“You have to inspire yourself every day. Even if you had a massively bad day before, you have to try to find the victories in it.”

Today's episode of Be Customer Led features Richard Botto, Founder & CEO of Stage 32. Stage 32 is an online platform and marketplace aimed at democratizing the entertainment industry, by providing networking and training opportunities for all film, television, digital content makers and professionals, globally. The member community is now over 750,000!

Throughout today's episode, Richard discusses his journey and experience creating his company and developing the community and member experience.

[01:14] Richard's Journey – Mentioning how an entrepreneurial spirit blossomed inside of him, Richard explains his story so far and the distinguishing aspects that drove him to become a business founder. 

[07:12] Stage 32 -  Richard mentions how he came up with the name Stage 32, the genesis of the firm and why he launched it.

[12:45] Challenges –  While recounting the instances where he noticed the community's curvy expansion, Richard shares the evolution of his struggles and victories over the last 11 years. 

[22:26] Richard's Advice – Richard offers suggestions and assistance to anyone considering doing something similar to what he did.

[27:23] Community. Not a Platform – Richard discusses what he does differently to emphasize the community experience and make individuals feel like they are not part of a large platform but rather part of a community to help one another grow, expand, and develop. 

[31:31] Inspiration – Leaving several worthy facts, Richard reveals who he admires and where he finds inspiration.

Resources:

Connect with Richard:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/richardbotto/

Company Website: stage32.com

Richard RB Botto on Building a Community & Member Experience

Welcome to be customer lad, where we'll explore how leading experts in customer and employee experience are navigating organizations through their own journey to be customer led and the actions and behaviors of lawyers and businesses exhibit to get there. And now your host of Bill's staikos.

We're going to talk about not only his journey and his experience starting this company, but also. Developing the community or member experience as well. Rich, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's great to have you on be customer led.

thank you for having me big fan of the show and everything that you do for the community.

[00:01:08] Bill Staikos: so kind, that's so kind of you, so, Hey, rich, as our first question for every guest is tell us a little bit about your journey. And your background and some of the differentiating factors that really led you to be com a business founder. And you've got this really interesting background, right?

Like you, you started a publication a while back and you've got this great background in media and then you started stage 32. So kind of walk us through that and just, your journey go back as far as you like as well.

And a lot of ways, my grandparents were both sets of Italian immigrants came over and made very different lives for themselves. My father's father worked with his hands. He was an electrician, a carpenter blue collar. Just an unbelievable human being, but whatever it took to get it done, hard worker in supporting the family.

And my mother's father became a higher up at general motors. So I got to kind of see both ends of the spectrum. I was going to sleep the building as a kid, going through the top floor, looking out over Manhattan and then going on jobs with my father's father, where he was, fixing a door or laying down a carpet or helping somebody out in some.

roofing and whatever. And so I got to see both ends of that, and I just admired the hell out of them. They're my heroes. They really ought to this day. And then my father, same thing, he started out sort of in the corporate world, he became a pharmacist, went from, getting that pharmacy degree to working in pharmaceutical advertising for very, very big corporation in Manhattan and worked his way up through the ranks.

Into one time. It was one of the top 100 New York times privately held companies. Wow. And was able to compete against the whole company. Did he work with the gigantic accounts? Like the Johnson and Johnson accounts, Tylenol and everything like that. So I got to see all ends of it, the entrepreneurial spirit and everything, and the entrepreneurial spirit of it all was something that really grew inside of me.

I had jobs, I worked for people and I worked my ass off, but I always felt like I wanted to do. Something on my own and then kind of budding up against that was I had a very creative streak. I was a writer. I did some acting and which is very, a lot of people don't realize this, the people that watch films, but being a creative is, is a very entrepreneurial person.

Even though it looks like all these people come together to create a project. You're really, you do a lot of work in isolation, right? Or right in isolation, the director plans, the film in isolation, actors learn their lines in isolation sometimes. And even when actors are done with a role, they have to go and market themselves to the next one.

