Ever wonder where all your time goes each week? EP #208 - Den Lennie

G' day guys. Den here, host of your how to Skill a video Wizards podcast. If you're listening for the first time, welcome to show if you're a long time listener. Thanks for coming back. This is episode number 208 and today we're talking about leadership and team building because it's a subject that I think every filmmaker needs to polish their skills on.

The the only way to scale your business is to work with contractors or full time staff. There's just no way you can generate the kind of revenues that will give you the profits if you try and do everything yourself.

And we talked about this last week in the Systems Chat. If you haven't heard that, go back and listen to episode 206 about building proven video business systems to help you become more effective and more efficient in your business. But I'm going to finish off with the this is one of our growth accelerators. This IS Growth Accelerator 8. And we've been running a series of breakdowns of those growth accelerators over the last 10 or 12 weeks. So flick back through the episodes and you'll see the other ones that we've been doing.

But you know, if I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, oh, I just looked down. I want to grow my business, but I just don't want to have staff.

I'd be very, very, very, very wealthy.

And, and that used to be me as well. So. So I want to be very clear about that. I was like, oh, I don't want staff because I didn't actually know how to work with the team. I didn't know how to lead, I didn't know how to create the right framework to make it successful. And what I talked about last week was.

The importance of systems when it comes to working with the team. You need to have solid systems, clearly defined processes. We talked about how to measure that with KPIs. And so what I want to share with you today is like having a team is not escaping, scary as it might seem. And you don't have to have full time team. Plenty of my VBA members are doing multiple six figures. I mean high six figures with one, maybe two staff be some part time.

So what I want to just be getting really clear from the outset is that I understand the fear of hiring a team. But as far as I'm concerned, no business has ever scaled without a team. So you just need to decide where you want to sit. And like, look, if you want to just be a freelance business owner, do everything yourself and you're happy with that, that is okay. Like there's no, there's no shame in that. That is completely fine. If that's what you want to do then that's cool. But just understand that there will be periods in your life where you are working like a Trojan and other times when you'll be just burnt out and worn out and which wish you had some support.

So if you do want to scale and not be involved in the day to day, then you have to look at bringing on a team. And I realize that that is terrifying for some people.

But you know what? You don't have to hire staff. And this is where the things that things have changed with the art of outsourcing and working remotely with people.

In fact, I'm working with someone just now who's an outsourced freelance production manager and we're talking about creating a course with a whole series of documentation and how to videos on every aspect of production management. So if you wanted to hire someone, you could get them to do this course and basically Liana is going to share exactly how she does everything. But Liana actually works as an outsourced production manager. But one of her challenges is she's limited by the size of her team, which is currently just herself because it's a very hands on personal business. But you don't need to hire a full time production manager. You can have someone who's on retainer, for example.

And the team doesn't have to be in your office.

You don't need to rent an office if you don't want to. Remember renting an office for let's call it a thousand dollars a month, that's $12,000 a year of profit that's eaten up by you having an office. And I know when I was in Sydney I had quite an expensive office. At one point I had a studio and an office in Wework in the middle of the Sydney and It was like $6,000 a month. Well that's $70,000 a year in rent that needs to come off profit. So I now work from home and I don't, I don't need an office. And I understand if you do. But think about it, if you don't need an office, can you work from. You know, I've got clients that built really cool offices in the gardens. Especially now with everything that's going on with the COVID you know, things are changing all the time. So getting used to working from home is not necessarily a bad thing.

But you can outsource support also to foreign countries at a Lower cost per hour, leveraging lower labor costs. They call that arbitrage. Gary Vee calls it arbitrage where you're taking advantage of a culture or, or an area in the world where they might speak English to the degree that you need them to. Educated similarly, but the cost of living is a lot lower and therefore the average wage is a lot lower. And I used to struggle a bit with this thinking, are we taking advantage of people? And then someone explained to me that no, because in places like the Philippines there's an awful lot of unemployment. And if someone can get a job with a Western company, they will generally stay for years if you look after them. And so it's really important to provide a solid opportunity for individuals who are highly skilled.

Leverage lower labor costs than it would cost you in Australia or the UK or South Africa or the us. But everyone wins because.

The team are earning fairly in line with what they would be earning, probably more than what they'd earn if they were working for a Filipino company. But they get the perspective of the flexibility to work from home, etc. So that's just one option. I know there's a lot of opportunities to leverage help in Eastern Europe as well. One of our clients, Andres, has a post production company in Guatemala and our members of our VBA get preferential rates to outsource post production. And it's a very, very advanced post production company when they do really, really advanced motion graphics design implementation. And so, you know, it is something that.

