How to Scale Your Business in the Next 90 Days. EP #121 - Shorty

G', day, guys, how are you? It's Den Lenny here, host of the how to Scale, a video Business podcast, here with your shorty now, this week it's sponsored.

By Clearboard by Chuff Productions. Clearboard is a really fantastic way of presenting content to your audience if you have clients who are.

Used to Deliver keynotes or PowerPoints and they want a more interesting way of doing it. Now, if you want to learn more about Clearboard, you can actually go to chuffed productions.com.

And I'll also link to the site beneath. Ben is one of my clients and they've really been putting a lot of work in recently to building a new studio. They're based in the UK and it's a pretty innovative system, very simple system, but it's a system that allows clients to communicate in a more unusual way. So if you're interested in learning more about Clearboard, it's really cool. Reach out to Ben. I'll LinkedIn below. And I mean, he'd be happy to have a chat with you on LinkedIn and explain more about it to you, but it's the kind of thing that.

It works really well for explaining really complex data. And so, yeah, good shout out to Ben. I promised him I'd mention that on the podcast. So this week we are into a new planning quarter inside the Video Business Accelerator. And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that strategic planning is a big thing that I'm very committed to within our community. From a coaching perspective, it's critical that you have a very clear plan of what you're doing, who you're doing it for, how much you want to generate personally in the business, both from a revenue perspective and a profit perspective. And then you want to reverse engineer that and create a strategic plan that will help you achieve it in a meaningful time frame. It sounds pretty simple. It is. It doesn't mean it's easy. And as with most things, as with most things in business, My teeth back in. You know, the real true success of most business is just doing fairly mundane, repetitive tasks over and over again consistently. And as creatives, as filmmakers, sometimes we struggle with that consistency. And so, you know, it's very important that we create frameworks around.

What it is we're doing to ensure that we're spending our time on the right things. So today we did a planning session where we reboot our planning every 30 days, but every quarter we go a bit deeper. And so I want, you know, if you don't do any kind of Planning. I want you to kind of use this opportunity to, to kind of plan out your next 90 days. Have a think about, you know, what is it you want to achieve in the business. It might be a revenue goal, it might be what we're like. We are, we're building a new website. So for the next 90 days we'll be in full website mode. So our outcome is to build a high converting website that really reflects our experience and more importantly, the outcomes that help our clients achieve through the Video Business Accelerator program.

And I don't feel our website does that at the minute because it's just never been a priority for us. So we're working with a web company, we're working with copywriters and putting an awful lot of work into getting that up and running. So that's our strategic objective, the outcome of which will hopefully have us build more authority in the marketplace. If someone's never heard of us before, then they go to our website. They'll get a good idea of who we are, what we do and how we help people. And if that's something that will benefit you, the listener, and if you're listening to this and you're on a video production company, then there's every possibility that it will. So anyway, back to some kind of practical training for you. So the best way to figure out your strategic planning is to actually work out, you know, what it is you do and who you do it for. I'm not talking about kind of, you know, we make videos for X, Y and Z. But what is your true purpose? Why do you exist as a business? What difference do you want to make to your market? What impact do you want to have on your customers? The next part is to get very clear on what does that look like in a commercial sense. It's all very well saying, oh, I love to film documentaries, but if they're not commercially viable, then how can you turn what you love or what the, what stimulates you, what keeps you excited into something that generates income? Because one of the, one of the challenges that face a lot of filmmakers is they, they spend way too much time trying to make every project like a passion project, like every project they do has got to be amazing and something to put on the show reel. And I think it's a big mistake. At the end of the day, if you're a professional video production company, your job is to make videos for clients. They don't necessarily have to be videos that you want to watch, but they have to be videos that their audience want to Watch. And that is why as a professional, your job, your role is to, is to entirely, you know, take a concept, an obscure concept, and turn it into a story that is relatable to the audience who you're, you're making it for. And so, you know, without a plan, that becomes very difficult. So you want to, you want to figure out, you know, what is your mission, what is the strategic objective in terms of revenue goals, financial goals, where do you want your clients to be, how much money do you want to make? How many jobs do you want to work on? Because just having a financial goal is, is obscure. Let's just say you want to make a million bucks. It's like, well, why do you want to make a million bucks? Why do you need a million bucks? I remember while being in a business community with someone who ran a restaurant and he very proudly told me they generated a million dollars a year. And then the next sentence he said, but we don't keep any of it. Like, why on earth would you want to have 30 staff and bills and stress to say you've got a million dollar restaurant if you're not making any money? I'd much rather have $100,000 business working one day a week and keep $100,000. So, you know, profit and revenue are two different things. And be clear that the number that's important is the profit. How much do you keep? And also how much are you willing to do for that money? How much of your time are you willing to sell to achieve that goal? And you know, I think when we start off in business, we all get a bit excited about the idea of making a million or half a million or whatever the number might be. But really the only money that counts is the stuff that you have to keep after you've paid your tax, and then that's the stuff you can enjoy. So getting clear about what you want and how you're going to do that and how much time you want to have. For me personally, moving to Australia, moving up here to the sunshine coast, it's all about lifestyle. It's all about building a business around the life I want to live and nothing else. You know, we're building a beach house just now and we'll be 250 meters from the beach. The goal is to walk on the beach every day and work with amazing clients and coach people through our, through our programs and help people achieve great success. Whatever they define that to be, whatever they deem that to be. So you need to get very clear on that. And once you're clear on that, then you reverse engineer the steps. It's going to take over the next five to 10 years to achieve that. We always overestimate what we can achieve achieve in a month or a year, but underestimate what we can achieve in 6 months, 12 months, 18 months. You know, talk about in terms of like, you know, if you're talking about the next 30 days, we might be over ambitious what we think we'd achieve, but over six months we could achieve a lot. But more than that is think about life in terms of the next five to seven years and then you can start to really see enormous growth. So the strategic plan element is where we break down what are the different buckets or the different areas we need to put our attention. And the obvious ones are sales, marketing, you know, production, client retention.

But there's so much more to it than that. You know, there are literally 50 or 60 different strategic objectives you need to execute to get your business goals to say, a million bucks. And so what we do within the program is we create structure around that. We create a very clear structure that the guys check in every Monday with their objectives for the week and it gives them a bit of social accountability. But also more than that, it's building habits within themselves so that they start to get used to always thinking in terms of strategic planning. And the advantage of strategic planning is that when you get distracted on a shoot or a client calls in and you go, right, where was I? Instead of spending 20 minutes trying to get back to focus, you simply go to your list and go, all right, I was working on this website, let's do that thing now. And it's a very, very power process. So if, if it's something that you'd like to learn more about, then please reach out and I can, I can set up a 50 minute call with you, we can talk a bit more about how it might work for you. But that's me at a time for this week, folks. I, I've got good mate of mine Darren Moston on the podcast on Thursday. Darren runs online creative in Brighton in the uk. He's a colorist and post production facility and he's going to share his business journey and how he's still thriving and investing during lockdown and Covid and is actually building up a really solid business and some of the lessons he's learned in the last 21 years. So look forward to that and I'll see them. 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, coaching, then check out how you can work with me over@denleny.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.