How Nathan McGill Relaunched His Career After Hitting Rock Bottom

Nathan McGill (00:00)

As creatives, we cannot like the fact that ChatGPT can probably write a book better and faster than we can. I understand. I went to school to get an MFA, but at the same time, you cannot ignore the fact that that's a possibility. You have been through the cycle from where you started out: moving to Atlanta, starting Noodlehead Studios, then going into writing the book on Amazon with freelancing, getting in, building your frameworks for that, starting a business. You've had to reinvent yourself many, many times, and that's why you're still around. That's why you and I are on a podcast together right now. We're still here. A lot of guys are not here. When the tape became digital, they left. When the DVD stopped selling—

Jason Montoya (00:29)

Yeah.

Nathan McGill (00:41)

—because a lot of income came from those DVDs back in the day when we were doing movies—when streaming happened, a lot of the businesses went under and quit, and so did ours in a way. So technology has always disrupted things. You just have to smile at it and keep on going.

Jason Montoya (00:54)

Welcome to an inspirational people interview on the Share Life podcast. In this episode, I'm speaking with Nate McGill. Nate, say hello.

Nathan McGill (01:01)

Hello! Glad to be here, man.

Jason Montoya (01:03)

Now, you go by many names: Nathan, Nathaniel. Who gets which name?

Nathan McGill (01:07)

Yeah. That's a good question. It's the curse of most Nathans, actually. So, Nathaniel is what I always put on stuff. I think it's important. So, if it's a movie or a book, it's like Nathaniel Thomas McGill. My mom and parents call me Nathan. Everybody else calls me Nate. So, I answer to all three. That's it.

Jason Montoya (01:25)

Okay, all right. So, the three-named man. Nate and I go way, way, way back, almost 20 years. We met—

Nathan McGill (01:32)

We do. That's crazy to think about. Yeah, it's wild.

Jason Montoya (01:35)

—and yeah. So, I moved to Atlanta in 2005, and you and I met in 2007. You were working on a documentary called An Inconvenient Tax, and you needed help with some of the special effects animations. You somehow heard about me, and I was probably talking more about animation.

Nathan McGill (01:45)

That's right.

Jason Montoya (01:53)

My bachelor's degree is actually in 3D animation.

Nathan McGill (01:53)

Well, people forget this. We're both from the Atlanta area, but if you rewind the clock back to 2006, '07, around that time, there was not a whole lot of us then. Yes, the movie business is here now, but the independent filmmakers or even the marketers or the folks making video production, we all kind of knew each other, even if we hadn't worked together. And you guys had a really fun style of computer animation. Still, some of those animations in that particular film are still some of the most fun ones, I think, we ever had in any movie. So, you guys did a great job with that.

Jason Montoya (02:29)

Yeah, and Len Wickberg, who's my cousin and also worked for me, he did a lot of that animation, and he spent some hard, long hours making that happen. We played a little bit of a part, and there was some cool stuff he did that didn't make the final cut as well.

Nathan McGill (02:39)

Yes, he did. We probably drove him crazy. Yeah, what was so fun about that is you had to tell a story in an interesting way. An animation is a great way to break into a documentary full of, like, talking old white guys in front of bookshelves. About taxes, of all things, but we did one animation on the Boston Tea Party where Len had to use these hand-tipped drawing illustrations from historical documents and bring them to life to retell the story of the Boston Tea Party. It is still—like, that should have been an award-winning thing. I mean, it was award enough that we all got to have a film that was released by Warner Brothers. That little segment needs its own reward. You guys did a fantastic job, and I don't think folks around here really realized the impact that Noodlehead Studios had back in the day because, like I said, you all were one of the one-and-only folks around that were really doing that kind of marketing work for people back then. You all were a little bit on the tech side; you all were a little bit up the notch from folks that were just making your website look pretty, and that's about all we had back then.

Jason Montoya (03:46)

Yeah. Yeah, and it's kind of interesting just how ahead of the curve I was in a lot of ways, but then so ahead of the curve that I actually didn't stay on the curve long enough to benefit from that curve. So, I'll give you a couple of examples. Kind of some of the stuff you're talking about, because we kind of pivoted, but having that video production angle was great. You're in the optimization world of things. We're used to SEO, and now we have AEO.

Nathan McGill (04:21)

It's Answer Engine Optimization, yeah.

Jason Montoya (04:24)

So, AEO. One of the things that actually really helped us with Noodlehead Studios, particularly, is because we had video production on our website, but we actually optimized for "Atlanta video production." So, we were high up on Google. I mean, we had people reach out to us. I remember Coca-Cola called us for a project that didn't end up going through, but they Googled us and we popped up.

Nathan McGill (04:32)

That's right. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That's awesome.

Jason Montoya (04:51)

So, another thing I did is, this is kind of before YouTube really took off, I did a video series. It was like a little show called Pasta Salad, and we did these little episodes every week. I don't know why we didn't really lean into YouTube as much, but we would distribute them online and put them on our website. We were just doing a lot of interesting things.

Nathan McGill (05:02)

That's right. Well, it's because we were doing film work. I mean, you were doing the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition stuff, and so we were all working on real stuff that was credible on our reels and things like that. We didn't have our eye on social media that much back then because Facebook really wasn't till 2008. YouTube may have been there, but you could only post, like, movie trailers.

Jason Montoya (05:19)

Yeah, I did Extreme Makeover: Home Edition a few episodes, so yeah. I mean, I played with, I remember MySpace, yeah.

Nathan McGill (05:39)

Yeah, MySpace was around at that time, but I think because we were from traditional media, we were still trying to figure out DV tapes and how to record audio analog the best. I originally started my career in 1997 in local access television, and I would go door-to-door and sell advertisements. It was pretty much a local effort.

Jason Montoya (05:47)

Yeah, which I have a stack over here. In what area?

Nathan McGill (06:02)

It was here. I am from the Gwinnett County area. My family goes back to 1850 here, so it's been real hard to move. We did have an office in California for a little brief time, but I have always been planted here. And so, in '97, starting that local access TV show, my mind was on television, and then growing the dream. I mean, I went off and did concerts and events for a while for the Christian subculture world for about six years, but I grew up emulating Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. I had the dream, and like kids today will look at influencers and YouTube people, we were looking at our heroes and our storytellers, and we wanted to be at the cinema, and what would it take to get a movie into theaters one day? We were all kind of on that. So, we just missed social media. And now in my forties, I see all the same clues with AI, and I'm just like, I cannot miss it. I've got a job.

Jason Montoya (06:49)

Yeah. You want to get on the board?

Nathan McGill (07:02)

Right now, we've got to get on early, and it doesn't matter if I like it, and that's kind of the thing is: you don't have to like it. I mean, as creatives, we can not like the fact that ChatGPT can probably write a book better and faster than we can. I understand. I went to school to get an MFA, but at the same time, you cannot ignore the fact that that's a possibility. If you don't move, you... you have seen this, and you can probably speak to this just as well as I can, but you have been through the cycle from where you started out: moving to Atlanta, starting Noodlehead Studios, then going into writing the book on Amazon with freelancing, kind of getting in, building your frameworks for that, starting a business. I mean, you've had to reinvent yourself many, many times, and that's why you're still around. That's why you and I are on a podcast together right now, because we're still here. A lot of guys are not here. When the tape became digital, they left. When the DVD stopped selling—

Jason Montoya (07:50)

Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan McGill (08:02)

—income came from those DVDs back in the day when we were doing movies. When streaming happened, a lot of the businesses went under and quit, and so did ours in a way. So, technology has always disrupted things, and you just have to smile at it and keep on going.

