Pick a Partner. Not a Price.
January 5, 2026
What if the problem isn’t your budget, but your buying strategy? We break down why “pick a partner, not a price” is more than a catchy line. It’s a practical path to marketing that actually works. Instead of treating video like a commodity, we share how aligning on goals, scoping together, and planning distribution turns creative into measurable growth.
We challenge price-shopping habits with a simple test: are you comparing numbers or outcomes? You’ll hear real examples of clients who asked for a single asset but needed a smarter sequence. Fix the bottleneck first, then scale. We unpack how videos die without distribution, why paid media and SEO matter, and how content cadence keeps you top of mind long after a launch. There’s nuance too. One-off hero videos can outperform live moments at donor galas, especially when you craft the story and repurpose clips to build momentum before and after the event.
Our approach sits between a pure production vendor and a strategy-only agency. We sprint to quick wins, gather data fast, and keep iterating so every dollar learns. Expect candid talk on scope vs cost, when it makes sense to match a competitor’s “reasonable” price, and why pushback from a true partner beats a vendor’s polite yes. If you want creative that earns attention and a distribution engine that compounds it, this conversation maps the way from first brief to business impact.
Enjoyed the conversation? Follow the show, share it with a friend who’s weighing bids, and leave a review with your biggest marketing roadblock so we can tackle it next.
Reach out if you need help with consistent, story-driven video marketing for your brand, agency, business, association, or nonprofit.
FREE KICKSTART GUIDE: https://letsbackflip.com/guide/
Topics in This Episode
- (0:00) Setting The Stage: Method Over Madness
- (0:30) Defining “Pick A Partner, Not A Price”
- (2:05) Budget Limits And Scoping To Outcomes
- (3:45) Price Shopping vs Capability And Fit
- (6:30) Creativity Stereotypes And Versatility
- (9:45) Partnership Mindset And Price Matching
- (12:00) Strategy First: Beyond A Single Video
- (15:10) Distribution, Traffic, And Paid Media
- (18:20) When One-Off Videos Still Work: Galas
- (21:00) Trust, Incentives, And Shared Success
- (24:30) Vendor Pain: Car And Plumbing Anecdotes
- (27:00) Case Study: Shopify, Site Pain Points, Amazon
Transcript
Ryan Freng:
Welcome to the Backflip Effect, the podcast that proves there’s a method to the marketing madness. Specifically, a method that involves clever video strategy and a dash of creative mischief. Now don’t be fooled by bland ideas or big budget fluff. Instead, we tackle real client questions and share how we’ve transformed businesses with strategies that actually work. Grab your headphones and join us as we explore the nitty-gritty of turning everyday marketing woes into story-driven success. Let’s get started. So at the end of or kind of towards the second half of the last podcast, we really got into the pick a partner, not a price. And since we get really fired up about that, I thought that this would be a really good podcast to or to do on a different podcast, separate from budgeting. So if you came here for a pick a partner not a price, this is what we’re going to talk about. If you came for budgeting, that’s the previous one. Check that out. We uh pull back the curtains and reveal uh maybe unsatisfactorily that it just caught it costs money. There’s no there’s no dollar amount you can really put on it, but we give you some ranges, which is helpful. Yeah, so so I see I’ve got another topic already in mind for the next one, but it’s really this is my job, is just to keep John on task uh and try to have uh a conversation about one topic.
John Shoemaker:
The the uh the big budget fluff from the intro. I was thinking about that. And I mentioned this the other day about the backflip effect. At some point, there’ll have to be an episode maybe where we dive into an exploration of what is the backflip effect. You know, uh you’ll have to stay tuned for that. And yeah, so pick a partner, not a price. Uh I mean the philosophy of it is that the price is a is a flexible thing within some ranges, and it’s something that we build together. We build the project together with our clients.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, we we build the solution together, right? Yeah, yeah.
John Shoemaker:
So um there are times that somebody is limited by budget and they tell us, hey, this is all we have, and then we try to design the scope based on what they have to give them the best outcome, the best output, you know, for for their project. Um But in in picking a partner and not a price, the reason that we really like that is because this isn’t the same as uh shopping around for some sort of product uh or some sort of car where like, well, this car is this price, and then this car is that price, and which one do you want? Um and sometimes I think people, potential clients don’t realize that, and so then they compare vendors and they look at this one and then they look at this one, and there’s a different price here, and then they go with that one because it had a lower price. When they skip the part of the conversation we would like to have is like just come back to us and ask. Like, we probably could have done it the vast majority of the time.
