Transforming Headshots in a Virtual World

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week, your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Hey, welcome back to the Sales and Marketing podcast.

And yes, Matt and I took some time off for the holidays, so we haven't released the episode a little while. Yes, I am back more or less permanently. And yes, Matt and I authored a book, and the truth is Matt did all the work. He just surprised me with it one day.

But if you're interested in selling and marketing to Oil and Gas Industry and finding on Amazon, literally search for Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing. That's the energy growth playbook for Oil and Gas leaders. We'll put a link in the show notes. It's a few dollars.

And like I said, Matt did all the work. It's a summary of the last two years of podcast brought together with AI in a really easy to digest format. And I think it came out really well. But it's all our words, Mark, and some of our guests. So we appreciate all the contributions to everybody

listening and everyone that's come on the podcast and shared their knowledge. Which, by the way, audience, this podcast is now looking for a sponsor for 2026. So if you'd like to join the party and get in front of our audiences, which is all sales and marketing leaders

that work in and around the Oil and Gas industry, including the large tech companies, reach out to me, happy to share details. But throw all that out the window. We have Brian with us today with Capsule. And Brian, you have one of the most unique coming out

of COVID stories that I've ever heard. Before we get to what you do and who you are, tell your COVID story. Tell you the foundation story of your business. Yeah, thank you both. Excited to be here.

Boy, COVID, I can't believe it feels like a long time ago, yet yesterday also. Yeah, so I was in corporate for 10 years. And then I left. I decided I didn't want to work for anyone else again and make way less money.

But to do something on my own, and I started a mobile photo studio called the Headshot Truck. So think of a food truck, but there's a photo studio inside of it. We did this in Los Angeles, had a lot of success, and then able to turn it into Capturely,

which was an in-person photography company. We grew to 25 major cities around the country. We worked with large organizations that would have offices all over the place that would want one company to handle headshots at scale. It's a whole big issue around how it's all done historically.

And we really wanted to change that, that whole mode. So we were doing great. February of 2020, things were awesome. And then March it and we literally were out of business. It went crickets. And because no longer could you do in office

and conference headshots, which is 100% of our business. So we had to figure out a way to survive. And we did some things. We did product photography and video and other stuff. But meanwhile, we worked for two years to become a technology company

because LinkedIn had called me and said, Brian, if you can figure out how to do this virtually, you're going to have it made. And so we went to work two non-technical co-founders trying to duct tape and bailing wire some virtual solution to allow us to do remote headshots.

But it did take us two years and hiring a CTO. We figured it out and relaunched this Capturely virtual headshots in 2023. And it has just been a really amazing ride to this point. And if you went to one of our mixers at the end of 2025, I can't remember which month.

I think it was October. But your team was actually there. You gave away free headshots for people that were looking for work or people that wanted to upgrade their LinkedIn profile or whatever. And the work y'all did was amazing.

And the thing that was amazing is people got their headshots back. It seemed almost instantly. I know it wasn't instantly, but within the next day, literally stuff started coming back. And it's just a great service, but it's bigger than that. If you're in the sales and marketing space,

actually it doesn't even matter. If you're in today's world, 2026, your online profile is everything. And how many times have you connected with somebody and you looked at their LinkedIn picture and then you meet them in person

and you can't even recognize them because their picture was so old? So I love what y'all are doing. So Mark, I just wanted to highlight, I'm actually in that situation right now. I've had long hair for quite a while

and all my social media profiles, which need to be consistent for like entity, AI like systems, are all the same picture. However, I recently did cut my hair and I need to update all of them. So this is something that's really important

from a AI entity like discoverability standpoint that you need to have an accurate picture. Also, if you're posting online and then your profile is different, it creates a lot of confusion and it's all about trust in these systems.

So keeping an up-to-date photo is actually really important, but to go get a headshot and update them all, there's a lot of work that's involved in that. So this helps expedite that. I just want to highlight that as a true scenario and need that actually solution myself.

