I fell in love with longform storytelling as a fledgling student. I managed to get a few jobs at newspapers, but I kept getting laid off. With the newspaper industry’s nosedive, I decided to jumpstart my career plan and focus mainly on video storytelling. With the help of the CBDC, I started my own business — Folk Media Communications. 

I had no idea there would be so much to learn.  

While profiling small business owners at community newspapers, I realized how big of a need there was for clean, concise, and strategic communications. It’s something that feels like it should be intuitive, but very much isn’t. 

I also wholeheartedly believe that true storytelling is the key to the most effective messaging. This was nearly a decade ago, and “storytelling” wasn’t the misused buzzword it is today.  

So, I became a video communications company with a focus on strategic storytelling.  This also led to becoming the first “content marketing” company in northern New Brunswick, as the world’s hunger for content grew and people recognized they needed help navigating paid and organic social media advertising. In many cases managing the whole campaign made the most sense. 

My palms get sweaty imagining trying to start my business without the help of the CBDC.  

As a freelancer, you are really in the business of selling your time. Aside from getting better at your chosen craft, you need to excel in selling yourself, scheduling your work, and budgeting your expenses. You often don’t know how you’ll cover next month’s bills.  

The Self-Employment Benefit Program provides a small runway, so you can focus on getting your services in front of people first and managing all the supporting details of the business second.  

In a lot of ways, I feel the program allowed me to build up the momentum in my business that I’m still riding today, eight years later.  

The CBDC’s business loans also allowed me to schedule equipment upgrades to maintain my quality, without depleting my operating funds. Nothing goes to plan, especially early in a business, and having the means to survive something like a large project getting canceled at the last minute is absolutely necessary. I’ve happily paid back two loans so far.  

The CBDC gave me the means to learn. I could focus on what mattered most and survive the small mistakes.  

If there’s one piece of hard-learned advice I would give a service-based business that is basically freelancing, it is learn who your client is and what they actually value. They may not even know what that is themselves. 

It turns out the “time, quality, price” trade-off is as irrefutable as the laws of physics. The old expression says you can choose two, but not all three. If your product is good and fast, it won’t be cheap. I thought I knew my clients’ priorities, based on what they told me, but in many cases they actually valued the exact opposite.  

The way you prioritize these three qualities informs everything about your business: the way you position your services, the niche of clients you pursue, the price point you compete at, the investments you make, and most importantly — the way you schedule your time. Once I figured this out, my clients stayed consistently happy, my schedule became manageable, and I became more confident in the services I provide. It took me more than five years before this light bulb went off.  

It’s hard to imagine I would have ever gotten this far down the bumpy road without the initial push from the CBDC.  

Adam Hodnett, Folk Media Communications 
Bathurst, New Brunswick 

Footnote: 

Adam was hired in the fall of 2022 to shoot two videos for the Atlantic Association of CBDCs (AACBDC). In a casual conversation Adam shared he was once a CBDC client.  He had come full circle, from being a client of CBDC to CBDC being a client of his. Adam has gone on to create additional videos, photograph clients and write articles for AACBDC which help tell the success stories of others – and in turn the success of CBDC and Folk Media.