https://www.listennotes.com/e/9f7426671fe745b3a4c39932f8be04b4

Well, hello and welcome to the show. We've been just discussing a few things before this episode, so apologies for the slight giggling. But we're going to keep this thing because we're trying to, you know, it's real, it's real life. We're not trying to kind of, you know, pretend this is anything but what it is. Now, this is a great time of year for resetting, and I think A lot of times we can come up with excuses why we're not able to do more in our business. And it's like, I don't have time. Well, you do have time now. It's the perfect time of year for really no excuses because practically nobody's working. It's a great opportunity to, I guess, get a bit strategic, maybe do a bit of a time audit. So yeah, Alana, let's kick off with you because this was a topic that was really that you came up with and I think is a great topic. What do you see, hear, feel out there? What inspired this topic? And please do share your views.

Yeah, so I suggested this topic because I have a lot of different conversations with a lot of different people and something that comes up a lot with people that are wanting to scale their business but don't know how is the excuse of, but I don't have the time. And I just see that as a bit of a sort of mindset shift and that people need to perhaps do a bit of an audit of their habits and what they're doing and look at if their habits are actually serving them to achieve what they want. So for me, it's like if you're trying to be an elite athlete, you know, you're going to be doing habits like training daily, you're going to be eating the right food, you're going to be, you know, working on a positive mindset, things like that. And I think the exact same thing relates to scaling a video production business. I think people really have to look at the habits and are those habits serving your greater purpose of wanting to be an entrepreneur? So maybe you need to ditch Netflix and instead get on Sales Navigator, you know, making sure that you're looking after yourself and, you know, putting yourself in the right frame of mind for that. So, yeah, I think you've got to get really strategic in all areas of your life. What, what do you think, Caleb?

Yeah, yeah, that's, I was just thinking, as you were saying, It, I kind of remember back to when I was like right in that, mentality mode of operation. Uh, it was pre-kids, spoke like, I'm, I'm coming to you as a father of three little boys. And I still, I find time to grow a business and I sometimes do hear people, and you know, not throwing any shade on those who don't have a family or haven't embarked on that journey yet. They say, I don't have, I just don't, you know, I'm so busy, I don't have time. And I look back at myself when I, pre-kids, I go, if we were.

I know, I know.

Wow, I didn't have time. I didn't know what time was. Like, the perspective shift is all a matter of perspective. all a matter of very subjective. It's like you do a full-time job.

Before you start work. And when you knock off from work, you're doing another day's work, getting into bed, and then you're doing work after that. So, yeah, I, I had a friend.

Of mine who kept saying, every time we'd catch up, it was always like, how are you going? Oh, I'm so busy. And that was just like the default. But I think when we realized it was just, that was the default operating for everybody. Everybody's busy. It then lets you go, Right, we're all busy, but what do I actually want to do and what am I trying to achieve in this time, right?

Yeah.

So I think like realizing that it's all relative, you might have 20 kids and a full-time job, whatever, or you might be single and with heaps of quote unquote time, you'll still feel the push and pull of busy. But I think this topic about it being strategic, it's all about the intentionality you use your time, right? so I, I always like to think of the quiet time of the year and go, you know what? We've got the, the luxury of, of space and time without the pressures of immediate client projects.

Right.

You know, you can pretty confidently say there might be a week or two where there's not a whole lot of other projects going on. So how do you take that, that space and time that you've got to really expand your thinking around, you know, what you do with your time day to day, what does good busy look like? How are you going to set yourself and the team some goals for the future? And also just keep that as the kind of underlying driver behind any other tasks you do. So when you do get busy, what's the thing you can always fall back to, to go, no, actually the priority with my time is this thing. So I'd be really keen to hear what you guys think about what those kind of drivers are underneath your strategic time management, because I I think they're really good guiders for wanting to scale or wanting to sell more or whatever it might be.

