Meet Will Stroud

We were lucky to catch up with Will Stroud recently and have shared our conversation below.

Will, thank you so much for joining us today. Let’s jump right into something we’re really interested in hearing about from you – being the only one in the room. So many of us find ourselves as the only woman in the room, the only immigrant or the only artist in the room, etc. Can you talk to us about how you have learned to be effective and successful in situations where you are the only one in the room like you?

I spent the first 20 years of my career working in the action sports industry, mostly focused on producing video content in the BMX world with professional athletes. Over those two decades I was fortunate enough to travel to 30+ countries with pro BMX teams for video shoots and events and I loved every second of it. I got to travel and produce content for brands like Red Bull, Nike, Vans, Monster Energy and tons of other smaller brands in the BMX world. I learned so much about different cultures along my filmmaking journey all while filming grown men get paid to do stunts on “little kids bikes”. I’m 43 now but I guess I fit the stereo type of what you think a BMX rider or a skateboarder would look like. I’m not super clean cut, have visible tattoos and some folks in the corporate world would not look at me and not immediately think they would look to hire someone like me to produce their content. For the past 5+ years of my career I have shifted my focus from action sports content to corporate video storytelling projects with brands like Bobcat Equipment, United Therapeutics, Biogen and Lenovo. Now I’m in rooms with more C-suite clients where I can try to look like a corporate marketer here to sell you content, or I can be my normal, authentic self and try to make a real and personal connection with folks that value strong creative partnerships. Learning to be comfortable in my own skin has created the resiliency and confidence to keep going no matter how many times I fail in business and life in general.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I co-founded Press Record Media in 2020 with my business partner, Ryan Timms. Ryan also has a strong action sports background as he was a professional rollerblader for almost a decade. BMX and rollerblading are parallel worlds that are very similar. Ryan and I were introduced by a mutual friend in 2016 where we instantly hit it off with our similar backgrounds in action sports and interest in content production. From 2016-2019 we worked together on dozens of video shoots for numerous corporate clients and eventually decided in 2020 that it was time to start a new creative agency where we could officially combine forces and seek out creative partnerships with brands that value video storytelling. It has been a wild ride so far and I’m really proud of the work our team has done. Since 2020, Press Record Media has scaled up to a 5 person team of passionate storytellers and we all love creating meaningful content for brands that want to tell their story in an authentic way that resonates with their customers and employees. Currently we are focusing on branded content and storytelling videos in the biotech, pharma, AEC, heavy equipment and technology spaces. There are so many powerful stories to tell in all of those verticals but the brands have to be willing to look in the right places to find the stories that are meaningful. That’s where Press Record Media comes in and can help brands find those stories even when brands don’t immediately understand where to look or the creative process.

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?

Resilience: being self employed for 25+ years will teach you all the hard lessons. The wins, the fails and everything in between. The path is not always clear and sometimes if feels like the grass is always greener if I were to give up and go climb the corporate ladder somewhere else. Resilience can also feel like stubbornness depending on the day.

Set goals: being able to zoom out of the day to day noise and set short term and long term goals is critical. In the marketing world if you lose your focus and waste time chasing the wrong things you will not make it. Having clear goals for my business, sales, our clients and our employees is critical for success and it’s important to track the things that matter.

Be an expert in your field: being a “jack of all trades” is something you learn in the freelance world. You want to be able to offer any creative services possible to clients to capture as much revenue as possible. On the flip side, most “jack of all trades” are the “master of none”. I’d rather our creative agency specialize in fewer services where we are the experts in content production rather than offer lots of extra bells and whistles that we don’t specialize in.

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?

Press Record Media offers an extremely niche product with our branded video content packages. Most brands know they need video content for their websites and social channels, but don’t necessarily know how to start or what type of content their business needs to differentiate themselves from their competition. We’ve had lots of meetings with brands across multiple industries that really like the type of content we make and verbally express they want to engage us for video marketing support but the main friction point we hear is “we love your content but we don’t have a line item on our marketing budget for video”. That has become a common theme with small and medium size businesses but I think it’s because we’re still early in the game of brands producing their own content. In 3-5 years I believe all brands will have line items in their marketing budgets for custom brand films and storytelling content. I still firmly believe that brands have to post authentic content somewhat regularly to cut through all the noise on social media. Our agency would rather have 5-10 larger accounts with brands that value custom storytelling content instead of 50+ smaller accounts that just want the “cheapest and basic” packages.

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Image Credits

Photos by Jordan Fox, Caroline Almy and Dave Mavro

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