Real Talk: From Skate Parks to Big Marks with Sam Lecons. EP #335

Hey, guys, welcome back to the show.

I have had a couple of weeks off and honestly, that's because after 330 plus episodes, sometimes you just get a bit stale. And I felt I was getting a bit stale, so I wanted to come back with a bit of a bang. And. And this actually today's interview is with Sam Lecons, who's the director of the Stream national group here in Australia. Sammy's been a member of the VBA elite program for three years, and it was actually him who said, hey, look, you know, you should start doing interviews on the show again, because he actually discovered me through an interview I did three years ago, plus with Tony Iannuzi from New York. And Tony runs a company that does live streaming in av. And Sammy is in live streaming and. And it's just acquired an AV company. And so today we're going to talk about his journey in business. Starting out in 2017 in the wedding industry and evolving that business, pivoting into streaming. And that set his stage for his next big move in 2020. But I'll let him explain what that's all about. As always, thanks for listening. We appreciate you, and I think you're going to get a lot of value from this episode.

Welcome to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. Each week we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business. With your host, Dan Lenny, discover how the accelerator program is transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. enjoy this episode.

Mate.

We've been talking about doing this podcast for quite a little while.

I'm going to say probably a couple years.

Yeah. I think what's especially cool about doing this today is I haven't done an interview on the podcast, probably for easily six months, maybe even longer.

And we're using a new thing called SquadCast, which I discovered about 30 minutes ago. True. I'm talking to Australia's, one of Australia's premium suppliers of live streaming. And I've been doing this a little while and I decided to use SquadCast 30 minutes ago. So let's just hope that it all works.

I guess we'll find out.

Yeah, look, I guess what's cool is that you ended up we came across each other, or you came across me because of this podcast, which I think is. Yeah, pretty awesome.

Yeah, it was cool. I was listening to the conversation you had with Tony. I've gotten his last name. Yeah. Does live streaming. It must have been 2020, 21 when I heard it, because I remember it was two weeks before my wedding that I. I signed up with you.

And that was following it for directly following that, listening to that podcast. I filled out the form on your site and had a chat to you. But yeah, it was all about live streaming and things and hadn't heard really any podcasts on live streaming and the ins and out of business. So, yeah, it was fascinating.

And you've been married three years.

How long though? Yeah, three years in March, just gone.

Wow. Look, let's take the listeners back on a journey.

Tell us about how you got into. We know what you do. You. You talked about that just before the podcast started. But like, how did you get to here? Like you've just literally taken over another business. Right, which is.

Yeah.

How about I start the start? Hey. Yeah, so when I was in, since I was very young.

Had GoPros and things that I'd take to the skate park and make film stuff on our scooters and BMX with my mates.

I think when I started doing that, Instagram didn't even have videos yet.

Very early YouTube, please don't go looking for them.

Like scooter skate park videos. So I was pretty hooked from then. And my parents have always said that I was the type of kid that would put my homework second and go to the skate park first. And they had it at the time, but they're very glad I did it now because it's led to what's been an amazing journey with video in particular. But I was pretty hooked from that from a young age. And then in school, there was an opportunity to do a short course that was accredited through tafe, which is a educational body here in Australia.

To do live theater and events. And I was pretty interested in it. So I signed up for it. It was six months and it was four hours a week on a Wednesday night. And we learned all about audio and visual and lighting and kind of the ins and outs of staging and those sorts of things. And that kind of built on foundations of what I already had from video, which had got a little bit more not professional, but progressive by then. I was still doing films and stuff at school.

And then I was really hooked with AV from from the start. And all throughout year 11 and 12 at school, I would email the venue coordinator. The venue was on site of the school and they had touring shows come in and I would email them, say, any opportunity to do work soon, let me know, I want to be involved. And the teachers hated it because it was on the same campus as the school. So very often I would have like my physics teacher or something walking into the theater with midday on a Tuesday, I'm hanging a light off of the. The ceiling and they're like, what are you doing in here? And I'm like, I'm getting paid to be here today.

The guy who managed the theater would come in and say, no, he's with me today. Like, I've got approval from the family and everything that was. That was just building on my rebellious rebelliousness, which is very much a theme in my life. But I was very hooked then. So then as soon as I finished school, I traveled for six months, went to Canada, worked in Canada, then spent a few months on the west coast of America. And I was just creating videos and taking photos every single day. Worked in a ski resort. We'd be taking photos and videos, like even just on the phone, but then on the west coast in particular, was doing videos every day, was posting them online. And when I came home, a lot of mums, because my mum was my biggest fan, like most people, she was sharing them on Facebook and stuff. And a lot of my mum's friends had like 50th birthdays and different events on and that I wanted photographed or videoed. So I started doing work, doing that.