Yeah, the data supports that, Matthew. There's some amazing research on LinkedIn that talks about one. Having a professional photo, you're 14 times more likely to get a profile view, you're 36 times more likely to get a message via LinkedIn. And we're really in the first impressions business,

if I'm being honest, because what we do is help folks to be able to essentially have their digital version of themselves online. And in this Zoom era, it needs to look like the person that I meet on Zoom

or person in person. And it is about trust because human beings, science backs this up. We are programmed to make snap judgments, right? It is what's kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years. And one of those things that's so innate in us

is when you see something one way and then you see it another, it is like a mini trust violation. So having those consistent and making sure they're up to date is more important now than it's ever been. Guys, so the other thing that occurred to me is that if you run a sales or marketing organization,

you could leverage something like this to give you a heads up on your competition. Because if all of your sales team has up-to-date profiles and all of your sales teams gets increased activity because of up-to-date profile, it just benefits the sales team.

If you're listening to this and you run a sales team, pay attention to what these guys are talking about because 100% is going to make a difference and you're revenue in your sales. It does. Nowadays, the average professional has seven places to use a headshot.

So it's not just the executives on the website, although that's really important. You're going to meet the team page and all of the branding associated with that. But the reality is your sales team, your marketing team, it's in their email signature.

It's in their Slack channel. It's in their marketing collateral. These photos are everywhere. And what is that saying about your brand? If your salesperson or especially a leadership person, but it's an old photo from their wedding

or somebody's cut out of it or whatever, the reality is that does make an impression on customers. And so if the idea is to present yourself professionally and on brand and the antithesis of that is you're not doing it and therefore communicating something to those customers, it really does make a difference.

Yeah. And the other thing that I love that which I'll do, Brian, is in today's world, especially if you run a large sales organization, a lot of your sellers, the only frontline people in remote,

and trying to get them coordinated and get to an office at the same time, at the same place, so that you can bring a photographer and get good headshots as possible. But with what y'all do, not only can you do the headshots remotely,

you can create where it looks like everybody was in the studio together and you can add the current themes or backgrounds or other things that you're, I don't want to say Photoshop experts, but experts in touching up photos,

because I don't know if y'all use Photoshop or not, are able to reproduce and it looks amazing. And that was so key to being able to build this was not only do you be able to do the headshots remotely, so one of the big differentiators for us, we're not an AI generator company for us.

It starts with what's the raw image which needs to look like you, right? That's the whole point is what's that original image. We're also not a do-it-yourself service. There's some of those out there where essentially what they do is teach you

how to take your own headshots and then they really just edit them, right? So they're a post-production company, essentially. We're full service. We're the only do-it-for-you service. So you schedule a 10-minute headshot session

online can be anywhere in the world. You just want to schedule during daylight hours because we use natural light. So how do we make it consistent? Natural light, sunlight, it's abundant, it's consistent, and it's flattering.

And so as long as you have a window and it's daylight out, we can get your headshots done for you. It's all done in 10 minutes with a professional photographer. You're absolutely right about having to do it. It's the old school way of bringing everybody in and it's scheduling, it's a nightmare.

It takes a lot of time for that. And remote folks don't have the physical capability, but the reality is nowadays, no one has the time to go to a studio and spend an hour there and an hour back and all that. Think about how much time, money,

that cost your team to do that. Where with us, it's 10 minutes with a professional, meaning they're going to do it right the first time. They understand lighting and positioning. They know how to make you feel comfortable because getting headshots is awkward.

Most people don't love doing it. So if we can make it fun and engaging, that ultimately comes out in the photos. And then to the editing piece, yeah, we're a human in the loop company. We're high tech, but also high touch.

And so having that kind of human element of making sure that the editing is done really well is super important. And that's also how we're able to maintain brand consistency. And Brian, correctly, if I'm wrong, literally all you need is a smartphone in a window

and you want the phone to be steady. So hopefully tripod or you set it on a ledge or have somebody else hold it. But really, that's it. You have an app that then takes that photograph and sends it back to your team.

And that's when y'all start working on it. Yes, exactly. In fact, as of right now, there is no need to download the app. So we were an app company. We're still a technology company, but it's now it's a web app, which is awesome.

Yep, that way all you need to do is click a link. No download required. It eliminates a step there. And that's what a lot of our enterprise customers have been asking for. So now we have it.

I love it. So it's frictionless and quite frankly, it's going to get through, if you work for Chevron, it's going to get through Chevron's firewall. Whereas the app may or may not have gotten through the firewall. This is great.

