• Why Leo rejected "better, faster, cheaper" and promised clients faster, cheaper, and brand compliant instead — and why the third one is what closes deals
• How an internal efficiency tool became a client-facing product, and why the invisible version was not enough
• The three-part model: a setup fee to build the client's brand system, monthly recurring content, and quarterly maintenance that feeds flagship work back into the platform
• Where the humans stayed — AI built the infrastructure, but scripts, animation, and quality control are still people
• The ideal client profile that surfaced on the first few pitches, and who needed more convincing
• Why speed becomes table stakes when every firm gets faster — and how platform stickiness creates the recurring revenue that pure speed never could
• A comparable video that ran $8,000 over five weeks now runs about $1,500 in under two — and what that does to the value of the engagement for both sides

Jeff Klaumann: Hey everybody, welcome to the Pro Serv Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. I’m Jeff Klaumann, I’m the president of Collective 54, and I’m your host. If you’re new to the show, here’s what we’re all about — helping you do three things: make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. Everything we record here is built exclusively for boutique professional services firms, so if you’re in the expertise business, if you market, sell, and deliver expertise, this is the show for you.

We have a good one today, and it starts with a piece of conventional wisdom I think is dead wrong. We often treat speed as the payoff from AI — you run the same process faster, you pass some of that along as a lower price, and you call that a win. Here’s the problem: every firm in your category is getting faster this year, so speed stops being an advantage and becomes the expectation. Which means the question is not how fast you can run your process — it’s whether the thing you sell and deliver is still the right thing to sell and deliver. That’s the gap, and that’s the show today.

So to help us think through it, I have Leo Falkenstein on the show. Leo is the co-founder and executive producer of Consume Media, a video marketing agency outside Atlanta. 12 straight years of growth, and a Collective 54 member. He’s been on the show before, talking about what happened when he started tracking his team’s time. I’ve known Leo for a while, and we’ve worked on a few things together. He’s one of the members I go to when I want a straight answer. So, Leo, welcome back to the show. Great to have you on today. I gave everyone the quick headline, so quickly tell the audience who Consume Media serves and what you do for them.

Leo Falkenstein: Awesome. Thanks so much, Jeff. So, as Jeff said, Leo Falkenstein, founder of Consume Media. We are a full-service video marketing agency, primarily serving B2B technology companies, and we help them with their go-to-market optimization — things like using video to generate brand awareness and new leads, convert prospects faster, decrease customer churn, and a variety of other business goals. We use video to help our clients achieve the business goals they’re looking to achieve.

Jeff Klaumann: Fantastic. Leo, we were speaking a few weeks ago, and something you said really stuck with me — and that’s really the reason you’re on the show today. Almost every firm answers the AI question the same way: we got faster, so we got cheaper. You went a different direction. Take us back before any of that. What did delivery look like for Consume Media, and what was actually broken about it?

Leo Falkenstein: Yeah. So historically — and we still do this — Consume Media delivers flagship video solutions for businesses. Think about a big commercial campaign, or your brand anthem video, or a big, important case study or testimonial project. These types of videos that require a lot of resources to get done. And that’s been a valuable offering, and it continues to be a valuable offering for our clients.

But right now, the world is changing — obviously because of AI, but also how people are consuming content is different. Video consumption is at an all-time high, so people are watching more video than ever before. That means there is more content out there than ever before, which means that if we’re only doing the large flagship video campaigns that take weeks and weeks to get done, the brands we’re serving don’t have as much visibility with the audiences they serve. So our goal was to tap into a new category of video.

There’s a triangle, right — better, faster, cheaper. We said at this point, better, faster, cheaper is going to be difficult for us. But what can we promise? We can promise faster, cheaper, and brand compliant. Because when you’re working with fast-paced, high-growth B2B technology companies, anyone can create content with Claude or ChatGPT or anything like that. But if it’s not on brand, no one’s going to post it, no one’s going to use it. So that’s what we wanted to serve — we wanted to solve the problem of creating more content more quickly at a better price point. Not better, faster, cheaper, but faster, cheaper, brand compliant.

Jeff Klaumann: So before we get into what changed, tell us about the platform. Describe it in plain terms, maybe the way you would to a new client who’s never seen it. What does it do, and how does it do something different than a human used to?

Leo Falkenstein: So our goal was to create something that our clients can feel — something they can hold and touch. We’ve always been able to build off of the assets we’ve created for our clients previously, but it was just in everyone’s head, right? Like, oh yeah, I think we created this over here, we created that 5 years ago, maybe we can reuse that. But what we wanted to create was something that made our clients see, feel, and understand the investment they’ve made in their brand system, in their video systems. So we created a platform called Motion Studio.

