Personal Habits to help you succeed in your video business. EP #180 - Den Lennie

G', day, guys. Dan here with an episode of the how to Scale a Video Business podcast. Today I'm going to talk about personal systems in this episode. 180. So by personal systems, what I mean? I mean ways in which you can hack yourself and break out of bad habits that perhaps aren't serving you to achieve your goals in business and in life. And these are things that I have been implementing myself in my own life the last few years and I've seen a tremendous impact and I've then shared them with my Mastermind members and they are seeing a tremendous impact. So I wanted to share them with you today.

Because, interestingly, I've had quite a number of calls recently with prospective members or clients potentially. And it's been an interesting pattern in a lot of the calls that haven't gone ahead. And I see these patterns in, I mean, I've done hundreds of calls, so I kind of. I've seen everything there is to see, I've heard everything there is to hear. And I see patterns in people's behavior that stops them from taking decisive action to help them build their business. And so I wanted to share a bit today about that and reflect on that and also compare that to my members who are absolutely killing it, who take absolute responsibility for their success and failure, have a real connection with extreme ownership, and more importantly, aren't afraid to acknowledge when they don't know everything. So one of the patterns I'm seeing with a lot of the calls I'm having is that people come to me and say, oh, I want some help. And they tell me for 40 odd minutes what the problems are in their business. When I say I can help them and give them a solution, and when money becomes involved, they shit themselves and then quickly recoil and come up with lots of excuses as to why they can't do it now. And they think they just want to figure out what to do on their own. And yet what's happened is over a period of months and years, they've been stagnant. And this is 50 fairly common in a business that's not quite ready for growth. You know, it's like a kind of constantly seeking a hack or a quick fix to just solve an individual problem. In actual fact, to grow your business, there's a lot of different things need to happen. But first and foremost, it needs to start with you. When I compare a call that ends up becoming a customer and then we do some amazing work together and I think about the clients I've got in my group just now, both Groups, the foundation and the Mastermind and the level of commitment they have to understanding this is a marathon, not a sprint. And that to build a business takes years and lots of experience and knowledge. And those that are ready and who are serious and committed to their business take the chance to work with me and my team and they do it faster. I mean, the average member of my mastermind doubles their profit in under 12 months. Doubles profit, not revenue profit. So. But I wanted to share some of the things we talk about in that group versus the kind of, some of the conversation we're having with people who are, who are kind of dabbling in the idea of getting some coaching and perhaps don't make a decision to go ahead and let me be clear, that's fine. You know, I'm not for everyone and I don't want to work with everyone. I'm very fortunate. Our business is going really well. We're profitable, we're growing. So I don't actually have to work with everyone that comes through the door. In fact, I get to choose. And that is the ultimate goal of any business, is to choose who you work with and be able to say no to people. They're not a right fit. But today I wanted to talk about some hacks that we've been deploying in the Mastermind and me personally, that we've seen to be incredible for growth personally and in business. And the first one I'm going to start with, and I touched on this last week, is thinking time. We're deploying a daily thinking time strategy where you sit down for 15 to 25 minutes with a pad and a piece of paper and a pen and you pose a question that needs to be solved and you spend 20, 25 minutes writing down 15 or 20 different possible solutions. And this has been phenomenal. And this has led on to some deeper questions from my mastermind members about scaling and some of the challenges of scaling. And a lot of these businesses are doing extremely well. I mean, they're doing tens of thousands of dollars a month in revenue. And, you know, your problems just change as your revenue grows. And the biggest challenge you've got is sustaining it. But number one is to spend some time thinking. Actual thinking time is really important. I wanted to mention that again because it is, it's. It's a discipline. And what you'll find is most people won't be able to do it for any more than a couple of days. We've set a challenge for 20 days to do it 20 days consecutively in the group and the reason this is important is it's about building a new daily habit, a personal system for execution.

