Cole Heilborn (00:29.984)

It's so easy to stay busy. It's so easy to always be moving forwards, especially in this world of hustle and bustle. But.

If I give myself a few minutes to sit back and just reflect on 2025 and the journey that the podcast has been on, the journey that Portside has been on, and the journey that I've been on personally.

The word that comes to mind is just grateful. And so I wanted to sit down and just share with you our gratitude for you, for listening to this podcast, for supporting us to showing up episode in, episode out, and being fans of the show. You know, I think it's, there's a lot that's been happening behind the scenes here at Portside.

over the last 12 months. And I've alluded to some of it and I've talked about some of it. But this year, undoubtedly has been one of the most difficult years that we've ever had in business. And simultaneously, it has been the most rewarding and the most groundbreaking year that we've ever had in business. And so I want to share with you a little story because I think it's going to do a better job explaining what we've

been up to and what's been happening behind the scenes and it'll maybe make my gratitude feel, you'll understand it better.

Cole Heilborn (02:09.614)

I've told every guest who joins this show, I kind of explained to them how did the podcast come to be? Why did we start producing this show? And I'll kind of give you the quick version if you haven't heard it already. Basically, I started Portside 10 years ago. We were a video production company producing video work for tons of brands. And we wanted to be producing work in the outdoor industry, but it took us many,

many years to actually get to that point. But along the way as we were producing video content, clients would come to us, they'd give us the ask or they'd give us the brief. We'd go and make the thing and we'd come back to the client and we would pass it off to them and then cross our fingers and hope that it would work once it was out into the world. We did that enough and we realized that

There was a big difference between the work that would work and the work that wouldn't work. And the delta that was often the variable of success was outside of our control as filmmakers. Yet when projects wouldn't work, it would often reflect poorly of us. And this happened enough times that we decided we needed to learn about how this world of marketing worked so that we could become better filmmakers. And that's what led to the show. We decided, well, let's sit down and

interview the people who know the answers to these questions and why don't we do it in a public format and start a podcast. You know, for those of you who have been around, that was five years ago, almost 220 plus episodes ago. And for those five years, I've said this before, Portside was trying on a variety of different hats. We never really knew who we were as a company. And because of that, we struggled.

struggled a lot over the years. And yeah, we had some awesome wins and we did some great projects and we had some great success with clients. But Portside, it was a deep struggle and you just have to look at our profit and loss statements from each of those years and you see how real the struggle was and is.

Cole Heilborn (04:26.741)

The problem that we kept running up against though was this misunderstanding or a lack of understanding about who we were. We were the kind of this production company that was doing videos and photos, but talking about marketing and branding and the importance of asking deeper, bigger questions. Then personally, as the owner of Portside, I'm thrown into the middle of it all and I didn't really know,

What am I made up of? What's my unique expertise or foundation that I can fall back on and then the business can kind of fall back on? Well, all of this came to a head at the beginning of this year. I finally sat down and I said, I've had enough with not knowing who we are. Come hell or high water, we're gonna figure this out. And it was months of...

of really hard work, of asking hard questions. It was months of consulting with friends, with colleagues, with other professionals, and it took a long time. Unfortunately, while we were in this kind soul-searching stage of the business in the early months of 25,

We weren't making any money. We weren't landing any projects. And I'll be candid, the business was really close to going under. I don't remember if I actually started looking for a full-time job position somewhere, but I sure considered it. Maybe it sounds like I'm making light of that time.

months after the fact, but it was real. It was difficult, and we really struggled. But I had this belief, naive, a naive belief that like if we could just figure out who we were.

Cole Heilborn (06:36.159)

and what we offered. That's step number one. And that finally came together. the reason I'm telling you all this is because the podcast has played such an integral role in our journey and our story. And it has helped us figure out who we are.

And Who We Are is a creative studio that helps outdoor brands with their content strategy and their production.

We realized after many hours of hard questions and brainstorming sessions that we still were a production company. Those were services that we still offered. But we knew that we were capable and we kind of had a higher calling to work further upstream and help brands actually figure out how do they show up in the world through their video and photo content and their social content strategies.

And that's where the podcast plugged in so well to kind of our story and our brand is like the podcast has been fueling the insights and the strategy since day one. We just haven't fully realized it yet. so anyways, I just want to say thank you because ever since we relaunched the business, the early half of this year, the second half has been incredible.

We have expanded, we have grown, we've taken on so many new initiatives and projects. We've launched our Slack community for the podcast. We've launched our backcountry marketing shop talks for guests. And Portside has grown considerably in the last six months. In fact, the work that we have lined up for 2026 is more than we've done in 2025 and 2024 combined. And a large part of that is because

Cole Heilborn (08:37.487)

of the podcast. It's one given us the insights to help our clients do great work and produce meaningful work, but it's also been such a great way for us to learn, for us to build relationships, for us to build a community, and that wouldn't be possible without you. So I just wanna say thank you. I really mean it. I feel like this year, again, it almost broke us, but I

feel optimistic, feel excited, I feel ready to take on 2026. And you know, we're still a small team. There's still a lot we would like to do. We'll see what we can actually pull off. I still believe that focus is a really, really valuable tool.

But anyways, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for listening. We're going to be back in twenty twenty six with a new slate of episodes and community events. And I hope to see you and I hope to see you there.

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