How to make success almost inevitable. EP #246 - Den Lennie

Well, hey guys, it's Dan Lenny here. Welcome to 2022, the first episode of the how to Scale a Video Business Podcast. Here is episode 246 and I thought what we'd do today is talk through some best practices for how to set up your year ahead. We're actually not back fully at work until the 10th, but this week I am using the space and time to think, to plan to dump all of the ideas I've had while I've been on hol and to reflect on last year and think about how we approach this year differently. And what I hope this episode will do is help you to, you know, start the year differently. You know, as far as I've managed to kind of evaluate over the last year, I've recognized that success is a series of habits, microhabits and habits that you stack on top of each other to get an outcome. I think where we fail, we fall down is when we end up, you know, trying to achieve too much in a time frame that is not realistic. So that's today's topic and I can't wait to get in the show.

Welcome to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. Each week we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business. With your host Dan Lenny, discover how the accelerator program is transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. enjoy this episode.

So I kind of eased back into work today after, you know, a considerable break. And this year we just had such a good kind of quiet Christmas. The weather's been shocking actually up here in Queensland. We've had a tropical cyclone of hovering off the coast for the last weekend or two and so it's been really wet, but nonetheless managed to catch a lot of films and just spend some time being. And that's where I want to start today's episode because.

I started today by using, I've got this, this device called Remarkable, which is basically a kind of a digital notepad. And I just literally sat down and started brain dumping because I don't know about you, but I have a whole ton of ideas. But ideas on their own can actually derail your business if you're not careful. And so I think it's important to get your ideas down and on paper.

And then they're out. And then my process involves taking those ideas and just leaving them for a few hours and then coming back to them and then breaking them into a mind map. So I have a bit of a kind of multi step process here. So I dump the ideas down randomly on a bit of paper or on this remarkable. And then I leave them, then I come back and I then put them into a mind map and then I kind of put them into departments. And once they're in departments, then I can start to prioritize. Now my next step's going to be to recreate my vision board for this year and also to start to create an annual plan. And that will feed into and become a strategic set of objectives. But before we get there, the other thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to look at all of those opportunities and evaluate them. And this is something I learned from one of my mentors, Ben Simkin, about opportunity evaluation. I think Richard Branson said, you know, opportunities are like buses. They come past you every single day and there's any number you can jump onto and go for a ride, but it doesn't mean that you should. And the reason for that is, is that we only have a finite amount of energy and resources. If you have a bigger team, you have more resources because you can spread some of the kind of day to day operations out to the team. But if you don't, you've got to be really careful not to kind of grab a new idea and run with it without really doing some due diligence. And this process of, you know, vomiting out the thoughts in your brain onto a piece of paper and then putting those into a mind map helps you to kind of, kind of process and filter the ideas and look through them with different lenses on. Because the whole idea of opportunity evaluation is that the purpose of a business, right, is to make a profit for the shareholders, okay? That is the absolute profit driven commercial reasons of business exists. Anything other than that's a hobby. But when you start to evaluate how you can spend your time, not all opportunities are created equally. And so if you don't go through this evaluation process, you might have a really enthusiastic idea. And look, as creatives, we've always got great ideas. And I'm. My personality type is like, you know, come up with an idea, run with it. So I have to pull myself back and say, well, before we run with this idea, what kind of resources are going to be required for it? What kind of time is involved in achieving the outcome? What is the return on investment for time and resources? And is it the highest yielding profit for the least amount of work? And you might think, oh, Dan, that sounds a bit commercial, a little bit, you know, kind of capitalist. It is, but hear me out. I regard wealth not Just in monetary terms, but in terms of time I have available and the freedom I have within that time. And for that, I need money to either fund a project or pay a team to do the operational things that needed are needed in the business. Take this podcast, for example. There's no way I can get out of actually recording the podcast. That's the bit I have to do. But I'm spending some time today planning the program for the year ahead in the vba and at the same time, the podcast episodes that will accompany that and support that. So I'm building a system to make podcast production even more efficient. Now, I have a team who then take this podcast and they do all of the uploading and they get the show notes created from a copywriter we work with the liaise with Kelvin to do that. They upload the podcast, they get the show notes back, they create the graphics, and they upload to all the platforms and create all the social media. So 90% of the podcast distribution is done by my team. I just have to create the content. So it's about efficiency and it's about the highest and best use of my time. And the highest and best use of my time is to be studying, learning and decanting that knowledge and applying it in my own business.

