Tim Phillips – videographer & WFH solopreneur for 26 years

NOTES

Phillips Video Post

SUMMARY

Tim discusses his journey as a solopreneur, emphasizing the importance of having a supportive partner. He credits his wife for being his rock during challenging times, such as the 2008 financial crisis and the aftermath of 9/11. Tim highlights the joys of working from home, which allowed him to be a stay-at-home dad and spend quality time with his family.

Tim’s entrepreneurial journey hasn’t been without its challenges. The responsibility of being a solopreneur weighs heavily on him, especially during lean months. However, prudent financial decisions, like making multiple mortgage payments when business is good, have helped him navigate these challenges.

One of Tim’s strengths is his ability to tell a story through editing. He describes how he visualizes a script in his head even before shooting begins. This skill has enabled him to craft compelling narratives from hours of raw footage. He shares a poignant moment when he interviewed a woman who had experienced school integration in the 1960s, emphasizing the honor he felt in helping her tell her story.

Tim also touches on his early days, including his experiences in the food service industry. These experiences taught him valuable life lessons about human behavior and the importance of treating others with kindness and respect.

Regarding business growth, Tim is fortunate to rely on word-of-mouth referrals, eliminating the need for aggressive marketing. This has allowed him to choose projects that align with his values and work with clients he genuinely enjoys.

In a lighter segment, Kyle conducts a “lightning round” of questions, where Tim reveals his favorite candy bar as “Whatchamacallit” and expresses his fondness for ’80s rock bands like Journey and Def Leppard.

In summary, the podcast offers a candid look into the life and career of Tim Phillips, highlighting the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, the significance of personal relationships, and the passion behind storytelling.

Kyle Knowles:
Hello there. Welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast, a podcast about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, founders, business owners, and business partnerships from startups to stay ups, to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and future entrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Knowles and I’m just trying to make some cool content on a Monday evening. Today’s guest is Tim Phillips, a solopreneur, video producer, editor, and founder of Phillips Video Post. Tim has over 35 years of experience and founded Phillips Video Post in 1997. After 10 years at ABC Channel 4, Salt Lake City. Tim offers a unique blend of quality, creativity, and speed, and has a proven track record of completing projects on time and on budget. Tim is committed to using the latest digital technology to create high quality videos that meet the needs of his clients and his clients include Proctor & Gamble, Subway, and several state of Utah agencies, including the Utah State Board of Education and the Museum of Natural History, also Salt Lake County Health Department, and the Episcopal Diocese of Utah. Tim lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and youngest daughter. Tim, welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast.

Tim Phillips:
Thank you, Kyle. Good to join you. Thank you.

Kyle Knowles:
I’m so happy you’re here. And 1997 was 26 years ago, so congratulations on being in business for so long. I was reading some stuff today. I have to pull my notes out here, but yeah, I read some stats today that something like 50% of businesses go out of business within the first four years, and there’s some other stats from a book called E-Myth Revisited, where I believe his name is Michael Gerber, but he talks about how 80% of businesses go out of business within the first five years, and 80% of the businesses that remain after five years go out of business within six to 10 years. So that’s quite a feat for you to be in business for 26 years. And I was going to ask you my first question for you, what do you attribute that track record of being in business for 26 years too?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, I’m curious what the odds are for surviving 27 years because I’ll cross my fingers. I just try and do right by my clients. That’s the most basic way of saying it is I’m easy to get along with. I think I make good products, good end videos for them, and I listen to what they want and have the expectation that they’re hiring me and paying me for my knowledge. And so I’m able to say, “Yeah, we could do a spinning graphic on this very mellow church video, but instead we could do this and not drive people crazy.” So I think it’s just getting along with people and I’m lucky I get to be selective who I work with nowadays, and I think that’s pretty much it, just riding the tide of up and down economies and having low overhead and here I am.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, yeah. So talk to me a little bit about your overhead. Explain to everyone, first of all, what is your setup? How do you work day to day?

Tim Phillips:
Sure, yeah. When I started in ’97, I had a little office in downtown Sugar House. It’s no longer there, it got torn down a few years ago. And then in early 2000 when our oldest child was born, right before she was born, I decided to move home. And I had a lot of my clients concerned about that. It wasn’t as common back then to work out of your house, and this was long before being able to upload videos and get approvals. I had clients with me every day and they were concerned how that would look to their clients, especially to my ad agency clients, stuff like that. But I moved home successfully, and I think I’m a better vendor for them since I moved home because quite often, they’d call and say, “Oh, we need this change made before a board meeting.” And I’m like, “Sure, I’ll wander downstairs and have it for you in 10 minutes.”
Instead of, “Oh, it’s going to be a bit, I’ve got to get over there and there’s traffic.” And so I’ve been at home ever since and I just have my computing setup up for the editing and a nice color correcting monitor and change computers every couple of years to try and stay up to date as much as possible when time allows for transitioning to do computers because I try to be in the middle of projects.
A few years ago I started shooting, filming, so I have a bunch of camera gear I’ve been building on, and I found out with camera gear that you never have enough. You just keep buying and buying and buying, and there’s always room to buy more. I have my client couch back there, which hasn’t been used in probably, I don’t know, six years, seven years, because now clients give me their scripts and the footage or I go shoot the footage and then I show them a copy to look at and we make changes from there. But now that gets to be the family hanging out with me spot. Another, the nice thing about being at home is just having the family here when I’m working and hanging out and watching TV or doing homework or whatever.

Kyle Knowles:
Excellent. And you’ve just had this office in your basement for years then?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, it’s on the main floor, so the only thing we had to do construction wise was we live in Sugar House and the house was built in 1901, and I often say I wish they’d built me a bigger edit bay when they built the house in 1901, but the front door led to the living room through the dining room and then into the office. So we built a separate door that you come in the front door and come right into the office. I have a little reception room for back in the days when clients would come and hang out, and I would have multiple clients, one finishing and one waiting. And so they’d wait in the little reception room where I have my accounting computer and a bunch of old nifty vintage computers to look at. But yeah, it’s worked out really well to be here and I’m lucky I get to do it.

Kyle Knowles:
I just want to geek out on your gear a little bit and talk about your camera set up initially. You’re a Sony guy it sounds like.