One of the things I see, and I'm not going to reveal anyone's details or talk about anyone specifically, but I've had a number of calls this year already, and we tend to convert about 60% of people we have calls with to become a client of some kind with us, which is probably a pretty reasonable conversion ratio. But what's interesting about those that don't is that they're just actually not ready. They're not ready for coaching. They're not coachable because they still think that they can figure it out themselves. They think that the solution is just one phone call, and if they just do this one thing, they'll get a result. And the truth is, that's not going to happen. Simply not going to happen. Because once you solve one problem, you discover another problem and another problem and another problem. So one of the things we do inside the VBA is we take an oath of extreme ownership where we recognize that this is a marathon, not a sprint. We recognize that we have to show up and commit. And one of those commitments is about doing that daily planning the daily thinking time. And it comes from a book, the Road Less Stupid, which I've talked about before on the show by Keith J. Cunningham. But here's the thing, right? You know, you can read dozens and dozens of books. I've read probably hundreds. It doesn't really matter until you start to execute. You have to actually implement and execute and do it consistently. And I say, you know, do it for three months consistently, get the same result, and then make sure you get it for a fourth month. And it's not a fluke. And so the key here is to make sure you are disciplined enough to actually execute on, on the theory. So one of the things that thinking time does is it forces you to solve a single problem every single day. So you can go deep diving and spend, you know, 25 minutes a day for five days solving five core strategic problems in your business each week. But then you have to execute. And that is where most people fall down, because most video businesses on the whole, are trying to do too much themselves. And they are the bottleneck in the business. And so by forcing you to sit down and think, you resolve better, better problems, you come up with better answers and better questions to the problems that you're facing in your business. So that's number one, thinking time. The second lesson I'm going to share with you is that for many, many years, you know, I just killed myself in my business working seven days a week. I took seven days a week as a badge of honor. I took, you know, the fact that I could work six in the morning till midnight as a badge of honor. I thought it was all about, you know, the more I put in, the more hustle, the better. And that was just okay, you know, you're just going to burn out there. There's. For three years, when I first started my business, I hit the same revenue. It was about £250,000 a year, the same revenue, almost within five to ten grand every single year for three years running. And the reason for that was I was the problem. I didn't have staff. I did it all myself. I just. I just did everything. I worked harder, I outworked everyone else and so I could make more money. But. But it wasn't sustainable and I was burnt out. And nowadays I have a team. I probably work three and a half days a week.

And we generate all the revenue we need, all the profit we need. I drive a lovely car, I live in a lovely house. I have plenty of time to spend doing the things I want to do. And that is because I've discovered that the less you do, the more you make. But the caveat is the less you do of the right things. And there are lots of things you can do in your business and life that will keep you busy, that won't necessarily move the needle. And one of the things you have to be very, very careful of is a level of self awareness and the stories that come up in your brain when you justify to yourself why you're doing something one way or the other. A common one I hear is, oh, you know, I like doing the editing, so I don't want to give it up. Which is, you know, fair enough, you like editing, so be an editor. If you want to be a business owner, you have to give up the editing. You can't be a business owner and do all the editing. You know, Richard Branson doesn't fly the planes or check you in. He's got nothing to do with the airline he's scaled up where he's got a team.

You know, it's Steve Jobs didn't build the computers. I did in the early days, but then he brought smart people in. So from a video business perspective, the very first hire you need to make is an editor, because that is where most of the heavy lifting is going to go. But then what you do with your time is you spend it focused on sales and business development. And the biggest mistake I see small business owners make, freelance videographers who try to be business owners, is they simply don't focus enough on sales. If I had a dollar for every time someone tells me on a call, oh, I get my work through word of mouth. And it's almost like they're proud of the fact they get from word of mouth, that's fine. But word of mouth is not going to scale your business. Word of mouth would get you to hear, but it's not going to get you beyond that because it's too reliant on the phone ringing. You have to go out and be proactive in your marketing, proactive in your outreach, and be disciplined to do it every single day and track it and have a KPI to know that you're on target. You know, how do you know you're reaching out to enough people? I often hear on calls that, you know, oh, well, you know, I kind of only market when I'm quiet. And you have to market when you're busy. That's really important because there's a marketing lag time of between 90 and 120 days after you speed a piece of marketing out before you see any results. So it's really important that if you do want to scale, and this is the thing, you know, not everyone wants to scale, and that is okay. There's nothing wrong with staying in the freelance lane and doing a bit of work here. And there's. But if you want to build a business that can function without you and generate a consistent and predictable income, then you have to embrace extreme ownership. You have to embrace the fact that you cannot do everything yourself. In fact, I would say that from the majority of my masterminders, the ones that are really going through the most growth are the ones who are stepping back from, you know, haven't edited for probably years or certainly a year. And then, you know, they're not really shooting as much. They might do the odd shoot, but if they are going out, they're going out to be the interface between the client and the project. And the ones who are seeing the greatest growth are focusing purely on business development. They see their role as the business development lead in their business. Their job is purely to generate inquiries, close deals, and fill the pipeline so that the team can stay busy. And that is how you generate predictable income, predictable profit. You know that if you're going to make $50,000 next month, that you're going to take home 15 of that. And it's also having clear understandings of what your Net profit should be and understanding what those numbers actually are and doing your numbers in the way where you reflect on them every month and, you know, what your revenue was, what your gross profit was, what your net profit was, and what those percentages are.

