How Hiring an Editor Will 10X Your Video Business And Free Up Your Time

In this video we're going to be talking about how to hire an editor and how to build out an SOP process to actually train that editor so you can start getting things off your plate. And so if you're a video business owner and you feel like you're busy all the time, the number one thing you're probably doing is you're probably editing way too much. And what happens is when you're editing, you can't take sales calls. And when you're editing, you're doing something that you can pay someone $25 an hour to do, when you could be taking sales calls and closing people on multi tens of thousands of dollar contracts, which is ultimately gonna make your business more money and is a much better use of your time. And so I see so many people who are stuck editing because they love it. And again, there's nothing wrong with that, but we gotta build the system first and have you start taking sales calls and then hire an editor. And then if you wanna get back to editing afterwards, you absolutely can. But it's typically why your business is bottlenecked and you can't grow to the next level. There's also some pitfalls that you're gonna run into if you hire the wrong editor. So I'm gonna walk through in this video how to actually do that, what to do and how to build out an editor SOP that I build out with my, they can actually start taking things off their plate and they don't have to worry about doing all the editing themselves. So let's jump over to my iPad. We're gonna talk about how to hire an actual editor. And there's two different main places you can look. So when you're hiring an editor, there's a couple things you wanna look at. So number one, what are they editing? Sorry for my handwriting. And number two, what is your budget? So number one, if you have more story based content, you're going to want to hire somebody within the USA or within Canada, if you're based in Canada. So you want somebody who's local or you want somebody who is at least in that country who you can start outsourcing things to. Because this type of stuff requires a little bit more, it requires more knowledge and you need a more experienced editor to be able to handle story based content. So this is like brand films, longer type stuff, stuff that requires pacing and where they need to understand how that actually works. And then you have more short form content, YouTube content and then ad content. And so for stuff like this, we can hire Somebody in either the Philippines or somewhere like India. And so the reason you need, the reason you can do this is because you don't need them to be as experienced. And typically here it's cheaper to hire somebody to do this type of content and they can handle that. Whereas like they start to struggle with the story based content where it's content around like, you know, pacing, editing, flow and understanding, that kind of stuff. So like that's the kind of two buckets that you want to look at. And so if you have clients that you're just doing short form content for YouTube content and ad content, I would hire somebody in the Philippines. And typically for this you're gonna pay about $20 per minute of finished clip here. And then for something like this, you're typically gonna be paying anywhere between 25 to $50 an hour of work. Whereas you can see these are a little bit different in cost. It's cheaper to go with people over here and it's more expensive to have the story based content, but you're getting a better product. At the end of the day, what I wouldn't do is what I see a lot of people do is they hire this person to do this type of content when it's really not needed. It's kind of overkill and they're killing their margins because they could just hire somebody a lot cheaper. So let's talk about the process for actually getting these people. So typically you're gonna go on, you can either go in Facebook groups, there's a couple different ways. Right? Facebook groups. If you're looking for these type of people, the more experienced people, for the less experienced people, you can use something like online jobs. Ph. Now I'm going to talk about the hiring process for each. For these you're going to want to get about 20 applicants. And then of those 20 applicants, you're going to screen them, you're going to have them send their portfolio, and then you're going to pick about 10 of those people to move forward with an interview. And then of those 10 people, let's get this out of the way real quick. Of those 10 people, you're then going to have five of them do what we call a test project. Now, what is a test project? This is a project where you pay them a small amount of money to do a test project so you can see if they edit the way that you want. You see a lot of people make the mistake where they don't do a test project. They hire this person and then they have no idea if they're good or not. And they end up having to fire them or take them off or whatever at the end of the day because it didn't work out. Whereas if you could do a test project, you can pay them a small amount of money to edit, like a small sample clip to. It doesn't have to be anything huge. And then you then take those people and you select your top two to three people of those, and then you make your final pick and then you keep these other two to three people, other two people after you make the top pick and you keep the other two as a backup if this one doesn't work out. And so typically Facebook groups, referrals are always gonna be good. So people like asking, you know, if you're in the industry, like, I know a lot of people who have editors