Jason Montoya (08:19)

Yeah. Well, one of the things I will say about the reinvention thing is, so I had my marketing company from 2007 to 2014, and I shut it down. And through that transition, which I then became a freelancer, which was a bit of a reinvention—instead of having a company, it was just me. But that transition and then kind of rebuilding a business, it actually prepared me for the pandemic.

Nathan McGill (08:38)

Mm-hmm.

Jason Montoya (08:47)

So, when the pandemic hit in 2020, I thought I was going to have to reinvent all over again. It turned out my reinvention from before carried over. I had already was working virtually. I had multiple clients. I had the flexibility of freelancing versus an office and a staff. Those were things that kind of held me back before. This time I was able to do that. And then what it allowed me to do is, because I had already done the invention to sort of make sure I was making an income on my main work, in terms of freelancing is what I do to make money, I was able to reinvent, kind of launch my content creation business. So, the pandemic is when I launched the podcast. So, yeah.

Nathan McGill (09:25)

That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I know we're going to talk about a little bit of AI, but I'll just say it now: AI loves long-form media the same way that SEO did, but it's because you and I are on here answering questions. So, when we talk about optimizing our content, the more questions that you ask me—like, there's not a business that doesn't have that page of frequently asked questions on their website—but to put that in audio form and do it over and over again is what chat loves, and that's what a lot of these things love. Yeah.

Jason Montoya (09:53)

Yeah. So, tell us more about that in case people are like, "What the heck are you talking about? What does that mean? Why should I care about FAQs?"

Nathan McGill (10:01)

Well, it's hard to even know where to start, because you and I have been in this business a long time. We've seen all these different kinds of marketing come and go. It's always good to identify when you're talking about brand marketing versus direct marketing. And then you get AI that comes into the mix and starts to disrupt these old worlds of the way that we think and work. A lot of times when a company is spending a lot of money on branding, they're either an older brand or it's something like buying billboards on the side of the road, or you're doing print, or you're a TV commercial, radio. There are traditional metrics that are hard to measure. And then you've got direct marketing, which is a ton of things that you have to put on the checklist to do as a business, especially if you're a home service business or if you're a healthcare business, and those things are constantly changing. Marketing companies can really take advantage of people very easily by keeping the business models basically like, "We've got, let's say, 12 new clients are coming in every year. Six are going to figure out that we're full of crap, and then we're going to have that pipeline filled back up, and we're just going to keep going on forever and ever and ever."

Jason Montoya (11:05)

Yeah.

Nathan McGill (11:20)

You give them an ad spend. They're buying stuff on Google and Meta and whatever the latest thing is. And then you ask about your ROI metrics, and they're going to give you back some kind of chart or whatever, and you're just wondering, "Did I sell anything? What lead came from what?" There are all these disconnected things. We want to deliver to people as a marketing company or creative company, either way, you're selling money. You have to sell that ROI back to somebody. You have to say, "Here's where all your leads came from. Here's all the things that are working. Here's some stuff that's not working. We need to reinvest what's not working into what is working."

Jason Montoya (11:36)

Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan McGill (12:01)

"Okay, and we need to fix this. Maybe there's an SEO issue on the site, or maybe we need to spend more in local services because you're in a highly competitive market like home services, and it's just a matter of who can spend the most." There are all these things that we've been dealing with this stuff for years and years and years. I think in the direct marketing world now, that's confusing enough, but now we've got a lot of business owners that are going home. They know that ChatGPT is helping them with their blog. It's helping them understand SEO a little bit. It's kind of answering some of these executive coaching questions that you would get. So, it's starting to disrupt all these other kinds of little markets, but we're thinking about, "How can this thing help me? How can it help me?" And we're using it at home, but we're not really realizing that in a very short amount of time, and really, it's already here, people are going to ask, "What's the best plumber in my city?" And if you haven't thought about how chat and these other AI things get their answer, well then your business is on fire already. And that's a big, big problem. And it's a problem. Who do you call to solve that problem? Well, as marketers, I'm talking about that problem now. We're figuring out that now. It's not like SEO and this Answer Engine Optimization are disconnected. You still have to fix SEO. You still have to do all the old things that you were doing, but now there are brand-new things to do. And if you're with a company, a marketing company, that is clearly just one of these funnel flippers where they're just bringing in a few clients, doing some stuff, paying your ads, it's kind of like "set it, forget it." "I know I'm spending way too much money on this." You probably just need to fire the entire group. I think you don't feel confident in doing that because you don't know what part of marketing is working and what's not. You don't know what brought in a client. You don't know what didn't. So, the old cliché is that you spend a ton of money in marketing, but you don't know what's working, so they just keep on spending it. There's a ton of marketers in business that actually have no purpose in the world, but they're just still alive, still humming, because folks are mostly afraid, and they're afraid because they just don't have the knowledge. So, what they need is a partner. They need somebody to come in and say, "Look, we're going to have an equity stake in this business, or we're going to have a partnership that is significant enough to where we're going to live by our own merits. And if we don't bring you money, we don't get paid."

Jason Montoya (14:14)

Yeah. Yeah. Performance-based. Yeah.

Nathan McGill (14:33)

And so, we're just confident in that level. When you've... the great thing about being in your forties and starting a new business that's kind of doing what ours is doing, just like yourself, you know, we've been around it a long time. And when we have been around it a long time, that means we have a ton of people that we know that solve very specific problems. So, what we can do as a new company is come in and still work with the folks that we've worked with for the last decade. So, yeah, the company is 90 days old because AI is like right here. I mean, it's new. It's a brand-new problem to solve. So, it's a new company, but, you know, video production is still going to be more important than ever. The guys that I have in that department I've been with for 15 years. You know, there's... it's the new stuff. It's the new problem. A lot of the stuff that you're going to be familiar with—the things that you do every day for your clients—it's just one more problem that we can solve. But I feel like it's a problem that if you're not talking about it, you're not going to own it. And we know if you're not talking about it, you don't own it. Other people might be doing this. They might be helping you, but they might still be talking about marketing, direct marketing, and they're just talking about the wrong thing. So, they got to change their messaging a little bit.

Jason Montoya (15:45)

Yeah. Well, I'd like you to dive in a little bit to this idea that you missed the train with so many other things that this is a train you don't want to miss. And what I wanted you to talk about is, when I did my reinvention, when I shut down my marketing company and then I jumped into freelancing, one of my regrets was that I wish I had been, in my case, blogging, so writing content, since I moved to Atlanta in 2005. I wish I had started a blog in 2005, and I had just been continually adding to it. But really, the core underneath that regret was I was tired of starting over, and I wanted to create things that I was just building. It was like more of a staircase where I was moving up the staircase instead of having to start over every time I reinvented, right? I wanted to be able to reinvent where I could take that momentum into the next thing and then take that momentum into the next thing, and each thing was building on it versus starting over. Do you relate to any of that as part of this transition that you've been through?

