Den's Clint Eastwood Story (And Episode 200!) EP #200 - Den Lennie

Well, hey guys, welcome to this slightly different episode of the how to Scale a Video Business podcast today. This is episode 200, and I was racking my brains as to how to mark the occasion. And oftentimes when shows get to this kind of size, you do a retrospective, you look over previous guests. But to be honest, with 200 episodes, there's a lot to get through. So I thought what I'd do is tell you my story. I probably touched on bits of this as we've gone through the show, and if you've been listening to us for a while, then thank you. 200 episodes is a bit of a milestone. We've done it in about 18 months, and I'll talk a bit about that later on. But I thought that what I should do is actually tell my story from the beginning as a means for you to really understand who I am and how I got to where I am today. Because I think as a. As a slightly introverted filmmaker, you know, I. You never really want to talk about yourself. You want to talk about the results you get from other people and the help that you do. But I thought it was my wife that said to me, look, you should share your story because it's inspiring. That's what I'm going to do today. So I've come down to the beach where I live, which I guess is the first inspiring.

Thing to note. I mean, I live literally 400 meters that way. And this is the beach that my wife and I walk on every morning at sunrise and every evening at 4:35 o' clock, we take the dogs out. So I guess we'll start there because that is where I am now today. 2021. We're in July 2021. And you know, it's. It's taken a while to get here, but it all started with a trip, I guess I did, to Australia 24 years ago when I backpacked around here. But let's. Let's go back a bit further. So I grew up in a little town called Edinburgh in Scotland. And from the age of about 16, I. I kind of wanted different. I didn't really want to follow the path that everyone else was following. And, you know, since a youngster, my dad had DSLR cameras. Well, not dsr, SLR cameras. And I used to enjoy, you know, picking them up and looking through the lens and looking at the world through a lens. And I was never really that interested in the photography part. I was interested in the moving image part. So when I got to school and, yeah, I was bullied at school, so I didn't really feel like I fitted in. So I got stuck into the theater. And at that time we had a VHS video camera, one with a separate record was locked in the AV cupboard. And I managed to kind of befriend the guy in the AV cupboard and start shooting things at school, you know. And so when work experience came around at about age 16.

I didn't want to do the jobs that were advertised so I started ringing around radio stations and I'd always been fascinated by sound and audio and recording and video. So I rang around all the local radio stations to see if someone would give me a week's work experience. And I. Lots of no's. So I guess from an early age I started door knocking and cold calling. But it was a Friday afternoon and I remember calling the BBC in Scotland and they were based in Edinburgh or they had a branch in Edinburgh. And I just asked to speak to someone about work experience and the receptionist just put me straight through to the boss and he was kind of impressed with my tenacity and said, well look, you know, get your teacher to write a letter and we'll figure it out. And that was the beginning of my, I guess, my career because I spent a week or two, I'd say a week, I think it was in the radio studios. And that was fascinating, great. But I remember being introduced to the, to a news crew and they had a big three tube Ikegami camera, separate U matic recorder. And I met Ian and Jim who became lifelong friends. And I picked up the camera, put the zoom rocker on, that was it, I was hooked. So I then spent the rest of the week with the news crew and in that very first week of work experience, ended up doing an interview with Clint Eastwood. So I was completely and utterly hooked, you know. So after that I went off and I wanted to join the BBC and the cameraman said, look, you go and get an education. So I went to college, applied the BBC, got rejected, went to university. Well, it was a polytechnic, it was like a technical college or like a TAFE here in Australia. And they were. The film course was quite new and I was feeling a little bit frustrated. So my girlfriend at the time was going to go to Australia for a year and I was like, well, if she goes that'll be it. So maybe I should go too. So I decided to save all my money up, work three jobs. I did follow spot at the Edinburgh fringe for like three weeks. I worked in Haagen Dazs ice cream, I worked in hotels and I scraped together enough money for the flight, I think it was £800 return, remember that? And I had about 4, £400 in cash and we flew off to Australia in, that would have been August or September of 1992. Landed in Australia in Melbourne and you know, pretty quickly ran out of money. So we found our way to the Gold coast where we got a job in a hotel there and proceeded to spend 11 months in Australia, fell in love with Queensland, lived in Cairns for four months or as they say here, Keynes, and you know, just, just fell in love with Australia, passed through the Sunshine coast, very close to where I live now and just discovered this incredible lifestyle existed. And I'd grown up in Scotland, which is beautiful but the weather's not great and I'd spent 25 years, you know, in Scotland.

