How to avoid running around like a headless freelancer! EP #124 - Tim Arch

Hey, guys. Dan here. Welcome to this episode of the how to Scale A Video Business Podcast. Today's guest is Tim Arch, the founder of Arch Creative in Melbourne, Australia. Now, Tim and I have been working together for about 20 months. He has been one of my coaching clients from the very outset of the video business accelerator. And Tim has seen an incredible journey as he's progressed from freelancer to business owner, and more importantly, spending more time with his family whilst his business grows with his team around him. So what I wanted to do is get Tim on the show and share his journey and hopefully help you understand and perhaps resonate with you. If you're someone sitting there being very much in a freelance capacity, wanting to scale your business, or perhaps you're just in a business that you know you're probably doing too many things in. So please do enjoy this episode.

Well, g', day, Tim. It's been a long time coming, this podcast. I think I might have asked you six or seven times, but you're a busy guy because one of the reasons I wanted to get you on the show is that you've been through an incredible journey where really the motivation was spending more time with your family and your children while still growing your video business. So welcome to the show. Tell me about that, tell me about that, that, that shift that happened maybe almost two years ago where you decided to kind of adjust your business in a way that would allow you to spend more time with your kids.

Oh, firstly, thanks, Dan. Good to finally make it here.

Yeah, well, it's, it's been a pretty important part of our family. My wife and I are doing as much as we can to share the care of the kids.

So we've got a, got a five year old and a two and a half year old and another little one on the way. So it's always been pretty, family's always been pretty important to me.

And it's just been pretty very freeing to be able to keep the business running as opposed to running around like a headless freelancer, having to do everything, anything and everything. And yeah, being able to cut back to four days a week, three days a week at times.

In fact, two and a half days, two to two and a half days a week during this current, the last six months or some of that anyway, when we lost access to childcare thanks to Covid down in Melbourne.

But yeah, it's certainly wouldn't have been up to do it with your help then. But.

Take me back to two years ago.

And what was life like for you and the family? Prior to making these changes.

Yeah, well, two years ago.

I'm pretty sure two years ago I was doing four days a week. Although no Jen, my wife would have been off on mat leave so I might have. I was probably squeezing in five days a week and then work on the weekends when necessary.

Still very much in that I need to do everything. I don't think, I don't think I'd tried. I hadn't been outsourcing anything when I came first came to you, had I?

I don't think so, no. I think, I think you'd just been on holiday. I think you'd had a really good couple of months towards the end of 2020.

Yeah. Yep. Took. Took about a six week break. Yeah. Took advantage of, of, of my wife being on Matt leave and we had a lovely holiday in, in Tassie, driving around, camping, fun times with two little kids. But it was. No, it was lovely but put the business on hold effectively and came back to no work. And I mean summer's usually a quiet time for me anyway so I thought I could just ignore the business and come back to business as usual. But that was kind of a real eye opener to me that I can't just rely on things to carry along as they were. And.

I think that was part of the impetus for seeking out your help, Ken.

And I suppose, you know, at the time you were very much. You identified as a freelancer, didn't you? You were someone who take work, do the work, so spend the money, you know, and, and that cycle. Tell me about what, what. Because I think a lot of people listening to the show probably can, can identify with that and it's quite, it's quite a daunting period because you kind of, you're used to doing everything yourself and keeping all the money and it's quite, it's, it's quite a big step, isn't it, to start thinking in terms of building a business. How did that evolve for you?

Well, I think the definitely coming back to not enough work in the pipeline was an eye opener to like yeah, I need to do more than just rely on the, the word of mouth that I had going.

There was certainly a lot more I could be doing. But when you are doing everything, all the production stuff yourself, you're shooting, you're editing, you.

You really don't have a lot of time for everything else you should be doing to run the business. Like yeah, as a freelancer you're waiting for the phone to calls. Hey, I need a video shot over here. Okay. I'LL go do that for you. And then you drop everything else that you were doing and off you run.

And what started to change, you know, you started working with us like I think was it February 2019 and we're now in October 2020. And what were some of the things that you implemented straight away that started having quite an immediate effect.