Right? So these two parallel lines in a lot of ways converge and I launched the magazine called razor magazine. About 15 years ago. And it was a men's lifestyle magazine that competed against GQ and Esquire. And at that time we used to say that it was the magazine when we were done with your maximum years, but not ready for your Esquire years.

So it was a very upscale sort of the way GQ was back into Tate day. And we were a single title publisher, which was very entrepreneurial and, competing against the, the hearse and the Conde Nast who's world. And we out routinely outsole, GQ and Esquire. the only problem that we ran into was timing.

Really, we were at a time where everything was starting, not when we started, but over time, everything digital. And we were ahead of the curve on that having a digital component, but for a single title publisher with print in that era, there was, there wasn't much room for it to really explore, even though.

Literally our west five issues. Everyone else sold the one before we, when we shut it down, it had the highest membership that we had ever had. We were profitable, but it wasn't. There was no way to get to the next level and nobody was going to buy us because print was dying. Now the good that came out of that, besides what the experience was that I got to meet a lot of people in the entertainment industry and having come from a writing and acting background and being fascinated by the business.

Of film from when I was a little kid, this allowed me to meet a lot of people in the industry and get sort of a masterclass on how the business, the industry runs. And that by virtue of that led me to starting stage 32, becoming a producer, to becoming an actor, becoming a screenwriter, and then having the idea to start stage 32, which for people who are listening and don't know what it is, it's the world's largest platform for connecting and educating film, television, and the.

Creatives and professionals across the globe. So it's the biggest social media and e-learning platform for the entertainment industry anywhere in the world.

Starting the platform. I mean, and you've got hundreds of thousands of members as well, and I want to get into that and how you think about and manage the experience around that. But like one, I got to know, like, how did you think, what does the name mean? Like, I've been racking my brain, like, what is stage 32 and how did you come up with it?

But like, what was the Genesis for you? Starting that business say, Hey, there's a need here to bring creatives together around this and men. That was really ahead of its time, too. Think about what was going on 11 years ago. Right. Like we barely had, we didn't even have like these things in our pocket essentially are just barely.

So tell us a little bit about the name, how you came up with it, but also sort of the Genesis for the business and why you started

I worked for a bunch of tech companies on a few of them sold. And while razor was going on before it, right during that time. So one thing I learned in the tech world is if something hits on a mass scale, it usually funnels down to an each level. So Facebook explode, Twitter was just coming on the scene more or less and starting to get some traction.

This is pre-Instagram. What I saw was that I understood why people were on Facebook. But people in my industry, people in the entertainment industry, when I asked them what they were getting out of Facebook, that they were on it, they would say, yeah, I'm on it, but I'm not getting any business off. And what I came to learn was that basically Facebook is, you're sharing your babies, your patch, your salad, or whatever, right.

You really getting any business done. So my idea was understanding that things funneled down to niche. I believed that rubbish social media platforms were eventually going. Filtered down to niche and more concentrated social network platforms or social media platforms. And I felt like they needed to be one for the entertainment industry.

So a really great cast. And we were filming in the middle of nowhere in Michigan because that's where the tax incentives were. We were all staying in a Hilton. There was no star egos and everything like that. And when you do that, Everybody comes together. It's like summer camp, everybody, can't wait to, be together.

But then when it's over, it's the type of thing where everybody goes, we're going to be together forever. And we're going to stay together. We're going to talk to each other ever. And then of course you go home and nobody talks to each other until somebody need something. And in this particular instance, it was the tax incentives and Michigan driving.

And all these people that had so much work that they didn't know what to do with now suddenly had no work. And they were putting me in LA and saying, can you connect me too? Can you connect with you? Can you connect me to? And my pushback was, this is a tribal business and a lot of people want to work with known entities and we need to help you build relationships.

I can vouch champions are everything in this business, but we need to get you a community. And that's where I finally sat there and said, okay, if you don't live in a. For entertainment. If you're not in New York, LA, or London, these days, Georgia, or something like that, how do you build your network and how do you make connections that matter?