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, I had a Canon camera at first, and quite often I’d have to shoot supplemental stuff while I was editing something. I did a documentary on pain medicine a few years ago, the people who are dealing with pain but who get in trouble with the FDA because they’re considered the same type of person who would jump over a pharmacy counter to steal pain meds from the Walgreens type thing. So I helped edit a video on pain medicine, and so I would need shots of pills and the documentary was shot, and I just needed background shots to blur out and put graphics in front of. So I had a Canon camera. I don’t even remember which one it was, honestly, I wasn’t very good at it.
And then maybe four years ago, it was becoming harder to justify hiring a crew to do a few shots of B roll, a few shots of a building or a machine running. So I went and bought a Sony a7 III, which was a great starter cam for a guy who didn’t really know all that much about filming. I knew the process, obviously. I’ve been producing since I went into business, but I would just hire a crew to do the filming and I’d say, “Shoot that. Shoot that. We’re going to do this interview.” And so I know composition and what I want a shot to look like and all that stuff, but actually controlling the buttons was a whole different game. So I really immersed myself in learning how to set the iris and how to set the F-stops and all that stuff because it wasn’t really something I ever had to deal with. I just said, “Shoot that,” and then smarter people than I would shoot it.
So I got a7 III and that worked well for about a year, couple years. And then when the Sony FX3 came out, I got one of those and really love that because I’m still trying to be better at lighting. There are lighting people who are really, really good at it, who’ve been doing it for decades, and I’m still at the early stages of understanding even three point lighting for an interview set up. So I liked the FX3 because it had the tidbit 4K, so it’d just give you that much more wiggle room when I’m color correcting, like, “Oh, I should have brightened that side of the face up,” and I can go, “Boop” and do it because there’s all that data in there to play with.
And then I also bought a Sony FX30, which is the dumbed down FX3, and it works really well for a B-cam, for a tight profile shot in an interview. Or quite often, I do scenarios where on a training video we’ll see one side or the other side of a situation, like somebody trying to buy alcohol from the liquor store without an ID. So I can be able to do both sides at once with both cameras and it works out well. I don’t have a red camera, I don’t have anything super fancy when I’m not doing Super Bowl commercials, I’m doing web videos and training videos, industrial stuff, corporate videos, and they don’t need 8K. They just need to look good and ultimately end up on the web somewhere and still look good.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense, so when you got your cameras, you say you immersed yourself. So what was your process of learning how to really dive into these cameras and get the most out of them?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, just a lot of YouTube videos, lynda.com, which I think is not lynda.com anymore. I think LinkedIn bought it just specifically about how to light, how to light interviews, how to light green screens, how to light white cyc backgrounds, just whenever something comes up and I’m not comfortable. I just had to do my first white background video for the Salt Lake County Health Department where we had a guy in front of a white screen for a training video. And again, it comes natural to some people because they’ve been lighting all their lives. And for me, it was like, okay, I got to make sure I’ve got distance. I don’t want shadows. I’ve got to make sure the back is consistently lit, but I need to make sure my talent is consistently lit, but they’ve got to look differently consistently lit so that he stands out. And so just whenever something pops up, I just hop on YouTube and white cyc lighting and there’s a bazillion videos, and I try to absorb it and learn.

Kyle Knowles:
YouTube is the way. It’s a great learning platform, isn’t it?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, it’s taught me a lot. Even just the thing, the exposure triangle and stuff like that where again, I didn’t have to know that stuff because I just said, “Film that thing,” and they would do it, and it was like, oh, now I need to figure out my ISO and all that jazz. But I think I’m quite good at it now. I would not be conceited enough to say, “I’ve learned all there is to learn about lighting,” but I’m a lot better than I was four years ago. I think I’m a lot better than I was last year or even a few months ago. I just keep trying to improve on it.

Kyle Knowles:
And then how did you go about learning video editing in the first place? So you were at Channel 4 and just talk a little bit about your experience, those 10 years at Channel 4 and what you went through and what you learned there.

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, even before that, when I was a sophomore in high school, I took TV class at West High. I grew up in Rose Park and went to West and took the TV class and was really interested in it. I’m not sure why it clicked. I took TV and accounting my sophomore year. I’m not very good at math, so I veered my way over to TV class and just really enjoyed being behind the scenes. It was in a class of mostly juniors and seniors, and then the people on air were like the cheerleaders and the football players, and I was the goofy kid behind the camera, which I still am today. I’m still the goofy guy behind the camera and it’s way more and have less hair, but I’m still the same guy behind the camera and just really liked the process. But back then, especially in high school, it’s not like we had CMX machines or really fancy machines. It was VHS to VHS. You’d play and play and record and smash your edits together and try not to make them look too glitchy. And the final product would be on VHS.
That summer I took TV class at Viewmont in Davis County, I think is what district they’re in. So I’d go there every day during the summer to learn more TV stuff. And then my junior year, I started taking TV at Highland High in the afternoon. So I was a student at West doing all my core classes, go up for TV at Highland and I really liked editing. I liked shooting, but I really, really liked editing a lot. And then I got my job at Channel 4 during my junior year working five nights a week, they called me a feed tech, so I would record the network news shows that the editors would then splice into the nightly stories. And I worked my way up eventually and became a part-time editor, a full-time editor and so on.
But when I was at Highland unfortunately my TV teacher was great, and he just said, “Don’t come up here anymore. You’ve got a job. Why are you coming up every afternoon when you have to go to work afterwards? So I’ll give you an A, but you’re doing what you would’ve been learning here, so don’t waste your time coming here,” which was really nice of him. And I worked at Channel 4 ever since those 10 years, and like I said, I worked my up and eventually was chief editor and mostly editing sweeps pieces back then. Sweeps months where May November, February, and it was big deal. They didn’t have the immediate ratings results, so everything was focused on those three months to get the ratings. And so I would do mostly those stories that were done in sweeps. And interestingly, I got my job at Channel 4 and I wanted to be a news photographer, go out and film the action. And the way to do that was you started as an editor and then they would promote you to being a shooter, a photographer.
And I just liked being in the edit bay. I liked crafting the story and I liked being the last step before it went on air or before somebody saw it. And when the chances came to move up, I was just like, “No, I’m happy in my dark little edit dungeon. I don’t have to go stand on the freeway during a snowstorm and film. I just like being here.” I mean, even now you see behind, it’s really dark and this is my little home. It was just editing and getting to tell stories.

Kyle Knowles:
Over those years at ABC, you were making something every day that was aired, or what were the number of pieces that you created, do you think, in those times?

Tim Phillips:
Daily news stuff, a couple of packages which are like the self-contained reporter stories, and then just the voiceover bits, which is the stuff that airs while the anchors are talking, “Today in Kerns, an ice cream store opened,” that kind of thing. So just whatever would come. There was a staff of, I think, back then it was different. Today, nowadays the photographers generally edit their own stuff at the TV stations, but we had I think, 10, 12 editors and another 15 or so photographers that would go out and film the news. So yeah, I just edit the pieces that edit on the news and it’s relentless. There’s newscasts on holidays and there’s newscasts when war is happening, and there’s newscasts when there’s not much news and you have to come out and find news.
And when I quit my job and told my news director that I was going into business on my own, I told him, “I can handle the pressure of daily news. I just don’t want to anymore.” I want to do something else. It beats you. There’s deadlines. And back then, it was so much easier than what these poor people deal with now. Channel 4 had two newscasts, a 5:30 and a 10:00, and nowadays they have hours and hours and a half dozen hours of news and it just cranks out and it’s always going. So I had it easy and it was overwhelming. So I’m glad I got out when I did.

