Winding Down and Reflecting. EP #355

G' day guys. It's Dan. It's the 13th of December. I'm a bit late recording the podcast this week. I've been pretty knackered actually. We had a huge week last week in Melbourne where we hosted the one day business growth summit for videographers. We had about 28 videographers in the room. Incredible day and I'll talk a bit about that in a minute. And then we hosted our three day Elite Mastermind in Collingwood in Victoria and Melbourne. Had an awesome time, lots to share and that's what I want to do today to give you some really good nuggets to be able to think about as you go into the Christmas break. Ready for next year.

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.

So I don't know about you, but like by this time of the year, I think, I think we're all kind of winding down.

We've got one full week of business left before a Christmas break and I think thankfully for the majority of videographers, it's the only time in the year where virtually the whole industry kind of shuts down in the corporate world and you get to have that very rare couple of weeks break.

As you sort of reconsider what you want to do differently next year.

Look, not been an easy year for a lot of people and I was hanging out with a friend of mine who runs an automation business and does like five or six million dollars a year and he was saying they'd had a really rough first half of the year and that I think there's definitely a sense that a lot of people are holding off spending maybe till 2025. We're not that far away from there now really. But look, I wanted to just reflect a bit on last week's events. One of the questions we asked people in the room was what was your biggest win for 2024? And I'd love to have you reflect on that over the next couple of weeks. You know, I think it's, especially when things are a bit harder than normal, like what's not flying in for a lot of people.

Some people are doing very well, some industries are really thriving. But I think I hear a lot more people commenting on it being a bit slower, clients taking longer to make decisions, putting things off. But I think it's really Important to reflect on the things you have succeeded in. You know, what have your biggest Wins been in 2024? But then following that, what was your biggest lesson in 2024? And you know, I think we have a lot more lessons that we reflect on. I don't know about you, but I tend to always focus on my mistakes and think, how can I, how can I avoid that next time? How can I put a system in place to avoid that?

And then, you know, I want you to think about what's the one thing you want to do differently next year? What do you want, how do you want your business to look in the next 12 months? We sometimes forget that we get to choose as business owners who we do business with and how we do business. And beyond the need to create income, sometimes that can be quite a daunting.

Sort of thought process because when you have full control.

Sometimes you feel a little bit crippled. I'm sitting here looking at my Canon Pro 1000 photo printer. I've got five or six or eight boxes of Ilford Smooth Pearl Galleria paper. I've got everything from a three down to a four to a one. So a four, a five, a.

Six and a two. And I've got thousands of images on my computer. And I often say I'd love to spend some more time printing photographs.

But what I've observed is if I don't actually schedule that in, it doesn't happen. So one of the things I did this year was I built a separate computer station right next to my desk. It's got an easel monitor and the Mac studio. And I just bought this amazing 8 TB Sandisk SSD for like 800 bucks super fast. And I am going to force myself to work on photography on a completely different machine. I was trying to do it on my main desktop setup, but it just wasn't working because every time I went to do something, I'd check an email or I'd look at something that was on my to do list. So, yeah, that's one of my goals for next year is to create more time and space to do more landscape photography. So think about what it is you want to do differently next year. And then what you can do is you can start to build your business around it. So one of my goals for next year is to work a 5 hour workday from 9 till 1. That's a 4 hour work day. So 9 till 2, 8 till 1. But the goal is to create some time every day so that I can be creative, be that play Music, photography, work in the garden. And I say work in the garden. We've got a nearly 2 acre property, so it's actually not really even just working in the garden, it's just maintaining the huge space that we have to maintain. It rains a lot here, it sun's out a lot. So stuff grows very, very quickly. And then one of the things we're going to do next year is we're going to build a studio cottage, granny flat in our property to provide some housing that we can rent out for, you know, anyone who wants to long term let on our property. It's going to create an income stream and ultimately when we're older we could downsize into that, rent the house out, go and do some traveling. So we're always thinking about Sam and I, you know, how do we want life to look? And I think we have a choice. You know, I think one of the things that's become clear to me in the last couple of years is we don't have to do business the way we've been told we have to do business. I think if you are niched into an industry that really appreciates what you do, you can easily become a rock star in that industry. One of my clients, Grant is, is a rock star in the transport logistics industry. He is someone who was on this podcast a few weeks ago and he is just developing more and more client relationships inside the transport logistics industry. He has 43 clients and we were, we were talking at the Mastermind last week about if you got to 86 clients, what would that do to your business? And it just opened up a whole world of possibility. Then we started looking at the scope for transport and logistics company just here in Australia. Then there were like 2 or 3,000 that were like active on LinkedIn. I think the overall market size was something like 50 or 60,000. So there was a big amount of opportunity. And so I think what's important this time of year is I'm going to touch a bit more on this on the episodes in the coming weeks is really having some opportunity to take some time out and reflect. One of the exercises we do in the VBA is a vision board exercise. In fact, we're running a Sprint just now, a 30 day sprint and everyone in that Sprint has done their vision board and they've all commented on how game changing it's been to be able to envisage a life in the future that doesn't perhaps exist yet. And something very powerful about the intention of having a vision board is that we as Creative people are able to, you know, see it and then imagine it and what is imagined becomes reality. So it's a really cool thing to do. And I think especially this time of year when everyone's feeling a bit tired, a bit worn out, needs a break, maybe you're looking forward to Christmas, maybe you're not, but either way I think it's important that you just take some time out and chill. I was going to talk about the event we did last week. I'll briefly talk about it. All the video mentors were there. We covered mastering sales, talking about money and communicating value. Had a massive session, nearly a 90 minute session on that with.

A couple of legends, Caleb and Andy, talking about everything from why feels sales feels hard and how to confidently sell higher value projects without that fear of.

Rejection or confusion or you know, any of the fears that come up during sales. So we talked a lot about sales mindset, why sales feels hard, you know, how to understand your clients needs and, and communicate that value both in a tangible form and the intangible form. And then we moved on to pricing with confidence and how do you craft a seamless sales process and what tools people use for sales success. And then we moved on to what we call our VBA growth roadmap and shared a little bit about that journey. And then we moved into how marketing is a key part of building your sales funnel and how Grant and Matt from Lift Video Production and Balloon Tree Productions consist generate leads on LinkedIn without feeling sleazy or annoying. Matt talked a bit about his Strategy on, on YouTube and it was just a great event where we, we talked a lot about, you know, how to connect with opportunities, how to build consistency around your marketing, what content you need to create to build that, that network. And LinkedIn particularly is very much A3, a three way process of connecting content and engage. And it might seem like a lot of work but the fact is any kind of marketing does involve some work and for the majority of videographers that I speak to pre vba, they're always saying things like oh, I've never done any marketing, you know, I rely on word of mouth and I think that's been harder this year for a lot of people. So yeah, and then we had a whole session asking the mentors a kind of a Q and A and some great takeaways and ahas. And so I'm excited to say we've now we actually decided to film that at the very last minute and it's been edited at the moment and we will be making that available to purchase on the website, both@thevideomentors.com and@denleny.com so if you weren't able to make the event, you'll be able to access that content at some point in the near future. So I'm sure you're if you're on the email list, you'll get an email about that and then we mention it again next week once it's up and running. But yeah, folks, folks, I just wanted to say take some time for the next week or two to reflect, review.

And consider what you want your moves to be next year, because it'll be there in just a jiffy.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator podcast with your host, Den Lenny. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support or and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com 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.