A Little Talked About Benefit of Consistent Marketing - Caleb Maxwell EP #095

Hey, guys. Dan here with another episode of the how to Scale, a video business podcast. This week I've got Caleb Maxwell, the co founder of Hebron Films from Bendigo, Australia on the show. Now, for those of you not in Australia, Bendigo is a small country town about two and a half hours north west of Melbourne. So it's kind of in the middle of nowhere. But what's fascinating about Hebron Films and Caleb is that when coronavirus hit, he went really hard in helping his customers and clients. And as a result, his business actually grew during the crisis. Now I've not heard many stories of businesses growing during the crisis, but Caleb has a very unique personality, a very unique approach, and really drives positivity as a kind of daily habit. And so I wanted to bring him on the show for him to explain how it is they do what they do. Now, Hebron Films help regional businesses trade nationally and internationally through custom generated content and strategy. Now, Caleb is a member of my video business accelerator and he has had an incredible couple of months, really when the rest of the world was really on shutdown. But I want to share with you how he did that and what makes him different, because I think you'll get a lot of value from really just listening to how he approaches problems. And I think you'll find this to be a very, very powerful episode, particularly how he went out and reached out to clients at a time when most businesses were kind of in shutdown mode. And I think we can all take lessons from this that will really help us, and more importantly you, to really come out the other end of this really strong. So I hope you really, really enjoy this episode. Caleb, welcome to the show.

Hey, how you doing, mate?

It's so good to have you on the show and I wanted to bring you on because I don't know anyone who throughout this Covid crisis has been busier working than you.

Oh, that's nice.

And I mean, we'll talk about that in a moment, but I think what I want to start is like, how do you remain so positive during a time when so many of your industry colleagues were basically losing their shit?

Yeah, good question. And I love talking about positivity because I feel like it's a gift that I have, but it's not something that, you know, it's something I've had to work at and it's something that has really seen me through some tough times. But one of them being the start of this whole Covid situation, I to set the scene like I had a business partner. We Built this business up over six years. And then.

We parted ways and I've taken over business. And then, like, first thing that happened, like, the next day, it was bam. Covid shut down.

I know. I'm laughing because I remember it rightly. I remember you saying you'd literally just started working with us. And. And then, like, my business partners were just setting up this new business, like that very new ABN's everything. And then Covid happened, and I'm like, to anyone else, that would have been an absolute disaster. But.

I looked at everything, and the positivity thing I have that keeps me straight and narrow is the whole idea of reframing. So taking. It's the understanding that no matter what the situation is, there is always a positive outcome in it, and.

It can always work out for my good.

So long as I look at it the right way and take the right steps. And, you know, whether you're devastated or not is a mindset. It's, you know, reality often has very little to do with. Or their circumstances have very little to do with your reality that comes from you. So I looked at the situation and.

It looked bad.

On the surface level. But then as. And it was actually super helpful and just perfect timing that I was engaging in the video business accelerator group because I was able to.

Have a window into another group who was experiencing the same thing. And then I kind of was able to reframe the situation from there to go, well, you know, now there's less people doing what I do. The overwhelming feeling is of hopelessness. So if I'm not hopeless, then already got a platform and almost like an advantage to move forward because I am seeing or I'm looking for opportunities. And once I started looking for opportunities, then they just showed up.

Also, what's interesting, and people may not realize this, but, you know, you live in this fairly small country town in Victoria, in Bendigo.

And I think that's a huge advantage because you're kind of used to having to, I wouldn't say prove yourself, but I guess there's a degree of, oh, we're not in the city, therefore maybe there's not as many opportunities. That's not what you found, is it? I mean, you've framed that very differently in your business.

Yeah, no, that's something that we've mastered over the last six years is. When we started, there wasn't much in terms of a video production industry in Bendigo.

And all of the big Bendigo businesses were pretty much sourcing their video production from Melbourne. And we had to very quickly prove that we were just as good as, or if not better than Melbourne suppliers and we were local and easier to deal with. So, yeah, no, we had gone through that process before and conquered that challenge. So bringing that in now is no worries.

Talk to me about, you know, how you responded to the COVID shutdown. Talk me through the steps you took and how you kind of like, for the benefit of people listening who maybe don't have that energy that you have, talk me through the actual practical steps. How did you manage that in your own mind?

So.

Firstly, I had to get clear on where I stood and I had to get clear on what my perspective was. So before anything else, I sat down with my wife and employee and we were like, right, this is what the situation is.

What'S our response or what is our perspective on it? And.

Coming from, I think that that.

