Meet Calen Wolfskill

We recently connected with Calen Wolfskill and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Calen, so great to have you on the platform. There’s so much we want to ask you, but let’s start with the topic of self-care. Do you do anything for self-care and if so, do you think it’s had a meaningful impact on your effectiveness?

About 2 years ago I decided that I needed to get back into weight lifting. I didn’t like my appearance and felt that I was just always the small guy in the room. The goal I had when starting was to reach 200lbs of body weight. Along the way though I learned a lot about myself. I learned that getting up super early made me more effective. I learned that starting my day with exercise made me feel accomplished and energized right away, which in turn made me immediately effective when starting to do client work around 8AM every day. Along with the exercise I came across a Chris Do podcast episode with Hal Elrod, the author of the miracle morning, which inspired me to try out my own version of the miracle morning routine. That routine now is how I start every single day. Lastly, I also reminded myself that reaching your goals takes time and also dedication in this process. It took me 6 months to reach that 200lb body weight goal. That was a great reminder that things will never come easy in my business and they will almost never come immediately either. You have to keep working at things and tweaking them until you get the results you’re looking for.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I started filming videos at a novice level when I was around 10 or so. I one day just started doing it and found that I was pretty decent at it. Eventually I took my high schools TV class and learned more about the actual film making/story telling process and became hooked with applying those principles to my creative ideas. I continued to hone my craft in college making short films for fun outside of classes or for assignments. Then eventually falling into a marketing position after that to start my professional career, which allowed me to merge my love of making video content with marketing in my current role a the founder and president of Ruby Media, LLC.

My main focus professionally today is on my business, Ruby Media, LLC, and expanding that to support a team and help others achieve their own personal and professional goals in life. Ruby Media is a video agency that mainly works with blue collar industrial businesses to help them create a tangible brand that speaks to and connects with their customers. Whether that’s homeowners connecting to general contractors or commercial builders connecting with custom fabrication shops for elements of their latest building. We use several different strategies and types of content to help these types of businesses build their brand, build trust, and ultimately win more clients through content.

What I find most exciting ab0out what I do is that it allows me to build connections with my customers, rather than just provide them with a service. A lot of the time I have to ask people to tell me their story and I end up learning about my clients or the customers of my client and how their got to where they are today. Sometimes I’m privileged en0ugh to hear about the hardships they went through as well. The work I do is also different every time still. Sure, there’s a system and process we follow for developing a certain type of content, but that journey is almost always different, along with the end result. The reason being, that everyone’s story is different and it gets told in a different way.

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?

A very strong work ethic

A desire to learn and constantly improve to the point of what I learned could only be near perfection

It took me too long to learn this, but ask others around you for help or guidance, but only ask those that you’re looking to become or who know more than you

My advice for young people just starting in their journey, as someone who truly isn’t that far along in his own, is to embrace the stuff that sucks. Embrace working the long late nights, the troubleshooting something you don’t know, the failure when something doesn’t work, and always learn a lesson from it along the way. Every decision you make as an entrepreneur has a lesson attached to it, the good and the bad. Learn those lessons and make better decisions next time. That lesson could be “I should have called this person sooner”. It could be “this little detail truly wasn’t going to move my goals forward so it didn’t need to be perfect”. Whatever the situation there is something to be learned.

What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?

I think when you are a business owner or entrepreneur it’s your job to know at least a little bit about everything your business does. Honestly, if you’re like most of us you probably were doing it all at some point in the early days of your company. However, as you build revenue and build the business you need to focus not only on what you’re great at, but also what’s going to move the company forward. It’s your job to move the business forward to expand and grow it that’s your goal.

My opinion is this. Do everything in the beginning for as long as you can, until you reach a point where you can bring in help. Then hire people or contractors to do the things that don’t bring you joy, or that you’re not talented at. For instance you may not be good at accounting, but someone else or a different company, is amazing at it and will do it more effectively and with more joy than you will. So let them do it! This principle can be applied to pretty much every role in your business until you’re left doing what lights you up and what you’re really talented at.

In the last year for example I grew my business to a point where I could start to hire contract work editors to complete some of my projects that I wasn’t gifted at, or that I felt weren’t the best use of my time. This freed me up to work on larger more important projects, operations, marketing, and sales. Essentially, things that were going to move the business forward.

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