The Umbilical Cord “trap” that befalls many business owners. EP#71 - Keziah Robinson

G', day, guys, and welcome to the how to Scale a Video Business podcast. If you are new to the show, welcome. Lovely to have you on board. We have a Fairback catalog of episodes now, and we put out two episodes a week, so there is an enormous amount of content for you to get through and help you to scale your business. This week, we're going back to the second part of our interview with Casey Robinson from Casia Partners over there in Boston. Kezia is a business coach, investor, and strategist. And last week, we had an incredible conversation about really breaking that freelancer mindset and that idea that, you know, you run a business now and all the money is yours, but how to kind of make sure that you have a role in your business and that you are, you know, applying yourself appropriately. And we were getting into such a big conversation, I wanted to split this into two shows because today, today we're going to talk more clearly about how to separate yourself from the things you don't want to do in your business and also relinquish some of that control where you feel like you can't delegate some of the tasks in your business because you're the only person that knows how to do them. And how we can, in fact, shift that mindset away from that dependence on you. Because, you know, if the business is dependent on you, it's not a business. It's just a job. And if you don't go to the office and the work doesn't happen, then that's not a business. So what we want to be doing is investigating ways in which you can work on the stuff that you love in your business, but find team to come in and do the things that you don't love. And Kezia has a really great, unique, and, you know, very experienced perspective, having worked with many, many businesses over 20 years. So I want you to dig in, grab a coffee, enjoy this episode, and, yeah, I hope you get as much value from it as I did. Interviewing Kezia.

Hey, guys. Just before we get started in this week's episode, I wanted to make sure you were aware of some new resources we've got for you over@denleny.com that's D E N L E N N I E dot com, including I'm giving away a free copy of my book, A Filmmaker's Guide to Budgets and Quotes that Increase Profit margin on Productions by 20 to 30% instantly. So if you want to grab a copy of that book, it's on the website now, and we're adding new resources to the resources tab all the time to help you scale your business faster. Thanks so much and enjoy the show.

Kezia, thank you so much for agreeing to come back. I felt like our last conversation was going so well that I just thought there's just so much more to talk about here. So I want to just pick up where we left off last week, which was we were talking about this idea of the business owner, the individual struggling with releasing control, you know, perhaps not taking vacations or, you know, just not being willing to delegate without trying to control. And I wondered if you. If you could pick up on that, that notion of, you know, for example, clients not taking vacations because they feel they've got the business. The business.

And it's, I mean, such a fantastic question because I think we always, and I'm sure you and I, we both caught ourselves doing the same thing many, many times. Pushing off, taking care of ourselves or taking a vacation. And the biggest thing is the baby steps. I really, I really do think that when someone has a lot of control issues, you kind of have to start with some baby steps. And one of them that I do is, and I do a lot of behavioral work with people is like, what is. Where's the source of the control? There are people who are just very control oriented and they just want to control everything. We're going to take a different tactic at them versus someone who just cares a lot about the image or just is super passionate about the business and has a very high standard. But one of the things, I had a great client, ongoing client, just fantastic businesswoman. And she had not taken a vacation in years, and she and her boyfriend were planning to go to Europe, and it was one of these things where she really, really wanted to take this vacation. And so we went through who. How many times a day she might check, right? And we started, you know, she has a social media business, and so there's postings and things like that. And she had a junior person. I was like, you know, two weeks before you're gonna start letting the junior person. We went through how often that person would post what the criteria were for a good post. I often said there's gotta be an acceptable error rate. It's not gonna be perfect. What you're trying to make sure is that it's 5% and not 50%. And so we went through and really trained her into how to manage and how to delegate and how to the person beneath her. And then she was able to go on her vacation. I think she checked her email two or three Times but she got to go away for a whole week and it was very liberating.