The primary original purpose of Motion Studio was for us and our clients to see exactly that — all the assets that have been created for them that can be used in future videos. They’ve already been designed, they’ve already been animated, they’ve already been approved, so they’re brand compliant, and it’s all in one spot. That was the initial idea. And then as we started building this platform, we started thinking — oh, what if this platform could actually do this? Or what if it could do that?

And what it’s become is a portal where our clients can not just see what’s available for them, but can actually start to envision or create their own video inside of the platform. They can do something as literal as, oh, I like this, I like this, I like this — let’s string it together, and that becomes the script of a video. Or they can type in something like, we have this new product offering about X, Y, and Z, I want a video done by this date that’s going to achieve this goal. And that helps us get a head start and starts to script something for us.

What started as an organizational tool became a content creation tool. And it’s not like you press a button, build something out, and get a video — but what you get is the structure and the story. The story becomes something the clients can create, or we can create more quickly, and then our team does the back-end work to actually produce the video. There’s also technology we’ve built into Adobe that helps us do the video faster. So there are two components — the Motion Studio platform that’s visible to the client, and the Adobe backend that’s really just visible to us, but it helps us create content faster and cheaper for our clients.

Jeff Klaumann: Beautiful. Here’s the part I really like about this — you didn’t just build this as an internal tool to help you and your team do better work or do it faster. You really made it into something that the client buys. You essentially turned it into a way that changes how they work, and probably saves them from navigating the brand police and approvals and all of those things they have to do internally. So, how did you package and price the engagement — or the platform, I should say — and what does the client own when the product is done, so to speak?

Leo Falkenstein: Exactly. So there are essentially three components of the new offering. There’s a setup fee, because if you’re a brand new client, we need to conceptualize, design, animate, and create the technology for your brand. If you’re a client we’ve been working with before, we’ve probably already conceptualized, designed, and animated — and now we just need to create the technology. So there’s a setup fee. New clients are paying somewhere between $25,000 to $50,000 for the setup fee. Existing clients are probably getting closer to the $10,000 to $15,000 range to set this up.

Then there is the monthly recurring content part of it. For example, some are saying, okay, we’re going to spend $5,000 a month on this content. That could be ten $500 videos, that could be five $1,000 videos, or some combination. Each type of video comes with its own cost, and we’re building that into the system as well so you can know how many credits you’re going to use as you’re building out your video.

And then there’s what we call the quarterly updates — or the maintenance — because the idea is that we’re not only doing the videos inside of Motion Studio, we’re also doing flagship videos as well. As we create these larger flagship videos, we’re going to want to take the components we’re designing there and build them into Motion Studio, so their platform and their videos in the future become more robust, more interesting, more complicated — but still, of course, on brand. So three components: setup, monthly content, and quarterly maintenance.

Jeff Klaumann: You know, the easy version of this was available. You could have taken the process you already have today and figured out a way to do it faster, and just gone with that. But you didn’t do that. You decided building the platform was the right call, instead of just speeding up what you had. Why was that the case for you?

Leo Falkenstein: We had a problem — we did not, and still right now do not, have as much recurring revenue as we used to have. There are several reasons for that, but we wanted to create stickiness. And we believe that if we have a platform — something you can see, hold, feel, that our clients have already invested a lot into, and that they can see growing over time — that will help us create more recurring revenue for our business. Even if it’s just $500 or $7,500 a month, if you’ve got a bunch of clients doing that, that starts to add up.

We started with just doing it faster. The first thing we did was just that Adobe layer — we said, we’re going to build this, and it’s going to make it faster and less costly per video for our clients. But our clients could feel that it cost less, and that’s all they felt. Now they have something they can touch, play around with, experiment with, and they feel like they’ve invested into something they want to keep pouring into. That was probably the primary reason — how can we create more stickiness and get more recurring revenue? By giving them something they can hold and expand onto.

Jeff Klaumann: Founder after my own heart, talking about recurring revenue — makes life a heck of a lot easier, so kudos to you.

Okay, so every firm has to decide where the machine stops and the person starts. What did you deliberately keep human? What did you refuse to automate or put into the platform, at least initially, to help define where that human and machine interaction starts and stops?

Leo Falkenstein: Yeah. So we used AI to do two things. Number one, build the platform. We would have had to hire who knows who, and spend how much — and keep spending however much — to build this platform if we did not have tools like Claude Code. That’s the Motion Studio side. For the Adobe technology side, yes, we had the capabilities of building some of this before, but it took a long time and was less customizable. So we’re using AI, Claude Code, Claude Skills, and different other Claude tools to build the platform and the Adobe technology.

