See a full gallery of photos from UCLA Anderson’s 2017 Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans
By Paul Feinberg
Tyler Hill grew up in a ski town, skating and snowboarding with his friends. Influenced by reality TV daredevil Johnny Knoxville and his band of merry men, Hill and his crew messed around with cameras, capturing their own stunts.
Hill’s hobby took a more serious turn when he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.
“I was a combat photographer and videographer in the Marines. I did two tours in Iraq,” says Hill, who served in the military from 2005 through 2010 and was deployed in ’06 and ’08.
When Hill separated from active duty he transitioned into a career in outdoor television, specializing in filming shows in remote areas ranging from Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan to Iceland and Greenland. He later earned a degree in filmmaking and became a freelance video producer in Dallas. While there, he saw his clientele shift from big companies with big budgets to YouTubers and Instagrammers making big bucks for posting branded content.
“I’m in the wrong business,” he realized. “I need to go into business for myself and start booking my own clients and doing my own social media marketing.” So he founded Social Video Solutions in Salt Lake City, Utah.
“I knew very well the technical aspects of how to make a video and how to make a video perform well. I knew how to market it. I knew all the artistic and technical things, but I had no idea how to run a business, market myself (or) any of those things,” Hill says.
This realization led Hill to enroll in UCLA Anderson’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities. The fact that his brother Trevor (who runs a nonprofit that provides wilderness therapy for veterans) participated in EBV at Anderson a few years prior helped lead Hill to the program.
While at UCLA, Hill worked on some key concepts. “Forecasting was the big thing for me. I tend to be a little bit of a perfectionist. I tend to not want to do things unless I know I can do them right. I was never able to do projections and forecasting and stuff like that,” Hill says. “It isn’t until you’re learning and hearing from very, very smart individuals that you realize you don’t always know everything that you’re doing. You just plan accordingly, make the best assumptions that you can and then you kind of — as we say in the military — adapt and overcome. Assess, adapt, and overcome.”
Hill says his EBV group was “very tight.”
“You had colonels and majors sitting alongside lance corporals and corporals. The level of communication that we had with each other and the openness to be able to evaluate our ideas and support each other, it was very cool,” Hill says. “Instead of being in a military setting where you’re so focused on what rank and what service everybody is, we were there because we’re all veterans and because we have an entrepreneurial spirit.”
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