Yeah, I reckon for me it was just getting out of the sea of options and ideas and just like I was always playing in this, the ether of, well, we could do this or we could do that. And I had no business skills really or knowledge of how I was going to achieve these things. And they were all a bit intangible. I couldn't grasp them. Like I had concepts, but no, it led to no action. And so when I started to get some real traction around time management and being effective and, and contributing to something specific and growing my business, it was when I was able to put get some learning, foundation of learning and processes behind a specific thing I wanted to achieve. So firstly, it was like I needed to learn how to run a business. Really? And that's like a big topic, right? I needed to learn that business is all about systems. It's all about something that a structure that helps you achieve an outcome with small, repeatable tasks. I had to realize that discipline was a really massive and important part of achieving things and that my life wasn't just gonna be all, you know, peaches and rainbows, but I, and like highfalutin creative concepts and projects, that the day-to-day life of a business owner is doing boring things that you left the motivation to do long behind you. and, but you know, it's contributing to the, the outcome that you've set and that, you know, that just the discipline of doing that, those things is going to, it's going to Edge you closer to the goal, whether that be a financial goal, which we all have Financial goals. We all set them every, every year and track those every month. But then what is the what is the business that I want to build here? Like, what a put some flesh around that? What am I actually building? Am I, am I, what's the impact I'm going to have on the world here? Like, what are, what are the values that I'm expanding into my community? We all here, I have a really strong set of language and about those values. It's not just we're building a business to so that I can go on more holidays and escape from life like those in the rat race, right? We're, we're building something for a purpose and we're building something with meaning and all those good things.

I love that discipline. That's- I think it just, it all comes down to discipline at the end of the day, doesn't it? You know?

Yeah.

And I think being aware that, I'm going to prefix this, as I'm not against people having a good time and partying and like, and I've done plenty of that in my life, but I, there's been periods in my life where I've been drinking booze every weekend, you know, glass of wine at the end of the weekend, been a big week, let's get a bottle of wine, couple of beers. And I think certainly in Australia, there's a big culture of, hey, have a drink, socialize, relax. And I didn't drink for six months as an experiment. And then I've kind of really backed off the booze again. And what I've noticed is this correlation between If I'm really serious and committed to my business, it needs all of my attention whenever I've got available space and time. And, you know, we've all got commitments. So you make a decision. Is having this beer or this wine going to help me to achieve my goals, or is it going to slow me down, hinder me, make me a bit sluggish. It's a depressing. And so the next day you always feel a bit down. And again, I'm very, I'm not, I'm not judging anyone for having a drink. It's not that it comes down to prioritizing. And Alana and I were talking this week about, just some of our kind of outside of work habits and, and, and things we enjoy. And it was something that Alana hadn't done for a while. And it was so great. And we had a conversation about, you know, what life was like, maybe 10 years ago out partying versus what life is like now, and how we've both kind of separately channeled a new way of getting fulfillment. And it doesn't involve artificial stimulus. And I'm not trying to be cryptic on purpose. I'm just being respectful of it. It was a private conversation.

But, but the point being, you ain't all that cryptic.

But the point being is that having a drink Is a stimulus. And I've noticed that by not drinking and replacing it with like these dash waters, which are just zero calorie, it's not sponsored.

But if you'd like to, Dash, we'll.

Take- I mean, take a sip. Yeah, why not? It's really interesting, especially this time of year where there's been a lot of socializing. I've just really observed the disassociation with having a drink being how I relax. and finding other ways. And that has helped my mental state, my mental capacity to deal with challenges in the business. Quiet periods in a year, things go up, things go down. I just wonder if that's something that relates to this.

Yeah, it's funny you should say that because I haven't drunk in quite a while, just by choice, not for any particular reason. It just doesn't feel right anymore, so I just stopped. I'll have a drink every now and then, but it's definitely with me scaling my business and then not going out and not drinking, it's definitely kind of occurred at the same time. And I think it's because I'm putting that energy now into my business. And I think you almost have to look at it like a pie chart, right? This is, you know, your time and your attention and your energy. And if you're putting more of that energy and attention into partying, less is going to be going into your family or your business. And so you just got to look at how much of your pie chart you want taken up by certain things and where your focus needs to be.

Yeah.

And I guess too, like sort of talking to that pie chart idea is that like, if you feel like it's set up one way, but you want more of a different part of it, like maybe it is family time or something like that, just by removing the other parts and putting more time into the business, you then open it up, right? So you do have to have those really hard conversations with yourself and go, is this the best use of my time right now? And am I doing this for a reason that is valuable? Now, again, I also drink, I have, you know, go to the movies, do whatever. And like, sometimes you need that, you need those outlets and those sort of releases. But at the same time, like if you find yourself doing that to the detriment of the goals and desires you have in your business or in your life, something has to give somewhere. There needs to be sacrifices or compromises to go, we can't have everything. So what do you focus on and get the most out of that? And so I think as business owners, we've got the most opportunity to us because we have all of these tools at our disposal to leverage and create more for ourselves. Maybe it's bringing in team, maybe it's selling more, maybe it's whatever it is, we can kind of move things to create the life and the business that we want for ourselves. But you can't have everything. You can't be watching Netflix 10 hours a day and running a really successful business. and see your kids every day of the week. Like it's just something has to change there. So being really kind of critical of your own time used and then going, right, I want to address these things and sort of putting in place some structure and intentionality behind it just means that you are much clearer and focused on what you're going to achieve. And I think, you know, the quiet points of the year are the really good opportunities to reflect on that without the kind of immediacy of like, okay, well, I kind of just got 20 minutes to think about this. Now I'm gonna go to a job. It's like, no, you've got the luxury to be able to spend a day, a week on this and really sort of plan it out and set that as the benchmark for what you're wanting to achieve.

