Today I’m joined by Neil K. Carroll, founder of vidwheel, who took the long way out of corporate: video agency → higher-ed job → rebuilding as a lean solo business.

Neil shares how a simple testimonial project for a startup turned into something much bigger—a repeatable, productized service that helps founders uncover the stories and insights hidden inside their customer relationships.

If you’re stuck in corporate and wondering what you would even sell, this episode will help you see the path: start with what you already know, listen for the real problem, and bet on yourself.

What You’ll Learn

• Neil’s escape path: agency burnout → COVID pivots → higher-ed → solo
• The “Root Thread” deep testimonial approach and why it delivers strategic customer insight
• How to productize what you already do without boxing yourself in
• Why referrals and local networks are enough for a one-person business
• How Neil priced his offer and why undercharging early is part of the process
• The 4 levers every offer should hit: save time, save money, make money, reduce risk
• Why betting on yourself beats betting on corporate stability

Key Takeaways

• Your corporate title doesn’t matter—your ability to solve problems does
• Productized services make selling and delivery easier
• Customer conversations reveal the real value you offer
• Solopreneurs don’t need 100 clients—you need a few right-fit ones
• You can always go back to corporate… but very few people want to once they leave

About Neil K. Carroll

Neil is the founder of vidwheel, helping startups and small businesses capture deep customer stories through Root Thread testimonial interviews and his hardware-enabled Mini Studio (VidKit 3).

He combines interviewing skill, remote production, and AI-assisted analysis to help companies extract messaging, proof, and product insight directly from their customers.

Connect with Neil:

LinkedIn: Neil K. Carroll

Website: vidwheel.com

Hey Neil Carroll, welcome to the Corporate Escapee Podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me on Brett. It's great to be here.

My pleasure. And as I continued to branch out and find, I think, interesting stories, the end result being how do we get people out of corporate and into a job or not even a job, right. Into a work that they control the flexibility, the freedom, the path forward, and not just being reactionary. And what I really like about your story, and that's what we're going to drill into is you kind of had the reverse path. You did have corporate, but you've been out for a while.

You left corporate to start a, what I'll call a traditional startup, right? With employees, people you realize maybe that's not for you went into higher ed for a bit and then now transitioned to solo entrepreneurship. And I love some of the model and things you're building. So I just think your story is really interesting and I appreciate you, you coming on and, spending some time with us and sharing it.

Sure, yeah, I'm happy to. It has been a bit of a journey, any of the blanks I can fill in or anything that we want to talk about, you let me know.

Yeah. And maybe we start with what are you doing today? Because I think it's genius, right? What you're selling. And I know part of it was accidental, how you discovered how you're adding value. So why don't you share with the audience what you're doing today? And then I want to take us back a little bit, just to kind of go through your, uh, your, process.

Yeah, so I'll give you kind of the official, I guess, version. And what we're doing today is helping startups, primarily other businesses as well, uncover the stories that are hidden in their customer relationships. So we do this through what we call root thread videos. And you can kind of think of them like really deep testimonials, right? We're searching for messaging and going a lot

deeper into these conversations that we have than just like the polished little marketing piece that a lot of these testimonials end up as. And then the other piece of what we're doing is we're capturing these through a new piece of hardware that I've put together called the VidKit 3, or we call it the Mini Studio as well. And this is just a...

Enclosed little studio that we ship to the end user folds out of the case and with the literal press of a button you're you're sent into a virtual studio like this one and Having a conversation so it like takes all that friction out of the the whole situation that you have when it comes to getting people on camera and making sure they're they're

feed looks good and all the other pieces that come with it.

Yeah. And it's such a good area for business too, because again, coming from B2B and now even in the, solo space, everybody is so bad at capturing those testimonials, right? They're so powerful, but yet we're all afraid to ask for them. And especially the target market you're going after right now is startups. need it, right? They don't have a ton of proof of concept and you've taken the friction out of that process by providing the service for it. And,

All right, so maybe let's tease it there because what you've uncovered is another business opportunity we'll come back to because I think that's even more genius than the testimonial piece of it. So go back, what was your original idea for the big company or the startup that you were gonna create?

