Managing time better [For Videographers]. EP #323 - Den Lennie

Do you ever find yourself doing low level tasks in your business that you kind of know you shouldn't be doing? Well, in today's video, I'm going to walk you through the concept of leveraging other people's time and being able to calculate how and when you should leverage someone else's time using something called effective hourly rate. Now in this clip, I want to take you through a coaching call we did where I was discussing with my clients how to decide which when you should do something yourself and when you should hire someone else. And I'm going to show you exactly how to calculate that. Now, if you find this useful, please do like and subscribe. And here's the clip.

Effective hourly rate is what is your time worth every single day based on what you pay yourself? So let's say it's $100. For argument's sake.

Anything that can be done for less than $100 should be done by someone else. So a great example would be cleaning your house. Okay, cleaning your house is probably $40 an hour task or $25 an hour task. So hire someone at $25 an hour to clean your house because your hours are worth $100 each. The cleaners charging $25 an hour. So you're leveraging someone else's time so you can spend an hour creating business and opportunity and deploying 25% of that revenue to have your house cleaned. Same with a gardener. If you've got a garden, don't be cutting the grass because you have to go and buy a lawnmower and a trimmer and like, deal with the grass and like, unless you love cutting grass. Okay, if it's your therapy, then great, do it. But that's another $25 an hour task.

This is one that's really interesting and that is, you know, cooking your own food and going out for lunch. Now this is not something I've managed to nail because my wife just is like not having a bar of it. But if I was being truly optimized, I would be buying ready meals from like Muscle Chef or something and just stacking them in the fridge. And I'd be pulling them out and sticking them in the microwave and having that every day and have my portion control dinner. Lunch would take 15 minutes instead of like, which we, we go to the shopping market and we buy vegetables and food and we got something to go out for lunch. And then there's just definitely an element of. And so that's time we spend together. But we're always looking to find time and if we're going to optimize and find time, then we need to look at methods of doing so. But it's kind of fun this, right? You just look at ways in which you can leverage your time. So editing, you can get a really good editor for 35 bucks an hour. Between 35 and 50 bucks. Now you're talking amazing editor. So if you can produce, work at $100 an hour and pay an editor $50 an hour, then you're actually leveraging your time. And that's a concept which is much harder to deploy in a meaningful way on a daily basis. But it's a really interesting concept to remind yourself of as your business starts to grow.

So where do you start with that? Do you do like time journaling or something? Do you just kind of document every half hour of your day of what you're doing and then put a value.

To them that becomes kind of like painful? So we want to try and keep it as simple as possible. I would literally do the audit of the last year's business. I think that's module.

Yeah, that's the one I'm stuck on.

Okay, perfect. It's kind of a cluster specifically about that because that's something that most people get stuck on. It's probably the hardest thing in the entire program because. Let me, let me take a stab at why it's hard, right? You have no fucking idea how long things take. They just got done. And you have no idea what things really cost. And it's really painful to go back and have to think about it. And the part of the journey of this is to go back and think about it because you'll be really surprised how much more money you spent or how much more time you spent on a project. And you may come across a situation where on paper, that project wasn't profitable because you spent too much money or too much time. And that's part of the lesson that we get from this audit process because then it allows us to streamline and think more strategically about the notion of time and value and resource and how much that resource costs. And then we're looking at the cost of the resource versus the price. And that means you can change your pricing to accommodate the resource. It's all left brain stuff. And it's definitely the hardest part of this entire process because it's like the crayons are firmly in the bottom drawer and they're locked. We're talking numbers, nuts and bolts, and self reflection, which is, you know, nobody wants to look in the mirror and realize they screwed something up.

But I'm completely okay with doing that. It's the problem I'm getting hung up on is like, I want to do it as accurate as possible, but that's where I'm getting hung up because I just don't know on some of this stuff.

Okay, so, so approximate. So the easiest equation is to take the number of days on the project and how many people were involved and just add approximately. So if you had like a $5,000 project and you had a crew that went out to shoot for a day and you did three days in editing, just approximately, what would that cost you in terms of time? And a really good. Weirdly, one of these kind of benchmark numbers that sort of keeps coming up is.

And Caleb, who ran the call last week at Hebron, we worked this out with him.

It's about $150 an hour across his business for every project. So we approximated $150 Australian, which is about $100 US an hour.

That was like, if they had a $7,500 Australian project, that'd be like $5,000 US project. And it was like a one day shoot, three day edit. There'd be half a day of pre and a day shoot and then, you know, three days of post. It worked out that they were like, they're working about 100 bucks an hour. So the three hours of pre, the eight hours on set, that's like 11 hours plus 30 hours of post. It's 40 hours, blah, blah, blah, five grand.

That will give you a bit of an idea. But it is like part of this process is just kind of like working that out and really sitting in that space. We've designed it so you sit in a space going, well, how do I want, how much time was there? Because we typically, when we're freelancers, we don't think like that. We just love doing the work and we'll sit and tweak for hours and we just want to give a great project. From a business perspective, if you are looking to scale and do multiple projects and have team on board, you have to constrict and constrain how much time is spent on pre production. The production part is easy. It's usually a half day or a day shooting five, you know, four hours, six hours, eight hours, whatever. The post production bit can blow out because you get that first cut done in the day and you send it off to the client and then you wait and then you get it back and you tweak a bit more and you do some other things and then you wait. And so it's not like three linear days where you're just sitting there twiddling your thumbs waiting for feedback. You're generally, you know, probably use probably on B and H, fucking around with some new camera package you want to buy and deciding how you can afford it or watching WWC going, oh, I now need that new Mac that's completely out of like scope of what I've already got. And anyway, we're all there, right? So that way you are keeping an eye on like if you were to do this objectively and have three production teams in three locations, if you didn't know how long things take and said that the client's paying five grand. So we've only got three days of edit and two of those days are editing. One day's really spare for changes. So if your editor runs that into four days, you've eaten all your margin. And so it's just, it's just a kind of more process driven way of approaching your time.

So I hope you found that helpful. Now, if you'd like to get involved and maybe come and be part of this free community, you can do so by clicking the link below. It's completely free to join or if you want to, you can watch our free training.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator podcast with your host, Dan Lenny. 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.