Show, Don’t Tell: Premier Outdoor Living Embraces Visual Storytelling

There’s a popular saying, "find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life,” which Sean Collinsgru and his team at Premier Outdoor Living LLC appear to have fully embraced.

They are a design-build firm based in New Jersey, specializing in decks, patios, and anything necessary to create a unique outdoor space for homes. While remodeling is their main gig, they’ve got a pretty sweet side hustle: YouTube content creation.

Collinsgru started his YouTube channel, Premier Outdoor Living in 2016, where he documents the various renovation jobs his crew takes on. Their multi-purpose approach to their content, seeking to both entertain and educate, has earned them over 400,000 subscribers.

Play to Your Strengths and Use What You Have

Collinsgru took to social media in the early days of starting his company in 2015 simply due to his prior experience with the apps. Starting out at the age of 26, he was already familiar with and active on Instagram and Facebook and was able to see the marketing potential of the platforms.

Seeing an opportunity for expansion, he shifted focus in 2019 over to YouTube, motivated both by Collinsgru wanting to double down on his strengths of content creation, as well as a desire to tap into a market that Collinsgru felt they could satisfy.

“There’s lots of stuff I wasn’t good at, so I leaned into the one or two things that I’m a little bit better at,” says Collinsgru. “It was another way to be creative and have fun.”

By 2022, Premier Outdoor Living had found enough success that Collinsgru was able to hire on a full-time videographer and editor, delegating the technical stuff to someone more qualified and freeing himself up to further focus on the business and more creative aspects of the content.

Build with Personality and Welcome Negativity

The banter and camaraderie of Premier Outdoor Living’s crew plays a large role in their success. Realizing that there is only so much you can teach people about constructing decks and patios before you run out of content, they decided to use their channel as more than just a "how-to" guide.

Collinsgru describes their content as an intersection of instructional tutorials, a showcase of their goofy personalities, and design-centric HGTV-inspired approach. Having fun while they build is crucial, as a positive energy present on the jobsite helps translates to good content.

Positive energy doesn’t always translate on the viewers end, though, not that Collinsgru is complaining. While most of the feedback Premier Outdoor Living receives from viewers is supportive, the videos with the most negative feedback tend to be the ones that perform the best in views and engagement.

So, while fostering a positive community is certainly important to Premier Outdoor Living, a few haters boosting up the view count every now and then isn’t exactly the end of the world.

Show, Don’t Tell

To Sean, his content is a method of storytelling. He focuses in on a specific element of the job for each video and dedicates that video to problem-solving that specific thing. From his experience, people learn a lot faster through demonstration rather than through explanation.

“Just show the process and people will be able to understand it better by watching it, and then it's a lot easier for them to apply that detail to a project of their own,” says Collinsgru.

It’s in this way that Premier Outdoor Living is able to have their cake and eat it too. They can make jobsite vlog-style content and have fun with it while also simultaneously giving their viewers an educational look at the process and the different trial and error methods they use if something doesn’t pan out. It gives their content legs, serving both markets without alienating either audience.

Strive for Improvement, Not Perfection

While the views, exposure, revenue, and joy of being on the job all bring Collinsgru happiness, his number one priority lies in self-improvement.

“I always want to try to become a better designer. That's the thing,” says Collinsgru. “I'm really passionate about coming up with new, unique ideas, and the fact that we create videos around it gives an added incentive for us to continue to try to come up with new stuff that we can talk about and show.”

Melding personal and professional growth with fun is important to Collinsgru. But you have to have the right attitude about it. By his own admission, he is far from perfect. He screws up on occasion, forgets to order supplies; but he is aware of his strengths, plays to them, and uses his work and his content as an avenue to continue learning and growing as both a builder and a person.