Yeah. So, I mean, we were, it was just a pretty traditional, you know, production house, working out of Buffalo, New York area. And we were working with a lot of corporate clients, higher ed clients. and we would kind of do whatever, whatever they needed, you know, we were doing a lot of, testimonial or interview based videos. were doing some, TV spots. We were doing a lot of like internet.

marketing spots and so on. But that all kind of came apart when COVID hit, right? And it was a mess for us. so I pulled way back and started really looking into the virtual production space at that point, which led me in some very interesting directions. But I think I skipped over

Okay.

what we really wanted to talk about was like the seed of this testimonial service that we have. So go back to that. while we were, you know, while I did have my agency and so on, one of our clients was a startup, that came out of, kind of the infrastructure here in Buffalo. They won a big business competition that we have here. And once they were funded, soon after I,

heard from one of the founders and they wanted to create testimonial videos, right? So we just went in, we did our thing. We were, you know, talked to people. got the good, the bad and the ugly out of these interviews and delivered polished testimonial videos to this company. What I kind of realized as we continued to go on was that was part of the value, but a big piece of the value that we provided to that startup.

was kind of delivering customer feedback in like a more, I guess, direct way, right? I would, as a third party, have conversations with these very early customers. And here, like I mentioned earlier, the good, the bad, and the ugly, right? We would keep the good stuff for the testimonials, but the other bits were really useful feedback when I would have conversations with the founder that I worked with mostly.

so those conversations kind of help guide some of their, know, internal, ideas on product and features and so on. because it was, you know, from, from the customer themselves, this is, this is how we use it. We don't really care about that, those types of things. So it was super helpful, to help develop a little bit of

from a customer. Yeah.

product market fit there for that company. And it was early for him too, right? Like these were, these were early, early customers. So it really was able to impact the, direction they went. And, you know, I'm not saying we, we had too much to do with it, but they went public and did the whole thing. And, you know, a lot of people did really well because of, because of that company. So, or because

of the strategy and how they built things out and so on.

That's my origin story. If I was you, man, I'd be telling that one. Because, quite honestly, you probably did give them some insights that helped shape would they have maybe got there? Yeah. But you hear a lot of these startups, not many make it, right? So it takes a slightly different turn and correct me if I'm wrong. Your background wasn't in customer experience or customer insights. was video, right?

Yes, yep.

For sure.

Yeah, it's video production, it's one of those things that I've done so many interviews at this point in my career that I often know, I won't toot my own horn, but I'm not too bad at it, right? I can usually get some interesting insights out of people just by having the conversation.

Yeah. And what I like again, for folks that are sitting in corporate right now going, man, I, you know, I was a sales rep or I don't care whatever it is there. When you start to get to these smaller businesses, they're, more flexible and need foundational type of stuff. And you uncovered a bit of a problem, right? That you addressed it just because you kept your, kept listening and seeing where the opportunity is. And that's where I really try to get folks to see is you don't

Don't translate what you're doing in corporate because that's a job title to what you want to do with startups. Figure out where you can add value. If you're a curious person, there's this may be a good angle for you, right? Cause you're going to ask good questions and you're going to be good. So, all right. So that wasn't the intent. was the video production, but you started to figure out, Hey, I've got some interesting ideas. But ultimately you got away from the agency. You transitioned into it back into higher ed, into higher ed for a bit. Right.

Well, tell the story.

Yeah, before higher ed during the COVID days and then for a bit after that, I really moved into trying to do a lot of production and kind of video work remotely, right? So it was about, it was about my, a big part of what I did was working with

Makes sense.

small business owners to try and empower them. This was early in the pandemic, right? Empower them to create their own content. And, you know, we used a lot of training. We sold a lot of like kits, actually this kit that I'm on that has this set up as comes out of that era. And then we actually got some production jobs that were very interesting where,

You know, we were doing a lot of work overseas and so on for, you know, for, I'm not going to name clients, like for, you know, startup, related clientele that we're doing a lot of, you know, incubator type work and things like that. So it was, it was very interesting times. Right. And, I learned a lot from that, but that work was good.