Ryan Freng:
Um well, it’s because they short circuits the the discussion of can this group even do what you want? Yeah. You know, do they have the experience, the depth, the um I said pedigree before, but the um the example work.
John Shoemaker:
Well, and and some and and I mentioned before that you know, in humility, certainly there are times when the answer is no. Like you don’t oh yeah, you don’t dive with backflip or with what we’re saying or what it is that we’re gonna do. And that’s okay. That’s totally fine. I’ve never heard that, and I would love to hear that.
Ryan Freng:
Like, yeah, uh except maybe once, like, oh, backflip is like the big, you know, kind of fancy, expensive, and like that’s just not what we need. I have heard that before. But like, no one’s really like, oh, the vibe’s not good. I, you know, it didn’t make sense like creatively or anything like that. It’s you know, if it comes back, it’s like, well, this group is cheaper. Yeah, it’s like, okay.
John Shoemaker:
So yeah, one time, one time I did hear through the grapevine from some other company that worked with some competitor that they were told, oh, backflip is they’re like comedic or you know, these like kind of wild creative ideas. Yeah. And you know, we’re the business in the business videos. Like, dude, we can do boring business if that’s what you want. You know, anyone can do that. Like, anyway, so tell me how I’m gonna be all down a road. Name names. So um it it was it was Brian. Um it’s that’s look him up on LinkedIn. Yeah, it’s your uh it’s your uh evil alter eagle.
Ryan Freng:
Ooh, an alter ego. Okay, so this is how ideation happens. Random nonsense in discussion, like alter ego or eagle. I can say it wrong. The alter eagle. The all alter eagle. Pay attention to our social media. It’s Brian. Brian, the alter eagle, will make an appearance at some point. Yes, yes. See, this is what you get when you pick the partner. This is why you pay more.
John Shoemaker:
So uh the point is that we want people to work with us, yes, uh, that you know, that are like, okay, I think I like this other project that I saw, I like what you did here. Yeah, I feel like you’re speaking my language, you understand this would work well for me. Yeah, you understand what I’m trying to do in my business, and then we can work out the scope of the project and the price together. Yeah. But if we don’t get to have that conversation, we can never move beyond that. And you had the idea recently, and maybe this is the announcement of it happening, where we should just start saying, Yeah, like we will match any reasonable price. Yeah. And reasonable is key. You know, it’s gotta make sense.
Ryan Freng:
Because that’s the undertone of what we’re saying. Pick a partner, not a price. Like if we pitch 30 and somebody came back and said, we’ll do it for 20, and we can see that scope, yeah, we can work towards that scope with you.
John Shoemaker:
Yeah. And and again, I would say the majority of the time, the other price or the lower price we’ll say is because they were gonna do something different than we were gonna do. They were gonna do less, or the scope was gonna be tighter, or it’s just different. You know, it’s not the creative that we do. Yeah. So we can, yeah. And and again, like when we get to work with a client or gain a new client and start working with them, we get fired up. It’s it’s where we’re less like your old style video production company and more like a marketing agency where we’re thinking about strategy. Right. You know, because there is that model of video production company where and there are good companies that you know we know uh locally here that are really solid at what they do and they will say firsthand. Like, I don’t I don’t write scripts. Like, if you want that, we’ll work as a script writer or you know, whatever. But we are about strategy and about solutions.
Ryan Freng:
So yeah, we want to be kind of that full stack for our partners. We don’t want to be a vendor, we don’t want to just provide a very narrow thing because a lot of times our clients don’t know what to do with that thing, like we were talking about in the budgeting conversation. They don’t know what to do with it. So we want to provide the other components so that it can be successful. So a $30,000 video actually helps them grow their revenue by some percentage in that year versus I put the promotion on the website. And we we heard this early on, and I think it’s why we developed in this way and pivoted. People would invest in video and then put it on a website that nobody went to, or put it on a YouTube channel that had no subscribers and put no money behind it. So it’s like those are like very simple things of like, okay, we need to drive traffic to the video. How do we do that? On the website, well, we need uh SEO or paid ads on YouTube. We probably need paid ads because you probably don’t have an uh audience. Um where else? Social media, you may have uh good social media following, but we need to get it on there and we need to have a bunch of frequent touches because you know what? That evergreen video that you thought could be you know good for years, you posted it and people forgot about it hours later. Yeah now. Will people go back? Absolutely, and you can reuse content, but you gotta keep you have to keep a video pulse going. You have to, you know, have more, and that’s what we you know realize. That’s where the market went, that’s how social and digital went.