The other thing about taking vacations, so I, I've got a very busy me and, and I'm essentially what am I doing in me. I'm off to Bali for a men's retreat for, for. There's eight men, all similar age, all business owners. We're going to a retreat to work on self. So it's a very, it's a very confronting process. It's eight, eight days literally living in the jungle. And so I'm, I'm out of the business for 10 days and then I come back and then I'm going somewhere else for a few days. And then the week before I go to Bali, my wife and I are, we're actually going down to Sydney where our friends are coming up two weeks before and they're picking up our campervan, they're driving it down to Sydney which is about 3,000km and then we're going to fly down to Sydney and take 8 days, 10 days to drive it back up to our home. So for the, for the best part of, of May, I'm kind of on vacation or I'm working on, you know, on, on, on, on myself which is really kind of business training, business coaching really. But I'm, I'm, I'm now looking at my scheduling planner for our content and making sure the team are aware that I'm pretty much not around for three weeks in May, but the business will still run. But the added benefit of being away from the business is that I can't be the best coach and provide the best value to my audience if I'm not taking time out and actually resting and exploring. And the thing that I find when you take time out of a business is you have some of your best, best ideas when you're not actually involved at any level in the day to day, which I guess is what you know what, partly what your client experienced in Europe is not only time away from the business, but actually time to just breathe and think. How important is strategic time out of the business in your view?

I put that in the context of sort of self care and investing in the self.

I think it's very important to be able to step away and to be able to get perspective. But I also generally, I mean one of the more I felt, you know, it's one of the. Sometimes you have a client come in and you do work and you just go, oh God. I gave him an exercise where he looked at his activities and his relationships and kind of it's a matrix on what is generating positive energy for you. How much energy are you putting out into, let's say a relationship? And he literally looked at me and he said, I have no restorative activities. There is nothing right now that I am putting, which is a low energy investment for me that generates energy back. And I said, well, put sleep on it. And he's like, I don't even do that enough. And so I really, when I look at people, I'm like, it might not be for you. For some people, you might not need a vacation, but it might be. I take a sewing class every week for three hours and there's literally I cannot focus on anything other than the sewing. There's no capacity to think about the business business. And it just clears my mind and opens it up. So I really think it's important for you to have ongoing restorative activities and to have that time away. And the greatest. It's not just that you have fantastic thoughts. Your employees, the people who work for you, they have fantastic thoughts, right? They get to prove that they can manage the business. And if they can't manage the business, then you're not doing your job as the business owner.

I love that so much. I love that so much. I want to just touch on something you mentioned last week. Towards the end of the call we were talking about, you know, this idea that people, some, some business owners don't want to release control. And particularly in a video production environment where the, the, the business owner has the relationship with the client. They've typically turned up on set and been there maybe behind the camera or producing. They will certainly start by doing the editing as well. And they'll lays with the client and they feel like there's this very strong bond between client and, and provider. But one of the challenges that I observe with with people that I work with is they have to unlock that, that psychological connection almost. It's almost like a mother, mother, child connection where it's like, oh, but the client expects me.

How do you. Have you experienced this? Where clients go. But you know. Yeah, because that's all great. You don't really understand that the clients come to me because of me.

I'm sure you've experienced that. But what are some of the steps that you might employ to help someone detach from that as they go along in the journey to free them up from being that sort of umbilical cord, if you like?

Well, one of the things is to look at, you know, what do you give up, right? And I think I'm always. Whenever somebody is going to make a change and they're showing resistance that it's because they're giving something up. And so to really get the. The client in touch with what are you giving up? Are you giving up? Is your perception that you won't have any engagement with the clients or you won't get to have any fun engagement, you won't be part of the creative process? Sometimes it's just you're giving up being the most important person in the business if you start to have other people have the power to engage with the client. So a lot of it's just getting in touch with like, what is the thing you're going to have, you're going to give up. So we can visualize go into the future, you can kind of mourn that, but you can also look at what's on the other side of it. Another thing though is that often people, the way they. Because they want to be the most important, what they do is they've already positioned with the existing clients, they've positioned that the June other people are not as good. Right. They're cheaper and not as good. So, oh, if I can't handle it, you can work with Ted, right? Who is inherently then going to be not as good. Like, that's how I've set it up. This is my apprentice, this is my this. And so I think one of of the things is to look at is maybe you can't do it with some of the existing clients, but as you're bringing in new clients is that they're meeting. You might be in part of the consultation, but you are not the primary point of contact at the beginning. And it is always about how you have this fantastic team, people who are just as good at you, maybe even better than you, and you're starting to position them in a way where I don't feel as a client, like, if so and so told me to reach out to you, Dan, I don't feel like I got cheated when you try to have me work with another person on your team. So there's a lot of that as well. And that requires a little sublimation of the ego. You have to say, I'm not, you know, I'm no longer going to be proud just for myself. I want to be proud my whole business. I want to be proud for my whole team.