Nah, it's fine.

the training of the small business owners and stuff after, after everybody was back, you know, doing their thing really like petered out. And, so then my next step there, kept all the remote production clients, but I did actually take a job in higher ed and it was at my alma mater. And I thought it could be a lot of fun. And my wife worked there and I was like, this will be great. which was great. until.

not long into the time there, we found out that we were pregnant. And, so before long, the flexibility of working for myself came calling again, right. you, the, the nine to five is, is, is, you know, plus commute and all that is tough when you got a little, little guy at home. So, so yeah, I fell back to, the solo stuff again. And,

Yeah, I get it.

that's closer to present day, guess, at this point.

Yeah. So maybe we can get into some of the tactics because people are always curious. Cause you kind of kept the conversations going. What I, again, I love and what I've learning to do right over the last five years is not chase something for too long or see where the path gets. There's just too much resistance, right? And I can already see sending startups and making them do their own testimonials. I'm like great in theory and it's going to add a ton of value, but having them actually do that.

I get it right at a hundred percent get it, but then starting to see the opportunity emerging. Right. So, so when you decided, right, I'm going solo, right. Forget the agency. We're going to, we're going to figure out the solo because you want the flexibility. What were kind of the next steps? How did you go find new customers or were that was that first step back into the video production? Or did you have the customer insights at this time? Where, where was your head when you were going back into this?

Yeah. So, going back in, I did want to create a product, right? And that's where the root thread videos came from this idea of these deep testimonials. And it was kind of a, an evolution of what we had done in the agency and where, what I was talking about. So to give a little more context to what I'm talking about with the deep testimonials is we go ahead and we have, well, first off we helped.

clients figure out who the best customers to talk to for a testimonial are, right? There's a few different value points that we really focus on that help people figure out like, okay, this person is the one we need to target because they've had a lot of impact on how we do things or they have other, we've got a few characteristics that we really try to hone in on. Then we help

record those interviews. We like to do it with our kit. Sometimes we do it in person. Sometimes people don't want the kit involved and just want to do it themselves. We can accommodate that too. But then the next step always happens, which is we take that testimonial interview and we analyze it. So we've got a good setup. It's AI kind of.

Assisted is usually what I say, a lot of manual, a lot of AI there, but what we come out with is a really detailed report of kind of the insights of the interview. And it's got everything from like a suggested testimonial video script pulled right from the transcript. A lot of, you know, little clips that you can use for social and so on. The overall kind of language that

the client is using so that, you know, like clips and things that you might be able to incorporate into your marketing language using your, client's own voice, their own words, and other insights about tone and, know, things like that. and objections, right? So, you know, problems that you've solved, the, the, the things that they didn't like, like other things that you don't always,

So good.

get communicated in those testimonials. And so that report replaces that conversation that I would have had with the founder way back when and makes it a little more standardized, I guess.

Got it.

Yeah, I like that approach. So I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit, probably not too much, but the one thing I like to, again, folks coming out of corporate are not used to sales and like, look, we don't have to go through product. There's a whole thing. What I usually like to say is what is the problem that you're going to solve? Right. And so in this case, how did you position the problem with the startup founder or owners? What is the problem? They need testimonials from their clients or did you start positioning it as

Mm-hmm.

testimonials and insights. So just kind of curious if you look at it from the problem that you're solving, how would you define the problem? then two, how were you positioning that to potential clients?

Yeah, a lot of what I talk about, you know, in sales conversations or in marketing materials and so on is that the insights that you're seeking as a business owner, right? Of like what to say, how to say it, what's important to your clients. It exists. You just have to go ahead and kind of extract it and you can, you can find it at your, you know, through your client.

relationships and having those conversations. I guess I position it mostly as, as strategy, right? Whether that's for marketing or product development. but then, you know, you also get the testimonial, which is kind of fun for people.

Highly valuable. Right. Again, you probably, well, you knew you were selling that as the value, the prop of it. And, you know, and the other thing I like to question folks on is, right, is the problem you're solving, there's a need to solve problem and there's nice to solve problems. To me, this is definitely a need to solve, right? If you're new, you need to understand your customers. You need to understand the pain points. They need to understand the feedback. So the way I look at it, there's four, four values, right? There's save time.