Is very, very smart if you're systemized, if you know what it is you need to happen. And so the key to solid outsourcing is having really clear communication.

And allowing your team to work autonomously, but based on the clear indication of what you expect from them. So let me say that again, the key to solid outsourcing and successful outsourcing is having clear communication and allowing your team to work autonomously, but based on clear indications of what's expected from them. So Milk on my team, for example, we speak once a week for 10 to 20 minutes on a Monday. We communicate every day via Slack, but I largely leave her to get on with it. She knows what she needs to do. She's a smart, very smart girl. She does a lot of the backend marketing support for us here and is an absolute rock star. You know, I mean, she's just been with me a year and absolute rock star. And actually we were talking a few months ago, approached and said, look, I'd like more responsibility. And we discussed what she'd like to do. And what Milka really wants to do is manage a team. And well, that's great for me because I don't want to manage a team. So I'm going to promote Milka and bring in some support into the company so she'll then manage that team. So I'm stepping back from having to be hands on day to day, which means I can focus on working with my clients on specific challenges or working in our, in our systemization process. As I mentioned last week, something that we're doing, we're opening up some slots for where we'll actually help you systemize your business. It's a very hands on service, it's not a cheap service, but in 12 to 16 weeks we'll completely systemize your business top to toe.

So combining solid systems and processes.

With the autonomous and clear leadership indications that you need from your team, it means you can build a very talented offshore team that saves you time and money, but without compromising on quality. And that's the key. I think there's a lot of misinformation that you know, somehow overseas support isn't as good. And look, there are some incredible creatives overseas as well. And so if you are, if you're willing to put the work in to systemize your business, you can then leverage offshore support. Because what we do, for example in our systemization process, we extract all the information from the business owner. And being a video business owner myself, I know the kind of things that are going through someone's head. I know the confusion, I know the overwhelm, I know the speed at which business owners think to get stuff done. And sometimes bringing in a new member of the team who's perhaps not from TV or someone who's not familiar with your process, it freaks them out because they're just like, this person's a madman. I don't want to work for this idiot. And that would be the same for me. My wife used to say to me, you can't give me drive by instructions. But I was so busy, I was so stressed, I was so much going on that I was just firing off instructions and it wasn't healthy. And so putting the right systems in place ties really, really closely in with hiring a team.

And then what you're doing is once you've got the right team and the right systems and processes, you can create a framework and allow your team to step up to the systems as a roadmap and execute the processes based on the breakdowns. These are just some of the many strategies we deploy Inside the vba.

Designed to help you navigate more fluidly through the process so that you can onboard your team much more smoothly and in a much more practical way. But for all of this to happen, you have to learn to become a leader. You don't want to have to be the manager of staff, you want to lead your team. And being a leader means being vulnerable, being willing to accept that there's work you've got to do, being willing to accept that you don't have all the answers. One of the things that I'm most proud of inside the VBA is we've got a very conscious group of business owners. And our, our key sort of words to describe us are fulfillment and conscious, as in, we respect each and every one of us, we respect our clients, we respect the prospects, and we, we want to be consciously creating businesses that fulfill us from a revenue perspective, but also means that we can spend time with people we care about. And so inside the accelerator method, we're teaching you how to be a better leader as well. And you know you're going to have a much better experience doing that than if you try and figure out yourself. And figuring out yourself, you've got to ask yourself, is that just you being a freelancer going, oh, I don't really want to kind of have a call and maybe spend some money because I'm scared. So you think about, you know, what is holding you back? Is it the person looking in the mirror that's, that's holding you back from, from stepping into that discomfort?

And the great thing is once, once you lean into it and you feel the support and you get access to the right roadmap, you'll start to feel like you're winning again. You start to feel that you can actually get this under control, get this beast under control and take on more projects which will help you to unleash your creativity and do more. And, and so many of our members are really focused on building a great business so that they can have more time off and create revenue streams that can then allow for creativity. Chris, one of our members just recently took a month out and made a film and paid for it with profits from his business. All sorts of incentives and actually I want to be talking more about finance and accounting over the coming months. We're partnering up with an agency here in Sydney that I can't talk too much about the minute, but they're specialist accounting firm who specialize in film and tv. And while they'll be talking specifically about the Australian legislation.