John Shoemaker:
I th I think there’s one place, I think there’s one place where the the one video payoff maybe still works. Um, and that might be at the donor benefit dinner or donor gala, that sort of thing.
Ryan Freng:
Where you have a you’ve paid for a big captive audience. Right.
John Shoemaker:
You have a captive audience, right, and then you have paid for a video that is you know edited and you know made beautifully to share a message that is like you know, pulling on the heartstrings and that gets people fired up. Yeah. And I’ve heard, I’ve heard just recently from you know clients that I think the video testimonials that we had were better than the live testimonials we had because you know, people people knew what they were saying or whatever.
Ryan Freng:
I’m a huge proponent of that, by the way. Like I love the organizations that we support and that we go to. I get, you know, because it’s up to the talent of the person or the student. And not everyone is an expert speaker, nor should they be. And they get coached phenomenally too. And so what we see up there is kind of the their best effort. Now, when we do the video testimonial at like a gala, we’re able to craft it in a super engaging way that you know, through our skills that we’ve honed over the last 20 years in engaging storytelling. And yeah, then what results? You get testimonies that said live have less impact than on video. And now we have the video asset that can be little pieces that can be dripped up to the event or after the event. So even though it is just a one thing, so certainly, yeah, certainly you can make more use of it.
John Shoemaker:
Doing the full plan will result in more and better, but that would be one place where a one-off video could still be very valuable to you. Um that’s a hard ROI to like plan for, but what’s the what’s the impact of uh making or what’s the result of making an emotional impact with donors? Some percentage increase in what they are willing to write down and commit to. And right.
Ryan Freng:
Well, and we could pull up all the video statistics, maybe I can real quick and throw some of that out there. But 72% of people when shopping for a product will, you know, uh they view video primarily, you know, to learn more about the product. And over 50% will share video, you know, more than all the other types of content combined, you know.
John Shoemaker:
We we talk about the building industry a lot as an analogy, uh, you know, building a house and what does a house cost and that kind of thing. And that’s from our last podcast episode. There’s a company that uh we worked with a while ago that’s still around. I think Property Revival. I love the company, love the guys there. And I remember from one of the interviews, uh, one of the guys saying that it’s like we’ve had times where we’ve talked a client out of something that’s more expensive because we’re like, I don’t, I don’t actually think that’s gonna be necessary for you here, you know, based on the neighborhood you’re in and kind of the comparable houses and things like that. I think this makes the most sense, and I think you’re gonna be really happy with this. I love that perspective because it’s they’re being partners with those people, they’re not just going for the top, the top dollar, the top price. The the same thing is true with us. Like we are, and it just comes down to trust. Like I guess if you don’t trust us, if you don’t trust your vendors, then don’t hire them, don’t work with them. But you have to engage in conversation and then get to that level of trust, and then say, Hey, I want you to be successful because if you’re successful, you will be happy and then I will be successful, and then we’ll probably do more work together. Right. So, like, why wouldn’t it be in my best interest to make sure that your projects, your products result in more revenue and more donations or more whatever it is that you’re going for? Right. That is in my best interest.
Ryan Freng:
Right. When we partner, our partner’s success is our success, but our partner’s success is first. Yeah. As opposed to a vendor relationship where they just do the thing and it may or may not be successful. Um, like I did get my car fixed yesterday and they replaced the bulb, and they’re like, ah, it looks like the assembly’s blown, you know, it’ll cost more. And I didn’t know that until I was like reading the report. Like nobody even told me that.
John Shoemaker:
Yeah.
Ryan Freng:
Um, just such a kind of vendor, and and it was actually a pretty good experience at a car dealership, but like just such a vendor, like, I’m just gonna do a thing and you know, not take care of you. Um, we take care of our clients. We want to partner at that level and provide that service so they can succeed first. They succeed first, like you said, then we have success as well. And it’s win-win, as opposed to, okay, now you just have this piece of content that nobody’s viewing and you love it, but it’s lose-lose.
John Shoemaker:
And it’s it’s harder in a in a partnership because there’s gonna be some push and pull. Like a vendor will often just say, you know, yes, sir, no, sir, how high, you know, what, right? And from us, you’re gonna get, you know, strong opinions about things. Another another one that happened to me recently in my uh in my life is I have a vendor uh who came in to do some work on my house, and they made some choices. This is involving plumbing, they made some choices about putting things in certain places or doing them in a certain way that I was like, why? Like, and I was like, Well, technically, this is what I said, I guess, but we’re not thinking together like a strategy of like, oh, I wonder what would be ideal, I wonder what they would want, I wonder if they actually meant this or want this, right? And like that’s the vendor versus partnership to be like, hey, you you said that you’re looking for this, you’re looking for a two-minute, you know, promo video, uh, that’s a walkthrough of your business. You’re like, is that really what you need, or might it be better to start here or something like that? Right. You know?