And I was still working in the theater there as well. And it was like just a natural progression. I had these video skills that I'd been building on. I had obviously the AV skills with audio and visual and lighting, and the venue manager, whenever they would get asked for video in the theater, they didn't have any infrastructure for it. They didn't have cameras there. They. They didn't have anything there. They would get external companies in to record videos for clients if they required it, and they'd bill directly to the client. So all of a sudden I became like a. I guess a preferred supplier there because I knew the venue really well and the venue manager would just recommend me to anyone and everyone who wanted video. So I started event video there. I was also doing wedding video and photography at the same time.

I think 2017 was my first wedding video. And it. And for those that have worked in weddings, know that it's extremely tiring, but it's very much a snowball effect. Brides talk to brides and they share videos and stuff and things really took off there. So I was doing that pretty heavily until.

2019, I think I did my first live stream, which was in conjunction with the theater again. So we're doing a lot of imag video switching and like DVD recording and USB stuff already. But just added a live streaming unit in there and was switching live and send that to a live stream. Little did we know Covid was coming.

2020 I had the opportunity to purchase Stream Adelaide. The business came up for sale from a lad named Jason who owns another company called no Backlog that do offshore wedding video editing. But he was based in Adelaide and he had this business he'd been working on for a year or so and he needed to focus on his other business. So he was selling this and it came with a few clients, a couple funeral companies in particular and.

Some government clients that he'd been working with. No contracts or anything. It was just.

Built relationships that I was buying into along with a little bit of gear. And I got it at an absolute steal. It was pretty much gear value. Like I turned around and sold quite a bit of the gear and would have covered the cost of buying the business very quickly.

But little did we know that Covid was just around the corner and I just invested in all of this live streaming gear. I had the blackmagic switches, I had the blackmagic.

Video encoder that I can't even remember what's called now. But also a live view solo unit which I just acquired with the business, which I didn't have beforehand. And then Covid hit and all businesses, everything went quiet for a while. But.

We very quickly the phone started ringing and these existing relationships that we had were like funerals in particular because they could have 10 people or something and there were like, if you're in the industry of death or taxes, then you're a sure bet because people are always dying and you're never going to stop paying taxes.

Yeah, there were three funerals, probably even more just with one funeral company a week that we were live streaming just straight off the bat. We had all the gear, we had everything there. The entire world had a shortage of of electronics, but in particular live streaming gear. Because every church, every funeral company, everyone who was doing events bought all of this gear overnight and it sold out. A lot of people couldn't get stuff so we were in a really good position with cameras and live streaming gear went from there. So we were doing a lot of funerals and things during that. Funerals are still something that we do occasionally, but yeah, we are very much in corporate live streaming events. So skimming over a few things.

I am a member of the VBA Elite mastermind with then, which happened in 2021 and things have just been progressively snowballing since then. So I was a little bit worried still in 2020, 2021. Because I thought.

When this Covid thing's over, no one's going to want live streaming. But I guess it was just about building foundations that would allow for success on the long, in the long term. So yeah, we've pivoted to corporate conference and events, so multi day conference.

And a bit of internal communication stuff with government and so on. But that's. It's been much less interesting since kind of 2022 has been.

There's still been progressive, we've been progressing, but there hasn't been any major things that have happened until.

Literally two days ago. Acquired an AV business which we've been in talks for 18 months. But I had been working with this company for almost 10 years doing AV support first in like a labor role. They didn't do any vision or anything. So whenever they would need labor, live streaming or IMAG or anything, they would come to us and the opportunity to purchase that business came up. So we'd been in talks for a long time, but April 1, which was two days ago as we're talking, we took over that.

And I obviously had all this experience with AV.

And things, but I had a very high respect for Ralph, who was the person who owned the business before and didn't want to step on its toes.

In the Barossa Valley. It's very small, almost like a country town. And that, yeah, just out of respect, hadn't really gone into av, but the opportunity was there to buy it off of him. So now I've gone into that. But yeah, that's a journey in a nutshell, to be honest. There's a lot of talking.

Yeah, no, it's very cool. I'm interested in the fact that there has been quite a journey and obviously we don't have the time to go into all the details.