And that stage 32. And that's when I finally convinced myself to do it. And we'll talk about how we built the community and everything. Like that's what really convinced me to do it and to say that this is necessary. And then the other part of it was, I definitely had the vision. That this global entity team and business was kind of become consolidated and that you weren't going to have to live in LA, that these streaming companies would eventually have to create their own content because there's only so many libraries you can buy.

Okay. And I just thought it would happen quicker. It took a little bit longer to get there. It's like, cause they're like, 18, 19. And so there was a huge span commitment by these products. To to do this, but I felt like it needed to be this. That was the impetus was to say, okay, we need to connect them.

We need to educate. And we need to create a marketplace to connect content creator with content maker. And that was the whole impetus stage 32. And then the name very quickly comes from I'm a big Orson Welles fan and throughout history, Austin Wells has become pretty maligned. I mean, people look at him like he was addicted.

The reality is situation was if you read anything about Wells, he was the ultimate collaborator and this business is all about collaboration. So stage 32 comes from the fact that citizen Kane was filmed on the old RKO 17. On the RKO studio, lot stage 17, which today is paramount stage 32. So if you go to a stage, if you go to paramount on a tour and you go to stage 32, you will see a plaque in front of the stage that tells you that citizen came to spend

What a cool story. Oh man, that's a cool story. So by the way, like I was just, while you were talking, I had to Google, when was LinkedIn created in 2002? So you were even like a year ahead of LinkedIn. Thinking about how social media platforms are going to become more niche. And then you start seeing 32 a year later, as read starts LinkedIn, but like you're really focused on this community.

What has been the most rewarding part of that journey for you? And maybe even what's the most challenging part too, right? There's probably a lot of folks who are listening who want to go start their own thing. How have those maybe challenges or even successes even evolve. A little bit over the last, 11 years.

So,

They're a tech company and it scares the shit out of Hollywood. And now they're starting to adjust to it or maybe it really does. It scares the hell out. Now they have no choice, but to accept it. And now that. There's 17 laps behind now, and now you're done. And the gas, right? We knew that this would happen.

We needed to convince Hollywood that, this was a place where they could send people can train. Where they needed to beyond to make proper connections and where they can come to find the best content and shorten their path to finding content. So that by far was our biggest challenge on sort of a macro level on a micro level.

Of course. It's how do you build a community? How do you get people to see that it's worthy? So one of the first moves that I made early on, I, I wrote down, I kind of planning the entire thing. I wrote down like five or six. Things, I was unmovable on that. these were the things that had to happen.

One was that you had to stand in front of your own name, who couldn't be drilled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Okay. Two was that I was going to stand out in front of the platform and make it very, very clear that I wasn't just some tech CEO that came up with this idea. And I, I'm up in the ivory tower, just basically that I am just like you.

I am scratching a cool. And fighting every day and three that we were going to lean on empathy because we need to in life, but I need of course. And I think that hope that's understood, but I mean, in this business, especially this is a business of rejection. This is a business with no artists in general, when you're dealing with people who are not artists in general, things, more scrutiny.

People that aren't artists don't understand. Why do you suffer for it? Why do you, I mean, I think that's so dramatic. I mean, when I moved to suffer, I'm not getting paid, putting in all this time, putting in, one step forward, 10 steps back, and feeling beaten down all the time. So we've really leaned into the empathy of the idea that we're rolling.

And we understand the struggle together and we're going to go through this together and, oh, by the way, if we build this community together, then it will be a rising tide lifts, all boats situation, because men to take each other with us, because again, it's a tribal business. So if we spend our time communicating, building our tribes, building our relationships, if we spend our time educating ourselves and certainly spend our time.

Honing our craft. And then I'm able to create, and with my team now, of course, be able to create a marketplace where if you've done these things, now you have direct access to decision-makers. We will shorten the path to success. Those rejections will become less. The negative feelings will become less.

