Do you know who your ideal clients actually are? EP #113 - Shorty

G', day, guys. Dan here with this week's shorty for the how to Scale a Video Business podcast. Hope you're doing well. Just dropping into your feed to give you a little nugget to kickstart your week.

So it's actually been 26 weeks since COVID really shut down the world. Half a year. Half. And what an interesting time it's been. And especially interesting how different people have handled this situation and how they've responded to the situation with their businesses. And I'm talking, of course, specifically about video businesses.

I've observed a number of people who've kind of thrown their hands up in the air and gone, oh, Coronavirus has basically screwed us. I saw someone yesterday who said they hadn't had any work since March. And what absolutely threw me about this company was that this company does motion graphics. And I actually thought it was unexcusable that they could be affected that way. And I think the owners of that company are fully responsible.

Because I have members of my group and people I know who are not in the motion graphics space who ended up doing motion graphics projects when Coronavirus hit because they wanted to keep their business going. And there definitely seems to be a kind of a twofold split. There are those companies who have just thrown their hands in there and gone, oh, my God, there's nothing I can do. Not my fault. It's so tough. Hopefully the government will sort me out. And then there's those who have pivoted and adapted and recognized. This is an opportunity to grow stronger. And I'm very fortunate that the members of my accelerator program are of that ilk. You know, they don't give up easily. It's not a culture we foster. We cost foster a culture of get out there and get on with it. And so it's just fascinating, you know, how different people respond to these situations. And I think what that. What that highlights for you, if you're. If you're a smart business owner, is that if you can survive this and thrive in this time. I'm not talking about, you know, survive as a first basic principle. But then how can you thrive in this time? You will come out of this so strong, your business will never have experienced such growth and such success. So if that's you, good for you. You know, good for cracking on, because none of this is easy. But, you know, what else are you going to do? I mean, I certainly couldn't just sit back and wait for a handout. I kind of find another way. In fact, we did. In fact, we're having Tom on the podcast this week. One of my clients who's an aerial filming expert aficionado and does a lot of work for BBC, we created a training program together when coronavirus kicked off. And we're like, how, how can we, you know, join forces, make something great? So I'm actually bringing Tom on the podcast on Thursday to talk about that process and a bit more about the drone course, but more importantly, how him and his wife Mish just kind of went from like a really. They were, they were, they were starting to grow and they had a great couple of months. January, February, then they got kicked to the guts in March. And then, you know, all kind of fell apart. But they've rebuilt it, you know, and that' that's kind of what we teach in the accelerator program. But we just came off a call this morning and as I like to do, I like to share the insights of that call. And today we did something really, really kind of deep, actually, and quite high level. And, you know, I said to the guys, look, this was actually a really tough training to put together.

And, you know, one of the things we were very big on in the group is creating a strategic plan for your business. You know, if you want to achieve success, you can't just rely on word of mouth. You can't just rely on stuff falling into your lap and responding. You've got to have a strategic plan with the financial target and a marketing system to execute and be able to measure the response to that marketing plan and respond and convert visitors into clients and clients into ongoing, repeat customers.

And we have something called our accelerator roadmap, and I'll just run that through with you. So step one of the roadmap is to establish a solid foundation for your business. It's like, make sure you know what you're doing, why you're doing it, what it is you want to achieve and what that looks like. And then we audit your business and we kind of figure out where you are today and where the opportunities are. Step two is to create an unstoppable mindset. You know, you have to accept that when you're building a business, you're going to fail often. And what we need to do is learn to fail fast and build a callus up so that you can kind of, you know, become stronger through the experience. You know, business education is not free. Business lessons aren't free. And the more lessons you learn and the more you realize failure is part of success, the easier it becomes. But also managing your ego, managing how you Respond to things, managing how you deal with these challenges. And step three, today we talked about, you know, defining exactly who you want to do business with, going into real detail. Once you know exactly who you want to do business with, you want to go out and attract your perfect client every time. Once you attract your perfect client, how do you convert them into steady sales? Another. Another big involved process. And then step six is, is create streamlined systems to liberate your time. And once you're at that stage, it's about step seven, tracking and measuring the right metrics for steady growth. Then you kind of go this kind of perpetual cycle of establishing, are you still doing what you want to be doing?

Are there new customer demographics you want to go after? Is there a different offer you want to do? Can you increase your conversion? Can you increase your profit margin? And how are you operating your systems? So today was all about creating a customer avatar and understanding where that fits in.

And creating smart goals, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely specific goals. And so we took the notion of we just need more leads and we turned it into a more specific goal of we have a targeted and well articulated offer that attracts our ideal clients and delivers 10 leads per week consistently. And so when you break that down.

What we have to do is work out, you know, the specifics, which is a targeted and well articulated offer, which is measurable, attracting your ideal clients. And before we go any further, we need to stop and go, well, who is our ideal client? A common mistake that I think many, many, all business owners, specifically video business owners make is they try and appeal to everyone and do everything for everyone. And when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up talking to no one. And so creating a detailed client avatar is actually a very in depth process with about 13 different steps. And what we did today was we went through that in detail and created a step by step execution checklist so that you can literally plug and play and follow the steps of what's required when identifying your ideal customer. And we have something called the Ask framework, which is a series of questions that we get our members to ask their clients and extract an awful lot of this information.

And then we look at demographics, psychographics, we looked at some examples, and understanding the hierarchy of business needs, what people actually want when they are hiring a video production company. And it's not necessarily what you think it might be. Understanding human emotion, understanding positive and negative emotion, understanding that different people have different needs and that fundamentally we as human beings make decisions based on emotion. We validate with logic. And so we went through a variety of different examples. I guess what I wanted to share with you today is that if you don't have a clearly defined client avatar and you don't fully understand what their sort of core problems and needs are and how your solution not only satisfies those needs, but makes them feel like you're the only people to work with, well, you are going to struggle. And you know, unfortunately there's just. We spent 90 minutes on this this morning as part of our coaching session.

But the important thing is that most clients want to avoid risk, they want to avoid hassle, they want to gain praise and they want to have fun and then they want to make a profit. So these are the things you have to consider and also you got to consider who are the other people who are involved in the decision making process. And this process we went through today is all about identifying your one to three core client types and building up an avatar document for each of them. Because if you don't understand who you want to do business with, you're never going to be able to work out how to communicate with them. And this is pretty high level stuff. And, and fundamentally, you know, this is what, what we teaching in the video business accelerator.

It's one of my clients this morning said, you know, this is probably the most highly educated video production company group on the planet. And I thought that was an immense, immense compliment. So, so I thanks, thanks for that, Andrew. It was, it was a great thing to, to observe and, and it's true. You know, we want to create the highest trained business filmmakers on the planet. So guys, if you're interested in learning more about that, you know where to find the details over@denleny.com I look forward to bringing to you Thursday's episode where we talk with Tom about the three step drone filming system. But until then, guys, have an awesome day. You've been listening to the how to Scale a Video Business podcast with me, your host, Lens Den 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@denleny.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 favorite. Share it on social media and in groups that you might be in. See you next week.