Ryan Freng:
Right. Some people don’t like that. I mean, you know, when you’re talking about that too, it’s like, we’re not even talking about going the extra mile. We’re like going the extra marathon with somebody, you know, in there for the long haul, extra 25. 25 miles. Well, one mile plus 25, right? Well, 26.2. Yeah. Yeah. I thought you were just subtracting the one mile, but it was expected. Um and it makes me think, so your story makes me think about uh an awesome current client who we’re doing some Shopify websites for, and then some photos and some branding and and other things. Um, and they came to us and just wanted to replace their current website. Um, and they had seen some great success on Amazon. And because of the great success on Amazon, we started asking more questions about which direction would be best. You know, maybe we get a little more business going for you and then we update the website, right? Because it’s gonna be a bigger cost. Well, come to find out in this process, there was some pain points that made operating the business suck with the website. And it was like, this is my biggest pain point right now. I need to get this fixed. So as a partner, we had that discussion, saw the opportunity for business growth, and suggested that, but then came back to whatever the biggest pain point was, started addressing that biggest, biggest pain point, but then we’re also able to help address brand in photography with the look towards, okay, after we fix this major pain point that’s causing basically uh bottleneck in your business, then we can look at that other marketing where there’s a huge opportunity because you have seen huge sales over here. Uh, and because Amazon changes their rules, you’ve lost that channel. But we now know that there’s a lot of people who want this product, we can market to that. We’ll we’ll start that after we fix this pain point. That whole thing doesn’t happen in a, you know, pitch a, you know, just update our website, you know, type of deal. But because he was willing to partner with us, we were able to strategize and figure out how best to solve his pain points.
John Shoemaker:
Yeah. Because if somebody has just responded to the simple request, and let’s say they came in with a pretty low budget number that you’re like, oh, that’s a low budget, and then you said, Okay, let’s do that. And then you got that done, and then you put it into place and it didn’t solve the problem. Right.
Ryan Freng:
Now you’ve just thrown away that budget, or it was it didn’t even do anything. Gave somebody what they asked for, but it’s not what they needed.
John Shoemaker:
Yeah.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah.
John Shoemaker:
Um that uh that brought me again to that to that topic of um you know the backflip effect and what you know, what is it that people are looking for?
Ryan Freng:
That’s okay. Every podcast you will get the new idea, and then that will set us off to the next episode.
John Shoemaker:
So what are people looking for in in business? They’re there this is an oversimplification, but it people are looking for quick wins or quicker wins. Not many people are very good, and that’s okay. It’s not a critique on businesses, because we do the same thing. Not very many people are are good at planning way ahead of where they’re gonna need the thing. Where I think just the pace of life and the pace of business were pretty reactionary. Like we see something happening and then we try to like we try to see it happening early and then try to start pivoting and start making something happen. You don’t most people don’t want, even if they know they need marketing and they know they need a marketing team and agency work and strategy, they don’t want to spend a lot of money and then wait for three months, six months for all that I all those ideas to start being, you know, put together and put down. Like planning is important, but it goes all the way back to you know, our business plan way back when it was like you can spend forever writing a business plan, or you can start working in your business. And with marketing. It’s actually even a part of an important part of the process is to start doing stuff so that you can start getting data back and start making decisions based on that. So spending way too long on excess strategy, I’ll say you need to have some, but uh spending way too long and way, you know, too much of the effort in that and not getting anything done for it is also not good. Um yeah, I guess I was I was going back to the that’s kind of the counterpoint, I guess, of the partner uh, you know, like just giving them what they want.
