Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Aponte.
Matt, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I’m just a Puerto Rican boy raised in a small country town in North Florida. Youngest of four boys, son to a Spanish “Spitfire” Mom, and my Dad who was an entrepreneur for as long as I can remember. That is where I got my entrepreneurial blood from.
I remember I was a hustler as far back as 2nd grade! I took a new box of pens from my dad’s office to school and started selling them for .50 cents each. I was killing it until the school patrol caught me and turned me in, they made me give all the money back. That was my first experience of the “system” trying to keep the little man down. No not really LOL, but I was pretty bummed about giving the money back.
That was when it all started, though. I always had a knack for seeing an opportunity where I could make some money. Even though I started my first official business 25 years ago when I was 16 (a window cleaning business), my entrepreneurial journey didn’t seriously start until 2009 when I started 212 Photography.
I say it didn’t seriously start until then because prior to that, I had started multiple businesses, but they were more like “side-gigs” or full-time freelancing opportunities. But this time… well, this time was different because it was the bottom of the 2008 crash. I was working a crappy commission-only B2B sales job for a few months and I was barely making $300/week.
To top it off I was going through a divorce, my house went into foreclosure and my cars were repossessed. I had also seriously injured my back, so I had not been working for a few weeks. Then one morning, when I woke up, and habitually swallowed 1500 mg of extra-strength Tylenol, just so I could curb the back paid enough to try and function through my morning. It was that morning in May of 2009 when I realized that I pretty much hated my life, hated what I was doing and had officially hit rock bottom.
I was about to be evicted from the place I was renting, I was stealing electricity cause I couldn’t pay for it, I was buying groceries at the dollar store, I had just applied for food stamps and I had pawned everything I had of value just to survive. My life sounded a lot like some old country songs!
That is when I made the decision to start my own business and do what I wanted to do. Something I was passionate about and not just doing what would make me money. So I started 212 Photography. I did not have a camera cause I had pawned it, so I had to borrow money from a friend to buy a camera and get business cards printed so I could start making money as a photographer.
I had always loved photography, I was a classically trained photographer since the age of 21 and had previously photographed weddings, events and family portraits mostly for fun, but I always loved it since I was 17 years of age. So I knew that if I still loved it, then at 30 years old, I would love it at least for a few more years so I could make a living out of it.
So, that is what I did. I started shooting family portraits for a friend who worked at a daycare center and was able to mention me to a lot of her parents.
I got my first big break the next year in 2010 when a local country music artist reached out to me to see if I would be interested in photographing his new album cover. I was super excited and immediately jumped at the opportunity. He was having a music video filmed as well at the same time, so I was able to be behind the scenes and photograph. This is when I quickly realized that I was very interested in video production.
One day I got my hands on a DSLR video camera and shot a little creative short film while hanging out at my girlfriend’s place. I showed it to the music artist and he really liked my style and how it turned out. Long story short, the music video he was paying to have filmed, turned out horrible and looked like something that was produced in 1996.
The producer was old and didn’t want to make changes for him so he was furious! Since I had developed a friendship with the music artist, he made me a proposition. He said, “Matt, that little video you shot playing around at your girlfriend’s house was better quality than what I paid this dude $5,000 bucks to shoot. What if I bought you a new video camera, would you film my music video as a trade?”
I couldn’t say YES fast enough! The video turned out great, he loved it and it got a lot of exposure. Exactly what he wanted. That was how 212 Creative Media was born. Shortly after I quickly realized that the money was in shooting for businesses and so I focused on commercial filming and creating promo and advertising videos.
Now ten years after that first music video, 212 Creative Media has had the privilege to produce video and do commercial advertising for brands such as Ford, Acura, Life Storage, GE, Toyota as well as 26 major universities across the nation, including CSU here in Colorado. That is actually when I was “introduced” to Colorado and fell in love with it and shortly after, I moved here with my wife.
Over the years, I have always kept the company at the edge of technology, keeping an eye on what could be the next big thing to help businesses in the digital video marketing arena and then offer those services to them. We have since built our own in-house interactive video technology and we are one of the leading companies in the nation when it comes to Video SEO marketing.
It has not been easy to keep the company going all those years. There have been many ups and downs and many times when I wasn’t sure we would make it. However, in the last four years, we have experienced steady growth and are even experiencing hyper-growth during this pandemic.
Today we specialize in filling the gaps in traditional video marketing. Where a standard great video production ends with a great video commercial for a business, we take it ten steps further and turn that video into a lead-producing, profit-generating machine using Google Video Search Marketing coupled with proprietary techniques we have developed over the years.