Regardless of where you are in the world. You could take the information and ask your accountant, hey, is there something like this in the UK or South Africa or Canada or the us? So we're going to be helping you focus more regularly on and I want to be doing this as a regular, maybe once a month slot on accountancy and numbers and knowing your numbers and knowing what's available to you. So, you know, it's really important that you understand that if you want to scale your business, you have to think about expanding the team, even just in terms of admin support. It's remarkable how many jobs you do that take time that you think at the time it's only a couple of minutes, but you add it up. Classic one is bookkeeping. Oh, I do my own books. I don't want to pay a bookkeeper 300 quid a month or whatever. It's like it's kind of a false economy. Because what you're saying is you'd rather do something which is not your core skill that doesn't generate you money to save some money, rather than spending that time talking to prospects, talking to clients, having a conversation with them and engaging them in a conversation that might lead to some work. And that is where I think I'm going to be as bold as to say 85% of even people listening to this show are going, that's me, and I shouldn't be doing it. But I do. Because you're in that potentially in that lack mindset. And it's particularly challenging when there's lockdowns and work's been a bit funny, what with, you know, stop starts and lots of companies being apprehensive about spending money. But the bottom line is it's, it's totally doable. It's totally doable. You can still provide amazing service even during these crazy times. In fact, it's probably the time when you should be reaching out to your market and saying, hey, I actually want to just check in with you. You know, how's it all going? But you know, that's the thing is if you're busy doing all the admin tasks in your business because you don't want to hire someone that's taking away opportunity time. And we call it opportunity cost. Whenever you're doing something that's not revenue generating, there's an opportunity cost. So before I leave you one, one thing you can do is download an app called and it's just escaped my brain. I should have thought of this earlier, but, you know, I suddenly, I often record these podcasts off the Cuff based on a topic I want to cover and.

It'S just completely escaped my mind. I'm sorry, that's just completely blown it. But.

Rescue Time. That's it. Rescue Time. RescueTime.com download Rescue Time, install it across all your devices. And what it will do is will track what kind of apps you're using and for how long. Now what that's going to do is it's going to give you a report on a daily basis and a weekly basis on how you're spending your time. And it's a really good first step in coordinating and understanding where you are spending your time. And is it on revenue generating activities or is it on stuff that could be done by someone else? And from there you can say, well, now I'm starting to track what I'm doing. A manual way to do it is just to have a spreadsheet with the next 14 days and from like 7 in the morning till 7 at night, track what you do for every hour. And is every hour being used constructively to generate revenue or deliver client projects and even delivering client projects? I mean, you know, editing is one of the first things you should be outsourcing and it's probably the hardest thing to let go of. But if you think about how much time you spend editing, it's just, it's huge. So if you're able to let go of the editing and let go of the add on, you will find yourself with so much opportunity. One of my clients. His core goal each week is just to reach out to 30 clients and have a conversation. Last week he scored a $40,000 deal from doing that. 30 clients. He reached out to three or four interesting conversations. 26. Either he couldn't get through to or they didn't have time to talk to him. But one was like, yeah, we got a project. So let me ask you this. Are you willing to clear your diary to give yourself the opportunity to spend a day reaching out to 30 opportunities on the basis that one might turn into a $40,000 project? I'd say that's probably a good use of your time. So, guys, that's for me this week and I will talk to you again very soon. Have a quick listen to this. Ask yourself this. Has owning your own video business been everything you dreamed it would be when you first got started? It might be hard to admit, but think about whether you're genuinely achieving everything you set out to. When you made that decision to grab the camera and go it alone, are you really working less? Are you really earning more? And are you really in control? Chances are you're bloody good at what you do, but you're having to work like a dog, 70 plus hours a week. Whether it's filming, editing, marketing or any of the other jobs that come with being the big boss of your own video company. When you're managing projects, constantly searching out for new clients and worrying about cash flow, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture or make real progress. Let's face it, that stress is the last thing you need when you're trying to run a profitable company that supports you and the people you care about. Truth is, a business that provides financial, professional and personal freedom really is achievable. But maybe you've got that nagging feeling that you're overworked, lacking stability, and struggling to get to where you really want to be right now. It could be that you just don't know how to make a positive change on your own. So I created the Video Business Accelerator Coaching programs to really supercharge your video business. With these unique coaching programs, you'll learn all the tools you need to get complete confidence in the success of your video business. You can take the first step on your journey to a successful business that doesn't control your life. Let me show you how. Head over to denlani.com and click on Accelerator.