Today we’d like to introduce you to Filip Matic.
Hi Filip, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I have always had an independent/entrepreneurial spirit – this likely stems from my parents who immigrated from a war torn country (Former Yugoslavia) when I was five years old, watching them start from the absolute bottom & claw their way up. Even as a kid, I would ask my parents to buy me the newest soda on the market… then take it to school and sell them by the can to kids.
I went to school for marketing, and during my time there my buddies & I started a brand that wasn’t even supposed to be a brand – the goal was to unite people together, build a culture at our university & support our athletics programs. This brand took on a life of its own, which lead to us starting to work with creatives in the design, video & photo space. This ultimately lead us to discovering a huge challenge in the freelance creative market – whether it was creatives not knowing how to turn their skills into a profession or creatives being taken advantage of at the freelance level by bigger brands & individuals. So we set out to build a national community of some of the best videographers & photographers in the country – a place where they could all come together, learn from each other, grow together, work on meaningful projects together & ultimately create something that is bigger than any single one of us.
I have always been someone who believes in building communities, believes in the power of what communities can do. So I suppose building Campus Lens (what our company started as) was a natural progression. Since then, we’ve been incredibly blessed to grow to a level where we had to create a parent company to handle our larger scale clients & productions, known as Lens Media House.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
Nothing worth having in life typically comes smoothly! There have been IMMENSE challenges, roadblocks along the way & these challenges will only continue to increase in scale as we continue to grow & move towards our ultimate goal.
Personally, I have had challenges every step of the way in my life. When it comes to my professional career, one of the first major challenges I faced was getting hired to a Marketing agency & a very solid salary, signing a lease in that new city, and then one day at lunch being told I have to clock out because they have no money to pay me anymore! About a month after I signed a 12 months lease.
That’s just the start, not to mention the countless obstacles we have faced building our business – starting with no investment capital, building it all from scratch & piecing together money how ever we could. But with any challenge lies a greater opportunity – for those who are willing to work through those challenges to get to that opportunity. That has always been my mindset, if everything is going smoothly & easily, then it’s a sign to me that I am not working hard enough or pushing beyond my comfort zone to achieve even more than I currently am.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
The name of my business is Lens Media House. At our core, our mission is to empower creative minds to tell your story better. We’ve built our entire business backwards – every decision we make is with our creative talent in mind first, rather than our clients. That can seem counter intuitive and it certainly should not be mistaken with us not prioritizing our client’s needs. But we have put our company culture, our team first – we believe that by having a thriving community of talent who is happy with their role, loves the work they do, that this all translates positively to use serving our clients & their needs.
We have a unique business model, many people want to put us in a box so they can conceptualize what we do. Generically speaking, we are a creative agency x vetted creative talent marketplace hybrid. We go out and recruit some of the best talents in video & photo production in the country, put them through rigorous vetting & interview processes, hire about 3% of all applicants, and then train them up before they ever step foot on a set. From there – brands, companies, artists & individuals can either A) hire talent directly through us to execute a vision they already have built out or B) hire us as a company to develop full content marketing campaigns to help achieve their end goals.
Whether it’s social content, ad campaigns, recap videos, event coverage, promotional content, docu-series/narrative, branding videos or anything in between… we are your one stop shop to centralize all of your video & photo media needs nationwide.
We are most proud of the incredible culture & community we have built – we are MOST proud of the quality & diversity of human beings on our team. Some of the most talented & selfless individuals I have ever met, that is what we pride ourselves on above any of the actual work we do (which is pretty great work as well 😉 )
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
Man, there’s a lot to love about LA. My favorite part about Los Angeles is that it is truly blue collar – there’s this idea from the outside world that people don’t work as hard on the west coast, that LA is just glitz & glamor. But the fact is that these are some of the hardest working people in the world who make up the population here. You cannot skip a beat or you WILL get passed up! I love that energy, the hustle, the “I can’t get caught slipping or it’s a wrap for me” mentality here.
If you want to HUSTLE, this is the city for you. Unlimited opportunity, you just have to be willing to put in the (real) work to seize it!
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: lensmediahouse.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/toldbylens?utm_medium=copy_link