Nathan McGill (16:43)

Yes, of course. Yeah, a hundred percent. I think it's because that's what it is. So, psychologically speaking and spiritually speaking, I think a lot of my twenties and thirties was driven by a fear of failure. Now, I was the kind of person that reacted to failure in that failure was not an option, so I was going to work longer and do more. But that was my adult fairy tale: failure is not an option. It is an option. You don't have to go big; you can go home. I mean, you can totally. And I think that's great advice. I would love to do a book or a movie or something called "Failure Is an Option." It's actually a really great... but I was so afraid of it that it really drove me into my darkest moment, you know, when I was fighting against technology and not wanting to move from traditional filmmaking and physical media, which basically recouped and then paid profit upon the films that we were making, and we made I think like 15 in all. When it started to get to the last four or five, streaming had come in. When you have like the cable on demand button, I mean, that was a pretty good source of revenue that could replace the DVD. So, we're talking about making movies around like $150,000 to $200,000 per budget. We needed to recoup at least $250,000. DVDs and on-demand could get you there. But our first check from Netflix, which actually I think was for An Inconvenient Tax, was for $15,000. Like, what am I supposed to do with that? Feed the craft service people? What are we talking about here? What are we doing? So, I started to freak out and figured it was already too late. I was at the end. So, I did take that failure absolutely hard. But are there things that were learning lessons all along the way that were going to go into my next business? Of course, because I took a couple of years off and then, like you, back in about 2019, said, "You know, if I'm honest with myself, most of the documentary films I make would have been podcasts. So, let's try that." And then there was a local publisher that came along and said, "Well, if you're going to do that, why you come do that with us?" And I was like, "All right, great. Let's do that. Let's start podcasting there." Now, the podcasting business model that I decided to run at that time—because every podcast is the Wild Wild West; everybody's got just different business models—but that business model that I put on top of podcasting for that particular business was the local access television show business model from 1997.

Jason Montoya (19:20)

So, tell people what that is, because they may not understand if they're old enough or they weren't in that world, what the heck that is.

Nathan McGill (19:25)

Yeah, so local access TV was you would buy the time on television. In 1997, at a local access television station, PSP Channel 12, 30 minutes of airtime was $60. People are like, "What?" Yeah. $60. And then, so I would take that, and I would go down the street, and two kids, 17, 18 years old, knocking on doors, knocking onto a pizza, local pizza place. And I would sell them a commercial for $250. My whole summer of shows were paid for. And then I would sell three or four commercials per show. Instead of cutting yards, I would just... and the draw to be on TV in the nineties was great. And so that was fun.

Jason Montoya (20:05)

Yeah. So, you know what's funny? When I first moved here in 2005, it was probably like a year after I moved here. There was a production company that was doing a local access TV show called Urban Idol. This is when American Idol was big. It was like the hip-hop scene, and they hired me to come in and film this contest and brought in the cameras and filmed it, and then they aired it on some local access TV.

Nathan McGill (20:35)

Yeah, man. That's where it's at, dude. But yeah, even all these old business models, they'll find a home, you know? For the film business, it was the same thing. The film business is basically general contracting like construction, and that's the way I would always explain it to people. Most of the time, the investors weren't really from the film industry. They had an interest in the topic that we were trying to make change happen within, but it was a lot easier to say, "Look, it's going to cost about the price of a house, and then we're going to sell it and make a little bit of a profit, and we're going to make more reach than we make return. But this is sort of the model, and I promise not to lose your money. But if I do, there's a tax incentive for that." And that "failure is not an option" thing—it drove me to figure out all kinds of different licensing ways that we could actually pay people's money back. So, the reason that we got to make as many films as we did with my partner, Vince, at Ventoryo at the time, who you know, was because we did pay people back until we couldn't pay people back, and then we still did, until the model broke and the tax laws changed. So, in about 2014 or '15, there's a big changeover with the way that tax for independent producers happened. We got audited. It was really bad. It kind of put everybody in the dirt there for a minute. A lot of people went out of business. I ended up selling my partnership, and I left the business at the time back to Vincent. Vincent continued to run the company. He, and he's found ways over the last decade, really, to continually work, and he obviously has had to change his model along with the times. But kudos to him because Life is My Movie Entertainment is still alive, and that's great. And we're actually working together right now on a streaming show. So, I don't know how much I can really talk about with it, but we're in post-production on that. It's really fun to work with an old partner again. So, that's fun.

Jason Montoya (22:40)

Yeah, yeah. So, let's rewind a little bit back to your story here. So, you're an author, screenwriter, producer, director, entrepreneur. You've got this weird... tell us like how did it all unfold on the kind of the story and creative side, less on the business side. Tell us that part of the story.

Nathan McGill (22:58)

The part of the story of how, like, just the creative journey, if you will, or yeah.

Jason Montoya (23:02)

Yeah, your creative journey more on the creative side versus the business technical side. Does that make sense?

Nathan McGill (23:08)

I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, creatively speaking, I was probably just, like I said, I was interested in story above all else. And so, when I was a kid, we would make movies in our backyard and do stuff like that in order to tell stories. What a lot of people don't know is that when I was a kid, my sister passed away. And so, I think a lot of the entertainer in me was formed in my childhood because I was trying to make some depressed parents happy and make everybody smile and make jokes and do comedy. At the same time, I saw that they were satisfied the most when I got all A's and got gold stars. And so, there you have the performer again. So, the performer in me kind of went right alongside with the artist. And if you've ever done any Enneagram studies, I'm a three with a four wing. So, I'm a producer that cares a little bit more about looking the part rather than getting all the other stuff right. Sometimes that's kind of my fatal flaw, if you will, but kind of recovering from that, if you will. But over the years, I feel like that did me a service because early on in my film career, a lot of my insecurities presented themselves as confidence. And so, where I felt like I wasn't enough or I had some imposter syndrome, I also had the ability to bust into the room full of the people and make a pitch and "I know what I'm doing." I just had that ability where people would be like, "Okay, great. Let's go with him." I mean, even my first job—

Jason Montoya (24:35)

Yeah. Yeah. And why, why move? Why movies? Why not, you know, writing or magazines or plays?

Nathan McGill (24:46)

I think it was the era. Movies were the stories that I resonate with. Yeah, I mean, the '80s, man, the '80s and the '90s, and the Star Wars and the Indiana Jones and just the home—

Jason Montoya (24:50)

So, you were thinking an object of your time? Yeah. Was there a particular director or movie that really inspired you?

Nathan McGill (25:02)

When I was younger, it was really... I was all about Robert Zemeckis. I loved just the way that he would do effects before pre-digital effects, which kind of not appreciated as much as they used to be, but his also the use of foreshadowing and a lot of the Back to the Future films and things like that were always, you know, just so great. And then, yeah, I mean, the art of it all. I just love the experience, and it was just the top of the ladder for me. I was like, "Okay." A lot of my friends were in music, and I did play in a band for a while. Like most creatives, I kind of hopped around and tried to figure out what my thing was. I think I was surrounded by people who were way more talented musically than I was. So, I gravitated towards more towards the video and film side of things, and crazy enough, that's what started paying the bills early on, too. So, once the folks in the church world figured out I could make stuff, I was kind of off to the races.

Jason Montoya (26:04)

Yeah. Well, tell us about that part of the story, and was it a positive or a negative experience?