I think the biggest thing was the encouragement to let go of the creative, the editing side of things. I always thought like no, I need to do that because that's where I pull the piece together. I was quite proud of the fact that I'd go out and take a like shoot an hour long interview and distill that down to two minutes. But I'm realizing that I'm not the only one that can do that. And that's. It's still a. It's absolutely a collaborative process.

And just the freedom of being able to hand over that editing, the editing side of things.

Because yeah, a day of shooting will result in more than in two or three days of editing.

That just frees you up so much to time wise to focus more on the business side of things. Like the doing is the easy part, the running the business. That is a bit. None of us have actually learned properly before going out thinking yeah, we can do this.

It's interesting because I think and I experienced this, it's like we really enjoy being in production. But I think reach a point where as your family expands you start to go well because. Because production is so labor intensive. And so if you are going to do everything yourself, you're pretty much committing to just being a filmmaker full time. Because if you're not. If you're not shooting, you're editing. If you're not editing, you're producing, you're not producing, you're chasing invoices or paying bills. And then most, most freelancers aren't doing any kind of marketing. I mean I speak to hundreds and ask the question. It's like all word of mouth networking. And I think the last six months have really change that environment because there is. There is no networking. So can you talk a bit about some of the obstacles you had to overcome in terms of, you know, letting go and what you first moved. I think you hired an editor. Can I pretty much full time as a contractor. And how did that start to impact other time available for you and how did that then pan out from there?

Well, yeah, I mean like I said it's the majority of the job is post production.

In terms of amount of time spent. So it just meant That I had a couple of days a week spare now to focus on.

Things like marketing, coming up with a plan, not just going at it.

Planning for a year or a five year plan even, rather than just kind of treading water, going along as normal. It really allowed me to grow the business, which has been fantastic. Like.

When our second child came along.

We dropped back down to just a single income rather than an income plus a part time.

And looked at the numbers and we're like, you need a pay rise, Tim. And that was easy to do. Didn't really have to think about it. Rather than. Whereas previously the like revenue had just been pretty much a steady, a constant. I'd built it to a certain point and then yeah, without doing any extra work outside of doing the. Doing the production side of things, I was kind of stuck on a. It kind of plateaued.

I think one of the things that's interesting about working with you is that I've seen a real shift to going from that freelancer curse of feast and famine, doing everything yourself, keeping all the money and thinking you're doing okay and by all intents and purposes doing pretty well. But it's not scalable to shifting to more of a business owner model and a business owner mindset. What were some of the challenges that you had to overcome in doing that and how did you actually overcome them?

Well, just that shift in mindset itself, that was a huge kind of aha moment for me.

Excuse me. Tummy rumbling. It's lunchtime when we're recording this.

Yeah, that. Absolutely. That shift, that first. Not quite employee, but the first, first step towards bringing on some extra help and realizing that that meant that it's possible to do.

2, 3, 4 days of filming different jobs. And then as things got busier, like I had a really busy period end of last year where I would. I'd have two or three freelancers shooting for me as well. So.

When you. Yeah, just. When you realize that there's more to it than just just going out and shooting everything yourself.

The possibilities of scale are quite exciting.

And you know, I talked to a few people from the video business accelerator on this podcast. Andrew's been on, Ryan's been on, Simon's been on, Caleb has been on, and Pat. And they all talk about the fact that when they started they were kind of quite.

Stubborn about wanting to hang on to production, but actually now they've been in it for a while, they're starting to see the creativity in running a business and the reward that comes from creating something. Can you can you talk a bit to that? What's your experience being there, sort of stepping back from production and how have you, how have you replaced that fix, if you will, from like being out on shoots and doing edits. What kind of what gets your juices going now?

Yeah, it's been really fascinating watching everyone going, pretty much everyone going through exactly the same like oh yeah, I remember those days.

But yeah, in terms of like creative outlets now it's that having that time to think about well, what can we start doing better? Like I'm at the point now where I'm looking at what can we do to enhance, to improve our offering to start kind of.

