Planning a Long-Term Business Strategy. EP #192 - Den Lennie

Hey guys. Dan here for this week's episode of the how to Scale a Video Business podcast. And today we're going to be dipping back into breaking down more of the eight growth accelerators. And today we're going to be talking about the importance of planning for a long term business strategy. This is actually Growth Accelerator 3. And if you're new to this show and you haven't heard the other episodes regarding this mini series we're doing, the eight growth accelerators are eight key areas that we've identified working with video businesses for the last four years that are critical in terms of putting in place the right structure so you can scale consistently. And scaling consistently means, you know, in practical terms, often doubling profit in 12 months or less. And you know, there's no one thing that I, that that creates that solution. You know, you could generate more inquiries and get more business in, but that's going to create some problems with capacity. And, and if it's just you on your own or with one other person, that capacity is going to fill up quite quickly. And so what I wanted to talk to about you about today was planning for a long term business strategy. You know, I see a lot of increasing amount of offers in the marketplace for, you know, courses that will promise to make 20 or 30 grand in, you know, three weeks. And the truth is that that can sometimes happen, but it's not necessarily sustainable. And some of these offers are really compelling and they're really exciting and they seem to like, you know, be very interesting for a lot of people to go. That would be great. And of course we're always, you know, intrigued by something that seems to be a great outcome. But oftentimes, you know, if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is. And what I've noticed, being in business for 12 years, being in the industry for 26.

And working with businesses day in, day out, week in week out, is that no one scales quickly and sustains it. So what we want to be doing is taking some of the notions of, you know, before you go on a video shoot, right, you, you have a plan, right? You do pre production. If you, if you've done your pre production properly, the shoot goes smoothly. So you've got call sheets and shooting scripts and.

Storyboards so you know exactly what's going to happen when, so that when you're on set, you're maximizing the amount of time you have available. We were talking on a coaching call the other day about, you know, unit moves when you're doing bigger productions, trying to Avoid unit moves because it takes so much time to move 30 people, in some cases, from one area to another. But I want to ask the question, why do you think so many video business entrepreneurs fail to prepare in their business for how they're going to scale, how they're going to grow their business in the most effective ways? And so today I want to talk about strategic planning for your year and assessing where you are in the business growth journey currently and where you'd like to be in, let's say, 12 months from now. And this isn't, you know, sensational. It's not gonna be like, hey, just do this one thing and you'll make 20 grand. It's a much more considered approach, a much more measured approach. And so what I want you to think about is, you know, what. What is the outcome you want to achieve?

Because, you know, you need to understand where you're at on the business growth journey and understand where you're at in that roadmap. Once you've worked that out, then you can work on creating a strategic plan. So we always start with, where do you want to get to?

And it's always about focusing on what is the outcome you're looking for. What does success look like to you?

Is it a house? Is it a car? Is it a certain location you want to live in? Is it the certain type of work you want to be doing? Is it the amount of time you want to be spending doing other things? So, you know, getting very clear on what success looks like to you is really, really important, because then you can start to establish, well, what is, what do we need to do to facilitate that? And that's where the strategic plan comes in. Once you're clear on your focus and the revenue you want to generate, then you can start to build the mechanism and in many ways reverse engineer that process. You know, when JFK announced they were going to put a man on the moon in 1960.

The plan was to put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth within the decade. I think did it in 1969. So they were a year early. The strategic plan is like the objective is to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth or woman.

And the goal was then to work out, well, how do we do that? We need a strategic plan and a time frame, and nothing that's worthwhile happens quickly.

You know, you want to build something sustainable that's lifelong, lasting, you've got to set it up properly. And that's where the strategic plan comes into place. So let's say you've got your goal of, say you want to earn, let's call it $200,000 in the next 12 months. Profit or revenue depending on where you're at in the journey, doesn't really matter. Well, let's say you wanted to make $200,000 in profit. You let's call it £100,000. $200,000, just random figures. That's the goal. So how are you going to execute that plan? How are you actually going to do that? And so what you need to do is break your year down into quarters and then to months and into weeks and to days. And if the goal is to achieve, you know, 200,000 profit in 12 months time, how much do you have to sell to generate that? Well, if you are operating at 50% gross profit, then let's, for argument's sake, 30% gross profit. So to make 200,000 gross profit, you have to generate 400,000. So that now becomes a different number. So how do you divide that 400,000 by 12 to generate a figure each month?

That's the basic premise, that's how much you need to sell to achieve the outcome. But then you start breaking down, well, how do we get in front of the right numbers of people to, to be able to do that? Because that is something, that's a whole different kettle of fish. So if you want to generate, I'm just going to work this out here because I've, my brain's not working.

So you're going to generate $33,000 a month.

To generate $400,000 a year. So how do you sell $33,000 a month worth of product assuming you're making 50% profit? Well, you need a strategic plan. You know, your overall outcome is, okay, I want to earn $400,000 in revenue and I want 200,000 of that to be in profit.

