Are You Too Reliant on a Key Client?

G', day, guys. Well, today's a very special day because this is episode number 52 of the podcast. Now, while we've been running for a bit longer than a year, it's nice to celebrate numbers. And today I wanted to talk about key person or key business reliance. You know, I'm increasingly hearing stories of businesses that have one or two main clients, and the risk to one of those clients leaving would be quite devastating to any business. And I want to share a story with you about how that impacted our business at one point and how we've managed to mitigate that risk. So today is a solo episode. I am digging into this important topic that I hope you will take away and get great value from. I'm going to share with you some examples of how to mitigate some of those risks and, you know, support you on that journey. So enjoy the episode.

Welcome to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. Each week we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business. With your host, Dan Lenny, discover how the accelerator program is transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. enjoy this episode.

This is a big topic, folks, and one I know will resonate with you guys listening to this and watching this, because it's something we've all done at one point, and that is have kind of a lot of our business with one or two major clients. And what's great is that when that's going well, you know, there's a lot of money flowing in, there's a great relationship, but what happens is you start to become kind of a little too reliant on that one big client. And then at some point, they will either change the amount they're spending with you or just stop working with you altogether. It can be as simple as someone you have a relationship with at a senior level leaves, a new person comes in and they've got their own team. And that can be a really tough pill to swallow. And I talk to a lot of filmmakers. I have a lot of calls with a lot of people. And the thing that shows up again and again is that people say, yeah, kind of most of my business is with one or two big clients, and that's a really dangerous thing to do. And I think you know that. But how do you. How do you sort of, you know, get out of that hole? How do you kind of reach out to more clients and actually expand what you're doing? Well, I want to tell you a story that about something that happened to me recently wasn't client related, but I think it illustrates this point very, very well. And we'd spent quite some time putting together a new case study video and doing the research and building the funnel and the systems that go around that. And we were ready to press go on the Facebook ad campaign. We'd written five different ads, and we had four different images for each ad. We had 30 different audiences with a possible 600 different combinations. We really kind of looked at this very, very clearly as. As a. As a new marketing strategy. We went to go live, and Facebook disapproved one of the ads. Well, actually, what happened was they approved an ad. So I went, that's looking good. I'll go to bed. When I woke up the next morning, they had disapproved everything. Now, Facebook is a very interesting platform. It's a monopoly, and they set the rules, and they have some very vague community guidelines. And the AI, the machine bot that scans your ads, can pick up on some words and ban you saying, this is wrong. And we got this alert saying, your ad is disapproved because we won't promote MLM or make money from home schemes. Now, that's not what we do. But sometimes the language we use in our ads to do with growth and success trigger the AI. So I woke up to my entire ad account being banned. Now, this is not uncommon. If you advertise on Facebook, they've got a pretty strict policy where they'll kind of just, you know, shut your account down. But what you can do is appeal, and you appeal. And a human looks at it and goes, oh, yeah, I can see that you're not like some sort of dodgy scheme. And then they open up your account account again. Now, what's been happening recently is a lot of people on Facebook have had some very weird stuff going on. And so they lifted my account, restrict my account, bam. And said, yeah, you're all good to go. But almost immediately, I personally became restricted. Now, this is a very new thing with Facebook. They restricted me, saying I'd breached the community guidelines around my ads. Now, what's really unusual is that this happened to about four or five other people that I know who in a mastermind group that I am part of that I coach him outside of the accelerator program.

And, like, the point here is, is that for three weeks now, I've not been able to personally advertise. Now my ad accounts back up, and I've got a business partner and he's able to go in and tweak things. So, you know, we've got some fail safes there. But what was really interesting for the two weeks that I could not market on Facebook, it was pretty frustrating. But instead of getting pissed off, I was like, well, let's just imagine I can't work with Facebook. So it's equivalent to having a big client and that big client suddenly not being there anymore. I was like, okay, what will I do? How would I. If I was not able to advertise on Facebook, what would I do? So I started thinking about that and.

And I started looking. You know, I've been looking at LinkedIn for quite some time. We do a lot of LinkedIn work with our clients in the accelerator program. And I was like, well, I'm not really kind of playing a big game there, so I'll go hard on LinkedIn. And then I also opened up my free Facebook group, which I renamed how to scale a Video Business. And if you've not actually been and checked that group out yet, I'll make sure we link it below. But it's facebook.com groups how to scale a Video Business. Or just search for me Dan Lenny and connect with me and I'll invite you in. But. And we post daily content there. So what happened as a result of this was because I also attend events and Charlie and I talked about this in a few episodes back about the importance of investing in your own education. So I'm a member of Ben Simkins Mastermind and I'm a mentor for that group. And we had an event just a couple of weeks ago and there was lots of different guest speakers and I picked up a lot of different advice and tips and hint.

