Grow Your Video Business with Ryan Koral

504. The First Hire That Gives You Your Life Back with Ricky Norris

Aug 24, 2026

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Ricky Norris spent a decade shooting documentaries overseas before trading the airports for a San Diego studio, a wife, and three daughters. Now he's running Kilometer Zero and wrestling with the thing nobody warns you about in film school — that you're not just a filmmaker, you're a business of one, and nobody handed you the manual. In this conversation we dig into why a wide net catches the wrong clients, who to hire first when you're finally ready to stop being an island, and how to structure a week so the work stops following you to the dinner table.

Key Takeaways

A wide net isn't a strategy. When you'll take any project that pays, you end up with a patchwork of unrelated businesses instead of one real one — and no clear reason for anyone to choose you.
Your first hire probably isn't creative. Admin, calendar, inbox, and fit calls buy back more hours than another editor, and those hours are what let you work on the business.
One plus one should equal three. Hiring isn't subtracting salary from revenue — done right, the accountability and capacity should multiply what the business can actually produce.
You'll never reach the bottom of the list. There's always another email, another marketing task, another lunch you could book. Time blocking and daily themes beat reacting to whatever hits the inbox.

In this episode

[00:00] Welcome to the show!

[06:08] Meet Ricky Norris

[08:31] Ricky's Story

[16:51] Handling Multiple Roles

[22:31] Tailoring Your Business

[24:36] One Man Band

[36:26] Building Client Relationships

[38:11] Event Booths

[42:07] Finding Balance In The Work

[52:04] Connect with Ricky

[52:52] Outro

Quotes

"Everybody thinks their problems are unique to them — in work, in marriage, in family and life. And when you pop that bubble, everything decompresses." — Ricky Norris

"It's a really big net, and none of the right fish are going in, because it's too wide." — Ricky Norris

"There's no HR company. You are your HR company." — Ricky Norris

"If I'm starting to hire my first employee, it's not going to be a shooter or an editor. It's going to be somebody that's going to help me on the administrative side." — Ryan Koral

"Don't let the next three hours be dictated by what comes into your email." — Ryan Koral