Mastering the 20-Mile March. EP #140 - Den Lennie

G', day, guys. Den Lenny here, host of the how to Scale a Video Business podcast.

Coming to you today with an important lesson on pacing yourself so that you can meet all of your objectives and achieve all of your goals without burning out, without.

Falling short, but also making sure you are clear on why you're doing what you're doing and that you've got a roadmap, something that you can actually focus on that will help you achieve it in the time frame you set and not just kind of an ad hoc, you know, mishmash of things.

So I want to talk today about the 20 mile march principle, which is from a book called Great by Choice by Jim Collins and actually start. I wrote about this in a newsletter back in August of 2016 and I dug it out because I wanted to go over it because it's such an important.

Theory that I'm certain you'll find it very beneficial. So, you know, I talk a lot about planning in these, in these sessions and really what I wanted to do in today's episode was really, as we come towards the end of a turbulent year, I wanted to illustrate why proper strategic planning that is closely aligned with your purpose and mission can actually become a life or death decision. Now we'll come back to why that is in a little bit. Now, thankfully, making films and producing video content for corporates and agencies shouldn't in itself lead to actual life threatening scenarios. However, the severity of a negative outcome could arise if you don't set time aside to create a strategic plan for your business. And it'll be proportional to the amount of preparation you invest at the beginning of your journey. Now let me try and explain that. The good news is it's never too late to start planning. Whether you've been running your business in excess of a decade or you're just starting. Planning works for every business. The one thing focus I frequently refer to is so important because that one thing focus, when broken down, becomes a priorities list of itself from anywhere between, you know, 1580 elements that might contribute in a 12 month period to achieving your mission. So our purpose here@denlenettry.com is to help video producers succeed in business. That is it. That is one sentence. It's clear, succinct and concise.

And you know, when, when you kind of have a very clear declaration of what it is you do, it helps you really stay focused on how you're spending your time. I mean, you make it a public declaration or you write something down, you become more accountable to it and you're more likely to actually do it.

So the purpose is like, you know, how do you want to help your target market achieve their outcomes?

Now, when we get into kind of planning, we don't outside the scope of what we can do on a podcast. But you want to be clear about your purpose, which is, you know, who you help to succeed in their area and then your mission, which is, what is the commercial goal? What is the commercial aim.

Of that?

So then you want to sit down for at least a day and brainstorm all of the things that need to happen in order to make your mission a reality. So if you want to make $500,000 in profit and what we need, what needs to happen. What needs to happen is $200,000 in profit. Maybe it's 100,000, but how many jobs is that going to mean? What kind of jobs? What kind of size of jobs?

And if you're saying, you know, you don't have time to sit down and plan, then there's something wrong with the way you're operating your time, because we all have the same amount of time every day. And so why is it some businesses succeed and truly achieve greatness when others complain that they're not going anywhere? And it's been a tough year, and it's all to do with how you use that time. You know, think about when President Kennedy announced in the early 60s, we're going to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade and return him safely to Earth. That was the purpose. The intention was to, you know, create accountability for. For that mission.

And, and the mission itself for that was quite straightforward. They had nine years to figure out how they would transport three men safely to the moon, land, collect samples, and return them safely to Earth. Now, the planning for that one journey took an excess of nine years for a mission that lasted eight days, three hours, 18 minutes and 35 seconds. So if you're serious about building your video business into a sustainable enter enterprise with predictable revenue and a workload that you can handle without burning out, then it's important you pay attention to the lessons I want to share with you. Whether you want to make 50 grand this year or hit a million, the outcome is entirely based on a solid foundation of strategic planning. So I want to talk a bit here about.

It's a case study, actually, from the antarctic expeditions in 1911 with Amundsen versus Scott. So early in the 20th century, there was a race between the nations to be the first Antarctic explorers to reach the South Pole. Now a British team was led by Robert Scott. And they set off on routes and one route and another Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen. So here's what happened. The round trip Trek was roughly 1400 miles, the equivalent of New York to Chicago and back. The environment was uncertain and unforgiving. There were temperatures that could easily reach 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, even during the summer. They had no means of modern communication, no cell phones, no satellite links, no radio. A rescue would have been improbable if they were to ever, you know, find themselves in trouble. One leader led his team to victory and safely, and the other team led to defeat and death.

