Time to ramp things up - Plan for success. EP #137 - Shorty

G', day, guys. Den here on Tuesday 1st December. My goodness, I cannot believe we are in December again. What a year. I've just come off a phenomenal coaching call with my accelerator clients. Now we do two calls a day call. One is for our Australian members and our US members and we offer a couple of our Brits and Irish often jump on that call as well. Let me do a second call in the evening which covers off Australia and Europe. And this call at the beginning of the month is always about planning.

So we reset a strategic plan every month and we start by reviewing the last 30 days, looking at our lessons learned and our wins and what strategic obstacles are in the way from, you know.

Achieving the goals that you want to achieve for your business in the next month. And this being December, there can be a tendency for, for some of people to, to think that, you know, or things are starting to slow down. Clients aren't going to be spending, you know, going into January. It's typically a quiet time of the year and typically January can be a quieter time of the year.

But it's really important that you don't, you don't stop, that you keep your momentum up. And, you know, some of the feedback we got on the call this morning was just how, how important being on these calls are for motivation and stimulus and ideas. We shared some incredible ideas this morning around an opportunity that Jethro had with a company that makes kitchen equipment. And you know, they just signed them up for a 30 grand gig. And that was really powerful because Stas, who'd been doing some work with the bottling plant, has been doing a lot of internal comms, a lot of internal training, a lot of staff training videos. And what we were discussing was, you know, there's a lot of money to be made in what we would call classically boring corporate. Except it doesn't need to be boring. You can turn those videos into works of art and shoot them beautifully and cut them beautifully and have great effects and great music. And so the really important part of this is that those kind of clients have a lot of money to spend and they have a lot of problems to solve. And video is the kind of thing that can help them solve it. And what they often are looking for is one supplier that they can trust. And a lot of these companies are what we refer to as knee to knee companies. They're old school, they've been around for a long time, they're not very digitally advanced advanced, and they tend to do things live face to face, but they're realizing this year that that's not as, as plausible and so they're having to create more content and, and you know, I know that these are the kind of clients that will spend tens of thousands of dollars on projects ongoing and have enormous amounts of reach and also tend to be part of bigger umbrella organizations. And so it's just super exciting to, you know, to hear the guys on a call sharing the insights. And one of the advantages of being on these calls is that, you know, if you're, if you're on your own listening to this thinking, right, what, what's my next move in business? You know, you don't really have anyone to turn to. What we have on these calls is, is someone who's already been there and done that thing and making good, good coin, sharing how they did it. And so you can actually shortcut. So one of the benefits of membership to this program is you're shortcutting the kind of learning curve you're not having to go through and figure all this stuff out for yourself. And that's really powerful. So yeah, the planning session today we do every month, beginning of the month, we go through a planning session, we look at the last 30 days and we identify what are the opportunities for the next 30 days. And the three things that we always focus on are revenue generation, offers.

And, and ways to present opportunities to your, to your clients and then communicating that with your clients, both existing clients and potential new clients. And that's where your marketing system comes in. So it's a very powerful process, one that I always love, love doing because you know, the community in this video business accelerator is world class. We've got businesses from all over the world in video production at different, different stages of their business journey, openly sharing and, and that is so powerful because you know, we're very particular about who we let into the community. And that's not some false scarcity is genuinely, you know, we turn away about at least half of the people that apply, maybe even 60 or 70% because the strength in the community is, is the quality and attitude of members. Our members are world class video production companies who are entirely committed to serving their clients at the highest level who are focused entirely on delivering an outstanding service. So those clients come back again and again. And I'm very proud of all of the businesses in my community. And actually the added benefit is that they're all friends. There's not a single person in this community I wouldn't have around my house with my family and have barbecue. You know, we're a community, we actually thrive in seeing each other go, grow. And it's been an incredible year actually given all of the challenges that the market's seen. And you know, for the most part everyone's done extremely well and, and they may have had a few bumps in the road, but what I've observed is people that have grit, people that have resilience, people that have an understanding that you have to invest in yourself and that investment in yourself pays dividends months and years on, you know, thrive. And it's, it's, it's really awesome to, to watch these guys and girls grow. And that opportunity is there for the taking. You know, there, there is lots of opportunity in the world to, to, to create video content without having to be a marketing agency, without having to sell advertising or strategy. And, and that's not to say these, those aren't great add on services, but for the most part all of our clients are largely producing content. They're video production companies, they're video production agencies, they're just producing video content for training, education, internal comms, external comms and I think a lot of times out there in the world, not that I pay an enormous amount of attention to it, there's a lot of competition for the sexy stuff, the juicy stuff, the music videos, the kind of, the big projects. And in my experience they don't pay as well and there's a lot of competition and you know, the corporate world, they want safe, reliable, consistent and, and that's what we, that's what we focus on. We focus on serving a corporate market with large budgets, you know, who have to make videos for compliance or videos for communication, internal comms, external comms, that sort of thing. You know, Jethro has just won this project where they're, they're making a series of videos on kitchen appliances, how to use high end kitchen applian. Enormous, enormous potential to produce beautiful work because they want it to look elegant and in line with the brand. But an enormous amount of opportunity. And this client said to Jethro, he said, oh, we want to find one supplier and just work with them. So those are some of the incredible opportunities that exist. And I think oftentimes, and this became clear on the call today, sometimes we look too hard at the opportunities that are too far out of reach and oftentimes we don't spend enough time looking closer to home at the opportunities that are on our doorstep. And that is why we have these calls every week and we share these things. So actually on, on Thursday I had a, had a question from someone last week saying to me, what actually is the video business accelerator? And I realized that I hadn't actually ever really fully explained what it is. We talk about it a lot and I had quite a number inquiries recently. I just asked him what it was. So what I'm going to do on Thursday is I'm going to do a whole episode explaining exactly what it is, what we do, what we cover. So if you're interested in learning a bit more about it, tune in for Thursday's episode where I'll basically run through the whole thing. So until then, guys, have a great day.

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 and we benefit from mentorship, support and coaching, then check out how you can work with me over@denleny.com don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review. And don't forget to share if you feel you've gotten value from this episode and you think it would be useful for other filmmakers you know. And please do me a massive favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in. See you next week.