“I was very, very lucky to be able to make the slow progression that I did, and very thankful to my brother for enabling that because I wouldn’t have been able to do it without that flexibility,” Stokes says.
Small company, big impact
Captive8’s first client was a recycling company, which had learned about Stokes from some charity work he had done for a local church. The company wanted a video that followed recyclables circuitous path once they left people’s homes.
“It was pretty scary,” Stokes says. “Definitely kind of like being thrown in the deep end. Not that they knew that. I put things in place to make Captive8 feel and look bigger, and be really efficient.”
The resulting video turned out so well, the company wanted to work with Stokes again on another project. And so it began.
Nowadays, Captive8 does everything from drone work to event videos and animation—but small-business case studies are still the company’s bread and butter. After his experience wrangling a larger company, Stokes has no intentions of growing Captive8 Media beyond where it is right now.
”I’ve always wanted it to be quite a maneuverable company,” he explains. “I want to speak to customers, I want to be involved in the shoots, I want to see the edits, and I want to see the end results. But to enable that, I have always embraced and used technology as best I can. So using the right technology has always been really, really important.”
Creating efficiency and reliability
Stokes chooses tech to handle the annoying, unavoidable things that come with running a business, as well as to support him in doing the work he loves and learning all those niche facts.
And the more that those pieces of tech talk to each other the better. It’s part of why Stokes has used Dropbox “pretty much since day one,” he says. Quickfile, his accounting software, keeps him from having to chase people for payment, and it has a Dropbox integration so he can seamlessly capture receipts on the fly. And using Dropbox Replay to review and leave feedback on videos was an obvious choice for his team.
“Everything we do goes on Dropbox anyway,” Stokes says. “You don’t have to transfer anything. You just press the button and it is in Replay.”
“People can be unreliable,” he continues. “Systems generally—fingers crossed—aren’t. So with things like Replay, it means you don’t have to rely on people putting in the wrong time code with their feedback or getting things mixed up. It’s all there.