Nathan McGill (26:10)

It was both. I think when it first started out, it was a local pastor asking me to come to the church. I was in film school at the time at Georgia State, I think. And he came down on a visitation and saw I was editing something and invited me to church and then the next week, and invited me into the Georgia Baptist Convention, and they had a bunch of camps going on. And then you get to the camps, and you're talking to the lighting guys and the camera guys, and it's all one big circle. So, then I'm in Nashville, and then I'm off to the next event, and everybody needed those directing services back then, and people forget like there was no iPhones. There was no video on your phone. There was only a few people that could do video. And so, once you found a lane or a niche, if you will, you were kind of off to the races, and I just found a really good road crew that I was with. I had a really good road boss and a guy named Jeff Ransom who really brought me up and served as a great mentor in my life while we were out there on the road. And then I was on the road for six years doing that, all the way up until about 2005, 2006. Came home off the road to try to do a church start. That didn't go well at all. And then I tried to figure out like what do I do with this event company. It was pretty profitable at the time. I just wasted a bunch of money trying to do a church start, and that failed. And so, about that time, I went into marketing, of all things, for a film in downtown Atlanta with a guy named Neil Schulman, who's Dr. Neil Schulman. He wrote the movie Doc Hollywood. He wrote the book Doc Hollywood with Michael J. Fox. It was the book. And so, we worked on a couple of films and showcased them in the Midtown Art Cinema, and I was like, "Okay, I need to figure out a way to do this." Vincent and I went to high school together. He was actually making narrative films. I called him up and said, "I want in. How do we do this?" And he's like, "Well, I'm already working in Atlanta on this movie. We got a million-dollar budget. It's on the history of photography." And so, I came on board around that time, and then we merged our two companies together. We got that office in downtown Lawrenceville. You might remember we got 12 employees, and we just went to the races, and we were doing stuff for ESPN and NRB Network, and we're doing some local professional jobs with the county, and we were doing, you know, so we're still doing some local TV, and then we were still doing events, and we were still traveling. And instead of me going and doing the event, we would go with a crew, or we would put all the money into the company and help pay people salaries. Reality shows were big. I mean, it was definitely the race. I mean, looking back, I was just so blessed. I was so lucky. I wish that I could go back, knowing what I know now, and be more grateful for those things that I assumed were my greatest hits. I didn't see it like from the spiritual lens of being like, "God wrote this story for you, bro. Be grateful for it because you're living the dream." It's just that my expectations were so high with that Steven Spielberg in mind. I was like, "Man, you know, what's this going to matter unless we get out of Georgia?" But it ended up mattering because I think we set the framework for a lot of the stuff that ended up coming in a couple of years. So, we were kind of the first independents that I know of that had... there was a couple of other folks at the time, but like I said, we all kind of knew each other. But there weren't many.

Jason Montoya (29:39)

Yeah. So, what was the, because a lot of it was documentary work, that at least what we did and what I saw. How come you guys went that angle instead of, you know, independent films, fictional?

Nathan McGill (29:44)

Yes. Great question. Yeah, no, it really came down to being a business decision. We did a movie called Dangerous Calling, which a couple of the buds that I grew up making movies with directed. And we raised money for that movie, and then we got it out to DVD, and it was picked up by a Christian company called Cloud Ten Pictures, I do believe. And so, it was fun because that movie was, I think, one of the first that actually I went to Blockbuster and got, or Walmart and got, or Lifeway Christian Stores. Now, Lifeway Christian Stores and Blockbuster are both a thing of the past, so people don't even know what we're talking about, so even your highest successes don't matter in history. But looking at it, it was sort of like, "Okay, at best"—not to criticize the filmmakers at all, because they did a fantastic job—"but the budget that we were able to provide them with, they were shooting on those P2 cards, you know, with a Panasonic, whatever it was back in the day, and it wasn't film, and it kind of looked like a Hallmark Channel special." It probably should have went to Hallmark, to be honest. It wasn't kind of like what we wanted to do, but I knew I could raise that amount of money, and I figured like if we can raise that kind of money for nonfiction, then we're going to do quite well. And raising that kind of money for a fiction, we just couldn't compete in the marketplace because people had millions of dollars. And at the end of the day, we were just a couple of dudes from Georgia, man, trying to raise money with the folks we knew, and we were lucky to do it. I don't know how we did it. It's kind of a miracle, but yeah. So, that's how we got there. We wanted to make change. Also, I will just point out, I had a little bit of bitterness about the church world in a way because it became so entertainment-y, if I will, in some of the bigger events, because I worked my way up until I got to the point of doing arena shows, and it just didn't feel like Jesus would buy a ticket, you know what I mean? So, I was like, "Yeah, I'm kind of, if I'm going to do entertainment, I just want to go do entertainment." And there were some specific topics that I wanted to go work on a little bit. The tax film wasn't one that I had in mind to do necessarily. It was just the movie that happened to be economical in the time of an economic crisis. So, we all benefited from the time in which that movie was made, and the fact that Warner Brothers and others were like, "It's got something to do with the economy. Everybody pays taxes. We'll give it a try." And so, we all got that on the IMDb, thanks to just the times.

Nathan McGill (32:27)

But there were other things like prison reform, like American-made manufacturing, workforce development issues, economic development issues, fast fashion. There was things that I cared about because I came from a family of manufacturers, and I felt like we could do a really good job at telling those stories. And of course we did. We did do a good job. One of the films was Academy Qualified. It was released in theaters nationwide. So, I feel like we accomplished the dream as far as the Lord would allow because he knew it would go to my head.

Jason Montoya (32:59)

Yeah, and I, I mean, and now, I mean, there's so many documentaries that come out now on Netflix and streaming and stuff, but I think it's also important to recognize like back then, like, I remember, what year was Super Size Me? That was a really big one.

Nathan McGill (33:13)

Yeah, there was a renaissance. There was like, we rode the wave of... so what happened in the history of film history in the sense of the creative question is that you have to remember like the '90s independent cinema kind of happened because folks could get digital. They could film on their own with camcorders and with lens adapters, and it kind of had this whole like renaissance there. And then as the realism after 9/11 occurred, folks wanted that gritty realism. And you see Michael Moore kind of going in and trying to tell the truth about 9/11 or whatever, making a bunch of money, which lights up—

Jason Montoya (33:51)

Yeah, and Bowling for Columbine was his other movie. Yeah.

Nathan McGill (33:54)

Yeah, Bowling for Columbine, and then you have, yes, Super Size Me, which takes like the man-on-the-street approach, and you start to see these different sub-genres of documentaries start to form where you have, like, no longer did people think of it like the Ken Burns on PBS, but you had different styles. And so, like, some of our films, we would start off by watching other documentaries and going, "Okay, well, let's make one called," you know, so there was these films. You'll probably remember there's a whole genre of "watch the weirdos" where like you would just find like King of Kong or King of—is it King of Kong, the Donkey Kong movie? Man, there were so... there's so many good ones.

Jason Montoya (34:31)

I don't know. Kind of the the the Tiger Guy would be a new version of that, The Hoarders.

