Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Terence Perry. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Terence, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
I’ve always been a hard worker. Ever since childhood, I’ve been competitive and always wanted to be the best at whatever I did. I always wanted to work hard and become someone people looked up to. When I would read about the figures I looked up to, they all had a great work ethic. In high school, I developed a love for cameras and would spend most of my time researching how to edit videos and practicing making videos for fun. In college, I began recording my friends and I in vlogs and editing them for fun. Over time, I kept getting better at it and people would ask me to make videos for money. Slowly but surely, my hobby started to turn into a business. I graduated from college and began working in the government and doing videography as a side hustle. For the next 13 years I mastered my skills and worked on scaling my business. In May 2023, I was fired from my government job and decided to take my business full-time. It was hard at first because it was scary to abruptly start being a full-time entrepreneur but I knew my work ethic and trust in God would sustain me. All the long nights of editing and mastering my craft over the years had prepared me to be able to stand on my own as a full-time entrepreneur and I had no idea those 13 years were practice for the real deal. I heavily invested into myself over the years as well which helped to separate me from most of my peers in my industry. I’ve always been one to believe in ambition and believing that the most successful people are just like me. Anything they can do, I can figure it out too.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
Professionally, I focus on my business called Lamar Visuals. I create branding content for entrepreneurs. I think the most special part of my business is that it literally started as a hobby for me. I sold candy and snacks in high school to save up for my first DSLR camera which was a $500 Nikon. I wanted to vlog and take pictures and just be creative. At the time, Tumblr and Twitter was really big and I wanted to be the guy who was always posting cool content. It’s exciting that I was able to find my passion at an early age and stick with it over 10 years. Most people never find their passion or never turn it into a business. I feel blessed that I never quit on it and that ultimately my cameras saved my life. I had a great government job making 6 figures before the age of 30, but I still wasn’t fulfilled. When I was fired from my job, I could have applied to more and waited to re-enter the workforce, but I decided to take a risk and start my business full time. Without my cameras and skillset to make compelling content, I don’t know how I would have found anything else I loved to do. Now I get to travel the world and create content, all from finding something I loved and attempting to be on e of the best at it.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Perseverance, belief in myself, and dreaming big are the three qualities I think were most impactful on my journey.
For folks who are early in their journey, I would advise them to never give up on themselves and to seek out other like minded people. When you hang around people with big dreams, it rubs off on you. My cousin and I would talk almost everyday about our goals and the big dreams we had for our future. That constant exposure to believing in myself, laid the foundation for me. Also, I would advise them not to take advice from everyone. Some people aren’t qualified to give advice in certain areas. Family and friends can be the first people to kill your dreams and goals because you’ll let their doubt infect your thinking before you let a stranger’s doubt. So only take advice from people on things they have experience in. I can ask my family for advice on business, but I can’t always take it too seriously because they may haven’t had the right experiences to accurately tell me what to do when I’m attempting things they haven’t done.
How would you spend the next decade if you somehow knew that it was your last?
A challenge I am facing currently his scaling my business to the level I want to reach. The first thing I had to do to scale my business was relieve myself of editing duties. I still edit most of my videos but I realized that I was hitting a glass ceiling with my time when I had to do all the shooting and editing myself. Now that I have editors that I contract on some projects, it opens up my time to go and shoot more content and make more money. the next thing I want scale is my team. I want to mentor other content creators in my area so that I can have multiple content shoots happening simultaneously and scale the business.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: lamarvisuals
- Twitter: lamarvisuals
- Youtube: Lamar visuals
