The Company Man YouTube Channel: The Rise, Rise Again, and Rise Once More | Why They’re Successful
This video is a bit unique from my usual other videos as today we’ll be talking about the Rise of
the Company Man YouTube Channel. If you don’t know, Company Man has a channel on YouTube where he,
well, spends a lot of time talking about a lot of companies. Having just started in 2017,
the Company Man YouTube channel is nearly 4 years old today and has over 1.1 million
subscribers and has amassed 141 million views! In this video, I’ll deep dive and give you the
Company Insight into the rapid rise of Company Man - how this one-man YouTuber rose to greatness,
his keys to success and some shocking things I’m 100% sure you don’t know about him!
But before we begin, if you guys enjoy videos like this, please take a quick second,
click the LIKE button, subscribe button and notification bell to know when new videos
come out each week. With that in mind, thanks for doing that and now let’s start the video.
The Beginning of the Company Man YouTube Channel There isn’t a lot of information publicly released
on Company Man. We do know the YouTube content creator goes by the name Mike, that he’s American
and he’s a very private individual – after all, no one has any idea what he looks like!
Company Man joined YouTube on May 12, 2017 and his first video was published on May 16, 2017.
Throughout the four years, he’s been focused on educational videos that showcase different
companies or brands and he’s been very consistent publishing every Wednesday. His first video was
the famous, “Decline of Kmart…What Happened” which has accumulated over 4.1 million views to date.
He then went on to publish other videos including, “What happened to MTV”, “Google is a remarkable
Company,” and “What’s the deal with Vine” which were all moderate successes, accumulating some 300,000
to 700,000 views each. For some reason, the videos that then became more popular on his channel
were ones talking about downfalls and failures. The following videos he created about, “The
Problem Facing Harley Davidson” and “The Decline of Blockbuster” went on to accumulate over 1 million
views per video. He then went on to cover 200 companies, ranging from all different industries,
from Food Restaurants to Airlines, to Tech and just about every single topic you can think of.
All the videos are also quite different in how he approaches the company. For example,
Company Man covers a lot of different genres. I’ll go over some briefly. There’s:
Company Declines Bigger than you Know
How did They get so big? Versus
The Rise and Fall and Rise Again And
Why They’re Successful Company Man, the YouTube channel,
has been a huge success. At the end of Year 1, his subscriber count was
270,000. In Year 2, it grew to 551,000. In Year 3, it continued growing to 831,000 subscribers.
Today, he has over 1 million subscribers with 200 videos! Wow, that growth is incredible.
And with so many subscribers he’s made a huge impact on people’s lives.
Teachers have used his videos during classes, one guy got a Jeopardy question right because
of something he learned on a Company Man video, kids have even chosen college majors based on
his videos and others have passed job interviews from the knowledge they learned by watching his
videos. Let’s go over the Interesting Facts about the Company Man YouTube channel and then go over
what I think is the key to Mike’s success! Interesting Fact 1:
The Hardest Part About YouTube Company Man has been on record saying
that the most challenging part each week has been choosing the topics to cover in his videos.
After all, it gets tough when he’s covered so many companies already. So in his second year, Company
Man started a website, Company Man Ideas.com, so viewers could vote on topics. I think that’s
a great way to generate new ideas and see what viewers are interested in learning more about.
Interesting Fact 2: Company Man’s Favorite Video If you ask Company Man what video he likes the
most, he is on record of saying that his favorite video is the one he made about Bernie Madoff.
Bernie Madoff, if you don’t know is the former American financier who created a huge ponzi scheme
and cheated investors of over $65 billion. I’ve included a link to Company Man’s video on Madoff
below. Company Man has said that the hardest YouTube videos for him to produce are the
ones which are about scandals because in general scandals are very complicated by nature involving
so many people and companies. And the key is to explain the scandal in a way that everyone can
easily understand in just a 10 minute video, or in other words, “Explain Like I’m Five.”
Interesting Fact 3: The Video Company Man is Most Proud
Company Man has been on record of saying the YouTube video he is most proud of making is
the one he made about The Rise and Fall...And Rise Again of Champion. Champion is a clothing brand,
which is a subsidiary of Hanesbrands, which was originally a subsidiary of Sara Lee. Champion
was really popular in the 1980's and 1990's especially in Basketball. The Company literally
fell off the screens of everyone when Nike and Adidas grew quickly in the past few decades,
but recently Champion has been making a comeback in the past few years. The reason why Company
Man is most proud of the Champion video is because he’s a big fan of basketball and the
video was a collaboration of over 12 people who worked together with him on contributing
to the video. Company Man’s interest in basketball also gives us a hint on his main Key to Success.
Key Factor to the Success of the Company Man YouTube Channel
Let me start by saying that this entire section is just a hypothesis and detective work of mine.
Company Man has never come out openly to admit or verify these things. But I’ll tell you how I
came to these conclusions, and you can let me know if you think I’m right or not. Also,
it would be amazing if Mike himself from Company Man could verify if my guess is right
and what he thinks. Diversification
In my humble opinion, the key to the Company Man YouTube Channel success is diversification.
Diversifying is a really important element to success because it helps reduce the risk if
something bad happens. This is often expressed in the saying “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,�
which is common advice which means you should not concentrate all efforts and resources in one area
as you could lose everything. Diversification is most common in finance in portfolio management,
which is why financial advisors often recommend you purchase many different
stocks or ETFs rather than go all in on one particular investment.
