Adapting to the 'seasons' in your video business. EP #227 - Shorty

Howdy guys. It's Den here on Tuesday, October 19th. This is episode 227.

This Week's Shorty. So I want to start by saying thank you. We get a weekly.

Like roundup of the numbers. We don't track it too massively, but you know, we track how many downloads we have a week, how many listeners and stuff. And we just had our first ever over thousand downloads a week, which was really cool.

So thank you for listening. Hitting a milestone, like a thousand downloads a week is pretty cool. And I always like to think of what would a thousand people look like in a room listening to me speak on the microphone. So I'm grateful that obviously enough people find this content helpful and useful. You know, all I want to do is share my knowledge and insights with, you know, the businesses I work with every day to, to see them build and scale. And I realize not everyone is ready for the commitment that that requires. But obviously the reason we do this, this free podcast, is to provide value. Now in terms of a marketing funnel, we don't do it just for the good of our health. We, we want to provide value and we hope that enough people will listen to the podcast and then maybe decide to go to the website, download an ebook, get some, some emails off us and have a dig around and see if there's something there that resonates. And you know, at some point when you're ready, maybe you'll think about having a chat about joining one of our programs. And that's really, it's a front end marketing offer. It's, it's truly a, an SEO.

Free line content strategy. So we create these two episodes a week with a view to getting the message out there to provide a space for you to come and feel like you're not alone. Feel like there are lots of challenges in business. And what we do is we try to play everything through the lens of a videographer. And look, building a business is hard, it takes, it's challenging, it can be overwhelming. In fact, I talk about overwhelm in an episode next week because I see it a lot where people find themselves overwhelmed. And overwhelm is usually just a sign that you need to create some better personal systems to help you focus. But anyway, I wanted to say thank you for listening. I appreciate you being here. And it was, it was a nice moment to see that. I think it was 10, 19 downloads we had last week. And, and that's the thing. This, this, this whole marketing strategy, everything in marketing takes time. We have been, you know, running the show in this form for almost two years. And you know, it's a fair bit of work. You know, it's a commitment. We don't have any sponsorship, we don't do any kind of like paid advertising with it. We just, we provide it as a part of our front end marketing. So if you enjoy it, the thing you could do that would be of the greatest value would be to leave us a review on Apple or wherever you consume your podcasts.

And also, you know, reach out to me on LinkedIn, Denleny, and let me know where you're listening and what you love about the show. And yeah, it'd be nice to know how far and wide our reach is. You know, you're, you're sitting here in an office in Australia speaking into a microphone. You don't really know who those thousand people are. I mean, I know some of the listeners because they tell me. But anyway, I wanted to say thank you for listening. I appreciate you being here. And just to touch a little bit on this morning's coaching call, we had an absolutely phenomenal call this morning and we've been having a lot of discussion recently about the sort of juxtaposition between winning the big high paying jobs and balancing that with the lower paying jobs that may not necessarily be as creative. And the conversation moved further that way this week to talk about innovation within video. You know, how are you innovating your service offering so that you don't become staid or don't become old fashioned, you don't lose touch with what the current trends are or what the market seeking. But what was really cool was while there's, there are always new market trends, that the general consensus from the members was that the majority of blue chip clients, the ones, you know, 5 million plus who are spending money on content, they just want safety and security and nothing too groundbreaking or that pushes the boundary too much. And that's really what the VBA is all about. We are servicing the corporate video end of the market. And one of my, one of my clients, Declan in, in Ireland, who's been with us a couple of years now, he, he says, you know, I don't mind being the boring corporate guy. He said that I'm okay with that. And, and I think we say that from the point of view of us as creators, you know, not every job you do is going to creatively stimulate you. But we are professional filmmakers, which means we have to create work that may not be the most exciting for us, but our job is to make it look exciting for the market. And I liken that to my time as a cameraman, when almost every day you'd reach a situation where you'd be in a small room with no space and you couldn't turn the lights off and you have to try and make it look interesting. And from a lighting perspective. For me, creating shape, creating contrast is the job of the lighting cameraman, the job of the director of photography, whatever you want to call yourself, but really your job is to turn a two dimensional image on screen, create some depth and dynamics, you know, so everything you're seeing in real life in 3D gets crushed down to 2D on a screen. So you have to use light and shade and color and contrast and depth of field to separate, you know, the important information from the non important information. And it's a lot like business. You know, you're just working out, you know, where does your effort and energy need to go?