You're at a stage now where you've just acquired an AV company which is such a cool.

Side sideways move because.

There, there is a limit to how many people need live streaming on a daily basis, especially in South Australia. And you just can't be busy five days a week. There's just isn't that much work. But what's cool about the AV is that you are now going to get AV jobs that allows you the opportunity to upsell streaming on streaming. You've got streaming jobs where you can say, hey, do you want staging and AV with that?

Which is really exciting because that's a really smart way to grow a business. You have an existing client base, you're buying all this Gear and the reputation of the company. But you're now going to be exposed to other opportunities.

Yeah.

How do you feel about that?

One of the biggest things about it that I'm really excited about, obviously it makes us more busy. It's doubled, it's easily doubled, if not probably tripled our business overnight. Time will tell. It's only been two, two days. But just looking at projections, it's going to be massive for us. But.

Aside from myself being busier, I'm very excited for the team because we can use the team between the two businesses and we have a few staff that work very regularly with us every week and then there's a few of them that we call on maybe once every two weeks and now to be able to give them more work as well. Because the live streaming and av, the skills necessary, the problem solving skills, the technical know how, signal path, those sorts of things very similar across the two disciplines. If you know how to live stream, then you pretty much know how to do AV or at least get it to where AV can work before doing your mixing and your EQs and things.

So it's very exciting in that aspect. But yeah, certainly huge opportunity to not only sell from AV to live streaming and video recording and pre recorded content, but also the other way around from those streaming clients we've been servicing for four, four or five years now. We can cross sell them back into AV as well, which creates huge opportunity. And yeah, everyone, everyone wants more leads and more opportunities. There's no real better way to do it than to.

Find the right opportunity and purchase another business. I'm not like not saying that's an opportunity that comes along very often, but there was certainly an aspect of luck in that. But you don't get the possibility of that luck and those opportunities without putting yourself in the right place and asking the right questions. Yeah, it's very exciting to be able to cross sell and cross use staff and gear as well between the businesses.

Yeah, for sure. I think it's also exciting that.

You are casual employed by this AV company as a younger guy and now you're in the company.

That's pretty crazy because. So Ralph, the guy who owned the business before is still around. We've got a year kind of transition period where he'll be introducing me to clients and holding my hand, so to say, in an advisory role, but also doing a bit of tech stuff, labor stuff where required. And I'm his boss now, I'm paying his bills. That is an interesting dynamic. But yeah, you can't Let those things run to your head.

I mean, the cool thing as well, of course, is that you now have this opportunity to go back to your entire database and go, oh, hey, by the way, we now do av. So it's like another touch point to open a conversation back up and reengage a relationship.

We're very active on LinkedIn. We've got over four. Well, I personally have over 4,000 connections on LinkedIn and have been doing a very heavy LinkedIn marketing strategy since 2021. And even just the conversations that have been sparked up from those existing connections that we've had that potentially we haven't even been able to service because they didn't require live streaming. And now they see that we've got av and there's a lot more opportunities there to.

To use all of that across there as well. Yeah.

Look, I think this is, it's such an inspiring story. And I guess when you sat and listened to me talk to Tony three years ago, like, Tony wasn't a video guy who bought an AV company and then just went ballistic.

But what I'd love to do is I, I think when people listen to these kind of things, it's like, oh, so that sounds great, Sam, you've been lucky. Good. Lucky for you. It's okay for you. You've been lucky. But I know as someone who's worked with you very closely, the challenges that you've had along the way, you've gotten married, you, you had a baby, you're having another baby, you bought a house.

What else have been some of the really tough challenges in growing a business.

The way you have, like, what have been some of the kind of real struggles.

Yeah.

Certainly.

I just, I just want people to think it's all like sunshine, you know.

Anyone who's done live streaming knows that it's not easy. Like, some of our most challenging days.

There was one day where actually my daughter was born.

Almost six weeks early. So we ended up in hospital when we hadn't expected to. I was meant to be on site, had to send someone very last minute because we didn't know the night before and that we weren't until the night before that we weren't going to be there. And they rocked up on site and the live stream wasn't working and they didn't have an SD card. That's one of the worst days. Also, my daughter was born that day.

And then we've had other days where, like we had two streams on one day and both of them weren't working and ended up being one of our providers that was having issues but we didn't know at the times. Like those are super technical challenges that have made things really tough. But.

Like amongst staff, we've had plenty of staffing issues like holding staff.