Nathan McGill (34:37)

"Watch the Weirdos," that's it. Yeah, Tiger King would be "Watch the Weirdos." And so then you have a lot of the Super Size guy on a mission going to find something. Throw in 30 days on there. So, you would build in the actual frameworks or the story frameworks that would be built around these little, I hate to say the word "products" for lack of a better word, but that's your story, right? And so, as long as you had a three-act structure on a thing, it kept you from falling into a reality TV show, because that's that was the other thing that was powering the documentary renaissance at the time was that reality television was also very popular, so people would take a chance with a documentary every once in a while, and you would see them like chart. I think that we were riding like the end of the wave. So, early 2000s was like the peak, and then we actually ate out the rest of ours as that wave kind of went into the 2008 recession. And American Made Movie was great, but I know you help a lot of folks with all these different frameworks and ways to think about things that you help folks with. I have this thing that I need to really make a keynote out of, but I'll draw like a circle, and then I'll have all these different pieces of media around the circle. And in the center is the thing that you really want to accomplish. And so, if you want to make a movie, you put the movie in the middle. Then you might have a podcast, and you might have a book, and you might have a keynote. But if you really want to be a keynote speaker, you put that in the middle, and then you do the movie, and then the movie kind of helps you with the keynote, or the book helps you with the keynote. Same thing. If you want to be an author, book's in the middle, keynote supports the book, you know, and it can go vice versa. It's just what is the thing that you really want to do? With American Made Movie, we wanted to make change. We wanted to make a reach over return, and streaming had already started to disrupt things. So, a lot of folks think that the point was the movie. The movie was never in the center of the circle. PR was always in the center. And so, that's why we made the decisions we did: to make a film that connected all these different think tanks and organizations to start to talk to one another. And then the movie gave fuel to the reason why we would be on Fox Business or every morning show that there is in the country. And that's why I got a tour bus, because it wasn't about us. I needed a camera to point at something in front of a theater, and a tour bus is a great thing to point a camera at. When you have the thing in the center, you start to make different decisions, and that's kind of the thing with PR's in your center. You're creating things to generate PR. Yeah, that's right.

Jason Montoya (37:10)

Yeah. Things to make the PR come to life, yeah. I think you guys had me do some local interview for An Inconvenient Tax, some local video publication. Yeah.

Nathan McGill (37:21)

Probably, yeah. We were always pretty good at PR. We were always pretty good at that kind of stuff. I mean, you had to have it. People forget that the Academy had rules, and I was very, I was a stickler about those rules. I even got pretty sassy on the phone with the guy who's our current president one time about the rules that he would like to break in the film because Donald Trump was going to be in American Made Movie, but he was the only guy that asked for money. He was the only guy who wanted to be paid, and I was like, "I can't pay you, bro." This was far before anybody knew he was going to be president.

Jason Montoya (38:00)

Because if you pay someone, in terms of the Academy, if you pay someone, then it violates the rule and it's not technically a documentary anymore.

Nathan McGill (38:04)

Right, bingo, yeah. And so, we were sticklers for that kind of stuff because the question at the time, too, is like, you have this imposter syndrome as an artist always, and you want to make sure that you're real. And so, the guidelines and the rules, like that's what you held yourself up to, because no matter at what level that you were producing film, even when I had gone, I made sure that the actual national release released the movie in the AMC 18 in my hometown because it was only there for two weeks. Documentaries don't come to where we live, but we made sure that AMC would do that for us because we wanted the hometown to be able to go to a real theater and see it there. At the same time, it was competing with, like, Man of Steel or something, so it was never going to win, but it's kind of the point that it was there. But at the same time that was happening and a theater, somebody came up to me and said, "Do you do weddings?" And I think we all have that thing on our shoulder where we're just like, "Are you joking me right now? You don't know I have a real company."

Jason Montoya (39:12)

"I'd like you to film my wedding." If you can hold a camera, you know.

Nathan McGill (39:17)

"Like, come on now." Yeah, but you just have to, as you get older, you can start laughing at it now, but it's kind of like, "Come on, man. Come on. What do I got to do? What do I got to do to get my bona fides?" Thank goodness that Christ doesn't ask us to do stuff to win his love and approval, right? I think I was trying to earn it for so long that I caused most of the disasters in my life. But when you realize like, "No, this creative thing is more of a gift. He's going to write with you. Just hang on, dude, we're going for a ride." That's where it gets fun. As you get older, you do understand that a little bit more. But I guess for the younger audience, anybody listening, I would just say, "Let the writer write, you know. Trust what's happening in your life. Trust the narrative. Do not get your expectations mixed up in it because it's only going to lead to future resentments." It's okay. All this is leading to a greater story than we even get to know. So, that's kind of the fun part about it. It's not really like we could talk war stories all day long, and you and I both got them, man. And they're fun to talk about. There's no question. But at the end of the day, I think it's just like, "Man, what a journey. What a ride. I'm so blessed to feel like we got to do some of this stuff because a lot of people, they don't get to live their dream because of their circumstance or where they grew up, or they're just trapped." Luckily, I didn't have that experience.

Jason Montoya (40:42)

Yeah, and learning to just appreciate it. Well, tell us how your Christian faith has played a role in your journey here.

Nathan McGill (40:49)

Well, it's really been kind of everything. I think that I got—I was actually talking to my daughter about this. So, my wife and daughter, who's about 13 now, we were talking after the sermon on Sunday at church. We go to Sugar Hill Church here in Sugar Hill, Georgia. And we were just kind of talking about how, like, God's kind of truth on everybody's heart and your mom and you have this moral compass. So, when Dad's in here watching an R-rated movie, y'all feel like y'all need to tell me that it's bad and it's garbage and you're going to like, and you're coming at me, but you don't know the theology or you don't know the verses. You don't have that because that's on your heart. Isn't that cool that you have that, and that that's super, super special? For me, I had to learn it differently. So, I had to come in it from an intellectual standpoint, and I think the Lord knew that, which is why he gave me a great experience of, like, growing up, I saw God work in my family to kind of help them over the death of a child. I did accept Jesus during that time, and I did write a book. On Amazon, it's called A Damn Mess, and I kind of tell the whole story. But then in my film career and trying to earn it and having done all the Christian events, one of the benefits was I got to sit under these incredible Bible teachers, like your David Nassar's and your David Jeremiah and I mean, all these different folks that would preach all these different events, the Voddie Baucham who we just lost, you know, like all these different evangelists and theologians. And then I would wrestle with like this theology versus that theology. And because I'm making content, I'm getting my hand slapped all the time because I'm like, "Okay, what do we got? We got six different theologies. They're all Christian. You believe this. You believe that." I had to figure it out in my brain. And so, it took a long time for me to actually put it in my heart. At the same time, I'm an artist in the church, so I'm misunderstood. They don't know what to do with me half the time. They're moving me from here to there. They're telling me, "Go pursue your passion elsewhere. You don't belong here." And you get all of those kinds of cuts and bruises along the way.