Now, Amundsen adhered to a regime of constant progress, never going too far in good weather and careful to stay away from the red line of exhaustion. Now, Amundsen prepared rigorously for years in advance of the journey. He learned what worked in polar conditions, going as far as living with the Eskimos to learn how they moved in sub zero temperatures, what they wore. And he reviewed every conceivable situation that his team might encounter en route to the pole. He trained his body and mind with fanatical discipline. Now, Scott represents quite a contrast to Amundsen. His preparation was limited, and what plans he made were based on his own intuitive conclusions rather than direct research of the environment he was entering.

Now, Amundsen stored three tons of supplies for five men versus Scott, who stored one ton for 17 men. Amundsen used sled dogs that he learned from the Eskimos, Whereas Scott used unproven motor sledges, which failed within days of his journey. Beginning now, Amundsen carried enough extra supplies to miss every single supply depot and yet still have enough to go another hundred miles. Whereas Scott ran everything dangerously close to his calculations, so that missing even one supply depot would bring disaster.

A single detail aptly highlights the difference between their approaches. Scott brought one thermometer for a key altitude assessment, and he exploded in an outburst of wrath when it broke, Whereas Amundsen bought four such devices. Now, the divergence in preparation goes on and on and on. Unlike Scott, Amundsen systematically built enormous buffers for unforeseen events. He designed the entire journey to systematically reduce the role of big forces and chance events. He presumed that bad events would strike his team somewhere along the journey, and he prepared for them. And this is a great example of what's happened this year with COVID There are businesses who went, oh, my God, we are destroyed. But the whole world was shut down. And there's other businesses went, okay. How can we pivot quickly to do something else because these are the businesses that are prepared for things to go wrong. And I think sometimes.

You know, it's very easy to kind of just live on hope and be maybe a bit quiet, work wise and think, well, hopefully someone will just ring, rather than having a marketing system, rather than having a clear idea of who your clients are and attracting them into your business on a regular basis and having a process for moving them through your funnel. So on December 15, 1911, Amundsen and his team reached the South Pole. He and his teammates planted the Norwegian flag and then went right back to work. They could not have known that Scott and his team were now desperately man hauling their sleds a full 360 miles behind them. More than a month later, Scott found himself staring at Amundsen's flag at the South Pole. Now, Amundsen had already traveled 500 miles back north and Scott and his team turned back north dejected just as the seasons began to turn. The already menacing weather turned more severe while supplies dwindled and Scott and his men struggled through the snow. Now Amundsen and his team reached home base on January 25, the precise day he had planned. Running out of supplies, Scott and his team stalled in mid March, exhausted and depressed. Eight months later, a British reconnaissance party found the frozen bodies of Scottish and his two teammates in a forlorn snow drift little tent just 10 miles short of his supply depot. And the whole team had perished. So when we look to the key points.

Just as striking a difference between the preparations between the two men was the discipline of Amundsen to press forward in bad weather and to hold his team back in good weather. So throughout the journey, Amundsen adhered to a regime of constant progress, never going too far in good weather, careful to stay away from the red line of exhaustion that could leave his team exposed. Yet pressing ahead in nasty weather to stay on pace, Amundsen throttled back his well tuned team to travel between 15 and 20 miles per day in a relentless marshal 90 degrees south. That's where the 20 mile march phrase comes from. When a member of Amundsen team suggested he could go faster up to 25 miles a day, Amundsen said no, they needed to rest and sleep so as to continually replenish their energy. And in contrast, Scott would sometimes drive his team to exhaustion on good days and then sit in his tent and complain about the weather on bad days. At one point, Scott faced six days of gale force winds and traveled on none. Where Whereas Amundsen faced 15 and travelled on 8. Amundsen clocked in at the South Pole right on his pre decided pace, having averaged 15.5 miles per day. Scott, in contrast, fell behind early with no plan of a daily pace. And as the conditions worsened, enhanced by his lack of preparation for unseen events, he and his team never recovered.

So how does this all apply to filmmaking? Well, we often tend to wildly overestimate what we can achieve in 12 months, but we wildly underestimate what we can achieve in 60 months. You know, one year versus five years.