I remember speaking to, you know, I love meeting successful people and I love just observing and listening. And they're often so generous with their Perspectives. And a common trait I've heard again and again is I hire smarter people than me for my team. Like my team are way smarter than me, like that. That's creating value for your client. And I think that it's such an important point to pause on is that we start a business with an idea and a relationship with a client and then we grow that. But we very quickly get to a point where we have a capacity issue. And in fact what the clients want is the service and the, the results that you got than when it was just maybe one on one. But if you don't scale your team and your systems and your processes to be able to work with more clients, so every client gets that service, you're actually doing them a disservice. And what I see happening is clients going, well, I'm just going to go and do this one job. You know, I'm going to go back on the tools for a while and just, just kind of, kind of can we do a couple of days a week? And the first question I say to them is, ask them is, well, why, why do you need to go back on the tools? Oh, well, I just want to kind of touch base with clients and I want to kind of just keep, keep my hand in. It's like, well, that's okay, but. But I want to ask a deeper question, which is, are you doing this because you want to increase your profit? Because you think if you just do this job you'll keep more profit? And they're like, well, yeah, it's like, well, we're looking at this the wrong way. What would you say to someone in that scenario? Because I'm sure that's something that's common across all industries.

Well, a lot of times I say look at the client, right? You've trained the clients to expect things. So if it's really. So sometimes people just, they miss the job, right? I think there's, to be fair is sometimes you actually miss the job. Which point I will say, take a pro bono client, right? If you just miss the work, then that's a fantastic opportunity because you can afford to not pay yourself, right? So you could take pro bono clients or low bono, do work with somebody who really does, who's being an ideal client. They just don't have the ability to pay. So that's a great way. If what you're doing is missing the work. If you really are thinking, oh, I don't really need this person over here, that person over there. A lot of times you kind of trained, you've got the wrong kind of client. Because a real. The client should really only want to pay you for the things where you add a lot of value, and you should really only want to be doing the work where you add a lot of value. Sometimes you've trained the client to always be asking for you, or you've taken a client who's super particular. One of my clients calls them pixel pushers or they're always there. They want to go through every single pixel on the picture. Right. And adjust it, you know, yes, that person only wants to talk to you, but that's not really the type of client you want in the long run. Think that you have to kind of look at why are they trying to get back into it and if they really just miss the work. Pro bono clients are a fantastic way for you to really get to enjoy the work you're doing, do very high quality work, and kind of not be crowding out the ability of the rest of people in your business to do profitable work.

Oh, that's so good. This is just so gold. It really is. You know, I love the idea of pro bono work because then what you're doing is you're actually asking yourself the question, am I going to go out and do this work because I want to do it because I miss it, or am I actually trying to keep more of the money? And it's something that I see very, very much in the early stages of the freelancer mindset. Haven't quite adopted the business owner mindset. And I just. I love what you're sharing around that, because I think the biggest challenge and obstacle for any creative business is that they have a heightened magnifying glass over that.

That feeling of self, that feeling of their artist, their artistry, and their style. But I say to all my clients, anything can be systemized, even the creative process.

What are your thoughts around some strategies and some baby steps for, let's say, a freelancer who's currently doing everything? Maybe they've just outsourced the bookkeeping, but they're still kind of doing the creative. They're still doing some of the admin. What would you be suggesting in terms of helping them to walk through a future vision of themselves that would ultimately have them not being required for the business but still drawing income?

Well, I look at. I mean, I do a lot of work with people on, you know, what's the mission? You know, mission, vision, values. And if you don't have a mission beyond doing the work, beyond the artistry.

