5 Ways to Avoid Overwhelm in Your Video Business in 2023. EP #294 - Den Lennie

It's very normal to start January and feel like you want to just chuck in your video business altogether. You've just had a really good break over Christmas, and your calendar may not be looking quite as full as you'd like in January. I've been speaking to a number of people over the last few days who've all been saying the same things, and here's why. When you take some time off at Christmas, you need and enjoy a really good break. I myself have just done one, and it's been amazing. But as I come back to the office this week, even I'm feeling that kind of sense of impatience, impending kind of anxiety around getting started into the new year. And so today, what I'm going to do is share with you some tips on how to get restarted and look into 2023 as a video production business to help you not freak out in the process. I'm Dan, and if you're new to this channel, I help filmmakers and videographers scale their video production businesses in a holistic way that is focused more on getting the right lifestyle and not simply on the numbers. So let's start with how do you get started again after a break? As creatives, it's so important that we have a break. When I have a break, I go and walk along the beach or I walk in the forest. I get creatively stimulated. Over Christmas, I spent time scanning a load of old slides from my childhood and from trips I'd taken 20 years ago in Africa. So I've really enjoyed dipping into my creative flow. So as January came around and I started reengaging my brain in the business world, you know, those old anxiety start to creep up. And I've spoken to a few of my clients who've said similar things. I'm not sure I want to do this anymore. I'm really freaking out. My calendar's not looking as full as I'd like it, and that's perfectly normal because we're humans, and as creatives, I think we have a particularly sensitive disposition when it comes to how we feel about things we're doing. In the creative world, we are always looking for ways to be stimulated, to come up with fresh ideas. But in business, we need to be more measured, we need to be more deliberate. So if you're worried about your business or you're thinking about quitting and doing something else, I want you to stop today and just pause and think about this for a second. Do you really want to go and work for someone else? Do you really want to be told when to show up for work, when to leave work, when you can go for your lunch, or the thing that got me when I was employed was having to ask another person if I could take holidays or vacation time. The answer is probably going to be no, you don't really want to go back to that. We sometimes have rose tinted glasses what we think that life is going to be like, but in actual fact all we're doing is just resetting. The fact is you have all the abilities and skills to go and get work. The chances are though, you may not have been implementing those skills regularly or as regularly as perhaps the more creative pursuits. One of the areas where this can start to really play up in your subconscious is social media. And comparing yourself to others on social media, it's actually super unhealthy. And as hard as it is, I strongly recommend you limit your time on social media because people are often posting their kind of, you know, front end glossy, slightly curated, if not heavily curated vision of their life. The truth is, in January, for the majority of filmmakers, it's a quiet time of year. But what this gives you is a huge opportunity to start thinking about how you can do this year differently. So how can you do 2023 differently in your video production business? Well, the chances are you're very focused on the gear, the technique, the process, but probably not quite as focused on lead generation, being clear on who you want to target as a niche, being on your marketing message and ensuring that marketing message actually talks to your target market and not just a kind of generic set of marketing spiel that you hope will talk to a wide audience. One of the greatest challenges that face a video production business is having a single voice and talking to one particular customer at a time. There's a saying in marketing that if you try and talk to everyone, you end up talking to no one. And this is a common problem I see in videographers is they can do videos across a broad range of topics and genres. But that doesn't mean you should, because what we found is that when you specialize, when you niche down, when you become known for a particular type of content, you get passed around that person's network a lot more easily. It's a much more easy way to generate inquiries. So how can you break this habit? So here's how I do it. First of all, I'm a member of a couple of different masterminds. Now, a mastermind is a group of business owners who get together virtually or physically at certain periods, either weekly or monthly or quarterly To, I guess, sit around a virtual boardroom table and discuss their business challenges, discuss their anxieties around mindset, what's working, what's not working. And really, one of the greatest benefits of that is that when you sit around the table with others in the same field, you get to understand how they're doing things. They might be a few steps ahead of you, you might be a few steps ahead of someone else. You can share your knowledge with someone who's a bit farther behind you. You can ask for help from people who are further ahead on the journey. And it's a very powerful environment to help you to think better and more healthily about your business growth. They say that your net worth is the sum of the parts of your net work. So