And even when you do get a no, you will have a safety net of. To lift you up and to hold you and protect you. And to make you say, Hey, I get it. I've been there and it's going to get better and don't worry about it and we'll keep going forward. So I think those were the challenges. And I'm very, when you say what's been the most rewarding part of that, for me, it's the fact that we were able, we accepted those challenges and we conquered them.

We are now partners with Netflix, we're partners with the American film market we're partners with can with the education partner for all of these platforms, we're educating them. For Netflix, they have hired us to do that. That's amazing to us. And the fact that we've been able to build this community from literally a hundred people that I invited on day one to over 900,000 people today and have done most of it via word of mouth and by via people, inviting other people is, I mean, I can't get any more rewarding than that.

look I've, I've tried to start a community around customer experience myself. It's really incredibly hard work. Like I gave you so much credit you and your, and the team and the folks that you've worked with. When you think about sort of those early days, getting a hundred people on the platform and evolving, and now bringing sort of these monster organizations as partners, what do you think some of the bigger factors for success were in building that community and creating an experience around that?

[00:17:02] Richard Botto: Probably with, the first few success stories that we had where, you're always looking. A community that's skeptical. Okay. And I think that a lot of communities, all, but certainly in the entertainment business, if you've been in this business for more than five minutes, when you come in for the first five minutes, you're full filled with optimism and have no cynicism or pessimism at all.

And then you're in for five minutes and then it all goes the other way. And so if you're in it from one to five minutes, you kind of get cynical and you get pessimistic. What was monumentally important to me was that the first piece of communication that you got when you came onto the site, the first communication we see was me saying to you, we talk about it a little bit earlier.

that I'm just like you I'm scratching coin, just like you. If we do this together, if you help me build this community, we will succeed. That message has stayed the same for the last 11 years. So that was one thing that diffuses people. It makes people feel like, okay, there's a human here. There's empathy here.

Like, he just wasn't connecting with it because what was different from what they had done previous like eight, nine films. So he just put a clip online and he said, score it and send me it. And if I like it, I'll send you more and we'll see. And. Gentlemen Denmark's sent over his clips and they met over zoom or, back in those days, I guess it was Skype and he, I have him and they never got on a plane to meet him in LA now, but nothing.

He just tells them the entire film and they scored it over online. That was proof positive of the idea that we believe that the world was going to get smarter. And that physical filming doesn't mean that all post-production and for that matter will preproduction needs to be in the spot that you're filming in this world.

It's more common that it's not anymore, that it's not all being done in LA. It's not all being done in New York, it's being done everywhere. So once we started having those success stories, we'll land, and now, at this point in our, in our cycle of life, I mean, we're, tens of thousands of success stories.

That was the thing that really made the community. You could be as cynical as you want, but that's how I knew, right? Like, like people will challenge and say, oh, how do you, and I just sit there and go, this is your problem. It's not all it's used. And most people accept that and embrace that.

It took us a long time to cultivate relationships with teachers of that caliber, because they're all taught by people in the industry at the top level doing it right now. They didn't want to do it for us at the beginning. And we knew that we knew we had to prove ourselves, but as we proved ourselves to them, and then they came on board and started teaching.

Then the production companies and the streamers and the studios, I think he noticed that. And then they started coming on board in the marketplace, part of things, and every single one of those that you bring on and everyone you get to announce is what validation, right? It's more validation that what you're doing and when your mission, your mission is being accepted by, people that are at the highest level of the industry.

Maybe when you're starting out, but you might say here's some guidance and advice for folks who might be thinking about something.

And one of them, I won't name the company, but it was a very well-known company put 4 million into it and hired a bunch of C-level guys from Silicon valley to come in and run it. But that was the. That was the pitfall. These were guys that understood how to run a tech platform, but they didn't understand how to run a community.

They had nobody out in front of it. They had no messaging. They really had no mission in a lot of ways. We would look at it and say, okay, what's the purpose of this platform? So, the pitfall that I see, not just an odd business, but I get to teach all over and I do get to teach business and talk to people who are trying to build communities or social platforms.

