Getting Clients by Doing FREE Shoots is a Terrible Idea - Do This Instead!

A common piece of advice I’ve seen out there for filmmakers and videographers for getting work is to start by doing free shoots. This is something I disagree with.

So I wanted to make a quick video to share my experience of why I think doing free work to get paid work is a terrible idea and what you could do instead.

The advice I’ve seen is to call up a business or a video production company and tell them you want to make them a video or do a shoot for free. The idea is that if you do a good job, they will hire you next time and pay you what you want.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that almost never works. If I had to estimate, I would say that works one out of ten times.

The first impression that a company will have is that you are the free labor. Even if you do an amazing job, and they decide to hire you again, they will never pay industry standard rates.
I’ve gone down this path many times and it nearly always ends the same. You get stuck in the box you created for yourself.

So what’s the better way to do this that actually leads to good-paying gigs?

After I went down this path myself, I realized I had to work with several businesses or clients to even get them to pay me anything. Doing five free shoots to get a paid one didn’t make any sense, especially when the paid one I got by doing this never paid me what I wanted to get paid.

Instead, I did a free shoot for a company that I didn’t intend to work with again. Why? Because I didn’t have any examples of that style of shoot or that type of client.

So I would do a free shoot simply as a marketing expense for my own company. I didn’t even think about it as a free shoot. I wasn’t trying to get more work for that company.

It was an exchange. I didn’t have an example to get similar clients. So I asked for their time and in exchange, they got a free video.
All I had to do was invest my time in exchange for a marketing asset I could use for the next five years.

What I did after that was use that sample video to get similar clients. I never tried to get that same client to give me paid work. Even though they were very impressed, they would never value me at the same rate as a new client. Because they already got me for free and that’s their first impression of me.

The next step was to build a landing page with that example video that targeted that exact type of client. In my case, it was a marketing video for a law firm that I did for free. I used it to target other law firms and show them exactly what they would receive. Then I created an offer and priced that offer around industry standard pricing. I never needed to do another free shoot or even a discounted shoot, because I had a very relevant example.

I’ve done this similar strategy with multiple industries in my early days. And it helped me break into law, healthcare and food, and travel, without ever discounting or doing a free shoot after I had my sample.

So, don’t do free shoots, hoping that client or company would give you paid work. Instead, shoot a video for a company only as an example and target similar companies with that example. The sample company doesn’t need to become your client. That’s not the goal. The goal is to use them to break into a new industry.

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