Kyle Knowles:
So it was just relentless.

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, it’s always there. There’s always packages. There’s always news to be edited. They can’t go to black from 5:30 to 10:00. They’ve got to have something. And generally, that involves edited pieces.

Kyle Knowles:
So you would’ve done a couple thousand pieces that aired then in a 10 year period basically. I don’t know when you went full time there, but even if it was only for five years, that would’ve just been relentless creating content pieces, but you really cut your teeth and knew how to tell a story and edit it into a story then, right?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, and I think that’s what helps me. Maybe one of the other reasons I’ve been able to stick around this long is I think I’m really good at doing corporate video, but back then I would sometimes have three hours to edit a piece, and sometimes I’d have 20 minutes because the news starts at 5:30 or 10:00 whether I’m ready or not. So I think I bring some speed that maybe people who haven’t dealt with that environment where I can go slower and take my time or I can be fast and get it done. Even today, I’ll tell my clients who have a tricky deadline, I’ll say, “I will get it done. It’s just a matter of how much we all sleep beforehand.” I will meet your deadline, but the more time the better because we can finesse it and polish it and not be working 20 hours a day on it, but we’ll always get it done.

Kyle Knowles:
That is awesome. And I think bringing that perspective of being able to have those deadlines probably helps a lot because you know exactly what it’s going to take to get something done, depending on how much time it takes, you know what it can be given the time constraints. And so you were editing on hardware back at ABC?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, even you see a cross dissolve in any piece, it fades from one shot to another, which nowadays is you press a button, boom, and you have a cross dissolve and you can say a 30 frame cross dissolve or a 60 frame cross dissolve or whatever, and it’s just like boom, boom. You might have to press two buttons. And back then all the edit bays had two beta decks. Sorry, this is an old beta tape because I still do archive footage for Craig Wirth stories. So you’d have your player deck and your record deck, and if you wanted to do a dissolve from one shot to another, we had a third deck that was on a cart that you would wheel into the edit bay and hook it up so that you could do a fade from one shot to another because you would need those shots on two different decks. Nowadays, obviously it’s all on computers and hard drives.
But yeah, so it was really like, “Is this worth a dissolve?” I mean, it’s going to take us a half an hour to get this machine set up, and then you have to do your A roll and your B roll, and you’ve got to make sure the shots are ready because on fancier stories, there’d be many dissolves. So you’d have to lay down your audio on both tapes and have the shots alternate on one tape or the other so that you could fade between them. So yeah, it was old time hardcore editing and so much easier. Back then we were like, “Holy cow, this is great. I can’t even imagine what the film guys dealt with because this is a breeze.” You can do a dissolve with only a half an hour’s notice. And the film guys, they’d have to process all sorts of stuff.
So I felt like we were very advanced back then, yes. But then when I went into business is when non-linear editing had really started being more available. And we got an Avid Media Composer at Channel 4 for my last two years, and Avid was the big name. It still is a big name, but they were the big name in nonlinear because they were really the only ones doing it for the professional crowd. And that was amazing to be able to push buttons on a keyboard and have it dissolve. Back then I could push a button and have it dissolve with only one year left in my tenure at Channel 4. So that’s what I ended up buying when I went into business on my own was an Avid and it was revolutionary.

Kyle Knowles:
And how much did that piece of equipment cost?

Tim Phillips:
It wasn’t so bad. It was only 125 grand and that actually was just basically the dongle, the little USB key you got because it was just a Mac computer, which was pricey back then, but you could buy one for three or four grand. It was the Avid software, which would come on probably, I don’t know if it was CD Rom yet or not. You had to buy the media space because you need faster hard drives to hold your media. It’s less important today, but back then you needed really expensive hard drives. So my first Avid hard drive system, which was four 9 gigabyte hard drives stuck together, so 36 gigs. You can go into Walmart and get a 36 gig thumb drive for eight bucks nowadays. And that alone costs 10 grand just for that hard drive space. And then the dongle, which is what you stick in the computer to say this is a legit piece of equipment.
And I thought it was a steal at 125 grand. It was a lease payment of, I don’t even know what it was like 2 or $3,000 a month because the one that Channel 4 had was $175,000. So I was like, “Well, how could I not? It’s only $125,000. I’d be a fool not to buy it.” And that payment was a killer some months. It was brand new in business. I didn’t always have certainly any extra money and I didn’t always have business because I was trying to establish a business, but it always seemed to get paid. And now I’m on Premier and it costs me $50 a month, which people grumble about that, “$50 a month.” It’s not a big deal. And I’m toying with switching to Resolve and that’s free. Or if you want to be really fancy, it’s $300 bucks one time.It’s a different world.
But I remember worrying when iMovie came out, for example. I was talking to a friend of mine and I was like, “Ah, people are going to be able to edit as much as they want for next to nothing. What’s going to happen to our profession?” And she’s very wise and said, ‘There are a lot of keyboards in the world. There are a lot of typewriters in the world, but that doesn’t make you an author. You still have to have the skill to edit a story, to write a story.” So that made me feel better. And all these years later, it seems to still be true.

Kyle Knowles:
Yes, it is. I was just thinking about, you buy , I don’t know, $1,000 iPhone 14 Pro Max, whatever, and just think what you can do as far as shooting and even editing on the phone compared to your $125,000 machine. But yeah, it’s incredible the advances we’ve made. And it’s interesting because you talked about your process and we talked about this the other day, but talk about your upgrade cycle for your technology, for your hardware and software.

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, I don’t claim to be super tech savvy. I know how to use computers. I’ve been on a Mac my whole life. My brother got a Mac in ’85, and so he ended up programming on Macs and there were always Macs available. When I first got the Avid, you had to be on a Macintosh because the whole point of Windows 95 was that there were windows and you needed multiple windows to have the nonlinear editing. And so I’ve just always been very comfortable on a Mac, but I don’t know the behind the scenes stuff as well. I am good at loading my own software and stuff, but I just basically buy a new computer every couple of years. I get it updated as much as my OS will let me, as much as whatever software I’m using, used to be Final Cut, used to be Avid, now it’s Premier, I’ll get those as updated as possible and then I just don’t touch it for two years. I don’t update the software, I don’t update the operating system because that’s when you run into trouble.
You see that on the bullet boards like, “I was in the middle of my documentary and I updated my operating system and I lost everything.” Yeah, I mean, that probably usually doesn’t happen, but there’s a chance. So I don’t like taking that risk of being in the middle of something and having something go wrong, and I’m always in the middle of something. I don’t work at a bank where Friday afternoon the transactions are done and then we come back Monday. I’m always in the middle of something, so I just get a new… As a matter of fact, I’ll show you here. I have this lovely Mac studio that I bought about two months ago and it’s a Mac Studio Ultra and I’m just waiting for a lull and I’ll take this machine apart and rewire this one up and get it fully loaded with the current software, and then that’ll be my happy machine for a couple of years and repeat.
And it works well because people have all kinds of trouble with Premier, especially for some reason it’s really buggy at times like, “I crashed 10 times today.” And since I got this machine up and running just over two years ago, I think I’ve crashed three times and when I crash, I lose money because I have to figure it out and I have to stop working and I can’t bill. So I like having a stable though slightly outdated machine.

