How to Build Resilience in your Video Business - EP#086 shorty

G' day guys. Tuesday 5th May.

Just tuning in for this week's Shorty.

Today was planning day in the accelerator. We spend the first Tuesday of every month refining our strategic plan.

And I started today with a quote from Jocko Willink about building resilience. Something I'm sure you've had to do a lot of recently.

And I think it's worth sharing with you because, well, you know, Jocko is a very smart guy and he says, you know, building resilience is a decision you got rejected. What's your decision? You can decide to go knock on another door or curl up in a little ball and cry. My recommendation is that you go knock on another door and try again. That's resilience.

And you know, Jocko Willinks, a retired US Navy seal. He's the number one New York best selling author. New York Times best selling author. If you've not read his book, then you should definitely go and check it out. It's phenomenal and certainly one of the must reads as far as I'm concerned. And what I love about Jocko is it's just all real, literally battle tested theory and strategy. You know, it's not something that's just kind of come out of a book. He's. He's dealt with a life and death situations and then extracted leadership decisions from them. And that I think is pretty, is pretty amazing. Anyway, I hope you're doing okay. Here in Australia things are being loosened off. I know in New Zealand they've come out of stage four and I'm observing that there's some, you know, some plans for loosening rest of the world. So I think what we've got to bear in mind is that this is all going to come to an end probably sooner than we realize. And so you want to be building muscle just now. You want to be making sure you're ready for when things, you know, return to some level of normality. Now working with my clients as I do, you know, we've virtually everyone has been pivoting their business or pivoting their offer in some way. And one of the things that's interesting that we discussed in today's call was that, you know, within our environment we don't allow to acknowledge that the coronavirus really exists. You know, I mean, we acknowledge it obviously, but we don't let it become the reason why things can or can't happen. In fact, what we've done is we fostered an environment where there is no negativity, there is no negative news. There is no, you know, influence that, that will prevent you from taking action. You know, we want to build resilience in our community and that's what we do. So how are you building resilience? How are you, you know, where are you getting your support from? It's very important that you, that you, you get support from, from the right people and, and, and don't listen to the news and don't listen to kind of, you know, even well meaning friends. I mean, social media, Facebook's just rife with bullshit.

You know, everything from the 5G to, you know, the, the virus was started as a kind of cyber attack. I mean, none of this I have any interest in because we are in a situation where we are where we are. So that's my dog chewing my chair. If you can just hear that gnawing in the background, you know, we are where we are and we have to deal with the situation as it is. So I prefer not to get involved in conspiracy theories and discussions that really don't serve me or my clients. How. And he was sharing this morning's college. It was a planning call and we were, we were going around the group once we'd done the planning session and we asked everyone to talk about, you know, one.

Thing to celebrate from the previous month. You know, what was one, what was one achievement and then what was one lesson learned. And so many of the achievements were around, you know, acting quickly, not spending time, thinking too hard, just going out and offering their clients something different and, and also an acknowledgement of, of marketing and how, you know, you can spend a lot of time marketing your business and often feel like no one's listening.

But in actual fact, you're having a greater impact on the wider community than you perhaps think. I mean, this, this podcast is a great example. I think we're up to episode 85, something like that.

You know, it takes a while to get up there.

And you know, you don't get any direct feedback. You don't get, you don't, you know, you get your numbers of who's downloading and consumption and that sort of thing, but you don't really know who's, who's consuming the content. I mean, I don't really know most people who are on the end of the microphone.

So as a little kind of request, I suppose if you've not connected with me in some way and just consume in silence and that's completely fine. But I'd love to know what, where you are. So do me a favor and just go over to LinkedIn and search for me Denleny D E N L E N N I E and just connect with me and tell me where you're listening from because it's fascinating. I get stats and there's listeners all over the world, but I'd love to connect with you. And we had a message from a guy in Norway recently, someone in Canada, and I would just love for you to share with me where you're listening from because I'm curious and if you feel like doing that, great. If you don't, that's okay too. But back to the planning. The thing with planning, we have something called the U quadrant and I won't go into now because it's kind of quite involved. But we really, what we do is we base our philosophies around the fact that you are driving your life and business. Seems obvious, right? But we have a review and attack process where we talk about you as an energy and, and how much self discipline and self control you have and how you score yourself and things like goals and time management and awareness of where you need to get to. Then we look at process. How are you prioritizing your long term outcomes.

And are you saying no to requests that don't support your long term outcomes? And then how to create systems for execution. Then we look at outcomes. Are you consistently completing goals and making progress and getting results and are you intensely focused and on deliberate actions? Of course we need to measure everything. So we look at tracking results against benchmarks and reviewing the processes that do and don't work. And we had some discussion today about, you know, marketing that's working and not working. And you know, it's really important that you kind of look out for these things. And then, and then we look at, you know, basically the main sections of your business. You know, marketing prospects, sales, clients, delivery, operations. And we, and we score, you know, every month. Do you have a fully functioning marketing system that's consistently delivering qualified leads? Would you score out of 10? You know, you have a consistent measurable lead process and a nurture process for moving prospects into buyers. How do you score? Do you have a high converting sales process and know what that conversion ratio is? Are your clients buying repeatedly from you and their happy to refer you new business? This is a really crucial one. Are you able to run multiple productions simultaneously without needing to be there coordinating everything? And are your processes documented and systemized in detail every step of the way? We look at these things every 30 days and what we do is we score out of 10 and then based on that score helps you focus your energy on where you need to spend your time next. And then we identify opportunities and we identify ways in which you can develop your focus and align and assign time in your diary to achieve those goals. And it's something that I've been using this process for probably four years. It's based on a combination of different things, but various mentoring groups I've been in. But fundamentally, it's from Vern Harnish, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. And this way of.

You know, of planning strategically has just enabled me as a creative to get more shit done, like, you know, without distraction, without getting kind of sidetracked onto B and H or looking at a YouTube or a Vimeo video.

And what's really cool is that I just assign blocks of time in a day to achieve certain things. And it really is a phenomenal process to. To follow and one that I found to be very, very effective. So, yeah, I'll. I'll actually post. I'm going to post the planning template up on. I'm going to make a video available on the resources section of the website that kind of just gives an overview of this process. So if you're interested in grabbing that, you can go to the resources page over on the website@denlenny.com and you can download a template and have a go at this yourself. I think it'll really help you.

And yeah, I'll just finish up by sharing another jocko quote, which I thought was very, very appropriate. I mean, his thing is discipline equals freedom, right? And I very much agree with that. But he says if you stop looking for a shortcut and find your discipline and your will, then you will find your freedom. And I think that's pretty cool. 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 a ceiling and we benefit from mentorship, support and coaching, then check out how you can work with me over@denlenny.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 favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in. See you next week.