Inspiring Conversations with Troy Castro of LS Media

Today we’d like to introduce you to Troy Castro.

Hi Troy , it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I started my business during COVID. I’d never touched a camera in my life,
but I’d been an artist as long as I can remember, drawing, painting,
writing, as well as martial arts. When everything shut down, I was gifted a
camera, and everything just clicked. Color, composition, storytelling. I
taught myself and built a portfolio from scratch.

Word of mouth carried it from there. The camera alone doesn’t get you
clients, so I taught myself the business side too — funnels, marketing, the
systems that actually bring work in. That’s what turned a photography
business into an agency. It stopped being stills and became the whole
picture: video, editing, brand content, and the marketing behind it. The
work that took hold was MMA, and that’s the focus now.

The last piece was AI. I had never written a line of code in my life, and I
taught myself to build agents and automations anyway. They run the parts of
the job that used to bury me, and now I build the same systems for other
businesses. I automated the boring tedious stuff, so I could stay focused on the creative elements of my agency.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has not been smooth.

Early on I lost my savings to a shady business partner, right after my wife
and I got married. He belittled my art constantly, but the one useful piece
of advice I ever got from him was this: if you don’t learn sales funnels
and AI automation, you aren’t doing anything. He was right, and I built the
business on those two skills.

The harder part was quieter. I landed a retainer that took the pressure off
sales, but I had underbid it, so I was buried in the work. I lost my
copywriter and absorbed that too. For over a year I worked 8am to 3am,
seven days a week, doing the selling, the shooting, the editing, the
writing, and the systems by myself. I knew exactly what to do to fix it. I
didn’t have the energy left to do it.

Learning to build agentic AI was its own wall. I had never written a line
of code. I studied for three weeks, found the exact method I needed, then
sat on it for two more weeks because I had never been anywhere near that
territory. When I finally started, I locked myself out of my own server for
three days straight.

What came out of that is the entire backend of my agency. I built a series
of automations that handle the parts of the work nobody sees, the intake,
the file handling, the follow-up, the reporting, so my hours go to the
creative work instead. It worked well enough that clients started asking
for the same thing, and now building those systems for other businesses is
its own side of the company.

None of it was smooth. It just stopped being optional.

We’ve been impressed with LS Media , but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
LS Media is a creative agency. We make the content, we run the marketing
machine that puts it to work, and we build the automations that sit
underneath both.

Photo, video, and editing on one side, and the funnels, follow-up, and
campaigns that turn it into actual business on the other. Most shops do one
or the other, and the handoff between them is where clients lose money.

AI is the third leg and the one that changed the company. I build the
backend systems that handle the tedious repeatable work a business is
drowning in, the intake, the follow-up, the reporting. I built them for
myself first, to dig out of my own workload, and then clients started
asking for the same thing.

That’s also the line I hold in my own shop. Nothing creative gets handed to
a machine. I still edit every frame myself. Everything tedious gets
automated, and everything that requires taste doesn’t.

What matters most to you? Why?
Storytelling. Everything I have built is a storytelling machine.

I was a writer, a painter, and a historian long before I ever picked up a
camera, and all of it was the same thing in different forms. Narrative is
how the world actually runs. It’s how a company gets funded, how a movement
gets started, how people decide who is worth their attention and who isn’t.
Whoever tells the better story usually wins, and most of the time it isn’t
the person with the better product.

That’s what clients are really hiring me for. Not photos, not video, not
funnels. They have something worth paying attention to and no way to make
anyone see it. My job is to find the true version of their story and put it
where it can be found.

It’s also why I automate everything else. The systems I build exist to buy
back hours, and those hours go into the storytelling. That’s the part I
won’t hand off. A machine can move files and chase follow-ups, but it can’t
tell you which moment matters.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lsmedia.ai/vip-consultaions
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/troymichael_ls_media
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/troy-michael-ba249069/