Ryan Freng:
Well, yeah, I mean, and my sister-in-law worked at a hospital down south, and they got federal funding, and the federal funding was uh in part tied to their ratings by their customers, by their patients. And they would get addicts who would come in and demand um painkillers or demand medication, and then the staff would determine it’s not good for you, it’s not a viable solution for whatever you got going on, then they get rated lowly. So then they lose funding, right? So the system is slightly set up in that regard to incentivize giving addicts their poison, which is insane. Like for us, maybe we would be more successful if we just shut up and like, okay, what’s your budget? You have 10, 10 to 20. I’ll just do 20. I was like, where, where, how is this gonna connect? We give very poison, you know, like you come in and you don’t know necessarily what’s good for you. Um, and you’ve given us a range, 10 to 20, and you know, we often come back and we’re like, okay, here’s this amazing thing we can do for 20. And they’re like, Well, I’ve this guy will do it for 10. I’m like, I bet he will, you know. Um, but what do you what do you want? Do you want a partner who’s gonna run that marathon with you, who’s going to stick with you, who’s gonna see what happens after it goes out, right? Who’s gonna follow up, who’s going to, you know, the whole cadence and choreography of onboarding and project management and then offboarding or success after the project, like that’s it’s a whole kind of package that we have and we continue to refine and continue to build more for our clients. So again, it’s you know, it’s not just a video, it’s success with video is what we really wanna, what we really want to offer success with video to our partners.
John Shoemaker:
Good. So that helped me understand where where we sit. I think we’re in the perfect place in the middle. We’re not the vendor who’s just like, all right, I’ll take that budget and I’ll make that thing, and I’m not thinking about it. We’re also not a huge agency that only does strategy. That only does strategy. And then when it comes down to, okay, that’s great. So when are we gonna, you know, have this up and running or have our commercial or have our social plan? We’re like, well, we we gotta make that, you know, right? Like there’s that stress that people have. I think we sit in the middle really well where we we go fast because we know the people need things, they need it right away and they want to see stuff getting out there. Um, so we try to like sprint, we we sprint that strategy into can we start making something, getting you some quick results? And then once you start getting some results, now we’re working together and now we can pivot and decide, you know, yeah, what’s down the line next.
Ryan Freng:
I need I need AI to be listening and and pulling these thoughts together because it’s like actionable strategy with you know exceptional, creative, and something something video success. Yeah, right. And that, and then you go, and that’s the backflip effect. Yes, there we go. What is the backflip effect? So that that that’d be a good next um next podcast. We’d have to think about it more because we haven’t really dialed it in. But that’s the whole point of this podcast is to talk about the lessons we’ve learned. Maybe we should have like, oh, that’d be another good one too. Um, like failures, like our biggest failures. Like that’d be really interesting.
John Shoemaker:
That would be a fun episode.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah. And there’s, you know, there’s three of us partners now too. And like interpersonalness is probably one of the most difficult things. Yeah. Because when we’re rocking and you know, grokking in fullness, it’s easy to weather any challenges. But when we are not grokking in not fullness, uh, that’s when it becomes more challenging. And certainly missteps with clients, but that’d be a fun one. I think if you’re not grokking in fullness, that’s the worst that it can be. Not grokking in unfulness is the same as grokking in fullness?
John Shoemaker:
If you’re not grokking in in less than full, then it’s not quite as bad of a non-grok. But what did um what did we decide grok is? Because it it’s also the like understanding your group understanding or like being in understanding or something.
Ryan Freng:
Hey Siri, what does the word grok mean? Uh understand something intuitively or by empathy.
John Shoemaker:
Oh yeah. Alright. Yeah.
Ryan Freng:
Because of all the commercials, children grok things immediately. You know, like you we’ve all heard that phrase. You know, yeah. Like because of commercials. Because of French fries at McDonald’s. Um, all right. Well, that’s what we got. That was good. That was a good uh choose a partner, not a price discussion. And hopefully we kind of covered our perspective, and it’s not, you know. Okay. I think we’re grind. I don’t know how to turn off notifications. Okay, I’m this year’s old that like I can’t operate technology. I’m on do not disturb mode, and I just got two phone calls.
John Shoemaker:
Yeah.
Ryan Freng:
I give up. It’s an emergency. We just need we just need fire somewhere. They can break one, they can get you if there’s a fire. One was an 800 number and one was a friend slash client. I’ll call them both back. Um, but the the whole partner thing, hopefully it’s clear that you know the goal is video success, the win for the partner, which then creates a win for us. Right. And we can develop that together, and it’s got to be outcome and value oriented. Otherwise, who cares? Like, don’t do the thing, don’t spend the money.
John Shoemaker:
Yeah.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah. We did it. We did. Thank you for coming on to part. There’s no way to I don’t how do we end this?
John Shoemaker:
But what it needs to happen at the end is it’s just it’s like a slow fade out with like a theme song. Just care to talk about.
Ryan Freng:
Oh, that’s weird, you’re yeah. And then cut back to John explaining how we end. All right, that’s it.