The benefit of diversification is you reduce your risk if something goes wrong in one thing. The
disadvantage of diversification is the upside is more spread out so if one thing goes really well,
the benefit wouldn’t be as big. A simple example is if you invested your entire portfolio in Enron,
you would be bankrupt. On the opposite end, if you invested just $5,800 in Tesla stock in 2010,
you would be a Tesla Millionaire in 2021, often known today as Teslanaires.
So back to Company Man. If you do a lot more searches on YouTube,
you’ll see that there’s two other video channels which Mike might have started as well at the same
time as the Company Man YouTube Channel. Second YouTube Channel - Mike's Thoughts
Mike’s Thoughts is a YouTube channel where Mike talks mostly about movies.
At this YouTube channel page, Mike actually links to his Company Man Twitter account and the Company
Man YouTube channel page. He also links to his next YouTube channel, which I’ll talk about later.
The Mike’s Thoughts logo is also awfully similar to that of Company Man in the blue
and black coloring. The channel has 6,200 subscribers and was started in July 2017,
similar timing when Mike started Company Man in May 2017. Mike published just 9 videos on this
channel starting in July 2017 about the Three Stooges followed by videos on other movies.
If you watch any of the videos, you’ll notice the voice also sounds awfully similar to Company Man’s
voice as well! The first video earned 11,000 views. Although very impressive for any YouTube
channel, this was nothing compared to the Company Man YouTube channel. The last video published was
“Ranking Every Die Hard Movie” in December 2018. This video only ended up getting 3,000 views
and showed this YouTube channel was not as successful as his main Company Man channel.
Third YouTube Channel - Basketball’s Best! Interestingly, the Mike’s Thoughts YouTube
page also links to another YouTube channel called “Basketball’s Best!” Mike had said on
record on his Company Man YouTube channel that he loves basketball with his Champion video!
This BasketBall’s Best YouTube channel has a total of 38 videos and was started in March 2017. So,
this YouTube channel is actually older and started even before Company Man itself!
The first video published was “What was Michael Jordan’s Best Season”.
(Great video by the way, I’m a huge MJ Jordan from when I was a kid!) which got over 500,000 views.
There are also many other videos about other basketball stars and basketball teams. The logo
of Basketball’s Best YouTube Channel is similar to Mike’s Thoughts and the Company Man logo,
and the voice seems the same as Company Man as well. The channel has almost 9,000 subscribers.
How did Company Man Succeed? My best guess is Mike, the Company Man,
originally started different YouTube channels based on his personal interests back in 2017.
Obviously, the guy loves basketball, movies and delving deep into companies.
In the beginning, he diversified his time and energy in different YouTube channels.
This helped him spread out his risk and also helped him see which channels people were most
interested in watching. However, when he saw the Company Man YouTube channel was taking
off the most, he slowly decided to just focus 100% of his time and energy solely on that.
Even for myself on my Company Insight YouTube Channel, I’ve come to realize each YouTube
video I make takes a minimum of several days to research and actually create and edit each video.
There’s only 24 hours in each day and 7 days in a week after all. I believe that Mike’s key to
success was diversifying in the beginning, and after seeing what works and what doesn’t work,
investing 100% on what was taking off like a rocket, which was Company Man. And that’s
what lead to the Company Man YouTube channel success. On a side note, Mike, if you’re watching,
it would be really cool if you continued Basketball’s Best YouTube Channel as well!
I think a lot of subscribers would love that! What is Company Insight?
What I love about Company Man is he’s authentic and down to earth. He not one of those YouTubers
who does paid endorsements and sponsorships trying to convince us to join Skillshare. Company Man is
real. He actually responds to comments. He’s also pretty active on the Community, where he’ll often
post survey questions. To top it off, Mike seems like a really simple and humble guy. For example,
he doesn’t use any fancy equipment and is just a down to earth person. Interestingly, Company
Man’s logo was created a day before the channel was made and is actually taken from a picture of
him. And this logo hasn’t changed since day one! Personally, for me, that’s really awesome!
I was inspired by Company Man to start my own YouTube channel, Company Insight.
On the Company Insight channel, I’ll not only be going over companies I’m fascinated by,
but I’ll also be covering companies both large and small and Companies all around the world
outside the United States. The world is so big now, and I think it’s important that everyone,
especially Americans, look outward and also know what’s going on outside their hometown.
Lastly, I also hope someday, my YouTube channel can help inspire people or at least help learn
something new just to cheer up their day. I don’t know about you, but I look forward to
every Wednesday for Company Man’s update and am super excited each week to see what new
video comes out next. Personally, I really admire and respect Mike for what he’s done.
It is no easy feat, sticking to a routine schedule each week for the past almost 4 years now.
Think about how many of us have made New Years resolutions to get fit or go to the gym, and how
many of us are still following that routine after a few months or even a couple weeks later!
So with that said, again thank you so much for watching my video. There was a significant amount
of research and work that went into making this video possible, so if you wouldn’t mind giving
the video a LIKE or sharing it with your friends, it would really help out a lot.
If you like videos like this one, be sure to check out some of my other content like
the Rise and Fall of Playboy or the Rise and Fall of Skullcandy Earbuds.
Thank you again for watching and I’ll see you again next week on Company Insight!