Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sharif Bennett. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Sharif, thank you so much for making time for us today. We can’t wait to dive into your story and the lessons you’ve learned along the way, but maybe we can start with something foundational to your success. How have you gone about developing your ability to communicate effectively?
I was raised in a house that valued communication and thus reading and writing was an integral part of my adolescent development. These skills were further fostered when I attended Swarthmore, a liberal arts college known for its heavy emphasis on critical thinking and activism. After college, I began to study stand up comedy as an art form and upon moving back to New York, began to perform at open mics. Later, I moved to Chicago and continued with stand up and then moved to improv training at both Second City and ChicagoIO (Formerly ImprovOlympic). All of these activities served to train me to be able to speak and communicate in a variety of fashions.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Cineblock is an ecosystem that allows for a content creator’s work to be tokenized into a digital asset and distributed on the blockchain to facilitate the ability for anyone to purchase a stake in their project at any stage of production. The platform offers monetization opportunities through our proprietary NFT marketplace, e-commerce store, and equity tokenization model. The investor or stakeholder will be able to monitor and track all transactions as they relate to the project and will receive their share of revenue directly to their accounts in real time.
As CineBlock’s Chief Evangelist Officer, I oversee the marketing, sales and public relations aspects of our organization. This entails brand promotion and direct communication with content creators in an effort to get their projects onto the CineBlock platform. As we look to launch in early 2024, our first act will be to tokenize a film entitled Malibu Road which can currently be viewed on Tubi or Amazon Prime.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
3 skill/qualities/expertise areas necessary for developing CineBlock
1) Accountability – It is of utter importance to hold yourself and any team members accountable for their tasks. Procrastination is certainly easy but focused hard work with short term goals is vital to the success of any growing organization.
2) Sales – Sales is the lifeblood of any business. If you do not have a sales strategy and outlook, your business, regardless of how quality the product/service is, will fail and fail quickly is you are unable to understand the pain point of your customers and tie it to the product/service you provide.
3) Adaptability – Markets are constantly changing and you as a business founder, have to be able to adapt to these conditions. It can take years to build a product/company and by the time you are ready to launch, the initial idea you developed may no longer be necessary to the demographic you were initially targeting.
Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?
Everyone would love to be good at everything. But in the real world, we all have certain areas where we are stronger than others. With that being said, I think it is better to know what your areas of strength and weaknesses are. Continue to leverage your strengths and outsource/collaborate with like-minded people in areas where you need help. The reason I feel this way is because time is the limiting factors in all of our lives. In the modern era, certain business skill sets have become so specialized that to attempting to learn it may take a disproportionate amount of time. As a salesperson with 10 years of experience, taking the time to learn coding would not be in the best interest of CineBlock. It makes more sense for the business to hire someone else to manage that role within the organization. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is critical to scaling.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://cineblock.info/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cineblockfilms/
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/p/CineBlock-Films-100069149075534/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cineblock/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/cineblockfilms?lang=en
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cineblock+films ;