what do you mean by that? Well, you are the sum of the five people who are closest to you. Now, in terms of, like, practicalities, what does that mean? Well, it means that if you were to take the salaries or income of the five people closest to you in your network and divided them by five, there's a very good chance your income will be in that percentage. So if you're taking advice from your partner, from your friends, from people you go and play football with, they may not be actually acting in your best interest. And so a mastermind group has people who are objective in giving you feedback on your business. And so that's the thing that I find to be the most important thing in my business. The second thing I do is I create a vision board for the year ahead. That vision board is purely images of things that I would like to see happen in my life. I've run these vision boards for a number of years, and they always come true. In fact, they come true faster and faster and faster. So having a clear vision for the year ahead is a really practical and helpful way to start your year. The third thing I do is I convert that vision into a big picture plan. Now, the big picture plan is a way of laying out, you know, where is my traffic going to come from in my business? What are my landing pages and web pages going to look like? What does my marketing look like? What are my products and services, and what is my capacity for delivering those products and services? And therefore, what is the retail value of them? And how many can I realistically service? Therefore, can I reach my financial goals for the year? And I found that these tools, the vision board, really taps into my creativity. The big picture plan helps me kind of use that other side of my brain to really tap into logic and planning. And I use a couple of apps. A new app that I'm using is called Todoist. And Todoist helps me just kind of understand where things are going and in what order. So one of the things I'm doing this year is really making a bigger commitment to this YouTube channel. You can see here we've improved the studio look. We did 25 YouTube videos last year, tested a lot of different things and learned a lot of lessons. And so this year, one of my big focuses is going to be to grow this YouTube channel. I want to get it to 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year. And as I'm building a strategy for that in Todoist as we speak. So this is Todoist. And what you can see here is I've got goals which are to hit 100k followers by the end of 2023 and my current stats, which is 8 and a half thousand subs. I've got what's what I'm working on right now. Work in progress, things that have to happen regularly, things that are done, things that are ready. Then I've got a content column here where things like hiring a video editor, create a regular schedule for production, find the top YouTubers and follow create a channel trailer, create playlists of relevant keyword topics. As you can see, this just the single goal of growing my YouTube channel for the next year has 2, 4, 6, 8, like 20 different tasks already and I'm not finished. So if I were to try and figure that out in one go, it would become massively overwhelming. And so by using Todoist here, I'm able to break those tasks down and then I'm only ever working on one thing at a time. So if I decided Today to record YouTube video, I'm actually doing that now. So I'm actually recording this YouTube video now. So I'm only thinking about one thing at a time. Your brain is like ram. There's only so many things that can handle at one time. So if you give it too much to do, you just get overwhelmed. And then the fourth thing that I do that's really important is I diarize times in my calendar to get certain tasks done. I find if I don't put things in a weekly calendar, they just don't happen. Because now when I talk about diarizing, I work to what I call a default diary where I do certain things on certain days at certain times. And what I found is that's been really integral in me being able to push through all of the tasks that need to be done. I think it was Tony Robbins that said we all overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in five years. And so I found that this process of taking off weekly goals inside of my calendar really helps me to achieve a lot more less time. And then the fifth thing I'm doing is I'm really committing to my health this year. I have been a member of a gym for a few months and I'm now committing to going to the gym on a Monday, a Thursday and a Friday to do weight training and a Tuesday night and a Saturday morning. I'm going to do Pilates. Now I started doing Pilates last week and I thought it was for girls and how wrong I was. It is the most challenging and demanding thing I've ever done. So I'm doing something new as well. So what I want you to do is think about these tips and ask yourself, what are you doing? That is an old habit and what can you do to build a new habit? So let me know in the comments what you think of these strategies and what are your strategies for getting this year kicked off? Now do me one favor. Head over to YouTube. Find me Denlenny on YouTube and subscribe to this channel because what you're listening to is actually the audio from a new weekly YouTube series I'm going to be developing. Make sure you follow. Subscribe. Ding the bell because I'm going to be sharing really helpful tips weekly on a Monday on YouTube from now on.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast with your host, Dan Lenny. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com to learn more about how the Accelerator program can help you today. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review.