How To Get Champagne Results With a Beer Budget

You don't need a Hollywood budget to make a blockbuster ad.

Many years ago I was working with my now business partner, Brandon, in one of his other businesses, Data Doctors, a computer repair and data recovery business with a national footprint in the United States.

The challenge they were having — and quite honestly all businesses have — is building their brand, their market share, and of course, increasing their customer base.

At the time, they started expanding their service offerings from computer repair and data recovery to smartphone repair. Let's face it: smartphones are computers and if you own one, you know those things are as slippery as snot.

So, we decided to create an ad. But I thought, rather than creating a boring 30 second ad, why not get a little more creative? Think out of the box and do something that not only advertises the service, but does so in a creative, fun, and memorable way…

Parody For The Win

Gym Class Heroes had a hit song featuring Adam Levine around that time. You could not escape this memorable song — it was everywhere. I thought it would be great to parody that song and shoot a video that went along with it. The two partners were on board. But… there wasn't really a budget for this type of production. So, I, along with a group of young and hungry interns, took our DSLR cameras and some smartphones to the streets, and over the course of two days, filmed this advertisement.

Again, there was no budget for this. And the fact is: you don't need a Hollywood budget to build something of this quality. You just need imagination, time, and the willingness to put in the work. That's all it takes.

What "Imagination, Time, And Work" Actually Looks Like

Let me break that down, because it's easy to nod along and still not know what to do Monday morning.

Imagination doesn't mean you need to be some creative genius sitting around waiting for lightning to strike. It means paying attention to what's already popular and figuring out how your business fits into it. A song everybody's sick of hearing on the radio isn't a nuisance — it's free attention you can borrow. People already know the tune, already know the words, already have an emotional association with it. Parody rides on top of that instead of trying to build recognition from zero. That's the whole trick: don't create demand for attention, redirect demand that already exists.

Time means you stop waiting for the "right" moment with the "right" budget and you just start. Two days. That's it. Two days with a DSLR, a couple of smartphones, and some interns who wanted to prove themselves. You don't need a shot list a mile long or a permit for every corner of the city. You need a rough plan, a location, and the willingness to hit record and figure out the rest as you go. Perfectionism is the enemy of scrappy production — the businesses that win with a beer budget are the ones who accept "good enough to be memorable" beats "perfect but never finished."

And willingness to put in the work — that's the one everybody skips over because it's the least glamorous. It means being the guy in front of the camera even when you don't want to be. It means burning a weekend on something with zero guarantee it'll land. Small businesses don't have agencies standing by to absorb the grunt work. You are the agency. Interns and iPhones are your production crew, and that's not a consolation prize — some of the most talked-about ads in history came out of exactly that kind of setup because scrappy forces creativity you'd never reach with an unlimited budget.

If you're a small business owner reading this wondering how you compete with the big guys running national TV campaigns: you don't compete on budget. You compete on being willing to look a little ridiculous, move a little faster, and care more about the idea than the production value. Nobody remembers a technically perfect ad. They remember the one that made them laugh, or the one where the owner clearly put himself on the line to sell it.

A few days later, the video was done. And the ad was ready for the world.

I want you to watch Smartphone Kind of Man not because it's witty or funny, but because I want you to see the possibilities of what you can do for your business. In fact, I don't want you to see it because I was pretty chunky at the time and hated being on camera, but no one else could have pulled it off the way I could, so I did it.

Hope this ad shows you what's possible. If a couple of interns, a borrowed melody, and two days on the street can build something people still talk about years later, imagine what you could do if you just stopped waiting for the budget that was never coming anyway.