Brian, I got to ask you. You have a very good team. In fact, you and I met because one of your team members called called me and they did such a professional job. They didn't try to sell me anything. They explained what y'all do,

that we end up inviting y'all to one of our mixers. We're actually trying to get you to come join us at a couple of conferences. So you're only going to ask conferences. But from a leadership point of view, because this is your company,

what are some of the things that you struggle with between your company being an in-person company before the pandemic and now you're totally virtual from a leadership point of view? Just audience has a lot of senior people and I bet they would love some insights

in what was going through your head when you had to make that transition. Yeah, it was really tough. So my co-founder at the time, he and I essentially ran the company together. We were able to bring in a CTO

and we went from a team of seven. I think it was pre-COVID an hour at 28. So really exciting. But that was incredibly scary, to be honest with you. We had just done an SBA loan, 500K a couple months before.

To kickstart this in-person photography company and grow to 25 cities, and we had our LinkedIn was our client, right? And so to take a big dive like that, you really had to figure out and remember why you're doing it

and then be incredibly resilient. I think if I could say anything about our team, that we are a resilient bunch. We figure out a way and we push through and we believed in each other. I think we had, from a leadership perspective,

we were very transparent. I think that was always very important for us, was to be transparent with our team, let them know what our cash position was and what choices we needed to make and why. And when you get buy-in from your team,

when they understand the reasons why certain things are happening, they then believe in the mission and they want to be a part of it. And we could not have gotten through COVID without all of those things.

And in trying to build a super solid culture, we are all remote first as well. All of our employees are remote. We do have a small office where a couple of folks are, but that's the way we've been able to maintain a great brand by giving our employees

like transparency of what's happening within the business. Yeah, I think that's important too. Other thing that happened during the pandemic is a lot of salespeople, besides business, a lot of salespeople had to totally change the way they were selling.

You can no longer take somebody to lunch. Matt, I know you wanted to jump in here. Go ahead. No, I really think that a lot of businesses, especially in oil and gas, or that same line of thinking, Mark,

is they're trying to understand they've been doing things the same way for so long. Get hearing other people's stories and what they did because they know they need to go through that transformation. We were like 71% of people still operate

in the industrial era, manual data entry. They're not using automation. They're not doing these things, but I'm starting to see that shift happen, and now we have this next cycle

of like agentic AI coming on the scene. And so people are trying to play catch-up, and I think COVID was a great accelerator to move people online. Now, from a digital marketing standpoint, the bid cost adds went up,

like people had to come up with new strategies, things fanned out to different platforms, and you're having to find different way to reach people. But back to your point, Mark, it always is human to human. Now, the newer generation, though, is tech savvy,

and they expect that. Like I've heard stories of there was like a reservoir, I forget the name of the tool, but there was like a reservoir reserve tool that you had to be in the office to access, okay? And I got laid off.

He went and raised some money, and he goes, I'm gonna put this all on the cloud, I'm gonna make sure it's secure, and now it's like the gold standard of what people are using, because that expectation is that convenience.

So whether it be photos in the office, whether it be sales meetings, like whatever it is you're doing or showing demos and samples, everybody's gotten more technology savvy, and it's almost, I think, an expectation,

because if you're not doing these things, and you're not technology first in your thinking, it says something about your brand. And so I just know that there's a lot of internal conversations that are happening, and I come in on consulting with different industries

that they're going, how do we get to that next step? How do we transform what they're doing? And the leadership now gets it. So I think that there's some momentum behind this, and I think it's turning. And so to hear more stories about businesses

going through that transformation, I think that helps them apply that to their own situation and what they might be able to do, and knowing that they need partners and tools to do these things. I could tell you there's a lot of organizations out there

that know that they need new headshots. And if they have a remote team, they're going, how do I do this consistently, professionally? Okay, we want to put them all on the website, and they're not going to look, everybody's going to take their own photo,

or okay, it's going to be AI generated. I see a lot of that happening. And I'm like, how did you get that picture? And then I'm like, that doesn't even look like you. So there's this big kind of trust factor that plays into it. And so I like what Brian said about the core being who you are.