Yes. Yep.

save money, make them money, reduce risk. And if I look at this service, it looks like you're doing all four, right? You could argue some may be more closely tied than others, but right. It's, definitely going to save them time. Cause if you understand the customer needs, you're going to make some better decisions. It can get you revenue quicker because you're positioning it right. And you're going to reduce risk. Cause you're not going off on a tangent and the customer's telling you, you stink at it. So all stuff I'm telling you, but I'm reinforcing for the audiences. They're thinking through whatever they want to do going.

Right.

And so, all right, so now you're starting to pick up the story from there. So now you started to get some clients.

Yes. yeah. Then that's actually a good point. So coming out of, higher ed, right. When I'm kind of relaunching on my own, didn't necessarily focus on the product is closely. I focused on video production and that was because I had a network that I engaged with again, and that got me, you know, work to do out of the gate. So.

Well, the ultimate goal is this like more specialized product or productized service. initially to make that transition and make it nice and smooth and not scary. I, I took video work and what I did that was interesting in terms of building out that second product is like the

I'll talk about the first production I did coming back out of higher ed was, was, it was a testimonial video, but it wasn't, you know, sold to the client as, as a root thread video with all these analytics and so on. But as part of my production service, right? So all they thought they were getting was a testimonial, but as part of my production service, I did the analytics report and then got their feedback on it. Right.

So I actually have a testimonial from that client based on that report and how useful it was to them. I think kind of reverse engineering, doing what you know you can get paid for and then kind of looping in what you're hoping to kind of build out can be a good strategy. So far so good on my end anyway.

Yeah, no, and it makes sense. It's again, I would say path of least resistance if get know what you know, be opportunistic with it if your networks there. But then then once you get again, a lot of the times this is confidence or momentum. Once you get a couple of those deals, you realize that I don't want to stick with the video, there's a bigger opportunity. But guess what you're starting to pay the bills. Now I can start to experiment and see where the real value comes in. I think you were talking offline or with the first time we met.

That one of your goals is you want to get further and further out of the business, right? The more you can build this thing up, right? Where, or I shouldn't say more out of the business more where again, we talked about the doing and the strategy, right? That more of it becomes strategy and one to many versus one to one and reduce the number of hours that you're putting into it to, to still provide a ton of value to the clients.

Yep. Yeah.

Right, right. like, given the, the, the product that we have, right. I mentioned that the kit, like that, that's a good place to kind of, I think. Look at, at the statement of like, you know, removing myself a bit from the business just in terms of like hours dedicated. So if I go on a local shoot to do a testimonial video, right, you gotta get all your gear set up.

Sorry. You get all your gear set up, you get to travel, you set up on site, you shoot, you come back, you ingest all the footage. There's a lot of, I think to most people's mind, hidden hours in that act. Whereas this mini studio is something that I'm starting to just roll out now and I'm really making part of our

product. And with that, is drop it off at FedEx. It's push button for the user. There's no setup for me or for them. And then, you know, I'll interview people for 20, 30 minutes and they send it back and we're done. So it's like a savings there. If I were to, to make the same video in those two different processes, one's going to take, you know, an hour of my time while the other one is

six hours of my time kind of thing. So.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, and that's what I, again, I kind of love everything about this because to me, I'm like, my God, you're going to send camera equipment. That just seems so, I can't do that. Right. What happens if they don't send it back or these don't, but you took the, and I'm sure that's part of the risk that you factored into it, but you know, just looking at the opportunity and maybe that's not one, maybe it is the insights that you stick with and the, the,

the testimonials because those aren't going to, the needs not going to go away. People need to do that. Somebody's going to have to do it for these business owners, but where virtual, you know, podcasts are going and people may not have a setup and, know, in the old days, maybe because this podcast is almost six years old now, which is crazy. You know, I would have had to have almost sent, mean, this mic I have is, know, from the first company that was helping me with production. They sent me a mic and they sent me these plugged in earphones. Guess what? I'm still using them, but

Nice.

You

guests that I'd interview were, you know, either off a phone or a really bad connection. So it's more when we moved a video, right? There's a just a service in providing that is which is which is interesting.

