Meet Ben Ferree of South Dayton

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ben Ferree.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I’ve always enjoyed creating videos ever since I first laid my hands on a camera. I never knew what I had wanted to do with my life, but I started attending college at Wright State University for mechanical engineering. During these years, I picked up a camera again with a friend, but this time I was far more serious about it. I stayed up all night teaching myself the craft of photo and video. So much so that my grades in college started to slip. I sat in my engineering classes watching tutorials for videography. By junior year, I had failed multiple classes not because I didn’t understand the material, but because my passion had shifted so much I couldn’t let it go. I was in deep enough into engineering so I decided to finish my degree and graduate with my bachelors in Mechanical Engineering.

After graduation I made the huge decision to go all out on my creative passion and take a huge risk on myself. Everyone told me how much money I could be making with an engineering degree, but I need to fuel the fire inside of me to do something for myself. At this time, I started an official LLC and was working for anyone I could. Horizon Project LLC was formed. Weddings, small brands, senior photos, etc., scrapping up all the money I could to survive.

The biggest skill I learned from this adventure was not how to take a good photo or video—it was how to effectively teach myself anything. During the ending years of college and after I graduated I took social media marketing seriously and had several viral videos that gained me over 800,000 followers on TikTok and over 40,000 on Instagram. I was treating my social media like a business and started working on my personal brand.

Eventually, I started working for multiple car dealerships of the same company and after seeing my success on social media and my understanding on marketing, they hired me to run all of their social medias and also create full scale marketing campaigns like TV commercials and paid Ads.

At the same time, I met some other creatives who had a similar passion—elevating other creators/brands and telling the stories that matter. Up until this point I had been doing everything alone. While it was going well, finding these creators and collaborating with them has been the MOST impactful thing I’ve ever done in my life. It all started from a random DM on instagram where we decided to go out and challenge ourselves to film 3 free ads for brands all within 24 hours. We did not sleep that entire day, but we eventually finished. Pretty soon the 5 of us (me, JD Groh, Lucas Osborne, Jon Sherf, and Xavier Gallo) decided we all worked so well together that we wanted to start a creative agency that was founded on the same principles that got us to meet a bunch of strangers and spend a full 24 hours with them. This agency was called 2GETHER Creative.

I’ve never felt more fulfilled in my life than when we were able to start bringing other creatives together. While we are a full-on creative production agency, we are extremely community driven, hence our name. Only a few months after running this agency, we hosted a community event where many creatives took the same risk we did when we first met each other—creating spec ads for with strangers. Many of the creatives signed up to be put in a team of 3-4 people they never met and they were tasked to go film and edit a free ad for a brand and have it done by night time ready to show the rest of the groups. The level of quality these groups were able to achieve in such a short time frame was phenomenal. They all were able to add insanely good portfolio pieces to their collection, but more importantly they started friendships that they will never forget. This was an amazing emotional night for the 5 of us at 2GETHER Creative since it is the core of what we believe in and now we are able to watch it happen for many others in our community.

Flash forward about a year, 2GETHER Creative is now working with large brands like New Balance, Orange Bowl, ON, Puma, and many more. We are again in the works of planning our next community event for this winter. While we all work individually on a good amount of projects, we are all trying to scale 2GETHER Creative to the fullest.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
There were many times in the beginning when I had less than $100 to my name. I had zero idea how to generate new leads and clients for myself. Making the shift from seeing myself as a guy with a camera to being a true business was the hardest. I loved the creative side of things, but I needed to learn how to run a business.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I specifically specialize in video marketing for businesses especially in the sports and running industry. I also specialize in marketing for car dealerships because I know the industry so well and what works.

I am most proud of me and my teams ability to adapt to any situation and still get a positive outcome.

What sets us apart is our personal brand for 2GTEHER Creative. Anyone who visits our social media will see that while we take our work very seriously, we always manage to create a great environment around ourselves. We focus on creating personal relationships with our clients so they can not only see us as business partners, but as friends as well.

Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
To make things easily understandable…

Horizon Project LLC is my agency that only myself, Ben Ferree, manages and runs. When I work with clients on my own, I work under Horizon Project.

2GETHER Creative is my agency that I co-founded with 4 other guys and work as a team together.

In the next 5-10 years, I plan on scaling both of these agencies and plan to be able to have enough clients to outsource work to our community and give other creatives big opportunities to work with large brands and build their own business.

Pricing:

• Pricing for us is based on the scope of work and varies per project.

Contact Info:

• Website: horizonprojectproductions.com
  2Gethercreative.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/horizonproject__/profilecard/?igsh=MXQweG9veXMyY2xhbw==
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-ferree-596825159?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/2gethercreative/profilecard/?igsh=ZmM3eWd3cWF3em9w