And even there's some data or guardrails put in with the AI generated images, which people are finding their way around it. But it can't look like you, or it shouldn't look like you, because now you're putting your face on this or that. So there's a whole different strand of things

that we could talk about with there being issues related to AI generated images and where the world's going. But starting out with who you are and what you do, and some kind of watermark or whatever, because I'm seeing it on the Capturely website, it's very professional, it's very consistent.

And it's probably one of the tools in the tool set that you need to think about if you're driving a remote team or you have people out in the field that you need updated images. And I know a lot of people on rigs, and there's a lot of industries that don't

utilize LinkedIn very well, because there's this whole layer of how do we utilize this technology? And I think Capturely is like one of the tools in the Quiver, if you will. Mark, back to you, sorry, I just wanted to...

I tell you what, we've used it, we paid for it. It's not expensive, very professional, very quick turnaround. Now, Brian was nice enough to cut us a discount because we were helping people that were looking for work. And Brian, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

This industry is going to remember that you helped a little bit with that stuff, which is great. But to see the work that your team does is just amazing. It makes everybody look great. It's ridiculously easy, it's seamless.

You can do it from anywhere, as long as you have some connectivity and a smartphone. But going back to where I was going originally with the whole sales thing, with the sales teams, if you want to leg up on your competition, Brian, I mean, you're a salesperson,

you have sales people in your mix. It is a big difference when people can immediately have that trust, as both of y'all have said, and see that picture, and then the person that's on the Zoom call or the person that's at the luncheon is that exact same person.

It's almost seamless, right? It's almost subconscious, but it gives you that edge up. So you have to have tons of stories of companies and people that have used your services, where when they're finished, they got their pictures up on whatever they were using the capturely pictures for,

it made a difference in their business. Absolutely. Tell us about LinkedIn. Yeah, tell me. Yeah, I already did. Yeah, no, I think you're 100% right.

I mean, there's so many... I love it when folks put their capturely headshot up on their LinkedIn, and they shout us out. And just to see when folks are so proud of themselves to put a photo of themselves out there, it is a big deal. It is a big deal.

Most of us don't love the way we look in photos. It is just who we are as human beings. Again, there's some science behind that. But when they want to push that out there, and they have something they feel really good about, it makes a huge difference.

And especially on a platform like LinkedIn, your employees, when they post on LinkedIn, they have a 500% larger reach than the company themselves. And what is the first thing you see when somebody posts on LinkedIn? It is their photo.

So it is an extension of the company. The way I like to think about it is in a Venn diagram. There is the company brand itself, right? You want consistency. You want everything to look professional. You want it to represent you and your brand.

You also want it to be cost effective. But then you have the employer brand, and this is how are we attracting and retaining talent? And I'm seeing a lot of shift over into the employer brand side of things from a marketing perspective, going like, how do we showcase our team in a way

that represents our brand so that we can attract better talent? And then on the personal or professional brand side for the individual, they're putting these photos out on LinkedIn and many other social media platforms. When you can get all three of those things to align, jokingly call it optimal brand alignment.

Ultimately, what it means is now you've got everything working in sync here. And that definitely goes to LinkedIn. And now LinkedIn, so many of us get hundreds or thousands of messages or whatever it is a day on LinkedIn. And you can tell if it's something in AI

that's sending you a message or if it's something super authentic. So when we talk about it, it's about, for us, AI is authentic imagery. We want you to look like you on a good day because you're going to get on the Zoom with somebody and it better look like you.

So Brian, you mentioned this earlier before we turn the microphone on it. Sometimes your company lives right smack in between marketing and HR. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, often marketing is the one who reaches out initially

as part of this initiative. It's we want to get consistent website or marketing says we want to get consistent headshots on our website of our leadership team and so forth. And so that's typically the initial reach out. But once we're able to get headshots for everyone,

then we move over into the HR side of things and we become part of the onboarding process. That way you always have consistent images of your team moving forward. Everybody feels like they have a photo that looks like everybody else on the team.

