Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E18 Nikolaj Kloch | Public Speaking, Career Changes, & Leading with Value
Nikolaj Kloch shares his unique journey from aerospace engineering to becoming a leading videographer specializing in content creation for public speakers. He discusses how engineering skills translate into entrepreneurship, content creation, and business development.
Main Topics:
- Transitioning from aerospace engineering to videography
- Building a business by leading with value
- Public speaking tips for engineers
- Leveraging engineering skills in content creation
- Social media and networking strategies
- Career change advice for professionals
About the guest: Nikolaj Kloch is a former aerospace engineer turned videographer who specializes in creating content for public speakers. With over four years of experience, he helps speakers boost their visibility, book more engagements, and increase their income—serving clients who’ve spoken for top companies like AWS, Jaguar, and Airbus. Previously, he worked at Boeing as a Propulsion Design Engineer and was part of the MSTEP Steering Committee. He holds engineering degrees from Georgia Tech and the Technical University of Denmark. Outside work, he’s an ultramarathon runner and Eagle Scout, known for his dedication, versatility, and inspiring career journey.
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
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It gets way easier the more you do it. It'll never be as hard as that first time you get up and stand in front of other people. But if you can speak as an engineer, you will go places.
Aaron Moncur:You Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of The being an engineer podcast today, we have kind of a an interesting, unique episode. We are going to talk about engineering a little bit, but more than that, we're going to focus on our guests journey into a different career, while still still continuing to hold on to to some extent, the old career of engineering. Nikolaj Kloch is an aerospace engineer turned leading videographer and content creator for public speakers. Nikolaj has collaborated with clients who have spoken at renowned organizations such as AWS Jaguar, or Jaguar, as the Brits said, rolls Roy, Rolls Royce and Airbus, his unique approach leverages his engineering background to help public speakers enhance their engagements, grow their following and increase their bookings. Nikolaj, I thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. Aaron, so I can't remember exactly how I came across you, or maybe you came across me. I don't remember now on LinkedIn, but I thought your story was super interesting. And I've been looking for not every episode, for sure, but every now and then, I think it would be fun to do some non engineering, but still interesting to engineers type of episodes, and I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to do so. So you you started out as an aerospace engineer and then eventually made a shift in your career, although I think I remember you telling me that you still are involved in engineering as well. Is that accurate? That is accurate. So how did you let's start with the first question that we all start with, what made you decide to become an engineer? And then if you could tell us a little bit about your journey into becoming a videographer and working with public speakers. Yeah, absolutely.
Nikolaj Kloch:So I kind of stumbled into engineering. I think a lot of us like to build things and see them. I stay away from software engineering strictly because I like seeing it in the real world. I like getting my hands on it, you know. So I'm half Danish, hence the name Nikolaj. I started playing with Legos as a kid. They're Danish as well, so it fits. And I kind of just started building things and fixing things and seeing kind of where it took me. That took me to Georgia College, and then I basically went physics. And I was like, What can I do with this? And then I was like, oh, there's a dual degree program with Georgia Tech, you know, and it just kind of kept going into it. How do I apply physics? How do I go into building with physics, mechanical engineering? And then I kind of stepped into my master's program, and I wanted to travel, so I went to Denmark and went to grad school over there, traveled a little bit, and then took it from there into aerospace, because the background of physics and mechanical engineering. I mean, you can find a mechanical engineer in almost any field. I think we all know that it's the jack of all trades, master of none. So I went from, I guess, Denmark, and started applying around. Then I was like, What's the coolest job that I could apply this to? Again, just thinking, how can I take this to the next level? Went into aerospace. I was a propulsion structures design engineer. Worked on some commercial and military aircraft, some really common, huge platforms, and I basically got to go in and do clean sheet design on the government side, which was fantastic. I absolutely love doing the clean sheet design. It's a very niche thing in terms of aerospace, because a lot of these planes have a problem with them. And you come in and you've got a bounding box, and you have a list of requirements that you have to meet. And let's say it's four by four by four, right? You have to fit your design in this tiny box with the clean sheet design. We were designing the entire missile launcher on structures, frames, everything. Kim Milley manufacturing, we actually saw the parts that we designed, and they produced them and put them up on a engine test stand, and it was really, really fun. And I started figuring out what the systems were in corporate, and I started figuring out how to basically take what people were telling me to do and then run with that. So I started going into a leadership course, and I started leading, like 100 gifted engineers at Boeing, so I was on this path, and then I was thinking, Okay, this is fun, but there's a part of me that believes that true intelligence is when you build something without having your handheld and corporate has a lot of kind of red tape structured everywhere, right? You're kind of guided down this path, this path, you're told kind of what you. And do when I'm like, I have this great idea. This would be incredible if we implemented this. And they're like, is it on any other airplane? No. Is it working anywhere else? No. And I'm like, but it would work. Let's try it. But you know, a lot of these companies want to do, what works, what's quick, what's the best solution,
Aaron Moncur:minimize risk. Exactly.
