The Limitless Power of One Thing Focus EP #100 Shorty

G', day, guys. It is Tuesday 23rd June, 2020. We are halfway through the year. It's Dan Lenny here, host of the How To Scale a Video Business podcast with this week's Shorty. We're also celebrating a bit of a birthday today. This is, in fact, our 100th episode of this show. So if you've been listening to us from the very beginning, thank you very much. If you just joined us, welcome. And this is this week's Shorty, and we're going to be talking about the one Thing focus, that helps you achieve more with less energy.

So, yeah, we've reached 100 episodes, which is, you know, a pretty awesome feat. You know, when you start a podcast, you start with no episodes and you go to one. And for those of you who've known me for a while, we did have a podcast back in 2012. Myself, Mick Jones and Bruce Logan, ASC. We ran about 18 episodes of that, but all of our schedules just got kind of collided and we weren't able to continue that. So we had a break for quite a few years. And then we resurrected the podcast, I think, in 2017, 2018, I think be 2018.

And we started with a couple of episodes. I saw an episode every fortnight, then we went weekly, and now we're up to two episodes a week. So. So it takes a bit of commitment to keep going. And I'm grateful for you, the listener and the viewer. I think most people listen, but we do have these snippets that we put out on Social. And, yeah, I'm kind of proud of what we've achieved. I think, like anything, it takes a certain amount of tenacity and discipline to keep these things going. But I do love doing it. I get to meet some fabulous people. In fact, I've just recorded the intro for an episode we're releasing next week with Lauren Kress. She's a neuroscientist, and we had an absolute ball recording that podcast. And she's going to share some incredible insights as to how our brain works and why we do things that we do and why we have biases and why our brain's basically lazy. And so, really great insights there. But today I wanted to share some insights on this idea of the One Thing Focus. We had our weekly group coaching call today with the Video Business Accelerator. And on this call in the month, which is the fourth week of the month, it's always a general Q and A where we focus on what's the one bottleneck or challenge that's in the way of your business. And typically in business, challenges fall into one of just two camps. You either have a marketing problem or a capacity problem. You know, if you've not got enough clients or you're not closing enough deals, then you have a marketing issue. If you've got too much work and you're feeling a bit snowed under, then you simply have a capacity issue. So one of our members this morning, who's been absolutely having a really busy time of it, was looking a bit frazzled, and he said, oh, I think I've got a capacity issue. So what we did was we brainstormed. And this is the power of a mastermind. If you've never been in a mastermind process, it's when eight or 10 businesses sit around a virtual table and we solve your problems.

Accelerators, like a board of directors for your video business. And it's something that it's very, very powerful. And so we were able to help this member this morning and map out a plan of action. And what we identified was he had a bottleneck in that he was carrying a lot of the information around in his head. And I know that's something that we can all relate to and. Interesting. I just. I just recorded a podcast an hour ago with Dave Jennings from Systemology, and Dave and I have been known each other for quite a few years now. He was on the podcast right at the beginning. We've done an event together, and he's spoken at one of my coaching events. And Dave is the master of all things systems, but he ran an SEO agency, he ran a video production company, and it was all very heavily systemized. Now he focuses all his efforts on Systemology and his software, System Hub. But again, you know, without systems, without a process, we become overwhelmed. And they said the brain, you know, in the book, the one thing. Gary Keller, phenomenal book. You should definitely read it if you haven't. You know, there's this notion that multitasking, we're taught when we're younger to multitask. Multitasking is something that computer processors do. They go from ones to zeros to zeros, to ones, to ones to zeros to zeros to ones. And they can multitask because they're just taking one instruction. Left, right, left, right, on, off, on, off, on, off, on, off, off, off, on.

And that is what a binary process is. Our brains are not binary. And so when we multitask, we literally freak out. Our brains get exhausted. In fact, one of the things Lauren said on the podcast is that if you Want to lose weight, Read. Because the brain will burn calories when it's thinking. And the brain is fundamentally lazy. The brain doesn't want to do any work from when we were back in prehistoric times. The brain is there to fundamentally at its core, at its nucleus, to keep us safe.

And so anything that's complex tires our brain out and we switch off. So when it comes to running your day, if you try and give yourself too many things to think about. So if your computer screen is on and you have got 15 windows open and your email is open, and Facebook is open and Twitter is open and LinkedIn's open and you've got things buzzing away on your phone and you're refreshing your email every two seconds to see if somebody's emailed you, you got to wear yourself out. That is the easiest way to go broke and go mad at the same time. So I always encourage a default diary and work on one strategic task at a time. So give, for example, the recording this episode of the show. So I do a shorty on a Tuesday. It takes me about one hour from start to finish. This one's taking me a bit longer because I actually recorded this 10 minutes ago and then realized that the actual card wasn't inside the Rodecaster. So big mistake for me. The red light wasn't. I'm like, oh, the red light's not on. Clearly it's been a while since I've been behind the camera, so I'm re recording it. But ordinarily it takes me an hour start to finish. By the time I've recorded, It takes about 10 minutes. 5, 10 minutes thinking about what I'm going to say. And then I download the card and then upload it to Buzzsprout and then write a description in the title and then, you know, throw some artwork together. We've got some templates that we use so I can actually just update the episode name and number and. And the whole thing takes about an hour. Now. It's quick because I use the Rodecaster Pro, but you know, it's. It's a process that I know will take an hour start to finish. So one of the things I think that I've learned in business that I want to share with you is that things often take longer than you think. And I think as filmmakers, we are usually over optimistic or overly optimistic at how long things will take. And generally speaking, everything takes twice as long as you think it's going to take. So when you look at your working week and your business week and you look at your strategic objectives, you know.

You got to be realistic about how long things take. But anyway, back to marketing issues and capacity issues. If you don't have enough clients and you don't have enough work, that's a marketing issue. And so your focus should be on identifying your key target markets, understanding what they need, speaking to them to find out what they need, and, and, and, and, and helping them achieve their outcomes.

Creating a sales process, Creating a marketing process, having a measurable marketing process and system, one that you can reflect on, check in on every week so that you know if your marketing is working or not. And then you've got your sales process, which is what happens when inquiries and leads come in. How are you able to qualify them? One of the conversations we had on the call this morning was one of my members had an enormous amount of leads coming in, but not all of the leads were ideal fit. So on the one hand, he's done an amazing job at getting a lot of inquiries, but now we were discussing how can we qualify the inquiry so that you're not taking lots of phone calls, answering questions with people that can't afford your service. And that's something that you have to do in your own business. You can't serve everyone. So you know, Gordon Ramsay doesn't, doesn't negotiate with people on price. You know, he doesn't serve McDonald's style food. He serves very high end food where there's not even any prices. I mean, you just go into his restaurant and then maybe a fixed price for a degustation menu and that's it.

There are different price points in every market and you don't really want to be going in as the cheapest because if you're the cheapest, it's not a very good negotiating tool price. So we very much focus on, you know, having high value propositions, having a great marketing equation, having a great marketing offer that separates what you do from everybody else in your space. So you become known as the expert in your field and from there your price can become elastic. So, guys, I want to wrap things up today. Thank you again for tuning in for 100 episodes. It's great to have gotten this far. Here's to the next hundred and be sure to tune in on Thursday. We've got Danny Lacy back for part two of his interview from Stardom Media and he's going to reveal why he fired or terminated a contract with six figures in that episode and how that left him feeling and what happened next. It's a gripping episode. So guys, have an awesome day and I'll see you later.

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 like 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.