Yeah, we're doing well with our bread and butter kind of clients but what, what sort of avenues can we explore to, to step up the production values, like start moving towards the like. My original dream was to be a DP and kind of coming back to those freelance days, I was a freelance camera assistant and absolutely had no time to do anything else other than you working 10 hour days minimum time. You're starting at all hours of the day, like from one day to, to the next and you've pretty much got time to do your washing and your grocery shopping on the weekend. That's, that's part of why, part of why I'm. How I ended up where I am now is I, I didn't want that enough to be that my, my whole entire life. And hats off to the guys that do it. I know there's a few, few out there that have managed to do that and have a family and everything.

That wasn't the journey for me.

I remember early on in our conversations one thing you were quite transfixed on was you really want to buy a studio space and have a studio and a creative space. Has that changed, has your view on that changed from 20 months ago?

It's changed in that now I actually know why I want that space and I'm not, absolutely not.

Jumping at, I'm not going to jump into anything tomorrow but I've been, been thinking about my 12 current 12 month plan and the end of that looks like that will be. Yeah, depending on how this 12 months go, that will be, yep, we need a studio space rather than I want a studio space for, for no apparent reason thinking yep, it'll be good to have and if we have it then we could do all this stuff. But rather again approaching it with a complete business focus saying okay, well why do we need a business or why do we need a studio space? What let's get to the point where we're using one more often than not.

And if we're enjoying doing that, then, yeah, let's, that's. And it makes financial sense. Let's go and do that.

I love it. I, I just love the journey. Watching your journey has been phenomenal. And, and we, we talk a lot. We actually become great friends and we spend a lot of time offline talking about bikes stuff.

Living by the beach too.

Hey, yeah, exactly.

But, but I love that, that you're so aware of the shifts that you've had because life before was a lot more chaotic and the fact that you're having another child and you spend so much time with the kids. I know that that's challenging. I know, especially in the last all.

Parents, challenging is one word for it.

But, you know, if someone's listening to this in that freelance mindset, I've been doing a lot of outreach recently on LinkedIn and a number of people come back and go, oh, I'm not looking for any paid coaching, I'm not looking to do any of that. But, you know, any free stuff sent it my way. And I asked them the question about, you know, what are their biggest challenges? And they're like, they always want more clients. And, and there seems to be this kind of gap between filmmakers saying they want this result or this outcome, but they don't necessarily want to pay for it or they don't want to invest the time. And I don't think it's actually got anything to do with money. I think it's more to do with time and commitment. Is that something that you could relate to from a couple of years ago? Like, you know, what would you say to someone who might be sitting there thinking, oh, this all sounds great, but, you know, it wouldn't work for me, or, ah, I'm just not sure, like, what, what could you share that might help them recognize why getting help from me or anyone really, and from a coaching perspective is such a, an important investment and one that ultimately doesn't actually cost you anything.

Yeah, well, I think, like, you can use as many free resources as you like, but they're going to be, A lot of them are going to be generic. A lot of them are going to be, well, I didn't pay for it, so if I don't do it, it doesn't really matter. I find it. It's. Yeah, I mean, the stats on, there's stats out there on completion rates of online courses, even ones that you pay for, where you just kind of left your own Devices. And they're, they're not brilliant. It's. It's like, I think it's single digits.

8%. Yeah.

Single digits. Yeah. Yeah.

It's having the. And it's a scary. For someone who hasn't done marketing before, it's a, it's a. That's a kind of a scary proposition. You're paying, potentially paying to put yourself out there.

And yeah, it's not like you go out and buy a camera, you've got a physical piece of gear to see. You go out and spend money on advertising and the. It just disappears. It's a lot harder to, to see a tangible result if you don't know what you're doing. I think having like. Yeah. Having someone like Dan in your corner, like looking over to your shoulder, holding your hand the whole time, just absolute confidence builder to go out and, and get it right the first time and to help you. Yeah. Continuously improve it too.

And what about the, the community aspect? How important is. We have weekly calls. How important is that community in the Facebook group and on the calls to helping you achieve your goals?