The absolute clarity of that is what separates the winners from the dabblers. Then what you have to do all of the tasks and strategic outcomes that need to be achieved in the next 12 months to make that a reality. So it could be, well, we need to create a marketing strategy that attracts clients with budgets of between, you know, 10 and $15,000. And we need to be, be going after, you know, four or five or six them a month and selling, you know, if you want to sell at your close rates, 50%, you want to be talking to six clients a month with the budget of 10,000. So your potential outco $60,000 in sales. But if you Only close half of them. You'll get $30,000 in sales and you'll get close to that 33,000amonth required for that financial outcome. So then you have to start breaking down, well, you know, we need to create a marketing strategy for that. How does that look? And we'll be talking about that in a future episode. But just from a strategic plan point of view, you need a marketing strategy, you need a sales process, you need a script you can use that you can repeat with every client to enable you to facilitate achieving that number. So we break them down into annual priorities, and then you break those down into quarterly priorities and then weekly goals. And by following this process.

You end up.

Reviewing these every 90 days. In fact, in the VBA, we review them every month. And over a course of a year, you're being amazed at what you can achieve. You know, I think it was Tony Robbins that said most people wildly overestimate what they can achieve in one year, but then they wildly underestimate what they can achieve in five. And I think there's, there's too much emphasis on immediate gratification and.

Less mature businesses feeling like they've got to do it all now. When in actual fact, building that solid foundation, running a plan strategically on an ongoing basis will be far more sustainable than the feast and famine rollercoaster of winning a big job, putting all your effort into it, and then everything else crashes and burns.

So imagine what you can achieve in five years with a solid strategic plan, a plan that's so laser focused on working towards your goals that it delivers the outcomes that feed your own vision of success. If you have a solid strategic plan that you review regularly, then you will achieve more in the next 12 months than you have in the last five years. You know, five years ago we just landed in Australia, didn't really know anyone living in Sydney, trying to figure out how to set up, set up a business there. And actually we'd set up the business, but how to actually generate project work? I mean, we landed and did the FS5 launch film, so that was a pretty decent project to start with. But then we ended up like any other business in any city, just looking around, going, well, we've now got.

This, this, this, this, this production company and these skills, but no one knows me. So how do we generate income? Then we had to go and start, you know, generating work from scratch. So whatever, whatever market you're in, whatever area you're in, you have to get clear on what needs to happen in order for you to, to Drive that, that outcome. And, and the way to do that is with a strategic plan. I'm not talking about a business plan. A strategic plan is a plan that has very specific outcome driven objectives. So a strategic plan would say, you know, in 12 months time we will have a marketing strategy that attracts six to 10 qualified leads into our business each month generating in excess of $35,000 per month at a close rate of 50%. That is a very specific strategic plan that you can then break down and work out what are the component parts that need to happen each of those stages to make that a reality. And this is where you know, this is, this is the truth bomb. Okay? This isn't, there's no shortcuts to this. You can't just generate, you know, 20 or 30 grands worth of business. And, and, and it keeps coming every month without an impact on capacity, with an impact on the systems that you need to run to make that a reality. I was talking to Caleb the other day, one of my cl, if you're interested. Actually you can go to the website and look under case studies. There's a great video with Caleb talking about his journey in the vba. I think you'll find it really inspiring. But Caleb had been spending time creating proposals in InDesign and they had an indesign subscription and they were, they were using it, but he was spending a lot of time creating them. And they've just recently moved to proposify and it's cut their time of executing proposals dramatically. And it was on a planning call that, that we discovered this and a planning call that he shared with us that they'd made this big shift. And even though it was like an extra 50 bucks a month for the software, the time they were saving strategically was, was quite incredible. So you know, by, by being in the VBA we have these strategic planning calls every month, which means for 90 minutes every month we get on a call and we review an annual plan, we review the quarterly plan, we review the monthly plan depending on where we're at on the journey. And.

We adjust the effort and energy accordingly to fulfill those aspects. And that is what's absolutely key in the strategic plan. Not only do you create the plan, but you check in with the plan on a weekly, on a monthly and a quarterly and an annual basis to make sure you're actually on track. Track. Because it's one thing to say, well, we want to generate 400,000 in revenue and 200,000 in profit and that means we need to score three 10,000 projects a month or three times $11,000 projects a month sounds easy in theory, but the reality is somewhat different because not everyone's ready to buy right now. And so you have to be having a pipeline of opportunities always coming through. And what typically happens in a creative business is that we get really busy on projects and then we don't do any marketing. And then things dry up and we're like, we haven't done any marketing. Now the pipeline is looking a bit lean, and then you've got to kind of get back on the wagon. So what we're always trying to do with the VBA is create consistency, create a more measured, consistent process. And that's where the folks that are in the group have the greatest success, is because we have these rhythms. This isn't just a course. It's an ongoing coaching program that helps you develop new habits, develop new mindsets around how long things take to happen.

So, guys, that's. That's the planning section. I mean, obviously we go into an awful lot more depth in the Mastermind, but I wanted to share that with you and hope you find it useful. And yeah, go and check out Caleb's case study on the website@denleny.com 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. Owner who's hit a ceiling and we benefit from mentorship, support and 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 social media and in groups that you might be in. So thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.