Yeah, yeah. I've already been approached, right? Sharing that mini studio set up by podcast production folks, right? Like that is, it is a, there's definitely value, right? Especially if you're, if you're, if your feed looks good and you took a lot of time to make it that way, I don't, I don't see why you'd want the person on the other end to, to, you know, drag you down.

Yeah. Yeah. And again, I'm sure we're going to ebb and flow out of this. We seem to be in an era now where it's more natural is preferred, right? It's the human. It's not overly produced. But I know we're going to go back. Everything's cyclical that we're going to, people are going to start to expect more of that. So again, the way I look at it, it's good to have options, right? You can start to experiment and explore and you may realize, man, it's just not worth the headache.

when I can really dig down into these customer insights and what else can I provide? I don't know. Like I said, this is the part that excites me for you and for others that are into this because once you get started, it's more of a river that's meandering, right? There's different points you can get to and make decisions. again, probably no wrong answers. So anyway, it's interesting.

Yeah. And that's, you know, that is, I think if you find a space, right in whatever market you're working in and you define, right, the way you do something differently, it's just like you were saying there, like what I'm describing is not the right setup for, I don't know, let's say nine out of 10 people, but that one that needs it and really sees the value in it is, is, is the one.

especially as a solo, you don't need a hundred new clients, you need a handful of new clients. So you want to focus on that one or, that was probably a bad example. It makes it sound like nobody wants what I'm doing.

Right?

No, I'm not. that is the beauty. You don't have to have a full on marketing plan or a sales force to do this. part of your evolution could be, well, this becomes a quarterly offering into these startups, where we're doing the testimonials on a quarterly basis. And we pick up the insights and it becomes part of their strategy. And you can package that and start to sell it to established companies if you want. So it just.

Again, I'm still in the camp. I want to work with people I want to work with. And I don't know if I would offer this back into corporate, but, there's enough small and even the right. We've talked a little bit about not on the offline was, you know, even selling into other solo preneurs, right. That need video testimonials and it's just a, it's going to be a massive market, right? It's already growing now. So if you can find a service that doesn't have to go into a small, mean, technically it is a small business, but a

Yes.

solo business is an interesting concept as well.

Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's a lot of different paths. I think, you know, especially get into the hardware side. There's, there's people have already had lots of ideas for where they're like, Ooh, I could use that. So, hopefully there's, you know, we can, I can, translate that into business and, you know, we keep rolling forward, you know, so.

Yeah.

Yeah, and so how are you finding new clients? Is it referrals from your current business networking? Maybe just to share how you're approaching that.

Sure. largely the clients that I've had since my reboot are largely folks that I've had some connection with before, or they're pretty direct referrals, right? and you know, there, there, there's different, I guess,

ways that people think about that, right? Some people say you can't survive on referrals alone. I would say as a solo, you can do pretty well on referrals alone.

Yeah, I'm...

I mean, you're a camp, by the way, with that. think you can absolutely, right, if you get.

Yeah, it's, I think it depends how you build your business. So if you build it out with a ton of overhead and you got to keep, you know, feeding the beast to, to, to get what you want out of it and so on, then maybe you can't, you know, survive in that kind of way. But like, I've got a pretty strong network locally. I've got a pretty large, but less, you know, deep network, online. And, yeah, it, it, I

I'm, I don't run out of sales conversations. I'll say it that way. Right. So that's, that's all I think you can ask for. I don't know. Maybe, maybe that's the wrong approach, but, uh, yeah, so far, so good in terms of always kind of having a project, uh, going and having sales conversations that lead to the next. So, yeah.

That's

Yeah. And two things you mentioned there that I get, I'm also a huge believer in is I also think many of us, solopreneurs or soon to be solopreneurs can build a business just in your backyard right now. You're in Buffalo, so it's a little bit bigger. Some of us are, I'm not rural, but some others are, but man, think just having the ability to connect with local other business owners, you can, you know,

build that because one, you've got an instant connection with them. say, Hey, we're both from Wheaton. You're both from Buffalo or wherever it is. I'm just getting started. Maybe there's a couple of folks I can connect with. I'd to help get bubble, whatever we can talk about that. think this is absolutely the path right. That, makes a ton of sense. And two is the productized service, right? It's

It's more repeatable. It's packaged. The risk is there. Business owners are used to buying it, even as a solopreneur business owners are used to buying these types of things. so again, we, just think we make things way too difficult on ourselves sometimes.