Nathan McGill (42:56)

So, I think it wasn't really like while I was from the South, went to church, knew the theology, could argue the points of Calvinism or Reformed theology or, you know, whatever. I would kind of get the, could argue it this way. I could argue it that way. It was really the objective documentarian—the same thing that makes me good at that. That was my faith. That's how it was where I put my faith. So, short story long is when the film company did bad, when the IRS audit came, I also had an unfortunate experience with substance abuse because of prescription pain medication. So, I had to go to rehab. And really, when I put my career down at the cross and knew that I was going to lose the big house and the cars that I bought and all the stupid stuff, and that none of that was going to earn me one bit of love from my creator or one bit of bona fide or no attaboy was coming from at least my creator, I really felt like a sense of relief that allowed me to just say, "Okay, I'm going to lay the filmmaker down at the cross. And what I'm going to pick up is service. And Lord, if you want me to be here at this rehab and serve these drug addicts for the next six months, I'm here." And that is what I did, Jason. I didn't go anywhere. I called my wife. She said, "That sounds like a great decision. And you know why it sounds like a great decision? Because it's not something that the producer, Nate McGill, would do." And I was like, "Yeah, that's true." And so, I hung out. Some people were like, "Hey, you're not around your wife and kids." I needed that, and they were completely fine because I was a train wreck by the time I got down there. They were cool with it. But we had lost our house. We had lost stuff. We needed to start back over from zero. And because I don't tell this story a lot in this kind of forum, over the last five or six years, that's why when I came out of that situation, I did go work for somebody else because I didn't really want to, like, I didn't know if I was okay. What I didn't want to do is go build another idol because my career had been my idol. That workaholism had been... that filmmaker identity is so, I don't know, sticky for me. Like, I do want that. And so, it's hard to admit that sometimes. It's like, "You know what? Some of those films that we made, like, I cared a little bit more about the award that was coming than the actual people that we were making it about." And that's some hard truth right there when you're like, "You know what? I just wanted an Emmy on that one." That's it, you know, whatever that it was. And so, I did not want to do that. So, I just decided I was going to serve, shut up, and serve. And I honestly thought I was going to be there until my kids were graduated. But as we prayed about it, prayed about it, prayed about it, we just felt more and more guided to that it was time. And then as my kids entered middle school, that I was going to go do a new thing, and I did not know what that thing was. And now we do. That's, I always say, "Let the writer write." You just have to be willing and listen and know.

Jason Montoya (46:00)

Yeah. Because you made the leap not, you quit without knowing what was ahead. Is that what happened? Yeah. So, you made the leap of faith, and then you hoped that something would be there. Right.

Nathan McGill (46:13)

That's correct. Yeah, yeah, that's correct. 100%. Well, you know, it was sort of like a conversation where I was sort of like, "You know, I think that I think I fulfilled my mission through the pandemic and being here, and I feel ready, and I feel strong, and I feel like I can go do something. I'm not sure what that thing is." And I was aware that AI was a thing, and I probably wasn't really thinking about it, though. Honestly, I was more like just talking to my people that I was around there and going, "You know, I think I can give you six more months." And it was more like, "Well, you got six minutes." So, you know, "If you're not going to be here," and to their credit, that's a great business practice that I totally endorse. I think that if somebody's not going to be with you, why would you keep him around? "Just go figure it out, dude." And that's super scary. But luckily, the way that God works, like he didn't give me that feeling overnight. I'd been sitting on it in my subconscious for quite a while. So, by the time that it boiled up, it only took a couple of days for everybody else in my life. Me being an incredibly loyal person who did not do any freelance while I was working for a creative company, like there were opportunities that I would turn down constantly. And so, when the word got out that I wasn't there anymore, stuff started to form pretty quickly. And then I knew that I wanted ownership. I knew that I wanted a problem to solve that was bigger than me, and that was something that could carry the weight of what those filmmaking thing did for me, which was just the ultimate drop of dopamine when you go tackle a big problem. And certainly, it was right in front of my face.

Jason Montoya (47:58)

Yeah, so they're like, "Hey, I want to work with you now that you're available. Let's do this thing." And so, all those opportunities popped up.

Nathan McGill (48:04)

Yeah. Yeah. The first, the first offer is really for a CMO role at a healthcare company. And then it became like, "You know what? I would love to be a CMO, but, you know, twofold. I don't think that I... I think I need another guy. I think I need somebody who's really an expert at the direct marketing side, who's really living on the screen, who's the dude in the chair, if you will, that can really watch and monitor all of these metrics. What I can give you is some really cool stuff. I'll give you the best content in far as film and video. Guys, I can give you the best-looking website. I can do your message and marketing. I am a giant Donald Miller nerd when it comes to StoryBrand. I love the messaging. He's thinking in the screenwriters framework anyway, very Joseph Campbell, very all that. And so, I, you know, I'll tear up a website in a heartbeat. I'll tear up a mission statement in a heartbeat. You know, I will do the problem solution result all day long." I love those kind of frameworks because it's very story centered, and that's the way my brain works. But there's all these different parts of a marketing department that need to form. And so, it was more like, "Why don't we start, why don't I start this company to solve your problem? Because it's a really cool problem." And the particular company in which my business partner is with is a company that says it's revenue cycle management, but the problem that they're solving is they're helping rural hospitals across America make sure that they're paid properly and that in the current healthcare situation that we've got, a lot of the folks that are marking down self-pay, they might actually have insurance, and the hospital never gets paid for that. If you send a medical bill to somebody's house, they don't necessarily like even can't really take that to collections. I mean, they do, but you don't really have to pay it because of the way that certain laws have changed and stuff. So, hospitals, rural hospitals in America are losing money like crazy. And so, it is a documentary problem, but one of the things that I learned in the last six years is that you listen to someone's problem, and you do not assume the solution. When I was a documentary filmmaker, I would that was my solution all day long. So, you would come to me and be like, "Hey, I want to do something on this issue. We're making a documentary. That's why you're here, right?" You're doing manufacturing, it's documentary. It's taxes, documentary. It's whatever. It's always a doc. Now, I don't do that because there's just so many different mediums. There's so many different ways to come at it. One solution is not a one-size-fits-all in this new world that we live in. And so, I always want to think through it and say, "You know, well, hold on. If we can save, if we can save some money for a hospital, then we save a whole town. And so, how do we do that with marketing where, you know, how do we do that? How do we come alongside you and figure out that? How do we tell that story better? How do we shift the understanding with a CFO at a rural hospital who's seeing all these numbers and all this stuff and they're speaking their insider language, but no one's just really like done the work of messaging to say, 'Your hospital is losing a million dollars a year. Would you like us to help stop that? Would you like us to go get it back? Would you like us to help recover that?'" And what I just said, like everybody in the whole world gets that problem. But when you're inside these industries, every industry has insider language, and sometimes it just kind of goes in one ear out the other. Or around here, we'll call it chamber speak, or any of those kinds of things. We have the ways that we communicate, and you know, so sometimes the messaging is sometimes the marketing is messaging, and sometimes it's, "My gosh, I have a roofing company, and I'm not on, when I asked ChatGPT, who the best roofer is, I'm not there. How do I fix that?" And so, that's kind of like why it's big enough for me to go, "Yeah, let's do this. We got all the tools. We got all the toys. We know a lot of the people. We can go make a dent in this." I tried to do a call out for creatives and other folks and be like, "Hey, look, you got a gift. You got a talent. Come on, let's go because I feel like I can we're going to find some kind of problem to solve through our network of folks at some point." So, it feels good, and it feels big, and it also feels very guided. I've used that word a lot today, but it's like, "Let the writer write." It's like I don't wake up and assume that this is where we're going to be in five years. I don't know where we're going to be in three months. I didn't know where I was going to be 90 days later. I did not think that I was going to be doing way better than I was 90 days ago. But when you follow God, it has a crazy way to work out. My wife was even like, "You know, we kind of were struggling with money a little bit before you left your job. We haven't struggled one time since you left. Isn't that crazy?" And I think it's because like, you start to measure everything. You start to really pay attention. My budget got a lot better around the house. I started running my family more like a business all of a sudden, and everything gets better when you start to measure stuff. So, yeah, man, it's been good.