or are editors asking for referrals. You're gonna get a higher quality person from a referral. And then after that you go Facebook and then you can go somewhere like indeed after that. That'd be the last kind of step there. But I would go referrals. So number one, referrals first, Number two, Facebook groups, and then number three, indeed. This is for people who are gonna be in the US or Canada, who you need to do story based content where it's a little bit more complex. So let's talk about the other option for Philippines or India. What I would do is online jobs. I would put out a very descriptive job posting where you have the pay, the requirements, the software knowledge, the. And then what they're gonna be creating. And then I would get 100 applications. I would then whittle that down to 10 people that you like based on their applications. I would then do a group interview with these people, which means you have everybody on a group interview. And then of that group interview, you're then gonna select your top five and you're gonna do one on one interviews. And then you're gonna select your top person and then you're gonna have a couple of backup people from here. Okay, so that's how you select them. Now let's talk about how to actually build an sop, which means standard operating procedure. And so the way I like to do this and think through this, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna explain how I think through it. I like to think of like, we have different buckets of content, right? So here's all of our buckets, all of our buckets of content. And so let's say we have one bucket of content, which is a brand film okay, great. Another one which is a testimonial, can't spell today. Another one which is gonna be like a short form. Content. Okay. And then another one which is gonna be, you know, you can think of other buckets of content, right? But then for each one of these buckets of content, you wanna just put together a Google Doc. So very simple. So do a Google Doc and put editor SOP at the top. And then you're gonna put each bucket of content in here. And so then within each bucket of content, I'm just gonna record a loom video. Super simple. I like using loom. You do a loom video and you basically walk them through each pro, like the process of editing this brand film. So you walk them through how to sort the footage, how to edit it, how to pace it, how to do the music, how to do every single little piece of that. And you do that for each bucket of content. I find that's more helpful because you're like, hey, here's a brand film. Here's how we edit it. Here's what a finished one should look like. Here's how I walk through and just basically loom record yourself editing a brand film and then loom record yourself editing a testimonial and loom record yourself and talk through it as you're doing it. That's the big mistake I see people make. They don't talk through it. Just basically be like, okay, cool, I'm editing a brand film. Here's my thought process, here's what I'm doing. Here's where I'm putting things. This is how I think through the pacing. This is what I do here. And then what you're doing is you just have a loom video. Loom video, Loom video. Loom video of how to edit each one of these buckets of content. Right? And then you just basically have more how to content. So think of it as like you're putting together a course on how to be an editor for your company. That's the way I think about it, right? So you, you basically do like a how to, how to, how to. So like, if you prefer only people who use Premiere, then you do, okay, here's how to use. You know, they should come in with knowledge. But like, here's how to set up a timeline that we like to have. This is how we like to have a timeline set up in Adobe Premiere. And then number two, here's how we export. Here's the settings that we use. So export settings, how to export, how to put the File structure in place, how to put the finished product so you can have it reviewed. How to, how to, how to. Everybody's editor SOP is going to be different. So you just have to build this. But the beautiful thing is once you build this one time, you don't have to build it anymore because then if a new person comes in, you just swap them in and you put them through the editor course, right? The editor mini course. And here's how to go through it, right? So that's the way I think about it. Hopefully that is helpful, guys, but that's. That's the way I think through how to actually go through and put together an sop. But you can do this with every role, right? You could do another one, which is, I can't draw today, so I'm just not going to try. But you could do another one where it's like a videographer sop, right? So here's where to go. Here's the camera gear we use. Here's how to go on shoot. Here's the buckets of content for a brand film. You're going to get these shots, these shots, these shots. For testimonial, you're going to get these shots, these shots, these shots, right? You want to make it templatized so I can plug a person in and they can start doing it immediately and I don't have to keep looking over their shoulder and wasting all this time. I record a video one time and then I don't have to do it anymore. So hopefully that makes sense. If you guys want our help, actually, like growing their business, hiring, finding editors, how to. How to actually grow the business, and offload tasks that you don't want to do. There should be a link below this video where you can learn a little bit more about what we do, how we help our clients, and hopefully that's helpful and we'll see you guys in the next video. I.