How keeping your hands on a video camera can limit your business's profits. EP #170 - Den Lennie

G', day, guys. Dan Lanney here, host of the how to Scale a video business podcast with this episode, number 170.

Cutely titled Letting Go of the Tools. What I mean by that? Well, I just came off one to one call with one of my clients who's got a really interesting situation. He's got about five jobs landed on his plate at one time worth about $200,000. And it's presenting him with some challenges. And so I wanted to share that with you today because I think you can learn a lot from the conversation we just had. But it is about growing your business and getting off the tools.

You see, when we start business, we generally producers, directors, editors, and we start by doing the classic E myth, which is, you know, we're the engineers in our business. We are actually the operators. We, we win the work, we do the work, we deliver the work, we take the money. But as you scale.

You can't get beyond that point unless you start to use other people. And oftentimes the easiest place to start is by farming out your editing. And then once you find out the editing, maybe you farm out the shooting.

But sometimes we get stuck trying to hold on to producing and directing. And really the where you can grow and scale is by stepping back from directing and the creative and actually just producing. And that might seem like a step too far for wherever you are in the journey just now, but let me explain why it's important. So this client of mine has five pretty major projects. Now, if he were to do the creative on even two of them, he'd be so consumed that he wouldn't be able to complete all five projects, which means you'd have to say no to some pretty significant clients. And as he said to me, you know, if you say no, it content means they don't ask you again. So what we discussed was, how could you take on all five projects without burning out, without dropping the ball, and without feeling like, you know, you're snowed under. Because we know that one project alone can be all consuming, let alone two or three, and certainly five, you know, you're likely to drop the ball. And so what we talked about was what were some of the possible scenarios that would be ideal to make sure all these jobs happen? And I was sharing with him how I typically run my Sony projects. And that is I always bring in really smart, talented DPs and directors to work with me as the producer. And so what that allows me to do is be the interface between the client who was Sony and all of their stakeholders and the creative team. And I find that that way because, you know, when you're doing projects with Sony, there's a lot of requirements in terms of style not offending any cultures. There's a lot of, I won't call it politics. There's a lot of prerequisites that must be adhered to and that can sometimes stifle a straight director's vision because we can have a great directorial idea. But if the powers at Sony, or whatever the client might be, decide it's just not appropriate for the brand, we have to change it. And that can sometimes mean diluting what was a very strong creative direction into a much more vanilla style. And I learned this quite early on. But, but as a producer, I accept that that is part of the deal of working with that client. And what I've always said to creative people that work done these projects is like, look, we don't have to do this, but if you are going to take this project on, this is, this is how they like to work. And it doesn't matter who the client is, there's always going to be a degree of house style or house preference. And so you kind of have to accept that, you know, this a project that is about your showreel or your creative desires. Sometimes there are projects where you have to adhere to certain guidelines that you maybe don't necessarily agree with. But I always say you choose your battles carefully. And I've had plenty of, you know, creative challenges with those kind of projects. But what I was trying to reflect back to my client was, you know, it's more important that you are the interface between these five core clients and, and bring lots of talent in. But one of the other benefits is you can hire a creative team, a director, and if for some reason the client isn't happy with the direction the creative is going in, you can always say, well, no problem, we can try something else and bring somebody else in. And so the lesson here is that you don't have to be the person coming up with the creative idea. That is not actually why the client's necessarily hiring you. They might be hiring you because you understand.