Jason Montoya (53:15)

So, when you think about living better, what does that mean to you?

Nathan McGill (53:17)

Well, living better is priority. It's knowing what your priority is. So, it's easy to say it's faith, it's family, it's then your career. But there's got to be a practice involved with that. You can't just give it lip service. And that's what I've found is that you just have to have a recurring habit that you're doing daily, if at all possible, to make sure that those things stay your priority. Because I can float off. I mean, I probably taking this conversation into different directions than we wanted to go. But it's like, I can do that very easily. I can create four full-time jobs for myself by Friday if I'm not super careful. And so, I try to keep family the first priority. And you know, there are great metrics. Money is a great metric. I know that a lot of times we don't want to talk about it, and then sometimes as Christians, we don't want to talk about it, but it is one of the most, well, it is one of the most important things that we can do. And what I'm trying to encourage men to do is literally sit down with a friend. Your finances might not look the same, but it is so important to have some accountability with your friends and your neighbors when it comes to that, to be able to not be afraid to say, "Look, I make this much money, and this is what my margin looks like." Then you might have a friend that's making twice as much money as you, but your margin actually works out to be quite the same. And so, that metric of what is wealth in between what you spend and what you make becomes critically important. So, when we downsized and started working for the last six years, we never changed our cost of living. So, I could actually make a jump because we never, in six years, we never changed what we were living on. We were making more consistently, but we never changed our cost of living. My wife drove a 10-year-old paid-for Suburban until last month, and we had to go because it finally broke down, and we were like, "We can't fix it. We've already put every new part on this thing." You know, "We have to get something now," but it wasn't like a celebration of like, "Let's go get a new car with a new business." We had literally not done anything. And the margin was good enough to go, "Let's go start a business." Now, I've got friends that work corporate jobs, and they're getting paid exponentially more there, but their cost of living is right there, too. So, if they lose that job, I mean, they're toast.

Jason Montoya (55:42)

Yeah, which means they can't lose it, which means they might be trapped.

Nathan McGill (55:44)

It's not a great thing to make a lot of money. Yeah, you're trapped. Yeah. If you're making $200,000 a year, yeah, you're trapped. If you're making, if you're making $200,000 right now with AI coming, bro, I mean, I don't know that you better have some margin, or you better be thinking about some margin, or you better move some stuff around or whatever. But I know what it's like to, when I was doing really well in the film business, I was also buying the stupid house and cars and had no margin, and I was broke with money.

Jason Montoya (56:13)

That's why the IRS could come in. The IRS, if I had margin and the IRS would have never bit me over, but because I had none, that's what they were able to do. So, I just—

Jason Montoya (56:22)

Then when they bit you, they bit something you didn't have.

Nathan McGill (56:25)

Exactly. And so, we always have to be keeping it up for the dry season. We need to be storing it up. So, faith is everything to me because those are the lessons. And so, you always look back to the framework, and you can go to a Dave Ramsey, or you could find something that works for you. But I feel like in the practical places of life, for me, always going back and basing that on through the lens of scripture and what's the best framework, if you will, for this system. I'm always going to trust someone else's system more so than my own by default because it gives me something to measure it against outside of myself and my own self-interest.

Jason Montoya (57:10)

So, how do you think about and use systems in your work and life?

Nathan McGill (57:13)

Yeah, I usually find something and then I just run with it. I've been using the StoryBrand for messaging for the last seven years. It's like, or when you're talking about addiction or something, and you're running the play of the 12 steps, if that don't work for you, run something else. But if it works for you, run it. And the whole state, the statement there is, "It works if you work it." Most frameworks work if you work them, to a certain point. They may not be as fancy or as sexy or whatever, but, you know, the three-act structure is a framework for story. And when you break it, the story's bad. And when you don't, the story's pretty good. So, why would you try to invent a new way to tell a story? Why don't you just stick with what works? It's because maybe you don't understand it well enough to work it, but, you know, that's so frameworks. Systems, same thing. We'll find a... sometimes a system is an app. When we're talking about budgeting, I'll use the EveryDollar, zero-dollar budget app. It's a framework. It's a zero-dollar budget. That's a framework. That's one way to do it. You don't have to do it that way.

Jason Montoya (58:24)

But just pick a way and do it.

Nathan McGill (58:25)

Just pick a way and do it. Yeah. Find something that works for you. And, you know, with same thing as with social media, any avenue that you want to take, there's probably a framework that you could at least get started with. And then you can always measure, like, "Is this good?" In the creative world, everything can be so subjective. You really do need a measure on, "Is this fitting a format?" And so, if you brought me an ad and you were like, "Nathan, look at this copy. What do you think about this ad?" I can tell you what I think about the ad, or I can tell you, "Well, that one-liner that you have there is not talking about a problem that anybody wants to solve. So, I don't care about it." Make it tell you problems. Get attention. People are trying to survive and thrive. Just cut to the chase. What's the problem that you're solving with that headline? I can—that's measuring it against a framework. If I tell the artist what I think about it, they may listen, they may not. It may work, it may not. It's just all subjective.

Jason Montoya (59:24)

Yeah. What about mentoring? How does mentoring play a role? What is its place in our lives?

Nathan McGill (59:34)

Yeah. So, I think it's good to both have your mentors and also mentor because I don't know about you, but you are a mentor. You are helping your people. You are... this is even a form of mentorship by creating this podcast. You do a great job with doing that, and you're always one the most generous people with your content. You really get out there, and you really break it down, and you have like a good candor and a loving way to do that. I'm a little bit more, "shake them till they get it right," but you're so much better than me at that, is I guess what I'm trying to say. But I feel like anytime you are trying to serve others and mentor someone else, it also holds me more accountable to live the way that I'm teaching. And we preach the best what we need to learn the most, right? So, it's like, sometimes I can give you the great advice on what to do and then I'm not running that play myself, you know? And so, what I'll always say is like, if you really want to get in shape, go be somebody's personal trainer. 'Cause then you got to be in shape, right? So, that's kind of the thing. So, you can just put that in any, any kind of area that you want, and it'll work.

Jason Montoya (1:00:54)

Is there any other words of wisdom you'd want to share with us that we didn't get a chance to dive into yet?

Nathan McGill (1:00:54)

No, I think that the thing is that I feel if people are having a business, I think that what we need in the season that's coming, I feel like we need to batten down the hatches a little bit, and we need to be as safe as we possibly can. And I think that it takes looking at yourself in the mirror sometimes at a certain level of business and ask yourself, "Is it really working?" And so, when people come on board, the problem usually is that they don't need a client, they need a better client. And a lot of the clients that are easiest to get from a marketing perspective or any other kind of perspective are the enthusiastic amateurs that don't know what they're doing because they're vulnerable. And so, what I try to do is at every intake, get real honest and upfront with people about, "Is that you?" And it's a weird conversation to have, Jason, because it's like, "Are you an enthusiastic amateur in terms of business? How's your wife feel about this endeavor? Or how does your husband feel about this endeavor? And what's your revenue look like? And have you done a P&L statement? And do you know how you're really doing, and what you're bringing home?" Because a lot of the entrepreneurs that we work with, I think the average income is like $30,000 a year, maybe after their expenses and paying other people. And that's for the ones that are still alive after five years. That's, so, like...