Yeah, it's that kind of comradeship. I think that we're all in this together at various stages of each other's journey. It's really encouraging to see people asking questions that you know the answer to and then you can likewise, you ask a question and you'll get three or four different approaches back.

And.

Yeah, just bouncing off each other's ideas.

It's absolutely a part of it that I've missed over the past few months not being able to make the time slot.

But.

Listening back to the recording, it's been really nice to hear everyone's voice and discover the. What kind of problems they're trying to solve.

Yeah, absolutely. And you write what you say that you know, when they say, when you're learning, you know, you, you can consume it via audio or video or through text and you absorb it and then when you implement it, you learn a bit more about the process. But when you start to share what you've learned with other people who are maybe a few steps further behind than you, that's when you really start to recognize how much you've achieved. And I've, I've noticed that you've kind of. You've reached a. Where you've, you've grown to a certain point in your business where you're actually way further down the road than someone like, who would have been in your position two years ago is now. And I think that's phenomenal. And it's so exciting to watch you. So.

What are you working on at the minute? What are you focusing on your business? I mean, there has been a very unusual period of time because you're in Melbourne, Victoria, where you went into a very, very strict stage four lockdown for the second time. And that's really put a lot of press on you guys. Yet you've continued to be a part of the program. You've continued to kind of build your business. That's, that's an interesting mindset. When I see others saying, oh, I've not had work for seven months, everything's a nightmare. What is it about what you're doing that's different to what I see A lot of people out there sort of, you know, I guess adopting a kind of more of a broad general public view, which is like, oh, it's a nightmare and nothing's happening. What is it you're doing differently, Tim, because, because you're still pushing forward.

Yeah, well, I think I've been lucky in some parts, but you can work out what the definition of luck is. But the, in that my client, a large part of my client base is government. So they've, they've still had money to spend and messaging to get out.

But it certainly, certainly hasn't been at the levels that I would have expected.

Without this pandemic.

And so my initial thought, like everyone else was, okay, I'm going to use this time for some self improvement. I'll smash through some of the coursework.

That hasn't quite eventuated because I've had enough work coming in to keep like. But yeah, having to cut down my work hours to two days a week so we can share the care of the kids without having access to childcare or Kinder.

Yeah. Has meant that the day to day has kept me busy enough.

Got a bit more free time now, now that daycare and kinder have gone back, back up to my full capacity. So right now I'm doing all I can to get some solid marketing in place.

So that we can pick up where we left, pick up where we left off and keep on this.

Kind of continuous year on year improvement.

I think that talks nicely to you. You've focused very, very much on government and comms and sports specifically.

A lot of video companies get fixated on doing everything for everyone at any time, fractally, for any price. And that's not something that we typically promote. Inside the video business accelerator, we have a slightly different approach. How's that? Is that something that was easy for you to do or were you kind of more of a general videographer beforehand or how has sort of specializing and focusing on becoming an expert in government and sport.

How's that, how's that helped you?

Yeah, again, listening to others journeys as I go through this, other members of the group has made me realize that actually, yeah, my, I was, I was the same deal. I thought I was a generalist doing everything, but when actually looked back, like one of the first things you get us to do is that the client audit. Look at who, where. Yeah. Where all the money's coming from, who are our biggest, biggest contributors to the bottom line.

And yeah, it made me realize that, well, yeah, most of my clients are government. I, I get on well with them. I know how they work.

I can service them pretty easily. And I think that. And that aspect of what we do is appreciated by them. We make it easy for them.

And so yeah, it absolutely made sense to double down on that. And yeah. Rather than, yeah. Rather than trying to appeal to them, to everyone. And funnily enough, I mean, part of the reason that for the government clients is prior to going out on my own freelancing in between, in between being a freelance camera assistant and then a freelance video producer, I was working in the comms. Working comms department for a couple of different government departments. And it was always frustrating when the messaging was we need we. Who's your target audience? I'd always ask our internal clients and the answer was always, oh, everyone.

Yeah.

And that's just not an effective way to communicate.

Exactly right. And, and you, you, I mean, how much would you say, what percentage of your work would you see as government?

I'd say at least 80 to 90. Yeah.