The pitfall. When I asked the question, what's the mission. I sometimes get a very cloudy answer when I asked them what's the value you're bringing to your people. I usually get a very muddled answer if I asked them what the end game is, it's always about. That's very clear because they know how they want to make.

They all know how they want to make money. Okay. But it's like, if you build it, they will come. Doesn't work. It's you have to be able to show the community upfront. Well, first of all, you have to be transparent as hell. Okay. You have to just be transparent as hell. This is what we're looking to do. This is what we hope to build, and here's how you can help us build it.

I think is very, very important. You give them ownership. You give them. You make them feel like they're part of it. All right. I think the second part is, is that you gotta make, you have to, you have to show, I keep saying it, but so true. You have to show empathy to the problem you're trying to solve in relationship to that human being.

So for us, it was sorta like the empathy is I live in Anchorage, Alaska, and I want to be a screenwriter and I have nobody around me. That has the same dream. So who do I talk to? How do I break in? How do I get anybody even read my material that could really give me honest feedback and educated feedback?

So we had to answer that we had to say, look, this is global. It's open 24 7 365, but you have to put in the word. The more you put in, the more you get out that resonated with people. So I think the pitfalls are, I have a great, I think it's true of a lot of businesses, not just building a community. I have a great idea.

This is how I'm going to monetize it, but I have no idea how I'm going to get customers. I have no idea how I'm going to get, like there's no plan to get customers. There's no way to show. There's no strategy to showing those customers what the value is. And there's no patience. You got to realize we didn't drive a penny into this country.

Not 1 cent into this company until like, I think it was year three or four. Might've been year four. And why? Because we had to build the community. We had to gain their trust. We had to show them the value and we wanted education to be the first revenue driver. Okay. But we had to move relationships with the teachers that we want.

We didn't want to bring in the guy that did it 20 years ago. We wanted to bring in the people that were doing it right now and not to tell. Yeah. Part of my language, masturbatory stories like you see on a lot of these things today where they, it's storytelling hour and you're paying a hundred bucks and what are you getting out of it?

We wanted people to come in and give real true, actionable information. Right now. So it took a long time to build that. So we embraced the long game. We knew going into it from day one of launch that we might not drive a diamond to this thing until year three or four, but we're going to break our asses, making those relationships so that we can do it and we can do it at a high level.

At that point, we have built enough trust with the community that when we launched education, they will like, of course, why wouldn't I take education here? Like look at the value they're bringing so that those are some of the pitfalls and some of the ways that we.

We're all helping each other. We probably even know all it w you probably even know, like, so many of the people that were there right now, it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands. How do you make people feel like, I know, I know rich or rich knows me, but we're going to help each other out. Like, how do you focus on that?

Is there anything that you do differently just to focus on community experience, make people feel like they're not part of a big platform, but really part of it. a community that's there to help each other grow and evolve and develop.

And because they, they lay themselves bare, which is, amazing. It does create this sense of a smaller community, even though it's gotten most. But we do put a huge and heavy emphasis, making sure that all of our employees are front facing. So if you get an email from somebody, exactly who that person is, because that person is active on the platform and you get to know that person, we make it very important that all of our employees do some live events and, whether they're, zoom town hall type meetings, or whether they're smaller videos that we put on social media.

Whatever it is. We want you to feel like you do know us. I put out so much content on social media, on Instagram and on Twitter. And I do that and I give away a lot for free. And I do that because I want, first of all, I want to, because again, I think that my experience is if I can't share my experiences as creative, so there are days, for example, like today I have a meeting on one of my pilot.

probably when that's over, at least within the next few days, I'll be sharing what happened, because I want people to know, I want people to know what's going on in the business, what this executive said to me, what they're looking for. So by making it very personal and by making yourself, like you said, human and feeling trustworthy, we have been able to keep.

right now we have this, one of our products is called the rate and the safe side writer's room was just like Danek community of just screenwriters in this particular part of the platform, obviously the, from school creatives. But in that room, we have companies that come to us that said, we need writers.

