Tim Mahoney for Founder Testimonial Videos

Speaker: Tim Mahoney, Founder and President, Thinking Man Films

Tim Mahoney: before ACTIV, one of our challenges in our business for sales We made films and had DVD's blue rays books. we had a lot of product, but it was just sitting in the warehouse and I was really concerned about, you know, what are we going to do to move this? In fact, our distributor, our main distributor, after the first year of the release of our first feature film after one year, they said, okay, I think we're about ready to retire your product because they were only interested in new products. And I said, well, wait a minute, this is a documentary, this has like years of sales that we can do with it, but they weren't interested in that because they didn't know how to sell to people directly. And that's when eventually I heard about ACTIV and we talked and we didn't know if it would work, but man, it really worked. And I'm so thankful that we were able to connect up with ACTIV and they really helped us create an opportunity where I as a filmmaker now can actually make films and then sell them directly to my customers, to the public, to our followers. And that's what we are very thankful for

Tim Mahoney: ACTIV has helped our company grow in a step by step approach When we first began, we were taking baby steps. We really only had one film and a book to market and we were able to put combinations together with them. And uh, you know, have ads created that would introduce people to who I was and the mission of the films that I was making and they were able to find that people were interested in them and that's a good thing. And, you know we we were using email and we had a list, but it was it was effective, but it wasn't near as effective as it became as ACTIV started showing us how to create marketing ads and to put them out and get to a broader audience. And I think that that was one way that they helped us grow. Another was that they've made, given us advice on the types of software that we should be using. We had one database contact management software that we're using that was really good. It helped us to get to where we were, but there came a time when they said, you know what, this isn't going to work as efficiently uh if you don't change to another one. And that one had more granular ability to look at information and integrated better with our store, which was a Shopify store. So we've made those listen to them and made the kinds of changes that we needed to make and our sales continue to grow and grow and grow and surprisingly, you know, let's say a year and a half ago, our sales have grown sometimes by 1,000% from where they were. Uh not just 100%, but 1,000%. And we're really, really thankful for those great months when we're really knocking it out of the park.

Tim Mahoney: The question is, Would you recommend ACTIV as am ecommerce partner? And I think I would have to say absolutely, I would they have been a coach, I would use, I use the word coach to coach us along to show us the trail ahead to say, Hey guys, this is really where we think uh you need to do, these are some ideas we have for marketing and in this particular case it's a win win situation or a lose lose situation if you don't have the right coach. And we have listened to their coaching and we've made suggestions of our own for communicating what our messages to our consumers and between the two of us, we've been very, very successful. And so yes, I would highly recommend ACTIV to be an ecommerce partner. The one thing I would add is that you need to have the right kind of chemistry within your own product line. I think it's important that we have seen that by having more than one product, by having the ability to Upsell makes this whole enterprise work much better, and also by keeping the content and information that you're sending out to people fresh. Those are important parts to this equation. So you can you there's certain things you have to do to make it work and ACTIV is on top of it, and and they're a great team that can help you become successful in the ecommerce area.