Well, yes. And I'll say this from, you know, the, some people are really not, they don't like the idea of productizing their business, If it's a service and they're like, well, what if somebody wants this or they don't want this aspect or whatever. So, this is the way I've generally dealt with this. And this comes back from when I was staffed up and had the small agency. We would have, you know,

a one pager for our, you know, kind of standard video and nobody would, would buy it necessarily. Right. It was always like, here's, here's probably what you want. Right. And it would be close to it. And they'd be like, well, maybe we want, I don't know, a different version or we want to add on another shoot day or whatever it was. like what it really is, is the starting point, which proves that you've

done this before to the client, right? They see it and they're like, okay, like they've already got a one pager. It's not their first time doing this. It clears up any, how do we want to put this, any discrepancies in where people might think the pricing would be. If you can hand somebody, and I'm.

saying this, right? Like virtually you could send an email or just say your price or whatever. But if somebody gets eyes on your price early in the sales conversation and is, you know, not scared away, I guess, right? Or whatever, right? You get rid of all the lowball clients that you didn't want anything to do with. And so, you know, that's

Yeah.

That was always useful to us. Like people wouldn't necessarily buy that exact thing, that exact product that was like one way to do the service that we had, but it was great to be able to, to hand it to them. And then, you know, you, you knew the, the paths forward, right? If the conversation continued or if it was like, Whoa, didn't expect it to cost that much. Then you can be like, all right, sorry. Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a filter, right? You're filtering out. You're less than ideal. And.

I think there's a salesperson who's like, you know, the earlier you're, you can get that no, the better, right? You waste a lot less time. I don't know who they attribute that to, but it's that kind of thing. Yeah.

100%.

A lot of your traditional sales, right? 100%. And I think that it's interesting because again, part of what I see the challenge of folks coming through the collective that are new is when I offer this, one, how do I price it? So I do want to get your perspective on how you thought about pricing, but two, just the wide, broad thing that you could offer all the way from a fractional type of a role to...

or and I call it advisory. But if you come up with this product that sits in the middle and say, Hey, this is my standard op and this is where I add the most value on a monthly basis. Here's the things that you get. It's then you can modify from it. It's not like you're reinventing the wheel and customizing a software solution, right? You can, you can work, but again, it's a good launching point. So, so with that said, how did you, how did you think about pricing? How did you end up where you were at? I'm curious.

Great. Yep.

Yeah, that's a good question. When I came up with my initial pricing, I guess I did a similar thing with this one. like, I usually think about, you get to think about the time that you're gonna dedicate, right? Now you shouldn't price by the hour, but if you're trying to put together a productized piece,

And you think like, wow, I'm going to put it for this much. And then you look at how much time is going to be dedicated and it, and these things don't mesh. Like you get to go back to the drawing board and figure something else out. But, I, I think this is a spot where, you, you probably go back to what you were saying about, don't overcomplicate it. If there's a similar product on the market that somebody's

putting out there, wouldn't be afraid to use that as a reference point. Also, you know, if, if you are selling a service early, right, if your first step is selling a service and you're doing it based on an hourly rate, like, you know, I would use that information, like people are willing to pay X amount per hour for this, you could, you could use that within your pricing as well. So my

actual pricing for these root thread videos is somewhat based off of what we did before as an agency and so on and kind of with, you know, things, extra, I guess value added in and, and things like that. So it's, it's tied to something I sold a million times before back at the agency, I guess. So, yeah.

All right.

Which makes sense. Most of us will be selling something that we are somewhat familiar with, even at price. And the other thing I tell people is, you're going to make a mistake and you're probably going to undercharge for the first one, two. But then you're going to start to figure out that, man, there's a lot more value to this than what I'm charging for. And you can slowly start to tick up the prices to see, to match that value until you find where the market value actually is.