There is a little bit of a learning curve and either you pay someone a lot of money to come in who knows everything and brings a lot of experience, or most of the time what we do is find people who don't have so much experience but are really willing to learn. Which puts a pretty, pretty heavy learning curve of like kind of three to six months before someone can go on site by themselves. So it takes quite a bit of time to get someone if we're having a staffing issue amongst that and like cash flow issues which happen with every business. But it certainly hasn't been.

Easy sailing. Smooth sailing.

But.

Yeah, and the stakes are higher. Right? You're live streaming funerals. And we all know in the video industry that gear breaks. Things that you rely on, like phone networks break. There is no guarantees. And then there's also. We're human, we make mistakes sometimes. I know you're very systemized now because we worked on the systems together, but there was a period of time when as a business is growing, you're growing faster than the resources you have available. Have there been situations where things have gone really wrong? And.

I'm thinking about one particular example. I'm not sure if you even want to talk about it because it's wondering.

If you're doing the person sleeping in.

Possibly.

But I think what I always want to do on this podcast, Sammy is not bullshit anyone. Like no one in the VBA has completely got their together, myself included. I think there's a degree of. And we know some people in the VBA who are making like literally millions of dollars. And when we were on a call with them, it's not like they've got some sort of secret recipe. It's all a magic. It's just more volume and. And everyone experiences, I think the same level of more volume of work under resourced trying to. It's like an underpowered engine trying to get up a hill. So what have been some of the situations where things have gone wrong and what's that been like to deal with?

It's not just about the gear is.

It's not just about training the staff. You've got to be like client.

This leads to a pretty good lesson that I learned that the thing that you alluded at. But we had two events going on at the exact Same time, one of them I was personally on site at because we were understaffed that day. And I think the event I was at was starting at 10am and the other event was starting at 11am so they were meant to be there at 10am and it was 9:58 and I just clicked go live on the.

Event I was on. And the person who was meant to be leading the other event called me and said I just woke up. And they were over an hour drive away from the event and the event was starting in an hour and two minutes.

Which was an absolute nightmare. And then I had. I received a few death threats that day actually, which were really fun.

I had the client in my ear and the stream was just starting and there was nothing I could do. Which in the end I found someone in that local town that was a camera person, but the camera batteries weren't charged and I was like, I don't care if you rock up with your phone and you start recording until my guy gets there, just do something, please. And they ended up getting there and as they were walking in, their phone was on their feet and they start pointing up and as they're pointing out, a person said, good morning and welcome. So very much last minute. And it was just recorded, it wasn't streamed and then my tech arrived 15 minutes later or something. So that was a horrible day. But I did learn that day that I need to try and be available to answer phone calls and problem solve. If we have multiple events going on at the same time, I can't really be on site because I can't do anything about the other event that having issues. If I'm on site at another event where if I'm in the office, I can focus with it, I can look at it with a level, I can run a cable to site, I can.

Organize things much better if I'm more doing management than on site. Not to say that I don't go on site, but I always try, especially when we've got multiple events on a day in a day to be available for the staff to call. Because live streaming and AV, we have.

95% of what we do is troubleshooting and to have some ears or someone to bounce things off and at the end of that's my company. So no one's going to care more than me. But to be available for that is really important. I did learn some lessons that day. I did come home that day and cried and said to Tash, my wife that I give up, I don't want to do this anymore. I'm going to get nine to five. But we're still here.

Yeah. Yeah.

Look, I, I think it's cool that you, you share those stories because stuff is inevitably going to go wrong. I've slept in on coaching calls. You're right. Only once in three years. Yeah.

But I think what's interesting is usually is the lessons. And I, I think what we discuss a lot in Elite is the kind of higher level thinking around the lessons. What are the systems that need to be in place? And that one is key, which is if you're going to scale your business to hundreds of thousands of dollars and potentially millions of dollars.

You have no choice but to get off the tools. You cannot be on the tools and run a business. And that's a great example because you have to be like the conductor in an orchestra. You have to be there to be able to respond and make strategic decisions. That's quite difficult for some people to do because obviously AV video, it's fun, right? It's like you're loading stuff in your rigging cameras. How do you reconcile that with yourself? That to grow the business you have to step back from hands on operation of like streams and things?

Yeah. It really comes down to what your overall bigger picture objective is.

Certainly at the start I was very much like most people. I didn't think anyone could do it as well as me and.

I needed to be doing everything on site as well. But my, my big picture was really that I wanted to be able to take holidays and have the business still paying not only myself, but covering its expenses, covering staffing costs. That was a huge thing. And to achieve that.

