When it's good to think negatively. EP #210 - Den Lennie

G', day guys. Dan here, episode 210 of the how to Scale a Video Business Podcast. And today we're talking about planning for the 20 mile march. Now, planning is something that I have harped on about fairly routinely on this podcast, probably once a month, if not once a quarter. Because it really is the thing that as creatives we tend to be a little bit relaxed on. I mean, we certainly plan shoots, but do we plan strategically for the growth of our business? And that's what I want to share with you today, but also more importantly, understanding that it doesn't have to be a race.

So I've talked about planning a lot and the importance of it, but I want to really illustrate why proper strategic planning that's closely aligned with your purpose and your mission can be a life or death decision. Now I don't mean to be dramatic, but I'll come back to that in a little bit. Making films and producing video content for corporates and agencies shouldn't in itself lead to a life or death life threatening scenario. So, you know, you know, I don't mean to be dramatic. However, the severity of a negative outcome that could arise if you don't set things up properly in advance, that is creating a strategic plan for how you're going to operate your business will be directly proportional or, you know, rather the severity of the negative outcome or the positive outcome rather will be directly proportional to the amount of preparation you invest at the beginning of your journey. So let me explain now, it's never too late to start planning. Whether you've been running your business for a decade or longer or you're just starting out, planning works for every single business. Now the one thing focus life frequently refer to is so important because that one thing, when broken down becomes a list of priorities for a business.

And those priorities might be anywhere from 30 to 50 different individual priorities that over a 12 to 24 month period will help you to get closer to achieving your mission. So our purpose is to help video producers succeed in business. It's clear, it's succinct, it's concise. Our mission is to build the most conscious and fulfilled network of video businesses around the world, operating in the uk, Australia, the us, south of Africa and Canada. Those are our main areas of operation. And we want to have a group of 50 business owners around the world working together, all scaling together by 2022.

So we've given ourselves a time frame and a number and a location. Whenever you make a declaration or you write something down, you're actually becoming More accountable to actually doing it. You're more likely to actually do it if you write it down. Inside the vba Every Monday, the members post their weekly goals, and their weekly goals are, which part of their strategic plan are they going to be executing this week? And so by putting it into the group, you hold yourself accountable to your peers. Makes sense, right?

So the idea of your mission is, it's the commercialization of your purpose, and it details your intention in terms of demographics, geographics, and financial. And so you might put revenue targets in there. And then what you want to do is sit down for at least a few hours, maybe a day, and brainstorm all the things that need to happen in order to make your mission a reality. And if you find yourself with that little voice in your head going, oh, but Dan, you know, I don't have time to sit down and plan. They say that about meditation, right? They say you should meditate for 10 minutes a day unless you're busy when you should meditate for an hour.

So, you know, think about, you know, maybe not going to the pub or not going and watching the football or not watching tv. Just sit and plan. You know, when President Kennedy in the 60s announced they were going to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, that was the purpose. The intention was to get a man to the moon and back safely. So they had nine years to figure out how they transport three men safely to the moon, land, collect samples, and return safely to Earth. The planning for this journey took in excess of nine years for a mission that lasted eight days, three hours, 18 minutes and 35 seconds. So if you're serious about building your video business into a sustainable enterprise with a predictable revenue and workload, then you need to pay attentions. To pay attentions. Pay attention to the lessons I'm going to share with you. Whether you want to earn 50k this year or a million, the outcome is entirely based on a solid foundation of strategic planning. So let me talk about a case study between Amundsen and Scott and the Antarctic expeditions of 1911. So early in the 20th century, there was a race between nations to be the first Antarctic explorers to reach the South Pole. The British team was led by Robert Scott, set off on one route and another Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen. The round trip Trek was roughly 1400 miles, so the equivalent of about, you know, New York to Chicago and back, you know, not. Not an insignificant journey. The environment was uncertain and unforgiving where temperatures could easily reach 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit even during the summer, they had no means of modern communications, no cell phones, no satellite links, no radio. A rescue would have been improbable if they were to air off course. One leader led his team to victory and safety. The other led his team to defeat and death. Now, Amundsen adhered to regimen, a regime of consistent progress and constant progress, never going too far in good weather and careful to stay away from the red line of exhaustion. Now, Amundsen prepared rigorously for years in advance of the journey. He learned what worked in polar conditions, going as far as to live with Eskimos, to learn how they moved in sub zero temperatures, what they wore. And he reviewed every conceivable situation that his team might encounter en route to the Pole. He trained his body and mind with fanatical discipline. Scott, on the other hand, represents quite a contrast. To Amundsen. His preparation was limited, and what plans he made were based on his own intuitive conclusions rather than direct research of the environment he was entering. So we think about that in terms of video production. Are you researching what works? For example, being in the vba, we have calls every week. You can be on that call and you will hear what's working and what's not working. Or do you just sit and go, I'll figure this out. Same kind of thing. Okay. This was a lot more serious, obviously. Amundsen stored 3 tons of supplies for 5 men versus Scott, who stored 1 ton for 17 men. Amundsen used sled dogs, learned from the Eskimos, whereas Scott used unproven motor sledges, which failed within days of his journey. Amundsen carried enough extra supplies to miss every single supply depot and still have enough to go another hundred miles. Scott ran everything dangerously close to his calculations, so that missing even one supply depot would bring disaster. A single detail aptly highlights the difference between their approaches. Scott brought one thermometer for key altitude measurement, and he exploded in an outburst of wrath when he broke it. Amundsen brought four such devices. The divergence in preparation goes on and on. Unlike Scott, Amundsen systematically built enormous buffers for unforeseen events. He designed the entire journey to systematically reduce the role of big forces and chance events. He presumed that bad events would strike his team somewhere along the journey, and he prepared for them. On December 15, 1911, Amundsen and his team reached the South Pole. He and his teammates planted the Norwegian flag and then went right back to work. They couldn't have known that Scott and his team were now desperately man hauling the sled fully 360 miles behind. More than a month later, Scott found himself staring at Amundsen's flag at the South Pole. Amundsen had already traveled 500 miles back north. Scott and his team turned back north dejected just as the seasons began to turn. The already menacing weather turned more severe. While supplies dwindled and Scott and his men struggled through the snow. Arminson and his team reached home base on January 25, the precise day he had planned. Running out of supplies, Scott and his team stalled in mid March, exhausted and depressed. Eight months later, a British reconnaissance party found the frozen bodies of Scott and his two teammates in a forlorn snow drift little tent just 10 miles short of his supply.