If the artistry in the work is not in service of something beyond yourself. It's very, it's. It will be very, very hard for you to ever want to leave the business. So a lot of it. There's an expression which hopefully doesn't have to be bleeped out, but I got this from a graphic designer. She says they call it crafturbation. When you just get so fixated on your craft that it becomes, you know, completely. You're no longer thinking about what is the design and service of. So with someone like that, when you start to explore, you know, what is the life that you want to have, Right. Let's make sure that we're. Because we're going to be targeting a business structure that's going to work with the life that you want to have with what you want. But also like, what are you. What are you doing this for? What is this in service of? What is beyond just the scope of the business and beyond just craft that starts to allow them to look at the drivers that will help you say, well, I want to do this at scale. I want to create value. I want to. I want to really execute on this mission. And I need more people with me. I need more bodies, I need more exposure, I need more clients if I'm really going to take this mission forward. I really like to sort of, with someone like that is to really separate, because if there isn't a mission, then you're probably going to max out and it's going to be very hard for you to delegate. And you may just be a lifelong kind of freelancer, you know, plus a few people you subcontract to. But I really believe most people, if you get into it, there is something that they care about that they really want to achieve or affect in the world that when they just haven't thought of applying their craft to it. That's kind of the step that I usually go to with someone at that phase.

Love that so much. I'm very big on, you know, so in our program, the video business accelerators, we start with why and within that, why is the purpose, mission values? Because you. You have to be working towards a mission. Otherwise you're just. You are just a freelancer who hires a few subcontractors and. And you're dealing too much with the here and now cash flow. Had a good month. I didn't have a good month. And not thinking broader about the kind of, the bigger strategy. One of my mentors, Ben Simkin, who is, you know, widely reported as one of the world's. He's actually reported by, by the Huffington Post, is the world's number one Facebook marketer. I work very closely with Ben. I'm actually one of the mentors in his program. And he says, you know, business is a game of decades. Everyone needs to stop literally, in his words, fucking about week to week, month to month being disappointed they're not achieving their goals in two or three months. Like he said, business is hard. He's like, it's really hard. And it never stops being hard. And it takes effort and input. But if you're not being strategic, if you're not, here's an incredible process called highest and best use of time, which is like identifying on a granular level all of the opportunities you have in front of you and putting them into a spreadsheet and evaluating them based on input, physical cost, output, and profitability in percentage terms. And he does this process once a month. And he said, I always identify my highest return, profit percentage. And that's the project I work on. And that's something that I think a lot of people struggle with. It's a bit like what you said last week about why did. Why do we struggle so much with writing down our goals? Because when the goals are written down, you can't unwrite them. And I think that's something that's very, very important to embrace. But it's hard because oftentimes we will default to the easy work, the work that we think, oh, well, we'll just, we'll just busy ourselves with that little task over there. And, you know, I just, I would love to get your thoughts on that from, from, from a coaching perspective and the kind of work that you do.

Well, I think you're very much right that if you, when you, if you haven't written the goal, then if you don't know why you're doing things, it's very easy to just kind of do whatever is in front of you, right? Because you don't have a real draw. Like there's a. You may have made a plan, you may even have, you know, for some people are not systems oriented, right. They're not that to the level of detail. And you can still work and have quite a successful business without being someone who's going to map things out to the, you know, to the millisecond. But you look at that, you know, for, for him, right, that he's decided there's a profitability matrix. And what I do with people is I use energy. I was like, you know, I will do time, money, all of those Things, but then also just mental energy. You know, I don't care how profitable a client is on paper, if after getting off the phone with them, you have to go around to the pub and have a pint, right, that was a bad client for you. You did the time that two hours that you spent recuperating, you didn't talk to your other clients, you didn't do marketing, you didn't talk to your family, you didn't. Right, like, so that's. I actually kind of have a, maybe a much less detailed kind of formula, but it does involve this mental and emotional energy. Try to look at the profitability of those. So I think there's a lot to be said for saying, you know, the things you don't want to do when you're kind of dicking around and doing these little bits. Like usually you're either afraid of them because if you did them you'd really have to go after the thing that you want, or you made some beautiful plan, but they don't have anything to do with the things you really want, right. So you don't really want to do them or, you know, you have, you've over systematized. You're not a person who's going to thrive in a minute by minute system. You need something else, but you don't really know how to build something that's a little bit more flexible or a little bit less rigid. And so you kind of abandon everything at once. I really like to. I think that one of the things we do as coaches, we kind of pull out. I don't know why you're not doing something. So a lot of the early exercises are to kind of identify and if we got the right goals, all of a sudden, man, you start doing a lot of things that you, before it was like pulling teeth and now magically you're, you know, you're sending all your invoices on time, you hire the bookkeeper, you fill out the, you know, Ben Simkins form, right? You start using it and it's because you have a goal that you really want.