We need to be able to.

Run jobs without me being there. And part of scaling as well is it's especially with live events.

With video and photography for example, like you can somewhat be lenient with the shoot days and work within schedules and calendars of both the production company and the end client. With av like we get contacted after the date has been set and the time's been set. So we don't have a choice when these things are going to happen. So very often we have double and triple bookings today. David, one of my staff has two funerals, one at 11am and one at 4pm.

And we did have an inquiry for another one at 10am as well. And that's just the nature of it is if we want to be able to service these clients, we need to be available when they need us. So to be able to achieve that, I certainly need to be off. I need to be off the tools, but to keep the business flowing. Like, we certainly still have ups and downs of cash flow and busyness and those sorts of things. But it happens all the time. And even with the top people who are doing millions of dollars in the vba.

They will very often get caught up on site for a month or something and then the pipeline gets very dry for two or three months because they haven't been doing the active marketing, they haven't been taking meetings, they haven't been doing those things. So having the staff on site allows me the time to spend quoting, meeting with clients, doing marketing and outreaching, checking in with clients, which are things that I'd never be able to do if I was on site today because I wouldn't have the brain space or the time.

So that's a big part of it is just looking at what the larger, bigger picture and the objective is in the long run and figuring out a way to make that happen. I hope that makes sense.

Yeah, no, it does. Completely. And I think it's. It's all great wisdom because you've experienced some of these.

Trying to put yourselves in the shoes of Sammy of three years ago, who was running a business mostly by every job.

Yeah. And three years on, you've bought a house, you've bought another business, you've got a second child on the way, and you're no longer. You're running a proper business that does hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. What have been some of your lessons along the way, in addition to what you've spoken about? You mentioned the marketing, active marketing. I love that expression because it's very common in the freelance mindset where. And I talk about the freelance mindset within context of you're a freelancer, basically, but you've got a business name and you're trying to migrate into that. Running a business.

You're concerned about putting editing out because you're not really charging enough and you feel like perhaps the client always wants to see you.

But that idea of active marketing, like, I've always been very impressed with how diligent you are at going after opportunities. But talk to me a little bit about the importance of cold outreach and cold. We're not cold calling. Actually going to a cold audience and introducing yourself. How do you manage that? How have you gone about that over the years?

When I say active marketing, I don't only mean LinkedIn and we have trialed with Google Ads and Facebook, but we're not active in. In those things. I certainly need to get back onto Facebook ads. But a lot of the active marketing as well is like following up the clients. We've got a pretty streamlined system of three, seven and 14 days after an inquiry, following up to make sure. See if they've got any questions.

Yeah. Any questions about the quote or what's included or just following up. Just like after 14 days, I'll say if I haven't heard from, I say, look, I'm gonna close this out. Wish you all the best. And you'd be surprised how often that just gets a response from people as well, like saying, oh, sorry, this is on my mind. I just haven't been able to deal with it. And then gets conversation going. So that's a big part of the marketing that we do as well. But the cold marketing, we've been doing full transparency. Dan and his team did manage.

LinkedIn outreach for quite a while. Probably to.

It was probably.

Yeah, it was well over a year and a half. Probably they would have. Would have connected us with 2,000 people at least, and attempted with many more, but I bought that in house. My wife has been doing that for quite a while now, which has just been literally building LinkedIn leads, lists of ideal clients, and then contacting them until they tell us to go away, essentially. And, yeah, like, we're not on LinkedIn to make friends, but we are there to kind of build relationships. And a lot of the time, like, we'll get messages back and say, sorry, live streaming is not something we need. And even sometimes I'll get the cold shoulder and get told to go away. And then 12, 18 months down the track, get a contact and say, I'm so sorry I said that to you. We need live streaming. Can you help us with this? And that just comes down to obviously having reached out to them. That opportunity wouldn't have come to come to us if we hadn't reached out to them, annoyed them, and then posted for a year and a half and they just saw us in the background. We generally do two posts a week on LinkedIn and a lot of it doesn't get a huge amount of engagement. But as soon as any of our connections think, oh, we need live streaming.

Hopefully they make the connection to us. A lot of them, a lot of message me and say, I know that this is the type of thing that you can do. So certainly like that cold outreach has been a huge driver and even just a lot of them people we haven't been able to service at all, but they have connected us with people who have needed this or their clients that have needed those services and things and that's been a huge driving force. It's been a really primary focus for cold outreach marketing for a good three years and has been quite successful.