A particular genre in the space. They might be hiring you because they like the way you understand how their client works and how their, how their internal clients work. So first of all is if you go to scale and you want to go beyond being a freelance, then you have to be able to take on multiple projects simultaneously. And that means you cannot be involved in a day to day role on those productions. You have to step back and become more of an executive producer, producer type person, whereby you are setting a creative brief with the client and your director and then you're getting the director to go away and do the development and then you come back and you touch it and then you present it to the client. And the other thing that we were talking about is that sometimes in agency land you're pitching an idea without having necessarily won the gig. And so in some cases you might have to speculate to get the work, but that's not something that I particularly endorse. But this particular client had, had had a kind of situation whereby they've got some great relationships and the agencies want to have two or three different suppliers. So it's not like they're pitching blind, it's just, it comes down to the style. Which means if you, if you, if you worked a particular style or a certain way of doing things, you get known for that, that could be your point of difference when it comes to delivering the work. So anyway, the conversation we had was, you know, you got to market and start building a list of contractors who could help you with the creative. But that was only one part of the challenge. The second part of the challenge was in fact the production management side of running five productions and scheduling and working through production. And, and this particular client has had had an issue whereby one of his existing projects, the client who was in the us, he was based here in Australia, had struggled to make a deadline because of something had gone wrong with the, that you'd lost power for a few days. And so the original deadline was moved because the feedback didn't come back at time. But that had a knock on effect with other productions that were being scheduled in. And so what I said to my client was the next hire you need to make as a production manager because he's got a team of editors, he's got a team of directors he can work with. But it's the production management and that's often where we can get very, very saturated. And of course when you're dealing with creative, that's the right hand side of the brain. And when you're dealing with production management, that's logistics, that's the left hand side of the brain. And so it's very difficult for one person to flip flop between creative one minute and logistics the next. And so hiring a production manager or a production coordinator is going to be a great hire. And what I suggested was, you know, putting a note out to some of the crew and production Facebook groups and saying, hey, I've got potentially six to eight weeks worth of production work for someone. And what I would suggest is, you know, get in touch, let me know if you're available. But if say someone's like $400 a day for a freelance, then I've got no issue with saying, Look, I've got 1750 a week for six weeks, would you like it? And that, I think is an important tool as a producer to negotiate with crew. One of the mistakes I see people making is that because once upon a time we were all freelance. And oftentimes, you know, freelance can get very hung up on their day.

And that's fine, that's how they choose to price. But equally.

Not every freelancer is working every day. So the idea of earning 400 a day, let's just say for argument's sake and saying, well, that's 2,000 a week, so it's a six week project, I want $12,000. You could say, well, that's all very well, but I mean, you might work three days a week at 400 and not work the other two days. You might be actually making 1200 a week. So I often go in the middle and say, well, I can give you 16 or 17 a week for six weeks, guaranteed work. And so don't be afraid to leverage project work at a lower price than the prescribed day rate because you're actually offering someone, you know, consistent work and it's up to the person whether or not they take it or not. And I've always done this, but a caveat is I'll often say to someone, look, I'm completely flexible. You don't need to be in an office. You know, if you want to work, you know, 10 hours one day and four hours the next, that's fine with me. Just need to make the work to be done. You know, everyone's working from home just now anyway. And then you could say, as another leverage point, look, you know, invoice me and I'll pay you within seven days. Whereas, you know, some, I've been in situations where you might be charging a higher day rate, but you're waiting 60 days to be paid if it's a big organization. So I think just using leverage tools to find ways to get people to kind of feel comfortable that it's a win win situation. I'm not suggesting ripping anyone off, I'm just saying that, you know, as a producer, producer, I think it's your role to modify deals, do deals with people to get, you know, a good return investment for you. But also there's some flexibility, but if you get a production manager on board to support you, that takes all of the logistics off your plate. So then as, as the kind of business owner, what you're in fact doing is simply coordinating the creatives. You're really spending time in your lane, which is liaising with clients, ensuring that clients communicating effectively and that you're communicating that to your production team. And what I found is that when you're that conduit in the middle, you become this very powerful asset to the business. Because if the client's not happy with something, the creative direction or something like that, they can simply come to you and say, look, we're not very happy about this, can we change it? And then you can present that to the creative team. So I think that, you know, where real value comes is when your production company becomes the conduit. I guess it's a bit like a mini agency where you are the interface between the client and the production team. And so what we were able to do on this call was just establish that that was in fact a really smart move. And in that way, even if it meant, you know, making less money per project. So let's say it was a $30,000 project and perhaps if you were going to be working on it and being involved in it and doing some bits, you might walk away with 10 grand and that leaves 20 for the production. What I said to this chap was, you know, if you said, well, I want to take six but I'm only going to do a day on it, well you, if you did five projects that you can make six grand on net profit, that's 30 grand profit from five projects without actually having to be involved physically in each project. And so it's a different way of thinking. It's a different way of thinking. So thinking as a business owner and, and it's actually not a bad thing to be stepping back from the tools. One of my other clients has just done this recently and he's, he' brought a production manager in part time initially. And that's a good side note. These don't have to be full time staff hires. These can be contracted part time or short term contracts. But this, this other client of mine, you know, said that he's actually getting a lot of creative buzz out of building his business. And so, you know, as you progress through your career in business, you find that different things give you different reward. And so simply, you know, thinking that if you're not shooting and lighting it's gonna, you're not Gonna be creative. It's not true. In fact, I remember distinctly when I kind of made that decision to, to stop being the dp. And that was a pretty, it was a pretty good dp. You know, I lit very well. I had lots of great compliments from some pretty significant ASC cinematographers. And so I knew, I knew my work was good. I'm a pretty shithole editor and again, I can tell a great story. But I realized that to scale my business I had to stop editing and to scale my business I had to stop shooting. And it was pretty weird at first because when you hire someone else in your role, of course they're going to do it differently. But what I also discovered was I got more value because I was bringing someone in who I trusted, who saw things from a different set of eyes. So not only was it cool to watch somebody else work and pick up a few tips and a few things, I was like, oh, that's interesting, but you can step back and be the producer, orchestrate. And I remember doing a big project just before we left for Australia with a client who wanted to shoot like 25 one minute videos about printer, toner, cartridge for like laser printers and photocopiers.