And the great thing about government is that, you know, they're a pretty safe bet. But I think what's, what's, what's, what's interesting worth pausing here and commenting on is that the reason that I'm such an advocate of specializing in becoming a master and, and really serving a particular section of the market is that you start to learn their language, you start to learn how they communicate, how they talk about things. And I guess you coming from that government background gives you an edge. How important do you think that is in, in, in the new business that you acquire through government? The fact that you've already done a.

Lot of government work, it certainly puts some minds at ease. And it's easy to come with a recommendation, which always helps. But yeah, like straight away they can, Our clients can see the. We totally understand when they need to Shift dates at the drop of a hat, or.

There can be really eager upfront to get this something happening and then it sits on the shelf for three months. Because they're in, in a large part they're driven by what's going on in politics.

They're not. They're not always running on their own time like they've got their own ideal timelines to work to. But yeah, the, the political game can sometimes get in the way of getting things done.

I do remember a quote from a report I was reading after the Black Saturday bushfires, and this came out of around about the same time there was some pretty devastating fires in California. And I remember reading a report talking about public communications around emergencies. And the line was, we can no longer afford to work at the speed of government.

Yeah. And. And that's just kind of really stuck with me that, yeah, the government works at a completely different speed from the rest of us. It's. It's not like the commercial world where they, they try to rush things to market. They. They'll get things done when they get things done.

Yeah. And I guess you have this, this in, in unique, intimate insight to that. And so I guess when a government department is looking to find a supplier and they've got a supplier over here who's talking about awards and all these projects they've done versus someone who's a specialist in government, I'm pretty sure they're going to be more likely to come to you. And that's typically what you found, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. Actually, I got some feedback the other day about, from, from a client asking them, yeah, why, why, why did they hire us? And they say the big thing was you showed a genuine passion and interest in what we were trying to do. And that really came through in the, in the proposal. And that was. So that was a big, big tick for going with us.

Nice. Nice. So what's next for you, Tim? You've got, you've got another baby on the way, so you're gonna be up to three in terms of business. And obviously Melbourne's in a slightly unique position just now. It's sort of opening. No one's quite sure. What does the next three or four months look like for you?

Trying to have as busy a summer as possible.

We. Yeah, some I've. I've found particularly typically December is pretty busy. Mad rush up to Christmas. Everyone wants to get everything done before taking, taking a summer break. And January, some years January has been. Most years January has been pretty quiet.

But recently it's been there's been a fair bit on so between now and then doing all I can to fill up that pipeline.

So we can kick off 2021 and just completely forget about 2020.

Yeah, I think that's probably a good thing for everyone. Well, Tim, thank you so much for sharing your story. I know that I just love working with you and we've become great friends and I always think that's the great sign of great business when you start a business relations someone and you become great friends. In fact, little little side story, the A7s launch film we were going that we just did recently. Tim and I actually were working together under NDA three or four months ago on a whole concept involving mountain biking and down in Victoria and you lined up so much of it and then the lockdown happened and we had to spin everything on its head. So it was a real shame we couldn't do that because very much looking.

For it tried to save it with by shooting in Canberra as a solution but then the yeah, I wasn't allowed out of the state. You weren't allowed. You were allowed in but you weren't allowed out again and yeah, exactly.

So we'll get that opportunity at some point, I'm sure.

I still want to shoot that video.

Yeah, yeah.

My A7S3 is arriving next week, so that's one nice one, Tim. Thanks so much. Where can people find out more about you?

We're@archcreative.com.

Other than that, I'm pretty much of a consumer on Instagram as a photographer as well. I should be a lot more active on there. I know, but we'll work that out if that falls into the marketing pipeline or not otherwise connect with me Timothy arch on LinkedIn.

Yeah, we'll link to that below on the blog. So guys, thanks so much and we'll see you next week. Hey guys, thanks for watching. I hope you got a huge amount of value from that episode. If you're looking for additional support or resources to support your business journey, then head over to Denlenny.com where you can get a whole heap of other resources, free downloads and access all the other episodes in this series. Be sure to subscribe and I'll see you next time.