Understanding or that opinion that everything can work out for my good enabled me to go. Instead of how we're going to survive, how we're going to thrive, it's not just about, you know, getting through, it's about leveraging. And business is always about how do you leverage a situation, how do you leverage an opportunity? So starting there, we were able to go, right, well.

What we can do now is if we pivot fast enough, we can communicate to the wider community and to the audience about and share some of the ideas that we know we can help. Because looking at the situation, people weren't able to meet in person. So the obvious opportunity there for a video producer is to go, let's meet online, or let's capture your message that you can't present to people in person and put it out to your audience through a video strategy. That's what we do. So our first step was to record a little video sharing some of our positivity.

And some ideas, and just say, hey, we're here to help you. Like, that is our genuine message. We can help solve your problems right now. And no other video producer in our region was doing that. So that really set us up to go. The perspective or the perception of us was that these guys are proactive, they're not hopeless, and people are drawn to that. They're like the overwhelming feeling in all of business, and there's some industries that were hit super hard was hopelessness. So seeing someone who's not hopeless and has ideas and seems like they could provide a solution, it was just like a magnet.

This is the thing, isn't it? I mean, one of the things we jumped on very, very quickly in the group was we need to show leadership to our market. That's really what I think you did talk to me about the impact of showing that leadership. What happened then?

Well.

Not too like that video did pretty well. We posted on LinkedIn. It wasn't super specific, but it gave, like I said, it gave us that top of mind feeling in a lot of our clients and.

Potential clients minds.

What we did then was actually go one step further instead of just putting out a message from, from an idea from the group, I believe. And something I've learned recently was reaching out to our clients directly. And one thing I just like this was gold and has been gold for me is the three call strategy. Thank you, Dan. Like we reached out to all of our clients and just checked in and said, hey, hey, how you going? Where can you tell me how you're affected? And was just that listening ear not coming in going, hey, we've got this solution, let buy it from me, I'm just coming in. But the three call strategy was just, it's just gold. Just call, call three times. If they don't answer on the third, then leave them, leave a message that. It sounds so simple, but I never do that. I'd call someone once and go, oh, they didn't answer. Maybe I'll call a second time. But didn't. Definitely not a third. It's putting yourself out there because it's saying, I have something really important to talk to you about and what result. The result from one of those calls was a client who was.

A really big client of ours and she answered, picked up and was a bit, you know, edgy on the phone going, you know, hi, what do you want?

And yeah, I was just able to have a really empathetic conversation with it. Just talking about, hey, what's. What does your business look like? What, what challenges you're facing now? Asked lots of really great questions and was just a really good sounding board from that.

We were able to like nothing happened on that call. She was like, yep, you know, thank you so much for calling at the end. She was really warm and appreciative at the end. But down the track we had some contact back saying, hey look, we need this video done. Can you help us out? And that was just one story of, you know, a whole list of like leads that would cut, would come in from seeing us on LinkedIn or knowing our brand and going, these guys may be able to help. These guys are probably still open. Look, they're all putting out all this message. They're open, let's get in touch.

I love it. And it wasn't the first time you did something like that. I mean, I remember you mentioning an art gallery almost.

Exactly the same time when people were literally losing it, going, oh, my God, everything's over. What I love about your approach is that you are. You were seeing the opportunity. And I know that's what we foster that in the group. I mean, the accelerator is all about bringing attention and going, let's ignore what's going on out there. What can we impact? So talk to me about that project. I thought that was just. It was so quick to respond and I think the speed of response is really key in business.

Yeah, yeah, that was a fantastic one. So we got a call from a client we'd never worked with before, a gallery, and they're like, hey, we need to. We've just opened this new exhibition and now we have to shut down. Like, what are we going to do? Can you help us do some video stuff? And we're like, okay, cool.

We had done like 360 virtual tours in the past and stuff like that, but we didn't have the gear anymore. We thought, look, let's pivot quick here. So we borrowed actually Bailey, my employee's camera, 360 camera. We got in there and we're like, hey, we can do this, this, this and this. We can capture your whole exhibition. We can put it up online. We'. We can do these workshops that you were going to do. We can, we can get footage. I ran, ran the person who was running the workshops through like a how to film yourself briefing so that we could get good footage from her and mashed it all together to create video workshops, a video workshop series. So we had this whole package of content.

Ready to pitch to them to solve their problems. And it was just, it was amazing. We got there, they had more spaces, so we were able to upsell them on filming more in their space while we could. And yeah, that project's all done and completed now, but it was that one to two week window when, like, everyone was a bit unsure these guys were ready to do something. And we were able to bring the suggestions on what they could do. And they loved it.

