don't be busy & broke as a videographer in 2025

In today's video, we're going to be talking about why you're busy and you're broke and what we need to do to change that. Because you can't be busy and not be making money. If that's what's happening, then you're fundamentally not working on the right things within your video business. And I want to help you change that. We want to work less and make more, not work more and make less. And fundamentally it just comes down to a couple of key shifts that you need to make within your schedule, within your video business. And, and this is what I see 99% of other video business owners not doing. So if you can do this, you can get ahead and you can beat your competition. Now, if you don't know me, my name is Eric Darren. I run Master Filmmaker and to date We've helped over 500 video business owners grow their business, scale their business, hire teams, buy back their time and be able to actually grow their business so they can make more money doing something that they love and serving their clients in an amazing way. And so these videos, I make them for free so I can share the value with you guys. You guys can get value and then trust me. And then if you want, you can get our help scaling your video business. So let's go ahead and dive in and talk about what most people are doing. So what most people are doing is if you look at their calendar, they typically are filling their calendar with things like editing, shooting and talking to clients like they're, they're talking to existing clients, right? And so the problem with this is they're not focusing on one thing. They're not focusing on what we call revenue generating activities. And so the only way the business grows is if you can focus on revenue generating activities. Like if you spend more time doing things that make money, surprise you make more money. Right? And so it's, it's a very simple concept, but I think a lot of us get stuck in this to where we're like, well, I don't know why I'm not making more money. I'm grinding my face off. I'm working. You know, I think someone from our team talked to someone who's working. Like, I think it was like 300 hours a month on their video business. But they were, you know, barely making 2 or 3k a month, which is, which is sad. It's tough. Like, that's really, really difficult. And I was there myself. Like, I think this person was working out. I'm not gonna say who it is, but they were working out of their bedroom. So they're in their house, their studio. They didn't get their studio anymore. And they were just like stuck in this place where like, they were working really, really hard but not making any money. And I don't want that for you. I want you to make a lot of money and not have to work super hard. And, and it's funny because, like, working harder doesn't make you more money. Working smarter and having more leverage makes you more money. And leverage can be defined as how much do you get out for what you put in. So if you're doing things that have very little leverage, like editing, for example, has very little leverage. Shooting has very little leverage. Talking to existing clients has very little leverage. Like, I can hire someone to do editing for me for 20 bucks an hour, right? I can hire someone to do shooting for me for, you know, depending on the level and skill level, like maybe 400 bucks a day for like an eight, like a half hour, half day, right? And maybe 800 bucks for a full day. You can make way more than that if you're on sales calls, right? So, and then talking to a client, like, I can hire a CSM or an admin person to do this and I can pay them 15 bucks an hour, maybe even less. And like, your business isn't built on $20 an hour tasks or $400 a day tasks or 15 hour a day tasks. Like, that's not how you build a large business. That's just not what happens, right? Like, you can't build a large business by doing all the editing yourself. You're gonna burn yourself out. And like, why would you, when you can literally hire somebody who's probably better than you at editing? You can hire somebody who's a better videographer than you. You can hire someone who's a better client success manager than you. Because like, if you have one person do each one of these roles, right, like they're gonna be better than you. Because, like, that's all they're doing. Like, if all they're doing every day is focusing on this one thing, they're going to be way better at editing, where you have to do the editing, the shooting, the talking to clients, you have to come up with all the ideas, you have to make sure the business is moving forward. But this is why, like, we see people who, you know, year after year after year, and like, they're just in the same place and they're working really, really hard, but they're not making more money, which again, I don't want that for you going into 2025. It's about leverage. It's about how can I actually get more for the work that I put in. Because, like, you know, I know a lot of people wear the I'm going to work super hard badge of honor. You know, they wear it on their sleeve like a badge of honor. But it's like, I mean, when you have a family and kids and like, you want to spend time with people, like, we're not building this to be a slave to our business. We're building this because we want to help clients and we want it to serve us at the end of the day. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. So what we need to do is focus on revenue generating activities. Right? So let's look at an example of what your calendar should look like. Right. And this is just an example. But number one, we really need to be focusing on a lead generation. So how are we getting more leads? And that's gonna come down to marketing. So this is setting up ads, doing pipeline, follow up, setting up a CRM, right? Setting up an inbound system, which is what we help our clients with. Spending an hour to an hour and a half on that per day is crucial. Like you, you cannot skip this block off an hour to an hour and a half every single day to just do marketing. That's setting up your CRM, that's setting up your inbound system, that's generating more leads. If you don't have money for an inbound system, that's sending dms, that's hitting up people A, that follow you, number one, B, people on your email list, C, people in your contact list, hitting up those warm followers first so then we can get leads in the door and start building our pipeline. So that's number one. Number two, we need to be focusing on sales calls, taking actual sales calls. This means talking to people who have not paid us money yet, who want to pay us money. Now the key difference here is like up here you're talking to clients, people who have already paid you money. You can hire an admin to do that. You don't need a lot of skill to do that. You can hire somebody for $15 an hour to do that. What this is, is you're actually talking to people who want to work with you, right? And typically these, these sales calls are about an hour long. So, so you could fit two sales calls in this time period in two hours. And we're just a math at the end here, right? So Two sales calls. And then if you close, and we'll go into the math in a second, but let's say you take two sales calls a day times five days a week. That equals 10 sales calls a week. And some of you are looking at me like I don't even take 10 sales calls a month. Well, that's why you're not growing, right? Because you're not taking enough sales calls. You're not talking to enough people. It's fundamentally what it is. So that's 10 sales calls a week. Let's say you close at 30%, which is pretty, pretty average. You would close three clients at whatever your price point is, which typically our clients are selling a minimum of a 15k package, right? So three clients times 15 equals $45,000 in revenue. So hopefully you can see, look, you just made $45,000 in revenue. If you take 10 sales calls, you close 3 of them at 15k each. That's 45k in revenue. This is why you're not growing. Let that sink in for a second. You could close if you took two sales calls a day, every day, five days a week, Monday through Friday, you would make 45k revenue, depending on your price point. But instead, you're stuck editing for 20 bucks an hour. You're stuck shooting for 400 bucks a day. You're stuck talking to clients and doing admin work for $15 an hour. Like, guys, you are stepping over dollars. I think the saying is to pick up pennies. Like, we have so much pride that we don't want to let these things go, that it literally is killing your business. It is. Let that sink in. It is literally killing your business by not letting this go. If all you did was spend. And what is this? This is 3 1/2 hours so far a day. And you have all this space in here to still do stuff, right? And then the last thing you want to focus on is you can work on client fulfillment. So this is like managing the CSM or the admin that we have doing the work, managing the videographer, managing the editor, doing revisions, but not actually doing the work yourself and spending two hours a day on this, right? So, like, guys, I just. We talk to so many people that it just really frustrates me. I just want you guys to see this. That, like, you literally could be making way more money. Like, I talked to one of our clients, Sean or Shane. Sorry, not Sean. I talked to Shane, and he was making, I think, about 300k a year. And I looked at what he was spending his time on. And he was spending most of his time on interfacing with clients and doing edits. I said, Shane, let's do the math. How much, how much time a day do you spend on edits? He's like five hours a day. I'm like, you could have taken five sales calls a day. And we worked out that he was leaving about 300 to 400k a year on the table by editing things himself. And I think you guys don't. And this is something I struggled with when I first started too. I don't think you realize that by doing these things here, you think you're saving money. Like you think you're saving 20 bucks an hour, you think you're saving 400 bucks a day or 800 bucks a day or $15 an hour. You're actually not. You're actually losing money by doing these tasks here. You are physically losing money because the opportunity cost that you're leaving on the table by not taking sales calls and instead working on things that are not revenue generating activities is costing you $45,000 a week. Literally is costing you $45,000 a Week by doing these things. So like, if you don't hire somebody, you're literally losing money. And that's the way I had to frame it for myself to get it through my, my thick skull, which like, you know, I'm very stubborn to get me to actually hire somebody to do this for me and take things off your plate. And it all comes down to just buying back your time. Because if all you do is work on things that don't make money, it's just gonna be really difficult to grow because you're not working on things that are making the business money. And like, no one else is gonna do that. Cause it's not their business. It's your job as the owner to do that. So I'm gonna end my rant here. Hopefully this was helpful for you guys. It's just something I see a lot that I really want you guys to work on because it helped me immensely. It made me way more money and I wanna make you a lot more money and make sure that you're crushing it and not burning yourself out doing all these things that don't actually help you grow the business. So hopefully you understand this comes from a place of love and shameless plug. If you want to learn more about what we do at Master Filmmaker, there should be a link down below. You can schedule a call with our team and we can see if we can help alleviate some of these things and help you hire these people and help you get more calls, get more leads, get more clients. And. And with that being said, we will see you in the next video.