Nikolaj Kloch:That's how it always is. So I went from that and I started kind of peeking out and starting businesses. I've done a marketing agency. The other business that I'm still involved with on engineering is medical wearables. So I actually have a license deal. We just signed for royalties in a medical wearable industry. I can't talk too much until everything's signed, but I'm excited for that one, and then I'll have a bigger company that's doing like, 8r and D engineers, and they have manufacturing engineers. So we built it, we did clinical trials. I have a surgeon and a physical therapist. That's my co founders. And you see the whole business aspect. You deal with lawyers, which aren't always fun. There's some great ones, though, too. You take the prototyping, you 3d print, you basically build something up and out of nothing from a real world problem. And I was only engineer on the team there's only three of us, so I had to be right. And then you figure out sales and outreach and marketing and how to make these contracts, and then you start building that up. And from this, I had to start picking up the camera and starting to do more content. And it's almost the natural progression you learn the business skills, you build a skill stack, and that's kind of how you become more well rounded. So I've always loved public speaking I was in fifth grade and I was in a Toastmasters class and I thought how can I bridge a business with something I love getting around people that are really high value I mean these people invest in their own trainings courses they're always paying for more information, not shortcuts but how can I get better. So I was thinking, how could I bridge all these gaps, and that was a natural progression and then my wife and I traveled for 10 months we just got back three weeks ago, six months in Europe, because we both have family there so we stayed free food, free laundry free housing, and then we went to Asia for four months. And during this time, I was building out the video editing side. So I was editing videos, doing the outreach, getting clients that were public speakers, and I was strictly on the editing side. I had to fly back to New Orleans for a conference and a few other places to actually film and get the content on the front end. So now I'm pushing on that side heavier to become the well rounded business. I think the beauty of engineers is that I truly believe that any engineer is very smart, and that they could just kind of take off the ropes on their brain, that they could figure out that business is just systems. It's finding out what works taking that and actually, like deriving from that to see what the basics are, and then pulling from those to iterate on, you know, go in cycles to actually produce something of value that you could do yourself. You know, that's a robotics, a drone like, whatever that might be in whatever niche it's all systems. The business side is all systems. And I think that's the beauty that we study so hard in school, at our jobs and everything like that, that this is easy, if you can just kind of separate the guard rails from success. You know, if there's a straight shoot, it's a lot easier to crush it and go all the way through. But if there's no rails it's still just as easy to get through but you kind of have to guide yourself along and that's going to be a gutter ball here and there Right? Bowling analogy you're going to make misses. You're going to have flops. But if you could fail, quick and I think engineers are afraid of failing, I know I am so if you can just kind of push through that failure process. I mean, you've been doing this podcast for how long did you save? Four years? Aaron,
Aaron Moncur:no longer six. Five years. Now, five years.
Nikolaj Kloch:You've had some some podcasts that were great, and you've had some that were not so. Great you pushed through and look at how refined everything is. Now you've got the audio
Aaron Moncur:they were, they were all 10 out of 10. Thank you very much. Nikki, one, no flaws, not like you and I just went through 10 minutes of technical troubleshooting before we started this very episode not like that happened.
Nikolaj Kloch:Oh, don't tell them that Aaron I wasn't gonna rat you out
Aaron Moncur:so let's talk about videography for a second here How did you know that you could make money doing this? Because that's that is the pinnacle question of every new business, can you make money doing it?
Nikolaj Kloch:I think the simplest way to explain that is, if you can hit 1% of your goal, you can hit 20, 3050, so if you can just find one paying client for that specific. Specific problem and asked to be a problem behind it, then you can make money off of that. So just test it, try and hit that as quickly as possible. And the way I did that was just outreach. I edited videos before I reached out to them, and I would actually give them value up front. I've always led with value. I think it's the easiest way to grow anything if you want good grades in school. The easiest way is to do the course assignment ahead of time and show up to your professor, you know, and talk with them, showing that I put in the work. Can you help me with this? And then it's the same relationship with everyone in the entire world. If you can show up with some value and be genuinely interested. The sales takes care of itself. The sales process is where they die and they're trying to how do I persuade them? How do I force their words? How do I close them?
Aaron Moncur:The Product Development expo or PDX is your chance to learn from subject matter experts, providing practical, hands on training for dozens of different engineering topics, gdnt, advanced surface modeling, DFM, plating and finishing techniques, programming robots, adhesive, dispensing, prototyping, Tips and Tricks and lots more. PDX happens october 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more at PD Expo. Dot engineer. That's P, D, E, x, p, O, dot engineer. So I think there's an analogy here. You talked about companies for who you worked previously, and they didn't want to let you try new ideas, because it represented risk, right? You're you're introducing risk into the equation. So if you can de risk a opportunity, a proposition for a prospective customer, becomes much, much easier to convert that, that prospect into a customer. I have a very short example that it did not turn out perfectly, but I got part of the way there, and I think I would not have gotten any of the way there if I hadn't started with value. I train in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and I've done so for many years, and unfortunately, three, three months ago, I tore my ACL. I actually am having surgery tomorrow, so that'll be fun. But anyway, I thought to myself, how could I make lemonade out of lemons here? Right? It's, it's not cheap to get an ACL repair. Let me tell you that. It's many 1000s of dollars. And so I was talking with the surgeon about this. And I had this thought, you know, this surgeon, he probably needs to market himself, right? He has to find new patients. And so I had this idea, what if I, like, created a documentary from, like, a genuine story from the patient's eyes, of what it's like to tear your ACL and then get it repaired, go through the surgery, the PT, you know, all of these things. Surely there are other out people out there who would find that useful. And maybe I can bring some business to this surgeon. So I got in touch with, I found the marketing director for this, this hospital and on LinkedIn. And instead of just reaching out and say, Hey, I have this idea, I actually filmed, like a little, you know, short segment, couple minute pilot, right? Beautiful lighting in the background. And I told a little bit of the story, and I sent it to him, and said, Hey, this is what I think it could look like. Are you interested in talking? He's like, Yeah, I am interested in talking. And we got on the phone. He was like, hey, this. It was awesome that you created this, you know, two minute segment for me, so I could see exactly what it would look like. The lighting was great, the audio quality was great. This is really cool. Anyway, long story short, it the trade I was proposing didn't work out, but I got the meeting, and, you know, it's a new contact there. Who knows what could come of that? Because I started with value.
