Always be innovating. EP #241 - Shorty

G', day guys. It's Dan here on Tuesday 14th December with episode Where Are we? Episode 241. And today I want to talk about innovation and ask you the question, are you innovating within your business?

Businesses that fail to innovate, die. It's as simple as that. And, and especially in our industry, you can't afford to sit back. You gotta be thinking, how can you improve and engage your clients on a more deeper level so they never want to leave you? Because that is what business is all about.

It costs way more to acquire a brand new customer as it does to retain an existing customer. And customers only ever leave if they don't feel like they're getting what they need anymore. And I learned this about two years ago. I just cut out all my social media and I just focused on helping my clients succeed. Now as a result of that, our attention rate is incredible. Within the vba, I have members that have been with me almost three years and I'm proud to call them friends. And their businesses are growing. And as a result, my business is growing. But the priority is always on helping my clients achieve their goals. And so we had an amazing session last night for our first call and we talked about the idea of wealth and the idea of how does, how do you create wealth and what does wealth mean? It doesn't necessarily mean Ferraris, Lambos and mansions. It can mean time, money and freedom. Time that is your own to choose to spend how you like. The money is there to fund it, and the freedom to choose how you spend your time.

And very few video businesses ever get to that stage because they're too stuck in the operations. They're too stuck doing what they always do, which is jumping on an edit, jumping on a shoot. Oh, but you know what? I like shooting, I like editing, I get it. But if you want to scale a video business, you can't be on the tools all the time. I'm not saying you can't pick and choose which jobs you do, but as long as you're still heavily involved in operations, you're going to find yourself struggling to ever really grow.

And you know, if you want to sustain a business that doesn't consume you, you got to start thinking about how you can innovate to stay ahead of the curve. And one of the ways you can do that is just by having a really strong culture, a really strong culture that people love working with you and they're attracted to you and they feel like they want to work with you because you're offering something nobody else is offering. Video production is a highly commoditized industry. It's a service industry where many people complain about erase the bottom on price, but you're only ever competing on price if you're not doing a good enough job of your marketing and your relationships. And so if you focus on that, you know, innovating in terms of how you market, how you communicate, how you connect with your clients, how you look after them.

Then all of your problems go away. And it's actually a very simple solution to a problem that plagues many, many video business owners this time of year. Things dry up a little bit and they start to panic. So use this time to innovate. How can you do things differently? How can you learn lessons from this year and create a new mindset going into next year? We had a phenomenal call just this morning actually. Caleb, one of our members, shared his six step process for hiring and retaining a players. And he gave an most amazing one hour long presentation about the way they've built their culture at Hebron. How they hire people very slowly and are constantly searching for unique talent because that impacts their culture and their clients notice and their clients just want to work with them. And they're not the cheapest video production company where they're based, but they are one of the most highly regarded and they charge a premium rate and they deliver a premium service. I'm very proud of those guys. They work really hard, but they're very smart and they're always innovating, they're always thinking, how can we do this better for our clients? And so if you're not thinking in terms of innovation in your video business, you are risking being left behind. I had an amazing conversation with one of my members this week where he was asking questions about how could he apply what he does to the metaverse. And some of you might be like the meta, what.

Innovating means looking ahead. Look at where the puck is going, not where it's been. And you know, if you go and Google any video production company on Google right now, it's very much more of the same. You know, it's all me too, me too, me too. And what I'm excited about is businesses that innovate and video, video businesses inside the VBA are having this kind of conversation all the time on our coaching calls. So we're in an environment where we're constantly thinking about where is the puck going? And.

We had a phenomenal session last night about wealth and building the race team to get you to the goal that you want to create wealth, which is time, money and freedom. And I'm super excited to see the guys response to that and how excited they are for next year. And we're shutting down. Next week on the 20th will be our last coaching call until the 10th of January and everyone has a really good break. And you know, it wasn't always like that. For many years as a freelancer, it was a really tough time. In fact, I hated it. But with diligence and study and investment in the right coaching, I've discovered how to build my business in a way where there's a team, there's a process, and I'm no longer the required linchpin to hold everything together. And I'm going to work on that even more next year. But one of the things we're doing to innovate is we're building an app. We're building an app that's going to be released sometime in January. It's been submitted to the App Store and we're now in the hands of Apple to process that. And that is primarily for our members to communicate on because we're moving off Facebook. And so whereas Facebook is a free platform, we don't like the fact that if the platform is free, you are the product. There's so much distraction, there's so much.

Influence there that we just don't like as a collective. And so we're investing in an app and we're going to launch that in January. What I'm also going to do is launch a group within the app for listeners of this podcast. And we had a fee, we have a free Facebook group. But you know, it's been so difficult to get any engagement in there because there's just so much noise on Facebook and we haven't really put a lot of effort into it in the last year or two. But I want to, for those of you that are interested, I'm going to have a, a kind of forum within the app that will allow listeners of this show who are thinking about ways in which to scale their business to come in, ask questions. We'll do some lives for members of the app exclusively in there. And then we'll have some great content as well to help you get that journey started. So we'll be releasing that sometime early in the new year, but that's what we're doing to innovate. We are relaunching our training content on a new platform. We're going to have a single sign on. So for those of you who are listening to this who are members of the community, there'll be a single sign on where you download the app, you log in once, you attach the training library, and everything is seamless. And so that's what we're doing. We're constantly looking at ways to make the journey simpler for our members, to take away the barriers. And by not being on Facebook, we remove a massive distraction. And I don't think Facebook's very good for people's mental health anyway because you get distracted and you start seeing things and you start to compare what you're doing to other people and it's just not a healthy environment. So we're taking, taking the bull by the horns and we're removing ourselves from that environment. And yes, we have to pay for that. But I don't mind investing in that because I'd rather have a community who are engaged in growing the business without distraction than anything else. And so I'll be sharing more details of that when we've got them. But if you're interested, there'll be an opportunity to download our app and get access to some great content and resources. As a podcast listener, 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 denlani.com and click on accelerator.