And then helping other businesses to achieve similar results. So in anything you do, when you come in to grow a business, you know, and this might be, if you've been used to doing a lot of the work yourself in your own business, this is going to take a bit of time to kind of make a mind shift on. But you cannot, you cannot grow your business if you do all of the work yourself. You will hit a ceiling, you'll hit it repeatedly. And, you know, part of my process today is reviewing our financials for the last year. And I like to do January to December just because I like the calendar year, even though our tax years are different around the world. But I look at January to December because I feel like there are seasons within that. And from that I evaluate, well, where do we get to this year, how much energy went into, what were the results, what were the outcomes, and what would I like to do more of and what would I like to do less of? And that whole process of throwing ideas down, putting them into a mind map, doing our unique planning process and evaluating the achievements from the last year, the lessons learned from the last year and where do you want to get to next all ties into your vision board. So it's a really important process and it's Derived in part from a book called the Road Less Stupid by Keith J. Cunningham. And Keith talks about, you know, thinking time and he actually advocates for thinking time every day. He advocates 45 minutes of thinking time every day. I think that's quite difficult to achieve when you're running a small business. But I think 20 minutes a day of thinking time is absolutely doable. But, but to get into the habit of thinking clearly every day for 20 minutes takes discipline. And, you know, another great book is, you know, from Jocko Willing. And I've mentioned Jocko many times, Discipline equals freedom. And I know that more than anything having, you know, finally embraced my health with a real focus in this last 12 months. And you know, I did two gym sessions over Christmas, between Christmas and New Year, I was at the gym this morning. And even though some days you feel like you're not achieving any growth, you do something at the gym and you realize you're actually stronger than you were three months ago. And that's why I think looking at cycles of three months is so important. So I feel it's really important at the beginning of the year to kind of have a kind of vision for where you want to get the business to. You know, I always liking running a business to being the captain of a ship. You have to have a destination in mind for the next period. And I feel like, you know, five or ten year goals are kind of so out of reach that they don't necessarily.

It'S difficult to make them realistic. I think having a vision for where you'd like to be in five years is very powerful. We did it moving to Australia back in 2012, 2013, that was the vision was vision was to move to Australia, live by the beach. And we moved there, you know, took us two years to get that all together. 2015, we moved here. 2021 is our sixth year, coming into our seventh year in Australia this year and.

We did it. So having that vision was very strong. But the execution comes down to lots of little habits, lots of little tasks. And so this idea of habit stacking is something else I want to kind of just touch on that habits.

Require energy. They require focused, constant and conscious energy. You have to decide you're going to change one thing and do it enough times, even when you don't feel like it, in order for you to be able to achieve that outcome. So habit stacking, something else. I'm going to be talking about more in the coming weeks, but really it's about getting clear on what you want and the more you can focus on what you want, the clearer you can become about that. It is simply a case of breaking down those steps and then prioritizing in what order you're going to do them. And the reason that the video business accelerator has been so successful, we're coming to our third year now, is that. Is that it's very hard to do these things on your own without some kind of accountability. And when you have an amazing group of other businesses who are a bit further down the road than you are.