And it's okay that not everything you're going to do is going to be exciting. Which leads me onto a conversation I had last week with a friend of mine, Gideon Shalwick, who runs splashio. We had lunch and we talked about the idea of seasons in business. And I may have touched on this before, but the idea that not every season needs to be a sprint to the finish, not every season needs to be a hard drive on sales. We were both discussing how we just had a winter season over here in Australia where we're just letting things settle in bed, in, fix a few things on the back end, ready for a kind of, you know, an end to the year, finish strong, have a break, come back in the new year and, and, and have a drive towards, you know, new opportunities. And that's something that I've certainly found. I was talking to my wife just yesterday about this, how sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. You can't always be running at, you know, 15 hour days, a million miles an hour. It just doesn't work. And, and sometimes some time and space, and certainly having a team helps this enormously, gives you the time and space to think strategically about where you want to go next. You know, one of the things we're doing just now is we're testing a new platform. We want to get off Facebook, so we host our secret groups on Facebook and there's a lot of comments from the chaps that just, you know, we just feel like it's a bit busy and a bit noisy.

And distracting and so we're trying a new service, but we're finding a bit of a hiccup with one of the, one of the aspects of it. And so we have to kind of weigh up, you know, is this worth the inconvenience while they tweak this one little aspect? And I'll tell you what it is. It's video upload speed. You know, we can upload videos every Friday we do a weekly WIN video inside the VBA Mastermind and we simply, simply pick up your phone, record a video, hit send and up it goes. But what we're finding is on the new platform, a one minute video has taken almost five minutes to upload. And so we've got to evaluate is that that going to decrease engagement and, and, and is it worth waiting the five minutes the video to go up to to get off Facebook? And the fact is we don't know. So we're beta testing that with a number of our members just at the minute. We'll see how that goes. But yeah, the idea really was to.

In taking some time out from the day to day operations, you can begin to explore how your future business might look. And that's something that I found to be quite an enjoyable process recently for the first time in many years, just not pushing hard all the time. And that's because we have an established business, we have systems, we have team.

And that is something that I really want for you in your business is to be able to kind of step back from the tools. And that's something that can be very hard to do, but we help people do it all the time. That's what we do inside the vba, you know, help you work out how to step back from being on the tools, how to build a team, how to build systems and get some of that freedom back. Ask yourself this. Has owning your own video business been everything you dreamed it would be when you first got started? It might be hard to admit, but think about whether you're genuinely achieving everything you set out to. When you made that decision to grab the camera and go it alone, are you really working less? Are you really earning more and are you really in control? Chances are you're bloody good at what you do, but you're having to work like a dog, 70 plus hours a week. Whether it's filming, editing, marketing or any of the other jobs that come with being the big boss of your own video company. When you're managing projects, constantly searching out for new clients and worrying about cash flow, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture or make real progress. Let's face it, that stress is the last thing you need when you're trying to run a profitable company that supports you and the people you care about. Truth is, a business that provides financial, professional, and personal freedom really is achievable. But maybe you've got that nagging feeling that you're overworked, lacking stability, and struggling to get to where you really want to be right now. It could be that you just don't know how to make a positive change on your own. So I created the Video Business Accelerator Coaching programs to really supercharge your video business. With these unique coaching programs, you'll learn all the tools you need to get complete confidence in the success of your video business. You can take the first step on your journey to a successful business that doesn't control your life. Let me show you how. Head over to Denlany.com and click on Accelerator.