Kyle Knowles:
So how much memory do you have? How much hard to space and how much memory do you have in this new Apple studio that you just got?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, the new one, that’s the thing is you still want separate media space because I think this came with a terabyte of internal memory, but you don’t really want your media fighting with the operating system. So I have a 12 terabyte Pegasus hard drive or immediate drive, which is a nice fast thunderbolt drive. And so your files, your project file and the operating system are all happily on the internal terabyte drive. And then the big beefy drives hold all the media because files are big nowadays. I do an hour long interview on the FX3 and it’s 100 gigs, and that adds up. It takes up a lot of space if you’re doing seven, eight interviews a week. So I just do that. And then some people have really fancy backup systems and I just buy cheap Costco drives that are on sale and it works well because they’re used four times throughout their whole life. I back up a bunch of stuff and stick it in a closet and you probably never even have to touch it again.
But I back up everything I work on because it’s a lot cheaper to spend $80 on a multi terabyte Costco drive than maybe a project backing up, maybe uses like $15 of that space on a backup drive. But then in four years when a client says, “Oh, we want to revisit that edit and here’s $10,000 to fix it and make it updated,” it’s a good investment for my whatever, $30 of hard drive space versus being able to go back into a project like it was just yesterday that I wrapped it up.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I like that upgrade cycle every two years and the way that you’re backing things up and everything like that. Sorry, I could geek out on this for a long time. I should probably ask some other questions. We can go offline on some of this other stuff I’d like to ask you about, but so if you were to tell someone that was going to become a solopreneur and do what you’re doing, what is the piece of advice that you would give to them?

Tim Phillips:
For me personally, it was just having a partner that’s supportive of the whole thing. My wife is awesome. We met in 1996, so right before I left Channel 4. She was with me as we looked for office space for the business. She was with me as we moved the office home. So for me, that was just having that support of, “Are we sure we want to do this with a kid and another kid coming in a little while?” This is a big jump not having the stability. There’s a lot of great things about this life. I lead with being able to have my own schedule and being able to work with who I want, but there’s no guarantee that the phone will ring tomorrow. And so really you’re rolling some predictable dice every day, but you’re rolling the dice that there will continue to be work.
And so for me it was just having her just always, always putting… The business was never more important within our family, but the business was important enough that we have meetings about it, even though she doesn’t care what machine I’m editing on or how much media space I have, but I always talk to her like, “Okay, I’m thinking about buying this.” And she’s always like, “Of course. If you need it, buy it.” I mean, first of all, you need to spend the money or the feds get it. So I’d rather go invest it into the business, but I still like to bounce things off of her. It’s also really nice to have another set of eyes when I’m editing, like, “Hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about this music?”
But for me, that’s what it was. It was just having somebody that was always there for me during the tough times because ’08 was a tough year, but we made it through and after 9/11 was tough, and that was a long time ago, but I was still in business and I had just bought a brand new machine maybe July of that year. So I had my first machine and then I bought another one with another really expensive payment every month, and the world was shook for a while there and we’re like, “Oh, are we’re going to get through this.” But we did.
And so just having her, but just knowing that it’s going to have a lot of ups and downs and even after all these years I’m like, “We made it another day.” This is great. And if I have to go get a job as a Walmart greeter tomorrow, I’ve had a really good run and did something I loved doing and let me work at home and be a stay at home dad basically. I mean, the kids always in here when they’re home and hanging out and if it ends tomorrow, it’s been a really good ride. I’ve been really lucky.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. So what do you think the hardest part of being a solopreneur is?

Tim Phillips:
Just that it’s all on your shoulders. Even now, financial experts are saying we’re going to have a recession, which you’ve been hearing for three years now. There’s a recession right around the corner, so you do have to pay attention to that kind of stuff. I think anybody that’s employed has to pay attention to that too, because corporations are not immune to having layoffs. And we’ve seen that a lot in Utah lately. But just having that in the back of your head, like, “Okay, we have to have enough in savings where we can get through a tough spot.” But my wife has a chronic illness, and so we’re lucky that she doesn’t have to work. She’s able to stay home and take care of herself. And so we don’t have dual incomes coming in, and so we have to make sure we’ve got enough saved, but we also need to make sure that we’re paying our monthly bills. And sometimes if there’s a lien month, we would quite often pay two mortgage payments when a big check came in, two or three mortgage payments just to get ahead.
So that way we’d know our mortgage is our biggest expense. If we have three months paid, we’re golden because then even if I had a really slow month, our house is secure, so we haven’t had to worry about that for a little while, but it’s crept in there over the years we’re like, “This is a tight month.” So you just got to know that there’s really no support out there. But for me, it’s the support within the house and it’s always gotten us through. And she’s helped, back when the business was slower, she’ll make cold calls for me and do that kind of stuff, and it’s just been great.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, speaking of cold calls and things like that, how do you get new customers?

Tim Phillips:
I’m really lucky. I haven’t had to market myself in, it’s been a while, 5-6 years. I have basic website where if people want to try and find me, they can, but it’s all been just word of mouth, which is really, really nice. So not only am I not having to work with people I don’t like, but I’m able to turn down work with people who I’ve worked with in the past and haven’t really gotten along with. And for me, my sanity is worth that.
Five or so years ago, I turned down, it was probably a $30,000 gig because I’d worked with them in the past and they were challenging to the point where I was losing sleep and snapping at my kids because I was under so much pressure to do it, and I was like, man, there’s no amount of money in the world is worth me losing my cool with my kids. So I politely refused their offer to work again, but I’m lucky somebody will call and say, “Hey, I worked with so-and-so and they said that you made a great video and we’re looking at doing one too,” and then it just turns into one.

Kyle Knowles:
So you’re doing all things then, you’re making these videos, producing them, editing, shooting, all of those kinds of things, but you’re also managing the business?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s just us and the managing isn’t such a huge deal. I generally work on larger things, and so I don’t need an accountant to send out two or three invoices a month. That’s really all I send out, especially now that I’m doing it all on my own. I’ll produce, I’ll film it, I’ll edit it and all that jazz. So I’m not doing a whole bunch of paperwork. I do my own taxes, which is probably a terrible, terrible idea, but I’m doing so well so far and nobody’s come knocking on the door, from the IRS. I’m declaring everything. And working at home is a great benefit tax wise too, because I get to deduct so much and deduct this part of the home office. And a lot of my expenses are partially a write off because of the business. But yeah, I do it all or Leslie helps me and we get it done.

Kyle Knowles:
What is the software you use for accounting and invoicing and things like that?