Nikolaj Kloch:Oh, beautifully, beautifully done. Aaron, you led with value. Came in strong. You know, you showed what you could do. That is exactly how to do it. And I just want to say I think the industry average is 6% for conversion on sales. So that is, I mean, it's going to take a lot, right? Yeah, but you're showing up like that. You just got a portfolio builder as well in the portfolio,
Aaron Moncur:absolutely, yeah. So you mentioned that in order to make money at a business, there has to be a problem that you're solving. What is the problem that you're solving with these public speakers?
Nikolaj Kloch:So the big the best way to frame it is, if you want to get paid more, you have to look like you're charging more. I know that simplifies everything down, but the best way to look like you're speaking at these huge events is to get somebody professionally filming you and editing you and then also talking with them. So there's ways of guiding videography, as you know, prompting people with questions, prompting people saying, Hey, you. For example, there's a content unit. Alex hormozi talks about this, and it's basically a problem, agitate, solve. So you're the classic storytelling arc. If you could build that into the public speaking presentation, which they should be speaking like this, because it's very satisfying to the mind. If you're given a problem, you're agitating that problem, giving pain points, if it's performance, you're tired, you're dragging, you can't focus. And then you solve that by saying you need sleep, water. You know, all of these solutions. So just packaging it from this vantage point, and you come in and of course, you'd say you guide them along this process, because it's the overall process, from sales all the way through the end product, which is that content, the top of funnel that's actually feeding people in so they can book more speaking engagements. And really quick, I just kind of want to note that a CRM, a customer relationship manager, management system, is built for engineers. It is the easiest thing to do in the world, if you just look at the very top, you have outreach conversation, started sales, and you go through this entire step by step process, and you just make an Excel spreadsheet, and you drag people along. You could literally see who's converting. So if 80% of your funnel is dropping out at the very top, you can see, okay, I need to fix this. Then you fix that for 14 days, if it works. Move on to the next problem in that sales funnel. It's the simplest thing in the world, if it's not convoluted with all of these business terms. You know, it is built for engineers to actually build a business and actually run from there. They're the best people to do this with, because they love numbers, and numbers don't lie, and numbers are easy to fix. You don't know numbers. You don't know what's happening. You don't know where water's falling out of the bucket, what holes to plug right? And if you could just take that system and work on it for six months, think about how much better that sales pipeline could be, it would be tremendous. Your life would be changed. But it a lot of people don't like numbers, and I think that's where engineers stand out systems you know, going through, seeing the basics, and then re engineering it, from what you want back to where you are.
Aaron Moncur:Just out of curiosity, what CRM are you using? So
Nikolaj Kloch:I tell anyone starting Excel spreadsheet, put their names in and a column with all the column you know, types like outreach, connections, conversation starter, blah, blah, blah. But I use go high level. It's pretty premier one. You can do a bunch of automations, texting, follow up emails. Those are big ones. Of course, if it's a client you really want, never use the automation on them. You should always do a custom email, especially if you have the time never, ever automate something if you really want that customer, if it's not a customer that you really want, then I would leverage AI, right? That's where you can really take that and run with it. And
Aaron Moncur:Why would, why would you spend time on a customer that you don't really want playing devil's advocate here?
Nikolaj Kloch:So it's a double edged sword, right? Because when you're starting out, you need all the clients you can get. When you get better, that's when you start being able to get choosy and picky with who you work with. So it's a balance, and there will be a time in everyone's career where they get to say no, and it's going to feel like I have to say no or something. It's going to be really heavily weighing on you, but that is the best thing in the world to do for you long term, is when you can actually sit down and go, Hey, we're not the best fit. I don't think I can give you what you're wanting, you know, or setting expectations in that call very firmly is something that you also have to look at and do, because if you over promise and under deliver, that's how you mismatch expectations. If you under promise and over deliver, that's how you really get that that middle ground of a great referral, referrals are the easiest way. It's a warm lead coming in to get more business, right? So really talking through that and then doing follow up emails. The best businesses in the world do outreach to their clients, their current clients. They ask them how they're doing, what's their problems? You know, you speak with them. If you're just responsive on email, you'll beat everybody else in the field, because nobody's responsive. They don't follow up, they don't hit deadlines. And again, that's what we're built for as engineers, is ETAC dates, right? Engineering tracking and control dates, things like that, that can really if you can hit those deadlines and be responsive, you're ahead of the curve. You're way ahead of the curve.
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Aaron Moncur:You know, what amazes me is that there are so many vendors we've reached out to over the years because they had a product or a service that we felt would be useful for our projects, and they don't respond. You know, you call, no one answers. You leave a voicemail and it's days or weeks or maybe never, so nobody responds, or you send an email to some black void inbox and no one gets back to you. We're literally trying to give these people money, and they fall on their faces and don't take it because they don't. I don't know why. I still don't understand it to this point, but when someone reaches out to us, we get back to them, like, within an hour. You know, it's quick, and it just blows my mind that there's so many companies out there that don't respond. They just don't respond. It's
Nikolaj Kloch:a industry worldwide problem. Every every industry has it. Every company has it. If you can just stand out on that part, which you're already doing. I mean, you're halfway there, just being responsive, talking to people like their people are you doing, like, engineering, relevant products and things like that. We mostly
Aaron Moncur:do engineering services. So we develop a lot of automation and custom fixturing for manufacturing, testing, inspection, assembly, that sort of thing. So it's all custom equipment services based we do have a product right now called Easy Motion. It's a pretty cool controller using a drag and drop visual block based programming interface that anyone can use. But outside of that, it's all engineering services.
