To encourage and enlighten the entrepreneurial-minded students at the William G. Rohrer College of Business, Vince Scian, a Rowan class of 2020 alum, returned to Rowan University for Coffee with an Entrepreneur. 

Scian spoke to America’s future entrepreneurs in the Business Hall, and Saxby’s provided the coffee and snacks during this event on Tuesday, Sept. 23. Scian is the owner and operator of 15M Media, a five-year-old company that produces high-quality short videos primarily for small companies, with a few larger businesses that round out his clientele.

On the 15M Media website, it describes the people who work there as being storytellers, strategists, and creatives. As it turns out, that’s a tad understated.

“We’re all three…we’ve found a good group of people who are a combination of those three things,” said Scian.

He didn’t stop there.

“I love a jack of all trades, master of none. I’m very much that, and then everyone on the team is a little better at one thing than another,” said Scian.

However, calling himself a master of none is a bit modest.

“At 15M Media, we do video production, we do marketing, consulting, and Facebook ads. We have been a lot of different things in the first four years of business, but we found out what we were great at…the things we decided that we should be the best [at] in the area. That’s a crazy thing to say, but we do genuinely believe that with time and experience, we could be the best,” said Scian.

The company and its three employees — Eddie Silver (director of operations), Rachel Burke (editor), and Scian himself — produce a multitude of media and carry about five projects at a time, with ever more coming in. Their ads, as it turns out, run the full stretch of video production and all it encompasses.

“We shoot Facebook content, and all kinds of digital ads, do everything short of TV,” said Scian.

The problem that escapes many people until it’s too late is that much of starting a new business is doing things you don’t want to do in order to stay afloat. That’s a lesson Scian and his employees figured out quickly.

“We used to do social media production back during COVID…because we were a brand-new company, we were just saying yes to anything…and everyone thought they needed social media back then, so we were doing social media management — I was never a social media person, I just said yes to literally anything. I knew I could make video content tell a story,” said Scian.

To bring that point home, Scian clarified another aspect that prospective business owners often overlook, offering sound words of advice to everyone in the room.

“The first five years of the business, you’re trying to survive, figure out who you are. We’re coming out of that ‘figuring out who we are’ stage right now and really settling into what we’re best at,” said Scian.

This can-do attitude of his carries throughout his work ethic.

“We ended up seeing a marketing guy, and I’m a big yes-man to anyone who pays me money…I’ll say yes to literally anything,” said Scian.

Early on, the entrepreneur may have also struck gold with an arrangement he had with a local high school, which provided him with free space to work, as long as 15M agreed to use the students as interns. Unfortunately, a problem with one of the other businesses in the space forced the school to shut down the program, leaving the group without an office to claim as their own.

These days, the trio has done away with the social media aspect of the business and is now highly focused on marketing and consulting, working out of Scian’s office space at home. The idea made good economic and humanitarian sense: if they dropped the part of the business they despised, they could lower prices on the flip side, allowing smaller businesses to afford them. That said, Scian hopes to find a new, reasonably priced workspace soon, thereby reclaiming his house.

“The goal is to scale. Everyone wants to be a 10 to 20-million-dollar business,” said Scian.

And while scaling his business to include satellites in Philadelphia, New York, and beyond may be part of the overall plan, Scian may have been talked into scaling back his aspirations.

“[My friend] said, ‘I never want to make a million dollars a year. That sounds exhausting’…I thought that it was hilarious because I never thought of it like that, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, to get to a million dollars, I have to quadruple the amount of work I’m doing right now,” said Scian.

While those may be the dreams, the reality is that a large part of Scian wants to scale back the company, allowing the group to focus on a several-block radius of businesses alone. Small business is where Scian’s heart truly lies.

“I have 20, 30, 40, 50 ideas every month. I run them through Eddie, and he’s like ‘One of these is good’ or ‘None of these is good,’” said Scian.

Perhaps the best pieces of advice of the morning were these words of wisdom:

“As an entrepreneur, you’re gonna have self-doubt. It’s gonna creep in,” said Scian.

The good news is there’s a remedy.

“When you present yourself confidently, because you do know yourself, you don’t want to lie…Don’t be afraid to not lie,” said Scian.

While these words may not exactly wax poetic, they possess the sharp, concise language of the business world and have had a resounding impact on how Scian and his cohorts have survived for five long years.

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