So I kind of was ready to for a change. Anyway, I came back, finished my degree and then instead of finishing and doing honours, which involved writing a 10,000 word dissertation.

I bailed and I got an opportunity to get a job. And actually this came about because when I worked at Haagen Dazs when they launched the store, they had a TV crew come. So I befriended the TV crew, kept in touch and when I got back from Australia, got in touch and he said, oh look, you know, they're looking for a sound record at Reuters, at GMTV Scotland, you should go for it. So I finished my third year of unique, applied for this job and got it. So I left university and started working in broadcast TV and worked for GMTV for two and a half years as a sound recorder, as an editor. We were cutting two machine front panel on the back of a machine in the back of a van. Probably the biggest story I covered in Scotland was the Dunblane Massacre. We were the second TV crew on the scene and we spent pretty harrowing week there. So you know, I got to experience some pretty cutting, you know, front, front line news stories. But then I was, I was getting frustrated. I wanted to be a cameraman and the cameraman Martin was, he wasn't going anywhere. So I applied for a job with BBC in East Anglia, got it actually rather cheekily, I, I flew, I did a live in the borders of Scotland on the day of my interviews with BBC, drove to Glasgow, flew to Luton.

Car, the car drove to Norwich which is a three and a half hour drive, turned up in my kind of work gear, my Gore Tex jacket and did an interview in front of a panel and they were like, oh, you know, you don't look like you're dressed for an interview, I'm like, well I was doing a live broadcast this morning for gmtv. So I kind of just went, you know, what do you want me to say? So anyway, I got that job, ended up working in East Anglia and Luton for a year as part of East BBC east and finally got to work for the BBC and it was like a pinnacle of a dream. But the fact is I didn't love it. It's a very bureaucratic organization. Learned a lot in that year, but I had a hunger for more. So I applied for a job that was advertised in the back of Broadcast magazine and London Tonight were looking for what they called news photographers, which were, you know, basically cameramen. So I went for that job and got that, got a 10,000 pound pay rise. Suddenly I was working four days a week in London and it was amazing. I did entertainment, I did, you know, travel news, current affairs. Met a really good friend of mine, Paul Mongi, who's still friends today. In fact, Paul's one of my clients in my mastermind group in the vba and Paul's had an amazing career as well and that was the beginning of my kind of real broadcast TV career in earnest. Shot lots of celebrities, lots of royalty, filmed the Queen, Queen Mother, lots of celebrities in various forms over the three and a half years I was in London and absolutely loved it, had an absolute ball.