Nikolaj Kloch:They're missing out on money. That's all right.
Aaron Moncur:Do you remember your very first public speaking customer, and what that process was, how you found the individual, what conversations led to that individual saying, Yeah, okay, did they? Did they know that you'd never done one of these before? How did you sell yourself, having never completed one of these project professionally.
Nikolaj Kloch:So actually, it comes down to network again to get your foot in the door. At the airspace engineering job that I worked, I was in that kind of accelerated program for leadership, and they paid for mentoring time. So then I could actually go and meet other people. And you should absolutely join this if you're in any company that offers something like this, these are the highest performing people that are offering mentorship because they love doing it. So I met this guy named Ryan Cass, super talented ultra marathon runner, all of these things, and outside of work, basically, we sat down, he invited me to a mastermind and then it was a bunch of real estate executive coaches, things like that. And there was this one guy I met named Dante de Batista, and I talked with them a little bit. I was like, Man, this guy's sharp. He's really knows what he's doing. He's paying for coaching. He's on top of it. So I kind of talked with them a little bit. Got his number, and then I reached out every month or so. And then six months later, I was like, Okay, I'm gonna travel. I'm going to pivot. Let's try and do this thing full time. Let me find the customers all of these sorts of things. And then I reached out to him and said, Hey, I will do it for you at this rate on a contract retainer, and 100% refund is one of the best ways to get clients as well. 100% refund, there's no risk at all. And a big one, if you can do this, is basically saying, I've never had someone ask for a refund. So really, really set those expectations on the sales call, if you can. But I basically reached out to him, offered him that service, and we've been working we're actually working on some big courses now. He's doing freshman seminar leadership courses right now, so it's a lot of fun. I flew with him to New Orleans from Bali, and then I had to fly back because my family was meeting us, and we had already arranged this. But then I had to go film him at the conference. So it was just an absolute mess. But never give up. Your phone is full of contacts that you could reach out for your service, your product, whatever that might be. And if you can sell one person, you can sell 100 it just it translates across the board. You get better and it gets easier. The start is always the hardest. It will never get harder than where you're at right now. It will only get easier. You have bigger challenges and problems that come up, but I'm sure with the podcast, you've had 1000 problems come up day one, it felt like into the world, and now you're you're rocking and rolling, right?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, you get those systems in place, and then everything. Just chugs along systems, see? Systems. That's right, yeah, this is why engineering is so great. One of the things that I really appreciated about my education as an engineer is that they teach you how to think, right? It's, it's not just regurgitate problems from a book, although there is a lot of that as well, but I feel like I learned how to think, and that was the most valuable thing about my education in engineering, was was that, and just like you said, I think that engineers can do just about anything they want. And I bet there are a lot of engineers, probably some even listening right now, who might be thinking to themselves, engineering is cool. I'm glad that I have that tool on my belt, but I'm kind of ready to try something different. And you can, you can try something different. There's nothing that says you spent four or six years in college getting a degree in engineering, and now that's the only thing that you can
Nikolaj Kloch:do exactly. And there's a lot of creativity in engineering. I think people really separate the two. But you have to be creative to come up with a design, you know, to figure out what the coding issue is, you really have to think, sit down, process it, and then build a solution. So I don't know why everyone says that there's no creativity in engineering. There is still a lot. Look at all these designs. Look at the Tesla cyber truck. I know there's a It's a beautifully designed car. If you think of it from a manufacturing process, it's just all stamped aluminum sheets. It's crazy, but it's completely unique. There was a lot of design thought that went back into that. There was a lot of creativity. We won't go into Tesla's on this, but
Aaron Moncur:Well, talk to me a little bit about the upward cycle that you emphasize with your speakers, right leading to more engagements, higher pay. What are some of those key factors?
Nikolaj Kloch:So it takes seven touch points to create a sale. A lot of these public speakers come in and they'll publish a 60 minute video, and then they just think people are gonna sit down and watch that as they're scrolling their LinkedIn feed, or whatever that might be. It's just the craziest thing to think that you have 30 to 60 different sound bites out of that that you can pull out and have it in slow, digestible clips. So if we can break that up from the 300 speaking engagements that they already have, break that up into digestible clips. Make something relevant that adds value to people. There has to be value in that, some sort of tip, something they learned, it needs to be something quickly digestible. If it's under 90 seconds on social media, you'll get twice the engagement. So if you're doing a 10 minute video, it's a lot harder to break that down and hit that same engagement. And then basically pulling all this together on the content side, you would then go and pull out images out of the videos, them on stage, them speaking. And then you could actually go and put a topic that they want to be speaking on. Then they get the value in the written post, so then they can bridge out into other topics, all of this together in a nicely packaged, you know, content solution is how they really get the leverage to look like a higher paid public speaker. Then people are starting to reach out on the sales touch points that I just talked about. Then they get more speaking engagements, and it's an upward cycle because the content looks better. They're investing more. The camera gear is better because they're investing in it again. And it's just that it gets easier and easier to grow off of that front if you invest at the front end, which it's not fun to invest in the front end if you're not where you want to be, but it's a lot easier to smash that if you think on a longer cycle. So if you think in a year, what that could be, how many sales touch points would that be? If you're connecting with the right people? Again, you can't be just connecting with everybody or following everybody. It needs to be relevant to your message. It needs to be the conference leaders. It needs to be the speaking coaches, everybody in the industry, because if you can hit those seven touch points, those sales touch points, then you can close another sale from warm, inbound or outbound messaging. So all of this is an upward cycle, because you look like you get paid more, then you get paid more. And I kind of always fall back on that, because it's the easiest way to describe it all. Of course, there's hundreds, hundreds of hours of work that goes into that, but it's, it's simple, not easy, if that makes sense, yeah.