From there, our team does the work. Our clients can decide how they want to deliver us a brief, but our team does the work. We still read the scripts, we revise the scripts — but we’re able to revise and edit and do everything faster because of what we’ve built. We still animate and put together the videos — that’s still done by a person. We still obviously have quality control. We’re not going to ship something that hasn’t been reviewed by at least our head of post-production. But that’s the gist — we’ve used AI to build the infrastructure, and the humans, whether it’s us or our clients, are the ones actually using the infrastructure.

Jeff Klaumann: Fantastic. So selling a client build-out into a conversation is definitely different than selling a video, I’m sure. How did clients react the first time you put it in front of them? What has been the learning curve for your team, and what have you learned from clients as you’ve gone down this path?

Leo Falkenstein: Yeah, it’s a great question. The clients who get it, get it quickly — is what I would say. If I’m talking to a VP of Brand or a CMO who’s very brand-focused, they get it instantly. If it’s someone who’s more numbers- and statistics-focused, it takes a little bit more explaining. But these people want content. They want content quicker, more nimbly, with more flexibility. And if we’re able to explain — hey, look, this video used to cost you $8,000 and take 5 weeks. A very comparable video now takes less than 2 weeks, it can be done in days depending on feedback, and costs you $1,500. You start adding those numbers up, and understanding there’s going to be, call it a $30,000 setup fee, it doesn’t take long to see the break-even point. Not just the break-even point of the numbers, but also the flexibility — oh, we have a product coming out next week, no one told us about this because our team’s moving so fast, marketing needs to make a video. They come to us and we’re able to do that for them. Before, we could have done it, but everyone would have been pulling their hair out.

So it’s all these things — being able to explain how fast you can get videos, how much less it costs, and understanding that it’s always going to be brand compliant. You don’t really have to worry about getting something back that isn’t going to work or that you’re not going to want to post. Our clients are still going to give us revisions — that’s part of the nature of the work we do. But if our clients don’t have revisions, we can literally go from getting the submission request to having a video in their hands within a day or two. And that’s never been done before for our firm, and for most firms.

Jeff Klaumann: Excellent. So I want to put a fine point on something you just described — you’ve started to identify an ideal client profile as it relates to the platform. People who are very brand-focused, people who want speed, people who want brand compliance — over people who are numbers-driven and metric-driven and not as focused on the creative side. Early on in launching this, you already have these germs of an ideal client profile starting to come to the surface, and that’s a big part of the launch of something new like this. So kudos to you and your team for leaning into that and learning.

So, Leo, one more question and then we’ll wrap this up. If a founder’s listening today and wants to start moving from selling hours toward selling what they’ve built and leaning more into recurring revenue, what should they do about it?

Leo Falkenstein: Just think about what you could not have done before. What have you always wanted but never been able to actually implement as part of your business?

For us, we’ve always thought about the Consume Media operating system, the Consume Media technology. But until Claude Code, until my business partner had time to sit down and utilize Claude Code, it just wasn’t a reality. You hear all these stories of people spending all this money and resources on developers, and it just never actually works. Well, with Claude, it’s so much easier to just get in. You can try, you can tinker, you can spend a weekend, you can get a prototype out, you can get feedback from your team, and you can tweak and tweak and tweak. Just think about what you’ve always wanted that you’ve never been able to do.

That’s what we did. A funny story — this whole idea came from a partner we wanted to work with last year. They had something, and for multiple reasons the partnership didn’t work out. And rather than saying, oh, this idea is trash, we can’t do it anymore, we said — what if we built a version of this technology? What if we built a version that is optimized for who we serve, which is B2B technology companies? We have a very specific niche, and they have very specific needs. So that’s what we did — created technology that was very, very specific to our target audience. Don’t just create technology for technology’s sake. Create something optimized for exactly who you serve.

Jeff Klaumann: Leo, thank you so much for joining me today. Alright, before we wrap, a couple calls to action. If you’re a member, keep an eye out for your invitation to our private member Q&A session with Leo, where you can ask your questions directly and we can get into even more detail. If you’re not a member, and today’s conversation has you thinking about joining, head over to Collective54.com, fill out an application, and we’ll be in touch. And if you’re not quite ready for either of those, there’s plenty more content waiting for you at Collective54.com, including past episodes and insights on the industry. Thanks for joining. Until next time, I wish you the best of luck as you grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.