You know, this is really important. You know, too many people are like, oh, you know, I made 30 grand last month. I'm like, well, how much did you keep? It's like, I don't know. It's like, well, you should know that the responsibility, if you're going to run a business, you need to know these things. So that's the other thing is a real kind of extreme ownership in terms of the timing. And so by getting rid of the busy tasks, I mean, a lot of videographers are always very, very busy, but it doesn't mean they're being productive or profitable. And so what you want to be doing is focusing on creating space so that you can sit and go through weekly reporting. You know, if you get into a habit of doing daily thinking time. And then once a week, you sit and look at your reports and you look at your revenue, you look at your sales pipeline, you look at what's being paid, what's not being paid, and you. And you assess on a weekly basis the position of your business. That way you can make really informed decisions about investment. If you're working with a great tax accountant, they will give you visibility ahead of time of what your tax liability is likely to be, so you can put that money aside and. And you create a whole new level of freedom and, and relaxed, quiet confidence in your business, because you'll know exactly what's going on and when. Now, the other thing that I've been very, very kind of vocal about is, is vision boards. And I'm just about to order a chair that I had on my vision board in 2012. It's an Eames.

Now, these are about six or seven thousand US dollars. This is not an inexpensive piece of furniture. And it was on my first vision board. And, you know, for many years, I just thought about getting a replica, but I put it on my vision board as a bit of a. Kind of a bit of a life goal. And so it's my 50th birthday this year, so I decided I'm going to buy myself an Emus chair. Now, this chair is about six and a half thousand US dollars, and it's going to become my thinking chair. And I wanted to share that with you. Not to gloat or brag or show off, but at the same time, you know, I have, I have earned it. So it's like, you know, that's the, that's the value of building a business is you can actually afford to do things that become, you know, dreams and now become reality. But what I'm intending to do is, is to purchase that chair and that rounds off my initial 2012 vision board. Now you might think, well, 2012 was a long time ago, that's like eight, nine years ago. But the majority of that vision board had been executed by 2015. And I've done subsequent vision boards and actually I need to do a new one because the vision board I did in November last year has all come true. And so taking that kind of, that system for executing your dreams and using the creative process of vision board is going to super like, it's just going to be so helpful to you actually achieving them. And I was looking back at this year and I guess the real lesson here is the deployment of patience, setting a clear vision for what I wanted the business to achieve. Where I wanted to live, where we wanted to live. In 2009, when I set the company up, it was always about moving to Australia. And in 2021, six years after moving to Australia, we have our beach house. I'm building an incredible 7.1.4 home cinema with 100 inch screen and, you know, incredible sound system. That's been a dream of mine for a long time.

I've got an amazing vehicle, I live by the beach.

