About

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This web­site and the DVDs we have for sale were pro­duced by Rick Smith and Kim Miller of Panorama Stu­dios.

We live in coastal Cal­i­for­nia in a small, idyl­lic spot a mile from the ocean. Before we started our own busi­ness, Rick ran a suc­cess­ful video pub­lish­ing depart­ment at Cal­i­for­nia Poly­tech­nic State Uni­ver­sity called Visual Edu­ca­tion Pro­duc­tions. (More about that to fol­low) We’ve run our own video pro­duc­tion busi­ness since 1998 and have oper­ated ecom­merce sites and been in inter­net mar­ket­ing since 2005. We also do cor­po­rate video work. Today though, we cherry pick our best video clients (Rick still loves the shoot­ing side of video and Kim enjoys edit­ing) and run our var­i­ous inter­net busi­nesses. We live with our cat Dominic and Rick has taken up the gui­tar again.

How We Got Started In This Busi­ness
(Rick) I began in media pro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing before the inven­tion of the VCR. Work­ing for a unique quasi-commercial uni­ver­sity depart­ment, Visual Edu­ca­tion Pro­duc­tions (VEP) at Cal­i­for­nia Poly­tech­nic State Uni­ver­sity, that spe­cial­ized in pro­duc­ing edu­ca­tional mate­ri­als, we were pro­duc­ing and sell­ing film­strips and slides and books. As my career and the indus­try changed and grew, so did VEP. Under my direc­tion, we moved into video pro­duc­tion, then CD-ROMs, soft­ware and other for­mats.  I am proud to say not only did we have many award win­ning pro­duc­tions and a few pro­grams aired on PBS and the His­tory Chan­nel, we also won awards for our direct mail mar­ket­ing efforts, includ­ing two “Best In Cat­a­logs” awards.We lit­er­ally sold mil­lions of dol­lars worth of edu­ca­tional videos and other media all over the world. All of this before the heady days of the inter­net. It was a great oppor­tu­nity to learn the nuts and bolts of marketing.

In 1997, the uni­ver­sity went in a new direc­tion and sold my divi­sion to another com­pany (note: that com­pany, CEV, had its roots and inspi­ra­tion in VEP). I decided at that point to go on my own.  I had always had a dream of pro­duc­ing and sell­ing my own videos on my own terms.

(Kim) I met Rick when he was the direc­tor of VEP. On the tail end of com­plet­ing my pho­tog­ra­phy degree and feel­ing sti­fled in my job in human resources for the uni­ver­sity, I approached him with my port­fo­lio in the hopes that he would hire me. Well, he didn’t hire me but I did end up work­ing with him any­way — as his spouse! (Much bet­ter ben­e­fits I might add!

In 2000, Joe Clokey with San Luis Video Pul­bish­ing hired us to pro­duce a new edu­ca­tional video on soil. Rick was so busy with a large client load that I decided to take a shot at start­ing it. I had never done any­thing besides a very lame lit­tle video for a pho­tog­ra­phy class before. But I had very recent expe­ri­ence doing pho­tog­ra­phy projects (Kudos to Cal Poly’s learn-by-doing focus!) and I decided to approach it as a class assign­ment. I researched, sto­ry­boarded, wrote a rough script, con­tracted with an advi­sor who helped me refine the script, and directed, shot, and edited it. Need­less to say, I was hooked. And the fact that video is still out there and sell­ing strongly for Joe excites me no end. It also won a Telly Award.  Not a bad first project!  At the time I was tick­led with a big check upon com­ple­tion but after see­ing how well it is doing, I have changed my thinking.

Enter The Internet

Prior to 2004, the bulk of our income came from cor­po­rate and client work, and Kim was still teth­ered to her sta­ble, good pay­ing job at the local uni­ver­sity. But that all changed for us In 2004.

(Rick) It all started with a video I made of my dad…

In 2005 we com­pleted a video I made called Patrick Smith’s: A Sense of Place. For years my dad, a well-known Florida writer and lec­turer, known for his hugely pop­u­lar book A Land Remem­bered, told me that if I made a video­tape of the talk he gave through­out Florida, that I would sell thou­sands. It was a project I seemed to keep putting off due to my client work and the very real fact that I live in Cal­i­for­nia and my dad lives in Florida. But then my dad was diag­nosed with can­cer and on a visit back there, he gra­ciously sat down with me on his back porch and I taped him. Over the next few years through numer­ous trips back home, I taped B-roll and researched photo archives to illus­trate his story. I turned that lit­tle story into a video that won sev­eral awards and was shown at film fes­ti­vals. In fact, the Tupelo Film Fes­ti­val invited me to attend, where I won the Founder’s Award prize.