I think what you're saying is a really great point. It sparked the thought in me that there's often a perspective shift that needs to happen, especially for those early in business. I know it happened for me that I treated I set up like a little prison for myself subconsciously. I treated my business as something that controlled me rather than something that I'm building. And so it's really, I think it's really easy to slip into that powerless mindset of the victim mindset of like, my time's not my own. I have to do this. I have to do that. Someone's telling me I have to do this. And really, as business owners, We create all those things. They're all made up. They're not real. Sorry to say. We are actually the masters of our own destiny, but you actually have to step into that persona, that perspective, and own it, or else you will just slip back into you'll put things in place that you can tell yourself control that control you. You're putting in place your own, you know, fake masters. to make yourself feel more comfortable about not taking the action that is actually going to build the life that you want. And I think, you know, part of the process that we go through in, in the video mentors and the VBA is that, that vision boarding exercise. And it, that's really about connecting with, what do I want? What do I want? And will I step into the person? Will I become the person I need to be? to build that rather than, am I gonna be led by those circumstances of life and just play the victim?

The life audit, Den's life audit was really eye opening for me with that. It was the first time I'd actually sat down and gone, how much of my time is going to family, to work, to friends, to spirituality? And yeah, getting me to do that practice was very revealing.

Yeah, we're talking about habit audits, aren't we? Really, it's understanding that a business does not grow itself. It takes enormous amounts of your own effort and the ability to make decisions fast and the ability to trust your instinct, but also to be brutally honest with yourself about your habits, the ones that are serving you and the ones that aren't. It's very confronting. It's like it's actually not for everyone. Running a business is not for everyone. And I think there's a very fashionable trend that everyone should be an entrepreneur. And they see the back end of a journey. They see Jeanine Ellis, they see Elon Musk, they see all these people going, oh my God, they've made it. But I think Matt, you were telling me you'd done a lot of work for Jeanine's company, and in the early days she'd be around. And now she's less so because she's more of a personality. But, and I think social media perpetuates this of people only show a curated end game. Here's what it looks like when it's done. And, you know, the fact is that the real hard work... A few months ago, Matt and I had a conversation, a really raw conversation about it had been a really tough month for me and him in business for a number of reasons. and we had a conversation after us going, reflecting on the fact that that is the business journey, how you respond when things are tough. And there's a dozen things that can happen on any given day that can make your business tough and make it potentially risk falling over at any point. And like you have to just be developing that awareness around your habits in how you think about these things, how you process them. then the action you take subsequently, and then the outcome of that.

I think, yeah, like recognizing your own strengths, weaknesses, flaws, biases, all of these things, even if you can't act on it in the moment, but just being able to recognize them puts you in such a great position to be able to take the right course of action for whatever you need. So, you know, for me, we had a really challenging month, as Den sort of alluded to, and like, you go through, you can have the rock solid, steely belief in what you're doing, but as things get harder and harder and harder, the more that self-doubt and that imposter syndrome creeps in, but you just kind of like the ebbs and flows of that, you have to just ride out and be brutally honest to yourself and say like, am I feeling this? Is this me? Am I being you know, the best version of myself for this, do you really believe in your thing? And really kind of just curate what you're doing with your time because those voices will creep in at any stage. And I think that as soon as you can recognize, all right, maybe I've become more complacent, or I'm not showing any humility here and owning the mistakes or the times I'm not showing up or whatever it is, just gives you that platform to be able to move forward from. if you don't recognize these things that you're in your own way or that you're constantly putting up barriers and saying, yeah, no, but this is going to happen and blah, blah, blah, and putting in excuses, you're just cheating yourself in those situations. So by prioritizing, recognizing what's in front of you and the challenges that you might present to your own situation through the way you, you act and behave, recognizing that just sort of frees you up to then make a really conscIous decision. I also, I heard a really great quote a couple of weeks ago that it's easy to look over the other side of the fence and go, the grass is always greener on the other side, but that grass still needs mowing. All grass needs mowing. So it doesn't matter if it's greener or not, you've still got to mow the grass. And it's like you have the most successful business in the world, be doing millions of dollars or be at the start of your journey making, you know, a couple of grand a month, but by comparing yourself to somebody else, it's just, it's impossible because you need to focus on your own grass and make sure that that's tidy and under control. So look in your own backyard, really assess where your challenges are, what your blockers are, and then go, how can I tackle this? How can I overcome this? And maybe it's bringing in some external support. Maybe it's Outsourcing some stuff and whatever it is, right? It's, it's all very case specific, but look in your own backyard and really just determine what's holding you back and then make a strategic decision to, to overcome that.