Tim Phillips:
I have no problem spending lots and lots of money on a new Mac. No problem to drop 3 or $4,000 on it, but I was sick of paying QuickBooks. It’s like $80 a month to send out my three invoices. So I just used a freebie, I can’t remember if it was free or maybe like a $20 one time thing off the app store, the Mac app store, I’m looking at it now, Bee Invoicing, and it’s really great for just sending out the invoices and letting me keep track of them. And it doesn’t do anything fancy like, “We’ll fax you when somebody has looked at the invoice and you can pay through credit card and we’ll let you know when it’s happened.” It doesn’t do anything fancy, but it works well for me with my minimal accounting. I don’t spend a lot of time doing paperwork, fortunately.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. And so that’s Bee as in buzzing bee? B-E-E

Tim Phillips:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Bee Invoicing, okay. And are there any other tools that you basically can’t live without? Software tools or hardware tools to run your business?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, I’m trying to think. My whole life is in my phone, and again, it’s just a basic, there are some people who have really fancy to-do lists and checklists and stuff like that. I just use a little app called Awesome Note on my iPhone, and it has my whole life, it has my schedule and just my various lists. And I’m doing a series of videos for Weber State right now. I do it every year. Fortunately I’m lucky they keep calling me back for the alumni center. And so I write my questions because I do the interviews generally when I do these interviews. So I write down my questions, I’ll look up the people we’re interviewing, their biographies, and tell me about when you were young, tell me about this hurdle you had to jump over. So that’s all just in my phone. I’m trying to think. Otherwise, I’m old, Kyle. I only have so much room in my brain.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, if it’s all on your phone, then you’re not that old, but you said it was called Awesome Note?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome note, okay. So it’s a list management calendar system?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Tim Phillips:
It works well. And then we do a shared calendar for the family through our iCloud, and that way if my wife has to make a doctor appointment, she can see if I’m filming and just working with the family that way.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. So what would Tim of 2023 tell Tim of 1997 when you left ABC and ventured out on your own?

Tim Phillips:
I think ultimately just that it’s going to be okay because it was really scary. It was a big jump with a new relationship and the thought of having a family, but ultimately, it’s so worth it. I had a great time at Channel 4, a lot of great friends that I’m still friends with in person or on Facebook, and starting as a kid in a really adult dominated world, I was the youngest person there by probably 15 years. And especially in the news department where you’ve got all these college educated Berkeley, master’s degree in journalism type people, and I’m just like, “Hi, I’m Tim. I’m still breaking out.” But they really welcomed me and I get along really well, still with some of them today, some of them are still in the TV business locally, but mostly that.
It’s going to have its ups and downs, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I tell people I’m the luckiest SOB in the world because we’ve always had money to pay our bills for the most part. Well always, just sometimes a little later. Over the years I’ve been able to volunteer at my kid’s school and get my wife where she needs to be and hang out. I mean, I get to hang out with my wife all day. And some people are like, “How do you stand it?” But man, that’s awesome. We get along, which is why we’re married. But having my kids in here playing their video games or doing their homework, I wouldn’t trade it. So yeah, if I’d known that it was going to go this, well, I wouldn’t have been so nervous, but who would’ve known?

Kyle Knowles:
I guess it’s easier to look back and tell yourself that now that you’ve been through so many different trials and obstacles and ups and downs with the business. But it’s really interesting to hear your perspective on what you would tell yourself from that long ago. So you talked about one of your skills being able to take something and tell a story about that. Is that your superpower as an editor?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, I think so. Like I say, five years ago, I would tell my clients very honestly, I don’t shoot and I don’t write. I’m not good at those things. So I’d be doing you a disservice by pretending like I do, but I hire people that are really good at those things to do them for me. Now, I feel like I’m a pretty good shooter. So now I just tell people I’m not a very good writer, but I think I’m really good at, a company will call and say, “Hey, we have this script. We want you to make this video.” I look at the script and I basically have a script edited in my head before we’ve shot the first frame of video. It’s just a matter of getting all the pieces. I know I want. I want a wide shot here and a tight shot here, and I want this person to roughly say, “If not for Jim, the CEO, my life would be a disaster, but I’m so glad he’s there.” So it’s pre-done in my head. I just have to make it happen.
But yeah, the storytelling part of the editing where I have two hours of interviews and one person talking for 45 minutes about something and knowing that I have to craft that into a three or four minute video, it’s not even daunting. It’s like, this is awesome, because I get to help them tell their story and I get to meet really cool people doing this. Just last week, I won’t mention name, but I was doing a video for Weber State and I got to interview a local gal, but she grew up in the south in the late ’50’s, early 60’s and a few years after Ruby Bridges was the first African-American kid to be put into an integrated school. But she did that same thing in her town in, I think, the early ’60’s, and it’s just like this person is living history. I mean, you see about that happening and it’s like, oh my gosh, that might’ve been scary as hell for this poor kid.
And I’m meeting somebody, I’m sitting five feet away from somebody who did that same thing, and I get to help her tell her story? Man, what an honor that is. So stuff like that is really cool. Just helping people like, “Tell me about your life and tell me what you’ve been through and let me turn that into something more condensed, but something hopefully equally as powerful.” It’s a great honor to do that.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, and what are some of the other stories that you’re really proud of that you’ve been able to tell over the past decade or 30 years?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, in my bio, I put in there the Episcopal Diocese of Utah, and that’s my friend Craig Wirth, who I met. And if anybody isn’t into local TV, Craig’s been a local reporter at Channel 2 and Channel 4, and he’s been Good Morning America. So he’s had this really long 50 year career, but I first met him when I was part-time at Channel 4, and they had him come to Channel 4 to start doing his little Wirth Watching stories. And so I remember looking, I was rolling the tapes of the show. It wasn’t digital back then. You’d have to play on the news stories when the director would tell you to. And in walks the news director with this guy, and I told my buddy, “Is that Tim Conway? Who is that guy? Looks like Tim Conway,” but it was Craig Wirth.
And so I edited his stories at Channel 4 when I was working there. He does a lot of documentary work. He grew up in Montana, and we’ve done all sorts of neat documentaries about the history of Great Falls, Montana and the history of the military in Montana, which I didn’t know, but it was a major player in World War II because a lot of the bombers took off from Montana to go overseas during the war and Glacier National Park, and just really cool things like that. And sorry, I do all his documentary stuff, but maybe 12 years ago he became the outreach communications guy for the Episcopal Diocese. And I’m not a religious guy, but they share my values of equality and empowering women and trying to help the underserved. And so I get to tell some of those kinds of stories for them, and I don’t shoot them, Craig shoots all those stuff, but I get to edit those stories. And I think that’s important too, is getting those messages out there that I’m a firm believer in.
So that’s really a special one. And they’re a church. I don’t charge them as much as I would charge the state or an ad agency, I give them a pretty hefty discount just because they’re sharing a really important message that I think the world needs to hear more of today. So just little things like that where I get to meet all these neat people. And for many years, I did videos for the Ronald McDonald House. This was 20 years ago, back when they were doing a yearly telethon on TV and just talking. I’m so lucky because we have our two kids and they’re both perfectly healthy, and you’ve got your three-year-old kid with cancer, and even when I try and be empathetic, I can’t even imagine what that’s like. So doing fundraising videos for them and helping to tell these stories just purely to get money donated to help these families. And so I’ve done some cheesy car commercials in my life, but it’s those kind of things that really, it’s not just paying the bills, it’s really trying to use my talent if I have any to help for good.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, I like those examples. It’s really interesting all the different projects you’ve been involved with. If you think about it over 26 years, I can only imagine how many pieces of content you’ve created over those years. Would you have an estimate? I mean, if you were creating even a couple of pieces of content a month, that’s adds up.