Proper preparation and research will always allow you to prepare for times when things don't go to plan. You know, if you lose a client who's been a big income generator for you and then you start to panic, well, start thinking about losing that client now. And so if it were to happen, you'd have a plan B and a plan C. And if you do that, you likelihood is you won't lose the big client. You'll just end up with more great business. Then you'll expand your team and you'll have a more robust business. If you don't have a certain set of skills, then either outsource it or invest in the time to learn it. No one was born a natural marketer or salesperson. These are skills that you learn, but it takes time to become a master of them. And you're going to fail a lot if you don't do it with guidance. All too often a lack of patience to play a longer game hinders meaningful progress. I think, you know, sometimes filmmakers, we can be a bit impatient, like we want it all now. We're kind of this immediate sort of gratification. No one expects you to be an expert in everything. So play to your strengths and don't be too proud to ask for help.

And planning is critical for success, so make sure you prioritize doing it. The other thing I wanted to share here was also from the book, which is a theory called fire bullets than cannonballs. And so when you're looking for new business opportunities and markets, it's important not to throw all you've got at a shiny opportunity on a whip whim. Let's imagine you think there might be an opportunity to create content for a manufacturing business or in that sector, so, so fire a bullet first. So let me try and explain this. Imagine you were at sea and you're in a war situation with two warships and you only have one cannonball left, but you have a bunch of rifles. If you fire your only cannonball at a moving target, there's a high probability that you're going to miss. However, if you shoot a bullet misc the risk is lower. So adjust 10 degrees and try again. Still missed but closer. Then adjust another 10 degrees and keep going until you hit. Once you've nailed the target with a bullet, then you can bring in the big guns and fire the cannonball, knowing it's going to strike the target. The same rings true. In business. The most systematic way to test a market is to test small. If you have an idea, then trial it first. See if there's sufficient demand before going all in. Once you've done a few jobs and you made some money, then you can scale up. Whatever you don't do, don't go buying the camera first thinking it's best to be future proof. You're just deluding yourself. You know, a Canon C100 is still a very capable camera and you can pick them up cheap and you can shoot a lot of corporate on them. Now let me say again, very few clients are insisting on 4K.

And I know there's benefits to shooting in 4K and delivering in 1080 but focus on identifying and serving your market with what they want. Help them solve a problem, help them get what they want. And they will. They will. You will become their absolute go to. You know I've got a client, Jethro who's just landed a pretty sizable gig working for a kitchen appliance company and it's a high end kitchen appliance company and what they're doing is they're making all of the training films but they them to be beautiful. And I think he won a 25 grand job last week and he just mentioned in our, in our group at the weekend on our weekly wins which we have a weekly win process on every Friday everyone posts a video citing what their wins have been for the week. And you know, it's just awesome hearing people's progress. But Jetta was like oh my God, we got such great feedback from this first round. They're now talking to us about doing another project and we've now got work booked into December and January.

All at really solid budgets. So you know they've really focused on being in that niche and it's really, really paying off. So I guess to wrap things up today, I just wanted to share that story with you because I think it's very powerful. And you know the key with building any business, let alone a video business is just to look at other industries and ask yourself how do they do it? Because we're in A time and place where, you know, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You don't have to come up with a new and exciting way to sell video. In fact, one of the mistakes I often see is creators trying to do something different for different sake. At the end of the day, a corporate video is a tool used by a marketing department to communicate a message to, to a target audience. And what clients typically want is safe, reliable, you know, not, not too risky. People will show up on time, they'll do a great job, they'll charge a fair price. And if you're clear on the market you're in, and you're clear on the sector you're in and your pricing is right, then you'll build a million dollar business without, without any, any trouble at all. And you can do that on two or three employees. You know, you don't have to have an office and six employees to be generating a million. I have plenty of clients who are, who are doing seven figures who don't have that at all. So, guys, I hope you found this useful. I love the story of the 20 mile march. It's something that I have embedded in my business for years now and it really is the secret to building a sustainable business. So, as always, thanks for listening and if you can give us a review, I'd really appreciate it and I'll talk to you next week.

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 and coaching, then check out how you can work with me over@denlenny.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.