His entire team had perished. Now the key points here is just as a striking difference between the preparations between the two men was the discipline of Amundsen to press forward in bad weather and hold back his team in good weather.

Throughout the journey, Amundsen adhered to a regime of constant progress, never going too far in good weather. Careful to stay away from the red line of exhaustion that could leave his team exposed, yet pressing ahead in nasty weather to stay on pace, Amundsen throttled back his well tuned team to travel between 15 and 20 miles a day in the relentless march to 90 degrees south. Hence the phrase the 20 mile march. When a member of Amundsen's team suggested they can go faster up to 25 miles a day, Amundsen said no, they needed to rest and sleep so as to continually replenish their energy. Now think about that in your video business if you've got a strategic goal to hit a certain revenue number. A couple of my clients did this recently. We did their half year analysis and they were on target. Very easy to then go, well, we're on target so let's push a bit harder. But every single one of them has gone. No, I'm happy our targets are set for the year. We're going to keep going. Very, very important lesson and they're all advocates of the 20 mile march. It'll come as no surprise. In contrast, Scott would sometimes drive his team to exhaustion on good days and then sit up in his tent and complain about the weather on bad days. At one point, Scott faced six days of gale force winds and traveled on none of them, Whereas Amundsen faced 15 and traveled on 8. Amundsen clocked in at the South Pole right on his pre decided pace, having averaged 15.5 miles per day. Scott, in contrast, fell behind early with no plan of daily pace. And as the conditions worsened, enhanced by his lack of preparation for unforeseen events, he and his team never recovered. So that is why we have 52 check ins into the VBA. 50 actually, we take two weeks off at Christmas, but 50 check ins every single week. The 20 mile march, it's a philosophy that we live and breathe inside the VBA and it creates consistent progress for our members so that they're always running or walking in a brisk pace down the 20 mile march. So, you know, how does this apply to filmmaking? Well, we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in 12 months. Okay, but we wildly underestimate what we can achieve in five years. So stop trying to get everything in the next 12 months and think about what can you build in the next five years and what needs to be in place to make that consistent. Five years ago, I mean, we just arrived in Australia, now we live by the beach and, you know, it's a total contrast.

Proper preparation and research will allow you to prepare for the times when things don't go to plan. So, you know, if you lose a client who's been a significant income generator for you and panic sets in, well, if you plan for the fact that at some point they're going to leave, you can start to build up additional sources. We had Andrew Fowler on the podcast just recently from Lux Films. He talked about this when he joined the vba. He had one main client, now they have several. So he doesn't any longer feel so vulnerable if the main client decides to leave. In actual fact, the main clients got busier. So now I got more and more work.

If you don't have a certain skill set, then either outsource it or invest the time to learn it. No one was born a natural marketer or natural salesperson. You didn't come out of the womb knowing how to film a camera, right? So these are skills that you learn in the same way as you learn filmmaking skills, but it takes time to become a master of them.