As the Founder & CEO of 212 Creative Media, I couldn’t be more proud of how far we have come. From a $230 camera making $75 per family portrait, to a million-dollar company and still growing. I would love to say that I did it all myself, but that would be a lie. It is because, at every pivotal moment of my life, I met one person that either taught me something or made me aware of something that set me on a new direction to improve myself and my business. I owe all of my success to good people and the ability to remain flexible in the thinking that I know everything.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The biggest challenge and obstacle I faced was myself and my pride. As business owners, we often do not realize that our businesses are a reflection of ourselves entirely. We are the one that is at the steering wheel, and if we are not open to change, improvement and criticism, then we will end up driving the whole company off a cliff.
I had many good people come into the business in the past and most of the time, they did not stick around because I was frankly an a$$ to work for or work with. I knew better and was rarely open to doing anything different. It wasn’t until late 2017 when I had a complete breakdown and finally realized that I was the bottleneck, I was the problem. I was what was holding my company back.
Once I realized that and changed my approach and began to work on myself as a person through personal development, my business and my life quite literally turned completely around.
We’d love to hear more about 212 Creative Media.
First off, 212 stands for the boiling point of creativity. At 211 degrees water is hot, but at 212 degrees water boils and produces steam and steam can power a locomotive. It represents that one extra degree of effort that pays off huge. 212 Creative Media is technically a video marketing agency. But I don’t really like using that term to describe us, nor “digital marketing firm” or “video production company.” The reason being is because none of them really describe what we do.
What we do is offer businesses an extremely effective way to use video to drive more brand exposure, and generate leads and sales to their businesses. We do this through our main service called Google Video Search Marketing. This is when we use Video SEO techniques to place a high converting commercial at the top of local Google search results and we do it in under 30 days.
Everyone knows how powerful it is for a business to show up at the top of a Google Search, and everyone also knows the power of good video marketing. So we combine the two by placing a video commercial at the top of google search results.
However, we do not just rank any commercial because not every promo video is good for organic traffic. We have developed a commercial video formula, after researching over 1,000,000 ad data points, and created a very high converting commercial for businesses that convert Google organic traffic higher than any other kind of video commercial.
We also can take that a step further and create interactive video lead generation funnels. We do this with our in-house interactive video technology and can actually feed the viewer a custom video response based on their interactions and this drives them into a lead funnel for our clients, drastically increasing their conversion rates and the ROI on their marketing dollars. We guarantee results.
So it is pretty clear what sets us apart from others because we place a huge focus on creating real lasting results by using our video marketing services in ways other companies do not, or cannot. I am most proud of how far we have come, and that after ten years, we are not only standing but thriving. Like I mentioned before, it all started in desperation with a cheap $230 camera.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
There have been a few people that I would like to give credit to. First off, my wife, Jessica. This business nearly caused divorce in our marriage early in 2018. I was blinded by success and desperate for it and did not realize the toll it was taking on our marriage.
I realized what was happening, made the necessary changes and now we have a wonderful marriage and she is even a part owner in the company now. But none of this would have happened if she wasn’t as supportive as she was.
She is my biggest cheerleader and believed in me when no one else would. She stuck by my side, even when I didn’t deserve it.
I mentioned the country music artist that took a chance on me. Because he did and the way things unfolded, I was able to start my video production business.
I guess I owe some pretty big credit to my oldest brother Tony as well. He is the one that gave me the idea to combine video marketing with search engine results back in 2012, which has largely made the company what it is today.
The team that I have now is the most solid close-knit team and I am so grateful for them every day, because if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be growing the way we are. We are a small but solid team. I never really had any mentors along the way until the last couple years. My only mentors before then were those I never met, like Tony Robins, Jim Rohn, Napoleon Hill, to name a few, along with others that I would model through books I would read.
In recent years I had the privileged to be coached by one of the best (in my opinion) business coaches in the industry Dave Evans. It is because of his coaching and business framework that I was able to gain clarity for my business and have a solid foundation to scale on.
My business strategist Jason is top notch with helping me with process management and seeing the big picture. There have been many others along the way in the past 11 years that I have learned from, taken little bits of knowledge and technique and applied it in my business and life with my own spin to it.
One thing I learned early on, even though it took a long time for me to admit it, is that the most important thing we can do in our life is to learn from others and model success. That is what life is all about, experiencing and learning.
Pricing:
- Packages Range $2,500 – $30,000
Contact Info:
- Address: 7475 W 5th Ave
- Website: https://www.212creativemedia.com
- Phone: 720-500-7063
- Email: matt@212creativemedia.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/212_creative_media
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/212creativemedia
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