Yeah.

I mean you're absolutely right about the frequency and the consistency on LinkedIn, but it's all about putting the right message in front of the right people at the right time. It's just that it's never usually the right time for the client and that the entire reason that you that we encourage posting so frequently is so that when the client is ready, you are a factor in their mind and that's really all there is to it. But as creative types, we're not very good at some of the consistency stuff. But I think you've done very well at initially outsourcing it and then insourcing it because you just have to be doing the same thing over and over again. I noticed that we haven't done a podcast for a little while. The numbers started to drop off. But I came to a decision that I was honestly I was getting a bit bored of it. I'd done 330 odd episodes and I wanted to get back into doing interviews. And you'd said to me quite a while ago we should do an interview and then we just got. The life got in the way. But I think this is going to be the kickstart of more interviews talking about the realities of running a business.

Which brings me on to what has your experience been in the vba? The friendships you've made, the support you get, the good, the bad, the ugly that I think maybe people listening to this, someone said to me this morning, oh, I'm. I've been looking at the Elite for a while, but I think it's just out of my league and I guess I want to try and dispel some of the myths because obviously there is a threshold in Elite. We want. We typically work with businesses doing 15 to 20k a month and upwards but up level deals with anyone who's not at that level and you're in both groups. What, what are some of the things you've observed in, in your journey.

In the vba? How has it helped? What have been the times when you felt it's been the most Val, I.

I don't have any business partners or anything. I'm the only. I am the sole director of the company.

So certainly before joining the VBA I felt very lonely a lot of the times because I felt nobody could relate to the problems that I was experiencing, at least not in my network.

Yeah, I don't have a lot of. I have more now in my local area that are a similar age with. With businesses and similar problems. But certainly at the time it was a very lonely world. And certainly I remember there was one day in particular where we were streaming at two schools and both streams fell over and I was sitting in the van in a McDonald's car park at 9pm at night after having bumped them all out and edited and uploaded the videos. And I was just crying to myself and I was like, I got nobody to talk to about this. We weren't married at the time. I was with my partner. But she didn't understand because it didn't make any sense why I would be crying over this stupid thing. Which in hindsight is. It was a little speck in the journey, but it was a massive deal at the time. Obviously that's not something that you want to experience ever.

But as soon as I joined the vbi.

Not to be cliche or anything, but like a family, like a bunch of people who had similar problems and similar life experiences that were struggling with similar things that I could bounce ideas off of or they had dealt with these things in the past could bounce ideas off and it like, it could be anything down to like, mindset being one, but the wording to use towards a client dealing with a situation being another. Because when you're the only person in the business and you're in a heated moment where something bad has happened, you're not making the best choices and using the best words. So to run that by some other people who have similar experiences.

And dealings was really good. But amongst that, amongst, I wouldn't have ever started doing LinkedIn. I don't believe if I hadn't been in the VBA and seen how successful other people were, how much success other people were having with it and yeah, just like heaps of learning opportunities anytime, like often two or three times a week, I'm having issues. And we have our weekly call that I can raise it on or.

Post it in the group and get some answers and run ideas by people. It's like essentially having a board of directors that you're not paying.

But really create wisdom and add value to the company.

Yeah.

And I think also there's a lot of real raw honesty in there, isn't there? We've given you a few hot seats where we had to point out, I guess what I call the shadows or the cracks, the things that you're not seeing in your business. And I think it's really important that in a supportive and I'm going to use the word loving environment where people are very respectful to each other, there's a high degree of trust and that means that we can be extremely raw and extremely honest. And I think that's something that's hard to find someone to tell you the truth when people are often very polite. How have you found those kind of situations? I feel it's important to share it all. Like, it's not always just a lot. Everything's great. There are times when we pull each other up and actually hold each other to account.

Yeah.

No one's gonna, generally speaking, no one's gonna be as invested and concerned about your business as you are, which is your responsibility at the end of the day. But I'd never met such group of people who would actually be. Be concerned about things like that. Pointing out different cracks and like saying. Not going to say heart to heart or man to man, but to your face, like pointing out things and not being afraid of saying it or of any judgment or anything and just saying you shouldn't be making this decision because you're just trying to run a business and make decisions quickly and things. So having those conversations is really helpful. And certainly.

If I didn't have the vba, I probably would have sold off half of my business and be regretting it.