All too often, a lack of patience to play the long game hinders meaningful progress. Nobody expects you to be an expert in everything. So play to your strengths and don't be too proud to ask for help. Planning is critical for success, so make sure you are prioritizing doing it. So really the key lessons here is, you know, you just, you don't want to be.

You don't want to be kind of rushing too far ahead. You want to get really clear.

On, on what you're doing and be very measured and set up that plan, like Amundsen did, you want to be doing the research. What is it you're looking to achieve in your business? Who do you want to serve?

Another great anecdote is from a book called the Great by Choice by Jim Collins. And it uses the analogy of fire bullets, then cannonballs. And what this is done is it's.

It'S talking about the idea that you're at sea in a war situation. There's two boats and you only have one cannonball left, but you have a bunch of rifles. If you fire your only cannonball at a moving target, then there's a high probability that you'll miss. But if you shoot a bullet first and miss, the risk is lower. So you adjust 10 degrees and try again, still miss, bit closer, then adjust another 10 degrees and keep going until you hit. Once you've nailed the target with a bullet, then bring in the big guns and fire the cannonball, knowing it's going to strike the target. So you know, when you're looking for new business opportunities in markets, it's important not to throw all you've got at a shiny object on a whim. You know, let's imagine you think there was an opportunity to create content for a manufacturing business or sector.

You want to fire the bullets first and check if there's actually an opportunity there. So the most systematic way to test a market is to test small. If you have an idea, then trial it first, see if there is sufficient demand before going all in. You know, before you start building websites and saying we're now going to focus on this area, do a few jobs in that sector, make sure you can make money on it. And then when you see the opportunity and you understand how those industries work, manufacturing for example, I'll give you a great example. Manufacturing is a knee to knee kind of organization. They're not generally terribly tech savvy, you know, old school manufacturers, they want to meet you, shake your hand, sit in an office and discuss things and they'll have a process for doing things. Each industry is unique, so make sure there's demand. I often hear this, you know, people talking about, you know, wanting to go into business opportunities because they think there's an opportunity. I often hear people talking about going into small businesses and the thing with small business, be happy to talk to you, but they don't have any money and they're spending their own money. When a business owner is spending their own money, they are far more emotionally attached to that because they're basically taking money out the kid's Mouth as opposed to a larger organization who's just spending a budget. It's just a number on a spreadsheet and at the end of the year they've got to spend the money. So you know, once you've done a few jobs and made some money, then you can scale up and it's a bit like, you know, camera tech. I'll just finish with this. You know, I see the cost of camera tech. You know, I think an FS6 is probably $18,000, like 9 or 10,000 pounds. And it's like, is it going to give you any more than an A7SIII? Now there may be a situation where the answer is yes, maybe a situation, the answer is no. But don't go out and spend the 18 or 20 thousand dollars or the 10 thousand pounds on a camera kit and then go and get the work. When in actual fact, you know, a C100 or an old A7s with a, with a recorder will do the job. I did a job quite a few years ago and first time I recorded it on the FS7, second time I recorded it on the A7s, the client didn't know the difference and they didn't care. But one camera was costing like five or six times what the other one was costing. So even today there aren't that many clients who are insisting on delivering in 4k. So forget 6k, 8k, all that kind of stuff unless there's a very good reason. And I say that, you know, because a lot of my clients are shooting 6K and above because they're doing high end corporate and they're shooting 6K and they're using the extra scalability to re edit and post and also future proofing. But these are businesses that are doing very, very well who are in, you know, 50, 60 grand a month. And so focus on identifying where you can reach the optimum market for your service. Become the go to person and then it's so much more fun scaling up when you've got the money to do. So.

Ask yourself this, has owning your own video business been everything you dreamed it would be when you first got started? It might be hard to admit, but think about whether you're genuinely achieving everything you set out to when you made that decision to grab the camera and go it alone. Are you really working less? Are you really earning more and are you really in control? Chances are you're bloody good at what you do, but you're having to work like a dog, 70 plus hours a week, whether it's filming editing, marketing, or any of the other jobs that come with being the big boss of your own video company. When you're managing projects, constantly searching out for new clients and worrying about cash flow, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture or make real progress. Let's face it, that stress is the last thing you need when you're trying to run a profitable company that supports you and the people you care about. Truth is, a business that provides financial, professional and personal freedom really is achievable. But maybe you've got that nagging feeling that you're overworked, lacking stability, and struggling to get to where you really want to be right now. It could be that you just don't know how to make a positive change on your own. So I created the Video Business Accelerator Coaching programs to really supercharge your video business. With these unique coaching programs, you'll learn all the tools you need to get complete confidence in the success of your video business. You can take the first step on your journey to a successful business that doesn't control your life. Let me show you how. Head over to Dental and click on Accelerator.