Jason Montoya (1:02:27)

Yeah. I remember, I, well, before I moved to Atlanta, I had a little eBay business, and man, I was selling stuff, and it felt like, "Man, I'm like doing really, really good." And then I did a spreadsheet of like my income and expenses, and I was just breaking even. I was like, "Oh, I'm not doing good at all. That's a big nothing."

Nathan McGill (1:02:44)

Yeah, well, you could live a long time, breaking even, and you could get the next payday and the next payday, and you can do that. But I think that's kind of like, is the business really working if you're putting away for the future? And that's kind of where you need the most help. But it's hard for all of us to put our hand up and say like, "You know what? I really don't know what I'm doing. I need some leadership coaching, or I need to come and get with Jason about the things that he's doing because what I really need is a structure, or I need a framework, or I've got to figure out a way to be steadily making some sort of a profit margin better than I'm making right now." And that's what I see you trying to help people do. And so, I would just encourage people to use your resources and to really dive deep into the blogs that you've done and the books that you've written, because it's all there, and it works if you work it. So, I think it's like what it takes is the courage enough to go, "You know, I've been listening to the content. I've been reading a little bit here. I've caught a podcast or two. Jason, can you really help me because I am an enthusiastic amateur? I love being in business for myself, but I don't know how to make it work." And just understand that that is okay because nobody taught us how to do this. I mean, nobody in school said, "This is how you be an entrepreneur," right? So, we're... there you go. And I guarantee you that they're not using that software that you learned back then.

Jason Montoya (1:04:00)

Yeah, my degree is in 3D animation, which I don't do at all. Exactly. AI is probably doing half of it anyway. That's also one of the things I try to do is, there are things I'm really good at, and I can kind of do them, and then there are things that I'm an amateur. When I had Noodlehead in the earlier years, I tried to pretend that we were better than we were, but it created a weird effect because it attracted people that really wanted that competence, which we couldn't deliver, and then it repelled the people like, "Well, I need a starter marketing company, not like an award-winning one." So, we ended up attracting the wrong people. And so, I think if you're more honest and sincere about where you are, you're going to attract people that are going to meet you at where you are.

Nathan McGill (1:04:29)

Sure, we all did. That's right. Yeah, that's right. I remember like the same week that I started the business, I sat down with some subcontractors and said, "Who's going to do design? Who's going to do video? Who's going to do these things?" And I got in one particular quote for a business, and I was like, "There's no way I can afford you. Like, I know we've been buds for a while, but I'm looking at this thing and going, y'all either need to rethink some stuff or I need to rethink some stuff because this is not going to work." But, and then you find yourself making a logo, and you're like, "Look, I'm not going to logo." So, you go to the client and you're like, "Look, this is like the second logo that I've made. I'm just letting you know. It's going to be great because I understand associative marketing, and this brand's going to be based on, like we talked about, a framework. So, these hex codes are from this business that you want to be like, and these fonts are from these two businesses merged together that you're going to like. Like, I can technically prove what, but I'm just letting you know that like I had to pay somebody just a tiny bit of money to help me create the working files in Photoshop for this one because we're not scaled up to the size that I really want to be where I can bring in the pros that I know and love, and they're friends, but I don't want to give them less than they're worth." And you know what? Being on front street with your client like that, and I think it built more credibility in that moment. They were like, "We get it. Hey, you're starting it up. We get, you know, we get it totally. That's awesome. Hey, we love it. You know, we didn't know all this work went into it." Yeah, "Here you go." And so, and then you overdeliver on the things that you're really great at. So, you're always you're not going to be good at everything all at once, but when you are starting out, you kind of do have to do more than you feel secure in doing, but raise your hand and go get some help and ask a guy. And that's where the fun is.

Jason Montoya (1:06:33)

And ask AI.

Nathan McGill (1:06:34)

You can ask AI. Yeah, man. I mean, it's an executive coach waiting for you. And look, that's humbling, too, because you think that, "Wow, I've got 20 years in filmmaking. Y'all can ask me any question you want, and I'll be able to answer it." Well, so can your phone. So, there you go. Not going to go into executive coaching anytime soon over here.

Jason Montoya (1:06:56)

So, if someone is wanted, who would be a good fit to work with you? Like, what's the problem they're facing and who are they?

Nathan McGill (1:07:02)

Home service businesses I feel are the ones that are going to need us the most, and I think that's where my focus is going to be. Obviously, we work in a healthcare space, in which we will work with other healthcare companies that one of our clients is already working with to help them because we're already essentially in the C-suite in the hospital and the, in the healthcare space in that way. But in terms of bringing on new folks, the reason we're building a podcast studio right now, and the reason that we want to start talking about this problem more and more, is because I have a passion for workforce development, and it was why I spent five years doing American Made Movie and doing those kinds of things because I believe that our trades and our tradesmen are very, very valuable to our society. And when their businesses start to get affected, or they start to see a dip in revenue because of something as dumb as SEO changing over to an answer engine, and they're too busy with their plumbing business or their roofing business or whatever to go and make that change, essentially, you could have a business that's accepted private equity funds that's done great historically. And all of a sudden, they're not anywhere to be found, and nobody knows they exist because all of a sudden, no one's looking through that same window. And it'll happen over time. And, you know, folks will do as best they can. But it feels to me that there is an urgency there and enough business there for not just me, but a lot of other marketers to go, "Hey, Nate, that's a great idea. Let's go solve that problem." And if everybody goes and solves that problem right now and it puts me out of business, I'll go start a new business. But I think it's a big enough problem where we all could do this. And so, I'm okay with other people doing it, and I'm okay with somebody calling me up and being like, "Hey, hey, you're trying to tackle that problem. So, are we over here. Let's get on the phone and figure out what the services are that we're going to offer." I would love that more than anything. I am not a competitive person. I am totally collaborative in these kind of things. And if you're serious about solving problems, and you're not one of those funnel hack marketing companies that I talked about before need to eliminate themselves from the face of the earth because all they're doing is scamming people for $3,500 a month or more, like, let's actually go solve the problem because if we do that, we're all going to make money. It's going to be great.

Jason Montoya (1:09:23)

Yeah. How can people connect with you? Find you? Are you online at all?

Nathan McGill (1:09:28)

Yeah, I am. Right now you can see a bunch of these new Sora videos on my Facebook and Instagram. I'm having fun with that AI. It's crazy, man. They don't even need cameras anymore. Yeah, you could go, hit me up. You can hit me up on social. It's Nathaniel McGill on Facebook. I think the same thing on Instagram. You can hit me at nate [at] welovetotalk [dot] com.

Jason Montoya (1:09:55)

Cool. Well, Nate, thank you so much for sharing your life with us today. This has been another episode of the Share Life Podcast.

Nathan McGill (1:09:58)

Thank you, sir. It's been good.