It's really important. And it's been amazing to see these organizations, particularly the larger organizations, although small ones too, to really think about how do we want to engage our teams differently? How do we want to invest in employee engagement

and employee advocacy? How do we want to improve our employee benefits and headshots that fit into that space really well? And it really comes down to communications. It comes down to internal and external communications. That's where we live in between marketing and HR

because comms speaks with everyone. They understand how things re-communicated internally and externally. So it's been really fun to get deep into these organizations and understand in these larger courtship, getting deeper into these organizations

and seeing these larger corporate initiatives that are not just about marketing for the sake of sales, although that's important. It really comes into the culture. And how they want to be perceived and how they want their employees to feel.

And so for us to be able to come in and be a part of that initiative has been really special. Dude, how powerful is that? As an industry, we struggle with retention and recruiting a talent. Let's be honest here.

Half the world thinks we're destroying the planet. And what a great idea and how useful that to be part of the HR stack, right? So if you work in HR, there's nothing to worry about. Whenever you have a new hire, you just ping capturely and they make sure you have the headshot

that fits your profile of everybody else. Dude, that's genius on y'all's part. HR people, if you're listening to this, reach out to Capturely. We'll have a link in the show notes. Brian, this has been great.

And once again, I appreciate you working with us. Appreciate you helping out our industry a little bit. We're going to try to get you to some of the conferences. Folks who come to our mixers, you can see Capturely at our future mixers. But we're getting close to winding down the show.

And we're at the point now where we usually ask our guests for a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. Do you have a fail or tip of the week for our audience? I do. This is a tip. I'm sure I've got a lot of fails,

but this tip has been really important to me. I use this tool called Press Master. They're awesome. I heard about them through a friend, and it is just, I always struggled with trying to figure out

what am I going to post on LinkedIn that might resonate with somebody. What is, what's important to me, but also might be important to the audience. And this has just been a great AI tool to help me to ideate.

And it has this interview process. It's not just a copy-paste post situation. It really helps you understand and frame the things that you want to talk about and being able to do it in your own voice. So that tool has helped me go from

one or two posts a month to two or three posts a week because it's just really allowed me to get through that process faster than I could before. And what a great tip. And we'll put a link for the tool that Brian's talked about in the show notes.

Also in the show notes will be a link to Capsule. If you want to go check them out, feel free to reach out to them, tell them whoever answers that OGG and sent you. We'll also put a link to Brian's LinkedIn profile if you want to reach out and connect with him directly.

Dude, looking forward to work with you in 2026. Thank you for joining Matt and I. This was good. Looking forward to doing more work with you. This is the point usually where I try to get the audience to sign up for our newsletters,

but they're sold out already for 2026. And this is just January. Pat them back to Jada, my sales team for getting our newsletters sold out for the entire year. We're doing our mixers here in Houston,

pick back up this month in January. We'll go all the way till the summer. We take a break during the summer then we pick back up in the fall. Also doing mixers in Lafayette, Louisiana, Dallas, Denver, Pittsburgh,

and our first one in London in the UK sometime this year. So working on that. Matt and I, all our social profiles are in the show notes. You want to check that out. And I think that's about it.

Anything else you want to do, Matt, before we get out? Well, one of the things that I've been working on for a number of publicly traded companies is AI interpretation risk. So how they're showing up, if they're going public

or they're getting stuff listed online, old data showing up in AI or showing up in the search engines, not appropriately. We're doing a lot of cleaning up data, like data hygiene type work,

like single source of truth sort of thing. So I don't know if you're struggling with that sort of thing. EWR digital, we're working on a lot of that. For clients, we do have some patents that are pending on some of the work

that we're doing, how we're doing it. We are going to be launching a leaderboard of a lot of the service based industries on how AI ready there are. So that will be coming here in Q1. So look forward to that.

And if you have any interest, you can reach out to EWRdigital.com or you can reach out to me directly. And folks, what Matt is talking about is huge. He made it sound like it's nothing. This is huge.

So pay attention. Stay tuned for that. One thing I forgot to bring up is Matt and I are actually doing a book signing event. We'll let you know when, it's probably going to be February of this year.

We're actually doing it, I believe, at the BMW dealership. So we have drinks and food and maybe even some live music. Should be good times to pay attention to that. Follow the OGGN on LinkedIn

if you want the first notification when we're doing our book signing. All right, guys, we got to get out of here. Remember, make a difference and not a sale.