Love that so much. It's so, so, so great. And, and, and I love the whole focus on energy because one thing we can't manage is time. Time. Time will continue to go on without us, but we can manage energy. And setting yourself up to manage energy. And I loved your comment on sleep. So many business owners seem to see sleep as an optional kind of luxury.

And I've been studying quite a lot on sleep and the importance of sleep. And I love to sleep. And if you're not getting seven to eight hours of sleep, minimum a night, and we're talking quality sleep, you're literally killing yourself. It's, there's some incredible resources on sleep and there's a particular expert, a sleep expert, and his name escapes me just now. He's done some incredible TED talks and he has a book. I've read his book, his books, kind of, kind of hard going. It's, it's very, very scientific. But his TED talk and I'll link to the talk, just his name, he's a doctor. And it's just completely escaped my, my mind. But, but sleep is where it begins. Sleep, hydration and time out of the day to day in order for you to revive, to renew your energy. Because when we start a business, we're so enthusiastic about it and then very quickly it can grind you down. So what other tips do you, do you, do you advise your clients to take in terms of managing energy and taking time out for themselves, do you have processes around that?

I have a lot of identifying. So one of the things I do, especially with relationships, there's often, and this could be clients, sometimes they're personal relationships. I'm very clear that, you know, if you're having an issue, the issue is with the relationship. It's not necessarily, you're never, you're not firing your mother or your father. Right. But you may have a relationship, the relationship itself may not be functioning and serving you well. One of the things I have people do, and this is the same thing with tasks, is I have them say, remove yourself. Let's imagine you are, you know, abducted by aliens. Right. What would, what, what would the person on the other side, whether it's the other side of the relationship or if it's a task that you're performing, what, what's their next best alternative? So you're no longer available to pick somebody up at the airport. What, what, who do they turn to next? What's the next? And you do that two to three times. I try to get to three. And I said, if you need to take money, no option. You know, take money out of the equation. When you start to get to the point where you go, yeah, you know, like other people could do this other, there's this, you know, this part of this relationship that isn't working. It doesn't have to be this way. Like, I don't have to respond to that email to that client. I don't have to even have that client when their contract is over. I can just Tell them I'm too busy to renew. So you can look at that. And you know, that's, that's sort of a framework that I'll go through a series of questions and actually making that out into a table to really look at what would happen if I were not available and how much of that, how much of the things that are draining me am I taking on when really I don't need to be doing them. I am not actually creating that much value.

Oh, I love that so much. I just looked up Matt Walker. Dr. Matt Walker is the sleep expert and he has a TED talk called Sleep Is yous Superpower. I recommend everyone goes and watches that. But again, Kezia, the thing that keeps coming up as we talk is that you as a coach, you identify the challenge, but you get someone to go through a process of writing it down. And it seems to me that.

Writing that down process makes everything more tangible because I think it's very easy when you're busy particularly. And we talk about in on this podcast about video production. You know, video production can be all encompassing. If you're on a job, you're on a shoot, you are not thinking about anything but getting there. Have you got the equipment, are the batteries charged, etc. Etc. And this is something that I'm continually exploring with my members is the days that you are in the office, you know, what are you spending your time on? Because if you're just kind of admin in the, you know, bookending each side of the shoot with, with shoot admin.

It'S crazy. And the other thing is, is, and I learned this from the four hour workweek when I first read it back in probably 2000, 2010, 2009.