Including.

A planning template for social media that we now use in our accelerator program. But I actually embraced that myself. And so in the absence of being able to use paid advertising, I've just gone really hard on organic. Now the thing that I've always struggled with with organic and I'm sure you probably find this as well, is like, what do I post? You know, I've been very erratic. I post bits and pieces. There's so many platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, you know, which ones do you use? YouTube. Where do you go? So, so I decided to just focus on Facebook and LinkedIn. I think it's really important if you're looking at marketing, just pick, pick one or two and just go hard there. So we have a Facebook page. I have my personal Facebook page, I have a business page and I have the free Facebook group. So those are my focus on, on, on LinkedIn on Facebook. Sorry. And then on LinkedIn, we have. We're doing a connection strategy, which is something we're teaching in our program as well and in content creation. So the organic approach has been really actually quite effective. And I guess the lesson here is that we kind of ignored organic because we were putting all our effort into paid, which is like we were putting all our effort into the big client. You know, the Facebook would put ad money in. It shows it's lots of people, people are attracted and you your audience that way. But while we weren't able to do that, we realized we'd been ignoring organic. And what I was struggling with was a process for organic. So I went and sought out the information and I've now got a planning template where we have different themes that we post every week. So on a Monday, we call it Proof Mondays, we'll always post a piece of content about Proof. It might be a story of my life, a story of the client's life might be a BTS image or a video. On a Tuesday, we'll do credibility. So I'll teach or I'll coach or I'll, you know, we'll do a Facebook Live or we'll create a list of assets or valuable insights that you can use. Character Wednesday. Wednesday, we'll talk about our values, our beliefs, maybe our worldviews. Maybe we'll be more vulnerable. Maybe we'll have a rant. On a Thursday, we'll look at Entertain me. Thursdays, we'll do some storytelling, maybe a random fact, maybe we'll look at something controversial and address that. And on Friday, we might look at a case study or, you know, something new that's coming. And that process has enabled me to have structure and take the guesswork out of posting and provide a framework. So I guess that the lesson here was we were really relying on Facebook as a source of traffic. And when we couldn't do that, we suddenly started to get much more creative about where to find other opportunities. So I want you to think about in your own business, are you too reliant on one or two main clients? And if you're not marketing, what channels could you be using and what could you post to engage with your audience? Now, this all becomes easier when you know your niche or you know your mark or you know your area of specialism. And I've spoken about this many, many times before and, you know, becoming known for something makes it much, much easier to market to that sector of the market. It's just impossible to reach everyone. And oftentimes there's this kind of propensity to say, well, you know, I do general video for everyone. And there's this fear of like, if I niche down too much, I'll miss out on other work. And the opposite is actually true. When you focus on a core target market and you get to know that target markets driving decision factors, you can create content that speaks to them, that they, they will understand and feel like that you resonate with them. You want your target market to go, ah, yeah, that's me, you understand me. And there is certainly a kind of quite tried and tested sort of marketing approach which says if you can describe your client's pain or problem or desires, wants and needs or aspirations better than they can, they will automatically assume that you are the right solution. Let me say that again. If you can describe and resonate with your client, your target market, and describe their problem or challenge or aspiration or desire better than they can, they will automatically assume you have the solution. So if you're trying to attract and appeal to everyone, you'll appeal to no one. And so looking at the marketing we're doing, you know, we appeal to a very narrow sector of the community. We, we are, you know, we help video production companies scale fast using our nine growth accelerator system. So it's video production companies, we tend to work with companies that are doing 200 to $300,000 plus and who are looking to get to 600, 700,000 are close to a million. We have some businesses doing over a million, we have some businesses doing 100,000. But everyone in the group is, is focused on growth and on scale. We tend not to work with freelancers unless you're a freelancer who is running a small business who wants to move up a gear. So we're very, very specific about how we work with. Now, that's not to say we don't provide value to people who are starting out in their career using the podcast or in the free Facebook group. And what we're doing is we're creating an opportunity for them to learn from us, to get them to get to know us. And maybe they'll like us, maybe they won't, and if they want, they'll leave. But we create a community of people who are interested in building a business. And we now post in that group every single day, Monday to Friday, different content each day. And, and what we do is we're providing a platform to have a conversation about some of the challenges you might be facing at that scale stage of your business. And we can Provide you with some insights, with some tips, some hints, and some advice to help you progress to that next level. Now that's, that's a great value offer. Like this podcast, which is completely free. You know, we have a number of ways in which you can learn for free or next to free. The podcast is free. The Facebook group is free. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, you can connect with me on Facebook. And then we have some books which are very low cost, like, you know, a few bucks. So there's. There's actually lots of ways in which you can, you know, can get to know us for next to free. Before you get to a point where you might want some more support and look at one of our paid programs. And this is partly down to a marketing analysis that tells you, you know, only 3% of your market are ready to buy now. 7% of the market are maybe kind of interested and could be persuaded. And then another 30% are interested, but just not now. And then the following 60% are just not interested no matter what. 30% are be like, yeah, I wouldn't buy from you, not interested. And the last 60, 30% are like, even if it's free, I wouldn't take it. Just not interested. So when you understand that only 40% of your marker or 40 people in 100 are kind of interested in what you got to sell, only 3 out of 100 are ready. Now you got to start looking at ways to engage with that audience and share your knowledge, your expertise, build that relationship, build that trust. And I think what happens is when you rely on one or two big clients, they provide maybe 70 or 80% of all your income. And so you don't necessarily have a lot of time to do additional marketing. And maybe you don't feel you have to because you're so busy with this client. But let's imagine that client stops spending. It happened to one of my former clients, Jonas. He had two major clients. Brexit happened back in 2016, and he lost both those clients overnight. 80% of his revenue disappeared from underneath him like that instantly. Now, thankfully, he's rebuilt his business. We spent a couple of years working together. He's just recently finished up with us. And he's going great guns. He's. He's rediverted his attention to the art world. He's super busy and, you know, we wish him all the very best. He's had, you know, work with him a couple of years. He said, some great successes. We don't expect people to stay with us forever by the way, you know, it's, it's we, we help get to the next level and then, and then they could sometimes go off and sometimes they stay and that's completely cool. But, but what I want you to be thinking about is that nothing ever lasts forever. No client lasts forever. You know, I remember just as we were leaving the uk, my main contact at Sony in London moved, moved to bt. And I realized at that time that Dan was someone we had a tremendous relationship with, but somebody new was going to come in and actually they ended up restructuring the role and the marketing division got sort of split up into different people and there just wasn't the same relationship and there wasn't the same level of work. Thankfully, I'd actually gone deeper into Sony and had relationships in Japan and we continued to do work for Sony. But I want you to think about your own set of clients, you know, and be like, who is, who you've been working with for a long time and how much love are you showing them? You know, what are you doing for them outside of saying thanks very much for the invoices paid, how are you nurturing them to bring them even closer to you? Those are things that are critically important to maintain those relationships. But I also want you to start thinking strategically about not if, but when is that relationship going to end and what are you going to do about it? And if you can take some of that resource that you have in terms of profit from that client and start investing in yourself or some marketing. Even if it's organic. Look, I probably spend an hour a day on organic marketing and that will get quicker. I like to do it because I like to think about the stories I'm going to tell. And I've just discovered that when I've had a VA do or an assistant do it, we've tested a lot of different content. It just doesn't have the same connection. It doesn't, doesn't feel like it lands in the same way as me physically creating a bit of content and telling a story. So if you are, you know, if you can think about that and what could you be doing more of? Like, there's always a lead time with marketing. If you do 30 days of marketing now and we've always got Christmas coming up, but if you do 30 days of marketing now, you might not see the results of that until March or April. There is definitely a lead time, but I want you to think about, you know, a mitigating any risk in your business and be, how could you be doing more marketing and what kind of stories could you be telling? Here's the thing, right? I have filmmakers across the planet telling me that storytelling is a number one thing, and yet I don't see much of that storytelling coming across in social media. So think about that. If you want to sell your storytelling ability, what better way to do it than to grab the attention of the market up front by creating great content, great storytelling on your social media feeds and LinkedIn. Guys, LinkedIn is such an amazing opportunity if it's handled in the right way, it really is. So, you know, take a look at that and if you want some support and help with any of this, then reach out. You know, go to videobusinessaccelerator.com, click on the accelerator program, go through that process, you can click on the link, you can fill out a form and we can have a chat and see if there's something we can do to help. And if not, you'll get a call with me and learn some cool stuff and take some strategies away. So I want to leave you with that today.

Don't allow yourself to be vulnerable to that one or two major clients because at some point that relationship will change and you want to be ahead of the curve. And really, you know, make sure you've got some things in play now so that when it happens, it's only going to be like a dink. You know, your Teflon suit will be on and you won't feel that absolute devastation when you lose a big job. So, guys, that's it. We're getting close to the end of the year. Thank you for listening as always, and I'll talk to you next week.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator podcast with your host, Den Lenny. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.to learn more about how the Accelerator program can help you today. 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.