I think one of the most powerful things that I. It's not about me, but what I get out of being part of the accelerator program that I've created is being surrounded by really smart business owners who, you know, and I know I lead it, but it's fostered by the group. And that is, you know, leadership is about choosing what you consume and how you respond. And the thing that was, I think really key for me in that whole thing was just like, right, we need to step out front and set a course of action to support our clients. Can you share some of your perspectives being in the accelerator program and how that's impacted your business?

Yeah, definitely.

One thing that has been amazing and you just touched on it then was what you consume, what you feed on actually determines what choices you make and it influences what choices you make.

I was so on board with it. But you know, you are, you are very clear on suggesting that don't. Just don't consume any media at the moment, like the news media. Just stay away at the start that was really crucial, like not, not taking on board any communication. That was fear based because that influences you and it influences your decisions and your positivity and all that stuff. Stuff. But actually being a part of the group meant that I was able to bounce ideas off of other people. I was able to jump in on a process and that was probably the most valuable thing that I, you know, the reason we jumped into the video business accelerator because I had lots of different pieces of the puzzle going around and I could see so many options. But what the jumping into the program has done is given, given us like a process to follow and, and that's, you know, reigns in all the ideas into a step by step process, in an implementation of all sorts of golden things that mean that we've got structure, which was probably the most important thing for my business and for me because I can feel a little bit erratic and I get, you know, distracted by different ideas and is having a structure and a plan in place to follow, it just, it brings results because you don't have to be hold all the ideas up here. They're all written down, they're in a plan of attack. And you're breaking down those goals into tasks, weekly tasks, and getting it done and the whole time being supported by a group of people that are on the same process, which is absolute gold.

And it's interesting, isn't it, because you've been in business for six years. It's not like you didn't know how to run a business. I just want to touch on this because it's really interesting that in the last couple of months, I think virtually every business I know has been impacted in some way, yet you reported an increase in sales.

Yeah, it kind of surprised me too, to be honest. It was surprising.

Yeah.

But predictable because actually when you follow a process and the consistency that we do we deploy in the group on a weekly basis? I mean, it is, it is, it does work.

Yep. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's what we've found. We, as I said, like, we before, we kind of went month to month and we were thinking, you know, pulling it straws on ideas and implementing things sporadically, but having that plan and that process. Yeah, as you said, it makes things predictable. You go, I know that if I do this, I am going to get a result. And because I'm doing something, something will be achieved.

That sounds simple as well. But a lot of before we jumped into this group, we were doing a whole heap of random things and, and, I don't know, like measuring nothing, planning, very little. Just going, you know, week to week, day to day, as best we knew. But following the process and the steps and the guide, and having a guide, super valuable. Just the power of having a mentor in yourself and leading yourself, leading a group of people, it just nails in your focus. It really dials in that focus and enables you to take decisive actions that are leading towards a specific goal, which is what we want to achieve.

And as creatives, that's often where we kind of get unstuck. Because I run this group, because it's therapy for me. Because when I ran a business, I was hitting the same income year on year, doing everything myself, and we were doing pretty good money, but I was knackered. And I think what happened was I invested literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in education, traveled the world, going to events to learn everything I could about marketing, sales, copywriting, business process, sales process. And then I put it through the lens of I'm a creative. How can I interpret this and share this with others? Because for some people who are perhaps listening or watching this, who don't know what a mastermind is, can you describe what your perspective is on what this business mastermind is to help those who are perhaps on the outside looking and understand a bit more about what it is we're doing?

Yeah, sure. So.

A business mastermind, and our business mastermind is a group of filmmakers and video business owners.

Who want to scale their business.

Who are invested in the idea of growth and becoming more successful, leading more balanced lives. All of the good stuff. So we're all on the same page in terms of our goals. That's like the start of a business or a mastermind. But yeah, you go, no, no, I.

Was going to say.

And the power of that collective, it's, it's, it's really significant, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. Yeah. Because you. We're all, we're all striving for the same thing, which means we're doing it together, which is a whole heap more powerful than trying to do something on your own because you have a group of people that are kind of almost as invested in your success as they are in their own success. Which is, which is a crazy cool thing. But what we do is we led by yourself. We're on a process of.

Implementing business processes and systems into our business in a way that communicates our special source who we are and what we do for clients in terms of getting real results and getting success for our clients through our services. We implement these things to make our business super clear but also scalable. So to go beyond ourselves, which is something as creatives is, I know that's a big step is thinking about business as something outside of yourself because we know that you can't, if you're going to sell a business, your business isn't worth anything if it's just you because you can't sell you.