Tim Phillips:
Oh yeah. I’m sure thousands of things when I’ve been able to say it’s done. A lot, a lot. Not even counting my Channel 4 stuff, which was thousands in a year sometimes. But yeah, just a lot and sometimes it’s just like this is paying the bills and sometimes, usually it’s really meaningful, especially now that I get to be a little more selective about, no offense to people who do soccer games and stuff like that, the world needs that too if you’re going out and shooting a kid to get a recruiting, video made, stuff like that, that’s awesome, but I don’t have to do that kind of stuff, and I’m lucky for that.

Kyle Knowles:
Were your parents or any of your relatives, entrepreneurs or solopreneurs?

Tim Phillips:
No, I lost my dad early. He died when I was 12, but no, not really. No, just had a chance to do it. And I was like, “Well, I’m single. Leslie and I are dating, but I’m single.” I was making, at the time, decent money as a full-time nine year employee of Channel 4 at the time. So I had a little bit of money saved up and I was like, “I’m going to try it. I’ll try it, and if it doesn’t work, I can always come back here or go to another station.” I certainly have the experience. So no, it was very much just trying it to see how it went, but I didn’t have anybody to look up to like, “Oh, well, uncle Frank did it, so I know I can do it, and he’ll give me advice.” I just gave it a try.

Kyle Knowles:
And what was the thing that pushed you over the edge? Was it just the relentless schedule and all the deadlines at ABC, or did you feel like you could just make more money if you left ABC?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, I didn’t really think about it being the money, honestly. That wasn’t really a part of it, but I think it was just the flexibility. I remember I’d been on my own for maybe a couple of years and it was February and it was middle of February, and I was like, “Hey, it’s February. And I didn’t have to think about it being sweeps.” It didn’t even enter my mind that it’s ratings and so, for 10 years, that’s all it was. You’re getting ready for ratings and then they happen, and then you’re getting ready for the next ratings period. So you don’t get time off or anything like that during those months. And so I think that was it. Just like, “I’m done doing this. I think I’m really good at this, but there are other things to try.” And that was the best time to give it a try. It worked out well to attempt it and being done with TV news and wanting to try something else. So just thought, why not?

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, makes sense. Just going back to your father passing away, and you were so young at the time, how old did you say you were?

Tim Phillips:
12.

Kyle Knowles:
12 years old. Because I was thinking about you at West High and then you were going all the way to Viewmont to take the TV class, and then you ended up going to Highland. And I was like, “Wow.” As a high school kid, just taking that on a job and you were really interested in it, but I just want to ask you the question, maybe your father’s death drove you to grow up a little bit faster and that you were willing to, because there are not a lot of high school kids that would just be like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to go take a class at another school and then another school. I don’t even know these people.” But did your father’s death have anything to do with your drive and maturity at such a young age and then taking on a full-time job basically in high school at ABC?

Tim Phillips:
It might have. Looking back, it wasn’t a super easy childhood, I think partially, but yeah, I think maybe it was like, “Okay, I want to have a different life.” Even when I’m bidding out projects today, I make more than many people do, and I try and if somebody’s like, “Oh, we don’t have that, but can we do it for a little bit less because we really want to work with you.” And I try and keep the perspective like I make more in a slow month than my dad ever made in a year. So I do pretty well when the work is there. So I try and keep that in my head. I mean, just for that reason.
But yeah, maybe that was it too. I got to grow up and I was the fourth oldest, but there was a big gap between me and my older siblings. So it was me and my little sister still living with my mom and all that. So yeah, it could have, it could have. Or just, I really liked TV, one of those two, I liked the process of editing and going out with these giant cameras that were connected by a cable to a big giant video deck on your hip, and it was a fun process. So a little bit of both maybe.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So your older siblings were out of the house when your father passed away?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, I think they were maybe still living there at the time, but they were, I don’t know, I can’t remember. It was a long time ago. Ask me what I ate for lunch, I wouldn’t know that either. But I think they were on their own mostly, but they may have been living in the basement separately or something.

Kyle Knowles:
All right, so other than being so mature and going and working at ABC full-time, did you exhibit any other entrepreneurial aspirations when you were younger? Did you have a lemonade stand? Did you mow lawns? Did you have a paper route? Anything like that?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, it’s funny, even maybe while I was in high school, but my mom was a Tupperware lady of all things. And so I had this idea where I wanted to film her doing a Tupperware party and sell it to the local distribution people like, “Hey, you don’t have to…” Now that I think about it’s brilliant because there was no internet back then, so it’s not like you could go and watch a YouTube video on Tupperware products. So I just always thought that would be neat to film the process of a Tupperware party and send it to potential customers of hers so that they could see what the products were, instead of thumbing through the catalog where you could actually see it in real life, you burp the lid.
So little things like that I would approach local companies about doing marketing videos or them even in high school, I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no sense of how to do a full marketing video, how to produce it or how to write it or anything. But I just thought it would be neat to go and try. Nothing ever came of it, but here I am all these years later doing exactly that, which is interesting. But no, before that I didn’t really, I worked at the old Diamond Lil’s over on North Temple, and your older viewers will remember that maybe, but it was an old steak restaurant. I worked there from when I was 14 to 16, and that was mostly to have money. My dad had died and my mom was a single parent trying to raise us and everything. And so I just wanted some of my own dough. So I went and worked as a busboy for a couple of years. Wasn’t very good at it, got hurt a lot, but it got me coke and snack money.

Kyle Knowles:
How did you get hurt as a busboy?

Tim Phillips:
A lot of broken plates, dishes. At the time, nobody had explained to me the issue with combining bleach and ammonia. So I’m back there getting a mop bucket ready, and I’m like, “Well bleach, well, I’ll put some ammonia in there. That’ll make the floor even cleaner.” And then having to go to the hospital, because I cast myself. Not a smart kid. My high school career, I literally went into my counselor in the 10th grade and I was like, “I want to get out of here and graduate with the bare minimum of effort.” I don’t like school. I didn’t like waking up. I was working at the restaurant until 10:00 and 11:00 at night on school nights, then working at Channel 4, doing the news until 10:00-11:00 at night on school nights after that.
And so I was just like, “I just want to graduate and I don’t care about having super good grades, just get me out of here.” And she reluctantly was like, “Well, I guess we can do this and this.” And so yeah, maybe I wasn’t as good a learner as I could have been. So anyway, yeah, I ended up getting hurt. I mean, I wasn’t constantly in an ambulance, but I took four or five trips to the hospital for various reasons back in my short tenure in food service.