Yeah, it's a great environment, especially when it's. When you're under a lot of pressure, when cash flows tight works, piling up and you just think, oh God, I just, I need to get out of this. But also I just want to talk a little bit about. There is I. I have an expression I use when I have on discovery calls, which I say to people, I explain everything that goes on inside the vba and I go, but we're not here to spiders. There is money to be made. I believe very passionately that you should be earning the same as a doctor or a lawyer doing what you do for a living.

And I like to see people get at least a 5 to 10 times ROI each year. Can you talk a bit about that? Some of the financial benefits of being in a group like this, obviously there's a cost associated with it, but I don't think it really costs you anything when you multiply. Even just some of the jobs you've gotten through members in the VA.

More than covers the cost of membership, your net worth.

So certainly being that we provide a little bit of a different service as well with live streaming, it has been, it's been very good. But just like the amount of not cross selling, but collaboration that there's been between the group in different states and different countries when things are required, is, creates a lot of opportunity. But beyond that, like, there are a few tweaks in particular that I made.

As soon as I joined the VBA and got the, got into the content, the educational content. There was a few things that I tweaked that doubled, tripled invoicing right overnight. And it was just there's a lot of things like mindset things that I was like, no one would ever pay that much. And then everyone was like, you're not charging anywhere near enough for that. You should be charging this much. And like doing that and getting a second pair of eyes what everyone's charging and what I should be charging that like dramatically increased the revenue very quickly. So yeah, like we've, we easily tripled very quickly after joining.

I think that mindset mentioned is really key. It is the thing that keeps me still being mentored by more successful people. I've always had mentors. I've always had coaches. I think it's because the greatest athletes in the world, the greatest performers in the world have coaches. The greatest singers and artists have voice coaches, they have management. The sports people have coaches and mentors.

It's so important because you will limit, you limit yourself based on your current perspective on the market. Something I hear a lot is, oh, things are really quiet in my area just now. I've been talking to a few people, everybody's quiet. And then there's an assumption that there's no workaround. And there's a danger of, I'm going to say, when you're having those conversations in free groups like Facebook.

Everyone'S just got an opinion. No one's investing to be there. And so a lot of times our opinions are like toilet seats there. There's always an asshole near one. And I think that it's so important to.

Have that perspective because there are some people in our group who are doing millions of dollars. And I ran an ad once and I talked about three people made over a million dollars last year. And the comments were insane. And what it just showed was a lack of belief that it's even possible. And it is. It's a significant figure to achieve as a video production company. And we know one person that's done over $2 million, but they're working extremely hard and they're running 30, 40 projects a month and they've got a team of five or six.

But that's not possible without the right Mindset. And I know you've got really ambitious goals for the company because you want to buy a nice house in the hill, have lots of kids and spend lots of time with them. And like, what better motivation than building a nice environment for your family to grow up in?

Yeah, it's a.

Yeah, it's.

Is very much a mindset thing. Like some decisions I made personally, and not saying that wherever I might sound like a radical radicalist or something, but I stopped watching, watching the news during COVID because it was all just. It was all bad news. You'd turn it on and you would just be depressed by everything you saw. And we like, outside of a few minor things that have major things that happen to the people, but it doesn't really affect my life. I never see the news or anything. We don't. We actually don't have cable tv. We have Netflix and things. So we can watch what we want when we want, but not watching the news, like deliberately, very actively got off of all of nine news and the news channels on Facebook and stuff and said, don't show me this. Because what you allow into your mindset can really affect your outcome and your output. And it's. Yeah, certainly, like, I hear that all the time. Like, there's no workaround at the moment. It's very quiet. And it's just something that I choose not to believe because as soon as you start believing it, then it becomes true.

Like, for example.

January is very quiet. Pretty much every industry in Australia because everyone's on holiday and no one's doing any work. Last year in January, we went away from January 11 to February 11 and we had our best month that we'd ever had. And I was on holidays. I was doing two or three hours work a day on the laptop, keeping up the clients and making sure things were running well. But that very much came down to the fact that during the last three months of the year before, I was very active in like, January. That year was horrible. I'm not going to let that be a thing again. So I was very active there. But then this year, again in January, like, January has been our best performing month so far. So it just goes to show, like, whatever you allow into your mindset will become reality. But if you choose not to believe those things, then you've got a better chance than if you do.

And I think that's one of the reasons that the weekly wins that we go with every Friday and Elite are so important, because.

It'S maybe only quiet in your particular sector. That particular week.