And that was something that, you know, I had awareness of before jumping into this group. But it's been, it's been jumping into the group has been a process of actually creating that business that is outside of myself, that is able to grow. Because we were hitting the same, we were finding the same thing that you described before is we were hitting a, you know, you know, an income ceiling of like 222 30k a year. And we did that a couple of years in a row. And we're like, we're trying but it's not growing. Like we had some really fast growth at the start, but this is, I'm not content with just hitting a ceiling. So jumping into this group was our way of going. Right. What are we going to do to grow beyond this ceiling breakthrough? We need to get some outside perspective and we need to jump on a process with a group of people. It was, yeah, the perfect, perfect situation.

Well, the mastermind group notion was created in the 30s and Napoleon Hill's book Think and Grow Rich and he interviewed, you know, a lot of industry leaders at the time and they discovered that the businesses that had a kind of board of directors style approach externally to the company enabled them to be challenged on some of their decisions. And I think that's one of the most valuable things. When we're on a weekly group coaching call, I have.

A non emotional attachment to a decision or a problem that's being presented. And so I have no reason not to Tell it straight. And that's something that I feel. I'd love to get your perspective on this. How important is that weekly connection where you come on a call and we have different themes on different weeks, but how important is that ability to present a problem and get a very objective perspective and maybe just sitting listening to other businesses? You sometimes get so many different ideas, don't you?

Yeah, 100%. That outside perspective is crucial because you don't, you know, when you're operating your business, you've. It's, you know, you're going step by step and plugging away and doing the best you can, but you don't. You don't get that outside feedback. And business, your business is a really personal thing. Like, it's really. It's close to home. So it's generally not something that you open for feedback. You know, you don't open publicly for feedback on what you're doing. But jumping into a business mastermind gives you that outside perspective. As you said, it's been super valuable for us because we come up with ideas or start on a process that we thought was going to be the right track. But we have the trust in you that you're going to tell it straight and that the other group members are going to contribute ideas that may bring us just slightly back on path where our idea was kind of heading in a direction that we didn't actually really want to go down. We just thought that might be the best way. But having your experience in building your own business, but leading others through the same process, it gives us confidence that decisions we make will be good ones, but they will lead to the outcomes that we want to achieve. So that confidence is. Is super important. It gives us the ability to act on things confidently, which kind of gets stuff done in terms of us making marketing material for ourselves, that's one thing that we were terrible at. Horrendously bad. We didn't do any. How did we survive? I don't know. But to grow, you need to communicate to a wider audience or your target audience that is bigger than just the potential and capability of word of mouth, which is what we were operating on before. I know as a common story.

So it's an interesting point in word about. Because I know this happened in my business, but again, this is not about me. I want to learn from you. It's like you were running a business for six years and you had a business partner and that relationship ceased. And I know it was all completely cool and amicable and your business partner wanted to go in a different direction. So what was it about? You know, with six years of experience, why was it, why did it take you six years before you reached out for external support? I think that's something that probably I know myself when I was running my business, we got a business coach in quite early on and it was a chunk of change at the time and it was like, oh, I'm not sure we can afford this. But once I'd done it once, it was almost like, how can I afford not to do this? But yet so many people I know and speak to never consider getting external support. Why do you think that is and what was it that changed for you?

That's a great question.

I kind of always.

Had a value and desire to get some external help, to get a business coach or business mentor, but it was really, for us it was about finding the right person. And we invested in a few different courses that, you know, standalone online courses that helped part of our business and saw part of, you know, a little bit of growth from that and business development. But I think it took us so long. And this kind of speaks to the challenge of partnerships in, is that when you have a 50, 50 partner, you need unanimous decision to make decisions. And it's tough when each individual has feelings and.

Hunches and wants to act on their intuition, but you kind of need to convince the other person to do it. So we made slow decisions as a result. And that's kind of one thing that I wanted to change. Taking over the business was to be able to make fast decisions and to be able to experience fast growth. And one of those things was finding the right person and being able to act on it quickly. And I have to credit Bailey, our post production master manager. He.

Found you somehow on LinkedIn was following you for a while and.

Could see that it would be a really great fit for us and was work it. What you were saying that you do was exactly what we wanted. And being having a video, having built your own video business and having a filmmaking background, it's just like that was one thing that really, really was a challenge for us in the business coach side of things because, you know, there's a ton of them getting around. We needed someone who got our business and I wasn't confident about that. With a lot of different business coaches, I, you know, they may have had a process and whatever, but I just like, I don't know if you're going to get.

