How to Plan For the Year Ahead. EP #247 - Shorty

Hey guys, in this video I'm going to talk about planning. We've just finished a coaching call with my clients and we were going through the importance of the constraints as a human being in business. And it's the same whether you're a video business or in any business. But I focus on helping video businesses. So let's talk about that.

The constraint you have in any business is time and energy and the results that you can get. And the.

Trade off is always time, energy and focus. So if you want to really grow your video business.

The first thing you've got to get handle on is what do you want, what is the goal? What is that number? Let's call it 500,000. Okay, as a round number and you're currently at 100,000. How do you get there? Does that even seem like it's like too big a number?

Whatever your goal is time, money, freedom.

Buying that camera you always wanted and having an amazing studio setup, it's. It's about priorities. And so the thing that no one really talks about is how do you prioritize on the right things. In video production, most people time gets sucked up in delivering the product, as in shooting, editing, production, delivery.

Where you need to be focusing your attention is at the front end of who is your ideal client and where are they and what do they want. And if you can get that right, then you can tailor your offering to give them what they want. The simplest answer that should be given on a website in principle is when someone lands on your website, it should resonate with them and it should basically say, you are in the right place, we're going to give you what you want. And most businesses get this wrong. So we were doing this session this morning in the VBA and we were breaking down. We started with like, what are all the accomplishments from the last year and what are all the lessons learned? And that is an opportunity to celebrate because achievements that you've made in your business. Because we always underestimate the achievements that we've made in our business and we don't pay enough attention to the lessons that we've learned so that we can kind of habit stack and not make the same mistakes again, but also identify which things worked so we can do more of them and which things didn't work so we can do less of them. And so once you've drawn a list and you can do this like pretty simply, you just take a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle and on the top of one page you write accomplishments. And on the Other page you write lessons learned and just sit down. Like, I mean I've got this, I do it on remarkable, which is this kind of tablet thing. What's cool about this is it actually shows up on my, on my screen as a kind of direct feed. But a pen and paper, you know, I've done plenty of them just using a pen and paper. There's something about doing this process manually that is really powerful. So you want to go somewhere quiet, not sitting at your desk. I don't recommend you do this.

Like on the computer. You want to be like physically writing because you want to sit and think about everything you've achieved in the last year. And then generally speaking, what's easier is all the screw ups, right? All the things you fucked up. So you want to make sure that.

You'Ve made sure that everything's kind of, you know, you've got it all written down and then you want to turn it into like an equation which is you look at a lesson learned or.

You know, an accomplishment and let's say you had a really good month of sales in November. So we had a great month of sales in November. So to turn that into a kind of equation, you want to ask how can we get a deeper question out of that? What we're trying to do here is create strategic priorities for the year ahead to allow us to grow our business with less work effort than the previous year.

And the reason for that is that in almost every scenario.

You can get so far by doing the work yourself, but you'll reach a ceiling, you'll cap. I remember when I was running my production company in the UK, I was doing about 250,000 sterling a year, 260,000 sterling a year, every year for three years running because it was just me. And it's only when I realized that by building a team you can leverage other people and focus on high value tasks that things start to make a shift.

And so this, this idea of focus is critically important because no amount of strategies are going to matter if you don't have the time and headspace to think clearly about what you're trying to achieve. So this process, you take your attention achievement, which is like let's say we had our best sales month in our production company in November. And then you want to say, well, how do we achieve X which is the desired outcome, which would be how do we create this kind of revenue every month given that there's an obstacle? So how do we achieve X given that Y? So how do we achieve this sales revenue Every month. Given that we don't have a marketing strategy, that would be something that would become a question to dig deeper into to create a strategic outcome. So what would the strategic outcome look like? It would be. And the way to do this is to look at the.

12 months from now. So you're sitting in January of next year and you're saying, we've redone this. We've actually nailed this. We had this best month happen more than once. In fact, the ideas make it every month. So what you would say is something like, we have a.

Very.

Targeted marketing strategy that attracts qualified leads into our pipeline, and we're closing 60% of those deals every month. That would be your strategic goal.

And from that strategic goal, you would say, okay, well, that's going to take some time to set up. So how about if in the next 90 days we just work on that one thing? So when you're not on shoots, when you're not in production, you just work on that one strategic goal. Now, the bigger your team, the more you can offer.

You can offload the work that you're doing to your team, the more strategic priorities you can create. So if you've got a list of, like, accomplishments and lessons learned, you can do this process for every single one. And you end up with these strategic goals. The next step of the process is to take those strategic goals and turn them into tasks. So let's say the goal was, we have.

An effective marketing strategy attracting our ideal clients.

And we've got five leads a month coming in, and we're closing at 60%. That's going to need a marketing strategy, that's going to need a sales process, and it's going to need a method for accountability to measure how that's doing. And so you'd start with the marketing strategy. You'd start with, well, auditing your business from last year. Who did you do the most work with? Where was the most profit? Not revenue, profit. Identify them and say, well, there's my niche that I'm going to target and I want to just talk a little bit about niching. Niching doesn't mean you only ever work in healthcare, for example. It is about making sure your marketing message is talking to one audience. The biggest issue with marketing is that if you try and market to everyone, you'll end up speaking to no one. And so you want to be clear on who you're marketing to.

So let's say your biggest opportunities in healthcare. So what you then want to do is go and find out as much as you can about that market and that person that hires you because you're selling person to person. Find out everything you can about what they like, what they don't like, what their pet peeves are, and build a profile, a customer avatar of that person and.

Then identify their wants, needs, aspirations, and what is important to them. Because then you can build a marketing offer that promises to solve that problem with your solution. And then you create a marketing funnel which is some means of finding out where these people are. You might be connecting with them on LinkedIn, you might run some ads and then you put that message in front of the right people. And if you put that in front of 100 people, 5 to 10 will take notice. Out of every hundred people that come to your offer or your website or to your respond to your message, only three are really in a position to buy something right now. But the other seven might be kind of interested at some point in the next few months. Another 20% might be interested at some point in the next year. 30% aren't interested and 30% wouldn't take it even if it was free. So there's no kind of equations to think about. But the idea is that the more people you speak to with the right message, customers will funnel in and you'll end up with two or three at the end who are ready to buy what you're selling. Now this takes some time to set up.

But it's off. You know, I think as Tony Robbins said, most people wildly overestimate what they can achieve in 12 months, but underestimate what they can achieve in five years. And so as I didn't wrap up this, this first sort of what I would call my shorty episode.

I want you to think about your own business and think about, you know, what is your messaging like? Is it clear? Is it really.

Does it make sense to the target market or is it a bit wishy washy? Because if you, if you make it clearer, you will have more impact and reach more of your target market and that will result in more sales and more sales will result in more income and business growth and you'll find yourself working for more of your ideal clients.

I hope you found that useful. This is a new approach I'm taking to my podcast. I'm going to put it on YouTube. I'd love to know your thoughts. What kind of things are you interested in learning about growing and scaling a video business. And I will see you in the next video.