Aaron Moncur:So you're, you're leveraging consecutive wins, like you leverage a success to get into a bigger success, and then you leverage that success to get into a bigger success and onwards and upwards. I imagine there are maybe some engineers right now listening to this, thinking, why do I need to know any of this? I have no interest in being a videographer or working with public speakers. But here's here's why this is useful. I am an engineer. And have been for 20 years now, and intend to continue being an engineer. And I actually spend a not in what's the word, I'm looking for a non trivial amount of time doing photography and videography as a tool to promote my business. And I actually started a photography company with a buddy of mine many years ago. We ran it just a side hustle, like 15 years ago. And those skills have served me so well, because I've been able to get really lovely, beautiful pictures of equipment and products that we've developed. And it's just like you said, Nikki, right? You leverage these wins, right? We deliver a product to a customer, we get some really, you know, cool looking photos or video of this product, and then we put it on our website and say, hey, look what we did. And it looks very professional, right? It looks like we're higher end than we actually are, because we have really nice looking pictures and video of these things. And you throw some lights in there, and you get a nice lens and some blur in the background, and all of a sudden, you know you look legit. You look like you know what you're doing. And maybe photography or videography, videography is not the tool for for you, dear listener, right now, but perhaps there's another supplementary skill that you could learn that would just enhance your career, your growth, your engineering trajectory that much more. I don't know what that is, but you know, hopefully you can understand the concept and apply it to whatever that might be for you
Nikolaj Kloch:exactly. And I do want to bridge the other side too, which public speaking is one of the highest leverage skills you can learn for your engineering career, because you have a lot of presentations. If you can do that confidently, you will stand out from the pack, you will absolutely grow on that front, even if it's just internally to your business, right? Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:that's a great point. What are some pro tips that you can share about public speaking that engineers could use in their presentations to their management, their leadership, their stakeholders? So
Nikolaj Kloch:absolutely don't try and just memorize the slides, but don't try and read everything off. If you can run through that slide five times, you will be better than everybody in the room, I promise you, if you can just run through it five times, and then the easiest way to get out of the nervousness feeling is really to join a Toastmasters or something like that. Locally, it's free until you sign up on a program, something like that, or just get, you know, a friend, in the room, and then just try and give it to them and see what they think. This gets easier. It's the exact same thing as engineering. You were so terrified with your first exam, and you saw that big fat 60 or whatever you got. I know every engineer at every school has that, that bell curve that is absolutely skewed to the left. But it gets easier. You get more confident. You grow from that. I would suggest also maybe not starting public speaking in a high stakes meeting. It's a lot easier to go and teach on a breakout topic that your company is actually starting to investigate. If that's AI in your business, if that's whatever you know, and there's going to be a room full of five people, it might be 10 people. It's not going to be 100 people. Those Breakout Rooms usually don't have that many attendees, right? It's low stakes, it's easy, it's fun. You can actually get interactive. Another great tip is to get the audience moving, whether that be things along the wall, you know, posters, and getting them to do some sort of activity if they're moving, the focus is off of you and your own brain. The focus really isn't on you. If they're staring at you during the presentation, their mind is a billion other places, but it's really hard to connect that.in their heads, but getting them up and moving and doing something in the room is the easiest way to make our brains turn off and go, Okay, they're focused on other things, you know? And that's it's it gets way easier the more you do it. It'll never be as hard as that first time you get up and stand in front of other people. But if you can speak as an engineer, you will go places in any any business. So to start practicing trial by fire. I'm
Aaron Moncur:curious about what kind of gear that you use, what editing software, and what cinematic camera or video camera that you're using, what kind of lenses?
Nikolaj Kloch:Yeah, absolutely. So I have the Sony FX three. It's a Netflix approved camera that's a big one for public speakers. Nobody cares about the camera type specifically, but you make a lot of people less nervous if you say Netflix approved.
Aaron Moncur:Netflix approved. They shot
Nikolaj Kloch:full films on it. So there's a few films you can Google it. I can't remember exactly. I think one's the Creator, but it just means that it is approved for you to film a movie on this camera, and they will post it. They will upload it to their network, wireless mics. I have a bunch of lights, 24 to 70 GM. Two is the best lens all around for these. You know. Know, close tied up shots and then the far away shots, it gives a good blur behind the the clients as well. So again, lighting would be not again, but lighting would be the most important thing you can do for your shot. It's absolutely comes down to lighting. If you can get a nice warm light at a 45 degree angle off the camera, it will make your camera look $3,000 more expensive. Or you could take a $10,000 camera into harsh light without like an ND filter or something, it'll blow out your shot. So it comes down to tools, and you don't have to have the most expensive to stand out. If your editing is incredible and the video isn't, then you know you can make up for it other places.