Kyle Knowles:
Busboy days, huh?

Tim Phillips:
But I will say that I think everybody should work in some service job because I think it teaches you how truly horribly people can treat each other. And I think it makes you a better person when you’re on the receiving end of that, because even as a lowly busboy, I got people yelling at me like, “Oh, you didn’t clean that fast enough. We had to wait for a table.” And so I think it gives you a different perspective on how to be a better human when you see the worst of humanity, which is surprising that the worst of humanity can sometimes come out at a coffee bar because somebody didn’t get the right amount of caramel in their drink. But yeah, it was an interesting experience.

Kyle Knowles:
Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Tim Phillips:
I think I’m very much an introvert. With the people I’m comfortable with, I’m very comfortable being myself, but generally I’m absolutely the last person that would be like, “A party? Well, sure, I’ll go. I’d love that.” That’s not me at all. And what I do is I have a smart aleck-y sense of humor. So when I meet somebody new and I’ll do my little Tim jokes and they’ll look at me like… I think you have to know me before you appreciate my snarkiness. And so no, I am not comfortable. Both of our kids went to a little hippie charter school on the avenue. It’s called The Open Classroom. We were there for 17 years and it was an absolute great place for our family to be. And that’s where I was able to volunteer, my wife and I, or both of us at the same time.
Part of the gig was you would go and volunteer once a week for a morning or afternoon and then this allowed for a lot of small group learning because you had all these parents in the building doing different centers and the teacher could spend more one-on-one time, et cetera. But those are my people. I’m really comfortable with my Open Classroom people. And so people that know me from there and I say, “Oh, I’m really shy.” They’re like, “Oh yeah, sure you are.” But I truly, truly am. I’m just as happy sitting here watching a show with Leslie as some people are like, “I need my guy time. I’m going to go out with the guys to the bar, honey. I’ll be back. Or maybe I won’t. We’ll see.” That’s not me.

Kyle Knowles:
What’s something that most people don’t know about you?

Tim Phillips:
We had a contest once at a camping trip, a class camp out, and you had to do the two truths and a lie, and I was able to say that I’d won an Emmy and nobody really believed that. But then I have to explain that it wasn’t like a Ted Danson for Cheers Emmy. It was just an editing Emmy for the Rocky Mountain States. But I won Best Editor one year. Gosh, so that one people don’t usually believe. I think just like that.
With the shyness, I don’t think people really believe that. If they know me, I’m really into old sitcoms and stuff. That’s my veg point. Sometimes people will say, “What are you reading?” I know how to read fortunately, but I’m not a guy who’s like, “Oh, I just finished my eighth book this month.” A lot of the reading I do honestly, is going on Reddit and looking at editing boards and sound engineering boards and stuff, just trying to better my skills a little bit, learning from other people. But you plop me down in front of an Andy Griffith and it’s awesome because my brain can shut off because editing is hard. Doing this stuff, there are worse jobs, I don’t have to lay down tar on the freeway in the summer. So those people that do that are heroes because they keep our roads going and it’s a job, but I just get to sit here and press buttons.
But it’s still, it’s hard to try to be creative for every client and try and make things just a little bit better than they’re expecting. So when I get in front of the TV, I just get to go like, “Ah.” My brain gets to shut off for a minute, which is delightful. So that for me, is relaxing. Just watching these old generally really dumb, not like Andy Griffith’s dumb, but dumber old shows where I can just tune out and let my brain be quiet for a minute.

Kyle Knowles:
What are some other examples besides Andy Griffith that you will veg out to?

Tim Phillips:
Oh man, what do I watch? I’m watching some Newhart’s now. Bob Newhart’s little Vermont Inn show. I like those. What do I watch? I like The Office, though I’ve gone through it 10 times and I’ve taken an Office break. I need a little Office break. I love Parks and Recs. I’ll catch that whenever I am on. But as far as the old ones, even Different Strokes and just the ones that really didn’t really have any redeeming value, even when they were on the air, but 30 years later, even less. But they’re just this mindless, and you giggle once in a while. Mash, which is a really good show, but still not.
There aren’t a lot of people nowadays who sit and watch, which my kids find hilarious because kids today, they don’t watch TV at all. Not only do they not know about the old ones, but they don’t know about the new ones at all. They just don’t. TV is just this foreign concepts. I actually showed our youngest kiddo a VHS tape the other day because they were talking about VHS and they couldn’t even imagine what one looked like. So we pulled out an old VHS tape.

Kyle Knowles:
Did you play it? Did you have a VCR to play it?

Tim Phillips:
I didn’t play it. I have a VCR somewhere in the house, but it’s not hooked up, but you lifted up the flap and pulled out the tape so you could see the tape itself. And it was like, “We have to rewind it.” You can’t just jump to the next thing. It’s linear.

Kyle Knowles:
They missed out on a lot of things including VHS tapes for sure.

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, yeah. Our older daughter, we have a daughter who’s in St. Louis in grad school. She’s working on her PhD and she’s very smart, and we try and support her by nodding knowingly when she tells us stuff we don’t understand like, “Oh, interesting.” But she grew up in that era a little bit, but none of these kids know a world without the internet and without mobile phones and on demand this and that.

Kyle Knowles:
I can only imagine because Spotify alone on some device that you can take anywhere with you and have access to all recorded music and the history of music is just something my 16 year old mind could have never wrapped it’s head around. Yeah, it’s amazing.

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, the entire history of the world is a button punch away. Really, we’re spoiled that way, I guess.

Kyle Knowles:
We are spoiled. Well, I’ve got a lightning round of questions that I’d like to ask you starting with what’s your favorite candy bar?

Tim Phillips:
I’m a Whatchamacallit guy and I’m proud of it, and I’ll fight you if you have a problem with that, Kyle.

Kyle Knowles:
I love it. I love Whatchamacallit. I had one for the first time in about a decade, a couple months ago, and I was going, “Why have I not been buying this ever? This is amazing.” And it’s amazing that it’s still around because it is a relic for me, the 80’s. Favorite musical artist.

Tim Phillips:
During some troubled times in my life, my teen years were not always great. So I go back to Journey, Def Leppard, those kind of guys. I got into Queen for a while. It’s funny, I know there are people passionate about music and I’ve never been passionate about music in any way, but I enjoy music, but my brain doesn’t work well enough to understand the lyrics. And so I’ll be la la la-ing to a song and my wife will be like, ” You know that song is about the ritual torture of horses, right?” And I’m like, “What? It is?” And I’m just like, “Whoa.” The words, and I don’t really comprehend it. So maybe that’s why I’ve never been into it. But yeah, those old timey, not old timey, Motown. That’s nice. I like Motown, old timey, but just ’80’s rock is-

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, classic rock.