Filmmaking, I don't know if you're going to get the video business. And that's you know, one thing we didn't even have to question with the Video Business Accelerator.

Yeah, no, it's. It's pretty cool. And again, I think that what makes this different is that obviously I've been in your shoes. I've been in that situation where you're running a video business and you're hitting the same revenue every year. Like, the business partnership thing's an interesting one.

It can.

It can be. I had business partners and I prefer not to now. It just, as you say, it makes things an awful lot easier. But it can work for some people, and I don't dismiss it entirely.

Yeah.

So how have things changed since you've been working with us? I mean, it's only been really a few months and we've had coronavirus at the same time. And how are you reflecting on your time? And I guess, well, look, you know, I suppose another way to look at this is that when coronavirus hit, some people were like, I've got to cut costs. And I'm really grateful that, you know, for the most part, very few members actually cut costs in this group. They saw this as a real lifeline. Talk to me about your journey and why you're still here.

Yeah, good. Look, we. Yeah, we jumped in. We've been three months in now, and.

We did look at our budgets and we're like, all right, we're cutting costs. What can we cut? And we looked at Video Business Accelerator as like, this is crucial in this time, especially, like more than the other time, like more than normal, normal times. We need.

Direction. We need help on our decisions because we don't have the luxury of time and making mistakes and learning from them. Every decision we make in this time really counts. So we need to have that confidence and trust and the backing of some people who are on the same journey and a mentor. So that's really kind of. And I mean, I saw the value in the first month. We started doing our strategic plan, we started doing. Working towards a bit of a marketing plan. And for the first time in many years, I. I felt that I was on track to build the business that I dreamed about, to build a business that I knew was possible. I always known it was possible, but I couldn't see how I was going to get there. And.

This group has given me confidence that I am getting there and I know the path. So that it's kind of been really, really, really important over the last three months to have stayed within the group and to have seen that value. It's been really, really special. But in terms of.

What businesses look like, it's actually enabled us to really get razor sharp on our priorities and what we should be focusing on.

And you know, you have different seasons in business that you need to be focusing your attention on different areas.

And in this season, it was really making sure that we are getting some revenue in the door and how we're going to do that. So, yeah, I suppose that three months is. We've had a. Yeah, it's really only been Corona that we've experienced in, in this business accelerator. But it's. Yeah, it's enabled us to not only survive, but thrive.

And, and, and we're obviously coming out of Corona now. I mean, how is, how are things looking in your pipeline now for the next three months?

Yeah, it's. It's felt like the floodgates have opened, to be honest. We were getting some good headway through the last three months, but now we've got like five big project inquiries come in in the last week, Another one this morning that are just like, if we took on all of these, it'd probably be over our capacity. Like, this is amazing. Like, we've got choice. And that's one thing that your marketing and generating leads gives you is choice to be able to look at your.

The work that's inquiries that are coming in and leads that are coming in and go, which one is the best fit for me? Which one do I bring the best value to? And yet at the moment, like, next three months is looking pretty.

Busy, but in a really constructive way. I know people throw out the, yeah, we're busy, we're busy. But sometimes busy can be.

Pretty useless unless it's the right type of busy.

And controlling what that looks like so that it doesn't drown you. But yeah, I'm confident that over the next three months we are sitting well in a great position to launch from because we've set our foundation up really well and we've been consistent through the last three months. We're in a position now that we actually get to coming out of the fog of Corona. We're able to actually really leverage the opportunities that are coming in and they are flooding it.

I'm so excited for you guys. I mean, you've grown during coronavirus and as you say, all of those things are right. You've got a very clear marketing message now. You've got a very clear target demographic. It is really that simple. It's not easy, but it's very simple. Where can people find out more about you and what you do?

Well, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I am going to be embarking on creating some awesome content for.

Our LinkedIn soon, which is going to be fun. Doing a little bit of a vlogging series or you can jump on our website to do a bit of stalking of us to see what our works like and all that jazz. But everything's going to be changing very soon and building and refining but website@hebronfilms.com or my LinkedIn Caleb Maxwell. You'll find me at either one of.

Those spots so we'll link to those in the show Notes Caleb, it's been a pleasure. I'm so excited to see where the next three months take you in the three months after that, because I'm very confident you're going to have an absolutely staggering year.

Thanks Dan. I'm looking forward to it too.

Hey guys, thanks for watching. I hope you got a huge, huge amount of value from that episode. If you're looking for additional support or resources to support your business journey, then head over to Denleny.com where you can get a whole heap of other resources, free downloads and access all the other episodes in the series. Be sure to subscribe and I'll see you next time.