Aaron Moncur:It's funny that you say that I would always back in my photography days, people would ask me what kind of camera I use, and I would always say the camera is the least important part of the equation. Lighting is the most important. And then I think your glass, the lenses that you're using and maybe editing, are maybe tied in second place, and then the camera body that you're using is kind of in last place, as long as it's like 30% and
Nikolaj Kloch:then it kind of stacks on each other. And for the editing software I'm using the Adobe suite and the Adobe Premiere and After Effects, if I think the powerful thing about being engineer as well is the fact that you can take 3d modeling and put those into scenes. You can actually go into After Effects and start doing renderings, you know, looking at the lighting, the angles, the drop shadows, all of these things, with a model that you made in 10 minutes that looks like you've put hours, 1000s of hours into it. I mean, I've done Catia SolidWorks fusion, 360 and that is a super powerful skill set to have in today's age, even if
Aaron Moncur:you don't want to have no idea you could do that. You can import, like a SolidWorks model, I don't know, a separate digest or something, into After Effects, and then render that in esteemed interesting it's super
Nikolaj Kloch:low weight, so it's not like a high detail, but it renders in high detail. You can actually bring them in. You don't need these other software suites to do it anymore. It's getting a lot easier, a lot quicker. There's plugins with AI where you can just write a prompt and it'll produce the model. Don't do that if you're an engineer, you have that. You have such a good skill set that took years to learn, that makes you stand out, right?
Aaron Moncur:That's really cool. What's an example of something you would model and then use that in a scene, like, I don't know, a microphone or something. So
Nikolaj Kloch:a really easy one would be to hang a microphone off of a string. You film it in'em. D model, making that from the person to your your video, there's for products. That's a really easy one. For a can, a bag of chips, a medical prototype, you could absolutely take that, put it on the the rotating, I can't remember what the table is called, the turntable. Yeah, nice lighting. It looks like a real product that you spent $10,000 on a video shoot that took you two hours to make. I mean, it's really incredible. Very cool. What?
Aaron Moncur:What advice would you give engineers who are considering some kind of significant career change.
Nikolaj Kloch:This came from a friend and a public speaker who's doing really well, and he was saying, Don't flinch. I talked to him about this a little while ago, and he said, Don't flinch when you're doing this. You need to go all in. You know, don't doubt yourself. If people are telling you not to do it, it means you're on the right path, unless you want their life, if you want their life, listen to what they're saying, right? But if you don't, if you want something different, if you want something new, you need to not flinch. You need to go head in and then fail. Of course, failing doesn't sound fun, but it's the best way to learn. And if you could stack that failure with another try right behind it, it's the best way to reinforce that it's okay. But if you fail, and then you don't do it for six months, that's the worst thing you can do for your brain. You really get stuck in these cycles of thinking that the failure is the end of the world. I've been up plenty of time speaking for companies, right when you're presenting all of your work, where I've had eight of the smartest engineers I've ever met just grilling me, absolutely grilling me. And then I get out, I'm just head down, feel like a failure. They were like 1000s of questions I didn't know. And then, you know, leadership walks up and they go, that was incredible. You did a really good job. I've never seen anyone you know stand up and defend their designs like that. To these engineers, the best thing is that we can't or the worst thing is that you can't see it from the outside frame until somebody tells you. So don't judge it off of the way you interpret things. Right? Try and take yourself out of that. Get another try at what you're doing, if that's sales, if that's product design, whatever that might be, if it's freelance work, a lot of engineers go into freelance work, you just need. To keep trying. If you get the first sale right and then they cancel and want to refund, try the next one. You've got a great still skill set that can be iterated on, and it's the same as iterative prototyping, right? If you build one, it's going to stink. It's the exact same thing you need to iterate figure out what works, what doesn't, fix it. Move on to the next one. That one stinks too. All right, we'll do 50 of them. That 50th is going to be incredible.
Aaron Moncur:I love what you said about if people tell you you're you can't do it, then you're on the right track. Or, I'm paraphrasing, it was something to that effect, we are putting on an event later this year called PDX, the product development Expo. We're not event planners here at Pipeline. We're engineers. Right? Last year we did a little pilot of this. We got our foot wet, but this year I am I'm 10x ing it. We're going big. We've rented out a convention center for this. And when I told my team that we're going to do this, some feedback was like, Are you sure we don't know how to do this, like you're planning you want to plan a major event, basically a trade show. And we've never we don't know how to do this, right? That's not what we do. And to me, it was like, Yeah, but we can figure this out. This is not rocket science, right? This is like, organization, communication, promotion. We can 100% figure this out. And one of our team members actually found a event planner and and called her and said, Hey, we're doing this event. You know, we don't really know what we don't know. Can you, can you consult for us? And I thought, that's that's not a bad idea, right? Get someone who has been through this many times before, and this event planner came in and basically fear mongered us. She was like, There's no way you can do this. You're setting your team up for failure. If you don't have a venue found already, then you're not going to find one. You need more time than this. You need more people than this. And it was so shocking to me, like there were other people as well. It wasn't just this event coordinator, but there were, there were multiple people who were like, you, you're not going to be able to do this, right? You know that, right? This isn't actually something that you can do. And man, here we are, three months later. We've got the venue book. We've got, like, our vendors signed up. We've got everything is all the bones are there. It's ready. We've We've got attendees who are signed up, registered, and we still have six months to go before the event starts like we we've, I feel like we've killed the the preparation, the organization, the communication. And it was just mind blowing to me, how many people were telling me you can't do this. You know, you can't do this, right? This is not going to work anyway. It's, I love it best is accepted.
