Are you looking far enough ahead - lessons from racing. EP #273 - Den Lennie

G', day, guys. It's Dan Lenny here with episode 273 of the how to Scale a Video Business Podcast. And this week I want to share a lesson I learned from something we did a couple of weeks ago, actually, which was really, really fun. We got to spend a morning racing around a track with Mini Australia in John Cooper Works Minis, which was a lot of fun, which I'll tell you more about in a second. But there was something about that taught me something really valuable that I think we can apply to business.

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So how does racing round a track in a very nice John Cuchepara Works Mini relate to business? Well, it's actually to do with racing lines. So one of the things that I enjoyed most about that experience was I didn't do the fastest lap by a long country mile. Nowhere near it, because I've never really raced cars. It's not something I've ever been that interested in. I mean, I enjoy watching F1, and we've done a bit of karting in the past, but nothing serious. And, you know, I'd always been aware of this idea of a racing line and apex and all these kind of things, but I didn't really know what they meant. And so one of the things that was really awesome about this day was we had instructors who kind of really carefully and described how to take bends and corners, when to break. And they had cones out on the track to help us kind of lead into this. And.

When we went out in the track the first time, there was like three or four cars and a lead car, which was the instructor. And we all had helmets on and stuff, but there were radios in the car. And so the instructor was talking through the turns as we drove around the track. So we were all in our own cars.

And. And so the first three laps, he was just walking us through each turn, when to break, when to turn and what to look for. And the thing that really blew my mind was how early.

We had to break and, and where we were looking as we turned the corner. And that was the thing that got me the analogy towards business. And it's this. Are you looking far enough ahead or are you staring at the steering wheel? Because if you stare at the steering wheel or just ahead of the car, you end up taking all the turns too late, braking too late, and then hitting the corner at the wrong speed, the wrong angle, and then you're actually slowing yourself down as you take the bend.

And the big lesson for me was first of all how early you brake and you brake on the straight and as you pull over to the left hand side of the track on a right hand bend, it's really late before you turn. But the thing that was the most fascinating and some of you might race cars, so you might know what this is, but it was, I never come across it for it was just how far up the track you were looking.

As you were turning the corner. And this crazy thing happened whereby by looking far up the track, the arms just followed. Now the other thing that was really important was how to sit yourself correctly in the car. And BMW have this thing where you put a hand on your head as if you were going to try and gauge the height between the roof and the top of your head. And they reckon it should be four fingers. And then the other thing is to have the steering wheel fully pulled out forward and you're sitting at kind of quarter to three on the steering wheel. And so I did that and it really made a huge difference. So you got great visibility. But that this idea of looking up the track.

Is incredible. And so we started doing these laps and on my final lap I hit 125 down the straight and I was really feeling very confident, turning into a corner at about 70, 80 miles an hour. And it was really incredible actually because I just started looking farther up the track and my body just naturally followed. And so when I think about success in business.

There'S a very direct analogy, and that is a lot of businesses spend too much time worrying about what's happening today.

And kind of worrying too much about the detail that's in front of them right away and not enough time looking ahead.

And so when, when, when people get into trouble with cash flow or with, with not feeling that they've got enough work, it's because they haven't looked far enough ahead and they haven't put preparation in place to make sure they know where they're going. And one of these areas that can cause problems is diluting your offer to the market being too much of a jack of all trades and a master of none. And the problem with that in a marketing context is that if you don't have a clear idea of who you're targeting and what they need, then how can you possibly give them what they want at a Stage when they're just floating around looking for a supplier, if they hit your website and you don't speak their language, they're probably going to ignore you. And so, you know, the idea of looking ahead is it's actually more work upfront than it is to just firefight. And so a lot of people I talk to have this problem where.

They'Re just going from job to job. They're just trying to kind of win the next job. And where I see successful businesses shine is when they get away from that feast and famine by having a very clear idea about who they're targeting and looking further down the track at what they want to achieve. And this comes into something we call the big picture planning. And the big picture is, you know, understanding. Well, it's twofold. One is, first of all, we start with the idea of what do you want success to look like for you? That's number one, how does your future look? And if you plan that out, then we do something called the big picture process, which is we actually map out in terms of what are the products you sell and we run some numbers on them to see how many can you potentially create in a month if you had enough resources that hadn't had enough leads. So let's say you do a talking head or a kind of, you know, a basic corporate. Maybe you could run three of them in a month for $7,500 euros pounds each. Well, you could make 20 grand a month just doing three jobs. But to get those three jobs, depending on your, your sort of, you know, ability to sell, you might only sell one in four to everyone you speak to. So to get three jobs a month, you would have to speak to 12 prospects, and that's 12 sales calls. And to get 12 sales calls booked in, you might need to have 50 to 100 people visit your website who have a genuine need for what you're selling. And that's how we work backwards to then look at your marketing funnel and your sources of traffic. So you need to feed traffic in some capacity into a funnel, and that funnels people into a point where they're ready to have a conversation with you. Then they go through a sales process, and that sales process will yield a certain number of customers. And, and that is what I mean by looking up the road. You know, if you just kind of think about, you know, getting a job to pay the bills, it's like a. It's like a vicious circle that's almost impossible to get out of. And so, you know, it's, it's really the idea of the work we do inside the Up Level program and the VBA elite. It's fundamentally the same just for businesses at different levels. So up levels more for the kind of freelancer, the business that's probably younger in gestation, and then up levels for a more established business who's looking to scale to multiple six figures a year of growth. But fundamentally they follow the same process, which is to get very clear on what you want to achieve and then look way down the road, but with a very clear plan of where your traffic is going to come to, where what kind of funnel your your audience is going to go through and how they're going to pop out the other side, either as a prospect ready to take action or as as not. And and that will yield you the five or three jobs a month that you might need to make 20 grand a month, for example. And and depending on your scale it might or it'll be less. But the fundamentals don't really change. And so I just wanted to share that with you Gati guys and have you think about where are you looking in your current trajectory and do you need the help of an instructor to guide you?

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Sam.