That's so good. One thing that makes me think of is that this kind of three stage formula of how you philosophy of how you take action, how a human takes action in their life. Every action you take is led by a decision that you've made. You have to decide to take an action, but every decision is influenced by thought. and so the whole philosophy is that the foundational work that any of us need to do is up here. How do we think about ourselves? How do we think about our time? How do we think about our employment and our future? If we can do some foundational work, and like Matt said, this is like journey stuff. It's not like instant results, you know, I'm gonna I'm going to rewind my brain and then I'm instantly going to think differently. But the first step is acknowledging and searching and going, Man, how do I think about this? How am I thinking about this? And just the actual action of questioning how you approach something and how you think about a certain topic, yourself, your business, your work, whatever, your time, gives you the opportunity to do that audit and to discover things you're like, what do I believe about What do I believe about how effective I'm gonna be? What do I believe? What's stopping me from doing the things that I know I should be doing? Or what's stopping me from learning? You know, those are all really foundational things. And they, when you change your thinking and change the way you think about something, it's gonna change the decisions you make. And when you've changed those decisions that you make, like we're talking about whether I'm gonna go have a beer and get sloshed on the weekend, 'cause that's what I see people around me doing, or whatever the reason is, then you change your decision making. It changes the actions that you are taking, and that changes everything.

Change your thoughts, change your life.

Yeah, it's powerful stuff, hey. And then, you know, it takes a while, you know, there's a certain amount of emotional maturity that if I'd had 20 years ago, I might be in a different place. But I went through a whole career as a cameraman and it was very boozy and drugs and all sorts of stuff. It was just one big party. We're talking about London in the late 90s, early 2000s, doing a lot of entertainment, like music and entertainment. There was just parties everywhere and it was great. I don't regret it. But the penalty I've paid is I started my business late and I learned this really late in life. Now, I still feel I've got bags of time, but if you're 25 listening to this, oh my God, I mean, like, I mean, can you imagine knowing this earlier and having the discipline to go, oh, maybe I won't do that. Maybe I'll just do this instead.

There's a great story, and I can't remember the player's name, but there's an NBA player who was in the gym at midnight on New Year's Eve one year, and he's probably done it for a number of years. And when asked by a bunch of reporters, like, what are you doing in the gym on, you know, New Year's Eve? He's like, nobody else is in the gym. That's one more training session I've got in than anybody else. And it's like, that's the mentality of the guy that wants to be the best, right? Like it's, if you want to get ahead, you can't be just sitting back on your laurels and expecting it to come to you. You need to put in the work, put in the reps, put in the effort to get what you want. So if we kind of come back to this time management thing, like, if you're really brutally honest with yourself and going, I'm actually wasting a bunch of my time and I'm not getting as much enjoyment from that as I, as I actually believe I am because society's telling me I've got to go out and party and do all these things. Well, it's a great opportunity to go, you know what? Let's put into place some more really strategic decisions about how I build my business over time. And I think it's probably worth mentioning as part of all of this is that I don't think we're advocating for hustle 24/7, never have a break here. Like it's always, the balance is important. There is time and space to enjoy the life you create for yourself, right? But I think finding the balance is the key and making sure that the equilibrium is not weighted too far one way. So the other stuff is missing out.

So that's- I think I've worked every.

Night this week, but tonight I'm going to be doing Netflix.

Yeah.

Hell yeah.

Need that Netflix.