And I've never worked so little in the sense that my focus is so narrow now on my VBA members that all I really do with my time is focus on how I can make that program better and serving my clients and having one to ones and helping them achieve their goals. Because off the back of that, that funds the business and obviously doing this podcast. And I sat this morning for 25 minutes and my question of the day was how can I create more value in the podcast? How can I expand the team so that the requirement of my time is less? And I came up with about 10 or 15 different ideas for ways to improve the reach of the podcast. Come up with different guest segments, come up with different ways of sharing knowledge, because we're 180 episodes in and that's been, you know, no mean feat, but my intention is to go for at least another 180. So I need to scale the team, which involves hiring people. And you know, we don't generate any income from the podcast. And so it's a front end marketing tool. And you know, we have I think we've hit just shy 50,000 downloads now, which is, you know, in itself an amazing achievement. But we can't really track how that converts to business. I know that when people have listened to the podcast and they have a conversation with me that they're more likely predisposed to be ready to do some coaching because they've been listening for a while. Not always the case, but usually. But it's a marketing channel that we've seen consistently come through as a lead nurture channel and a trust building channel. And you know, the filmmaking market is extremely skeptical. Very, very skeptical. And so sometimes people will listen to the show for a year before reaching out. And that's okay because, you know, everyone's ready when they're ready. So, you know, in your market, you know, how.

Deliberate are you being in your outreach, in your, in your marketing? How deliberate are you in talking to your target market and ensuring that you're answering the kind of questions that are appearing in their minds well in advance of them giving you any money? That is where time gives you space to think about these things. And so oftentimes people will say to me, well, if I give up the editing and the shooting, what am I going to do? And the answer is think more about how to scale your business, because what happens with most video businesses is that you just end up reacting to opportunities all the time. And, and so you're only ever really responding to requests. And when you, when you get to a point where you no longer have to shoot or edit, you can start to be much more deliberate and measured in your outbound marketing, which means you can attract the right kinds of customers and in some cases get rid of the customers that are no longer serving you. One of the areas that I find is particularly interesting is that when you start out in a video business, you know, there's always as one or two clients who were with you from the very beginning, you weren't probably charging enough. And now, you know, you're stuck on those old rates and they probably demand a lot of your time. And sometimes it's a question of having a conversation saying, look, guys, you know, we haven't actually put our rates up for a long time and while we appreciate working with you, you know, we can't sustain this any longer. So this going to be our new rates and we just wanted to run them by you and make sure you're okay with that. And if they say, well, we can't afford to pay that, it's like, well, look, we're really grateful to have done this work with you. We're not in a position to be able to serve you anymore at this rate. So we wish you the very best and walk away. Because when you do that, you will create space for a client who comes into your vicinity, who will absolutely give you everything you need. I've seen it time and time again when you're chasing the wrong opportunities, you're neglecting the space for the right opportunity to come into your vicinity. And so I want you to think about that as well, is, you know, do it. Do an audit of your customers and.

Who is serving your vision and who is not serving your vision. Because, you know, relationships change and it's not always appropriate to keep going with products and services and customers that perhaps don't serve you anymore.

So to wrap this up, it's gonna be a short episode today. The key is conscious awareness of where you want to go, who you want to be, how you want your life to look, and if you're ready to do what's required to change yourself and to change your habits, to allow you to embrace a new way of operating so that you can have everything you've ever dreamed of. Because I can tell you, if you set a clear vision for everything you've ever wanted, and you're very honest about where you are on the journey. And the truth is. And here's the pitch, if the truth is, if you want to do it faster, you will do it faster inside the vba, guaranteed. We are probably this week going to launch our new website, where we go. We've got a whole ton of case studies, and if you haven't had a look at them, I'll make sure and mention it when we go live. Hopefully this week we're going to do it and just. Just ironing out a few different things, but you will do it faster in the right environment. And if you try to do it on your own, it will take you a lot longer and you will have no one to turn to when things go wrong. And that is. That is why I created this environment. Because when I was running my business, I didn't have anyone to turn to. And I spent tens of thousands of dollars going to events around the world to find that support. And so I created my own environment that takes all of that information and puts it through the lens of a videography company. And that is why we're so successful at getting consistent results for our clients. The ones that do the work who show up get guaranteed results. It's as simple as that. Anyway, folks, I'M going to leave it there for this week. I hope that's of value to you. I will talk to you again soon. 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 hits 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. So thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.