Tim Phillips:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Your favorite cereal.

Tim Phillips:
That’ll be Frosted Flakes. If you’re looking for a gift bag, that’s where I’d start.

Kyle Knowles:
We already know the answer to this Mac or PC, obviously it’s a Mac. So Google Workspace or Microsoft Office?

Tim Phillips:
Google Workspace as of about two weeks ago because I just switched over my website and I have a very nice friend who helped me do that. My other hosting service was, I was missing emails. I kept getting people saying “Oh, we wrote you about doing a video and we didn’t hear back.” And I was like, “What? That’s thousands of dollars I missed.” And so he switched over my email to a new service and got me onto Google Workspace. So a month ago I would’ve said neither, what are those things? But now I’m a big fan of Google Workspace, even though I don’t really understand why, but I am.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. Dogs or cats?

Tim Phillips:
We have a cat. We’ve had cats over the years, so probably cats. I like dogs and I don’t really fully understand dog people, but good for them for being dog people. But we’ve just always preferred cats because they’re much more easygoing and low maintenance. We can go on a trip for a few days and be like, “Bye cat, here’s some food.” And they’re like, “Okay, have a good time.” And the dogs, you need to kennel them and get babysitting for them. And our cat doesn’t give a damn if we’re here or not. Frankly, he’d probably prefer that we weren’t here, so cats are easier.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Phantom or Les Mis?

Tim Phillips:
Phantom because when I was at 4 and Phantom of the Opera came on tour, this was mid ’90’s maybe, to Salt Lake, so Channel 4 did a big production about it. They were sponsoring and it was an hour long special that I was able to edit. So I got really into the music and I wouldn’t say no other Broadway product would I have even been interested in, but because I was immersed in that, I really got into it. As a matter of fact, the little inappropriate story for your podcast here, Kyle, when my wife got me drunk the first time was soon after that and we were living in an apartment and I got so drunk that I was singing show tunes really loudly at two and three in the morning, much to the regret of my apartment neighbors I’m sure. But I was singing phantom songs while I was completely blitzed. But even today I still go back and listen to some of the songs, but I’ve never really been one to fully appreciate the talent of those folks who do the musicals. But that one in particular I really got into.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. Is there a book that you recommend the most to people?

Tim Phillips:
That’s probably going back to the, I read fact books. I don’t really have anything inspirational like, “Oh, you should read John Smith’s 10 Habits of Successful Nomads.” I don’t read stuff like that. I’ll read how to books or not how to books, but why things are books. Like In space, why does this happen? So I read a lot of stuff like that, but nothing that I would go like, “You need to read this. It’s going to change your life. Once you know why, there’s no word that rhymes with orange, you will never be the same person.” Maybe I don’t have the patience for good books, but yeah, I’m a terrible example for my children, Kyle, basically.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, your daughter’s working on a PhD, so you must be some kind of inspiration and example, you and your wife.

Tim Phillips:
As my wife says, we try not to get in their way. We try not to ruin them. That’s a lot of bad parenting is like you try and control too much or you try and dictate decisions they make instead of them letting them be their own independent humans. And it baffled me, we spend all this time raising and nurturing and loving these kids with the whole purpose is to be like, “Okay, now leave.” That’s really weird. Having her across the country is really weird, but it’s where she’s supposed to be. It’s like she’s going off and living her life and it’s awesome. We still talk to her all the time, practically every day. But it’s such a weird thing to be like, “When you were four Bridgette, you promised you’d never leave and now you’re leaving. What are you thinking?”
And our other kiddo too, I haven’t mentioned her, Eliza, but both of our kids are just super kind, caring. They’re both really smart. They’re both really talented. But I tell them the main reason we’re proud of you two is because you give a about people. You want people to be okay and you want people to be treated well. You were both born pretty and smart, but you didn’t really have as much to do with that. Choosing to be kind, that’s your choice. That’s awesome. So we were lucky. We had two really great, amazing kids.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, I think it’s a testament to what you and your wife have done, and I love that sentiment. I think we should hand out T-shirts to all new parents that would say either daddy or mommy, try not to ruin them. I think it should be a T-shirt that’s handed out because I like that advice a lot for parents. Try not to ruin your kids.

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, that’s it because it’s easy to do.

Kyle Knowles:
I think so.

Tim Phillips:
You just got to step back and it’s all about them.

Kyle Knowles:
So Tim, I wanted to read one of the reviews, you have a quote on your website, but I’m trying to find it here. And it’s basically what was mentioned by one of your clients is that you’re easy to work with. And I think this goes all the way back to the start of our conversation, and you’re talking about working with people and your easy to work with. I think that’s why you’ve stayed in business for 26 years. And I get that sense from you just talking to you and all the different things that you’re into and your volunteer work and all the different projects you’ve worked on. I can tell that you’re very much a people person.
And I just want to go back to being an introvert because I’m an introvert as well, and I think there’s some confusion because a lot of people aren’t introverts. But introverts doesn’t mean that you don’t like people and you are very much a people person. And I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. I thank you so much for being generous with your time tonight and allowing me to geek out a little bit on your gear and some of your process and your workflow and the software that you use. But thanks so much Tim, and I look forward to seeing what you do over the next 26 years. If you can imagine that, going another 26 years in business, if you went that many years forward that you’ve already been in business. It’s just amazing to me, anyone that can be a solopreneur and be in business for 26 years. So thanks so much, Tim, for being on the podcast tonight.

Tim Phillips:
Thank you very much. It’s been a surprisingly fun and time. I was worried as I’ll get out about this and it’s been just super fun. Much more so than I thought it would be. So thank you, Kyle for making it easy.

Kyle Knowles:
Tim lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and youngest daughter. Tim, welcome to the-

Tim Phillips:
Kyle, I’m so sorry. I’m going to stop you. I’ve got a moth flying around behind me. Can you see that?

Kyle Knowles:
I can see a moth, but that’s awesome.

Tim Phillips:
I figured we better stop now than halfway through because it’s going to distract the hell out people. Sorry, give me a minute.

Kyle Knowles:
This is awesome. I’ve never had a moth on the show before. Okay, well cool. Let’s go ahead and get after it. Let’s try this.

Tim Phillips:
Cool.

Kyle Knowles:
I think you’re sounding good. You’re looking good.

Tim Phillips:
I can’t help it. Can you ask a bird not to sing, Kyle?

Kyle Knowles:
You can’t. You can’t. Okay, so I’m going to go through this introduction and then we’ll just get into it.

Tim Phillips:
Great.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Take a drink of water. Do you have a drink?

Tim Phillips:
Yeah, I do. Am I allowed to drink during it?

Kyle Knowles:
Go for it. Be as human as possible.

Tim Phillips:
Bourbon?

Kyle Knowles:
Bourbon yeah. That’s no problem at all. You might start slurring your words towards the end, but let’s do it.