But I'm also just curious, you know, if we bring this back to, you know, staring at the the top end of a year and going, okay, I want to do this year differently. This is the year I'm going to make my business work. And we talked about a lot of the kind of byproducts of making unhealthy decisions that are for your business. But if we think back to that idea of strategic time management, I mean, it's kind of a very grown up thing, isn't it? Strategic time management all sounds great. What does that mean in reality? If you're sitting in your home office right now going, I've got nothing in the calendar. And I want to do things differently this year. But what are the steps? What are some practical things you need to be doing to make those changes? Because everyone gets very motivated at the beginning of a new year or a new cycle saying, this is the year I'm going to do it differently. and when things are quiet, it's like, right, I'm all focused. And then something happens, and then it, and you quickly fall off the wagon and, and you go back to your old habits. So what are some of the practical things you'd be thinking about if you can wind the clock back to when we were all, you know, just the lonely freelancer, went, well, I want to build this thing up this year. What can I do differently?

I'll jump in if that's all right, because I, you know, we're talking about these quiet really challenging period. It's been one of those moments to go, all right, what do I need to get back to? And what's the, the most efficient and strategic use of my time to change the situation we're in? And it is, it's about the simple things, right? It's about what moves the needle, what brings in business, what moves the conversation forward in the sales process, and then just do that relentlessly in a really important time of the day. So start of every day, nine till 11, two hours of really focused follow up, cold outreach, phone calls, and then that sort of builds out the rest of your day. So it might be like, hey, client we haven't worked with for a year, house things, great. Oh yeah, awesome. We've been up to this, blah, blah, blah. Then I'll send you some examples that becomes a task for later in the day, but then you know that you can follow up with them in a couple of days and just that compounding effect of just sales mentality. It's repeatable, it's simple, and it's the thing that moves the needle. That's the thing that I think is the easiest and most simple version of this to do. But I think the other thing that is really worth implementing is looking at your goals for the next year, but then breaking it down into those, you use quarterly sprints or 90 day sprints and basically going, cool, I want to achieve 20% more revenue this year than last year. What does that look like on a month to month basis? Okay, if I have to sell an extra 10 grand a month, what does that mean I have to do weekly? And then sort of developing some actions off the back of that to really have as direction for what you're doing with your time. So if you go, cool, we need to bring in all this extra sales and we don't have a really strong marketing plan, we need to develop a marketing plan and a strategy for how we do that. Then you just break it down into those individual tasks and it gives you something tangible to work towards because if you just go, cool, we want to make an extra 20 this year and that's your goal. It's like, how, how possible is that? It's a bit too intangible at that stage. So breaking something down into shorter bite size, weekly or monthly goals just makes it so much easier to then, you know, progress and move forward.

That's great. I'm, I don't know about anyone else, but I am a, I love following a process and I, I. have identified that I work really well if I can find a structure and then just like play within that structure. So winding my mind back to, you know, earlier on in my career in this time of year, I, the times where I was able to really leverage something was being able to latch onto a plan that someone someone had created or a philosophy or some sort of something to structure me towards, whether it be a 90 day planning or a big picture kind of process, we use a big picture process and defining, you know, learning that system and then being able to follow that. So I'd be looking at learning, right? what am I going to learn? I don't have the skills or the knowledge right now to get to where I need to go. Where am I going to go to find that? That'd be me.

I'm not a huge structure person. I'm trying to become more structured. I'm very much got a creative brain. But like for me, the thing that I find that has the biggest impact, even it happened this week because we wrapped up Oh, hi.

I love the contributions that you're out for making.

Good little side note, if you're not watching the video version of this podcast, there's a lot going on.

Yeah, you're missing heaps.

You're just missing out on YouTube folks.

So we just wrapped up a whole lot of projects. And so, of course, instantly I got that fear of gotta get more work, gotta get out there, hit the pavement. because we were shooting a lot this week, there was just one morning where I could get up at 5:00 a.m., get on Sales Navigator and start conversations and start talking to people. And from that one morning, I got a contact that I had a coffee with that we're now pitching a $15,000 job to. So it's like, it's just one 5:00 a.m. wake up, it's $15,000. So for me, I would just be like, even if you don't have a big plan, even if you don't have structure, just get out there, show up, talk to people, have conversations like that. I feel like that's the most powerful thing you can do. It's just, whoop, it's just put yourself out there.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's a really good, it reminds me of this diagram I saw of like what people think showing up is, and it's like a cup full every single day. But the reality of showing up is like sometimes it's full, sometimes there's a little bit in it, sometimes it's half, sometimes it's spilt, but you've still got a cup and you're trying to fill it every single day. And I think that's the key to it, right? Is just showing up with the intention of doing what you need to do. and there's good days and bad days, but to show up and it'll follow.

Beautiful art.

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