needed to escape the brutal upstate NY winter and head back down to fix our tans. With a lineup of shoots ready to go, we booked our tickets and were promptly on our way to palm trees and sunshine. Here’s a quick breakdown of our trip, including what we were able to successfully apply from lessons learned on previous trips and new challenges we faced this time around. At the end of the day, we were able to capture a ton of content, expand our network, and become familiar with yet another region of the sunny state.
Our goal for this trip
Right, so if you’ve been following along over the past year of these trips, you’ll know that we were a bit naive at first going into these kinds of things. Between our expected budgets, various issues with transportation, and overall understanding of the place we were headed, making it out of our first trip was a miracle. This time, however, we went in with a game plan; focus on setting AS MANY shoots as possible over the course of 7 days while spending far less time doing “vacationy” things. To do this, we spent much more time cold-messaging as many car owners as possible, as well as businesses. With this trip being the first official one as our media agency, we wanted to continue to expand our portfolio by offering content shoots with local businesses. Finally, we wanted to spend more time in a region of Florida we hadn’t spent more than a week or so in… Tampa.
Immediate impressions
If there’s one thing that we learned on this trip, Tampa is nothing like Orlando. Landing in Tampa, we found it to be much more densely populated, which has both positives and negatives. On the one hand, this meant insane traffic and long travel times. On the other hand, there were thousands of potential businesses we could approach. On par with every single other trip we took, the first three days were rough. Hours spent driving around pitching businesses, following up constantly, and sitting around our AirBNB wondering when the actual content production part would happen. While we made a few connections and met up with a couple of good friends in the area, nothing seemed to be coming to fruition. So we made an executive decision: expand our outreach to Orlando. After all, Orlando is only a 90-minute drive. And immediately, within 24 hours, it seemed like the direction of our trip flipped.
With a number of previous and new contacts scheduled to shoot (thanks to our aggressive cold outreach), we were able to secure 9 shoots (yes, within a few hours) over the course of the next 4 days. We packed our bags again for the weekend and made the trip out to the middle of the state to start working.
There’s nothing like starting with our good friends from last time (@jamalpha, @5.0shorty, @devontecenat, @_liliana.z) and grabbing dinner. Here was a moment from the trip that stuck out to me: throughout the entire dinner, there was one main topic that was discussed by everyone—social media content strategy.
It stuck out to me because it affirms the idea that the environment and “tribe” you surround yourself with has a massive impact on yourself and the things that become a priority to you. Instead of having some conversation about current events, or gossip, or the weather, we were sitting down discussing what our content creation plans were for the new year—what formats we were expanding into, and what type of content we wanted our brands to be associated with.
It’s the kind of thing you dream of having as a full-time creative.
Onto the next day
After shooting deep into the night, we parked up and spent the night in the car. The next morning, we recharged at a local Starbucks, edited a few previews from the night before, then headed right back over to our location for our first shoot of the day around 10 AM.
After meeting with @m2nocomp, we spent the next few hours putting together videos and photos of his father’s San Marino Blue BMW G80 and grabbing some rollers. (We also took on a side quest for 30 minutes on the freeway recovering @leculte.co’s filters after some hurricane-grade winds took them right off their magnetic connector, thankfully there was zero damage to the filters.)
With our first shoot done, we refilled the car and headed to our next shoot with @mrexotics’ red Lamborghini Urus. We executed the same process, capturing content at a few different spots throughout our designated location, and finished out another successful shoot.
The last stretch
As we entered the last few days of our trip in Florida, we spent most of our days shooting for a few local businesses, namely One Exotics Tampa, Island Shines Mobile Detailing, and Shortwave Coffee. These shoots were interrupted by another day trip to Orlando, where we met with previous contacts again (@thetruthauto, @0il.money, @arabian.papii, and @ang.jefe) for another three shoots late into the night.
It became a game of prep, execute, offload, and repeat—but it’s what we had hoped for going in. While most people travel to take in the area or perhaps enjoy the destination, we were there to network, get content, and expand our brand into the area.
The creative game is one of “who knows who.” Someone who might not be the most talented photographer, videographer, or whatever creative profession you’re in will still get the higher-paying client if that client has no idea who you are or how good your work may be.
Location, network, customer service, and work ethic—those are the four key components to becoming successful in the creative space. Now, if you’re anything like us, it might require you to make certain investments and travel to places where it’s much easier to find opportunity. So that when the time comes, rather than jumping into a scary unknown with no connections, you’re familiar with the area, have a number of (hopefully) good connections, and a greater chance to find success.
It won’t be all sunshine and rainbows; every trip we take has historically started in chaos and frustration. But if you just stick it out and trust the process (AND ACTUALLY PUT IN SOME WORK), you’ll be surprised to find how much can change in a single day.