But then decided to go freelance and spent like 18 months deciding to go freelance anyway. Got the opportunity to go freelance and a couple of really good breaks. Ben Tesla, a good old mate of mine, got me involved with transworld Sports, so I got a gig with them and then the lovely Mary Nightingale brought me into Wish youh Were Here when she was the main presenter for that. So I got to shoot Wish youh Were Here for three years and that was just, you know, it was a dream job. Back in its day it was getting 12 million viewers and those of you not from the UK, Wish youh Were Here was a, a very, very successful travel program. And so we, you know, we had an amazing time doing that. Anyway, so I went freelance and then bust my leg actually on a shoot with a friend of mine called Pat Doyle. We were filming in Chamonix. Two guys were going to parascend off the summit of Mont Blanc and yeah, you know, had an accident and got airlift off the mountain. Six months off work. So it's pretty, pretty, pretty tough. But I went to Thailand and hung out and you know, I had insurance which was really cool. So got back to work, back into the freelance mode. Started shooting a lot with Nick Murray, who's now a massively successful director in la. And in fact next when I come on the podcast, at some point he's, he's won Emmys for doing Drag Race and he's working at the top end of TV now in Hollywood. And him and I shot quite a few programs. He bring me in to do things like Most Haunted Lives. I did outside broadcasts, I did, you know, sports, documentary. I shot stuff for rdf, things like, you know, Holiday Showdown really kind of. And I didn't love that stuff, but it was a good experience. Anyway, two years after my accident, I was filming in South Africa. Leg just didn't feel quite right. So I got home. I was actually shooting the pilot for A Place in the Sun, Home or Away Again with Pat and Benedicta Pinelli, she was the producer and we were filming in Cape Town. I didn't feel quite right. Got back home, went to see an ankle specialist, said basically your ankle's screwed, you've got arthritis. What do you do for a living? Said I'm a cameraman. He said that's it, not anymore. So I had a really kind of dark period there where I was told I just couldn't be a cameraman anymore. And that was pretty, pretty crazy because that's all I knew.

So I had to bail on that. Anyway.

Over a few months, you know, racking up a lot of debt, I mean, sort of 35, 40,000 pounds. I just bought a 200,000 pound house in St Albans. Suddenly my income was gone. Thought about going back into photography. None of that felt quite right. So I got a job with Pro Cam Television. John and Cal there hired me and I got a job in the warehouse. I just ran the warehouse because I needed something. So I went back into the warehouse. We sort of really started to revamp how they were systemizing their kits and stuff. But after a short period of time it became clear that I had skills as a cameraman and I could interface with production managers. So I went into the office and started business development and in that two or three year period added about a million pounds worth to their bottom line. Ended up with a share of that company. And until one trip to Las Vegas, like maybe an eight or ninth trip to Las Vegas for meb. Mark fourth from MIT Corp. And now cvp said, look, I'd love you to come and work for me, so why don't you come and jump ship? So I did. I had started a relationship with Sony by that point as well. So I Jumped ship to cvp. And in that time we got some pretty good growth for those guys. Helped set up CVP TV and started training people in how to do things using video. And that became.

Beginning, I guess, of F Stop Academy because I saw that the world was changing and I connected with Philip Bloom at that point, who had a small blog at that stage, and I saw he was going somewhere. So we teamed up and we set up F Stop Academy and started making tutorial videos. And the first tutorial video we made was the 5D Mark II. We shot it in an afternoon in Cambridge and made like $200,000. It was insane. So a few months later we did the 7D in Sarasota in Florida. And then it just didn't really work out. Phil was on a different trajectory. He was very much building his blog. I wanted to build the training organization. So we parted ways and I took on Estop Academy on my own, remortgaged the house and we built it up from there. And that was 2009. And over the last 12 years it's been my main occupation. So I guess 2012, 2013, got involved in a lot of filming again because cameras were getting smaller. Did a lot of work with James Tonkin at Hangman, filmed with Duran Duran, did their tour DVD. In 2012, we did Robbie Williams Take the Crown tour and some work in Madrid with Cristiano Ronaldo, which was quite funny because I didn't know who he was and I was there filming with them. And it was only when my nephew said, what are you doing with Ronaldo? I'm like, how do you know? And he's like, well, you've shown up on his Facebook page. And I saw he had 10min million fans. And I was like, wow, these are quite a big deal, this guy. But that's the way, isn't it? Often when you're filming, you're not necessarily tied up in who the person is. You're just doing your job. So I had a really great period there, but I still missed Australia. And I was getting towards my 45th birthday and I was like, if I don't do this now, I'm never going to do it. So I convinced my wife to take a trip to Australia and we actually went for six weeks. We ran some workshops and we traveled all over Australia and, you know, put it on, went business class and did it all properly and she fell in love with it as well. So that's how we began the journey of migrating to Australia. So 2015.