And we actually hired Susie Perry to come in and present this in a studio. And I think we probably had 20 people on set. I remember Chris saying to me, he said, oh, you got. It's fascinating watching you work, man. It just, it was like watching a conductor. Everything was very calm, everything was very smooth. And that's because we planned everything out meticulously. And I just stood back and made sure that Susie was happy, made sure the client was happy and let everyone else fantastic team on set, from hair and makeup to camera work to lighting. And I left everyone else to do their job on set, which allowed me to be interfacing with the client and the presenter, fantastic director on set. And so what we were able to do was produce this incredible amount of work in a short time. But Chris, the client who was paying, you know, considerable amount of money for this one day shoot, just said, I was just blown away by the way you orchestrated and conducted. And that I think is a great compliment. And that is what you want to be aiming for as a producer in a video production company that's scaling. So if you want to be making hundreds of thousands of dollars or pounds and settling up towards high six and seven figures, you have to step. The mistake I see businesses making that means that they don't reach their goals is they fall back into bad habits they jump on the tools, and that is where things start to fall apart. You've got to build that robustness in. The fact that if you're not on a creative role on set doesn't mean that you're not being creative. It's that shift between freelance and business owner. A business owner orchestrates, makes sure that all of the component parts are working, and a freelancer has a particular role. They are shooting, they are editing, they are lighting, they are doing sound. And I've enjoyed all of those roles in the past. But I recognize that my responsibility as a business owner was to coordinate shoots, to coordinate clients and make sure there was plenty of revenue coming in and hiring good team, looking after them so that they would always take my call and be happy to work for me. But ultimately, you have to let go of the tools, and that can be a hugely challenging journey for many. Having said that, I have a number of clients who have successfully done that, and they find new ways to fulfill that creative flow, to fulfill that creative desire. And that is, you know, orchestrating, coordinating multiple shoots simultaneously. And when you get to a point where you can put a shoot together and clients don't really notice that you're not there, but are really happy with the result, that is another whole level of glory. And it's funny, one of my other clients had been planning this big shoot that he got a stab at, and he got sick. He got really sick on the week of the shooting. And it was during COVID And so he just kind of couldn't go to the shoot. And ultimately the shoot had to be run by other people. And that's what forced him into a position where the client was delighted. But Grant didn't have to be there. And he was like, my God. It was such an amazing example of, like, just demonstrating that if you set things up correctly, you don't need to physically be in the room and appreciate that that is going to take some time to overcome. And sometimes you're going to want to be in the room, and there's sometimes going to be very good reasons why you should be in the room interfacing with the client. I'm not saying you should be playing golf when there's a big shoot on. I'm saying that if you don't need to be there, try not being there and see what happens. Or if you are going to be there, just be the orchestrator, be the conductor. Just. Just turn up and be there saying, yeah, the team have got this under control. Interface with the client, have a chat, see what else is happening and I think that will really, really serve you to, to move forward in the future. Anyway, guys, another short episode this week because I'm still unpacking my house and I will talk to you.

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 the ceiling and we benefit from mentorship, support and coaching, then check out how you can work with me over@denlenney.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 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. So thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.