Win­ning all those awards felt great but I had also put a lot of time and money into this film and felt my dad was right; I could actu­ally sell this thing. How­ever my mar­ket was in Florida and I lived in Cal­i­for­nia and my dad, due to his health prob­lems, was no longer able to do the lec­ture cir­cuit and sell them to his fans. So that left the internet.

Now as I have said, I had been in direct mail mar­ket­ing of media projects for 30 years but never sold any­thing on the inter­net except some video equip­ment on eBay. I could see the poten­tial of sell­ing on the inter­net and decided to build a web page. This video was a per­fect prod­uct for me to get started.

I was told that my mar­ket, older Florid­i­ans, prob­a­bly wouldn’t buy over the inter­net. As of today, my dad proved to be right and I have sold over 5,000 DVDs…and I am still get­ting orders for it from all over the U.S. I was thrilled to see that I could mix my desire to start a busi­ness on the inter­net with doing what I loved. As a result of this expe­ri­encee, Kim and I share a new way of life. She no longer works in human resources at the uni­ver­sity and is a full time part­ner in this busi­ness with me.

Great Back­ground Story, But So What?

What’s impor­tant to you is that we are video pub­lish­ers and we make money from it. The best way to demon­strate this is for you to see our 2008 year end sales we reported to the IRS.

We really only do the inter­net sales thing part time. We’ll go for weeks some­times with­out doing any kind of pro­mo­tion at all, and while we’re cer­tainly not ready to retire on this yet, our busi­ness is on a steady upward path. Our sales in July, typ­i­cally our slow­est month, were over $2,500. We usu­ally make twice that or more dur­ing the months of Octo­ber through Decem­ber. Bet­ter than that, we have not only sur­vived this reces­sion, but we’ve grown. We’ve even “dumped” some great clients to focus on our busi­ness. This is because not only we’ve become bet­ter at what we do but because we have added more to our prod­uct line. We’re excited to see what we can do when we finally have the time to focus on our inter­net sales.

I’m being hon­est with my fig­ures and hope you are not dis­cour­aged that we’re not regal­ing you with sto­ries of how we are mak­ing mil­lions overnight and liv­ing on our yacht while work­ing just a cou­ple hours a week while sail­ing the globe. I think most of those get rich quick sto­ries are B.S. and I’m not going to feed you a line like that. How­ever, we are not kid­ding when say we are mak­ing this much PART TIME, and often with­out putting any time at all into our estab­lished web­sites, other than ship­ping pack­ages and count­ing our receipts. Once we have a prod­uct fin­ished and a web­site in place, it can be pulling in $1,000 — $4,000 per month for us, basi­cally on autopi­lot. Now we are start­ing to make our videos avail­able as dig­i­tal down­loads or online videos so that we don’t even have to ship any­thing and the cus­tomer gets access to the infor­ma­tion imme­di­ately. Our goal is to get many such sites work­ing for us and that is the approach I sug­gest to you. Cre­ate mul­ti­ple streams of sales that all feed into one big river of income.

Work­ing in this busi­ness part time is our choice. If you do it full time just imag­ine what you can do. Rick has for­mer stu­dents he has men­tored who now run very suc­cess­ful high six fig­ure busi­nesses doing this as well. One, in fact, runs his com­pany part time with a staff, and that busi­ness brings in $500,000 a year with­out doing much mar­ket­ing beyond send­ing out a cat­a­log once or twice a year.

If this sounds good to you, then I encour­age you to read all of the infor­ma­tion on this web­site, read the blog entries, sign up for our newslet­ter and try our DVDs, located here. We are here to help you and oth­ers with sim­i­lar dreams. Yes, you can do it and and if you fol­low the infor­ma­tion in my DVDs and in the upcom­ing mem­ber­ship site, you will build your busi­ness faster and more effi­ciently that I did because you will have the ben­e­fit of my experience.

There really is no limit to what you can do in this busi­ness. I like to say that there is no “Some­day” on the cal­en­dar, so get started now.

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