Are you the video guy or a business owner? Shorty EP#70

G' day guys. Welcome to this Little Shorty. It's the 10th of March.

Week 11 of the year. So we're almost at the end of the first business quarter of the year and shit, hasn't it gone quickly? It's, it's been insane. We have just returned from Melbourne where we had our.

Quarterly mastermind with our video business accelerator clients here in Australia. Absolutely fantastic couple of days we had. On day one we had Alana joins join us who'd been on the podcast few weeks ago talking about a marketing strategy which went down really well. And we also had a two hour session with Yana Martens, your video coach, and helped us all understand how we can present better and, and get rid of some of those limiting beliefs and actually be more authentic with our content when reaching out to new clients. Because, you know, let's face it, there's so many video companies that don't actually use video to promote themselves. And the very thing you're selling is clients to buy into video because it's such a, great, you know, tool for communicating. And yet perhaps you're not using video yourself if you're not using video yourself. You want to think about that? Anyway, today I wanted to share a little insight from a presentation we did at the workshop last week and that we've just done on our weekly call. And really it's about productivity and it's called how to Achieve Productivity Nirvana and Claim five Hours Back Per Week. The most common complaint I think I get from filmmakers is they just don't have enough time. And so what this presentation was all about was, well, how can you create more time? And creating more time is actually something that you can, you can't create more time, but you can be much more effective with the time that you have. And I guess the, the challenge that faces most business owners in the video space is one of identity. You know, do you identify as a video guy or do you identify as a business owner? Because certainly my own journey, I started really life as a cameraman. I was a cameraman. That was my identity. And you know, following the accident in 2001, moved in some other things with equipment rental and sales for a while, but I was still known as the video guy. And it's only when I started the business in 2009 that that I realized I had to start learning how to be a business owner. And you know, what we tend to do is we tend to migrate from being the freelancer to the business owner and we tend to take a lot of bad habits with us.

That I think are not going to help you to grow your business. If you want to double your profit, you got to stop being the video guy and start thinking like a business owner. So imagine you hired a CEO to run your business. Let's say your business is doing 500,000 a year and you hired someone to run that. What tasks would you want them to be focusing on a daily basis? Would it be bookkeeping? Would it be doing the admin? Would it be tweaking edits? My guess is not. So stop doing it. Why are you doing it? If you're the most valuable asset in your business.

Why are you doing a lot of little things that could be outsourced or could be, you know, dealt with later? And so that's really the theme of today's coaching call was, you know, how do you build consistent growth? Well, it's the result of implementing the right tasks. And so, you know, if you want financial security, you need to identify as a business owner first, not just a video guy, and do what business owners do, which is, you know, act as if you are the business owner. I mean, you are the business owner, but actually act like a business owner. Don't keep doing little things. You know, if you're doing a little task that takes you 10 minutes a day, and you think, well, it's only 10 minutes. But if you do that every day, that's 50 minutes a week, maybe an hour a week, that's four hours a month. That's time you could be spending on. On marketing or sales. And really, any small business, in fact, any business, the primary focus should be marketing and sales. If you focus on marketing and sales, you're bringing cash into the business. All your other problems can go away with money. And so it's really important, you know, to ask yourself the question, would the CEO of a $500,000 company do what you're doing right now? And that's really, really important. And it ties into our growth accelerators, which is all to do with, you know, why? What are your personal. What is your purpose? What is your mission? What is your mission? Your mission is the, you know, the commercialization of your purpose and your personal goals and what does success look like for you? And at the moment, you're probably doing everything yourself. So. Or if you have a small team, are you delegating efficiently? So we look at Growth Accelerator 6, which is delegate. You know, it's about communication and autonomy, systems and processes, leadership. Now, if you're running a company with just yourself or maybe one person, you still need to learn to be a leader. But if you're just working on your own, then the leadership needs to come from within. You need to ask yourself the question is what I'm doing right now, the highest and best use of my time? And actually, I just recorded an amazing podcast with Ben Simkin last week, which will be coming out in the next month or so, all about the highest and best use theory. Ben's an absolute master of it. That's where I learned about it. And we got him on the show actually sharing, you know, exactly what that is. And Ben is a multimillionaire at sort of 34, you know, and. And he's. He's been working since he was 16. He's, he's. He used to be a computer. Computer nerd. He was the guy who was fixing the computers thinking no one else could do it. And so he's been through that kind of parallel, if you like, from being a video guy, he's been the computer guy, and he's built up multiple businesses. And, and one of those. One of the reasons he's been able to do that is the highest and best use theory. But anyway, how do you claim five hours back a week? Well, first of all, you've got to audit yourself. You've got to review your current situation. You've got to go, well, what am I doing just now that's not actually serving that bigger purpose? And then the second part of that is mindset. You've got to have principles for being productive. Your mindset has to be set in such a way that you actually know what you should be focusing on. And then you need to clear your plate. You need to clear your plate using the four Ds.