Yeah, I would say I wouldn't be afraid to undercharge for the first couple too, right? Because you're going to be figuring it out probably somewhat, just your processes and so on. I think there's nothing wrong with that. You can ratchet it up from there. The other piece of advice from somewhere, again,

more unsighted advice that I've heard that I think is great is if nobody's pushing back on your price, right? If every time you give your price, people are like, sign me up, then your price is too low. Yeah.

Right. I think that's right. Yeah. You want somebody to push back. That's for, that's for sure. But again, it's part of a, as you develop more confidence in yourself and the product and the business, then you're going to get more comfortable with, with, the sales price. Man, time is flying, Neil. Is there, I want to be respectful of your time. Is there anything that, any other pieces of advice, right? For soon to be, or would be solopreneurs that

Yeah. yeah.

You learned or you'd want to share before we wrap up

Yeah, sure. I would say, you know, the from now, like, don't have the breadth of corporate experience that a lot of people do, but I will say I've worked for myself a good portion of my career. And, I kind of never got the idea that people were like worried about going out on their own, right? People get, they get tied to that.

steady paycheck and all the other stuff. But like who would you rather bet on than yourself? You know, like I don't trust anybody more than myself. So, you know, you got to, you got to lean into that. You know, you're good at what you do. Go do it for yourself. Don't, don't make somebody else rich doing it. Yeah.

100%. I'm all on board. I'm a big fan of the bet on yourself and right. For so long, just yet paid other people's, you know, we paid their dues for it. And, you know, I think it's a great way to end this. So folks out there go bet on yourself 100%. And again, for some reason, if it doesn't work, you absolutely hate it. You know, you can find your way back into corporate if they're, willing to take you. So it's, again, I think you can find a path forward because the one

Small sample size. The data shows that the people that have gone solo, some have had to go back into corporate just to get a paycheck, to reramp or whatever. Less than 10 % said this wasn't for me. So I'm guessing the folks that are listening to this podcast, probably 50 % them going, I don't know if that's for me. So I'm telling you, once you get out, you have the conversation, you realize one, it's on you, you're problem solving. You're not all these things that corporate scares you.

It's, it's well worth it. Again, my, my advice was I started this late, but better late than never. And that's why now I'm working on anybody and everybody that hates their corporate job, that there is a path forward for you out there.

There's so much more to do, Like, you don't do the same thing every day, like you might sometimes get stuck with in some corporate roles. can, variety alone makes it worth giving a shot, right?

100%.

Yeah. And we wake up every day excited to go to work because it's, for yourself. so, all right, Neil. So if people want to learn more about you or connect with you, what's the, what's the best way for them to find you?

That's right.

Well, the best way to find me in where I kind of put most of my stuff is, is on LinkedIn. So Neil K Carol, I think probably that name tag show up in your edit, but I don't know. and then, and then vidwheel, is the company vidwheel.com or if you were to type in Neil vidwheel and LinkedIn, would imagine it would come right to me. So I should test that though, before I say that on a podcast again.

It did, yeah.

up yeah

Ha ha ha ha!

Well, we'll do that the audience will tell you if that's the case, know It's it's funny because when I was going a couple times I went back to find your profile I was trying to find just from memory I was typing in K for the Carol not to see for the Carol because the Neil K Carol was throwing me off but now nobody out there is gonna forget I'll never forget because I've done this twice. So that's genius on your part to to

Mm-hmm.

Yep. Because the kin, yeah.

You. That's and I'll leave it with this. I don't want to keep going, but the that Neil K right? I use that as my first name on LinkedIn. It's a built in bot detector too, because all the bots who send me a message, it'll say Neil K. Hey, I got this product. It's great to meet you. yeah, anybody can use that. Put your middle initial in that first name slot, you know?

That's so smart, yeah.

Usually it's the authors I come across have to put their middle initial there so they can separate themselves. But see, this is a tip and a tactic that we didn't think we were going to have today, but it's, uh, it's going in. So, all right, Neil, we'll appreciate you spending some time again. That's super cool. What you're building. love the idea. Um, we're going to stay connected because again, I think there's some services and some things we may be able to work on together and, uh, appreciate it. So good luck with everything. Stay warm in Buffalo and we'll, we'll catch up with you before too long.

tip.

Excellent. Thank you, Brad.