And what that does is not only lift everybody's spirits, but it makes everybody to highs in the shadows. And a lot of people. Okay. A lot of people have prayed. They're introverted. They don't think they have any value to bring whatever that makes them say, well, wait, I can do this too. I, and not, I think that again, I think creates that sense of community.

And we're always reason I love that question is because every single thing we do really, quite frankly, starts with that thought, how does this benefit everyone? How do we make everybody feel inspiration? I always say my brand is inspirational. Aspirational moment. So, how does it fit into that? How does it fit into it?

And we talk about it every day without fail. No joke.

And my last question for you also is where do you go for. Well, there's

There's a lot of people in the biz, I wouldn't say there's a lot of people I've read. I'm a voracious reader. I read a lot of books. I, I come back to there's certain books that I found to be so inspirational. And that you kind of fall back on when you're sitting there going to, can't be done.

One of them for sure is shoe dog by Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. I mean, if you read this book, if you're an entrepreneur in any way, and by the way, if you're a creative and you're wa you're listening to this, you are an entrepreneur. You should read this book. Anyway. I always say entrepreneurs. I mean, creatives always had.

What screenwriting books should I be? What acting books should I read? What produce? And I'm always like read business books because you literally are a business person. You are an entrepreneur, but if you are so I would recommend anybody listening to this and having a ready to read shoe dog. Not only because it's, business-wise, it's a masterclass, but wife wise.

And conquering and overcoming and your fears and I'm nobody, and I'm a fraud. And how can I compete against the big guys and all this crap that we all put on ourselves? This will make it all melt away. Like if you don't come out the other side of this book, right. It, it runs for a wall. I don't know what you could read.

I don't know who could talk to you. So

[00:31:25] Richard Botto: It's a, it's a life lesson master class. Right? So I think that's one that I draw inspiration from. I think the other thing I would say is that, and I, and this is going to sound really cliche, but it's totally not.

And I just think, I know a lot of people that are like this, and I'm sure you are as well. You have to inspire yourself every day. If you're not finding a way every morning, even if you had a massively bad day to day before, okay, you got to try to find the victories in it, or at the very least you have to wake up the next thing and go.

That was yesterday. Okay. And this is a new day. I know that sounds cliched, but it really is a way to walk through life because otherwise you're just going to let everything. Downhill on you. And I don't believe in that. I believe in, you're constantly moving up the hill, you sidestep the shit and you keep going and you learn from, everything that you've experienced.

And if, as long as you're in that mindset, I don't know how you don't inspire yourself every day, to be the better, the best to win the day. That, and that's the other part that I would just say, I'll impart this really, really quickly, but I do look at it that way. I do look at it that people set these massive goals.

That it's. So either though I wouldn't say any goals unrealistic, but the only way you get to those big goals is by setting micro goals, you have to be able to celebrate wins. Right? So what easier when the hat than to feel like you've won every day? And if you can't, if you've had one really bad day, then you look at it like, Hey, over the course of the last seven days, I won six and I lost.

I guess she's a championship game, right? That's a

rich, I've probably interviewed, I'm probably coming up on actually I'm over a hundred interviews. You're the first person in a hundred that has said, find inspiration in yourself, which I think is a really one that's interesting. I've talked to some really amazing individuals over the course of the last, almost two years.

So one, thank you for that. But two, just thanks for like just the inspirational content for us to finish this show on, on, just look within it's there. You just gotta find it and just make sure it comes out.

I believe at the end of the day, right. For our own, everybody's looking for champions elsewhere and certainly we need to succeed in life. We do need champions. You can't walk through it alone. There's this wiser Lifewise. But at the end of the day, you got to lie down with yourself and you're always going to be, your own biggest champion.

So I appreciated them that.

[00:34:44] Richard Botto: for listening to be customer led with bill staikos. We are grateful to our audience for the gift of their time. Be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com for more episodes. Leave us feedback on how we're doing or tell us what you want to hear more about until next time.

Whereas.