Nikolaj Kloch:Oh, I love it. You're making everybody stretch. That's what you should be doing. That's amazing. The best tip, take whatever go to a conference, take everything that you like from that and try and implement it. It makes the biggest difference in the world. If you like their recap video, you know, watch 10. Take some bits from each one. Storyboard, if you like the way they set up. Take tips out of that right? Just you're doing exactly what it is. You're taking it step by step. You're reaching out to people. You're talking and if you get people saying, No, you're on the right track.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I love it. I love it. Can you think of a particularly memorable experience you had with one of your clients, and can you share that story?
Nikolaj Kloch:Yeah, absolutely. So my second client is the first female helicopter pilot in the Royal British Air Force. Her name's Sarah Furness. She is an absolute badass. Sorry about the pro vanity, but she is amazing, great public speaker, and we connected. And now she's been, well, I guess we connected, and then I went through the exact same steps that we talked about. You know, we're getting more engagement. Everything looks clean, polished, cut. We're doing content bits. We're actually breaking those speeches down into better clips. She's writing the speeches in a better way as well, to where I can pull those from that, all of this to say she's been seeing a lot more growth. And then from this, I'm only doing the video editing for her, specifically the rest I do The Videography side as well. But from this, I'm actually getting better clips that are making it much easier to help her grow. So she's going on better podcasts, you know, she's going to bigger events, she's going to all of this upward spiral type of deal. And I get content back and it's 3,000% better. It's way easier to edit and make it look so polished that it's just a cycle. And that was actually the first time where I realized that it is a cycle. The exact same way you speak about your photography and videography for your podcast, right? This is something that, if you reiterate on people look at it and they go, Oh my God, this looks serious. This looks in depth, a lot of work action. Of effort has gone into this. And that was a really big one, where I go, okay, I can work with these people. I can do this. You know, if you fit 5% of your target, the 5% is the hardest to do. The very beginning is where you're going to fail. And that's why I always say, if you can sell the one, you can sell to 1000 if you can make it past that 5% and you're on year five, you know, I think it's 90% of podcasts only make it to 10 episodes, and you've blown past that. Aaron, so there's a lot of things that people could learn from you in that type of focus effort, you know, sticking to something that I think you could absolutely talk about for days and years and months, you know. So I think that was a really eye opening moment for me, and I'm sure you've had plenty as well.
Aaron Moncur:A little while ago, you talked about a tip for social media and sharing videos that are less than 90 seconds, as opposed to, you know, 10 minutes or an hour long. What other pro tips could you share that will help people get that will help people promote their their whether it's themselves or maybe it's a product that they've developed. But what are some other pro tips for leveraging promotions on social media these days? So
Nikolaj Kloch:the big one is recognizing patterns, you can't learn anything and it not be outdated in three three months. So if you could see the patterns and the content that's performing well, you could actually structure your own videos off of that and get the same performance. If not, I guarantee that you will have better performance than what you're doing if you could just emulate off of what is working. Another one is that LinkedIn is the it has the highest buying power per audience member. So the people on there are there for business. So if you're trying to sell something, LinkedIn is the best. I mean, the people are on there, they're professional, they're they've got a goal. They're on there for work. You know, they're connecting to progressive career. If you could help them with that, with a product, software, whatever that might be, service, then you could really leverage LinkedIn. If you're consistently posting, you know, there's seven touch points really matter when the feed goes away and they see, okay, you posted four months ago. Do you know anything about this? But if you post consistently, that's a really, really high leverage tip. Once you master one platform, the best way to spread out of that platform is to basically automate it off of that platform and learn the packaging of each platform. So Tiktok is going to be flashier, quicker, you know, fast cuts, these types of things where YouTube you could do a much longer keynote topic or or video podcast, right? That's where you actually take from the short form off Tiktok, you put in your profile to YouTube, and it funnels in viewers, and you actually build the biggest relationship on the long form. The long form has the biggest leverage that you could possibly get, but you have to produce the short form, to get people into that, that niche, that criteria, another one on LinkedIn, you can grow. You get 200 connection requests per week, and it resets Sunday night, your local time, at midnight. If you can use all of those requests make your LinkedIn look, you know, presentable, then you'll get a higher connection request. Eventually, at 500 followers, you can turn that or 500 connections, you can turn those over to followers, and this, keep doing this in at a 60% acceptance rate. In, you know, two months, you'll have 1000 followers on LinkedIn. I mean, it's low hanging fruit if you're trying to build a business, you know. And then you can post on that to the people. The caveat here is you have to be connecting with the right people that are in your network. You know, the buying power. If they're off a, you know, horizontal, that's okay, but you really want to think vertically here in terms of your ideal customer, because that will allow you to directly push the content most relevant to your customer, to them, they engage with it. And then you can actually just keep going off of that loop and finding more of that ideal person. Every social platform is trying to figure you out. If you make it easy on the platform, they make it easy on you. So if you go in, you're posting on, you know, 30 different topics that's really hard to have the network really kind of decipher that. Those are some of my most impactful tips. I would definitely say leverage those. At least choose one.
Aaron Moncur:Those are great. Yeah, let's say that you've identified the next client that you would like to land. What does your outreach look like? Is it just LinkedIn, messages, just emails? Is it phone calls? Is it all of the above? How do you get someone's attention?