You can follow the process with some confidence that there's someone to ask questions to. It's not just a kind of a risk of trying to sort of navigate blindly into the ocean. If you're going to sail from Europe to the Caribbean, it's been done many times before. You know, it might be the first time you're doing it and it will feel very new to you. But if you go and train with a skipper who's done it half a dozen times, you're going to get insights that are going to make the journey smoother, they're going to make it safer, they're going to ensure you get there in a timely manner and in one piece. If you just go out and try and figure out yourself by watching sailing videos on YouTube and reading a few books, you're just not going to be prepared. So, you know, masterminds, business groups, they provide that stability, they provide that roadmap, that navigation point, but they also provide you with an experienced crew who are sailing a similar kind of yacht to you. And that's the other thing that's important. You know, we've had some incredible successes in the group. In the last year, one of our clients in the UK just hit seven figures. That's over a million pounds a year in revenue for a video production company. And that isn't an accident. Those guys have been very strategic in what they set out to achieve. And it's funny because, you know, building a business to a point where you really want to get it to is not as hard as you think it's going to be. But there are lots of things that can trip you up along the way. And I think that one of the things that prevents people from growing faster is the they're not willing to invest in themselves, they're not willing, or they're scared if they make an investment in themselves, that they somehow won't show up and they won't get value. And it's interesting, I've had a few conversations in the last year where I'll talk to someone and they're just like, they've spent literally tens of thousands on equipment and they justify that as an investment, but when it comes to themselves, they won't spend a few thousand on themselves. And someone actually said to me recently, oh, well, because it's easy to put your credit card into B and H and order something, there's no real commitment. You pay the money whether you've got it or not, and the thing arrives and you get a hit. But when you actually have to invest in your business and invest in yourself, you kind of expose yourself. You have to kind of, you have to be of a certain strength of character to be willing to walk into an environment and say, hey, I may not know everything here, but I'm keen to learn. And, and if you get used to falling along the way and picking yourself up and keeping going anyway, it's amazing the results you'll get. You know, I'm noticing that with the gym, I'm just, I'm just getting stronger. And I said to my wife this morning, I said, you know, I go to the gym three days a week, three mornings a week, and I do a really solid session. You know, if I adjust my diet some more and keep doing that, then success is inevitable. It's actually inevitable. It's a done deal. I can't fail to get stronger, healthier, fitter. And what happens is like in anything you do, you know, this great time of the year, people start going to the gym and saying, right, this is my year to get fit. But about three or four weeks in, it gets hard and then they quit and they go back to their old behavior patterns. And what I've learned in business from, from, from being in my own business since 2008, 2009, working in other businesses prior to that, and working with a lot of mentors who have businesses more successful than mine is that it's just a journey. It's a journey of continual problems, challenges, obstacles, self doubt, being challenged by your own self beliefs to actually push through. And actually, success comes from incremental change all of the time, and not simply, I want to do this now and it'll be a huge success.

It's the small wins. I'll never forget a business that I worked with.

At CVP and the owner said to me, you know, business is like a roller coaster. It's like, look after the pennies and the pounds, look after themselves. Just keep chipping away and always be selling. And selling doesn't need to be like someone's actually transacting with you, but it could be beginning a relationship with someone, reaching out on LinkedIn, having the confidence to do that. And it's funny, because a lot of people I talk to when they first join our program is they're like, they're not that confident at reaching out what they call cold calling. But you don't need to cold call, but you do need to outreach. You do need to reach out to people. And one of the ways that we make that easy is by creating scripts and processes that have worked very extensively before. And so whenever someone joins our program, they're getting access to tried and tested blueprints, things that we know work so over time will yield results. And that's really what the whole reason for my existing as a business is. I want to help you to achieve results faster. Take this podcast, for example. We're at 246 episodes. We've done that in about a year and a half, two years max. And most of the other podcasts in this space have been around for four or five years and are at the same kind of numbers. And I just illustrate the point that the word accelerator, that's what we do. We do things at an accelerated speed. I came into podcasting late, and a few of the podcasts that are friends of ours, I mean, doing it four or five years, and we wanted to kind of to get into the game faster. And so we do two episodes a week, and we just smashed out more content. So we produced more content. We outworked all of the other podcasts by producing more content at an accelerated level. And the lesson in that is that if there's two speeds, you can work it. One is figure out for yourself as you go and just grow incrementally, or you can accelerate the process by being in an environment.

Where that acceleration is the norm. And so if that's something that interests you, then I want you to think really carefully about how you're going to push into this year and whether or not this year might be the year that you should be thinking about having a chat and seeing if the VBA is right for you. Now, one of the things I'm going to be doing this year is I'm only capping membership of the video business accelerator. We're close to 30 members at the minute, and we're going to cap the membership at 40. So once we get to 40, unless my members say, you know what, we've got space for some more and we'd like more people in the group, it's going to be a closed door and Therefore, the there's literally 10 spots left available in the VBA and once they're full, they're full. And, you know, people tend not to leave. One of my members, Tim, is coming up to his third year anniversary in the vba and you know, he's not planning to leave anytime soon because he gets so much value. And many of our members been with us two years, one year, three years. There's a reason they stay because it's like an insurance policy for your business and the investment returns on itself many, many multiples of times. And so it literally costs you nothing. If you invest $10 here and you get $50 back over here, then you're up $40. It's a win. Win. So, guys, I want you to think really carefully. Like, if you've been thinking about this and your business is at a point where it's, you know, it's, it's ready for the next step of growth, There are literally 10 spots left, and once they're full, the only way in will be if someone leaves. So, guys, I hope you have taken some insights from this podcast. Go away, write down the ideas you have for the year ahead, brain dump them, put them into some kind of list or mind map, and then start to evaluate them and prioritize them and I will see you on the next episode.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast with your host, Debbie. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com to learn more about how the accelerator program can help you today. 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.

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