We moved. It took us like nearly three years to get a visa. And we moved to Australia in July 2015, which is just a little over six years ago, and started again, you know, started right from scratch. And that was challenging because I had to kind of put my money where my mouth was and rebuild the business. And for the first few years we ran a production company here. The very first job we did was the FS5 launch film. And previously we'd done FS7 and the A7s and other films for Sony. I had very, very long standing relationship with Sony. We've done multiple launch films for them. But the FS5 was $100,000 project. So it was a good kickoff. And I got Mick Jones involved in that and we shot that in Sydney. And I typically feel the only day we were filming on Bondi beach was gray, which was a bit of a nightmare, but, you know, Mick pulled out the bag and we ended up with a great product. And then Sony asked me to go and spend the next 18 months periodically traveling around Asia, speaking at YouTube events. So I'd fly in and out of India or Singapore or where else I went. I went to Jakarta, I went to Seoul, we did one in Sydney, Taipei. So I had an incredible experience. We actually shot a series called Bereal during that time, which I documented the journey. So we were trying all sorts of social media marketing. And then, you know, we lived in Sydney for three years, four years almost, and then we moved up the coast here to Queensland and that sort of. In the last couple of years we spent two years in Noosa. I just last year filmed with Sony again to launch this camera, the A7S Mark III. And you know, just, just continually surprised by the fact that they keep coming back. But I think it's for a very simple reason is I, I give them what they want. I don't let my creative ego get in the way. I give them what they want. And, and the have a very complex set of requirements. Sony, when you're making content for them. In fact, they got in touch with me just last week again to ask if I would help judge a competition. So, you know, I think the lesson here is give clients what they want.

And you can have a very long and successful career with just a couple of clients. But to bring you up to speed today, you know, we moved to this beach house three months ago. Business has never been better. We've got a phenomenal group of business owners in the video business accelerator. And I stopped doing production probably a couple of years ago now, mostly because I feel like I've done it all. I've been very blessed. I've shot feature films, music, sport, documentary, lifestyle, entertainment. I've traveled to 50 countries around the world and I get to enjoy the snow. And so my time is now spent helping other business owners create balance and fulfillment and financial success in their life. And that's hugely rewarding. I have incredible clients who I call friends and who are all having phenomenal results. But I think more than anything, and I'll probably leave with this, is that to me, it's all about fulfillment, you know, reaching a point in your life where you are fulfilled, you love the work you do, you don't have to kill yourself for it, and you work smarter and not harder. And I think that's really what my biggest lesson has been. And I can't tell you how awesome it is to have achieved a level of success in life that we're living in the place we want to live. I've been with my wife for 16 years.

We have a lot of great successes behind us. We live in this incredible country, which I'm blessed to call home now. And really.

It all starts with an idea. You can do anything you want to do, you can achieve anything you want to achieve. If you create a plan, write it down, get clear on what success means to you.

And if you need some help with that, that's what we're here to do in the video business accelerator. Just one last thing. If you're not where you want to be, we did this in six years. From living in Essex to living by the beach, owning a house, and this is our doorstep every day. And I'm not saying that that's right for everyone, but if you're not achieving the results you want and you keep doing the same thing over and over again, maybe ask yourself what needs to change, or what do you need to change in yourself to achieve that success? Because it's very hard to achieve it on your own. I've had mentors, I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on business education, but it's been an investment. And every single cent I've spent in my own education, I've seen multiple returns. So if you're not getting the results you want, or you're not clear on the results you want, then jump on a call. Let's spin some ideas around and see if we can offer you some insight. And if we feel like there's a good fit and we can help you, we can talk about how we can work together, but if not, we can just have a chat and hopefully send you off some ideas. So, yeah, have a think about it, and I'll see you in the next episode.