But then you see somebody else having a 40 grand win and you're like, ah, you know what? There is money out there and there are people hiring. It's just that no business is busy 52 weeks a year. And I think it's, there's a lot of, you know, saying this as a person who's created this, there's a lot of value in the cracks of the vba as well as the content, the community, the live events, the coaching calls. What would you say to someone, if you can talk back to yourself of three years ago, because when you decided to join, it was a stretch financially.

But what would you say to someone?

I was pretty bright.

What would you say is that, what would you say to someone who is perhaps sitting listening to this, who's maybe been listening to the podcast for a while, who's aware of the vba, but for some reason has a limiting belief about their ability to justify investing in it or to, to even consider that if they're ready. What would you say to that person, given you've got the wisdom of three years of being in the process?

Yeah, I don't want to say manifest or anything, but it is manifesting. The biggest thing for me was like.

You'Re only capable of what you think you can do. So the first thing I would do is, and I say this to a lot of people who are standing out in business and you do it as part of the process, as a big picture, is draw out what your dream life would be.

And for me that's time with my kids, time for holidays, but productive work.

And then draw kind of a bit of a roadmap to getting there and then tell yourself it's possible.

A huge part or pretty much the entire reason I was able to get into the right mind space was because I joined the vba. But certainly.

Yeah, maybe you draw a big picture and you put those things down and you can achieve it by yourself in 10 or 15 years of hard work and a little bit of grace. But.

Certainly surrounding yourself with like minded people is a really important thing to do. And that was what catapulted my business because I knew what was actually possible then when I had no idea before. So being part of the VBA put me around like minded people who were doing pretty much exactly what I was doing in different places maybe, but certainly opened my eyes to what's possible.

And in a way that I wouldn't have been able to convince myself of. Maybe, yeah, maybe after 10 or 15 years I would have convinced myself that Those prices were justifiable, but by then the inflation would have hit.

Yeah, I, yeah, certainly joining a group like the VBA puts you around like minded people or up level or whatever. There's still a great community of people there and I've used people from up level for, for different jobs before as well and connected with people from up level. So yeah, it's certainly, certainly putting yourself around the right people is a great move.

Now the one thing as we sit and listen to you talk is people listening to you might be thinking, God, this guy's, he's married, he's got two kids or one on the way, he's bought a house, he's bought two businesses.

I wanted to leave this till the very last second. Do you want to share with people how old you are?

You're pumping up my tires then. Yeah, I'm 25. I'm 25.

Sammy. It's phenomenal. Like, I'm just so proud of you and your journey and we've had a few moments along the way where we've had to go head to head and battle out a particular decision. But to see you thrive and grow into a very capable entrepreneur is very rewarding for me. And you're only just scratching the surface of what's possible, you know, I mean, you know, I know that when you get that house on the hill, I'll be at the house roaming. It's, it's inevitable. And I love your ambition. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you feel is important to.

Just as you were saying then that I'm only 25. I have been in business since I was 18. But that brings me to another point of.

For a very long time, I was very eager to have all of those things right away.

Obviously, like I have done the big picture, I've designed my life how I want it to be and I'm pretty close to how I want it to be. Outside of the house on the hill. I spend lots of time with my family. I have an office from home that I'm in at the moment. I have an office in the city as well. But work between the two.

All of those things come down to having done the big picture. But I was very much in a, a hurry to get there for a very long time. It was only something that I noticed very recently when I was in the midst of.

Doing the business acquisition, that I actually don't need to be doing these things so quickly because as Den and a lot of people have been saying, there's a lot of people who 50 and above in the VBA as well who are saying you have so much time. And I'm like, but I want it now. But I have come to the realization that I don't need the things today. It will be better for me in the long term to do things slowly rather than have it all tomorrow. Because sometimes, like you should see pictures of me from three years ago to now, I look so much older and a lot of that would have come down to the stress that I put myself through for a very long time.

So yeah, I just wish I had taken things a little bit slow. I'm so grateful and appreciative for where I am now and and the journey that I'm still on. And obviously I've got a very long time of workable years left, but I do wish that I had stopped and smelled the roses a little bit more along along the way to my point here because yeah, certainly aged very quickly due to the amount of stress.

That's the industry, the nature of the industry. But yeah, just try and take things a little bit slow would be my advice to myself. 25 and having kids and a house and stuff is not something that you see every day. But that certainly what I wanted. I'm very grateful for it. But yeah, I do wish that I took it a little bit slower.

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 videobusiness Accelerator 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.