And then you need to identify which aspects of what you're doing moves the needle. In terms of what do you focus on? Because if you don't focus on the right things, you could be busy but not productive. And then we look at some daily productivity tips in terms of maximizing your day. But I want you to think about auditing yourself. Give yourself a score out of 10 on health and fitness, family, relationship, friends. Give yourself a score of 10 on business, personal finance, fun and spirituality. Those are the kind of key areas we need to be really kind of punching nines out of the park. But if you're not, that's okay. Don't judge it. Look at the areas that you're weak or light and think, well, that's where I need to focus. So really, in terms of mindset, you need to have a sense of urgency that you haven't got, you know, time to mess about figuring stuff out. You want to get there quickly. What? A new guy just joined us and asked mine, Declan, about a month ago, not even a month ago, and he just said today, he said, you know, I've, I've had more growth in the last, you know, seven days than I have in the last five years because we've just given him structure and he's got a successful company in Ireland and he's like, I just can't believe how, how much I was wasting time outside of the process. And he's just absolutely taken to like a dug to water and is absolutely thriving. And on the call this morning, we're just saying, you know, the call, the weekly calls are about checking in and getting that support. So I don't have time to go through all of the principles for being productive. But one key one is if you don't set the rules, others will make them for you. And the second thing I want you to focus on is separate your feelings from whatever task you've got in front of you because it doesn't matter. Sometimes you just got to just do stu to clear your plate. You want to be looking at the four Ds which is delegate, delete, defer. And do you know what can you delegate outside of you doing the work? What can you delete altogether? What can you just stop doing that's not serving your ultimate higher purpose of revenue and lifestyle? 3, what can you defer? What can you actually put off till later? And then number four, what can you do? What do you need to do right now that will absolutely serve you? So some examples of things you need to stop doing is like scrolling on social media, driving to meetings instead of making calls, speaking to unqualified leads. You know, people who just make an inquiry without any qualification purpose, it will just drain you. And there's actually quite a number of them. I don't have time to go through them just now. Delegate, what could you get other people to do for you? Bookkeeping, posting on social, any other low level tasks, then deferring, you know, what can be done later, you know, updating your branding or you know, perfecting things unnecessarily or coffee catch ups without any real agenda, or applying perfectionism where it's not required. Those are some of the key things there. But the things you should do more of are setting up partnerships or calling past clients or following up with old leads, or emailing your database or connecting on LinkedIn. Those are the things that actually drive your business forward. I just want to leave you today with some daily productivity tips. TTP Task Time Priority Set a task, allocate a time and prioritize it. And make sure you keep some white space in your calendar so you're not putting things back to back because then you're setting yourself up to fail. And the building blocks really are sleep, exercise, water, meditation and rest. So I guess the question is, what is the number one change you need to make to build your business and take it to the next level? And as always guys, if you love what you hear on the show here, please do share it and let people know and leave us a review on itunes. It really helps us to get the message out there. And as always, if you need support or help, reach out. I'm happy to have a chat. Connect with me on LinkedIn en Lenny and yeah, hope you have a great day.

You've been listening to the how to Scale a Video Business podcast with me, your host, Dan Lenny. If you're a video business owner who's hit a ceiling and we benefit from mentorship, support and coaching, then check out how you can work with me over@denlenny.com 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. And don't forget to share. If you feel you've gotten value from this episode and you think it would be useful for other filmmakers you know, then please do me a massive favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in. We'll see you next week.