Whenever it came back, we all read it.

Yeah. And the first thing I did, and I'm actually going to go back to this because I don't know why I stopped doing it, was Tim Ferriss has an email autoresponder which says hi to serve you best. I check my email twice a day, once at 12 o', clock, once at 4 o'.

Clock.

If your concern is of an urgent nature, you can message me on this phone number or send an email and I'll get back to it the two times listed above. And a second thing that I do, which I'll just share is that and this freaks people out, is my voicemail on my telephone. I haven't checked my voicemail in three years. My voicemail on my phone says, hi, thanks for calling, please do not leave a message. I will not listen to it, please text or send an email to this address. And so you want to be training your clients and the people that deal with you in the way that you operate. And Tim talks in his book about the fact that I want to manage my time and energy. I don't want other people coming in and managing that. So when we make decisions to put boundaries around our time and energy, beautiful things happen.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that one of that not being an immediate responder, right. The number of times people can solve their own problems. How many times have we done this? And you, oh, I missed this email. I was at dinner. And then you get an email like 20 minutes later, and it's like, oh, thanks. No, I figured out you're like, I didn't need to be involved or there'll be an email chain. I've been on when I was doing consulting, management consulting, I would be involved in these projects. And I go, you know what? I'm going to check this tomorrow because they're going to figure out they'll make a bunch of changes, a bunch of decisions, and then finally there'll be something that I actually need to weigh in on. There is a lot of that in terms of really.

Getting away from being the addiction that we have to providing that instant response. I also think the one thing that I know that you. You've talked about this on other, because I listened to several of your podcasts, is we sometimes treat. We want to be treated one way as the freelancer, as the business owner, and then we turn around and we don't treat the people who work for us with that same level of respect. So if you expect the people who work for you to be instant on and then you're going, well, don't call me. I'm only available at noon. I mean, that sends a really negative signal to, like, this is we're not on the same team. So some of it's also to just keep in mind, same thing. Like, you know, if. If you are asking someone to hire you to spend money for your quality expertise, and then you're doing your own bookkeeping and you've got, you know, when you're doing your own marketing plan, what are you doing here? Right? You don't value paying other people for that, but you somehow want your clients to value that from you, so you're not really living that value. I think it's important to kind of be respectful of your time and also be, you know, really be mindful of the burden and the expectations. You have people around you.

I Think that's a wonderful place to. To pause this conversation again. Kezia, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the show. You have so much value. You're clearly, you know, someone who's got an immense amount of experience, and. And I love the way you articulate. I think there's going to be very powerful exercise. So I want to say thank you very much for sharing your time. And for anyone who didn't catch last week's episode, you can go back and check that out. Kezia, just for the benefit of those that perhaps didn't hear last week, where can people find you and what's the best way to connect with you?

Best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn. I'm pretty much the only Kazia Robinson that I've seen around there, but it's spelled K, E, Z, I, A H. Or you can check my website out www.cassia-partners.com. and I think both of those will be in the notes.

Yeah.

And then I just want to really thank you so much. You do a fantastic job. This is really a wonderful. A wonderful podcast, and you bring together such. Such great experts, and I've just really been enjoying listening to it.

Well, I also want. Thank you so much. Also, we should. We should both thank Pat Henderson, who's actually one of my clients. You and Pat know each other locally where you are, and. And Pat was the person who said, oh, you've got to connect with Kezia. And he just, he sent me a message saying, hey, there's this friend of mine. I think you guys should connect.

And.

And we connected, and I had absolutely no idea why we were connecting, and there was no agenda. He just said, I know both of you guys, you need to connect. And I'm so pleased that he did because we had a fantastic call about a month ago just sharing perspectives. And so to have you on the show has been a real pleasure. So thank you very, very much indeed.

Thank you.

You've been listening to the how to Scale a Video Business podcast with me, your host, Dan Lenny. If you're a video business owner who's hit a ceiling and we benefit from mentorship, support, and coaching, then check out how you can work with me over@denlenny.com. don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes, and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review. And don't forget to share if you feel you've gotten value from this episode and you think it would be useful for us. 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.