Sayville native brings creative marketing agency NXT Digital home to Main Street

Chris Perez was always the one holding the camcorder.

At family parties and with friends, he was the kid filming everything and cutting it together in iMovie.

“Back then I never really thought I could make something out of it,” said Perez, who grew up in Sayville and graduated from high school there.

Now the 23-year-old runs the creative side of NXT Digital, a marketing agency he co-founded with Patchogue entrepreneur Ronny Elshazly. It operates out of a studio on Main Street, smack in the middle of the same downtown where Perez used to hang out with his pals.

“Having the office here, it’s kind of like a little dream of mine come true,” Perez told Greater Long Island. “I grew up in this town. I would go into Main Street, into the heart of Sayville, to hang out with my friends.”

The agency is going on two years old. It moved to 130 Main St. this year after a short stint on West Main Street in Patchogue.

On Long Island, he said, those businesses face a ton of competition. Perez takes pride in zeroing in on what makes his clients special, and then helping them stand out from the pack.

Google reviews remain important, he said, but they say enough about the company.

“Almost every company has a bunch of Google reviews,” Perez said. “I feel like it’s generic knowledge that … they get all their friends to leave five-star Google reviews. That says nothing about the company.”

Behind-the-scenes video is different — the kind Perez and his team specialize in — gives customers a sense of who they’ll be dealing with, he said.

“They no longer feel like a stranger,” Perez said. “They kind of feel like, ‘Oh, that’s John the plumber. He’s super nice with his employees.'”

That doesn’t mean every video has to be polished. Perez described a vlog-style video NXT made with a landscape lighting company. During the shoot, a job didn’t go as planned, and the owner walked viewers through how he fixed it.

“Sometimes people like to see, hey, these guys are human too,” Perez said. “Things aren’t always perfect, but you know, we take care of it.”

The second main service is ad management. NXT builds paid campaigns, connects them to the client’s website and creates landing pages for them. Perez said the team tracks performance of the campaigns every day.

“If we film 10 videos with a client, we post them up for ads, and when we see that three specific ones are performing super well and they’re bringing in a lot of new leads, we’ll be like, ‘Hey, we need you to come back in here. We’re going to shoot even more of those same types of scripts,’” he said.

Perez said some older business owners still come to the table believing word of mouth is the only way to go.

“They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” he said. “But when we show them the results, they change their mind very quickly.”

Most of NXT’s clients still work in the field, Perez said, and they don’t have time to edit video or run their own ad campaigns.

“We genuinely consider ourselves an extension of their business,” he said. “We want to be the marketing division of your company.”

Clients record podcasts and educational videos there, and the agency hosts consultations in the same space. Perez said prospective clients can see the whole operation as soon as they walk in for a free consultation.

“They see where they’re gonna shoot their podcast, they see where they’re going to shoot educational content, they see where we can have meetings,” he said. “They can envision what it’s going to be like working with us.”

He studied for two years at Suffolk County Community College, then transferred to SUNY Brockport and completed his bachelor’s degree in marketing online last year.

After he met Elshazly, Perez said, partnering up “was kind of a no-brainer,” calling his co-founder “incredibly creative person.”

Elshazly brings the contractor’s side of the business to the room. He spent more than 15 years in the trades, mostly in roofing, restoration and construction, and built a home services company into a multi-million dollar business before selling it in 2025.

The two don’t use formal titles. Perez called himself the creative director. He takes on most of the filming, manages the editing team and reviews all of the content before it goes to a client, while Elshazly handles the business side and much of the client ad management.

Perez said many people his age want to run their own business but hold back because of the cost of living on Long Island and the risk.

“I’m super glad I did take that risk,” he said. “I get to do something that I truly am passionate about. It just doesn’t feel like a job.”

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