Nikolaj Kloch:So I put these into two pockets, the clients that I really want to die for, like I have to have these people, and then, you know, people that I want to work with, but it's okay to get a note here and there. So the people that I'll die for, I will go and edit a video. I will say, I can record this for you, and I'll break it out into this amount of, you know, speaking engagement clips, but I'll format that in the way of saying, Hey, this is a real thing I learned from you. This is something I really enjoy talking to you about or learning off your profile. And here's value. Here is a video that I edited for you with a caption that will lead to higher engagement than what you're currently getting. So I'll
Aaron Moncur:just give them something, I'll solve the problem,
Nikolaj Kloch:and then in the other 80% I will usually go and connect with them, or follow them, however, on whatever platform, but LinkedIn is the bread and butter. Because of the highest buying power, you kind of get rid of all the people that are on social media just to scroll educational content performs the best for buying power. So if you're producing entertainment strictly, you will have more followers, more engagement, but you'll actually get less conversions on that sales funnel. But on the lower side, I will ask a question on a piece of content that they have that I'm genuinely interested in to open up a conversation. And this will be tied to something I do. How are you producing so much content each week? Or why are you posting more? Whatever that might be, and you actually start to agitate the problem in the questions while having a real conversation. A pro tip here is actually when you're reaching out to these people, if they live in Atlanta, and you're from Atlanta and you know a restaurant there, say, this restaurant, this item, 10 out of 10 would definitely recommend. Anyways, I hope you're having a great week. You know that that everyone loves being tribal. So if you could be tribal with your ideal customer, or say, oh my goodness, you know, I hate foreigners, and my name's Nikki line, the other person's name is, you know, Nikki laughs, something like that, right? And if I could bridge that gap to where we're both in this bucket together. Hey, how are you doing? It opens up the conversation on a different level than if you just kind of reached out and said, Hey, I'm trying to sell you something. I think the easy way not to land anybody is by reaching out and pitching. Instantly. Build a conversation, genuinely talk to them. Don't pitch on the sales call. Ask questions, you know, and then eventually they'll ask you what you do. And that is the door to actually say what you do. And that is the easiest way to do sales. If you over complicate it. The books are great. If you just mimic the books. These are people doing volume, 100 sales calls a day, you know. They don't care about anybody. They are just burning through the books. If you care, it's the easiest way to not waste your time. Meet people, and then a lot of the time these customers, these people, will come back, six months later, a year later, where they're going, Hey, I actually have this problem now, could you help me? And you go, I would love to. How is your daughter doing? By the way, you know, those just so much easier than taking the Wolf of Wall Street book and just digging in and going, Hey, how's it going? I've got the best stocks in the world for you. So I would absolutely leverage that. You mentioned,
Aaron Moncur:everyone likes to be tribal, and that's a really powerful principle. Robert Cialdini calls it the Unity principle. This is the author of influence, the power of persuasion, a really wonderful book for anyone who's who needs to persuade people right to their opinion. I read his book years ago, and I thought it was one of the best books I had ever read, especially from a business standpoint, and I learned that he used to be a professor at ASU, and I'm here at in Arizona, and I looked him up, and he's no longer a professor, you know, he's got on to he's pretty famous at this point, and multi, multi millionaire, I'm Sure, and a best selling author, but I thought I would love to take this guy out to lunch. That would be such a neat experience. But I thought, you know, who am I? Right? He's not going to go out to lunch with me. How am I even going to get a hold of this guy? Anyway, I found his profile on on LinkedIn, and I used this is one of the principles he talks about in his book, The Unity principle and the unit unity principle, just like you were saying, if you know a restaurant for the place that someone lives, talk about a menu item there, right? Something that connects you, whether it's geographically, ethnically, whatever, but something that connects you. Familial relationships are the biggest of course. But I reached out to him, and I said, Hey, I'm here in Tempe, which is a town here in Arizona, right around the university, and I'd love to take you out to lunch. And to my amazement, he responded and said, Yeah, sounds great. Let's do it. So we went out to lunch. And I said, Hey, why did you agree to go out to lunch with me? Like you're this superstar author and I'm just, you know. Kind of nobody. Why did you agree to go out to lunch with me? And he said, Well, you're from Tempe, and I'm here in Tempe. So I said, Yes, and it was, it was the Unity principle. So that's, I think that's such a powerful one. Anytime you can leverage that it actually works. What
Nikolaj Kloch:a cool example. I mean, he's huge. And for anyone listening, persuasion is one of the best things. If you use it for good, if you help people with persuasion, it is good. It is a good thing to learn, because you're helping them. You don't want to come in and sell them something you don't like, because you'll be horrible at sales. So you can't use persuasion for bad, right? I mean, you can,
Aaron Moncur:don't go short term, you can, but you won't go very far, exactly. Yeah. All right. Well, Nikki, this has been super fun. Thank you for sharing some of your experiences and insights with us, anything that we haven't talked about yet, that you'd like to hit on before we end this episode. I just
Nikolaj Kloch:want to say thank you so much for having me absolute blast. I'm really excited for it. So thank you so much. Cool.
Aaron Moncur:Excellent. How can people get in touch with you? Go to
Nikolaj Kloch:thriver, T, H, R, i, v, r, design.com just go to the contact page and email me. Awesome. Thank you so much again. Thank you so much, Aaron. I'll talk to you soon.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave dot engineer, thank you for listening. You.
